Students’ Record Label Showcased at CMJ

David Knowles Public Relations Manager

The basement of Lit Lounge is a post-rock dungeon. I didn’t see any shackles chained to the walls, but I’m still sure they’re there somewhere. As I descended into the depths last Friday, an elaborately screened poster of a bleeding dragon grabbed my eye. An extended investigation of the contents revealed that this was a poster for the show I had come to see: The Lovepump United CMJ Showcase.

Lovepump United is a record label started last year by two Vassar students, Mookie Singerman ’06 and Jake Friedman ’07. Both played a rollicking opening set as the band Glitter Pals to launch the night. CMJ is the College Music Journal, one of the country’s premier contemporary music publications. Every year CMJ hosts a monumental festival in New York City spanning four days and featuring hundreds of artists, performing at hundreds of venues all over the city.

This year, Lovepump United received not only their own showcase at Lit, but also a highlighting write-up in the festival’s genre guide as the premier noise rock event of the night. Also performing were the San Diego punk group Dmonstrations, fronted by highly regarded Japanese comic book artist Tetsunori Tawaraya, and their label mates Honeyhander. The award for weirdest band of the night went to Orlando based electro-spazz duo Yip-Yip, who performed a set of noisy/dancy analog keyboard manipulations dressed in checkered body suits against a checkered backdrop. They were followed by Singerman, fellow Vassar student Hamilton Jordan ’06, and alumnus Michael Sochynsky ’05, who played a set of train wreck metal laced with spacey dance interludes as Genghis Tron. But it was the final band of the evening, Montreal-based four-piece AIDS Wolf, who caused the most damage. AIDS Wolf play music that is, well, loud. I stood on a bench and watched as the crowd down front swung from the pipes on the ceiling, and lead singer Chloe Lum wailed on the floor, her microphone cord wrapped around her face. Then she took off her pants. “You don’t know how to party like we do in Canada,” she yelled. No, I thought, I certainly don’t.

When I talked to Lum outside of the 169 Bar in Chinatown the next day, her pants were on. “The show was really, really awesome,” she said “the crowd was really rowdy. I lost my earring. If anyone finds a weird squiggly hoop earring it’s mine.” Lum says she has enjoyed working with Lovepump and that she is excited for the release of the new AIDS Wolf EP on the label in January. She tells me about bands she was in before AIDS Wolf, the time she spent living in Oaxaca, Mexico, a former band member who got deported back to India, a roommate who went insane after taking a hundred hits of acid, and Seripop, the design company she runs with her partner and band mate, Yannick Desranleau. Apart from designing the poster that I had noticed the night before for the Lovepump United showcase, Seripop has done poster work for groups like Wolf Eyes, Xiu Xiu and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “We went on this art tour where we met all these people and displayed all our posters in galleries and bars,” she said. That 2004 tour, which lasted five weeks and covered 22 cities, introduced Desranleau and Lum to many of the venues and promoters they would work with through AIDS Wolf. “I don’t know that we would be as successful with this music project if we hadn’t done that tour. The art thing sort of made the music thing viable.”

AIDS Wolf, along with Yip-Yip and the Glitter Pals, played Vassar the night after the Lovepump Showcase. A healthy crowd came out to see a decidedly smaller event in the Main MPR that demonstrated, along with the Showcase, that it is a drive, and an ear for noise rock, that makes this “music thing” not only possible, but realized.