UPDATE 10/15: As a special gift, all attendees of the MAGIC TUBER STRINGBAND and MAN EATER (duo version) concert will receive a free poster, designed and printed by Patrick Masterson Letterpress Printing. Thank you for your continued support!
TICKETS ARE VERY LIMITED FOR THIS EVENT! $15 advance tickets, $20 day of show — PAY WHAT YOU WISH option also available! Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap; Physical tickets on sale soon for in-person purchase at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204
ALL AGES 7:00 PM Doors 8:00 PM Music
Magic Tuber Stringband by Libby Rodenbough
MAGIC TUBER STRINGBAND, hailing from North Carolina, probes the undercurrents of the landscapes around them. Highly skilled players and writers, the trio are leaders within the burgeoning avant composition world utilizing folk instrumentation. Their music appears to weave in and out of the fabric of their surroundings, reflecting their time spent living across the Southeast and studying its regional folk traditions and natural histories. Having performed recently at Big Ears, Hopscotch, Sound & Gravity (and many other places along the way) the group’s music resonates well beyond their regional roots. Their newest record, Heavy Water, was released May 22, 2026 on the venerable Thrill Jockey Records. The ensemble continues to stretch the parameters of acoustic instrumental expression with masterful flourishes of dense, textural arrangements, subtle minimalist gestures and deft improvisation.
MAN EATER (performing as the duo of Grace Rogers and Nadia Ramlagan for this concert) has built a unique repertoire and a following both inside of and outside of the old-time scene, having played in every setting from dive bars and house shows to old time festivals including the Celebration of Women in Old Time Music in Knoxville and the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School. They’ve shared stages with acts like the Local Honeys, and Leo Shannon & Sarah Kate Morgan. MAN EATER is committed to deep connection and study in the old-time music world, and meaningful connection with the broader music community.
$15 advance tickets, $20 day of show — PAY WHAT YOU WISH option also available! Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap; Physical tickets on sale for in-person purchase at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204
21+ 7:00 PM doors 8:00 PM music
AARON DILLOWAY and ED SUNSPOT on the same bill, two absolute masters of the American electrical unconscious. Top-shelf freak shit from people who have spent decades figuring out which wires to cross to make the furniture start remembering things…
The last time I saw AARON DILLOWAY perform, he came out dressed like somebody’s Pentecostal uncle headed to a funeral supper: collared shirt, chair, table, reel-to-reel tape machine. Nothing to worry about.
A black cord hung from the corner of his mouth like a second tongue, or some electrical tapeworm he’d pulled halfway out of himself and then changed his mind about. Somebody had wired him up from the inside and left a little extra hanging out. It was the sort of cord you’d find knotted behind a woodgrain Magnavox with the rabbit ears bent sideways, down there among the orange extension cords, dead Christmas lights, coaxial cable, bread ties, and one mysterious AC adapter belonging to an appliance nobody in the family has owned since 1987. The chair itself appeared to be mic’d, so every creak and bodily twitch entered the machinery. Man, chair, wire, tape: one miserable circuit.
Pretty soon DILLOWAY began to blur, losing his edges, like one of those nineteenth-century spirit photographs where the dead aunt appears behind the curtains, except the spirit world had apparently spent the intervening century wandering through Kmart.
Demonic to the thirty-third degree.
Like somebody had run the Devil through a tape loop, dubbed him onto a Maxell cassette, left him on the dashboard of a Buick LeSabre through three Kentucky summers, discovered him twenty years later in a shoebox marked MISC., and played him backward through the PA at the fellowship hall.
Rural electricity discovering it had been possessed. A séance in a double wide. An exorcism conducted by Radio Shack. – Crozier Lathrop
AARON DILLOWAY is one of the most creative, prolific, and revered figures in the Midwest American experimental/noise scene. His performances and recordings incorporate rhythmic loops from eight-track tapes, vocal improvisations, found sounds, and field recordings. He uses contact microphones in order to generate harsh, feedback-laced noises, sometimes placing microphones inside his mouth in order to create bizarre, ogre-like distorted voices. While he channels some dark, violent energies into his sonic constructions, there’s also a crucial element of playful, absurdist humor to his work, making his performances confusing yet highly enjoyable spectacles of Dadaist performance art. While AARON DILLOWAY is perhaps best known for his involvement with Michigan noise group Wolf Eyes, he’s had an extensive solo career, issuing hundreds of recordings (usually limited cassettes) under his own name, as well as Spine Scavenger. In addition, he’s also collaborated and issued split releases with other well-known noise and experimental artists such as Kevin Drumm, John Wiese, and many others. Dilloway is also the owner of Hanson Records, a long-running experimental music label as well as a brick-and-mortar record store and mail-order service based in Oberlin, Ohio. Born in 1976 and originally residing in Brighton, Michigan, AARON DILLOWAY began going to basement shows in Ann Arbor during the mid-’90s. ~ Paul Simpson, Rovi
AARON DILLOWAY‘s new album No Skill Comedy Mind Reading — his first full length since 2017 —will be released October 30th on Dais Records.
ED SUNSPOT makes music that sounds like somebody broke into the sound department of the future sometime around 1978 and licked everything.
He sits behind a bewildering thicket of homemade boxes, expensive-looking boxes, wires, knobs, switches, blinking lights, things apparently constructed in a garage, things apparently stolen from a laboratory, things that might control an irrigation system, things that might control the weather. It is impossible to tell what is connected to what. He seems to understand all of it.
Airbrushed chrome translated into electricity. Floating eyeballs translated into oscillators. Impossible staircases you can hear yourself climbing. Glowing tubes. Synthetic breezes. Little fluorescent melodies the color of discontinued antihistamines.
Everything impossibly clean and somehow contaminated. The future as imagined by people smoking indoors. – Crozier Lathrop
ED SUNSPOT is the nom de guerre of Robert Beatty, an artist and musician based in Lexington, Kentucky. Best known musically as a member of the excellent long-running noise trio Hair Police, Beatty has also released solo electronic music as Three Legged Race on the Spectrum Spools, Mountaain, and NNA Tapes labels, his own label Resonant Hole, and the “Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata” album under his own name on Glistening Examples. Beatty has also designed album covers for the likes of Matmos, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tame Impala, Kesha, the Weeknd, Warmer Milks, Thee Oh Sees, The Flaming Lips, The Soft Pink Truth, as well as posters for events presented by The Other Side of Life! https://robertbeattyart.com/
Special thanks to Kris Abplanalp, Aaron Dilloway, and Robert Beatty.
