Get HEXed at Club Anything

The Renaissance Faire is coming to Club Anything, 807 S. 5th Street, in Milwaukee on Saturday, 31 July.

Well, not exactly. But the HEX Renaissance Masquerade is a celebration encouraging patrons to dress like it is. Or in their favorite fetish attire.

Chicago-based electro/industrial quartet i: Scintilla will perform onstage and d.j. Dave Schock, a promoter who is also vice president of WT II Records (an industrial label started by a former Wax Trax employee to record music in the same vein), will be providing the musical backdrop for the rest of the night.

The Female-fronted i: Scintilla’s Singer Brittany Bindrim’s vocal stylings have caused the quartet to be likened to acts such as Garbage and Evanescence. Their combinations of atmospheric sound along with an industrial backbeat, however, seems to indicate influences like Gravity Kills and Nine Inch Nails. The band itself lists musicians who run the gamut of styles from Tori Amos to Skinny Puppy as inspirations. One of i: Scintilla’s claims to fame is their performance in 2009 at Leipzig, Germany’s annual Wave Gotik Treffen, the world’s most notable and respected festival celebrating dark art and music. Another is that they were chosen for Taco Bell’s “Feed the Beat” contest, something they reportedly only entered to receive one of the $500 gift certificates that are awarded to the top 100 bands.
The outfit’s newest release, “Dying and Falling,” will be out in October on Belgian label Alfa-Matrix, home also to Front 242 (a hugely influential Belgian electronic group who were, at one time, part of both Wax Trax’s and Metropolis’ rosters), Collide (gothic/industrial act from L.A.), and Danish electro-industrial project Laether Strip. The 11-track album is the band’s 4th straight partnering with producer Wade Alin (known for being electronica band Christ Analogue’s programmer and vocalist, the programmer and songwriter for the industrial act Atomica Project, and his work on band Scanalyzer with post-industrial act Sister Machine Gun’s Chris Randall).

Dave Schock, one of Chicago’s main promoters of electronic and industrial (as well as other categories along those lines) music, is host of the monthly WT II Sunday Night Showcases held at Chicago’s Darkroom. Set lists include music by artists such as Chris Connelly, the Dark Clan, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wolfsheim, the Sisters of Mercy, Skinny Puppy, Rasputina, the Gothsicles, Front 241, Acid Horse, Peter Murphy, Nick Cave, Icon of Coil, and the like.

Club Anything’s resident dj :GARZ will be both bartending and MCing the event. A well-respected musical host, his credentials include spinning at Leipzig’s Wave Gotik Treffen as well as in Berlin, Germany; western U.S. cities L.A. and San Fran Sisco, at Madison’s Inferno; and for a time at Chicago’s well-known goth/industrial club, Neo.
This masquerade, the first in a series, celebrates the mid-summer Celtic harvest festival Lammas, on August 1st in the northern hemisphere. The date marks the halfway point between the Summer Solstice (longest day of the year, between 20 and 21 June in the northern hemisphere, it also starts the reversal of the shortening of nighttime and lengthening of daylight and is the day when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky) and the Autumnal Equinox (when the earth’s axial tilt is neither away from or towards the sun, around this time, night and day are of the same approximate length). Each masquerade will have a theme which will dictate both the music provided and entertainment scheduled, appropriate costumes are encouraged. Cover is $3 and doors open at 8 p.m.