Iowa City
Iowa
Mission Creek Festival 2023
Arts and Entertainment
March 31, 2023
From: Mission Creek FestivalMission Creek Festival is a 3-day music and literature festival that takes place every spring in downtown Iowa City, Iowa. The festival thrives on intimacy and visceral connections between artists and audiences. We host events indoors at traditional venues and local shops converted into performances spaces solely for the festival.
The program champions independent-minded musicians and writers–some are well-known, some are underground, some are emerging, and all of them are singular. Inspired by our producing organization’s values–The Englert Theatre–we promote voices across ethnicities, cultures, and experiences that reflect the diversity of our community today and where it is headed in the future.
Schedule of Events:
Thursday, April 6, 2023:
5:45 PM -- Michelle Zauner
Hancher Auditorium
Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Her most recent album, Jubilee (2021), earned two GRAMMY nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. Her first book, Crying in H Mart, is a New York Times Best Seller. She’s currently adapting the memoir for the screen for MGM’s Orion Pictures.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American. • “In losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself.” —NPR
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Conversation moderated by Iowa City writer and professor Bryn Lovitt.
Bryn Lovitt is a culture writer, book critic, and visiting assistant professor with an MFA in Nonfiction from Iowa.
7:15 PM -- Black Belt Eagle Scout
Hancher Auditorium
This land runs through Katherine Paul’s blood. And it called to her. In dreams she saw the river, her ancestors, and her home. When the land calls, you listen. And KP found herself far from her ancestral lands during a time of collective trauma, when the world was wounded and in need of healing. In 2020 she made the journey from Portland back to the Skagit River, back to the cedar trees that stand tall and shrouded in fog, back to the tide flats and the mountains, back to Swinomish.
It is a powerful thing to return to our ancestral lands and often times the journey is not easy. Like the salmon through the currents, like the tide as it crawls to shore this is a story of return. It is the call and response. It is the outstretched arms of the people who came before, welcoming her home. The Land, The Water, The Sky is a celebration of lineage and strength. Even in its deepest moments of loneliness and grief, of frustration over a world wrought with colonial violence and pain, the songs remind us that if we slow down, if we listen to the waves and the wind through the trees, we will remember to breathe.
There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. There is a reimagining of Sedna who was offered to the sea, and a beautiful rumination on sacrifice and humanity, and what it means to hold the stories that work to teach us something.
Chord progressions born out of moments of sadness and solitude transform into the islands that sit blue along the horizon. The Salish Sea curves along her homelands, and when the singer is close to this water she is reminded of her grandmother, how she looked out at these same islands, and she’s held by spirit and memory.
The Land, The Water, The Sky rises and falls, in darkness and in light, but even in its most melancholy moments it is never despairing. That is the beauty of returning home. When you stand on ancestral lands it is impossible to be alone. You feel the arms and hands that hold you up, unwilling to let you fall into sorrow or abandonment. In her songs Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. In every note she has written a love letter to indigenous strength and healing.
There is a joy present here, a fierce blissfulness that comes with walking the trails along the river, feeling the sand and the stones beneath her feet. It is the pride and the certainty that comes with knowing her ancestors walked along the same land, dipped their hands into the water, and ran their fingertips along the same bark of cedar trees.
This is a story of hope, as it details the joy of returning. Katherine Paul’s journey home wasn’t made alone, and the songs are crowded with loved ones and relatives, like a really good party. And as the songs walk us through the land it is important we hover over the images and the beauty, the moments that mark this album as site specific. The power of this land is woven throughout, telling the story of narrow waterways, brush strokes, salmon stinta, and above all healing.
Let it take you. Move through the story and see the land through her eyes, because it is a gift, a welcomed s?abad?b.
8:30 PM -- Cat Power
Hancher Auditorium
Chan Marshall’s latest Covers album as Cat Power arrives, as all of her music does, at just the perfect time. Covers is a deeply felt, intimate, and altogether holistic collection of songs intended as a healing salve for the artist and listener alike, showcasing Marshall’s singular chronicling of the ever-evolving great American songbook. Self-produced and featuring renditions of classic songs from artists like Jackson Browne, the Replacements, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Billie Holiday, and the Cat Power catalog itself, Covers is at once a reminder of Marshall’s artistically intuitive power and the latest chapter in a truly illustrious career.
With a catalogue of songwriting that’s unparalleled in the worlds of indie rock and American music at large—spanning several decades and ten studio albums—Marshall’s work at Cat Power has defied genre and convention, her legacy rippling through the work of a wide range of contemporary musical luminaries ranging from Lana Del Rey, Clairo, and Soccer Mommy to Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Angel Olsen. There’s a rawness and immediacy to Marshall’s music that has stood the test of time, with every new musical missive from her as essential as what’s come before it.
Admission: Included with festival pass
Friday, April 7, 2023:
Venue: Prairie Lights
5:00 PM | Willow & Stock; Wild Culture Kombucha
6:00 PM | Revival; Basic Goods; MERGE
7:00 PM | Prairie Lights
8:00 PM | Afterparty: The Greenhouse
Admission: Free and open to the public!
The annual Lit Walk returns to MCF this year with three rounds of speakers at your favorite local hotspots. Bringing Iowa City to life in new ways, hear an unexpected variety of work from a mix of talented local and out-of-town writers.
Round 1:
R.S.V.P: Martine Riker, Skylar Alexandar, Brandon Courtney, Bethany Shultz Hurst, Susan Goslee
Wild Culture Kombucha: Sarah Minor, Raquel Gutierrez, Hannah Bonner, Asha Galindo, Mofiyinfoluwa O.
Willow & Stock: Colin Winnette, Carolyn Dekker, Cory Hutchinson-Ruess, Jennifer MacBain Stephens, Alisha Jeddeloh
Round 2:
Revival: Paige Lewis, Kaveh Akbar, Grace Morse, Kristen Renee Miller, Chloe Angyal
Basic Goods: Nicole Adabunu, Bill Nguyen, Juliana Lamy, Sarah Khatry, Ella Davis
MERGE: Martha Strawbridge, Tramaine Suubi, Jake Goldwasser, Okwudili Nebeolisa, Christine Byrne
Round 3 :
Prairie Lights: Shelley Wong, Lauren Haldeman, Courtney Marie Andrews
Afterparty:
The Greenhouse.
Extravision - Music Performance
Riverside Theatre
7:00 PM | Psych-folk rock band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Extravision is the intentionally malleable music of Des Moines humans Ryan Stier (The River Monks, Annalibera), Ben Dixon, Amanda Gibbons, and a rotation cast of helpers. Extravision is in a word, psychedelic, and seeks to explore that concept in multitudes. Sometimes spacious and expansive, sometimes glitchy and watery, sometimes a whisper, Extravision is as unpredictable as they are boundless.
FlyLife – Music Performance
Gabes
7:30 | Iowa-based rapper
Admission: Included with festival pass
Des Moines, Iowa-based rapper De’Angelo McGregor, aka FlyLife is known for his ability to mix catchy hooks with high level lyricism and fresh deliveries. FlyLife is not your ordinary rapper. He has learned to choose his cadences tactically over any type of instrumentation.
McGregor started Us Vs Them in early 2017. A group that took his city by storm with other artists such as Kaiyo Collects, Vin, UnoUp6, Ace Forgiato and Dominic Harrington. Through doing shows and giving back to the small community – they gained a following inside of their own city and some parts of the Midwest. McGregor has proven time after time to be a very prolific artist. Releasing whenever he feels necessary since his first tape in June of 2016, “2600”, he has released over 10 collections of music. McGregor says his goals as an artist are to continually inspire others to create and bring a fresh product every chance he gets.
Sudan Archives - Music Performance
Venue: The Englert
8:00 | Avant-garde R&B violinist & vocalist
Admission: Included with festival pass
Sudan Archives contains multitudes. She first emerged as an avant-garde violinist who channeled her playing through loop pedals. But she’s also much more than that: lovelorn songwriter, powerful vocal performer, and experimental beatmaker. She’s captivated audiences at festivals around the world with her hybrid sound, playing at Coachella, Pitchfork Midwinter, and FORM: Arcosanti, and sharing stages with St Vincent, Ibeyi, and Michael Kiwanuka while touring her trail-blazing EPs ?Sudan Archives? (2017) and? Sink? (2018). Sudan’s many identities truly coalesce in her debut album, ?Athena?: a psychedelic, magnetic take on modern R&B that’s unlike anything else you’ve heard.
“When I was a little girl, I thought I could rule the world,”? Sudan Archives announces in the sparse, string-plucked opening bars of ?Athena,? on the strident “Did You Know”. Her musicality and sense of self-belief developed as a young child in the church. Born Brittney Parks, but called Sudan from a young age, she moved around Cincinnati, Ohio many times as a child; religion and music were the most stable forces in her life. It was in church that Sudan began learning to play the violin by ear, participating in ensemble performances. “I remember? ?begging my mom to get me a violin,” she says. “From there I just never let it go – it felt like I had a purpose.”
Mr. Softheart -- Music Performance
Venue: Riverside Theatre
8:30 | Casual goth electronic band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Mr. Softheart is an American 3-piece from Des Moines and Cedar Falls, IA.
Formed in 2021 by brothers John and Nick Fisher, alongside their long-time creative partner Charlie Patterson, Mr. Softheart’s sound fits most closely within a post-punk ethos — albeit one that favors minimalism and intimacy over more conventional iterations of the genre. Their live show has been described as “intense, brooding, and at times, convincingly unhinged.” Their studio work has drawn comparisons ranging from Nick Cave to Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd. One random guy in a Tulsa bar called them “Goddamned wizards!”
Mr. Softheart is currently recording their debut full-length album, to be released in 2023.
Water From Your Eyes -- Music Performance
Venue: Gabes
9:00 | Brooklyn-based electro-pop duo
Admission: Included with festival pass
There’s no perfect way to describe Water From Your Eyes; to relate the New York duo in absolutes would be imprecise and frivolous. Since 2016, the group’s clear-eyed approach to dance music has combined austerity and satire, abrasion and charm, with the pair plotting sonic trajectories on All a Dance and forgoing traditional album structure with Somebody Else’s Song. Having begun as an anti-pop project à la New Order and LCD Soundsystems, Water From Your Eyes quickly found themselves pivoting into a style-shaking act, combining art pop, trance, and dance punk into a reflective fusion of influence and genre. Nate Amos (This is Lorelei) and Rachel Brown (Thanks for Coming) delight in contradiction on their upcoming Wharf Cat debut, Structure. Water From Your Eyes wade into straight-faced sub-genres with tongue-in-cheek wit and undoubtedly know-how for their most staggering project yet.
Influenced by Scott Walker’s sole 80s release, Climate of Hunter, and the echoing works of the color-field painter Mark Rothko, Structure’s cavernous dance pieces serve as the hypnotic bedrock between spoken-word monologues, cinematic numbers, and an ostensibly cheery opener. The seven-minute-long epics “My Love’s” and “Quotations” are sprawling and borderline excruciating, with both tracks deploying sawtoothed loops and grooves capable of hypnotizing even the most passive of listeners. Like Rothko’s contradictory depiction of the static and kinetic, Water From Your Eyes invite listeners to chip away at Structure’s stoic facade, to take a closer look at its detailed handiwork and trace the cracks in the mirror.
Despite its titular implications and arty conceptual aesthetics, Structure is more lighthearted than it is self-serious, with the only actual “structure” being found in its tracklist. “The important thing to remember is that this is weed music,” Amos says. “There was not a single drop of work done in the recording, editing, or mixing process that was not preceded by a spliff.” Bitingly witty in their respective solo projects, both Rachel Brown and Nate Amos naturally apply humor to Structure, a record which reflects the band’s lock-and-key creative process. “It’s like solving a puzzle with a ton of different answers,” offers Brown, whose lyrics are plucked from their own journal and filtered into Water From Your Eyes’ musically calculated format.
When put together, Structure’s fragmental base only bolsters its effectiveness as a sequential whole. The opener, “When You’re Around,” was originally intended for a film that was never made, while “Monday” is a song for a film that doesn’t exist. Both tracks serve as eerie precursors for Structure’s paralleled sides. Avid listeners will revel in repeated plays to uncover the record’s melodic subtleties, rhythmic minutiae, and lyrical repetition. Structure is a first-class achievement in brutalist pop: it’s dreamy and dissociative, nuanced and hypnotic, and weaves together threads for listeners to unravel with each spin.
Snail Mail -- Music Performance
Venue: The Englert
9:45 | Indie rock solo project
Admission: Included with festival pass
On her 2018 debut album Lush, seventeen-year-old Lindsey Jordan sang “I’m in full control / I’m not lost / Even when it’s love / Even when it’s not”. Her natural ability to be many things at once resonated with a lot of people. The contradiction of confidence and vulnerability, power and delicacy, had the impact of a wrecking ball when put to tape. It was an impressive and unequivocal career-making moment for Jordan.
On Valentine, her sophomore album out November 5th on Matador, Lindsey solidifies and defines this trajectory in a blaze of glory. In 10 songs, written over 2019-2020 by Jordan alone, we are taken on an adrenalizing odyssey of genuine originality in an era in which “indie” music has been reduced to gentle, homogenous pop composed mostly by ghost writers. Made with careful precision, Valentine shows an artist who has chosen to take her time. The reference points are broad and psychically stirring, while the lyrics build masterfully on the foundation set by Jordan’s first record to deliver a deeper understanding of heartbreak.
On “Ben Franklin”, the second single of the album, Jordan sings “Moved on, but nothing feels true / Sometimes I hate her just for not being you / Post rehab I’ve been feeling so small / I miss your attention, I wish I could call”. It’s here that she mourns a lost love, conceding the true nature of a fleeting romantic tie-up and ultimately, referencing a stay in a recovery facility in Arizona. This 45-day interlude followed issues stemming from a young life colliding with sudden fame and success. Since she was not allowed to bring her instruments or recording equipment, Jordan began tabulating the new album arrangements on paper solely out of memory and imagination. It was after this choice to take radical action that Valentine really took its unique shape.
Jordan took her newfound sense of clarity and calm to Durham, North Carolina, along with the bones of a new album. Here she worked with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee). For all the album’s vastness and gravity, it was in this small home studio that Jordan and Cook chipped away over the winter of early 2021 at co-producing a dynamic collection of genre-melding new songs, finishing it triumphantly in the spring. They were assisted by longtime bandmates Ray Brown and Alex Bass, as well as engineer Alex Farrar, with a live string section added later at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond.
Leaning more heavily into samples and synthesizers, the album hinges on a handful of remarkably untraditional pop songs. The first few seconds of opener and title track ‘Valentine’ see whispered voice and eerie sci-fi synth erupt into a stadium-sized, endorphin-rush of a chorus that is an overwhelming statement of intent. “Ben Franklin”, “Forever (Sailing)” and “Madonna” take imaginative routes to the highest peaks of catchiness. Jordan has always sung with a depth of intensity and conviction, and the climactic pop moments on Valentine are delivered with such a tenet and a darkness and a beauty that’s noisy and guttural, taking on the singularity that usually comes from a veteran artist.
As captivating as the synth-driven songs are, it’s the more delicate moments like “Light Blue”, “c.et. al.” and “Mia” that distill the albums range and depth. “Baby blue, I’m so behind / Can’t make sense of the faces in and out of my life / Whirling above our daily routines / Both buried in problems, baby, honestly” Jordan sings on “c. et. al.” with a devastating certainty. These more ethereal, dextrously finger-picked folk songs peppered in throughout the album are nuanced in their vocal delivery and confident in their intricate arrangement. They come in like a breath of air, a moment to let the mind wander, but quickly drown the listener in their melodic alchemy and lyrical punch.
The album is rounded out radiantly by guitar-driven rock songs like “Automate”, “Glory” and “Headlock”. Reminiscent of Lush but with a marked tonal shift, Jordan again shows her prowess as a guitar player with chorus-y leads and rhythmic, wall-of-sound riffs. “Headlock” highlights this pivot with high-pitched dissonance and celestially affected lead parts – “Can’t go out I’m tethered to / Another world where we’re together / Are you lost in it too?”, she sings with grit and fatigue, building so poignantly on her sturdy foundation of out-and-out melancholy. On Valentine, we are taken 100 miles deeper into the world Jordan created with Lush, led through passageways and around dark corners, landing somewhere we never dreamed existed.
Today, in the wake of recording Valentine, Jordan is focused on trying to continue healing without slowing down. The album comes in the midst of so much growth, in the fertile soil of a harrowing bottom-out. On the heels of life-altering success, a painful breakup and 6 weeks in treatment, Jordan appears vibrant and sharp. “Mia, don’t cry / I love you forever / But I gotta grow up now / No I can’t keep holding onto you anymore” she sings on the album closer “Mia”. She sings softly but her voice cuts through like a hacksaw. The song is lamenting a lost love, saying a somber goodbye, and it closes the door on a bitter cold season for Jordan. Leaving room for a long and storied path, Valentine is somehow a jolt and a lovebuzz all at once.
Yasmin Williams -- Music Performance
Venue: Riverside Theatre
9:45 - 10:45 | Acoustic fingerstyle guitarist & composer
Admission: Included with festival pass
Yasmin Williams sits on her leather couch, her guitar stretched across her lap horizontally with its strings turned to the sky. She taps on the fretboard with her left hand as her right hand plucks a kalimba placed on the guitar’s body. Her feet, clad in tap shoes, keep rhythm on a mic’d wooden board placed under her. Even with all limbs in play, it’s mind boggling that the melodic and percussive sounds that emerge are made by just one musician, playing in real time. With her ambidextrous and pedidextrous, multi-instrumental techniques of her own making and influences ranging from video games to West African griots subverting the predominantly white male canon of fingerstyle guitar, Yasmin Williams is truly a guitarist for the new century. So too is her stunning sophomore release, Urban Driftwood, an album for and of these times. Though the record is instrumental, its songs follow a narrative arc of 2020, illustrating both a personal journey and a national reckoning, through Williams’ evocative, lyrical compositions.
A native of northern Virginia, Williams, now 24, began playing electric guitar in 8th grade, after she beat the video game Guitar Hero 2 on expert level. Initially inspired by Jimi Hendrix and other shredders she was familiar with through the game, she quickly moved on to acoustic guitar, finding that it allowed her to combine fingerstyle techniques with the lap-tapping she had developed through Guitar Hero, as well as perform as a solo artist. By 10th grade, she had released an EP of songs of her own composition. Deriving no lineage from “American primitive” and rejecting the problematic connotations of the term, Williams’ influences include the smooth jazz and R&B she listened to growing up, Hendrix and Nirvana, go-go and hip-hop. Her love for the band Earth, Wind and Fire prompted her to incorporate the kalimba into her songwriting, and more recently, she’s drawn inspiration from other Black women guitarists such as Elizabeth Cotten, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Algia Mae Hinton. On Urban Driftwood, Williams references the music of West African griots through the inclusion of kora (which she recently learned) and by featuring the hand drumming of 150th generation djeli of the Kouyate family, Amadou Kouyate, on the title track.
Since its release in January 2021, Urban Driftwood has been praised by numerous publications such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Wasington Post, NPR Music, No Depression, Paste Magazine, and many others. Williams will be touring in support of Urban Driftwood throughout 2021.
Divino Niño -- Music Performance
Venue: Gabes
10:45 | Surreal, psychedelic American-Colombian rock band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Divino Niño are no strangers to bold reinvention. When Camilo Medina and Javier Forero—friends whose bond dates back to their childhoods in Bogotá, Colombia—moved to Chicago and recruited guitarist Guillermo Rodriguez to form a band, they were psych-pop outsiders playing live shows with a drum machine. With the addition of drummer Pierce Codina, their 2019 breakthrough and debut LP for Winspear, Foam, solidified their place as local indie rock mainstays. Soon after, multi-instrumentalist Justin Vittori joined to round out their lineup. Once again, with their masterful, unpredictable, and eminently danceable new album, the band has done something radical: They totally upended the way they write songs, eschewing practice room jams for unrelentingly collaborative beats, implied grooves for immersive dance floor heaters, and mellow vibes for frenetic doses of reggaeton, electropop, and trap on their most adventurous and ambitious work to date. Welcome to the Last Spa on Earth.
Saturday, April 8, 2023:
Small Press & Literary Magazine Bookfair
Venue: Chauncey
11:00 AM - 5:00 PM | The Chauncey
Admission: Free and available to public
The annual Mission Creek Festival Small Press & Literary bookfair returns! Stop by The Chauncey for books, conversation, and community. Grab a Mission Creek fest tote bag to carry your haul of books and discover these featured presses:
503 Press
Black Lawrence Press
Book*hug Press
Brink
Canarium Books
Dorothy, a publishing project
draft: the journal of process
earthwords: the undergraduate literary review
Europa Editions
Featherproof Books
Fonograf Editions
Ink Lit Mag
Little Engines
Long Day Press
Meekling Press
Midwest Review
New Moon Magazine
Partus Press
PromptPress
Rescue Press
Sarabande Books
The City High Review
The Iowa Review
The Sun Magazine
TriQuarterly
Two Dollar Radio
Yes Yes Books
Venue: FilmScene Theater 3
11:00-12:00 | FilmScene
Admission: Free and open to public
Meekling Press is a small “boundary-defying” publisher, printer, and arts collective based in Chicago, Illinois. Black Lawrence Press is an independent publisher of contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Join Meekling Press Publisher Rebecca Elliot and Black Lawrence Press Anthologies Editor and Immigrant Writing Series Editor Abayomi Animashaun as they discuss the merits, challenges, and opportunities presented in publishing chapbooks and genre-defying art books.
6th Annual I.C.E. C.R.E.A.M Zine Fair
Venue: Public Space One
11:00 AM |Public Space One
The Iowa City Expo for Comics and Real Eclectic Alternative Media (ICE CREAM) Returns!
The Sun, Readers Write Workshop
Venue: The Tuesday Agency at 12:30-1:30 pm
Admission: Free and open to register
In each monthly issue of The Sun, Readers Write asks readers to address subjects on which they’re the only authorities: “Drug Experiences,” “Tools,” “Learning the Hard Way,” “Cooking,” “Being Stubborn,” to name just a few. Topics are intentionally broad in order to give room for expression.
In this hour-long workshop, participants will learn about The Sun’s Readers Write section and draft entries for forthcoming, not-yet-announced topics. As time permits, participants will share work in an open, supportive environment, and have the opportunity to ask questions about submitting writing or the editing/selection process at The Sun.
Derek Askey:
Derek Askey is an associate editor at The Sun. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Venue: Filmscene Theater 3
2:00-3:00 |Filmscene Theater 3
Admission: Free and open to public
Founded in 2016, Fonograf Editions is a nonprofit literary record label and book press from Portland, Oregon. Sarabande Books is an independent publisher dedicated to poetry, short fiction, and essay, located in Louisville, KY. Join Fonograf Editions Editor Jeff Alessandrelli and Sarabande Books author Lauren Haldeman for an insider’s look at the role texture and hybridity play in indie publishing.
Pictoria Vark -- Music Performance
Venue: Big Grove Brewery
3:00 | Indie rock bassist, singer, & songwriter
Admission: Included with festival pass
Pictoria Vark is the project of Iowa City-based songwriter and bassist Victoria Park. Growing up in northern New Jersey and cutting her teeth on the NYC music scene, Park’s debut full-length record, “The Parts I Dread” documents a sudden paradigm shift she faced when her parents relocated to Wyoming when she was 19.
Much of Parts resonates as a scrapbook, brimming with faded photos and smudged annotations, recollecting the muted malaise of 2018 through 2020. Born from the unanticipated announcement that her parents were relocating from her childhood home in New Jersey to Wyoming, this personal change led to meditation on where, or what, home truly is.
Since its release, Pictoria Vark has exploded onto the national scene; she’s grabbed the attention of major publications and peers including Pitchfork, Forbes, and La Dispute, with whom she embarked her first full-U.S. tour last fall.
Mars Hojilla -- Music Performance
Venue: Trumpet Blossom Cafe
3:30 | Indie alt-rock solo project
Admission: Included with festival pass
Mars Hojilla is the freshly sprung solo project of Iowa City-based singer/songwriter Myles Evangelista (he/they). Born to two kickass Filipino immigrants in Peoria, Illinois, Myles’s first musical love was the household’s MAGIC SING Karaoke Machine, which fostered in him a love of classic pop and rock by scoring him highly on Queen, ABBA, and Elton John songs. He further pursued his passion for music with classical piano, French Horn, electric bass, and acoustic guitar performance, and eventually, songwriting. Myles overlays his indie/alt-rock style music with lyrics that explore every corner of human emotion and dive deep into his perspective on love, heartbreak, and growing pains in the transgender experience. “mars hojilla” is so named firstly for Myles’s mother, who gave him her maiden name as a middle name, and secondly for the cashier at the I-80 Arby’s, who misheard his actual first name for a planet.
Venue: The Tuesday Agency
3:30-4:30 | The Tuesday Agency
Admission: Free and open to public
Lit Hub’s Thresholds Podcast w/ Jordan Kisner, Ganavya, and Kaveh Akbar. Thresholds is a series of interviews with writers and artists you love about the transformative experiences (surprises, crises, existential freakouts, u-turns, breakthroughs) that have shaped their work.
Jordan Kisner
Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places, named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, and her writing also appears in New York The Believer, n+1, The Paris Review online, and many others. She’s the founder and host of the podcast Thresholds, and currently serves as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa.
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin 2022). Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. Since 2020, he has served as poetry editor for The Nation.
Ganavya
With a voice described as “a thick ephemera” (New York Times), with an “aching emotional intensity” (JazzTimes), “extraordinary” (DownBeat), and “haunting” (All About Jazz) vocalist, scholar, and multi instrumentalist ganavya lives, learns, and loves fluidly from many frameworks and understandings. Her recent works include writing and singing the first Tamil words to win a Latin Grammy, featured solo vocalist on Grammy award-winning Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021), leading a 3-day long spi/ritual gathering to honor Swami Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda titled Daughter of a Temple featuring esperanza spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins, Chris Sholar and many others (2022); solo vocalist and composer for the film this body is so impermanent…directed by Peter Sellars (2021); composition, dance and solo voice for Chapter 7: The Goddess directed by Peter Sellars, and Jerome Foundation commission Let’s Go Out and Play (2021).
The Uniphonics -- Music Performance
Venue: Big Grove Brewery
4:15 | Multi-genre, multi-instrumental band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Since forming in Iowa City in 2007, The Uniphonics performed in more than 15 states, played at notable festivals, and opened for platinum selling artists. They’ve released 3 albums: Truth Be Told (2009), Crawl (2010), and The Uniphonics (2020). “Crawl” and “The Uniphonics” feature collaborations with internationally known artists, including Grammy Award winning jazz legend Robin Eubanks, Twin Cities vocal phenom Heatbox, and Iowa guitar legend Dennis “Daddy-O” McMurrin.
Their self titled album includes 12 songs that draw from hip hop, funk, soul, jazz, reggae, and latin traditions. They’ve been described as “taking the jam-band approach to hip hop,” with virtuosic live band instrumentation and improvisation.
The Uniphonics are a who’s who of the Eastern Iowa music scene. The band shares members with other regional acts, including Diplomats of Solid Sound, The Candymakers, The Channel Cats, BEEs, Plastic Relations, The Swampland Jewels, Jumbies, and dozens more.
The Uniphonics are:
Forrest Heusinkveld: Drums, Vocals
Bethann Heidgerken: Vocals
Craig Heidgerken: Guitar
Derek Thorn (aka MC Animosity): Vocals
Nassor Cooper: Vocals
Eddie McKinley: Saxophone
Ryan Casteel: Bass
Karen Meat -- Music Performance
Venue: Trumpet Blossom Cafe
4:30 | Pop rock band experience
Admission: Included with festival pass
Karen Meat is a pop rock band experience based in Iowa, Midwest USA. In colorful outfits and antics, Karen Meat is fronted by Arin Eaton and backed by Dana Telsrow. Their melting synth and guitar rippin’ tunes bounce to the beat of Eaton’s melodic yet straight-to-the- point vocals, confessing weird life in a choir of her own harmonies.
Eaton began Karen Meat in Des Moines during the party years of the mid-2010s, along with bandmates Brad Turk and John Huffman. Their most recent full-band record Meat Your Heart Out, released in late 2019 under Karen Meat & The Heat, crystalizes their garagey dive bar spirit (“Pizza & Beer”, “Part of the Party”). In 2016, Eaton went out on her own in sunglasses and a giant sparkly mumu, crooning to a karaoke-style set produced by Telsrow. Now joining her on stage in mumus and his electric guitar, Eaton and Telsrow’s coordinated act perfectly aligns with their funky pop songs. Karen Meat’s record You’re An Ugly Person (Emotional Response Records, 2018) introduced the bubbly yet cranky harmony between Eaton and Telsrow – music that feels like a disco party decorated with sad clown paintings.
The Heavy Heavy -- Music Performance
Venue: Big Grove Brewery
5:30 | 5-piece retro-inspired rock band
Admission: Included with festival pass
The Heavy Heavy create the kind of unfettered rock-and-roll that warps time and place, immediately pulling the audience into a euphoric fugue state with its own sun-soaked atmosphere. Led by lifelong musicians Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, the Brighton, UK-based band began with a shared ambition of “making records that sound like our favorite records ever,” and soon arrived at a reverb-drenched collision of psychedelia and blues, acid rock and sunshine pop. As revealed on their gloriously hazy debut EP Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy breathe an incandescent new energy into sounds from decades ago, transcending eras with a hypnotic ease.
Friko -- Music Performance
Venue: Trumpet Blossom Cafe
5:45 | Chicago-based indie pop band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Fans know Friko (Bailey Minzenberger, Luke Stamos, and frontman Niko Kapetan) as vital rising stars in the Chicago scene. The music, which freelancer Britt Julious described as “perfect slices of indie-pop” in the Chicago Tribune last January, is complex, layered, and dynamic. Over the band’s time together, it has become clear they are comfortable embracing multiple musical extremes at once. Take a listen to the explosive and hypnotic beat of “In_Out” off their self managed 2022 EP release, Whenever Forever, and juxtapose it against the serene, strings soaked tracks that follow, “Half as Far” and “Can I See U Again.” It becomes even more pronounced in live performance, where a frenzied floor, grinding with wailing guitars and animation, in the very next minutes finds itself collectively holding its breath silently as the band eases them into a spell. Lyrically, Kapetan explores the possibility and risks of a life given over to music, interrogating what a life well-lived means to him. The duality rings out in the compositions, evoking rock and folk icons such as Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake. As Friko plays out sweeping melodies, held up by thrashing guitar and punchy beats, it feels as if Kapetan sings to you. Crooning about stories you know, memories you had but have somehow forgotten.
Capstone Reading & Afterparty Celebrating The Sun Magazine
Venue: The James
7:00 - 8:00 | The James
Admission: Free and open to public
This after party at The James is in celebration of The Sun Magazine’s 50th anniversary. Join us for these featured keynote speakers, poets, and authors:
Camonghne Felix
Camonghne Felix is a poet, essayist, political strategist, and cultural worker. She is the author of Build Yourself a Boat, which was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Awards, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, LitHub, PEN America, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays have been featured in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue and more.
Camonghne is currently working on a literary nonfiction collection, Dyscalculia, and a collection of essays, Let the Poets Govern
Michael Torres
Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and named one of NPR’s Books We Love, 2020. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com
Zoe Bossiere
Zoë Bossiere is a genderfluid nonfiction writer from Tucson, Arizona. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). She is also co-editor of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins anthology (Wayne State University Press, 2023).
Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised in eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.
Rachel Yoder
Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (Doubleday), her debut novel released in July 2021. A film adaptation produced by Annapurna, directed by Marielle Heller, and starring Amy Adams will be released in 2023. Searchlight will distribute worldwide. Rachel is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio and now lives in Iowa City.
BCJsPs -- Music Performance
Venue: Riverside Theatre
7:00 | Avant-garde soundscape music
Admission: Included with festival pass
Brian Penkrot, Jason Palamara, and Justin K Comer met in the early 2010s while pursuing graduate degrees in composition at the University of Iowa. Jason and Justin began playing together to accompany dancers, and eventually founded the duo JC?jp. The duo lost some steam when Jason moved to Indiana, but in 2019, Brian breathed new life into the project by inviting Jason and Justin to Chicago (a middle ground) to record new material. The trio BCJsPs (“bee-see-jays-peas”) was born.
Greg Wheeler & The Poly Mall Cops -- Music Performance
Venue: Gabes
7:30 | Local garage punk band
Admission: Included with festival pass
Straight out of Des Moines, IA, aka the ninth best place to live in the entire world, Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops deliver manic garage punk slime at its finest — whatever that means.
Greg Wheeler (The Wheelers, The Slats, Night Stories) joins Jill McLain-Meister and friendly neighborhood barber Hutch (The Vandon Arms) to form an unusual and frantic chemistry that leaves you winded, but thirsty for more.
Their recent 7-inch release, Room, is a fitting follow-up to their 2017 debut release, a split with St. Louis shriekers, Shitstorm – packing a punch with three high energy bangers.
Merging the sounds of past punk acts like the Wipers and The Rats with the modern garage leanings of acts like Thee Oh Sees and Jay Reatard, Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops add a fresh energy to the Midwest scene.
The band has shared the stage with crowd favorites like Downtown Boys, Death Valley Girls, No Age, The Shivas, Colleen Green, Ebony Tusks, Bob Log III, Dressy Bessy and Gooch Palms.
Are they really poly? Depends on how many drinks they’ve had. Are they really mall cops? Depends on how many drinks they’ve had. But no matter what goes on backstage, their onstage antics are guaranteed to be just as intriguing.
Courtney Marie Andrews -- Music Performance
Venue: The Englert
7:45 | Indie-folk Americana singer/songwriter
Admission: Included with festival pass
n the honey shores of Cape Cod in a beach shack, Courtney Marie Andrews found self-love and her voice. Every morning, she’d walk 6-8 miles around the back trails of an island and meditate on her life, perusing old memories and patterns like browsing a used bookshop. That summer of introspection led her to a joyous sense of beginnings and ends. When she let love for herself in, she therein let the outside love in, too—the summer feeling, the swaying cypress, the full moon, and the possibility of healthy love. This phase came only right after one of her darkest, though, where being alone with oneself was the most terrifying thing you could do. After more than a decade on the road, the Phoenix-born songwriter, poet, and painter finally had the space to process all the highs and lows of a life of constants. She was finally ready to make a record of triumph, while not completely forgetting the years that made her. That record is Loose Future.
After committing to penning a song a day, Courtney found the sounds of summer flowing through her writing—the romance, and possibility, and the free sounds. Collecting an album’s worth of material, she tied up some loose ends in Bisbee, Arizona, her “soul place” and beckoned Sam Evian to come and produce a record. Her guideposts were lots of harmonies and alternative percussion. The rest was pure exploration. At Flying Cloud Recordings in New York, she dipped in the creek every morning before proceeding. She wanted to embody the feeling of letting love in. Taking the dip is what letting love in feels like. Sometimes you plunge, and sometimes you walk slowly in. This summer feeling materializes on the first single “Satellite” where her shimmering vocals orbit delicate acoustic guitar, a soft beat, and buzzing intergalactic synths. As if bottling rays of July sun, it glows with the affirmation, “I like to see you shine—my favorite piece of the sky.”
“I’ve written a lot of love songs, but there’s always a tinge of heartbreak,” she explains. “I wanted to write a love song with no caveats, which I’ve never allowed myself to do. A satellite is so mysterious to the average person. It’s the idea somebody is floating around your mind. You’re not quite sure why, but you like it.”
“When you listen to me, I hope you feel good,” she leaves off. “I spent so much of my career relating to the brokenhearted. There will always be that side of me. With this record, I hope you feel love on multiple levels. It doesn’t have to be romantic; it could just be self-love or hope. I’ve come into the full spectrum of my own creativity and selfhood. I want to keep continuing exploring that forever against the backdrop of summer.”
Ebony Tusks -- Music Performance
Venue: Riverside Theatre
8:15 | The Only Ion: 9 p.m.
Admission: Included with festival pass
Arattling subwoofer is a sonic aberration, a byproduct of high volume that often results in a speaker system’s long-term damage. It takes the listening experience from exclusively aural to physical, evoking a range of reactions from listeners. This experience is bonded inextricably with rap music for both its fans and dissenters, a familiar beacon for some and an unwelcome nuisance for others. Marty was a cashier at Burger King while in high school, spending every Saturday morning working the drive-thru window. One of his best friends pulled up to the menu and filled the speaker with sounds from his 1972 Volkswagen Beetle’s cassette adapter. Marty’s headset was filled with hot, white noise. He knew it was a rap song but it was mutated to scorched earth. It also happened to come through the main speaker right inside the drive-thru window. His manager was not at all pleased, rushing quickly to turn it off. Marty and his friend laughed it off at the time. EBONY TUSKS is a compilation of moments like these. Daniel, Geese, and Marty are three people from the Midwest who take pleasure in the mutations of sound available in the least expected places.
Daniel Smith — DJ, Production
Geese Giesecke – Vocals, Production
Marty Hillard – Vocals, Production
McKinley Dixon -- Music Performance
Venue: Gabes
9:00 | Conscious hip hop & jazz rap artist
Admission: Included with festival pass
Richmond, Virginia-based artist McKinley Dixon has always used his music as a tool for healing, exploring, and unpacking the Black experience in order to create stories for others like him. On his previous two self-released albums, Dixon’s songs looked at concepts ranging from self-love to police brutality, and the complex trauma Black people navigate collectively and as individuals. For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her, Dixon’s debut album on Spacebomb, is the culmination of a journey where heartbreak and introspection challenged him to adapt new ways of communicating physically and mentally, as well as across time and space.
“Black people have an ability to talk about the concept of home—meaning communities, blocks, hoods—from a really thorough place because of those concepts’ connection to Blackness. That ability, and sort of already internalized and in place language, allows for the speaker (rapper) to exist in their current setting, while also being able to reminisce, dissect, and discuss their past,” says Dixon explaining the idea of rap as a form of time travel. “If time is ‘non-linear,’ what is stopping me from going back to process the past? I am here now, having learned what I have, and because of that I am able to go back and figure out patterns and trajectories to see better how I’ve gotten to this point. And to see what I can do differently for the community and people around me in the future to make where we’re going, together, better. For me and other Black folks, when you hear rap music, you are then able to take those moments in the music and apply them to your own life and patterns. It’s a glimpse into the worlds of others that look like you, and it allows you to feel a sense of belonging—and in a way, a sense of home. Rap music has a very sturdy trajectory of ‘I want to be somewhere else, one day I’ll be somewhere else, and I’ll take my whole community with me.’”
This unique concept of musical time travel elevates the storytelling on For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her as it moves through different stages of Dixon unpacking and processing his surroundings. The new album, which is the third piece of a trilogy, finds Dixon working through inner demons, complex relationships with religion, and trying to make sense of mortality for Black peoples. This winding road of turmoil is only amplified by a deeper pain he’s still finding the language to work through: in 2018, his best friend was tragically killed. In the context of just being Black and living in this world, “musical time travel” has become a way for Dixon to dissect traumatic timelines and pave his own road to processing, healing, and survival. “The album is me processing for myself now, and for my younger self,” explains Dixon. “It’s also a conversation to my homie who died, who didn’t have access to the same things as I did—didn’t have access to music, therapy, books.” With Black death constantly happening on a news cycle, within neighborhoods, and within families, processing has never had a specific start and end point. These 11 songs are a way for Dixon to cycle through fragmented memories and unclosed chapters, and begin to reconcile where these stories of racism, death, and trauma live on the new timeline he’s created for himself.
Kevin Morby -- Music Performance
Venue: The Englert
9:00 | GENRE: Indie folk-rock
Admission: Included with festival pass
Kevin Morby is a Kansas City based singer/songwriter. With his seven acclaimed solo albums and myriad records of various collaboration, Morby has become a true musical auteur. His singular vision, evocative lyrics, and aptitude for catchy, dense songwriting has placed him firmly among the ranks of modern icons. Each Morby record possesses its own unique persona and explores intriguing themes and fertile terrain through shifting, focused textures and dexterous, dedicated skill. This Is A Photograph, Morby’s latest album, finds him making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. The creatively invigorated songwriter has managed to align his finest songs, best vocal performances, most incisive lyrics, and his most lush arrangements to date.
Natural Information Society -- Music Performance
Venue: Riverside Theatre
9:45 | Multi-instrumental ensemble
Admission: Included with festival pass
Natural Information Society (NIS) is a band led by composer & multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams. The group’s music is grounded in Abrams’ hypnotic & interwoven writing. Performing with Lisa Alvarado’s free hanging paintings as mobile sets, NIS create environments at once meditative & propulsive. NIS navigates forms that emphasize simultaneous differences, rhythm & collective listening. The group has released six records, including descension (Out of Our Constrictions) 2021, for eremite records.
NIS tours as a quartet with Abrams on guimbri, Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums & Jason Stein on bass clarinet, occasionally appearing in larger formations & with guests.
Outside of NIS, Abrams has played & recorded with a broad range of artists including Fred Anderson, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nicole Mitchell & The Roots. He has composed scores to ten feature films including the Oscar nominated Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Abrams was a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2018 Grants to Artists award.
TEKE::TEKE -- Music Performance
Venue: Gabes
10:45 | Psychedelic Japanese surf rock band
Admission: Included with festival pass
After initially forming as a tribute band for Japanese guitar legend Takeshi Terauchi, TEKE::TEKE learned that they had to tear up their surf-tinged covers and build something new. Since then, the Montreal-based seven-piece have expanded their already wide scope into a dazzling journey through classic Japanese balladry and Brazillian psychedelia alike. Fusing everything from traditional Japanese instrumentation to punk guitar, TEKE::TEKE have created their own musical universe–one that’s continuously expanding.
On their debut album Shirushi, TEKE::TEKE blend their eastern and western influences to produce a set of songs that play like soundtracks to a wildly eccentric epic film saga. From the spiritual tale of “Yoru Ni” to the stomping adventure ride of “Kala Kala” and the doomed romance of “Dobugawa”, the Montreal-based seven-piece find a mystic cohesion. By tearing apart roaring punk guitar riffs, folk instrumentation, poetic Japanese lyrics, and big band energy, Shirushi builds a dazzling mosaic of styles and eras.
Date: April 6 - 8, 2023
Location: Various Venue in Iowa City, IA 52240.
Admission: Included with festival pass
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