Durham
Duke Basketball: A Pictorial History
Regulator BookshopLewis Bowling, a physical education instructor at Duke and N.C. Central and a fitness columnist for the Herald-Sun, has also moonlighted as a sports archivist at Duke. He has written a biography on football coach Wallace Wade, and just released Duke Basketball: A Pictorial History. The book, which consists entirely of photos from the official Duke Archive, is strictly fans-only. Though there are several exceptional photosincluding a Michael Jordan-esque (sorry, Dukies) shot of Class of ’86 forward Weldon Williams leaping into the airDuke Basketball mostly reads like a high-school yearbook, and it’s missing critical narrative and perspective to accompany the visuals. Curiously, the Williams photo caption does not list the game, or Williams’ name, and Bowling provides commentary only in rare cases (a quote from Christian Laettner, for example). If you’re a true Duke basketball fan, though, it ought to be worth seeing Bowling fill in the blanks during a book signing and slide show at The Regulator. The show starts at 7 p.m. and is free. Matt Saldaña
Chapel Hill
Talkdemonic
Local 506Like torchbearers Tortoise, Boards of Canada and Four Tet, Portland duo Talkdemonic assembles its generally instrumental scores with an amalgam of strings, percussion and electronics. On last month’s Eyes at Half Mast, though, they favor brevity, most of the 14 tracks clocking in under three minutes despite a roomful of instrumentsviola, banjo, organ, guitar, drums, synth … the list goes on. And despite their heavy use of electronics, multi-instrumentalist Kevin O’Connor and violist/ cellist Lisa Molinaro retain an intensely organic nature in their music. Talkdemonic dubbed its sound “folktronic hop.” About right. Show starts at 9:30 p.m., and it runs $8 at the door. Rich Ivey
Chapel Hill
Ironing, Hal McGee
NightlightNightlight is billing this as an after-party for Cat’s Cradle’s sold-out Girl Talk show, and we completely endorse that line of promotion: Girl Talk pulls splinters from pop hits or lifts their faces wholesale, cramming all of it into hyperlinked hour-long deluges of remixed mass media in which anyone can find something they like. Gainesville’s Ironing pulls pop artifacts in the opposite way, bending samples and tapes of mainstream culture through static, manipulation and general damage. Something once recognizable becomes a specter of itself, shrouded in mystery and allure. Last time tourmate Hal McGee visited, he recorded bits of conversation at every tour stop, sampling the reel in real-time at that night’s gig and recording the result to use it as the substrate for the next day’s musings. Our own Boyzone opens around 10 p.m. Grayson Currin
