This Saturday, a lineup filled from start to finish with two-piece bands will rock Mike ‘n’ Molly’s beer garden. Clatter (drums/bass with vocals), Triple Whip (bass/drums), Water Between Continents (guitar/drums), reds (guitar/electronics) and The Rise and Fall of Tomax and Xamot (guitar/drums) will play the show. Jane Boxall, drummer for Triple Whip, conceived and booked the show. She and Holly Rushakoff, Triple Whip’s bassist, sat down with On The Town to discuss the upcoming show and the ins and outs of performing in a duo.

On The Town: Duo-Fest comes up this Saturday, are you excited for it?

Jane: Yeah, it’s the first time I’ve set up anything like this. I’m excited because we’ve got this band called Clatter coming up from Missouri. They’re bass and drums but the lady sings as well. They sent me a CD and it sounds really good.

Holly: Can we say our secret?

Jane: Oh, yeah.

Holly: I have a surprise. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re planning on collaborating with Water Between Continents, it’s a guitar/drum duo. They learned a couple of our songs, we’re learning one of their songs, and so we’re going to fuse bands. We’re going to transition, I think the order will be from them to us?

Jane: Yeah, we’ll play on their last song and they’ll play on our first two songs. They’re both fantastic.

Holly: Brian Reedy was my favorite drummer until Jane came to town. Since we’ve been a duo we have not collaborated with other musicians for a show, except for the great cover up, but for our own songs we haven’t collaborated with anybody. This will be really exciting to see what they have to add, and Nick Rudd is a great guitarist.

On The Town: When did you start working with them?

Jane: We’re going to start later this week (laughs), but the idea was hatched a while ago.

Holly: It was at a show at the Iron Post that Nick proposed the idea of collaborating … Since we’ve had each others’ music we’ve been rehearsing on our own. It’ll be kind of a fresh, new, organic experience.

On The Town:  How did you come up with the idea for Duo-Fest?

Jane: I’m pretty sure it was because I’d been searching, just looking online to see what other bass and drum duos there were, because I wanted to check out what other people were doing with the same configuration we have. I came across this band called Clatter from Missouri, and then we just started talking about show swaps and they wanted to come play here. I thought, ‘well how about we have all duos and make it a festival?’ It went through the usual thing of said bands were confirmed at different points and then it all changed, but I think the lineup we’ve got is pretty good, I’m happy with it. Hopefully it could become a regular thing in the future.

On The Town: Was it relatively quick to put together or did you have some trouble?

Jane: The booking is always … a lot of things are conditional, like finding out if the bands are available, finding out if the venue is available and then a lot of bands will become unavailable. It’s generally a lot of time and e-mailing, trying to get things in place.

Holly: And also considering what out of town bands we could bring, because there were bands that we wanted but if we had too many out of town bands, we probably wouldn’t be able to pay them all fairly.

Jane: When I bring in bands from out of state, I don’t want it to cost them anything to play. I like to give them plenty of gas money. Hopefully that should work out because we’ve just got the one out of town band.

On The Town: What is it like being in a two person band?

Holly: You hear everything, as far as the audience goes. There’s no overlapping, which is traditionally what you have is this beautiful mesh of melodies and goings on. With the drums and bass, I think what we’re able to do is showcase our talents and we have a lot to show.

Jane: There are good points and bad points to being a two-piece. Obviously both of us have to carry our weight, there’s nothing to hide behind. If I mess up on the drums when we’re playing, it’s really obvious. Whereas, I’ve played in a lot of really big bands where there’s a lot more cushioning. The upside of that is … I feel that as a drummer I have a lot more freedom. I can play – I don’t want say overplay – but you know play some pretty involved, in your face kind of stuff that if I was just playing as a session drummer, I would get fired. That’s the kind of creative freedom that for me comes with it.
…Some people will say, we don’t really have songs as such. There’s no singing, you’re stripping away a lot of the things that people usually latch onto and feel comfortable with – typical song structures, verse-chorus, guitar and singing –  and we don’t have any of that. We’re kind of asking people to make a little bit of a leap of faith when they listen to us.

On The Town: Are you guys usually the only duo on the bill?

Jane: I would say, typically. We play with Water Between Continents quite a lot. I think (Duo-Fest) will be cool because it’ll be like our own little club, and we won’t be the freaks of the show for once.

Holly: I don’t really think of ourselves as ‘just a duo’ … I think that there’s enough going on between the two of us that sometimes we get the comment, ‘I can’t believe that two people can make that much sound.’ … I always like observing other musicians and seeing what they can do given only two members. I’m looking forward to celebrating that.

Jane: I think we’ve got enough variation … because even the other bass/drums duo, their stuff is so different to ours. They have vocals and it’s more of what you’d expect as a song. I think each act is going to be pretty different to the last one.

Duo-Fest begins at 8 p.m. this Saturday at Mike ‘n’ Molly’s, 105 N. Market St. This is a 21+ show, and cover is (appropriately) $2.