Jenny Hoyston and Kaia Wilson at Origami Vinyl: Sunday May 1, 2011

Origami Vinyl had a special show with two women, on Sunday night: Kaia Wilson (founding member of legendary punk/queercore acts Team Dresch and The Butchies) and Jenny Hoyston (lead singer of the band Erase Errata) stopped to do an in-store performance during their tour commemorating the 15th anniversary of the release of Kaia’s first solo album.

The store was filled with … women of course, but there were a few exceptions.

I kind of guessed what was going on, a queercore band founder, two gay women, but I was not at all familiar with them, contrarily to the crowd who was there, making requests for songs, old songs for most of it, and there was even one Kaia said she couldn't sing, it was definitively too old.

Erase Errata’s member Jenny Hoyston, who was sitting down as she had just broken her ankle, began with two acoustic songs she did alone, two quiet and melancholic tunes sung with a fragile but confident voice, then she did two other songs backed up by some electronic beats, synth and weird distorted pre-recorded noises. The atmosphere became way darker, more cavernous,.. more experimental at that moment, especially with her last solo song during which she used her guitar as a drum surface. But things lightened up again with the following songs, more country-folk, and a song she said had been written with blues-alt-country artist William Elliott Whitmore.  Kaia Wilson joined her for a few of them, and their vocal harmonies and bright folky guitars were pleasant but had nothing to do with experimentation anymore.



Kaia Wilson, with a ‘The Butchies’ sticker on her guitar, and an even more outgoing personality, was talking a lot about old memories, joking about her age, only ‘29’, sure! and sang a few of her ‘old’ songs as promised, from her first record ‘Finally A Dyke Album For The Whole Family’, that was  released in 1996.

I checked a little bit her background and Team Dresh is regarded as one of the first and most influential punk queer-core bands, with a clear lesbian and feminist message, so needless to say she is quite an iconic figure.

Performed with her acoustic guitar, her solo music sounded completely folk and upbeat most of the time, not punk at all. As she was taking requests and introducing her songs, I could not believe it,… she had a series of songs about cats, ‘Delilah’, ‘Mudball’, ‘Freewheel’, one of the cats being now 17 years old, as she explained… Exactly what I needed.

She covered Sinead O’ Connors' ‘Mandika’, and she and Jenny did more ‘country’ songs harmonizing again.
During their performance, the owner of Origami vinyl tweeted that Sara from Tegan and Sara (or was it Tegan?) was hanging out…. and I totally missed that!