Some 41 years after Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman and Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo Jr. came together to form Ween, their adult children Ashton Freeman and Michael Melchiondo III played their first show as a duo. The concert happened last Saturday at Soupçon Salon in Lambertville, NJ, just across the Delaware River from Ween’s birthplace of New Hope, PA.
Ashton and Michael made headlines late last month when they announced a show together at the small Soupçon Salon in the back of a coffee shop. Ahead of the show, Ashton (who performs ukulele-driven singer-songwriter music as Souperfruit) and Michael (who has a one-man noise project, Bugger) took up the rallying cry “We are Not Ween,” a claim they repeated during Saturday’s concert—shortly before covering Ween.
The pair’s 20-minute set, uploaded to Ashton’s Souperfuit YouTube channel under the title “we are not ween”, opened with the dreamy Ween rarity “Long Beach Island”. The song gained infamy in 1999 when the CD recording was stolen from Gene Ween’s home and uploaded online. Though Ween has never played the song live, that didn’t stop “We are Not Ween” from giving it a go. The pair’s stripped-back rendering of the song with Ashton on guitar/vocals and Michael on a drum machine was fittingly similar to the original bootleg’s raw nature, though Michael added some auxiliary sound manipulations on his mixer to give it an extra touch of originality.
The middle of the set is where Ashton and Michael made their move and stated their case, leaving audiences to taste the waste. For about ten minutes, the pair embarked on boundless experimental improvisation. Ashton gently stitched together hazy chords and added some lyrics from previous songs, as Michael went to work on his homemade jammy pac of mixers, pedals, knobs, and various buttons, originally supplying simple snare before gradually raising the intensity and ultimately sending the session off the deep end of percussive improv. The jam had a cyclical feel, ultimately arriving at a vaguely aquatic soundscape like something you’d hear off “Long Beach Island”.
To close the set, Ashton and Michael got the crowd involved with cult figure Wesley Willis‘ “Rock N Roll McDonalds”. The classic from the prolific outsider artist was a perfect ending to the “We are Not Ween” set, raucous and fun. Every moment of the fleeting 20-minute set was utterly unapologetic, fueled by the kind of artistic freedom only found when you’re with someone on your same creative wavelength. Exactly the kind of creative kinship that birthed Ween, though—as we all know—”We are Not Ween”.
Watch a full stream of Ashton Freeman and Michael Melchiondo at Soupçon Salon. Since the show, Ashton (who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns) posted on social media that they and Michael are taking bookings for future performances.
Ashton Freeman & Michael Melchiondo (“We Are Not Ween”) — Soupçon Salon — Lambertville, NJ — 3/29/25 — Full Set
[Video: souperfruit]