KXLL Tune In

Kidney failure, Obamacare, and sounds of hospital rooms all inspired Playboy Spaceman’s latest releases.

Playboy Spaceman’s latest recordings veer away from the guitar solos of their past, entering the ethereal. The song “Get Me Out of Here” teases with electronics reminiscent of medical devices. Songwriter and front man George Kuhar’s vocals are hazy and echo, grounded only by gritty drum machine fills.

He says song was recorded while  visiting a kidney specialist last year.

“It was a solo journey and I had some health concerns. I spent a few days in Seattle doing some blood work, tests and things.”

The lyrics came to him throughout the day. That night, he finished it from his Travelodge hotel room where he laid the electronic beats and vocals that would become its framework.

The song closes out their new EP, which complements Playboy Spaceman’s second full-length album that went live for download last week. Kuhar named the album “And His Father,” in honor of dad who passed away unexpectedly this spring.

The album was recorded at Peabody’s Monster, a South Franklin cooperative music space, where many of Juneau’s rock musicians can be heard practicing at night.

“It definitely has the feeling of a place where a lot of music has been played,” says Kuhar. “There’s cigarette stains in the carpet, posters all over the place and other profanities. ”

Band members Bridget Kuhar, Jason Messing, Nick Wagner and Simon Taylor all took a week off to record in their rehearsal space. But Kuhar says, the vocals just sounded wrong, “I wanted to be like a samurai and be like, swoosh swoosh — you know and done, let’s put it out there. I had to learn how to sing all over again.”

Kuhar’s experiences with the health care industry are a central theme on the album and inform his songwriting. In 2008 he received a kidney transplant from his now wife and collaborator Bridget, who plays keyboards in the band. Because of the Affordable Care Act, Kuhar was able to treat his pre-existing conditions, allowing him to take time off from his job at the hospital to finish the album.

He says he was inspired by the human perseverance he observed working in surgical services at Bartlett Regional Hospital, patients making hard decisions to overcome their medical issues, and how things become complicated with the business of medicine.

“I have a lot of frustration with the way money plays into health care. Profiting off someone’s ailment,” says Kuhar. “That part’s hard to swallow. And how we do we make that right? I don’t know.”

For now, Playboy Spaceman is taking their music north. They’re playing at the 49th State Brewing Co.’s locations in Anchorage on Friday and Healy on Saturday.

Juneau artist Devon Kasler’s premier EP Anger Machine is an even dose of teenage angst and fantasy. With his band Slim Grim & The Reaper Bros, Kasler evokes a familiar feeling of secretly listening to Black Sabbath or Danzig or Queens of the Stone Age, whatever your poison was. But for Kasler, it wasn’t just a phase. The blood, skulls and gore of musical past carry over to his day job as a tattoo artist at High Tide Tattoo.

His music is sinister, full of ghastly hooks, and it’s loud, as if Alice Cooper came of age in the early 2000s. The release is the result of a partnership between Kasler and high-school-friend-turned-producer Cole Paramore who mixed the EP and contributed percussion over the tracks Kasler recorded alone in his bedroom, many in a single take. 

You can hear collaboration on the single “Skeletal Ghoul,” which opens with brooding guitars that remain rooted in Paramore’s drumming, growing louder until it concludes with a ripping guitar solo from Kasler. Somehow, you can just guess this guy’s pedal board is bigger than yours.

The album artwork was created by fellow High Tide Tattoo employee Jolene Chup who goes by the handle Fakewitch, releasing her own series of visual art last September.

Get these bad boy vibes on Bandcamp or see the six-track EP performed live tonight at the Taqueria when Kasler debuts his new line of patches, T-shirts and lighters inspired by his collection of music. 

Marijuana activists in the capital city are planning a Southeast Alaska Cannabis Celebration this Friday at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center.

The event will feature eight bands, food carts and local businesses showing off their products and services. But organizers are asking attendees to leave the green stuff at home.

Giono Barrett hopes to start a marijuana farm with his brother in Juneau, but says they won’t have any plants to display at the cannabis celebration. Barrett points to a similar festival canceled recently in Anchorage after city officials told organizers they would not allow possession or use of pot at a municipal facility.

“We really want to just bring the community together and get people out of the woodwork,” Barrett says. “So the idea here is to hit that marijuana demographic, and get them out of their house and get them together and enjoying music together.”

Public consumption of marijuana is illegal, even under the state’s new recreational marijuana law. In addition, the City and Borough of Juneau currently has a moratorium on land use permits for marijuana-related businesses. Barrett opposed the moratorium at first, but now thinks it’s been good for Juneau’s marijuana community.

“I think it was in retrospect a really smart decision, because it gave us the opportunity to get to know each other — the cannabis community and our city,” he says.

The cannabis celebration is being organized by Revelry Events, founded by former KXLL music director and volunteer Jessie Herman-Haywood. She says you won’t have to be a marijuana user to get something out of it.

“Essentially this is just a really cool music festival,” Herman-Haywood says. “It’s a great opportunity for the cannabis community, whether you’re going to be starting a business, or maybe you want to be purchasing some, or maybe you just don’t know anything about cannabis and are really interested in the culture.”

Even though there’s not supposed to be any drugs or alcohol at the festival, Herman-Haywood says it will be a 21 and over gathering because of the material being discussed.

Local greenhouse Get Growing and clothing maker Aurora Projekt will be among the vendors at the event. Attorney Kevin Higgins also will have a booth. He’s a former public defender now in private practice, and a recreational marijuana user. He says he’s interested in watching the legalization process.

“Marijuana’s been a part of my life for over 20 years,” Higgins says. “It’s new and kind of uncharted territory. So it’s just interesting to see how it’s unfolding.”

Higgins says members of Juneau’s cannabis community have made themselves available to public officials at both the city and state level who are making decisions about how marijuana will be regulated.

“Trying to make sure that they’re not only making good decisions, but asking the right questions in arriving at those decisions,” he says. “And kind of still fighting uphill against a bunch of reefer madness.”

But in general Higgins says most politicians are doing a good job of thoughtfully approaching the issue.

Editor’s note: Jessie Herman-Heywood’s former role with KXLL has been clarified.

In the film “The Unrideables: Alaska Range” a former Juneau kid makes aggressive ski turns, flips and literally flies off snowy cliffs.

Jon Devore started skiing and skydiving in Juneau. Now, he’s turned his passion into a profession by skydiving, speedriding and performing Hollywood stunts for a living.

Unrideables is a documentary on speedriding, a combination of big mountain skiing and high speed parachute flying.

“I have spent my whole life waiting for this moment – an opportunity to pioneer and ski mountains that were previously thought unrideable,” Devore says in the film.

The 39-year-old grew up in Juneau.

“If you didn’t get outside and do something, you’d go crazy living here,” Devore says. “And as a kid, whether it was scuba diving, skiing, kayaking, climbing – I went out and did everything that this beautiful area offers.”

He started skiing Eaglecrest Ski Area at age 5 and, as a young adult, spent summers river raft guiding. His first time skydiving was in Juneau.

“When I was a senior in high school, a guy rolled through the town offering tandem skydiving and I was his first client,” Devore says.

After that, he was hooked. Devore moved to Arizona in 1995 to pursue skydiving full time. He became part of a group that was perfecting, what was at the time, a new style of skydiving – free flying.

“Most people think skydiving is belly to earth falling flat. Well, we were taking it into three dimensions whether we were standing up vertically and having our feet go first, or going head down towards the earth or everything in the middle,” he says.

Devore worked as a skydive coach and competed in world skydiving meets. After a little while, “the world of Hollywood and the stunt world started calling.”

He coordinates, films and performs aerial stunts.

“We did all the wingsuit scenes in Transformers 3 where we were flying our wingsuits through downtown Chicago through all the buildings having the robots chase us.

In “Furious 7,” part of the “The Fast and the Furious” series, Devore is an aerial cameraman for cars that are dropped out of an airplane. He’s the lead actor’s stunt double in the remake of “Point Break,” due to come out in December. The original movie was what first inspired him to skydive.

Devore is the manager of the Red Bull Air Force Team, which performs in about 60 shows a year doing stunts like skydiving into a Seattle Seahawks game or into a concert. In his 20 year career, Devore only recently experienced his first injury – a torn ACL.

But he says he’s had close calls. During a movie shoot in New Zealand, DeVore was supposed to jump out of a helicopter, land on a big mountain, cut his parachute off and ski down. He had been practicing for weeks, but while filming,

“My parachute didn’t open, my lines came out and they tied around my ski boots and bindings, so I basically tied myself up in the sky and my parachute never inflated. It was just being towed like a piece of garbage. And I took that all the way into the ground and impacted at probably 95-100 miles an hour, almost pure free fall speed,” Devore says.

Devore was positive he was going to die. All he could think about was his wife. His curled up his body and hit the ground on his back.

“Two minutes later, I stood up and didn’t have a broken bone, zero injuries, nothing,” Devore says.

The mountain he landed on was part of the Invincible Snowfields.

Despite the close calls, Devore loves what he does and is sticking with it for as long as he can. He has friends in their late 60s and early 70s still skydiving. He says, he may one day bring the sport back to Juneau and, just maybe, change some kid’s life.

From Hogwarts to lost cities above the clouds, Kazu Kibuishi’s illustrations have introduced fantastical places to legions of young readers. The graphic novelist visited Juneau over the weekend to teach workshops for aspiring artists.

Kazu Kibuishi is an artist who doesn’t like to overthink his work.

“Every time I draw, I really try not to be present. Me as an artist, I don’t want to get in the way of the reader and the experience. My job is to clarify it for them,” Kibuishi says.

Scholastic Books approached him in 2013 to submit sketches for the new cover art of the Harry Potter series; Kibuishi says he didn’t want to do it. He was intimidated by thinking of the popularity surrounding J.K. Rowling’s books.

“I didn’t want to be the guy responsible for this because I liked the covers as they were,” Kibuishi says.

After collaborating with fellow artist Jason Caffoe, the two submitted some sketches to Scholastic Books. The publishing company picked Kibuishi to design the seven new covers within three months.

The Washington-based artist approached the project using skills he learned as a film student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I just thought of myself as a cameraman that visited Hogwarts…” Kibuishi says. “I was just there to photograph it with my artistic technique and style.”

Kibuishi’s final seven covers showcased a new, modern perspective distinct from Mary Grand Pré’s originals. He used sharp, vibrant colors to depict different icons of Rowling’s world such as dementors and Diagon Alley.

Finding the right moment to capture in the covers was not always easy. Kibuishi says the second book in the series, “The Chamber of Secrets,” was the most challenging to design. After sketching over 70 drafts, he still could not find the right picture to communicate the book’s tone.

Kibuishi says he went back to the source material to solve this predicament. He asked himself what his emotional reaction was when he first read Rowling’s book.

“What do I feel about this book? What is it about this book? I feel like it’s a cup of tea. It feels like a tea party to me. It’s the one book that feels like a kid’s book almost. It’s the calm before the storm,” Kibuishi says.

Kibuishi decided on the elaborate home of Ron Weasley, best friend to Harry Potter, to put on the cover. Kibuishi says the setting is a place of comfort for Potter before battling his main antagonist, ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.’

Kibuishi says drawing always came natural to him, but writing was a craft that took him years to develop. He was born in Japan and was brought over to the U.S. by his mother at age three. He says the abandonment of his father would later serve as inspiration for the plot in his graphic novel series, “Amulet.” Kibusihi says he’s learned to use life experiences to create emotionally powerful narratives.

Yet, there are times when Kibuishi still gets writer’s block. When running empty on ideas, he says he simply turns to doodling as a quick remedy — a tip he shared with about 30 school children at a drawing workshop on Saturday in the Douglas Public Library.

Young, aspiring cartoonists came prepared to pitch their grand story ideas. Xander Love, an 11 year-old student from Juneau Montessori School, showed Kibuishi personal sketches of pirate ships and robots.

“I think he (Kibuishi) found the perfect match between steampunk and fantasy,” Love says.

Kibuishi says because the graphic novel industry is still relatively new, he often gets asked to teach workshops on how to break into the business. He says educating the next generation of writers and illustrators is important for the industry’s survival.

“I’m hoping that all the work that I do has some element of teaching in it,” Kibuishi says.

While in the capital city, Kibuishi also made stops at Alaska Robotics and the 2015 Alaska Library Association Conference in Centennial Hall. He’s in the process of working on the last three books in his “Amulet” graphic novel series and recently signed a new book deal with Scholastic Graphix.

Kibuishi says he thinks the characteristics of a successful artist are a fruitful curiosity, steady determination and a little bit of that magic known as talent.

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