On Tuesday, January 23rd @ 5pm, Charley Varrick speaks with Vanessa Hay and Kay Stanto of Athens based band, Pylon Reenactment Society, ahead of their show for this year’s SF Sketchfest at the Great American Music Hall on Thursday, January 25th.
Much more than a tribute band, Pylon Reenactment Society have written new songs with Pylon as their guiding star. PRS have delighted old Pylon fans while making new ones. PRS features original Pylon vocalist Vanessa Briscoe Hay, guitarist Jason NeSmith, bassist Kay Stanton and drummer Gregory Sanders.
PRS was formed in 2014 to play a few Pylon songs for a one-off show as part of an arts retrospective exhibit named Art Rocks Athens – appropriate as the members of Pylon were all art majors at UGA. Vanessa decided to call the project Pylon Reenactment Society – an inside joke among the original band when they were relearning their material in the early 2000s. The Art Rocks show was enthusiastically received. Encouraged, and with the surviving Pylon members’ blessings, Pylon Reenactment Society became a real band.
New album, Magnet Factory (Strolling Bones Records) organically grew out of jams and writing sessions over several years. As the album took shape, the lyrics peeled away at the layers of time and shared spaces that make up a life. A pair of unrecorded songs by Pylon were brought in to round out this collective unspoken theme.
