Not sad, just transcendent: 17 years of Kalamashoegazer

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special.

Though it’s a near-40-year-old niche genre with a name based on an insult from the snooty British music press, an annual festival devoted to shoegaze has been happening in Kalamazoo for 17 years.

Fans from around the country came out for the Kalamashoegazer 17 Sept. 4 and 5. 

Saturday evening, the Backroom of Bell’s Eccentric Cafe was festooned with large inflatable bubbles, psychedelic lights, and guitar-heavy groups filling the space with big swirling sounds. 

I’ve never been to one, but it’s survived for this long, a Kalamazoo institution that few know about. It’s one of those things that devoted Kalamazooans keep alive out of sheer joyful will.

But others don’t know shoegaze.

I pitched Second Wave editors about covering it. “Isn’t it emo? I always thought it was emo,” they say.

Is it shoegaze because they’re all sad, looking down at the floor? What do fans do at this thing, they wondered, “Stand there and be sad?”

No, it’s not emo….

“Do they stand and sway?”

Before the festival, I asked April Zimont, Kalamashoegazer organizer, how does one shoegaze?

One can “definitely sway,” she says, “but there is a lot of dancing… I don’t even know how quite to describe it,” she laughs. “There have been some semblances of a mosh pit going on from time to time, but it’s not aggressive…. yeah, if there could be an ‘ethereal mosh pit,’ that’s what we have goin’ on !” 

Mood-wise, “It’s pretty transcendent!” she says.

A Brief History of Shoegaze

In 1991, British music magazine NME cheekily called the band Slowdive a bunch of “shoe-gazers.” 

To make that wall of guitar sound, the band used effects pedals. Therefore, during performances, they stared down as their shoes worked the pedals.

“So they weren’t really fixated on being like Freddie Mercury or something like that as far as stage presence — it was more about a wall of sound,” Zimont says.

There’s a loose stylistic thread running through certain bands from before the term existed to now. They tend toward building a wall-of-sound that’s a little psychedelic, a little experimental. A sound dependent on technology, yet it has to be reproducible live. And the technology should be more analog than digital.

Zimont thinks that the first inspiration for the sound is from 1966, The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” where they dove headfirst into psychedelic studio experimentation for the first time.

Other names dropped as influences include Lou Reed and John Cale’s dense and noisy rock experimentations with The Velvet Underground. 

In 1977, David Bowie’s “Heroes” had that dreamy/abrasive background thanks to producer Brian Eno.

Noisy abrasiveness is part of it — see Jesus and the Mary Chain’s mid-80s records, where they played basic pop rock buried by overwhelming guitar noise. 

But it also could be pleasant, dreamy, melodic, like the Cocteau Twins’ late ’80s swirling sound. 

Then came My Bloody Valentine. Their late-’80s/early-’90s dreamy and noisy blasts of sound made them the first shoegaze — as a style, not an insult — band.

It seems mostly a UK thing, but American bands like Dinosaur Jr. also had an influence, Zimont says.

She sees a new wave of shoegaze happening since the Pandemic. It’s “becoming really popular again, and we were doing this stuff back when.”

A fest happening since the MySpace Era

Now there’s such a thing as Zoomergaze by Gen Z, expressing their post-Pandemic moods.

That makes me feel really old. 

We didn’t ask for her age, but Zimont, now a mother of three, mentioned the MySpace page of  Glowfriends’, her first band.

She and drummer husband Adam Zimont are now Vida Eterna, along with Lachlan MacQuarrie (guitar) and Matthew Willsea (bass). The Zimonts’ 12-year-old son Nolan Zimont made the video for their song “Facing the Other Way.” 

Zimont remembers her dad, prolific Kalamazoo guitarist Jeremy Morris, bringing home obscure EPs from Creation Records, My Bloody Valentine’s label. She formed shoegaze band Glowfriends as a teen with her brother Mark in 1996.

They played Kalamazoo, but later did tours to bigger shoegaze scenes. A lot of the older bands from the ’80s-’90s were back on the road, she noticed. There were new bands like hers on tour, she saw that there were shoegaze nights in Los Angeles, and older bands like the Cocteau Twins were making a comeback.

“I was like, what in the world, are you kidding me, there’s other people that love this type of music? This is a very niche thing,” she says.

On MySpace, Glowfriends described their style as “Kalamashoegazer.” People told them that sounded like the name of a festival, “like Lollapalooza or something and so …. Why not?” They toured with a lot of bands around the country and the world. “Why not bring them all here?”

It started in 2009, and is held annually in smaller venues like The Strutt, Kraftbrau and Louie’s. Bell’s has been a great step up, she says, with the Eccentric Cafe welcoming their audience and having a (rumored) million-dollar sound system that can handle shoegaze’s sonic textures.

Life is busy; she and Adam have three kids — surely putting on this festival for 17 years now is not easy?

“I’m living the dream,” she says. “It’s incredible, like absolutely amazing, that I’ve gotten to do this for this long. And then it’s turned into what it’s turned into.”

Sonic transcendence, not sadness

As I was leaving home for Bells, my wife says, “Are you going to go see your sad bands?”

“It’s not emo!” I tell her, like I’m a surly teen and she’s the parent who just doesn’t get it.

I rolled solo into Bell’s the last night of Kalamashoegazer. Having lost all sense of fashion at my age, I’m wearing a shirt with a colorful graphic that looks like it could be painted on the side of a van in 1975.

Everyone there seems to be wearing black or muted colors. Stripes seem a popular option for some reason, and there’s a scattering of sundresses here and there.

I hope they don’t judge me. But I’d talked with Randy DeKilder before the show. He’s attended most of the 17 years. He loves it partly because it’s a judgement-free zone. He has no fear of snobby hipsters judging his fashion, age, looks, he says — “and I’m a big guy!”

People here aren’t going to be cooler-than-thou. This is a genre named after an insult, after all.

DeKilder was up at the edge of the stage for Brief Candles, a band out of Milwaukee. He listed them as the act he’s most excited about for this fest.

They were a stand-out, though they went on at 6 pm. An ethereal twang and sting came from the guitars, something mid-’80s and British, post-punkish, with vocals buried in all the sound; they hit all the various stylistic notes. 

But they also jumbled things up in a mix of rhythms, slow and spacey to fast, chugging and relentless. They seemed to be pushing in new directions for this century, heard in songs like “Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes.” 

They also had a foot in the past. What is this ’80s thing cranked with energy? They were doing “Space Age Love Song” — I didn’t realize at the time it was a A Flock Of Seagulls cover.

Brief Candles got some people dancing. Zimont was right. Shoegaze fans move in unique ways. Some up front did a move that was like dance-jogging in place, with a whole upper-body head-banging, while clapping on the beat. That spread from there to the back — though further from the epicenter, the dance became looser movements of self-expression.

Between bands, I went to look at pedals. Cusack Electronics of Holland, Mich., was selling guitar effects pedals outside the entrance. 

“Sweet shirt,” Cusack Production Supervisor Brendin Becker says sincerely. I wave my Gen-X cred around by asking which pedal would make me sound like Hüsker Dü. He points out one of the cheaper models.

They have pedals that are labeled as chorus flangers, saturators, echo gazers, and the “1979,” guitar effects that range from $300 to $130. For their second year, they brought models to the fest with the latest Kalamashoegazer poster design. “The festival is always a blast for us,” Becker says. 

Maybe this explains why there aren’t a huge number of shoegaze bands. It must have cost a lot to get the racks of pedals that were on the Bell’s stage. These aren’t lo-fi garage bands with a limited budget.

The next group, Startographers, were playing Kalamazoo before embarking on a fall tour of Japan. Their style was guitar-heavy ’90s alternative, broken up by moments of guitar tuning.

Chicago’s Snowcuffs went into dreampop land, chill but still with that wall of sound, and guitars vaguely reminiscent of The Smiths. 

Elnuh of San Antonio also seemed like another dreampop band, until they slammed into heaviness and pedal-knob turnings. 

At this point my notes on the general Kalamashoegazer experience read: Vibe — chill. Dance — sway. Emotion — not sad.

Headliner Sungaze closed the fest with that big psychedelic sonic onslaught all those pedals can create. It’s not a hard rock or metal or punk onslaught. Not abrasive, just a lot of dreamy SOUND, loud, that had the crowd swaying and bopping in place.

Sungaze got the audience packed to the stage, but not as much as the second-to-last band, Zimont’s Vida Eterna.

The Kalamazoo band/fest organizers had local fans and visitors moving with dreamy to hard-rocking originals, plus a My Bloody Valentine cover.

Though bugged by issues with an in-ear monitor and by lower-than-usual ticket sales because Kalamashoegazer fell on Labor Day weekend this year, vocalist April Zimont lost herself in the music, bounding about the stage with the lo-tech instrument she favors, her tambourine. 

Not sad, not looking down. The primary mood is transcendent, as she said earlier.