Flagpole Feature: Venice Is Sinking

Flagpole Feature:

Venice Is Sinking's Sand & Lines
Featuring Special Guest, The Georgia Theatre

When smoke rose above the Georgia Theatre on June 19, 2009, Venice Is Sinking didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t just that they stood to lose a favorite place, somewhere they’d performed dozens of times and whose owner, Wilmot Greene, had always welcomed them warmly. It was that only the week before, the band had begun a Kickstarter.com campaign to raise the money for the pressing of Sand & Lines, the group's third LP, recorded over the course of four days in that very building (out June 15 via One Percent Press).

“We all felt really close to the Theatre because we had spent so much time there,” says vocalist and viola player Karolyn Troupe. “It was a loss for the town, but it was also a personal loss for us.”...[Read more]


I was lucky to be able to run the remnants of the interview on Creative Loafing Atlanta's Crib Notes Blog:

Venice Is Sinking talk Sand & Lines and rising above

Today, a year to the week after the Georgia Theatre in Athens was gutted by fire, the town’s native dream pop quintet Venice Is Sinking release Sand & Lines, the album they recorded in it. Produced by Athens’ prolific David Barbe, it’s an LP recorded wholly live on two microphones suspended above the theatre’s stage, and in light of the building’s fate, has become a de-facto historical document of what it once sounded like. Beyond that, it’s a watershed moment for VIS, whose previous studio recordings were painstakingly scalpeled into place over the course of many months. Sand & Lines, conversely, was recorded and wrapped in a week, features three covers and demonstrates the group’s ability, with the help of a slew of local friends, to cut loose.

I joined them at guitarist and vocalist Daniel Lawson’s home on the last day of May to talk about the album, the Theatre and their musical town over a table of tacos. Then we went and shot a BB gun in the backyard....[Read more]