On April 3 and 4, Hancher Auditorium held its inaugural Stop/Time Festival, a multi-disciplinary, multi-venue fest spread throughout the University of Iowa campus and downtown Iowa City.
“There’s a lot of stuff we know that’s cool that just doesn’t get on as many stages,” festival organizer Andre Perry said in an interview with Little Village ahead of the event. “We live in a community that supports that, but you still have to tend to it. Stop/Time is a pilot program for spreading out in the community a little more.”
Now that we’re on the other side of the fest, here are some takeaways and impressions from Hancher’s pilot program.
[Coverage provided by Kent Williams with additional support from LV Staff.]
Day 1
Donika Kelly
Two different performances in two different rooms at Hancher Auditorium kicked off the Stop/Time Festival. The event began with poet, author and Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, Donika Kelly, reading from her poems before Ambrose Akinmusire’s band took the stage.
In a gesture that seemed to speak to the Stop/Time ethos as a whole, Kelly and Akinmusire shared Hancher’s main Hadley stage, with the audience in a configuration known as “Hancher Up Close.” The poems Kelly presented used repetition, variation and rhythm in a reading that set up Akinmusire’s set perfectly. Her rhythmic recitation echoed hip-hop rhyming and slam poetry performances. But there were no cheap tricks or fallbacks in her words, something excusable in those popular genres. Kelly writes carefully, in a way that would satisfy the aesthetic demands of serious, academic poetry. Her exuberant performance in a live setting gave it vitality and rhythm you could feel.
Ambrose Akinmusire
Ambrose Akinmusire performed with the PUBLIQuartet, a string quartet, and his band of Chiquita Magic (synths and vocals), Sam Harris (piano and synth), Elijah Revell (drums), and hip-hop MC Kokayi. It was a genre-fluid performance, obviously, but perfectly without seams. The string quartet played through composed passages, that the rest of the band joined into, transitioning to modal jazz.
You can listen to the music presented by Akinmusire online to know what the static recorded version of the music sounded like. Performed live, it was rawer and looser, the energy in the recordings amplified by audience interaction. Chiquita Magic was a focus for me because of the good time she was clearly having, dancing and nodding her head. The nod was a guide for the audience through the more hectic odd-meter passages; they might be playing in 7/8 or 11/4 but she always found the groove. At the same time, she played intricate basslines and sang.
Akinmusire’s trumpet playing owes a lot to Miles Davis, more in timbre than in style. He plays gently with a liquid tone, without the bark and shrillness of virtuoso players. Elijah Ravel’s drumming was powerful, using gunshot-snare hits as accents. Kokayi’s singing and rhyming were as percussive and propulsive as Ravel’s drums. His diction and casual fluidity never faltered.
Mei Semones
A theme of the Stop/Time Festival is breaking genre boundaries, something Mei Semones does with impish grace. She coos her lyrics, like Astrud Gilberto, while casually tossing off intricate runs on her guitar. She and her band love to find the groove of odd meters, something she shares with Ambrose Akinmusire.
She sings both in Japanese and English, sometimes in the same song. In addition to her flirtation with bossa nova (as in her song “Dumb Feeling”), her work recalls contemporary Japanese indie-pop artists like Cornelius. But that’s just part of who she is, not a selling point; the Brazilian, jazz and prog-rock blend together in her unique expressions.
Her band is unique, too, with a violin and viola player who flesh out her guitar playing with a paradoxically rocking presence. Where Semones seemed almost shy, performing stock-still in front of the microphone, her string players were constantly moving, stalking the stage and dancing as they played.
Hancher is innovating with the more intimate “Club Hancher” configuration of their Strauss Hall and the seating of the audience on the main stage in their “Hancher Up Close” series. It’s a different experience for everyone — Semones and Akinmusire, as well as the audience — to be so close. It enhances the intangible elements of live performance: emotion, connection with audience and the energy within the room.
As I walked out I heard young students from the School of Music excitedly dissecting the performance, and saw older folks leaving with smiles as though awakening from a dream. I think Andre Perry and his team are onto something with Stop/Time.
Day 2
Community Celebration: The Westerlies
The second day of the Stop/Time Festival saw free community programming at the Museum of Natural History and the Old Capitol Senate Chamber — a sort of alternative homecoming concert, as Perry put it.
The Westerlies, an American brass quartet, started off the program in the Senate Chamber with “Fight On,” their re-imagining of the hymn dating back to the 1850s. The shape note stylings of the group bounced around the chamber, which was constructed just a decade before the original hymn. It was, like so much of the other programming in the larger festival, in conversation with deeply rooted American traditions and forms.
Sharp Pins
My second evening at Stop/Time started at Gabe’s. 2026 marks my 50th year going to shows there. It has been a center of Iowa City culture, hosting, over the years, an absurd list of legendary bands.
I showed up a little late, and as I climbed the stairs I thought I was hearing the sound engineer playing the Replacements. When I got to the top of the stairs I realized it was actually Sharp Pins.
Sharp Pins seems uniquely committed to mining 1980s indie music for inspiration. If they’d opened for Nirvana or Sonic Youth in the 1980s, there would be nothing futuristic or strange about their performance Saturday night. I don’t mean this to dismiss them; like Gabe’s, one cannot consider Sharp Pins without considering historic context.
But Sharp Pins is inspired by indie music of decades past, not retreading a style younger listeners weren’t around to experience. The songwriting is too intelligent, tuneful and fun. It’s new, but very much follows the example of Lennon and McCartney, the Kinks and Alex Chilton, finding pop hooks that surprise without jarring the ears.
Their album Balloon Balloon Balloon on Bandcamp shows them to be pop historians, proudly dedicated to the jangly guitar sound passed down from the Byrds to REM to Sharp Pins. Experienced live at Gabe’s, it’s more immediate, visceral, energetic and of the moment. Even as a trio, their tight harmonies and room-filling guitar chords are immediately accessible and exciting. I mistook them for our beloved Minnesotan Replacements, but that’s high praise.
Danez Smith
I left Gabe’s before Sharp Pins finished because Donika Kelly’s reading Friday night clued me into the vitality and relevance of the poets presented as “opening acts.” Danez Smith did not disappoint, performing his poems at Prairie Lights with reckless abandon. He focused on love poems, deeply romantic, vulnerable, embracing queer love but by no means limited to it. His expressions of love transcended gender, politics and sexuality, communicating pure human emotion.
I stayed for Branford Marsalis, whose performance another LV writer has reviewed in full. My capsule impression was that it was the least surprising performance of Stop/Time. They were four complete virtuosos doing their best to blow the roof off, and that’s always worthwhile.
Carmen Giménez
I left before the Marsalis encore to catch Iowa Poetry Workshop grad Carmen Giménez’s reading at Riverside Theatre. The Stop/Time poets owe a lot to Maya Angelou. She was an early proponent of performing her poems at readings, when most poets stuck to a dour monotone. Giménez read with her head down, but her words rushed out, full of anger and joy. I don’t know if she read “Bleeding Heart” but her performance crackled with an intensity matching that poem’s repeating, rhythmic language:
Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin.
It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending
with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending
with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields.
She’s a worthy inheritor of the long line and narrative intensity of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, a form that lesser poets emulate to their peril.
William Tyler
The indie folk artist William Tyler performed a meditative set of electric and acoustic guitar compositions, layering one song over a low-fi recording of a choral hymn that seemed to conjure the old spirits of the venue, Iowa City’s Masonic Building. I imagine it was many attendees’ first time setting foot inside the building, which is tucked away on College Street across from the public library.
The venue hosted a vinyl marketplace throughout the afternoon in its downstairs Social Hall, and performances into the evening in its main floor auditorium — a “vintage Craftsman-style space” which set an apt scene for Tyler’s cosmic country and psychedelic Americana.
Mali Obomsawin
One of the abiding joys of Iowa City’s music festivals is seeing performers that you know nothing about. Obomsawin, sans context, seemed somewhere between free jazz and the trance-inducing repetition of Moroccan Gnawa music. Post-performance research revealed that she’s Odanek First Nation, and incorporates Wabanaki language and music.
She sang during her performance but her primary instrument is the string bass. Her playing athletically physical, using every technique to vary timbre. Her singing was a tonal anchor in the intense driving chaos of improvisatory music. Her band — drums, guitar, saxophone and trumpet — more than kept up with her. She and the band seamlessly swerved from full on skronk freakouts into tonal, rhythmic grooves. It was literally unpredictable to a naive listener.
Guitarist alana amore colvin‘s playing was particularly riveting. Her restraint almost seemed aggressive; she’d wait for 30 seconds then drop in a chord stab or short burst of notes. She’d double Mali’s basslines, playing so quietly they were more visible than audible. Then, near the end of the performance, she exploded in a full-on virtuoso blast of atonal runs, before stepping back, leaving the rest of the band sparking wildly.
Free Jazz as a form can mean a lot of things, but Mali Obomsawin is as faithful to its true spirit: their performance was never arbitrary, always engaged in finding both freedom and deep meaning.
Tortoise
Tortoise, the second “top of the flyer” artist, like Branford Marsalis, was not a surprise. They are the elder statesmen of the Chicago rock avant-garde, formed by members of well-known Chicago bands Eleventh Dream Day and Gastro Del Sol. Their music synthesizes influences from European art rock bands like Can and Neu! with American experimentalists like Silver Apples.
Their live performance answered the question all artists should answer: why? Why are you making the music you make? Their answer is simple: fun. They may be serious musicians with an artistic legacy of serious music, but their real purpose is fun. They had a blast on stage, scurrying between instruments, leaning into the hypnotic repetition, finding the music inside what, in other hands, may feel like mechanical repetition.
They pulled the audience in, but never fell into the trap of “entertaining” the audience. If you didn’t show up expecting a Tortoise show, you were probably out the door early to catch Frankie and the Witch Fingers. The Englert crowd was more than willing to meet Tortoise halfway. There was palpable joy in the room during their encore.
A musician’s experience of a performance can be fraught with mistakes and technical difficulties, but Saturday night at the Englert, everything went right for Tortoise.
