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MUNCIE, IND. -- Apathy Wizards will return to their original home of Muncie, Ind. to release their long-awaited vinyl LP “Real Live Human Beings” on Saturday, May 28 at Be Here Now.
Brandishing instruments that reached their heights of popularity in the 1920s, the folk punk five-piece attempted to return the realness, the liveness and the humanity back to the musical experience on a hot June night in 2015.
For the previous five years, they had removed the barriers between themselves, their music and the audience. They traded drum sets for cajóns and suitcases, standard “rock” instruments for acoustic madness. They unplugged and refused to play on a stage.
Each performance took on the aura and energy of a traveling medicine show, and on that hot summer night, they captured 29 minutes of the most frenetic folk punk ever committed to tape. To capture the moment, Charleston, Illinois' Cavetone Records transported an analog recording studio to Muncie, complete with tape machines and plenty of tubes and vintage microphones.
The tape rolled at 15 inches a second, and the result was live, real, and unabashedly human. Vocalist and mandolin player Thor Goodman said, “We wanted to present an honest version of ourselves here; we aren't a studio band. We're a bunch of kids trying to scream you our gospel, live, raw, and real.”
Those reels held a completely live album, complete with a rowdy audience and absent of all overdubs. But with the band's relocation to Murfreesboro, Tenn., the release of the record looked far from certain.
Uprooted in a new bohemia, the Wizards struggled to adjust in their new home. Over the course of the winter, members traveled around the Midwest in order to complete the record through its final stages. As the entire process is analog, they had to hear the mix and master in person.
In yet another act of reconnecting music, artist, and audience, the band decided to return to the same place that they had recorded the album in order to release it, at Be Here Now, 505 N. Dill St. in downtown Muncie.
They will be joined by their labelmates, the film noir pop duo The Ex-Bombers. The 4% travel in from Terre Haute and Francis Wreck from Chicago and Front Royal from Baltimore round out the bill. Music begins at 8 p.m. and the cover charge is seven dollars. However, wearing an Apathy Wizards shirt drops this cover charge to five dollars and demonstrates that the wearer indeed is a real live human being.
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