Bands & Performers

Calvin Johnson & Ian Svenonius

Calvin puts the “present” in STAGE PRESENCE. He is there; the author of himself. Power and … fragility. Giving flesh to the phantom limb of American Tradition, his ballads reach across from the parallel universe of lives lived fully. He moves as he wants to be moved.

BIO

Calvin Johnson formed K in Summer, 1982. The impetus to start such a label is complex. At the time he lived in the Capitol Theater Building in downtown, Olympia, next door to Stella Marrs’ studio, the original Girl City. Together they played in a band, 003 Legion. The project of the summer was the Sub/Pop fanzine #8. Calvin had been working on the Sub/Pop fanzine with it’s founder, Bruce Pavitt, since 1980; important tasks assigned to Calvin included “late-night peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”. At this time, Bruce was on tour as Road Manager with Pell Mell, and Calvin was left to mind the front. The motto of Sub/Pop was “Decentralize Pop Culture”. It drew a lot of inspiration from the Olympia music magazine Op (founded by John Foster), which focused on music available through independent and artist owned labels, and the Olympia community radio station KAOS-FM, which had a music policy that prioritized such independent and do-it-yourself music. Both Calvin and Bruce worked with Op magazine and hosted radio shows on KAOS. Two issues of Sub/Pop were released as cassettes compiling underground music, mainly originating from Sub/Pop’s focus regions, the Northwestern and Midwestern United States. —From K website

www.krecs.com?
interest=62

Ian Folke Svenonius was born Minsk Belarus in 1951. After attending art school in Bulgaria, he was recruited by the Soviet security services to serve as an ideological enforcer of a nuclear detachment at a missile silo near Omsk. After the fall of socialism, Svenonius was recruited by a shadowy cabal of recalcitrants and sent to the USA to help destroy the institutions of American life — not for any particular ideological purpose but for the sake of spite and mean spiritedness.

To such an end, he has performed in several underground rock ‘n’ roll groups (e.g. The Nation of Ulysses, Make–Up, and Weird War). He has also published a book of essays entitled The Psychic Soviet (Drag City Press).

Through infiltrating the most loved American pastimes, such as popular music, dancing, journalism, and television, Svenonius’s handlers have programmed him to create confusion, existential crisis, and ennui in his peers through the paralyzing technique of “auto-criticism,” which was a communist mainstay.

This insidious operation has still not been revealed, but Svenonius is not its only exponent. The newest phase on the agenda, a chat show called Soft Focus with Svenonius as the host/mediator, talking to influential underground rock ‘n’ roll stars, is possibly the most successful manifestation of the mission so far.