Indie – Page 3

The Debut EP!

Happy New Year everyone! We are kicking off 2014 by self-releasing our debut EP!

Thanks to all of our old and new friends, 2013 was filled with fun live shows, lots of inspiration to create new music, and most importantly, good people to share it with. These songs are for you!

https://soundcloud.com/the-rungs/sets/the-rungs-ep

If you like what you hear, help us share our songs and connect with us via our social media pages here on the left and right menus.

Bloggers – We are looking for bloggers to help review our EP. Feel free to email me at mandy@rungsrungsrungs.com and I will gladly send you song downloads and any information you’d like about the band.

Thank you and best wishes to all 🙂

We are The Rungs. Thanks for supporting our music 🙂

Music

Photoreal / The Rungs / DJ Diwas at The Gates

So many overdue updates!!

We’ll have to begin where I left off, the Photoreal show at The Gates in Ithaca’s college town, all the way back on the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was definitely a cold night, something in-between rain and snow was coming down and icing the ground. Still, despite the unpleasant weather, a great group of friends came out to support the bands. Photoreal is Diwas’s main musical project with his good friend Dan. These guys have been playing music for years together, touring and recording with the former psychedelic rock band Ayurveda. Since the band split ways, they’ve been redeveloping their sound and live show as Photoreal! It is electronic, poppy, and straight rockin’, something like Chromeo meets Skrillex with intricate live guitar throughout.

It was our first time opening for them, so of course I was super excited! Photoreal uses these bright floor lights that change colors throughout the set, and since we were right before them, the lights were set up for our set too. This was my first time playing in front of such bright floor lights, and boy I was just like a little kid staring into the sun. Every time I looked down, my eyes locked right into the lights in a weird trance. I completely forget where we were at mid song a couple of times! Oh stage lights and your trickery!

Following The Rungs, Photoreal put on a great show, and Diwas, after already pulling a double by playing in two bands in a row, made it a triple and performed a DJ set for the last hour of the night!

Lyrics

Ride Lyrics

Ride, by The Rungs

Seems I’m in no hurry yet to get where I’m going so I might as well enjoy the ride

A scene sandwiched in between the same framed window and the always looking over me sky

Even though you’ve been through hell, you can’t quit now you’ve gotta go pick yourself up and get a move on

Tell me what you’re waiting for, a day a week another year another year another year gone

I’ve seen waste arise from haste and so I’m taking my time

Buildings and trees stationary streamed along the way I’m going rolling wheels radio on

(lyrics written by Mandy)

Music

A Halloween Haunting

This will be my most memorable Halloween yet!

When All Hallows’ Eve rolls around, the local rock shows get spooky.

While the Rungs did not have a Halloween show, I did get a chance to be a part of one with The Sutras! They are the only band in town that rocks out with a theremin, the instrument behind the creepy flesh tingling whistling sound featured in countless sci-fi and horror movie soundtracks.

The instrument was invented by Leon Theremin in Russia in the 1920s, after he worked as a radio engineer for the Red Army and developed a specialized antenna to serve as a motion detector. He noticed that when he moved his hand around, the pitch produced by the ‘Radio Watchman’ changed, and it could be used to play songs!

For The Sutras, the theremin’s quivering notes are the perfect addition to their complex, psychedelic arrangements, adding a haunting touch to the high energy jams that the audience gets lost in.

On this particular night, creepy and unexplainable things began to happen when the theremin’s blood chilling sound filled the air. Diwas was in the audience and managed to capture a photo of the madness that ensued…

We also managed to sneak my ipod in for a video, before the creatures came out of the woodwork!

Music

Ithaca Porchfest 2013

Porchfest is a neighborhood festival where bands use porches as stages. It takes place each year in September for a full day of music and dance through the streets of Ithaca’s fall creek neighborhood. This year, over 100 bands spread out on porches across the neighborhood and rocked out as audiences walked, biked, and danced up and down the streets and sidewalks. From classical to roots rock to country to pop to reggae to punk rock and from Appalachian to Brazilian to Irish to Swedish to Zimbabwean, porchfest celebrates all types of music.

We played on a particularly special porch. It was the house that we first lived in together when I moved to Ithaca and the house that we started playing music in together! Coincidentally, at the very time that we moved out, one of our friends moved in. So, when Porchfest rolled around, our friend was kind enough to open the porch up to our music.

The weather was sunny and cool, our friends filled the street in front of the porch, and we blasted our tunes through three little amps. Porchfest is something I look forward every year as the summer ends. It is a sign of fall, a chance to share our music with new listeners, meet new people, discover new bands, and play on a porch! Who doesn’t want to rock out on a porch?!

Porchfest is catching on in other towns! See if your town is one of them or learn how to start one in your neighborhood! http://www.porchfest.org/porchfests-elsewhere/

Music

Great Vibes at The Nines!

Saturday night we played at one of our favorite venues, The Nines, in Ithaca NY. It is actually the very place where we met, about 5 years ago. (I think it was 5…maybe 6? this is too much math already 🙂 )

Anywhoo, a band called Schooner from Durham NC had contacted us about playing a show together on their ‘Neighborhood Veins’ album release tour. After checking out their music and digging it, we were psyched to share a bill with them.

at the nines sept 2013

We hadn’t been making it up to The Nines very much over the past year, so we thought, ‘Lets play there! Don’t you miss that place?’

It turned out to be the perfect location for Schooner and us to tear it up! I’ve never been to a show there that didn’t have a great vibe. Not sure what it is. The people? The Pizza? (You must try the deep dish if you are ever in Ithaca!) It’s funny how some spaces and locations just don’t work. No matter how much people try to doctor a place up and re-brand, there is just something about it that is off. Then there are places that for no explainable reason just work. Something is special about them. The Nines is like that, it just feels good to be in that place. We will definitely be playing there again!

Here is a clip of our Feist cover from the show, My Moon My Man.

Live

Playing Gigs – Be Flexible!

The LOT 10 show went magnificently well! The guys from the touring act, Sool, had some old friends in the Ithaca area, so there was a nice little vibe of reunion in the air. I also learned a surprising lesson in flexibility. These guys are of a slightly older generation, and it seemed to be a later than usual night for some of their friends. Although they were scheduled to play last, they asked us to switch with them so that they could play earlier and relieve their friends of staying up super late. Diwas and I didn’t really think much of it. Here it was their show, they were only in town for one weekend, and they hadn’t seen some of these friend in many years, so of course we were like, ‘hey guys, its your show, whatever you want!’ From their response, it was evident that they were not used to playing with bands that were so flexible. Man, imagine how awkward and rigid the night would have been if we were like, ‘No guys, sorry, the line up has already been discussed, we can’t change it.’ Ha! That would have taken the fun right out of it! So anyway, the lesson learned is that when it comes to gigging with other bands, the key to having fun and ensuring a smooth event is flexibility. Things are constantly changing and you’ve just gotta roll with it. That night, with such good attitudes all around, the music was that much better. Both The Fly Rods and Sool rocked it! And here is a little home video from the first song of our set, BFF.

Music

Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival 2013

Well it was another exciting weekend for us, and of course, it was filled with music! indie talk poster We made it down to Atlantic City for the 4th annual Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival. Elephant Talk Indie Music Magazine’s Jerry Ryan organizes the festival each year and brings indie bands together from NJ and surrounding areas to make some noise in two neighboring music venues, The Boneyard and Le Grand Fromage, just a block away from the shore. The thing I love about Elephant Talk Indie events is how supportive the bands are of each other. It was great to see so many musicians come together and connect!

Now we didn’t play our best set ever, in fact it was our worst yet. Just prior, Diwas had been out of town recording music for one of his other projects and I had been working over-time a bit. By the time we set up at the festival, we hadn’t even rehearsed a Rungs song for two weeks (pretty much since g-roots)! To add to that, our electronics didn’t make the sound system very happy. But regardless, all shows must go on right!? And on it did. We had fun, and the folks in the audience were just radiating with positive vibrations that sent our tiredness and frustrations far out into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. It’s so great to be surrounded by people who are in it for the music 🙂 plus we got to sign the Elephant Talk Indie guitar!

Thank you Jerry Ryan and Elephant Talk Indie Music!

Live

More Grassroots Festival Recap

Grassroots Festival recap continues… (oh yes, there is more!)

Soooo as if playing late night Saturday night with the Sutras wasn’t enough, (see my last post if you missed this!) I played again on Sunday with ‘Diwas Gurung’! Diwas, (who is the other 50% of The Rungs) also plays in other projects, including his own solo Nepalese venture, titled, ‘Diwas Gurung’. You can listen to it at his bandcamp if you are curious 🙂 http://diwas.bandcamp.com/album/adhunique

Anywhooo, his Sunday set included a mix of Nepalese folk songs, originals, and we even threw in a Rungs song, Missed Connections! The band included members of a previous band he was in, his current bandmate in his other indie-electro-pop duo ‘Photoreal’ annnnnnd me! It was quite the musical reunion. I played a mix of synth parts, electronic drum hits, guitar, and vocals. Many thanks to those guys for letting me join them!

Most importantly, check out my loud pants, compliments of Diwas 🙂 videos on the way!

Live

Festival of Music and Dance!

Well I’ve slacked a little this month on my posts, but I’m back! I’ve been busy gearing up for the 23rd annual Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance that took place this weekend in Trumansburg NY.

I’ve been a regular Grassroots go-er since 2005, but this year was the best yet. The Sutras, an awesome indie-psychedelic-pop rock band from Ithaca NY invited me to sing with them! These guys are true rockers and some of the most talented musicians I’ve met, so you can imagine how psyched I was to perform with them. After two weeks of fun practices, we hit the stage around 1am on Saturday night, ready to rock the late night crowd! It was a completely different experience than what I’m used to with The Rungs. My only job was to sing certain parts of the songs, (and let me just say that EVERY song by The Sutras is super fun to sing), so I had no guitar or keys to hide behind, just me and my voice, loud and proud (or at least trying to be 🙂 ).

The entire set was a blast. I had a funny little moment to myself when I took a look at the set list and realized we were getting towards the end, I thought,”noooo this is so much fun, not ready for it to end yet!!!!” but as the universe rules, everything must start and end. So now I am ready for the next show. Where is it at? Lets go! More music!

Diwas was there too, not performing, but manning our newest purchase, a Cannon T2i. We decided to treat ourselves to the new gadget last week and it was a great choice! Every time I looked up he was like a little spiderman getting cool angles of videos and photos. Soooo hopefully we’ll have a video from the night to share soon! In the meantime, checkout The Sutras! http://thesutras.bandcamp.com/