According to bassist (and Grupo Fantasma founding member) Greg Gonzalez, "We have so many influences, when you come to see us it's a gumbo of sound." An apt metaphor for this pepper pot of a Latin jazz-funk fusion outfit currently boasting 10 members. Gonzales adds that the group's collective experience —and most of a decade … Read more
Move over, kudzu: Oriental bittersweet and a grab bag of other non-native, invasive plants may actually pose more of a threat to our Southern forests. Like kudzu, Oriental bittersweet can rapidly overwhelm native plants by covering and choking them. But unlike kudzu, which tends to be limited to sunny, open areas along roadways, Oriental bittersweet … Read more
When vocalist and composer Mariam Matossian made the move from her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia to Greenville, S.C., she didn't figure on meeting any fellow Armenian musicians. In fact, for her first year in Greenville, when Matossian performed it was mostly at venues thousands of miles away with her Canadian backing band. Vocalist Mariam … Read more
When you're a junker, it's hard to avoid magical thinking. Success is so dependent on serendipity you start to believe it's not just random. It was, for instance, easy to feel things were "meant to be" when I found, via that magical portal of Facebook, that my friend Rabuck was heading to the Biltmore Square … Read more
Flood Gallery is one of the only galleries in Asheville exhibiting work by out-of-town contemporary conceptual artists. Given its out-of-the-way location, the shows are all too often under attended, but the gallery is at least attempting to introduce new aesthetics and ideas to the artistic discourse of Asheville. "Skink," by Mike Calway-Fagen, was at one … Read more
Big news and big excitement for local playwright, actor, teacher and Xpress contributor John Crutchfield: His play, Songs of Robert, has been accepted into the New York International Fringe Festival. The mid-August festival spans 16 days, 200 venues and draws about 75,000 people. It's Crutchfield's first foray there, and a chance to show his work … Read more
From the opening notes, fuzzy and aggressive through Stella Blue's downstairs sound system, Wooden Toothe plants its feet firmly in the fuzzy-and-aggressive territory between country and punk. Yet this is no country-punk outfit. The quartet, fronted by sprightly bass player Pierce Harmon, nods to both Uncle Tupelo and the Sex Pistols with neither a twang … Read more
Sandlin Gaither wanted to point his camera at loud, foul-mouthed, rowdy, besotted subjects, which is pretty much how he ended up shooting chefs. Street vendors, Bangkok, Thailand Photos by Sandlin Gaither "God, they almost look like pirates," local photog Gaither says of the back-of-the-house workers who've become an ongoing project for him. "They have tattoos, … Read more
About five years ago, I was doing a renovation job at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. During the four months I was there, a passionate debate was playing out in the local paper via articles, editorials and letters to the editor. Let it go: On a guided tour with Altamont Anglers, Tom Baynes caught this … Read more
I take no chances with poison ivy. Its oil, urushiol, gives me little blisterlike welts that itch for weeks. But by early July, the three-leaved varmint was creeping up the chainlink fence in the dog lot, sneaking into the great swaths of English ivy that cover some corners of my yard, and even assaulting the … Read more
