♪♪
-Hi, and welcome to the show.
I'm Nancy Guppy coming to you
from one of Seattle's great independent music stores,
Easy Street Records.
Located in West Seattle
at the bustling corner of California and Alaska
and helmed by owners Matt and Kisha Vaughan,
Easy Street is a warm and welcoming community hub
packed with lots of vinyl,
a selection of CDs,
plus fun and groovy merch including posters, bags,
books, and must-have T-shirts.
On top of all that, they've got a killer cafe
and a robust in-store calendar of live performance.
Easy Street Records is open seven days a week.
Hours and location are at easystreetonline.com.
We've got a terrific lineup for you,
including a rock opera premiere from Bhama Roget...
-♪ Also, maybe now ♪
♪ There's a chance this could be our last dance ♪
-...a gorgeous listening room in Ballard...
[ Clouds of the West's "All Alight" playing ]
-♪ The reason for the turmoil inside ♪
-...and fresh music from Oliver Elf Army.
-♪ Mariko Aoki Phenomenon ♪
-♪ Haunted by French Knot ♪
-And we'll begin with the deeply personal,
creative journey of visual artist Grace Athena Flott.
♪♪
-My art and my motivation for making my art
is about body liberation,
which to me means
attempting to create safety and belonging
for everyone, for all bodies.
What I see my work doing is making a space
where we can acknowledge the truth
of human variation.
My name is Grace Athena Flott.
I'm a visual artist, primarily working in paint.
♪♪
I work mostly with oil paint on canvas,
and I also do a bit of printmaking.
So, I went to University of Washington.
I was on a path to go into economic and labor policy.
The thing that tipped me towards art or returned me to it,
was the major injury that I experienced.
When I was 20 years old,
I was on a study abroad program in Paris, France,
and I was injured in this apartment fire.
I sustained injuries, burn injuries
over like half of my body and also skeletal injuries.
I was in recovery in the hospital for two full months,
and part of that was in Paris.
And then I was medically evacuated
back to Harborview Medical Center here in Seattle,
an event that just totally changed
how I thought about myself and how people perceived me.
That experience of, like, waking up
in a different physical reality made me realize
that I didn't see any bodies like mine in media,
and it turned me towards this kind of, like, search
for meaning and belonging.
After I went to the University of Washington,
I then, like, went back to school a few years later
to learn to draw and paint the figure and portrait.
And that was at Gage Academy of Art.
So, I studied for four years
in an atelier, which is the French word for "workshop."
And it's a type of education
modeled after the kind of 19th century academic painters
who would train students in their studio.
I was attracted to that because it --
to me, realism
is a very powerful mode of communication.
This is an amazing storytelling tool.
I got these technical chops,
and then when I got out, I realized that,
you know, everything I learned was amazing and so useful,
and at the same time,
it was really rooted in a particular time period
and a particular philosophy
around what types of bodies are worthy of being portrayed.
Being me and knowing, like, my friends
and my community of people who might have burn injuries
or just really anybody,
we don't really fit into, like, an idealized version.
I think about my work
as kind of broadening the image of what is normal.
So I think a lot about whose body has value in society,
who gets to belong, who gets to decide,
and what that looks like.
So, I started a project called New Icons,
and it's a collaborative portrait project
with people in my community
with visible scarring from burn injuries.
And it started
because I was looking for my own visual history.
And I just started talking to friends,
and I said, "I know how to paint people,"
and, "Do you want to be in a painting?
I think that you are worthy of being in a painting."
And people were interested.
It just started with one person and grew from there.
I know that a few people that I painted,
it was the first time anyone even photographed them
since their injury.
Many of us can relate to feeling othered in some way.
That doesn't have to be about
even necessarily how you look.
I recently had two paintings acquired by the Port of Seattle
to be displayed at SeaTac International Airport,
and it's two paintings from the New Icons portrait project.
Portraiture is part of the storytelling piece
that I'm interested in.
People are powerful, and they tell a story.
Everyone's face tells a story.
I'm interested really in the map of the surface of the body
and what that says about someone's history
and who they are.
So, someone one day just sent me this call for art,
and it was to paint the portrait of Governor Jay Inslee.
And I just thought, "Wow, okay.
Well, I paint portraits, and I've lived in Washington
since I was 4 years old,"
east of the mountains and west of the mountains, just like him.
I applied and interviewed.
I met the governor. I met First Lady Trudi Inslee.
I met his team. Two weeks later,
we were doing the photo shoot,
so it was very fast paced.
Overall, like, the process really mirrored
the way that I work for most portrait commissions,
which is we started with, like, a big conversation
about the vision. How do you want to be portrayed?
What's most important to you, in this case about your legacy?
And then we take that and go into the photo shoot,
take 700 photos, and then I select kind of the top images.
And with Inslee, what I did
is a tiny or, like, a small digital version
of the big painting. And then I did the painting.
It took about seven weeks start to finish.
The painting was unveiled in January 2025
when he left office, when he retired.
-Three, two, one! -Three, two, one!
-Art! Whoa! -[ Cheers and applause ]
-Huge unveiling at the Capitol building in Olympia.
Over 200 people were there.
I could not have asked for a better opportunity.
To do the kind of work that I have done,
being an artist, we try so hard to get our work
validated in the public sphere,
and that's really meaningful to me.
I was lucky enough to get another commission
to paint the retired Washington State University president,
Kirk Schulz, and I just finished the painting.
It's about to be framed and delivered.
I'm in a kind of exploratory period.
So, this is the scar pattern enlarged with a screen print.
I'm starting to hit on bringing in, like, plants
and nature more into the work.
We see disfigurement and disability
quite often in nature,
and I also see my scar patterns,
like, the particular shapes from my body,
replicated in cracked earth, in riverbeds,
in tree bark.
I just finished a painting called "Washing with the Roots."
It's kind of an altar piece, um,
about healing through a connection to water
or your ancestors and place.
The figure is printed
with these things I call scar prints,
by rolling ink on the skin,
and then pressing paper and pulling a print.
And the balsam root is a plant that is really meaningful to me.
It not only grew everywhere
around where I'm from in Spokane,
but it is really resistant and resilient in a wildfire.
And as a burn survivor, that means a lot to me.
One thing that's important to me --
to continue working with the figure.
As long as we have a kind of body hierarchy in our world,
like, the figure will continue to be political
and really important.
I feel like I can speak the loudest about what it means
to go through a major change to one's body and not only survive,
but turn it into something that is creative
and can carry me into the future.
♪♪
-Learn more about Grace on her website
and follow her on Instagram.
♪♪
Listening to a record front to back is a satisfying experience,
and it turns out that sharing that experience
with a room full of like-minded strangers is surprisingly fun.
[ Clouds of the West's "Glass Radio" playing ]
♪♪
-When you're listening to vinyl,
I mean, you have to be physically present.
You have to clean the record when it goes onto the turntable.
You have to drop the needle.
When it's done, you have to get up,
move the tonearm over, flip the record, clean the record,
and then drop the needle again.
And so it requires you to be present in the space
in a way that sort of a, a never-ending playlist doesn't.
-♪ The youngest of them all ♪
-So we are in the hi-fi room at Shibuya Hi-Fi.
This is a space that is dedicated to listening,
so people listen here.
We pride ourselves in helping people
kind of tune out the noise of the modern world.
People come in, they have a cocktail
in the lounge out front,
and then they come back here, kick off their shoes --
so when you come to Shibuya Hi-Fi,
make sure you wear nice socks.
For 40 minutes, you're really spending time
with people you may or may not know,
and you're listening to a record that everyone loves together.
-This is it.
Our band is called Clouds of the West.
-We do about 80 records a month.
You can kind of look at our schedule,
and it sort of takes you through a tour of recorded music.
If there's anything that we love and sounds good, we'll play it.
♪♪
-♪ If I see the world aflame, I will do it ♪
-We've got one of the most amazing sound systems
that you'll find in this town or anywhere.
That's a Technics 1300G turntable.
The amplifier that we have
is a Luxman 505uXII hand-assembled in Japan.
We've got two sets of speakers in the hi-fi room here.
The smaller ones are ATC SCM50s.
The larger speakers in the corner are Klipschorns.
They were built by Paul Klipsch himself.
Klipschorns are known for their bountiful bottom end.
I mean, you can listen to a Bud Powell piano record
on there, and it's astonishing.
You can also listen to Led Zeppelin IV,
and it's thunderous.
So it can get down to some real kind of nuanced, soft music,
and it can get as loud as you want it to get.
[ Clouds of the West's "All I Want" playing ]
I think of all the artistic forms of expression,
I mean, music is the one that we all seem to have in common.
You can just feel a beat.
The music is what appeals to people,
but it's also the act of listening to music
that really resonates with people.
[ Clouds of the West's "All I Want" playing ]
♪♪
-For Shibuya's hours, location, and listening room schedule,
go to shibuyahifi.com.
Our musical guest this week is
the three-piece band Oliver Elf Army.
So here is Martin Adams, Mary Adams,
and Henry Yarsinske from the stage of the Sunset Tavern.
♪♪
[ Indistinct conversations ]
[ Can opens ]
-One, two, three, four.
-♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
-♪ The weight of the words is pressing down on me ♪
-♪ Can you show me the way to the bathrooms please ♪
-♪ We are seconds away from a calamity ♪
-♪ Can you show me the way to the bathrooms please ♪
-♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon, Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon, Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
-♪ The weight of the words is pressing down on me ♪
-♪ Can you show me the way to the bathrooms please ♪
-♪ We are seconds away from a calamity ♪
-♪ Can you show me the way to the bathrooms please ♪
♪ Oh sweet mother of Christ ♪
♪ Here comes that horrible feeling again ♪
♪ Oh sweet mother of Christ ♪
♪ Here comes that terrible feeling ♪
♪ Oh sweet mother of Christ ♪
♪ Here comes that horrible feeling again ♪
♪ Oh sweet mother of Christ ♪
♪ Here comes that terrible feeling ♪
♪♪
♪ The bookstore, the binding ♪
♪ Always searching but never finding ♪
♪ The reason for the turmoil inside ♪
-♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
-♪ Haunted by French Knot ♪
♪ And the egg yolk make out sessions ♪
♪ But please don’t kiss where you shit ♪
-♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
-♪ Surrounded by knowledge ♪
♪ The wisdom of the ages ♪
♪ But no one ever found the answer to the ♪
-♪ Mariko Aoki phenomenon ♪
-"Oliver Elf Army Are Not For Everyone" is available online,
and catch the band live on Saturday, March 28th
at Lucky Dime in Everett
and on Saturday, May 9th at Obec Brewing in Ballard.
Bhama Roget is an accomplished actor, improviser,
writer, and singer, and all these skills will come together
in the premiere of her epic rock opera
"Mother Nature: The Farewell Tour."
♪♪
-♪ Sacred moons, embodied earth ♪
♪ Goddesses of life and birth ♪
♪ Casting spells for your protection ♪
♪ And listening for my direction ♪
I'm Bhama Roget, and I am the author,
composer, performer, creator,
producer of "Mother Nature: The Farewell Tour."
-Let's do it. -One, two, three, four.
♪♪
-It's a rock opera. It's a ritual.
Mother Nature is in drag as a human.
♪ You bitches burned my witches ♪
This project is the thing that I've been trying to write
my whole life.
I needed a character that was big enough
to hold what I was trying to say
and also that could get away with saying all of it.
And that's how Mother Nature came
to be the storyteller rather than me.
And if I'm speaking as Mother Nature,
it's that you, humanity,
you're looking at everything you've created,
all of your systems and your progeny and your technology,
and you're trying to tell the difference
between your brilliant innovations
and your weapons of mass destruction,
and you can't. You don't know which is what.
You don't know what's going to help you
and what's going to eat you.
So she feels kind of about us like we might feel about A.I.
The genesis of this show came during the pandemic.
I just felt like everything was on fire
on the inside and on the outside.
What I did during the pandemic,
in order to keep sane, was I just went in my room,
and I did yoga with an app on my phone.
And then after I would do the yoga,
I would just lay there,
and I would just get this feeling of grief
that I didn't really recognize.
I just had this overwhelming feeling of contemplation about,
we're not meant to live like this.
All these things we're doing are terrible for us.
And they're so -- they're so far from
who we really are.
And during the pandemic, I just kind of randomly wrote this song
that went...
♪ We're all gonna die ♪
♪ Maybe not now, but eventually ♪
♪♪
♪ Also, maybe now there's a chance ♪
♪ This could be our last dance ♪
♪ Have you heard there's a meteor ♪
♪ Headed for earth ♪
I have an incredible band.
We're in Bootstrap Studios in the vault
and just kind of putting it all together.
On drums, I have Aimee Zoe. Legend.
Sherri Jerome is on lead guitar.
Ben Heege on bass, which I'm very excited about.
Also, John Ackerman is going to be leading the band,
and then I have Evan Mosher on audio visual
and various electronica.
I mean, I think the two big questions for me
are how did we get here,
and is there any -- is there any way out?
But here's the thing.
The dinosaurs got lucky,
because they didn't have to witness their own end
by their own hands, by their own teeny-tiny hands.
♪ When mankind was young ♪
♪ The only gods were the earth and sun ♪
I feel like there's a lot of shame
around being a human being right now,
and I want the audience to feel the beauty in themselves,
to touch that divinity within themselves
and -- and in a room together
and -- and feel hopeful and feel like we have agency
and we have choice about what kind of world we create.
♪♪
-"Mother Nature: The Farewell Tour"
runs April 2nd through the 5th
at Intiman Theater on Capitol Hill.
Ticket information is at intiman.org.
-♪ Are you not worried that this might be the end? ♪
-And that's a wrap.
Big, huge thanks to the fabulous crew here
at Easy Street Records for hosting us.
And thanks to you for tuning in.
We'll be back soon with lots more cool stuff.
And until then, we hope that you get out there,
try something new,
and experience the awesome power of art.
We'll see you soon.
♪♪