WFHB community radio and music label Hum Drum Press brought together bands Brick Lancaster, Billy Fortune and Prairie Scout for a live concert Feb. 19 at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre.
Hum Drum Press helps local musicians release independent songs and albums in and around the Midwest region. The label produced and released the first singles of all three bands that performed Wednesday.
Fans, friends and family filled the room, cheering and singing along with the performers.
“It's been cool to watch (Prairie Scout) grow into the project that it is today,” audience member River Epperson said. “For a while, my favorite (song) was ‘Ivy’ because I love when it gets loud and sounds like Shoegaze in the middle, but more recently, my favourite has been ‘Nerve’ because I think that has some of Natalie (Ingall)'s best songwriting in my opinion.”
Band Prairie Scout was started by lead vocalist Ingalls as a solo project during her senior year at IU. The project expanded to become a band of three other members: Julia Fegelman, Wesley Davis and John Hasey. The band closed the concert with its album “What’s ahead is behind me.”
The band derives inspiration from indie-folk pop genre and science fiction as their main themes of songs.
“The songs explore how there are cycles and patterns in your life that come back around when you least expect them, and you'll live out experiences that you felt like you've lived in the past,” Ingall said. “We have a song called ‘Cyclical.’ It is about the revolution of the Earth round of the sun. So, there's just a lot of circular movement and how it kind of plays into our day-to-day life. So that's the big theme that I like to explore.”
The band plans to work on its new material to be released in an EP, alongside performing various booked shows in Bloomington.
Brick Lancaster performed live for the first time as a band at the concert Wednesday. The band consists of five members: Reeder Vyain, Nathan Allen, Avery McGuire, Ethan Cantrell and Keegan Priest. The band played all songs from its album “Upanatem.”
The bandmates are all part of different bands, but it was their first time playing together. Lead guitarist and IU senior at the music school, Keegan Priest said it was a “full circle moment” playing for another band, Slug Rug, and then being a part of the first iterations for the label where the current band was officially formed.
“Reeder writes and plays the instruments on all the songs and then since we're all buds and we play in different bands together, he asks me to play for a live room for the show and maybe future shows,” Priest said. “It's like a different type of guitar playing than I usually like playing, and I think the performance went well, and I'm excited for future performances.”
Band “Billy Fortune” is a solo project by Billy Fortune, a senior at University of Cincinnati. Fortune and bandmate Elliott Pippin performed “Silverton,” “Be sincere,” “Billy’s Outro,” “My Mountain My Mountain” and a new song, “Mother Crane and Pictures of Loretta.”
Fortune grew up in Coshocton, Ohio, with a cultural influence of countryside music, which reflects his music composition style.
“I look up to the songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan. I like the mystique within their lyrics,” Fortune said. “I like the general feelings of beauty that you can make with your words and how you sing them and how you write them. I think overall, we all just wanted to create something that sounded beautiful and had a naturistic kind of landscape, but with the acoustic instruments it just kind of seems a little mystique, mellow, melancholy in a good bit.”
Fortune plans to produce his next album over the summer and has performances scheduled for April.
Label owner and musician Max DiFrisco said the label tries to empower local and emerging talent in music.
“We have a team of very skilled, capable and passionate people who put all this stuff together for artists,” DiFrisco said. “So, all of the albums were recorded by label engineers and producers and mixed by them as well. All of the graphic design was done in house by graphic designer, any photo or video work was done by label photographers and geographers. So, all of that is what we could provide as a community for the artists, which is exactly what I would have wanted to receive throughout this whole time.”
DiFrisco said that Hum Drum Press doesn’t have a set schedule for touring and playing shows. However, all the performing bands are active in Indiana and Chicago’s music scene.
DiFrisco is an IU alumnus and studied audio engineering at the Jacob School of Music. He graduated in 2024 and started the label during his senior year. He said all bands will continue with their independent gigs while the label sets up shop in Chicago to manage operations better and be more active in the Chicago music scene. However, they still want to have a presence in Bloomington.
“It's been really fulfilling and nice for the last couple of years to just be able to provide for our friends and the people that we are excited and whose music we're super excited about,” he said. “So, I think what to expect is just hopefully more of a presence and just always more music to listen to, watch and be a part of.”
Editor’s note: Natalie Ingalls previously worked at the IDS.
