MDR Showcase

Jordan (my husband, guitar and vocals in Missed Dunks at Summer League) and I moved to Memphis in May 2022 for my new job at the Grizzlies. By August, we had met and clicked with a few people, including our friend Aylen, who let us know about a show their friend from high school was playing in a band called “Big Clown” at the Lamplighter.

And that’s how Missed Dunks at Summer League was formed, put out a tape on Machine Duplication Recordings (MDR), and ended up playing this show at the Green Room at Crosstown with a bunch of crazy projection artists.

Just kidding… Unless? Once again, I’m going to link to Zach Mitchell (drummer of Big Clown, Late Night Cardigan, and Missed Dunks at Summer League)’s blog MDR Observer. His story of that night, what it means to him, and how it led to MDR and this showcase is really special.. so please go read it.

That night, our very first time at the Lamplighter, Jordan and I witnessed a sliver of Zach’s story. In his post, Zach uses a picture of him with his chunky camcorder filming the Spiral Rash set; that’s taken from a video I had taken on my phone because I really liked this band I was seeing in my new city. It’s a video I pulled up when Jordan and I connected the dots with Zach about the first time we saw him play in Big Clown, the first time we saw some local bands and thought there was something really special about this place.

Last Saturday’s show at the Green Room was full of so much that is special about the city of Memphis and the community I started witnessing in August 2022 (again, go read Zach’s post). A night of music from MDR’s Carry Ripple (Carter Earheart-Brown), Missed Dunks (Jordan, Zach, and Spence Bailey), and General Labor (Thomas Corbin, Elijah Poston, and Mitch Mealer) was accompanied by the Memphis Chroma Collective’s visual projection artists including Infinity Stairs (Graham Burks and Thomas Corbin, pulling double duty), Whimsyhaus (Overflow Gently and Magic Mirror), Unapologetic (Kid Maestro and Liz), and Handicrafts/Noah Hand. That’s a lot of people. I don’t even know if I technically met everyone there, but I’m so thankful y’all pulled it off. This felt insanely ambitious for a DIY scene, and I’m so glad I could listen, see, and photograph this.

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