Every once in a while a band that’s able to perfectly synthesize music and performance art appears. This is not that band. Redness is more like a rash – the kind that gives you that odd, almost-but-not-quite pleasurable sensation when you scratch it. Eczema, maybe. And that’s perfectly fine with them. As Popeye may or may not have said, "you are what you is."Emanating from the same sulfur infused metropolis that gave us one of the world’s finest philharmonics, Redness is at the other end of the sonic spectrum, preferring the exploration of finite disharmonics instead - usually from their home base stage at the Euclid Tavern, in Cleveland, OH. Pinochet's Chilean secret death squads of the 70s would have loved them. So would US PsyOps, today. The members of Redness all attended CIA, the Cleveland Institute of Art, where the band (and sister band Guyettes) originally formed. That should explain a lot but it doesn’t. The actual origins of a song like Little Debbie Donuts (featuring catholic schoolgirl Debbie Kimsey), like some great parable from Phoenician mythology, simply can’t be accounted for. And unlike more commercially successful North East Ohio period contemporaries Devo and Pere Ubu, Redness made a lot of their own instruments – which may or may not xplain why the others were, well, more commercially successful.I remember being half-passed out, riding at night in the back seat of what could’ve been a Gran Turismo, the first time I was in Cleveland. In my stupor, and in between swollen eyelids, I’d keep catching great, big orange flames shooting from the stacks of local metal foundries, high into the black sky above the stinking industrial canals. For some unknown reason, I immediately thought of the lyrics from one of Redness’ songs – “the bass and drums introduce the beat in the samba motif … yo no tiengo cambio … El Supremo taco …andale … andale … Xerox.†For a fleeting moment, I was under the delusion that I’d come to terms with my own little private psychosis and that everything finally made sense.Frank Coelho
Audio Artists
Lovey Dovey
Fin+Feather
Leopold
Suave Elbows
