The news is out! The doors have opened at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for Phish’s first of four nights at the venue, and the first Halloween Phishbills have been distributed, meaning that this year’s musical costume is now public knowledge. Without further adieu, tonight’s musical costume will be í Rokk by Kasvot Växt (which translates to “Face Plant” “into rock”), from Stavanger, Norway. Whatever that means…
A band and album so obscure, there are no official descriptions anywhere to be found on the Internet: except for this apparent 2006 interview on Furious.com that is getting a whole lot of Google referrals right about now.
As the Furious author, Jason Gross, introduces the album,
There are many albums that are more heard about than actually heard, but Kasvot Växt’s í rokk is even more obscure than almost anything else I’ve run across. I will admit to not even having heard the whole of it myself, but as a devoted listener to a particular community radio station in upstate New York in the late 1980’s, I was well tuned in when a few songs from it briefly rode the top of the charts of that tiny self-obsessed corner of the world. I’m pretty sure they were all played from the same taped copy of the album. The music wasn’t as mercurial as Magma (who sang in their own made-up language) and only slightly more mysterious than Horsebox or The Residents but there was something that was unique, appealing and alien about them that made them unforgettable nevertheless.
Read the full interview here, as well as a 2006 album review from WMFU’s Beware of the Blog. While both sources look credible, hours of research have led fans to uncover some decent truths of improbability. We’ll let this show play out before making any definitive claims, but…Face Plant! Into Rock.
The Phishbill opens,
It is as if Kasvot Växt never existed. But Halloween is about ghosts, is it not? And who better to tell us the story of a ghost than Phish? Phish has chosen the obscure Scandanavian band Kasvot Växt (translating to “Face Plant”) and their only recorded album, 1981’s í Rokk as their 2018 Halloween musical costume.
See below for the full-version of tonight’s Phishbill. Swedish Phish?
One of the most beloved Phish traditions is their Halloween “musical costume”, which dates back to their 1994 Halloween performance at Glen Falls, NY’s Glen Falls Civic Center. In 2016, Phish honored the late and legendary David Bowie by performing the entirety of his 1972 album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars in Las Vegas. However, the two years prior to that, Phish took a break from the “classic rock album” tradition, delivering sets of (at the time) unheard original material. For a complete look back at previous years’ Halloween costumes, read on over here.