Recap: Maria Minerva + Cherushii Live in Missoula, Montana
06 Nov 2013 — Evelyn Malinowski
On their US mini-tour this autumn, Maria Minerva, with glittery techno act Cherushii, stopped in Missoula, Montana to play our town's best alternative music venue, the Ole Beck VFW Post #209, a couple days short of Halloween.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars, or VFW, is a national club that plants community centers throughout the U.S, aimed for veterans but open to the public. They are specified by their post number coordinates. Los Angeles's has several including #9793, Chicago a few like #2024 and #1284, Seattle #9430 and #2289 Rainier Post, and Missoula's Ole Beck #209. Typically, any VFW post will be hosting country music bands and two-step dancing, cover bands, or Bingo. Rarely, especially out west, does a VFW see or hear the likes of Detroit techno or experimental pop.
Maria Minerva, a Not Not Fun all-star, whose amount of released work is not short of prolific, is a spectable before any audience: packed or hollow, fashionable or earth toned. Maria's post-grad disco, inticing videography, and striking stage presence are in many ways intellectually detached from and ahead of sober performance reception and music listening. With a warm up act like Cherushii, aka Chelsea Faith, a San Francisco producer who just released her Queen of Cups EP on 100% Silk, we are looking at a pair of powerful, professional, and unique figures from a new wave of techno and dance musicianship: the exciting female takeover, of sorts.
Missoula, Montana, however, is not a component of techno. It is not generally heard of, sees little of the global dance scene, and inconveniently bares a shortage of bank chains such as CitiBank and Chase Bank, to which Maria and Chelsea needed to pay visits, respectively. No, Sir. Missoula is a twee, country and folk, indie rock city, with fleeting movements of hip-hop and reggae. People here are generally open-minded to electronic music, at that, any music; however, electronica is, like so many other places in the States, peripheral and not a priority. This was exemplified by Maria and Chelsea's local opening support from Modality, an all-male psychedelic math-rock outfit who attracted most of the crowd, and left with most of the crowd. Modality served as something outstanding for the mini-tour, since most of the other local support in Portland and Seattle was from bedroom-synth girl bands, Chelsea told me.
How, you might wonder, does Missoula get acts such as Maria Minerva booked at a place like the VFW?
As of about four years ago, the so-called “saturated” music scene in Missoula wound up making Post #209 on W. Main Street a main hub. Shawna Lee and Tom Helgerson (of SHAHS) are widely responsible for this collaboration, and have seen a lot of success as well as frequent bookings. "The VFW crowd loves music. Our regulars are very loyal to the music seen. They buy merch and drinks for the bands and often times offer a place to crash," Shawna wrote me. Both ends of the spectrum, the veterans and the musicians, usually leave after a show with a sense of coalescence and a lot of Pabst Blue RIbbon in their gut.
Read more →