Megafaun & Fight the Big Bull feat. Justin Vernon & Sharon Van Etten
Sounds of the South

Friday, September 17, 2010 | 8:00 pm

Sounds of the South
Megafaun & Fight the Big Bull
feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver & Sharon Van Etten

The members of Megafaun moved from Wisconsin to Raleigh with Vernon as the band DeYarmond Edison.  After Vernon went back north to record as Bon Iver, the Cook brothers and Joe Westerlund stayed on in the Piedmont, crafting a timeless folk-pop that “drinks deeply from the well of the past but could only have been made today” (Drowned in Sound)—an archive of rural America’s ghosts.

In this exclusive live recording event, the rustic avant-gardists team with Fight the Big Bull, the “thrilling” (NPR) 9-piece jazz collective from Richmond, VA, along with Vernon and the blisteringly talented Van Etten. Together in Durham for three shows only, they’ll cut a live album based on Alan Lomax’s collection of shape-note songs and dirt-floor hymns, Sounds of the South, gathered during a two-year trek through the American southeast (1959-1961).

Recast through Megafaun’s experimental Americana, FtBB’s brass jazz, Vernon’s “chilly, rusty grandeur” (Village Voice), and Van Etten’s haunting soprano, the folk songs Lomax immortalized will live again at Hayti, once an AME Zion church and now a semi-sacred venue whose acoustics rival any studio’s.