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Advance Base / Karima Walker / Dan Wriggins - SOLD OUT

  • Public Space One 538 South Gilbert Street Iowa City, IA, 52240 United States (map)

SOLD OUT!

doors at 7:30/music at 8
masks & vax card/negative test required
at PS1 Close— 538 S. Gilbert
*access only via stairs while we make accessiblilty upgrades*

Advance Base is the melancholic synth pop project of Chicago, IL singer/songwriter Owen Ashworth (formerly of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone). Using a two-handed arsenal of electric piano, Omnichord, samplers, effect pedals & drum machines, Ashworth builds minimalist, heavy-hearted, & nostalgia-obsessed ballads around his conversational baritone. The warm, electronic sound of Advance Base has been described as "lo-fi," "depressed" & "weirdly uplifting."

Animal Companionship, the third & most recent "studio" album by Advance Base, was released September 21, 2018 by Run For Cover Records / Orindal Records. GoldFlakePaint & Various Small Flames both listed Animal Companionship among their top ten albums of 2018. Since then, Advance Base has released Wall of Tears & Other-Songs I Didn't Write, a home-recorded collection of (mostly) country/Americana covers arranged for electronic instruments & Live at Home, a collection of mid-quarantine livestream concert performances & the closest representation of an Advance Base live set commercially available.

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography and creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within Walker’s music has never been so articulately explored, or graced with as much intention, as on her 2021 album, Waking the Dreaming Body, which was featured on "best albums of the year" lists from Gorilla Vs Bear, Goldflakepaint, For the Rabbits, Deepest Currents, Hanif Abdurraqib & more.

“With her uncanny Americana, Walker’s experimental inclinations have allowed her to explore some previously unplumbed liminal space on the horizon, somewhere between sand and sky.” -Pitchfork

Dan Wriggins is a Philadelphia-based songwriter, musician, and poet. He grew up in the town of Yarmouth, Maine, and on Islesford, a small island community near Bar Harbor. In high school, he started playing piano and guitar, and met bandmates Michael Cormier and Peter Gill. He worked on lobster fishing boats before moving to Philadelphia and starting the alt-country band Friendship in 2015, with whom he has toured the US and Canada extensively. He lives and sometimes tours with his dog, Roy.

The EP Mr. Chill is Wriggins’ debut release under his own name. Michael Cormier’s minimal production is an open frame; quiet drums in a big room, classical guitar, and melodic organ lift Wriggins’ prose-poem lyrics. His solemn, wounded delivery makes lines like “you trust your gut/and your gut lies” and “read my salty lips/no new love” into deadly serious jokes. Title notwithstanding, Mr. Chill isn’t great background music - it’s rich and powerful, demanding attention as a profoundly moving and original work. UK music blog For the Rabbits named Mr. Chill their #1 EP of 2021.

"Wriggins has a knack for whip smart couplets (“I can tell you stuff that I can’t tell anyone else / because you don’t threaten to help”) that strikes me as real country, in an olden-golden way, bringing to mind folks like Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson. But there’s also a poignant thread of tenderness (“I still want to love this little world”) undulating throughout that recalls Gene Clark’s songs or the poems of James Tate. A peaceful resignation emanates from Wriggins’ tunes: an acceptance of the world and of one’s fraught relationship to it; moments of clarity and intimacy and others of loneliness and longing. It’s all in there, and it’s all refracting for you to find your own reflection in it, too." - Aquarium Drunkard