It seems that I am now playing double bills every show! On January 25th, The Rungs will play a benefit for Educate the Children, a not for profit organization that provides education and skill development programs to women and children in Nepal. The benefit will be held from 4-8pm at Lot 10 in Ithaca. Immediately afterwards, I will head over to another venue, The Haunt in Ithaca, to sing with my fav band, The Sutras! What are the odds of both shows happening in the same night? Lets just hope my crazy cold goes away by then!
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!
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 🙂
And now for a little recap of our show at Felicia’s, opening up for Gabriel Tavares and Powder the Moon.
Every Sunday night, Felicia’s hosts free music from 7pm to 9pm. The popular local acts and small touring bands that are drawn to this delicious cocktail bar always ensure good quality, consistent Sunday night entertainment.
It is one of those cozy small venues that has a nice warm vibe no matter how many people are in the audience. A good turnout really packs the place and it is quite the squeeze to make it to the bar or a comfy lounge seat across the room. We were lucky to have a moderately squeezy kind of night 🙂 and intimate type of show, (the first set of seats are only a couple of feet from the mic stands!)
Recently having left my day job due to a repetitive motion injury, (I haven’t written much about that because it is no fun 😦 music is way better and has been the most therapeutic activity, hence our catch phrase, ‘music is the best medicine’ !!! 🙂 ) I was just tickled to see friends from work in the audience. How nice of them to come out and support the band!
We also wore matching shirts that night, from our friends at House of Thoughts clothing company in the United Kingdom. Great shirts and we felt so pro with the matched look.
What made this particular show even more special was that it was the release of a live CD that Gabe had recorded in 2005 when he was invited down to New York city to share a gig with the band Faith at CBGB’s 313 Gallery. The show was one of a series of farewell shows that were scheduled when the legendary Bowery club lost their lease. Aptly named, ‘Live at CBGBs 313 Gallery’, the cd has a great raw roomy feel to it and you can almost make out Gabe hitting the strings of the guitar, just like at the live show. Powder The Moon is a male female duo with Gabe on guitar and Laura Penman on the upright bass. At the show Sunday night, they performed songs off the album and new originals. I love the addition of the upright bass and female vocal touch to Gabe’s solo sound! (Hopefully Powder the Moon will release a live cd someday tooo 🙂 )
Powder the Moon
Speaking of CD releases, we’re working on that one! It’ll happen soon, but for now, help share our music on soundcloud and youtube
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!
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!
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?!
Last weekend was the first weekend in a while that we didn’t have any shows booked, so we decided to get out of town for a little inspiration and catch Eric Johnson live at The Blue Note! We’ve been so busy lately running around with work and other projects, it was the perfect time to relax and go out for a band-date night.
At The Blue Note, we sank into our tightly packed seats and enjoyed superb music, tasty drinks and of course, each others company 🙂 It was just what we needed!
And we have a little list of guitar greats to see live that we’re slowly working on. Last year we saw Steve Vai in Rochester, and now we’ve got Eric Johnson checked off the list too. He laid down a great performance, accompanied by Mike Stern on guitar, Chris Maresh on bass, and Anton Fig on drums.
Exploring the things that inspire me to make music is teaching me so much about myself and how funny the mind works. Sometimes I just want to lock myself up in solitude and bust out songs that are piling up in my head, and other times I need a change of scenery to enjoy all of the beauty and art and music that surrounds me. Catching Eric Johnson live was a nice change of scenery, to take in and appreciate all of the amazing talent and experience and musical work of these guitar greats. Might I add, in this age of electronic music, DJs, etc (all stuff that I dooo love, but..) long live guitar! 🙂
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.
Well it was another exciting weekend for us, and of course, it was filled with music! 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!
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!
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!
therungsband.com 