Blog Bands by the half-hour

The one-take sets and interviews of The 30 Minute Music Hour began running on Wisconsin Public Television last year, and looking back at all the archived episodes, Decider has to admire its unpredictable selection of local and touring bands. In just over a year, it's taken in artists ranging from Pale Young Gentlemen to Robbie Fulks, from Natty Nation to Les Breastfeeders. Producer-host Andy Moore and crew gathered a similarly unusual lineup of three artists Tuesday afternoon for the series' latest batch of tapings (which were also webcast live). Decider made it over to the studio to watch the first two, Sleeping In The Aviary and That 1 Guy.

We'll be running a longer piece on the Hour later, but for now, Decider's got to say it's fun to watch the show come together. Sleeping In The Aviary got a bunch of friends to join them on the set with sock puppets during their six-song performance. Naturally, Moore did his brief interview with the band through a yellow sock puppet that SITA singer Elliott Kozel dubbed "Mr. Snuggles." A little while later, I gained a bit more respect for That 1 Guy—the one-man band of Mike Silverman and his Magic Pipe—as he taped an episode/webcast ahead of his show that night at The Annex. It helped that Moore and crew figured out an interesting way to shoot Silverman's one-of-a-kind instrument, a two-stringed hybrid thing that holds down bass, percussion, and melody parts all at once.

While that was going on, traditional bluegrass outfit Art Stevenson And High Water rehearsed down the hall for the day's third and final webcast. Moore says all of this will air on TV once the series starts back up in June, but for now the episodes are already online. Madison gets a widely scattered assortment of live music, and has a rather fragmented audience to go with it. The best thing about the Hour is that it tries to embrace all those fragments, or at least a lot of them, with the same enthusiasm and direct, intimate production values.