![]() "I was like, 'Screw this, I wanna get out there and see if people will talk to us or follow us. "We started the Twitter account and weren't updating it or doing anything with it," she says. For nearly twenty-five years, Milwaukee’s Cactus Club has been among the finest live music venues in the Midwest, featuring such acts as The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, The Sword, High On Fire, The Faint, Bright Eyes, Eyedea & Abilities, Red Fang, Sylvan Esso, Redd Kross, Sharon Van Etten, Polica, Russian Circles, King Tuff, and countless other. "Īlthough Acuna will be the first to admit that these interactions help keep people coming through the doors, the store's Twitter presence isn't a Machiavellian plot to take all your money. "It's nice when I see them come in to the store and I know that's and they like. "I've gotten to talk to a lot of cool customers," says Acuna. As the human behind the store's official Twitter account ( she's been making connections with music fans across the city. Who? Although Social Media Person is just one of the many hats Cactus Music Store Manager Cristina Acuna wears, it may be the one you best know her by. The thrill of *Cactus *is not that the music could fall apart at any moment, but that this duo can handle anything they throw at each other.Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community - a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. They certainly push each other, but they never overreach (one particularly dissonant passage in the aptly-titled “Snow Storm Coming” could be a mess in shakier hands, but here it feels like humans controlling weather). Kapp and Shipp move from calm to urgent to portentous in single turns of musical phrase, bringing a wide range of moods completely and assuredly within their grasp. That last example demonstrates the most compelling aspect of Cactus: the duo’s precise tonal control. In other spots, the pair’s exchanged pulses shift into less orderly flights, such as when Shipp’s hard-beat notes dissolve into Kapp’s cymbal runs on the gripping “Before.” Passages in the rolling “Money” and the meditative “After” find Shipp tapping chords between Kapp’s snare strikes in an impromptu call-and-response. There has always been a heavy rhythmic bent to the pianist’s music, but here he’s so inspired by Kapp’s versatile work that at times it sounds like he wants to be a second drummer. The responses that Kapp draws out of Shipp are some of the latter’s most percussive playing on record. Yet Cactus represents only the second time Kapp and Shipp have recorded togetherfollowing 2015’s Kapp-led quartet album Themes 4 Transmutationand they had never played as a duo until. The pair lock in immediately and never lose their keen eye-to-eye focus, engaging in such thorough dialogue that it’s hard to find a moment where one isn’t responding to the other. Given that level of unfamiliarity, their quick reaction time and thoughtful interplay are impressive. Yet* Cactus* represents only the second time Kapp and Shipp have recorded together-following 2015’s Kapp-led quartet album * Themes 4 Transmutation-*and they had never played as a duo until they pushed the record button on this fully-improvised session. Kapp came up in the middle of the ’60s free jazz groundswell, playing with saxophone legends Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, and Noah Howard. Shipp, meanwhile, has been a mainstay in New York’s improvising scene since the mid-’80s, best known for his work alongside bassist William Parker in saxophonist David S. The quality level matches the participants’ pedigrees. On Cactus, drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp take advantage of the possibilities inherent in their setup, persistently passing ideas back and forth in a wordless conversation.
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