Her Jazz Noise Collective Saturday! Hear Her Rawr!

Her Jazz Noise Collective at the Western Front, by Femke Van Delft. Not to be used without persimmons.

Erin of the Her Jazz Noise Collective and Shearing Pinx (pictured with the guitar, above) has left Vancouver for Montreal, and Fake Jazzers are still reeling from the possible loss of The Cobalt as a venue, but the Her Jazz Noise Collective has expanded and is movin' full steam ahead, with various events and projects afoot. One fast-upcoming event is happening on Saturday, September 5th - the Dinosaur Do-It-Yourself Dance Party. DJ's for the event include DJ Tapes - AKA Aja Rose Bond, the curly-haired one above - as well as "Berberler, Brady Marks, Ruggedly Handsome, and Drum Solo;" the event, which starts at 11, is a "late entry by donation after party" for the Western Front's free Play And Make Noise event, a short walk away from The Front, at Gropp's Gallery, 144 e. 6th ave @ Main.

I asked Aja - who will also perform as DJ Tapes for the upcoming Vancouver New Music Copyright/Copyleft festival, as part of a program that includes Mark Hosler of Negativland, Chris Cutler, Plunderphonics pirate John Oswald, Scanner and Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) - to explain more about the dino event. "Her Jazz has been desperately needing a P.A. for years," she wrote. "Also, we have this compilation coming out," a 2 CD anthology "spanning the last two years since our inception. It contains a lot of very diverse recordings will be a double CDR with handmade packaging, art and hopefully some writing about the various stages of our development." Both of these things will cost money, plus Her Jazz pays for their space out of their pockets, so it seems like a good time for a fundraiser (as Aja puts it, "we need a nest egg to hatch our baby dinosaurs.") The theme of the party stems from a book that AJA found called "D.I.Y. Dinosaurs", "all about making soft sculpture dinosaurs. While Sid, Ella and I were looking at it and working on the flier, we got dinosaur fever!" (They should've gotten inoculated). "It is nice to be doing an event that's not as serious as Women's Studies" - a performance series Her Jazz has put on for two seasons at VIVO. "Not that the event itself is serious, just that we have to take it seriously because it's part of VIVO's programming. This is just a dance party, fundraiser, and after-party for "Play and Make Noise"... if that doesn't say "dinosaurs", I don't know what does!"

I'll have more from Aja in an upcoming issue of The Skinny, and I'm going to try to make the event - I've loved dinosaurs since I was a kid, and used to have a room full of them - dinosaur models, toys, you name it. At the moment, I just have this stuffed dino with a hat that I found some years ago at Value Village. I wonder if this is the sort of soft-sculpture dino that Aja is talking about?
The Saturday night event is "all by donation and mostly for fun. It's all DJ's from Her Jazz so you can bet the music is going to be weird. I think we are going to have some dinosaur memorabilia like handmade t-shirts and buttons, yummy beverages and we'll see what else comes together. Costumes, anyone?" Well... I do have a pretty good cyclops mask... and a Sasquatch, too... No dinosaurs, though. Hm.

Her Jazz Noise Collective by Dan Kibke. Not to be used without persimmons.