Urban Honking

Thursday, August 18

8:30pm Nice Nice, White Rainbow, USF @ Holocene

Holocene presents…
Nice Nice
White Rainbow
USF (Universal Studios Florida)
Big Spider’s Back

Glimmering, swagger-rich electronic soundscapes that merge psychedelic mesmerism with the visceral quality of dance music.

USF (formerly Universal Studios Florida) is an electronic duo that began in Seattle in the fall of 2008. Band members Kyle Hargus and Jason Baxter released their eponymous debut EP in January 2009, and followed it with the critically-acclaimed full-length Ocean Sunbirds in June 2010, both on Brooklyn’s Little Fury Things Records. Described as “primitive in its joy, and cosmic in its intention” (Chocolate Bobka) and “[a merging of] psychotropic house music with sonic textures long foreign to dance music” (Impose Magazine), Ocean Sunbirds was an attempt at maintaining a uniform feeling across a sixty-minute exploration of imagined landscapes, and was featured in a variety of online and print publications, including Pitchfork Media and international press in Italy, Japan, Germany, the U.K., and Spain. With their second self-produced full-length the Spray, USF are aiming for something different. Through an emphasis on complex rhythms and melodic layering, the Spray is an attempt to evoke a broader spectrum of emotions and create a tangible atmosphere–one soaked in the textures of the Pacific Northwest and ideas related to hauntology, nostalgia, and the impermanence of things.

Beginning as a bedroom recording project in Seattle over the summer of 2007, electronic artist Big Spider’s Back has amassed a growing following in the Northwest music community, along with his newly adopted home in Brooklyn. Combining haunting vocals with swirling layers of lo-fi psychedelia, synthesizers and field recordings, his music alternates between soaring crescendos and dense thickets of electronic ambience. The result is one big, blissed out cacophony.