Tag Archives: Kentucky

AARON DILLOWAY and ED SUNSPOT at B-Side, Friday October 9th

Poster by Robert Beatty

The Other Side of Life is proud to present:

AARON DILLOWAY

and

ED SUNSPOT

Friday October 9, 2026
at B-Side
1076 E. Washington Street, 2nd Floor
Louisville, KY 40206

Buy Tickets

$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

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.

Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.

BITCHIN’ BAJAS with ELI WINTER AND TYLER DAMON at B-Side, Saturday September 19th

Poster designed by Tim Furnish

The Other Side of Life is proud to present:

BITCHIN’ BAJAS

with

ELI WINTER AND TYLER DAMON

Saturday September 19th, 2026
at B-Side
1076 E. Washington Street, 2nd Floor
Louisville, KY 40206

Buy Tickets

$20 advance tickets, $25 day of show
Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap; Physical tickets available for in-person purchase at Surface Noise, 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204 (cash only)

21+
7:00 PM doors
8:00 PM music

The latest album from BITCHIN’ BAJAS — the trio of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Danie Quinlivan — Inland See is deceptively immediate: four songs, entirely within themselves, all together forming an essential whole. With every successive BITCHIN’ BAJAS release, we see that the real key for them is a sense of discovery, that tingle that comes when you feel something breaking through. The sky opening up. Take “Skylarking” — a remarkable construction, built to and fro in the ether, but with a deceptive grasp of four-on-the-floor rhythm. A space dance that achieves completion in almost aggressive terms — aggressive like an oxygen bath! — showcasing jewels from their world music and jazz archives, then returning to their undulous source drone, riding smoothly back into silence. The stuff that fills this Inland See holds you up powerfully, as if you’re floating, saltwater or helium-wise — effervescent, effortless, elemental.

In the wake of 2025’s acclaimed Inland See, BITCHIN’ BAJAS ascend to higher ground with the Isle Peaks EP! Isle Peaks was initially released as a 2-song Qobuz exclusive, but BITCHIN’ BAJAS are a band of the people, for the people – and the people demanded its availability everywhere! Set for release on August 28th on vinyl, cassette, and digital, the 12″ EP and cassette feature “Watch Your Step”, an exclusive track not included on the Qobuz version or any digital platform. Listen to the title track, out now. Expanding through equal parts krautrock and new age zones, these three tracks ascend with the listener to signal-splitting heights on both atmospheric and esoteric scales. These cuts were sourced from the Inland See sessions, lovingly recorded analog (2″ multitrack tape and ½” 2-track), including the electroacoustic textures of sampled kalimba, field recordings, and autoharp.

Along with the announcement of Isle Peaks, BITCHIN’ BAJAS share a new run of US tour dates, as well as additions to their previously announced European dates. Climb Isle Peaks with us on August 28, 2026.

Photo by Beth Kotz

ELI WINTER‘s music synthesizes aspects of folk, rock, jazz, and devotional music, maintaining a waggish disregard for genre constraints emblematic of Chicago, his adopted hometown. His new album, A Trick of the Light, is an elegantly crafted and vibrant collection that finds the bandleader at the height of his powers: the dazzlingly intense arrangement of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s “Arabian Nightingale” that opens the album, Winter’s muscular, dreamy originals, and his daring arrangement of Carla Bley’s “Ida Lupino.” His concert history spans prestigious music festivals like Primavera Sound and Big Ears, pristine listening rooms, museums, university chapels, laundromat bars, and small rooms in shotgun houses. In Louisville he will perform with Chicago percussionist and improviser TYLER DAMON of Circuit des Yeux.

ELI WINTER‘s second turn as bandleader unfolds like a sky bleeding exhaust fumes, alternating pedal steel waltzes and jazz-burnt fuzz bombs. The record starts with an ecstatic riff on a Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell tune and doesn’t really let off the gas.” — Lars Gotrich, NPR

Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.

Recidivist, ep. 2: Codeine

Codeine Promo

(Codeine promo photo and other images swiped from http://pry.com/codeine)

I doubt they were the first band I “connected” with in the figurative sense — after all I’ve been nuts about music as long as I can remember. Yet I first heard Codeine at a pretty important time, when I was a teenager in Louisville, Kentucky, and they were one of the first out-of-town bands that I got to meet, champion, and really feel, well, connected to.

See the Louisville scene, great as it was at the time, was pretty insular. Not a lot of touring acts came through town at the beginning my formative punk/hardcore show-going years (though this changed as active bands like Rodan and Crain — as well as the legend of Slint — brought more bands interested in playing Louisville). Though despite being from New York City, the band already had some ties to Louisville: in 1990, Stephen Immerwahr (vocals, bass) recorded “Pea” with Bitch Magnet at Sound on Sound in Louisville with Howie Gano (who practically engineered every local punk/hardcore band at some point):

Bitch Magnet + Codeine

Somehow, I bought this single and got into it, sparking a life-long obsession with not only the awesome Bitch Magnet (more about them at a later date), but with this mysterious and nihilistic yet (unlike most hardcore I knew at the time) totally slow and sludgy song “Pea” on the flipside (sorry I don’t have it available for download). At some point I figured it out, and when I spotted Frigid Stars LP in some Sub-Pop print catalog (yes, kids, aside from going to what was called a “record store” to buy records, some of us actually ordered music out of mail-order catalogs too), I snapped it up. Immediately enthralled by the slow, yet melodic and heart-breaking sounds (the catalog described them as “a cross between Galaxie 500 and the Melvins“), I rushed off a letter to the P.O. box in the credits. Not too long after, I received a super-nice reply from Stephen (who am friends with to this day; oddly we first met at a Rodan/Palace Brothers show at the long-gone Highland House one Derby Day). Probably then I became Louisville’s biggest (and to my knowledge, only — until Scott Richter told me he too was a fan), and tried to spread the word on how great they were to all my friends.

Years later, I still listen to Codeine, and still maintain that they’re one of the greatest bands of their era. Despite what could be considered a major influence on quite a few bands (probably would put Low and Mogwai in there, among others), I still kinda think they didn’t quite get their due. Not enough people know, but then again I could be wrong. While goofing around, looking for Codeine info, I found this fantastic site filled with all kinds of great images and information. Although it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2005, there’s pretty much everything you could want on there, including 6 songs recorded by Codeine for Peel Sessions (download here) and a live set from the Vermonstress Fest in 1992 (download here).

The Peel Sessions contain some excellent performances of four Codeine classics, plus two songs I’d never heard before: “Median” and “Sure Looks That Way.” It’s a shame neither of those saw a proper release. The live show (originally posted on Bradley’s Almanac) starts off a little shaky, but eventually gathers a head of steam. It also documents an interesting period when Codeine was in-between main drummers Chris Brokaw and Doug Scharin, with Josh Madell of Antietam and Other Music filling in on the throne.

Codeine Insert

BONUS TRIVIA: If you can name the Minneapolis band and their record on which Immerwahr worked as assistant engineer, you’ll win… something.