This edition of Radio Free Charleston, “Snowshoe Shirt” comes to us from Third Eye Cabaret, a cool weekly night of label-defying performers who bring a daring Bohemian spirit to Charleston every Thursday night at The Cellar, 8 Capitol Street. Our music this week is by The BrotherSisters, Jamie Skeen, Louis Argento and Snakebox, and we kick things off with animation by Jacob Fertig.

We’ve taken a very cool night of performance and condensed it down to a less-than-thirty-minute sampler, and we hope it entices you to come check out one of Charleston’s most interesting and eclectic musical scenes.

“The Circus” is a very cool anti-war parable animated by Jacob Fertig, and was the winner of the  Best Animation award at the WVFFF in 2007.  Jake is actually hard at work on a new series of shorts which we hope to feature here on Radio Free Charleston. It’s very cool to have more new animation to show off to the world.

The brainchild of Douglas Imbrogno (who was also instrumental in the video revival of RFC), Third Eye Cabaret is usually hosted by The BrotherSisters, Imbrogno’s trio, along with Albert Perrone and Marylin McKeown. We feature The BrotherSisters in this episode with two songs, “Damn The Torpedoes” and “Angry Angel.”

Quoting their website, “The Brother Sisters feature the original music and selected cover songs of Douglas Imbrogno and Albert Perrone with Marylin McKeown on percussion. The Brother Sisters feature Douglas Imbrogno on guitar, keyboards and vocals and Albert Perrone on amped-up classical guitar and vocals. Albert’s guitar is called Cody. Doug’s guitar is called Taylor because, well, it’s a Taylor. And Taylor’s a nice name. Marylin plays a bevy of percusssion instruments from djembe to bongos.”

On December 5, Third Eye Cabaret will host The BrotherSisters’ CD release party, which will include a music video debut for “Damn The Torpedoes.” It should be a great night.

Jamie Skeen is a very talented musician who has appeared on RFC before as part of Rubber Soul, C2J2 and Prank Monkey. We showcase him on this episode playing bass to backing tracks of his own composition which we did not manage to get the title of before we wrote these notes. It is a pretty epic slab of progressive jazz, though.

Watch for more by Jamie on a future RFC MINI SHOW.

I don’t know Louis Argento yet. I know of him. He’s been a fixture of the folk scene in Charleston for some time and was the longtime host of an open mic night at The Boulevard Tavern. Louis makes his Radio Free Charleston debut with his touching original song, “Charlie,” about a veteran he knew. It’s a rather striking first impression from Mr. Argento.

Snakebox is an ever-mutating musical collective that debuted on RFC late last summer, and was featured on our most recent RFC MINI SHOW. True to form, they turn up here with an almost entirely new line-up, most of whom have previous ties to our show. Joining Kevin Crump and Beth Summers, who are both playing different instruments than they did on previous episodes of our show, are David Stephenson on guitar, Alasha Al Qudwah on violin, Adrian DeQuiros on various squeezable instruments and Frank Striker on drums.

David, then known as “D.T.” first appeared on episode 109, one of our “show without words” specials. Alasha has been on RFC numerous times, solo and as a member of QiET. Adrian was part of Martyranny’s Collective Pulse, the first musical collective we featured on the show way back on episode 13, which, coincidentally enough, we have just re-posted as our most recent “RFC Flashback.” It was cool to see so many RFC veterans come together and assemble, Voltron-style, into this newest incarnation of Snakebox.

You can check into Third Eye Cabaret every Thursday at 8 PM at The Cellar, 8 Captiol Street, Charleston, West Virginia. You can bet we’ll be doing more shows from there in the future.