Author: Shan

Artist, writer, music freak. www.sistersdissonance.com www.shanspykerauthor.com

First Aid Kit | Countdown to the Newport Folk Festival: 18 Days!

Plucked from our video collection, here’s a beautiful, stripped down version of “Ghost Town” by First Aid Kit from their show at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, PA on March 31, 2012. First Aid Kit will be performing at the Newport Folk Festival on Saturday, July 28 and at the sold out show with Conor Oberst and Dawes at Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, RI on Friday, July 27. The SisDiss sisters are looking forward to seeing the Söderberg sisters, Klara and Johanna, perform!

Photo and video by Ady for Sisters Dissonance (photo from First Aid Kit’s 2011 performance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC)

Bright Eyes | Countdown to the Newport Folk Festival: 19 days!

T-minus 19 days! Countdown continues with photos of Bright Eyes from the two-date appearance at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in March of 2011. Conor Oberst will appear at the 2012 Newport Folk Festival on Sunday, July 29.

Bright Eyes live at Radio City Music Hall 3-8-2011

Bright Eyes live at Radio City Music Hall March 9, 2012

Wilco | Countdown to the 2012 Newport Folk Festival: 20 days!

Sisters Dissonance has begun ticking the days off the calendar—21 (twenty one!) days and counting until the much anticipated Newport Folk Festival begins (20 if you count Wilco’s Friday show as the kick off).

We can’t wait, and to help us cope with the days between now and then we will be sharing photos and video from the Sisters Dissonance archives—some of which that have never been shared before—of many of the performers who are included on the 2012 Newport Folk Festival schedule.

Countdown! T-minus 20 Days!

Wilco live at Fillmore Detroit, Detroit, MI December 10, 2011

Wilco live at the Wilmington Grand Opera House, Wilmington, DE August 10, 2008

Sisters Dissonance bringing Mondo Instante to the 2012 Newport Folk Festival

If you follow my collaborative projects blog, Mental Beans! you may already be participating in the now well established photography project, Mondo Instante. If not and you are just learning about it, read on for more information, and please consider joining in!

Veterans of the MI project, you know what to do! Look below for the date and the time specific to your time zone to find out when you need to take your photo and submission information.

Sisters Dissonance will be hosting the next Mondo Instante event which is scheduled to take place while Ady and I are at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island at the end of this month. We are asking festival goers to join current MI participants for this round.

If you are joining us via an invitation you received while at the Newport Folk Festival

Welcome and thank you for looking further into this project! We hope you will join in by taking a photo at the predetermined date and time, and submit it to be included in the Mondo Instante 19 online photo exhibition. Instructions how to participate follow, but first a little bit of background on the project:

Mondo Instante (MI) is a global photography experiment that has been running monthly since October of 2010. It is a synchronized, time-specific global photography event that only lasts only one minute.

When an event is announced, the date and time is given in UTC time and is then converted for local times for it’s participants all around the world. At the specified MI event time, participants take a photo of where they are/what they are doing or seeing at that exact moment. Photos can be pre-planned, or they can be totally off the cuff (often much more fun!).

The idea is to create, for just a brief moment in time, little windows into each of the lives of the participants, who are located all around the world. The photo taking and subsequent viewing is great fun, but just as captivating is that feeling of unity, however brief, that is caused by the simultaneous anticipation that comes with taking part in a coordinated global event. For more information including background information on the project’s origins, visit the Mondo Instante information page on this site, and give a Like on the Mental Beans! Facebook page to keep up to date on MI announcements and events.

Mondo Instante 19 – Get your cameras ready! Spread the word!

Mondo Instante 19 EVENT: Sunday July 29, 2012 18:00:00 UTC

Time zone breakdown:

*NEWPORT FESTIVAL ATTENDEES*
Please take your photo between 2:00 and 2:01 PM SUNDAY JULY 29, 2012

Tel Aviv Israel | Helsinki Finland 9 PM IDT
Rome Italy | Belgrade Serbia | Vienna Austria | Barcelona Spain | Stockholm Sweden 8 PM CEST
England | Scotland | Northern Ireland 8 PM BST
Buenos Aires Argentina 3 PM ART
EST U.S.A. & CANADA | NEWPORT, RI NYC, Cleveland, Toronto, Detroit 2 PM EDT
CST USA & CANADA | Lafayette, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Antonio 1PM CDT
MST USA & CANADA | Denver, Calgary 12 PM MDT
PST USA | Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego 11 AM PDT

Monday, July 30, 2012

Auckland New Zealand 6 AM NZST
Melbourne Australia – Victoria 4 AM EST

Submission Information

Please include your name (first, first/last, or whatever you are called) and a sentence or two about your photo. Please include your location (Newport Folk Festival attendees can simply state NFF). If possible submit images as a 72dpi image at about 600×800.

Photo submission deadline: Friday, August 3, 2012

Send photos to: mentalbeans [at] tuliptreestudios dot com
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Images from past Mondo Instante events

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header photo: Guitar by Kara for MI6 Wednesday, March 9, 2011 7:30 pm UTC

Felice Brothers – live at the Mauch Chunk Opera House 2012

I think I speak for both Ady and I when I say that Jim Thorpe, PA has solidly planted itself at the top of our list of favorite towns to visit together. We were there the for the first time last year when the Brothers blew into town and played the Mauch Chunk Opera House, and we were quickly taken in by the old world charm oozing from its every nook and cranny. The town’s residents welcome their visitors warmly, and when the Felice Brothers arrive it’s as if there is a conspiracy of fun erupting—doors propped open and residents standing at their doorsteps to say hello, music players set on the porch blasting Felice Brothers albums, posters announcing their arrival plastered on every flat surface available—turning the town into one giant welcome party.

We had such a great time during our first visit that I was inspired to work on the illustration Two Sisters and a Tavern when we returned home. After spending many hours working on the illustration back then, I found it disorienting and surreal to be walking around Jim Thorpe once again. The illustration, a semi fact/semi fictitious geographical mash up of places and events, consumed me and became so vivid in my mind during its creation that when I stepped out onto the streets from our hotel room, it seemed that buildings had become displaced (“That shop/bar/tree should not be there! Should it?”).

After my own personal wave of bewildered nostalgia subsided, we headed out and about prepared for our Jim Thorpe adventures that awaited. We traveled there (almost exactly a year later from last year’s show, and this year, no tire blow out!) for the 2012 return with two wonderful friends, Cindy and Kristi, with much anticipation and excitement. We knew (rightly so) that the town would once again turn into the veritable Felice Brothers cheering squad. We tooled around the main drag for several hours before the show before finally tucking into Crave Fine Food & Spirits, a little gem of a tea house/restaurant that also serves spirits and other beverage delights, before we set out to the show, the pinnacle of our trip that involved four friends/two sisters plotting our convergence on a single ultimate destination—Kristi (author of Not That Kind of Groupie) traveling from Dolores, Colorado, Cindy from Brighton, Michigan and me from Cleveland, Ohio to meet up with my sis, Ady, traveling up from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the perfect trip and reaffirmed what Ady and I knew: Jim Thorpe and the Mauch Chunk Opera House is the best place to see a show—especially when it is the Felice Brothers.

James and Ian Felice of the Felice Brothers live at Mauch Chunk Opera House 6/23/2012

It was everything I had hoped the trip would be, great company traveling to and from, a fun day on the town followed by a fantastic show from the Felice Brothers, who also sung praises for Jim Thorpe and were visibly charged by the audience’s exuberance. A single math equation to sum it all up: Jim Thorpe + The Felice Brothers (@Mauch Chunk) = THE magic combination.