Despite Baltimore’s prolific and far-reaching music scene, Hopkins has yet to establish a recurring campus concert series showcasing local talent.
Junior Jonah Furman is angling to change that with his “Baltimore Curators” project.
Furman, a News-Letter staff writer, said he has wanted to do this for “forever,” but the idea finally came to fruition a couple of months ago.
After acquiring funds from the Student Activities Board, Furman booked his first band, Dope Body.
He made the conscious decision to provide the Baltimore-based bands with as much artistic freedom as possible, striving to put on more of a “product, a play of sorts, rather than just a simple concert.”
He gave Dope Body permission to choose two other bands for the bill and to design posters for the gig, which featured the faint outline of what appeared to be a man running in tighty-whities sometime past midnight.
To Furman’s pleasant surprise, Dope Body asked their friends Ecstatic Sunshine and Rapdragons to join them for the show, fashioning a most eclectic and diverse bill.
At the inaugural concert this past Saturday, which took place in Levering’s Great Hall, there was surely something for everybody.
Rapdragons opened — albeit an hour behind schedule due to some transportation difficulties — with, well, rap.
The shaggy-haired duo layer their own rhymes over backing tracks of various samples.
From a subjective perspective, unfortunately, the band is imbalanced in more than one way.
Foremost, to this listener, their samples outshine their own lyrics.
This might have something to do with the fact that a majority of their backing tracks are derived from fellow (and more famous) Baltimoreans such as Beach House and Future Islands. In fact, their most recent EP is entitled Featuring Baltimore.
It’s hard to decide if it is an homage as intended, or if Rapdragons piggy-backs off the success of their contemporaries.
Secondly, one of the MCs, Greg Ward, wearing a fantastic sweatshirt that read “Aged to Perfection,” was a far stronger rapper than his partner, Nick Often.
Like a wrestling match of sorts, Often kept tag-teaming Ward, with his ever-shortening breaths, to step in and take over, though the disparity in skill made the performance unbalanced.
Next up was Wham City staple Ecstatic Sunshine, which, over the years, has essentially just become a pseudonym for its lone constant Matthew Papich.
Since his partner, Dustin Wong, left the band in 2008 to focus on Ponytail, Papich has enlisted a bevy of rotating musicians for his albums.
Ecstatic Sunshine’s music is just that: music, void of lyrics.
The riffs, emanating from dueling guitars and noise machines, often recall a hybrid of an elaborate pinball machine and the classic Space Invaders video game.
Though catchy, after a while, the songs just meld together in an ambient (and Ambien-like) blanket, which is the risk one takes without any words or vocals to mix things up.
Last, but not least, were the curators themselves, Dope Body.
If one started feeling a little woozy during Ecstatic Sunshine’s set, Dope Body snapped the audience right out of their daze with their hard, fast, heavy punk.
Stark contrast would be an understatement.
Interestingly enough, the headliners are the only unsigned band out of the bunch, but their high-energy performances have nevertheless won them a substantial fan base.
Nearly every aspect of the trio’s music could be described with “fits and starts.”
Vocalist Andrew Laumann’s growls lurch over guitarist/bassist Zach Utz’s (a Baltimore surname if there ever was one) fast riffs and drummer Dave Jacober’s relentless rhythm section.
Dope Body might be an acquired taste, but it’s hard to name their equal in the local scene. They’re not striving for mainstream; they’re striving for loud.
All in all, for the first show of the series, Furman couldn’t have asked for a better bill, though the small audience of about sixty — largely MICA students — left something to be desired.
When asked about future plans, Furman expresses his desire for Baltimore Curators to grow into its own organization.
Currently, the series operates under the patronage of the WJHU radio station.
Furman, who will be continuing his efforts next year as well, hopes that his pet project will venture out from underneath its current bastion as a WJHU underling, though WJHU, where Furman DJs a weekly show, generously provided the sound equipment for the occasion.
He hopes that additional funding will enable the series to court even bigger bands and a larger audience by upping the project’s profile.
Indeed, Furman is looking to involve an affiliate of the Film and Media Studies program, who moonlights as a Wham City member, which would provide Baltimore Curators with wide-reaching booking connections.
Expanding is an ambitious plan, though it looks as if efforts are well underway.
The next show is likely to be in March, with Weekends — featuring a Hopkins graduate — tentatively headlining.
With the abundance of local artists, it would be silly for Hopkins to let them go unnoticed and Baltimore Curators hopes to bring them into the spotlight.
