The Garden and tour guest DJ Geniefactory, stirred up Wednesday evening with a mosh pit of excitement at Peeve’s Public House in Downtown Fresno.
The Garden, made up of brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears of Orange County, are an exciting “harsh noise” drum and bass band bringing their own spin to rock music with a genre fans call Vada Vada ”” a term coined from The Garden’s song and dance, “Vada Vada.”
Playing their third West Coast show on their 2015 tour with DJ Geniefactory, The Garden delivered a lively stage presence with continuous dancing and crowd interaction that included crowd diving and moshing.
“They are actors,” said Johnny Quiroz, Love the Captive executive director. “There’s never a dull moment when The Garden is playing.”
Since June 2014, Quiroz has booked The Garden three times, all of which brought audiences of both young and old.
“I thought it was a great turnout,” said Quiroz. “It’s important that Fresno has all age access to shows, and you can count on good shows every time you come out to Peeve’s.”
The Garden’s bassist, Wyatt Shears, said playing Fresno is always something to look forward to because of solid fan appreciation and following.
“There’s always a strong crowd presence,” said Shears. “Every time it has gotten crazy and the crowd always give us a lot of love.”
Since their first Fresno appearance at Quiroz’s home, The Garden twins have been busily working with record producer Rob Schnapf on a new album to be released sometime this year.
“We’ve been recording for the last year,” said Shears. “We put together an album and we’re working on a new label, which will be our second full length LP since ‘The Life & Times of a Paperclip.’ ”
Aside from The Garden, the Shears brothers have solo projects including their most recent Halloween EP collaboration with DJ Geniefactory’s Ashley Calhoun.
“I’ve known The Garden for a while and we thought it would be cool to spice things up with fans,” said Calhoun. “I DJ all kinds of stuff, but for this tour I’m doing specifically jungle music that consists mostly of drum and bass ”” it’s really raw and experimental.”
Calhoun said being on tour with The Garden brings a lot of energy and excitement to each show.
“Each show is special,” said Calhoun. “The audience response has been pretty good with lots of dancing ”” they really get into it.”
Jaime Hernandez, a graphic design major, said that the show was very energetic and very intense.
“Lots of people showed up,” said Hernandez. “It was really cool to see the change between The Garden’s first show at Johnny’s to playing here at Peeve’s.”
At the end of the night The Garden were wooed back on stage with the crowd chanting “We be Grindin’ ” a song from The Garden’s EP, “Struggle In Front Of Sector 27.”
“My favorite part of the show was when the crowd started chanting for an encore but it was just the lyrics to one of The Garden’s song,” said Hernandez. “I’m sure the Garden will always make a stop here.”
