DPCD, Kenan Serenbetz, Pocket Park, Luke McGovern
Doors 6:30PM / Show 7:30PM
$10ADV / $15DOS
DPCD is the work of Illinois musician Alec Watson. Taking its name after a four-letter secret code given to him by his great-grandfather, DPCD’s music is intimate and soft spoken, with Watson's meditative singing illuminated by fragile webs of piano, celeste, and guitar.
2021 saw two new DPCD releases; their third full-length album It's Hard for a Rich Man to Enter the Kingdom of God, and the home-recorded antique curiosity DPCD SINGS.
On Rich Man, Watson explores spirituality, anti-capitalism, and ambiguous loss. But rather than lecture on these themes, the album’s eleven songs feel their way through them. Stretches of wordless vocals and strands of repeated melodies lull listeners into a trance, and interlocking tapestries of guitar spin up ghosts of past selves.
DPCD SINGS conjures specters of a different sort. A home recording project, the album presents 16 original songs documenting an obsession with the Great American Songbook, its counterparts, and its living forms. The music contains nods to the great musical theater composers of the mid 20th century, the working Tin Pan Alley songwriter, and the common song. Hazed-out barbershop quartets dovetail with lonely piano ballads, lovingly embracing rhyme scheme and form. The verses linger on surrealist themes: specters swirl through dim hallways, mirrors reflect faces of unrequited lovers, and fading memories flicker under the light of the moon.
Watson lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Kenan Serenbetz creates music that explores relationships to land, other-than-human beings, memory, and identity. His work is steeped in various folk and land-based disciplines.
Bringing together knowledge of native ecology and plant medicine, his music interprets and expresses the need for right relationship with the land and the beings that we live with.
His music is firmly rooted in pre-industrial vocal traditions, having most notably studied plainchant (with Marcel Pérès of Ensemble Organum), Okinawan sanshin, and American shape note music.
Luke McGovern’s songs run the gamut, at times carrying a country twang, and other times following a more mystical sound inspired by the fantastic. He has been described as “If Townes Van Zandt were less cynical, more sober, and alive (Isthmus),” and works earnestly, though with humor, to craft his songs. The Madison singer/songwriter is largely self taught and self produced, recording songs in closets, bedrooms, basements, and garages. His new album Bestiary is a reflection on creatures- real and imaginary- and our relationship with them.
Pocket Park will also perform.