GroupThink

Sichaunese is okay with me

The International District's Sichuanese Cuisine Restaurant makes your mouth burn with love

By Janna Chan

Last weekend it occurred to me that I have never tried Vietnamese food. Of course I've dabbled in the occasional bowl of Phó and nibbled on a spring roll or two, but I have never sat down in a Vietnamese restaurant and just had at it. I am happy to say that nothing has changed since last weekend. I still haven't tried Vietnamese food.

My friends and I made a valiant effort in Seattle's paltry International District (aka, not even cool enough to be a real Chinatown), and cruised down Jackson Street with Vietnamese delicacies in mind. After parking in the lot that seemed the most busy we sauntered in front of two restaurants that seemed to be Vietnamese. Restaurant number one was pretty empty and this did not appeal to our elitist, must-have-the-best-first-time-Vietnamese-food-experience Spidey senses. Onto restaurant number two. Behold the Sichuanese Cuisine Restaurant (1048 S. Jackson St., Seattle, WA 98052; 206.720.1690). Okay, fine, Sichuanese food is from China, not Vietnam, but we only realized what the name of the restaurant was after we had sat down and accepted our tea and water service. I hate when people (i.e. me) sit down at a joint and after looking at the menu just gets up and leaves (especially after the water has been served). Luckily for the three of us (two white guys and a breathtaking young Chinese woman child) this was the restaurant I had been searching for. This was the home of affordable Shabu Shabu.

For those of you out of the loop, Shabu Shabu (aka, live action hotpot) is when a gigantic bowl of soup (half spicy/half not spicy for the low tolerance pussys out there) is placed on a gas burner on your table and various raw foods accompany it. Armed with three ladles and wooden chopsticks, diners plunge paper thin slices of raw pork, beef (lamb is an additional $10), tofu, Chinese cabbage, broccoli and rice noodles into the soup and voile!--You're enjoying Shabu Shabu. BTW, this restaurant also serves you a hefty bowl full of peanut sauce along with your hotpot and after some tenuous dipping we decided that you're probably supposed to just mix some sauce into your soup. Yum!

At this point I need to mention how difficult my Seattle search has been for Shabu Shabu. I grew up eating this meal and it’s one of those childhood comfort experiences that can’t be replaced by a bowl of ramen.

After about 20 minutes in the restaurant, it occurred to me that this is the new cool in the I.D. The place is small, about the size of your parent's bedroom, and only has about 7 or 8 tables. Around dinner time families, students, young hip folk and miscellaneous Sherpas are lined-up out the door waiting for some grub and a lot of people opt to sit European-style at the tables of other diners to expedite their meals. We dropped by on a Sunday night and we tried the Shabu Shabu for three ($10/person) and an order of fried dumplings ($4.50)—(It said “20” on the menu meaning 20 dumplings/order but we didn't really take it seriously. There are, for real, 20/order of the most delicious fried morsels you've ever had. It came with an authentic (I've been to Beijing, so I’m an expert) vinegar/soy dipping sauce and our waitress didn't even charge us for the order because it came late in our meal.)

Here's some info I "borrowed" from the Seattle Times on the restaurants details:

Cuisine: Chinese
Asian/Pan-Asian

Price: $

Hours: 11 a.m. - 9 p.m. daily

Meals: Lunch
Dinner

Reservations: Not available

Alcohol: Beer

Smoking: No smoking

Payment forms accepted:
All major credit cards

Parking: Free parking, Paid parking, Street parking

Disabled access: No obstacles to access

Related info: Free parking in strip mall parking lot.

Kill Rock Stars Showcase Showdown

(Photo courtesy of Xiu Xiu)

By Janna Chan for Three Imaginary Girls

Kill Rock Stars Showcase: Deerhoof, The Decemberists, Xiu Xiu and the Gossip
*Neumos, September 12, 2004
$12 advance tickets at Ticketswest
Doors 8:00pm
Show 9:00pm

Like watching a flashy, quick-paced, epilepsy-inducing anime cartoon, a live Deerhoof performance always gets the body vibrating with eyes rolled back in sheer ecstasy. Lead by bite-sized treat Satomi Matsuzaki, this San Francisco-based quartet shakes pop music like a rag doll with manic waves of electric guitar countered by Matsuzaki’s endlessly cute cheeps and chirps.

A fantastic compliment to Deerhoof for this star-studded showcase is Seattle-via-Los Angeles transplant Xiu Xiu (aka, Jamie Stewart). Completely manic and unpredictable in his own right, Stewart combines IDM-style drum machine with layers of dissonance, experimental instrumentation and bouts of heartfelt screams and indiscernible mutterings. In other words, Xiu Xiu forces you to look deep inside of yourself and not like what’s there. Rubbing salt in the wound are Portland homeboys, The Decemberists. Representing everything good about feeling horrible, singer Colin Meloy weaves intricate tales about circus freaks and sailing and, unlike many of his indie brethren, enunciates every word. Talk about one hell of a sing-a-long! Oh yeah, the Gossip will be playing too.

Six Feet High and Rising

Menomena are indie-rock giants in more ways than one.

(Photo courtesy of Menomena)

By Janna Chan for Seattle Weekly

If it seems that Portland-based omni-rock band Menomena came out of nowhere, you’re half right. Their freshman effort, I Am the Fun Blame Monster (an anagram for The First Menomena Album), quietly debuted last May, but within six months their mugs were plastered all over every indie rag and Web site in the nation. Although the band has gone nearly three years without a record label, distribution, a manager, or money, it’s still been tagged as the next big thing. The band members would talk about all this, but during our interview, they were too busy blushing to give an answer.

Menomena might well be the biggest band in indie rock—if only for their height. Singer and drummer Danny Seim towers over most people at 6 foot 7, but not pianist Brent Knopf, 6 foot 3, or bassist Justin Harris, who’s 6 feet even. Initially intimidating, the trio’s charming awkwardness and affability quickly win one over. Their music, on the other hand, is anything but awkward. I Am the Fun Blame Monster demonstrates an air of confidence and complexity that was initially slow to catch on. The band only sent out a few albums, one of them to Pitchfork, a popular online music magazine. Soon after, interest in the group exploded. “The Pitchfork thing was great,” says Seim. “They overlooked the fact that we didn’t have distribution, a lawyer or a publicist, or any of that industry stuff and still listened to our album. We started selling a lot of CDs from our Web site.”

The group is painfully modest when it comes to talking about their growing popularity—almost to the point of denial. “It’s weird that people think that we’re famous now or something. In our own lives, nothing has changed. We still make every CD to order by hand, and I still make copies for a living,” says Seim, referring to his day job at Kinko’s. (Knopf waits tables at McMenamins, while Harris is in college. )

Seim and Harris first met in high school; they won the West Lake Christian High School talent show playing in their self-described Pearl Jam–esque band. The two befriended Knopf, who attended Sam Barlow High School on the other side of Portland, after he was bullied into seeing one of their rock shows in 1995. “I was supposed to see this other band,” explains Knopf. “They canceled, and the club owner ‘insisted’ that I see Danny and Justin’s band.” Impressed, Knopf gave Seim a cassette of his own music. The two stayed in touch while Knopf was in New Hampshire for college. After Knopf’s graduation, in 2000, Menomena was born.

ONE OF THE most talked about features of Menomena is the group’s “fourth” member, Deeler, or Digital Looping Recorder. This is a computer program that Knopf created to record impromptu material. Most songs start out as a Deeler session, with Seim playing a drumbeat and the other members experimenting with sounds on top of it. Demo versions of the songs are recorded with Deeler in the band’s woodshed-turned-recording-studio, but then the songs are played live, reworked, and finally rerecorded without Deeler. “It gives us a bunch of raw material that we can mix together at a later date,” Knopf explains. “We don’t have to decide which parts will make the cut when we’re writing it. It’s hard to be creative and edit at the same time.”

The result is a kaleidoscope of resonant sounds with pop-tinged melodies and a foundation of hip-hop drumbeats. But the band does not use Deeler when playing live or even while recording. “People reading about Deeler think that we’re some sort of electronica or MIDI [based] band,” says Harris. “It doesn’t write music for us. It just stores it.” This might surprise people who have never seen the band live. The soulful, syncopated drumming is 100 percent organic, even when it sounds looped and almost impossible for a human to play. “At least 80 percent of the drums were influenced by hip-hop,” says Seim. “Growing up and listening to Public Enemy, I never understood the whole drum-machine and drum-loops thing. I didn’t know that there wasn’t an actual person playing those beats. I really wanted to play that way and try hard to imitate that bass-heavy and rhythmic drive that’s in the music.”

The three demonstrate a masterful grasp on how to marry dissonant sounds. Menomena’s music is wonderfully approachable and challenging in a way that other “art rock” bands strive not to be, each track an aural adventure where sharp electric guitars are piled high on top of organs and brooding bass lines. The languid, naturalistic “Twenty Cell Revolt,” featuring hand clapping, bells, alto sax, and a steady beat, contrasts with the aggressive “Monkey’s Back,” with its unrepentant drumming and a wicked-sounding Knopf vocal. Despite their differences, both songs demonstrate the band’s knack for dense layering.

To date, the band has sold more than 2,000 copies of its hand-assembled CD (each of which includes a fun flip book), and is struggling to keep up with the orders pouring in via www.menomena.com. And as they prepare for a West Coast tour, they’re also composing original music for a Portland modern-dance troupe. In an era where the Recording Industry Association of America has shown its true colors, Menomena have chosen to eschew the larger music industry for the time being. “It seems that we’ve done pretty well on our own,” says Harris. “We want to tour and reach a larger audience, but there seems to be a traditional path that bands take in order to do this. We’re not really interested in following that path, and I think that we can afford to wait.” After all, they still have their day jobs.

Seattle’s Fourthcity Collective Pulls Programmers Out Of The Bedroom

(Photo coutesy of Fourthcity)

By Janna Chan for West Coast Performer Magazine

Walking through Seattle’s deserted Pioneer Square, you hear a steady beat and instinctively follow it to Temple Billiards. This incognito home of the Deep Down Lounge, located in the basement of the pool hall, looks more like a Satanic lair than the birthplace of a new electronic music movement—but looks can be deceiving. Welcome to Fourthcity.

The energy is high for a Monday night and for the past year and a half, the Fourthcity electronic and visual arts collective has drawn hundreds of people to this dank and dark basement by providing the unpredictable. Founded in January 2003 by friends Zach Huntting, 28, (a.k.a. Zapan) and Dan Naspinski, 25, (a.k.a. djn), the lounge has been a home base and gallery of sorts for young MCs, turntablists, dancers, musicians and artists to demonstrate their skills. One by one curious club goers descend a steep wooden staircase with incredibly loud instrumental hip-hop accompanying their trip. Once inside, visitors are greeted by plush velvet furniture and a low ceiling held precariously with wooden beams. On a long banquet table in the front of the lounge is a 17-inch screen PowerBook actively being diddled by a young man. Next to him are two turn tables, several TV screens and a projector flashing a random hodgepodge of mixed media. The faint smell of dead rats, instead of being gross, only reinforces the feeling that this is truly an underground movement.

Comprised of roughly 30 volunteer artists, Fourthcity is one of the largest and increasingly successful art collectives in Seattle. Perhaps best known for starting the Laptop battle phenomenon on the West Coast, the collective has moved-on to produce their first compilation CD on their self-titled record label [18 tracks which include IDM, jungle, drum & bass, straight hip-hop, ambient and R&B], and continues to rigorously promote the artists they represent—all on a pro bono basis. “We’ve never been paid,” says Huntting matter-of-factly. “I mean, we’ve been lucky enough to make money from the very beginning, but all of that money goes into a group account. We have a treasurer (Huntting’s wife Eiko Kowada) that keeps track of our profits and prevents us from dipping into it for our own needs.” Along with Huntting, none of the other artists in the collective have ever been paid. Music and artwork, as well as postering and physical labor, is donated to the Fourthcity fund that, in turn, pays for more posters and invests in much needed audio equipment.

Currently, Huntting and Naspinski are the only full-time members of the crew (Naspinski also works a full-time day job as a paralegal) and are responsible for booking tour dates, guest artists, recording and mastering music from their musicians and promoting, promoting, promoting. “We’re incredibly good promoters,” boasts Huntting. “We have consistently been building relationships with relevant people in the scene, and half of my day-to-day life is postering around town and sending and replying to massive amounts of email.” His work is definitely paying off. Around town Fourthcity’s name has become synonymous with hip-hop, but no one ever expected the collective to also garner “indie cred” among the rockers.

“When we started out, we were just a network of artists on a Web space,” says Huntting. “There were dancers, visual artists and all kinds of musicians on the site and these differences really inspired everyone involved. Later, when we officially became Fourthcity it was difficult to exclude people because they were into different things. We were never about that.” The collective’s reputation for openness has garnered a mixed bag of visitors to their Monday night events. Live musicians, who have included hip-hop trio Scape and indie fringe rockers the Infernal Noise Brigade, have played to diverse crowds made up of hippies, computer programmers, hip-hoppers, attorneys and students. With so many genres represented, it would be easy to say that Fourthcity was too unorganized to acquire any future success if it weren’t for one thing—the Laptop Battles.

“I saw my first laptop performance back in 1999,” said Naspinski. “That was considerably early for laptop music, at least for Seattle, and it wasn’t until April 2003 that we sponsored one of our own at the Deep Down Lounge.” Huntting adds, “That one was kind of a free for all. It wasn’t really a battle then but more like a showcase of different talent. We like to say that Bobby Karate won that first show when he blew out our subwoofer. That was basically the end of that battle.” Both of the guys say that they were initially inspired by the laptop cage matches that were happening in Chicago during that time. (According to them, a person would perform and then get dressed in a funny costume and attempt to distract the next performer while getting the crowd to boo or cheer along side them). Fourthcity took this theory and tweaked it by adding more structure and making the battle predominantly about music with focus on the artists.

Currently preparing for their fifth Laptop Battle, the Fourthcity crew is pleased, but not surprised, by the popularity of the events. The last battle drew nearly 600 people to the Chop Suey night club (the two previous battles were sold out) and dozens of amateur musicians were denied a chance to compete. Back in the day, these battles were very open and a good place for newcomers to demonstrate their skills. Today, interested musicians need to submit demos of their music beforehand and only 16 are ultimately allowed to compete. “These shows always bring out the bedroom producers,” says Naspinski. “The laptop is a new way of making music and maybe, in the past, people were too afraid to play their music for other people. The battles have changed all of that because people can easily see that they’re not the only ones pushing buttons and adjusting levers in their bedroom.”

The crew took the battle on the road in April to showcase their talent and promote the Fourthcity name. They received warm welcomes in Vancouver, B.C., Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and were recently invited to Chicago, New York and Puerto Rico to help kick off similar battles. The ultimate obstacle for Fourthcity, like any other artist, is whether or not their art/music will catch on and remain relevant to listeners. The issue was a no-brainer for Huntting and Naspinski. “We take Fourthcity very seriously,” said a steely-eyed Huntting. “We want this to be a career and we want to maintain our artistic integrity—but we have a practical perspective too: We like our music. There are 6.8 billion people in the world and there has to be some people who want to give us money to continue doing what we’re doing.” Well, laptops don’t come cheap.

The next national Laptop Battle Championship is September 24 at Seattle’s Chop Suey. For more information on Fourthcity artists, tour dates and where to send demos, check out www.fourthcity.net.