W*A*S*H Featuring Kelly Atkins & Nils Erickson from 20 Minute Loop

An experimental variety show with guest stars, stand-up, music, audience members performing with the East Bay 3 as their accompaniment, and a live podcast recording.

with Shanti Charan, The East Bay 3 (W*A*S*H house band)

W*A*S*H
Modern day vaudeville with guest stars, stand-up, music, audience members performing with the East Bay 3 as their accompaniment, and a live podcast recording.

Kelly Atkins & Nils Erickson from 20 Minute Loop
In its most rudimentary form, 20 Minute Loop was founded innominately… Show more by Giles during college, circa 1995, as a home-recording project. He recorded a handful of demos to 8-track tape, but never officially released them. He did, however, have the opportunity to play them live to small audiences acoustically several times, usually with the vocal accompaniment of Kelly Atkins, who would later be the only consistent member in 20 Minute Loop besides Giles.

Giles originally toyed with other band names, such as With God on the Dog Team Trail, Pierre Bon Bon, Kill Whitey!, and PSA Flight 182, before finally settling on 20 Minute Loop. The band's name alluded to the duration of cockpit conversation recorded by an airplane's cockpit voice recorder for recovery in the event of a crash or other accident.

The actual band was established by Greg Giles in 1996, and their debut EP, With God On The Dog Team Trail, was released on New Year's Day in 1997. (Apart from Kelly Atkins, the band lineup Giles recruited for the EP featured no members of the final lineup.) With God On The Dog Team Trail featurede a lo-fi rendition of Jubilation - which was rerecorded for Decline of Day - as well as three other songs that were never released in any other form. With God On The Dog Team Trail was released on a small indie label, Trystero Records, which was run by a friend of Giles and has since gone defunct.

The band soon parted with Trystero, and struggled along for awhile with no means of releasing their music. They had recorded their first, self-titled album, and were already in the process of recording Decline of Day, when Jim Greer of the small, Berkeley-based indie label Fortune Records (not to be confused with the defunct Detroit, Michigan-based label of the same name) approached and offered to sign them. This begun a long-lasting relationship with Fortune Records - Greer would go on to release their first 3 albums and a split 7" with The Monolith.

Their debut album, 20 Minute Loop, was released to mostly positive critical reception, and thanks to positive publicity from local venues and indie distributor Aquarius Records, among others, they gained some recognition from the Bay Area indie scene. The band also played a great many shows in order to receive more publicity.

With a label deal and an album to their name, the band quickly released their second album, Decline of Day. This album received much more publicity, with positive reviews from Pitchfork, Allmusic, and CD Universe, et alia; yet the group still remained fairly unknown. The artwork for the album was provided by The Velvet Teen's lead singer Judah Nagler.

The band's breakthrough would arrive along with their next album, Yawn + House = Explosion, reviews for which appeared in nearly a dozen printed publications, as well as countless indie blogs. The artwork for Yawn + House = Explosion was of particular interest to many; the outside consisted of two different shots of a prepubescent girl grasping chickens, and the inside pamphlet consisted of the lyrics, many of which were determined using a dictionary game invented by the band, spelled out in such a way that it could be seen how certain words were strung together with the lyrics. This was the only album of 20 Minute Loop's to sell out; it sold a couple thousand copies.

The band parted from Fortune Records for unclear reasons to record their fourth album, Famous People Marry Famous People. The album, released in 2008, was arguably the band's most polished and intricate - it was recorded at John Vanderslice's renowned Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco, and featured over a half-dozen extra performers. It was also much more conceptual/graspable songs, with sophisticated ideas explained on each song's individual Bandcamp page. The album received slightly less publicity due to the loss of a label, but the band still did very well, receiving positive publicity from many well-known sites, such as PopMatters and KQED, amongst others.

The band played a few more shows before announcing a breakup on their Myspace, due to an inability to continue "outmaneuvering real-life contingencies". They announced that their "final show ever" would take place on November 15, but, untrue to their word, they reunited for Noise Pop 2012, opening for Imperial Teen.

Shanti Charan
Shanti Charan’s bubbly personality and contagious smile lure in audiences and her comedic abilities keeps them laughing. She is a fast-rising fresh face in the Bay Area comedy scene. Her ability to formulate quick connections makes it easy for her to communicate with diverse audiences. She won 1st place in the 2011 Rooster T Feather’s Comedy Competition and participated in the 2011 San Francisco International Comedy Competition where she advanced to the semi-finals. Charan was recently awarded SF Weekly’s 2012 Best Stand-Up on the Way Up. SF Weekly says Charan’s writing “is clever and confident beyond her years.”

The East Bay 3 (W*A*S*H house band)
The gents of the East Bay 3 have mastered telepathy, subliminal body language, and reflex training to sharpen their skills as accompanists. Want them to back you on "Billie Jean," done as a bossa-nova? Done. Want to stop on the chorus of a B-side by the Cure to tell your Robert Smith story? Got it. Want to sing "The Greatest Love of All" over a Sex Pistols riff? Roger that. Each week, new musical guests and audience members throw heavy objects at the EB3, and each week, some blood is left on the stage. The Rev. Gil Gilmartin, a former resident of Brazil, wears his thunderbass high; Kevin Seal, from Griddle and Pandora's music team, experiments on a Fender Rhodes; session drummer and studio wizard Adam White is widely known as The Most Followable Drummer In The Western Hemisphere. The EB3's motto? "The singer is always right."

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