Louisville Magazine

OCT 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 10.14 143 C Girls Rock By Tyler Curth Photo by Aaron Kingsbury The inaugural Outskirts Festival celebrates women in music. arrie Neumayer and Stephanie Gary have a lot in common. Both women are self-taught guitar players. Both 34-year-olds are in the post-punk band Julie of the Wolves. Both are former teachers: Neumayer in art, Gary in special education. Both quit because of the bureaucracy of the system and long hours. Both needed more liberating means of livelihood, self-expression. (Neumayer freelances as an illustrator, including for this magazine, and Gary works in interior design.) Tough Neumayer and Gary are laid-back and slightly on the soft-spoken side, they're in the process of making some noise in Louisville's independent music scene. Together, along with friend Joel Hunt, Neumayer and Gary are spearheading the Outskirts Festival, Louisville's frst-ever female-focused music festival. Outskirts — funded by a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women — will take place Oct. 10-12 at the New Vintage on South Preston Street. Featuring local and national talent, the fest seeks to encourage, support, inspire and highlight music made by women. Te 23 bands performing throughout the weekend are either all- female groups or female-fronted. "Tere are a lot more women playing music in Louisville these days," Gary says. "We were fairly isolated when we started playing." Which is why the two formed Rockshops, a separate entity of the festival at Lincoln Elementary, where girls 10 to 18 will assemble to rock. During the weekend, the girls will meet with instructors — such as drummer Meg Samples of the Deloreans, who is also the Louisville Leopard Percussionists' assistant director — and learn to form a band, playing Doo Wop Shop-loaned instruments. By weekend's end, groups will perform songs they've written. "Our emphasis is defnitely not on technicality," Neumayer says. "Our emphasis is on creativity and working together cooperatively. Our hope is that girls will support each other and build each other up and develop confdence and their ability to play music." While the babes rock, so will the mamas. And papas. Te women. And men. "We've actually had a number of people ask if only women are allowed to come," Neumayer says, laughing. Don't be stupid, boys. Music is for everyone. And the genres are all over the place. Indie rock. Punk rock. A metal group from Tacoma, Washington, called Lozen. Folksy singer-songwriter stuf. After- parties at the Cure Lounge, all DJs and hip-hop. And then there are some bands that just defy genre, such as Drinking Woman, a Louisville punk/hardcore band Neumayer frst fell in love with in the early '90s. But Drinking Woman broke up before Neumayer ever got to see them perform. "Tey're reuniting just for this," Neumayer says. Man Woman, is she excited. Gary is giddy, too. "I'm almost nervous to see (singer-songwriter) Marnie Stern," Gary says. "Like, how did we make that happen?" She momentarily forgets all those months of planning. What she didn't plan so well in regards to Outskirts: the baby. Gary is, in Neumayer's words, "very pregnant." "I'll be full-term festival weekend," Gary says. "He's already played six or seven shows with me, so hopefully he'll keep waiting."

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