Surprise! Fine Peduncle and Future Islands show

We discovered Knoxville’s Fine Peduncle last fall at BoBo gallery, and then again at Moogfest. He’s back in Asheville this week (just returned from Forecastle) playing a last-minute show at Toy Boat Community Art Space (101 Fairview Road) with Future Islands.

According to the Facebook invite for that show, “Future Islands had to cancel a leg of tour, and now they’re coming through Asheville to play a secret, last minute show this Tuesday. It’s only five bucks, so invite urrbody you know, and let’s pack the Toy Boat full of sweaty human beings. Jules Herne will be dropping an impromptu set at 10 p.m. sharp, Fine Peduncle will bring the raw brilliance at 10:30ish, and Future Islands will go on no later than 11:30 p.m.” Cover is $5.

Xpress spoke to Cole Murphy (aka Fine Peduncle) before his show at Broadway’s last February (also a bill with Baltimore-based Future islands). From a story previewing that show:

“Murphy struts, howls and writhes on the floor. He takes indecent liberties with the speaker cabinet, plays his touch pad with his foot, pours a beer over his torso and tears off his shirt.

“‘The things that I do, like the stripping, are a metaphor for what’s happening in the EPs,’ says Murphy. His three recordings, each with an entomological name, include Object Pupa (which he describes as the state when the insect can’t move around and is vulnerable), Ecdysis (the moulting process) and, just released in November, Aedeagus (an insect phallus). (The stage moniker “peduncle” refers to a supportive stem found in plants, invertebrate animals and in the human brain.)

“Murphy says that sometimes when he begins to undress during a show, ‘people think it’s kind of funny.’ But he’s found that as he improves as a performer and his audiences grow more comfortable with him as an artist, they begin to reciprocate.

“It started as a fluke: Murphy took his shirt off during a show because he was overheated. ‘I saw the effect immediately,’ says. ‘People are standing 10 or 15 feet away and you do that and people come up to you.’

“Murphy adds, ‘It’s become almost a ritual — I do these rituals and lead people in these rituals. As a result, these walls that we put up and the inhibitions on the room — I’m cutting through that tension with these maneuvers.’”

Read the full feature here.

Xpress also wrote about Future Islands:

“Baltimore-by-way-of-Greenville, N.C. trio Future Islands is darkly romantic and dreamy, both heart-on-sleeve and somehow adrift from emotion on a cool, untroubled sea. But, for all the swelling melodies and echoey percussion, this is electro-pop with feet planted equally in the future and in the past.

“It’s Samuel T. Herring’s reverberating baritone — a vocal that recalls Morrissey and New Order — that takes the listener back three decades. Though, in its retrospection, the band remains unfettered by nostalgia and any of the chintzy trappings that say ‘80s. It’s that essence, the nocturnal haunting, that runs through Future Islands’ sound.

“There’s also the fact that the band’s new album, On the Water was recorded literally on the water (in Elizabeth City, N.C.‘s historic Andrew S. Sanders House). Dance beats and washes of synthesizers are underscored by the ebb and pulse of waves and the clean ion-rich atmosphere of ocean air. On the Water breathes as much as it rocks.”

All photos by Rich Orris from the Broadways show in February.