April 11, 2011

Words: Benjamin Slayter and Erin Slayter

On Saturday April 2, 2011 the sports bars and pubs of Chicago were packed with fans: some came to watch the NCAA basketball finals, others were in town to catch the Cubs opening homestand and a few watched U.S. Women’s soccer fall to England. Right alongside those diehards was a group of fans gearing up for a sporting event unlike those others, Umphrey’s McGee’s UMBowl II. The event, held at the Park West, was the latest offering in interactive concert experiences from improvisational gurus Umphrey’s McGee who have quickly become a front-runner in delivering fans fully immersive and interactive experiences.

[Photo by Erin Slayter]

Supporting this talented bunch of musicians and helping make an event like this possible is an extremely dedicated network of management and crew. The highly capable support team provided the level of technical complexity, bandwidth for live streaming and SMS text-based bridges to not only attempt, but completely nail the required production elements. Together they have established themselves as some of the top innovators in crowdsourced musical performance, evidenced by the second totally interactive UMBowl.

• Previously on HT: UMBowl II Setlist & Recap

UM’s plan for their social experiment began with their S2 or “Stew Art” Series Interactive performances, named after their jams which pay tribute to an evening of improvisational practice in the empty Jimmy Stewart Ballroom at the Pittsburgh Renaissance Hotel. The special events, held for a limited number of fans prior to the band’s regular gigs, are driven by live interaction with the fans via text messaging on the Mozes platform.  To continue to build on the success of these events, and grow their unique level of engaging, two-way communication and collaboration with the crowd, UM last year introduced the “UMBowl” concept, four quarters of crowdsourced rock designed to thrill the audience in completely fan-centric ways.

READ ON for more on Umphrey’s UMBowl II…

Later this week Phish is releasing a remaster of the 7/31/99 Fuji Rock Fest show to benefit Japanese disaster relief, and to set you in the right frame of mind,

On their first full-length release – titled Mirrors – Washington D.C. up-and-comers U.S. Royalty piece a musical mosaic over the course of ten songs. Most early reviews of the album point to the Americana element, but the band manages to include sections of skinny tie ’80s themes, cutting hook-based rock and hushed ballads.

The songs don’t necessarily don’t flow per se, but rather serve as almost point-counterpoint, giving the record a appeal in getting to know both the songs as well as the song sequence. In the tender Voice Memo, one of the most introspective tracks, which closes out the album, singer John Thornley sings in earnest, “Where I hope to find some rest for my troubled soul.” For the rest of us, this song is a good place to find it.

Hidden Track: The reception to the album, Mirrors, has been terrific thus far, and rightfully so. I saw that you mentioned making a real shift in the songwriting approach for this project as opposed to the previous E.P. Could you describe what you did differently this time around?

John Thornley: Paul and I would demo and work out most of the songs beforehand. We would lay down and layer a lot of the parts then bring it to the rest of the band. Then we would fiddle with arrangements or add new ideas. It seemed to go faster than all sitting in a room together and writing from scratch.

HT: Also, how would you characterize the collaborative process with Gus Oberg? It’s not every day that a young band gets to team up with a Grammy winning engineer.

JT: We had known Gus for about a year before he worked on this project. As we were pulling together songs for this album, we really wanted him involved with the project because we felt he would be able to get the sound we had not been able to get on our recordings up to this point. He had seen us live, so he knew our live sound, but in the studio he was instrumental in helping us record something that could sound big and sweeping while at the same time layered and cohesive.

READ ON for more of Ryan’s chat with John Thornley of U.S. Royalty…

Alison Krauss & Union Station will release their first studio album in nearly seven years, Paper Airplane, tomorrow. On Wednesday, the group will visit The Ed Sullivan Theater for a performance