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Listings are
in the opposite order of appearance: headliner is listed at the top,
next is the support band(s),
and the last band listed is the opener.
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Tuesday March 31
2026
7:30PM doors -- music at 8:00PM ••• ALL AGES $20 Saintseneca [co-headlining] saintseneca.com folk rock Gladie [co-headlining] gladie.net/home Folksy indie rock TBA ... Saintseneca -from Colombus, OH -In a world orbited by two moons, lunar phases dance in tandem, tugging at the tides. Beneath these amulets of light lies the landscape in which SAINTSENECA’s new album Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs came to be. Bandleader Zac Little had been struggling, stalled out creatively and disconnected. Songwriting completely halted and depression took hold. “Art is like my bicycle powered lightbulb - always pedaling away, pushing back the grey gloom. Sometimes the chain breaks. Music didn’t sound good. It freaked me out. I always had used creativity as a vehicle to metabolize my emotions and experiences - process, digest, and move forward. Now it wasn’t working. This world gets heavy. Everyone falls into the pit at some point. I got crushed under the weight of something I couldn’t sing myself out of.” What’s an artist that doesn’t make art? He found himself asking: “What if I don’t do the thing that I thought made me, me?” While on a walk he found a pen tucked against the curb. It wasn’t special, yet he felt an invitation to pick it up. He took it home and set it to paper, surprised by its vibrant green offering. “I loved the way it looked, the way it would glide when the ink flowed. It felt good to just let go.” He began creating again in this spirit, painting monochrome rings expanding on the page like echoes. “I was weaving a naive little matrix, painting not so much what a flower looks like but how it feels.” They were contemplations unfurling in patterns and waves, no agenda, just delight in color upon color until an image appeared. At first it was fish, then fish gave way to flower heads. The practice was healing, footholds on which to climb up. The paintings amassed into a small collection, enough for an art show he displayed at a hospital. The solo exhibition inspired Little to paint all of the album's artwork on the beautiful gatefold jacket. “Joy and creativity loop back around… like lunar phases, hidden and then seen. Always felt.” The recording process began at Little’s home studio in Columbus, OH, working with producer Mike Mogis on mixes as well as repeat collaborator producer/engineer Glenn Davis. Like the green ink pen, the songs felt more found than written. “I wanted this album to reflect that - some songs were found on the landscape, others were found on two moons, orbiting that landscape like satellites, disparate pieces pulling on each other, creating a world of song.” The landscape consists of tracks 1-10, including Sweet Nothing, a nearly perfect nugget of breezy pop perfection, written on he and wife Leticia Wiggins’ (flute, piano, vocals) honeymoon. The birth of their first child coincides with the making of the album, making a debut on BITTER SUITE; a 7 minute twisted-folk ripper that ends with a sample of their newborn’s heartbeat in utero. He placed the next 11 songs on two different moons. Songs that had colors, green and orange: Viridian Moon and Cinnamon Moon. Little’s relationship to color is strong and a thread through the new album. If not Synesthesia, then nearly. As he sings on “Holy Hock”: Hidden in the ground right now / A hundred-something blossoms begging to shout / In wild magenta meant just like it sounds Little recalls the early spring blossom around the time he began to write again: “The color cut hard to my core, making its mark… zinging on some secret sting.” Viridian Moon contains tracks 11-15, including Battery Lifer, a track beautifully drenched in effects, moving into a genre that could be called Shoe Grass or Blue Gaze. A sweet melody moves lazily between the morphing duet of Little and bandmate Jessi Bream. Ethereal tones weave their way through the intoxicating arrangement, a standout on the album and a full immersion into the dually lit sound world. Saintseneca began in the Appalachian foothills of rural Southeast Ohio. “I was a kid way out in the middle of nowhere, alone in a haunted farmhouse at night.” Little’s experiences as a teenager in this setting have remained vivid, informing their catalog that begins with a self released, self-titled EP in 2009. After relocating and reforming in Columbus, Ohio, the band earned a dedicated following, performing intimate and charged sets of string driven DIY folk. Crisscrossing the country in a car on tour brought them national attention, connecting them to Portland, OR based Mama Bird Recording Co., who released their first full-length, LAST. In 2014 the band signed with ANTI- releasing their critically acclaimed LP Dark Arc, earning high praise from Pitchfork and landing a NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Their LP Such Things and the Mallwalker EP followed with 2018’s pinnacle Pillar of Na closing their stint with ANTI-. Highwalllow & Super Moon Songs, their first for Philadelphia indie label Lame-O Records, lands as Saintseneca’s most realized release to date, a twenty-one song opus that is more adventurous than anything prior, yet primed with a pop sense that makes accessing this expansive sonic world effortless. It’s familiar on the landscape but there’s more gravity. Two moons. Strings and synth side by side with drum machine and samples. Unamericana. “I found that I circled back to the country music that I grew up listening to and always wanted to run from - but then I just wanted to hear it. The voice of George Jones - raw and razor sharp with emotion, the alchemical perfection of Hank Williams’ song writing, Dolly Parton’s crushing melodies. They seemed to effortlessly cut through the air, floating in the atmosphere like perfume even after the songs stopped. I kept hearing this music in my dreams. It was surreal and penetrating, sweet beyond words. I would wake up and feel it evaporate as I tried to hang on. There’s a way this traditional music sounded in my head and I wanted to coax it into this realm. Take it somewhere weird and true and complicated. The way it really is.” Little comes off subtly at the surface but the craftsmanship in every phrase he drops is almost crushing. HIGHWALLLOW… finds his voice at its most elastic, riding the hills of home, buzzing by like a dragonfly, then laying low like an old farm dog. “For me that’s so much of what this album is; the longing to be inhabited by the spirits of creation.” It was the return of songs, the entry into a world where living is creating. “Every song that will ever be written already exists. It is simply a matter of becoming available for the wind to pass through you.” words by Ryan Eilbeck Gladie - - Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out, the second full-length record from Philadelphia band Gladie, opens with a contemplative instrumental called “Purple Year.” Along with acoustic strumming and a late-night wall of cricket-chirps, cello and gentle horn runs set a dewy, moonlit stage before second track and single “Born Yesterday” bursts alive with drums, bass, and bright guitar chord crunch. It’s like a cold, heart-jolting morning plunge as Augusta Koch’s familiar Philly tenor starts in: “It takes me more time, I’m a little unsteady/I was born yesterday, I forgot I could be somebody.”Koch realized while writing these songs that she had become an entirely different person: a mental, spiritual, and physical renaissance had unfolded over several years that, together, constituted an entirely new reality. Everything had changed, from relationships with friends to relationships with alcohol. Being on the other side of these tectonic shifts offered the sort of clarity that you can only get by going through the darkness: You Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out. It’s optimistic, but it’s scary, too—life changes always are. Who will you be at the end of them? “Born Yesterday,” which Koch wrote about not drinking alcohol anymore, offers a critical revelation that guides the record, and which was hard-earned while experiencing the overwhelming emotional acuity that developed while living without alcohol: “The way I feel, I could fill the ocean/When the wave comes crashing in, it said I’m not a fixed thing/I’m changeable.” “I like the idea that the record’s title can be both a positive and a negative,” says Koch. “It could seem sad, but it can also be hopeful in the sense that when you’re going through something really rough. It will get better, you will change, you will survive it, and you will be able to see it from a different perspective that you never thought you could.”Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out cycles through these transitions sonically and thematically. “Hit The Ground” is a folksy, desert-drive shuffle, while “Nothing,” opening with feedback screech, is a punk-rock rollercoaster ride that rejects the American cultural drive to want more and more and more until we die: “What would it feel like to want nothing?” cries Koch.“Soda” tells a shoegazey, indie-psych love story that imagines creating our own normal when we’re around the people that make us feel seen, rejecting societal pressure to hate ourselves and feel like we’re not enough: “I like the way we live in tandem and the world we wish to see/Sweet and cheap, we thrive on less,” Koch sings on the second verse. The gentle alt-rock waltz of “Smoking” reflects on a deeply missed habit, and pensive, spacey, synth-and-cello-centric closer “Something Fragile” ends the record with as many questions as it started: “Am I something fragile or something strong?” Koch wonders, still finding her footing in strange new realities. Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out marks the first Gladie production with a set band lineup, a feature which was previously hampered by the pandemic. As a result, the LP leans into Gladie’s live energy and dynamics, moving away from the home-recorded keys and drum machines of their 2020 debut Safe Sins.Koch recorded Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out at The Bunk in early 2022 with Matt Schimelfenig (guitar, keyboard, vocals), Pat Conaboy (guitar), Dennis Mishko (bass), and Miles Ziskind (drums). Schimelfenig also recorded and mixed the record, while Ryan Schwabe mastered. Mark Glick (cello), Mike Park (saxophone), and Brian Lockerm (trumpet) guest across four tracks. Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out will be released on November 18th on Plum Records, the label Koch started with former Cayetana bandmates Kelly Olsen and Allegra Anka. -Luke Ottenhof TBA - - |
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