Back for its second year and with a fourth day in tow, Ripplefest Texas 2022 confirms its full lineup, a total beast of legends and newcomers. Really, I don’t even know what to say here except that if you’re lucky enough to go, it’s probably the kind of thing you’re going to remember for a long gosh-darn time, and it’s the kind of lineup that serves as lording-over fodder on the part of those who were there to those who weren’t. Well, at least it would if the heavy underground weren’t too cool to each other for that kind of gatekeeping nonsense. In any case, this looks like a massive undertaking to put on, and the roster of assembled acts gets a hearty ‘fucking a’ from my corner of the universe.

Tickets for all four days will run you $150, but I feel like the festival earns that on both quality and quantity of product.

Here’s the announcement, info and links:

RIPPLE FEST TEXAS – The Far Out Lounge – July 21-24

4-day passes available now!

RippleFest Texas 2022 is back and the lineup is as big and hot as Texas itself! 4 days of blistering hot music at Austin’s premier music venue The Far Out Lounge. There will be everything from crushing heavy riffs, to acoustic and banjo picking, to improvisation jam sessions and puppet shows! So many legends and great music that this will be a 4 day weekend you will not want to miss!

TICKETS:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thefaroutloungestage/639551

FULL LINEUP:
Eagles of Death Metal, The Sword, Crowbar, Mothership, Big Business, The Obsessed, Stöner, Spirit Adrift, The Heavy Eyes, Sasquatch, REZN, Fatso Jetson, Heavy Temple, J.D. Pinkus, Lord Buffalo, Lo-Pan, Wino, El Perro, Void Vator, Hippie Death Cult, Howling Giant, Doctor Smoke, Nick Oliveri, High Desert Queen, Destroyer of Light, Ape Machine, High Priestess, Dryheat, Rubber Snake Charmers, Sun Crow, Holy Death Trio, Bone Church, Horseburner, Spirit Mother, Thunder Horse, Mother Iron Horse, The Age of Truth, Salem’s Bend, Las Cruces, All Souls, Kind, Fostermother, The Absurd, Godeye, Ole English, Mr. Plow, Snake Mountain Revival, Blue Heron, Grail, Formula 400, Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol, Eagle Claw, Bridge Farmers.

The Far Out Lounge is located at 8504 South Congress. Winner of Best New Venue at the Austin Music Awards 2020.

http://www.thefaroutaustin.com/

https://www.facebook.com/ripplefesttexas
https://www.facebook.com/LOMSProductions/
https://www.facebook.com/theripplemusic/
https://www.instagram.com/ripplemusic/
https://ripplemusic.bandcamp.com/
http://www.ripple-music.com/

Lo-Pan, Live at the Grog Shop, Cleveland, Ohio, Feb 18, 2022

Eagles of Death Metal, Peace, Love, Death Metal (2004)

I don’t believe in an afterlife. The body functions as a series of chemical reactions, and when that stops, it stops. Consciousness, our being, our soul, is not separate from that. We decay and our matter supports future life in an ongoing universal cycle. It is a process beautiful enough that a religious idea of heaven seems redundant.

Some might tell you that without god — really any god will do, but there are certainly individual teams out there touting their own over the others — anything becomes morally permissible. I’d counter that the events in Paris last night and many in the past demonstrate clearly that anything is morally permissible anyway, and that over the course of our history as a species, this chaos is not an aberration, but an ever-present norm. And that, since belief in the afterlife reward for “being good” while we’re alive hasn’t worked, maybe it’s time to try something else.

That’s not an especially persuasive position, but if you think you’re going to try to reason someone away from their deity, you’re wasting your breath anyhow, and it’s in times like this that it gives me comfort to know that even in the best of cases, life is short, and then over. It means that all we have while we exist is each other. Rather than ultimate spiritual anarchy, it means we need each other even more, to hold onto in this expanding void that only makes us smaller as it goes. It’s all the more reason to be as good, willfully kind, passionate and loving as we can possibly be, because the only ones who can help us through is us. We are all we have.

Amid the anger, the ongoing brutalities of war, the unquestioning of violence, it is imperative that we remember how much the same we are. How among us there is no “other,” and that any loss of life in a situation like that in Paris last night, whether the innocent person attending the Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, or someone out to dinner at a cafe, or at a football match, or a refugee falling out of a raft and drowning, or someone killed in a drone strike, or someone whose family has been murdered by a state, or someone driven to the point of suicide bombing or indiscriminately firing automatic weapons into an assembled crowd, is a tragedy. It’s not “us” and “them.” It’s just us.

The day when we can act on that belief as one people, all one voice, will probably never come. We have existed in conflict since before apes set up hierarchical social structures and I expect we will until there are none of us left. More reason to huddle together as much as possible and love those near you with everything you are.

When the history of these attacks is written — and it will be written about endlessly, and soft voices will wonder where the perpetrators got their funding and AK-47s and explosive devices, while loud voices actively do not — music will likely be a footnote. Eagles of Death Metal the same. A happenstance setting of a drawn, contained crowd rather than a causal factor. Nonetheless, these attacks now define the lives of everyone there, the band included, and those who survived will carry that with them for as long as they continue to live. For many, that feeling of shock and horror and that image of their compatriots being murdered will have a permanent fix on their being.

This makes it harder to ask someone to throw away their tradition and comfort in the notion of an eternal life for a blank-stare meaninglessness that requires us to create our own warmth in each other when over and over we show ourselves to be so mercilessly cold. But that is all we’ve ever had in the first place.

Love and strength to all of those affected by last night’s events. Vive la France, and please, peace.

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