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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Fort Vegan plays home to DIY-rock

When Holden Neal met Jackson Maier, he encouraged Maier to pick up a guitar and start playing.

Shortly after, the two Bloomington High School South students began playing music together in bands with other friends.

“We were weird,” Neal said. “And we still are.”

They played everywhere from house shows to variety shows and even gymnasiums, and formed local band Mary & Child, a politically driven sound machine with anti-war, -capitalism and -discrimination messages.

With Mary & Child a year old and growing, the now high school juniors Neal and Maier formed a new musical project titled Man Behind the Sun.

“Man Behind the Sun is more of an excuse to write personal songs,” Maier said. “It’s much darker and sounds more like garbage. I play cords on the bass and use the synth as more of a sound generator. It’s more noise than anything else.”

The duo will be playing a house show at 8 p.m. Sunday at 1222 W. Kirkwood Ave. — more commonly known as Fort Vegan —  with emo-core band Tristram of Grand Rapids, Mich. and Pleasure Blade, self-proclaimed as “Gloomington’s best/worst” knife rock.

Man Behind the Sun will play eight original songs Sunday night, but the set can be “blurred” a bit to include extra songs by use of Maier’s synth, he said.

Maier uses a synthesizer to create noise and beats for the backing track to songs and then utilizes his bass guitar to create cords and melodies. Neal backs up Maier with a drum set and both supply vocals to every song.

Maier said Man Behind the Sun is similar to the other bands that will be playing in terms of sound and artistic viewpoints.

“We are all really depressing,” Neal said sarcastically, but Maier said the bands all have a pretty similar message and focus behind their songs.

Maier said music is something about which he and Neal feel passionate, but they aren’t about to make it a money-making career just yet.

“It seems weird when people ask me ‘what do you do,’ because I could say, “I work in a restaurant making pierogis,’ but instead I say, ‘I play in a band,’” Maier said. “It’s not something I want to make money off of, because I want music to be accessible to people. If you want to be accessible to people and let people hear your music easily,
you can’t start making yourself inaccessible by charging them money just to listen.”

Holden said the band will play Sunday as Man Behind the Sun, but Mary & Child is still producing music as a band, in which he and Maier both have a part.

Sunday’s crowd members are asked to provide a donation at the door when entering the show, but those select broke listeners are always welcome, Maier said.

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