Music Review Featured in Chill Magazine Dec 2006

Anything but Sleep

by

Sarah Sala

• University student Chris Bathgate's music will resonate with you long after the amp is unplugged and you've pushed back your headphones.

• Self-classified as neo-folk, his songs are not to be heard while working or walking, but driving. His latest album, Throatsleep, will make you want to drive out past the lights of the city, seal yourself in the soundless space of your car and allow your chest to rise and fall in the comfortable words of a man who not only feels the swell of your sorrow, but was born to usher it into song.

• Bathgate rests his head at one of the most extraordinary living spaces in Ann Abor. One floor above Wazoo Records on State Street, Ann Arbor Vitae began as the architectural studio of the late Rich Ahern. With its twenty-three foot ceilings, loft spaces and large windows overlooking State Street, it's an amazing venue for shows. The Vitae is crowded with old architectural plans, bookshelves, instruments, fish tanks, plants, a cow skull and more hidden wonders than the discount bin at the Salvation Army, but most striking is its unique inhabitants.

• If Bathgate had it his way, his music would be filed under the slot marker "space-poetry fold with remnants of metal, American classical, bluegrass and blues," but for now, we'll just call it indie folk rock.

• Bathgate has opened for the likes of the Magnolia Electric Company, Great Lakes Swimmers, Nomo, Akrom Family, The Kills, and played shows in locales such as the Hamtramck Blowout, the Belmont, the Blind Pig and the Lager. While he is just back from playing three gigs in New York City, his dream is to someday play The Michigan Theater.

• Up coming from this artist in February is a box set entitled All That You Contain Is All That Will Remain, described as a "six (mini) disc set with fold out bits and a bunch of sweet photoplate prints." Only a hundred copies of these rerecorded songs will be released. The new full length album A Cork Tail Wake will also be released on a national level this year, the record label thus far undisclosed. This album is to be recorded on a fostex mr-8 and considered part three of the Silence/Throatsleep series.

• So if you're looking for lyrical content and a new artist to support, check out http://www.myspace.com/chrisbathgate or head to Ann Arbor's Wazoo Records or Encore REcords and rigle through the local section.

• Thank you Mr. Bathgate.

LATEST ALBUM:

Throatsleep

KEY TRACKS:

"Creak, Cure Dawn"

"All Of My Friends Have Been

Replaced With Cities"

"I Know How You're Going To Die Tonight"

Sarah Sala's Poem Featured in "The Statement" October 4, 2006

The Beans Daycare Center


Their piercing screams
knock like rocks off houses,
a collective of beginning voices
screech enough to drop
squirrels from the trees.

Forever in motion, the tiny
figures are frantic energies
of chase and retreat, digging
and scaling—here wriggling
fingers try to pull a tuft
of cat through the fence
and into their world,
there another feeds itself
a sandy-dirt swallow of grass.

When I leave my house
in the morning they arrest
themselves like brand new
sheep, stock still and staring.
I sometimes want to come over
to them, unsure how they would react,
but one hisses and another licks
at the gate: its superhero shoe, untied.

Copyright 2006 ©

An Article by Sarah Sala Featured in the October 2006 Issue of Chill Magazine

Head North to the Hidden Valley
by Sarah Sala


It’s welcome week. My housemates and I realize we are going to graduate this year and there are so many things we haven’t done yet. North Campus makes it into the conversation and we discover that none of us have ventured up there before. Somehow, I am the one voted to enroll in an art class and check it out.

I figure, hey, a bus schedule isn’t that hard to figure out, right?

Stepping down from said bus, the straggling future engineers give way to beautiful art students carrying space age cases of acrylics, drafting tubes slung across their backs. I have only seen a few of these wonders by themselves on Central before, but here, all in one place? It was like coming over a rise and seeing into the hidden valley of the dinosaurs. Their eyes were either pointed up in space, for sure conjuring up their next masterpieces or fixed to the ground in what seemed like a manic determination not to see or be seen.

No more than a few minutes later I found the Duderstat Building and was immediately convinced there is no other structure like it on campus. Banner after banner of fabric hung down from an arced corridor that seemingly stretched on for a full city block. Then appeared a glass-encased art gallery open to the public and whatttt?! The students in this magnificent land didn’t take the stairs to class like mere central campus mortals—but instead, were provided with a by-way of zigzagging escalators.

Rising higher and higher into that empty belly of architectural prowess, it became apparent that not only are there poker nights and concerts, poetry readings and bowling allies, football clubs and video game tournaments in this hidden valley, but even free pool lessons.

Okay, so maybe I won’t be able to convince you to visit North Campus after 11p.m. But it offers a pretty cool way to spend the brighter half of a Saturday. There’s a wave field on the Southeast side of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Building made by Maya Lin (who also designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. and the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama) that my roommates and I might actually check out someday.
Because, hey, a field of waves beats the dead soggy grass by the Diag.

Check out all the North Campus events: http://www.umich.edu/~uuap/art.html.