December 12, 2014
Friday night live at Transistor: Postpunk duo Beauty 2s and drum-bass-synth quartet Dream Council.
The Beauty 2s are Chris and Kelly Schmader, a brother-sister postpunk duo with a sound assembled from jaded vocals, surf and shoegaze-influenced guitar, and robotic drum machine grooves. By turns wistful and foreboding, their lyrics and music explore the lush, anxious moments that occur in the fourth place between work, love, and leisure, moments that make up the arrhythmic heartbeat of life in the corporate age. They've been playing clubs on the north side of Chicago for the past three years and in March of 2014 released their debut EP, "Nylon Boneyard."
Equipped with vocals, a guitar and a drum machine, the Beauty 2s played songs from their EP and other tracks.
Dream Council was born out of the refusal to adapt to modern forms of electronic music. Sean Pheanis developed the project out of the trash dumps of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He loved it there, but trust fund children from the world began to converge on said trash dumps....raising the cost of living. Relocating to Illinois the band evolved to showcase the talents of Timothy Dwyer on analog synth and Alysa Guyer on drum machine. A year into this process and the band is looking to put out its second album, "Back 2 the Internet," a conceptual work touching on the mythos of the World Wide Web (que dial-up feedback).