A blazing spectre:
Summer’s prelude, and a return to Hampden Skatepark (vol. 2)

7 July 2026

If you were to take a brief glance over it, your eyes would be caught by a few things. Scrawled top-down and longhand like its own conlang, my eyes swiped back and forth— BURNING QUESTION presents, a benefit for the BALTIMORE HARM REDUCTION COALITION, with music from SO NEAR, SO FAR with… HEADBOARD, EXHIBITION, PREVENTION SOCIETY, CUT THROUGH, XHEARTSTILLBEATINGX's (first show), and NITA TILLMAN, [who unfortunately was unable to play that afternoon's show]. 6/5, PWYC, THE SKATEPARK… ask a punk. Stenciled out and scanned in, it could’ve been taped to whichever walls outlining stairwells of a high-school it’d been occupying, or plastered onto a streetlight basking in summer air. Charming. In its background, there were these faint scribblings of jellyfish dancing in an oceanic breeze, and dead-right just past a list of bands was a giant, flaming orb; its eyes struck-through, its smile a gaping invitation. The eye had changed its form since we’d last seen one another, but sung its same song with a similar kind of fervor, speaking with a dulled yet spasmed whisper. I’d found myself returning, once more, to Hampden’s Skatepark, though not without its ornate differences. The show was to be held behind the bowl of the park, a decision of both strong-willed aesthetics and issues of permits; worked in its favor, though. An unabashed sun had grown bolder; a blazing, burning sun made itself apparent across even the darkest of night. Trees veiled newfound courage, blushing bright-to-light green hues on dazzling leaves; insects as well, peppering my walk and taking jabs at my arms, sprinting upright from hidden burrows deep within the soil or leaping all about on the stubborn path it’d laden.

Walking alongside Audrey on near-molten concrete, there were remnants of middle-aged men in construction garb fixing up burnt-down homes besides a church, or the scaffolding of a towering, burgundy-red brick-building similarly razed; it seemed as though the sun had made its empowering kind of stature a thing of palpable intensity not just for us, but for the very structures we’d come to observe. Above us were dashing trails of smoke left by airplanes, the raging sun, and the feeling of a newness difficult to describe. Coated in a heat-stricken haze, we’d stumbled into the real backwoods of Hampden, the behinds of row-homes and a strange quiet. A sun hitting the side of my heat made these twinkling, dancing holographic stars against my sunglasses. A lit cigarette resting in a street sign, the shade of an underpass by apartments heading up Falls Rd. framed by bungling wilderness and burlesque graffiti… even before our arrival, the heat had become a real character. It served as a blazing spectre, a silhouette draping itself over my eyes, face, cheeks, and the betweens of my fingers— I’d given it the simplest of mention countless, countless times, accompanied by a laugh or a silent resignation: “It’s mad hot out here”. Crossing a street between some Methodist church and a bright-signed, cluttered sign for a pizza place, we’d made it in time for the whispers of a soundcheck to mark our timeliness. The race was about to begin, and all we’d needed to hear was a shot in the air. The shot did its best to manifest, but was best characterized by what I can only call the spectre drawing the worst kind of attention to itself. Passersby observed it: “You look sweaty”. If not sardonicism, any attempts at earnesty were charred. I bet the man really did look sweaty. Pushing mid-eighties, it swept all semblances of shade concertgoers had beat us to. In the chase, there were a few foldable tables all fit with merchandise, parents in sunglasses and short, loose raiment, donning reluctant yet empathetic smiles, and ostensibly their children’s band tees, and the familiar sea of coloured hair. I was at home, and my mind was doing its best not to rest into the haze and take a nice, long bath in the sun, or risk being hit by skateboarders as I dove up close for photo-ops; I had an article to write, man!

A gust swept up the bits of ground and grass as xHeartStillBeatingx took to the front. There was this droning, moaning pre-show playlist melting into the beginnings of a fill, as every passing foot just made the dust, and bits of spray-on sunscreen dancing from my left, all the more potent. The band’s vocalist slid up a pair of glasses, black frames greased by the heat, and belted. Tracks bled like watercolor, segued one from one by calls to action or brisk pacing from each end of the crowd. I remember dashing from left, to center, to right, spinning that camera off the back of the drummer like a springboard or slanting out back and forth for a picture. Catching the attention of a set of young boys in wife-beaters doing tricks off little, bright-green dirt bikes or scooters in the bowl atop our heads, a few stood at the bordering fence from above like angels, their presence marked by simple, effective affirmations: “Good drumming!”. They couldn’t’ve been older than 10, and were about yay-waist high. The crowd was nervous, I have to admit, in the boiling heat, to really chuck themselves towards one another, save a few soldiers moshing and swinging in steaming masses. However, that anxiety wasn’t all-encompassing— a track introduced rather lovingly as a song about “loving on you”, at which point the band’s lead Finn blew a kiss to a fan in the audience, their voice kind of shattered all conceptions prior. Ducking my head from past a standing amp, the set could’ve blown my head and ears clean off my shoulders. There was a coat, a veil in the air by now; these screeches of anguish, of love, of an almost fear, compounded by the little happenings of a little boy chucking an empty plastic water bottle into the crowd below, or the wafts of red wine and weed, or the left-right marching of the band’s vocalist in both a glorious inhalation of the crowd’s fervor and a kind of stoic disregard. Smoke, or maybe an incorporeal haze, had been blown in my face, the dust, the weed, the love, as the crowd started a real beatdown craze in the center, in which the vocalist joined. Blurs of spin-kicks, dashing church-style button-ups with trimmed ends and short sleeves sweating into plaid under a purifying, prismatic plasma. Rays of rays of endless bliss blew out xHeartStillBeatingx.

Passing through the crowd, getting a good slice of what onlookers tended to lean towards, I’d been able to surmise quite the still life of it all. Smatterings of lawn chairs and distant, echoing small talk as Cut Through prepared for their set. My game of silent observation continued as the sun danced above, casting shadowy glints across the bowl and its railings above me. There was initially a building tension at its epicenter, rather, the tension of the outfit as they stood under the biggest player of the evening. Sweat pooled and oozed off their foreheads, melting at their fingertips as a crowd swarmed once again. Raring to go, there was a brief passing of pleasantries: “big thank you to Burning Question”, and with that, the shot rang, and the race was on. Bustling left, right, center, all over like dripping oil greasing the bottom-side of a wok, I’d made my move. Dashing past me were the backsides of a unified, sweat-tinged fusion of homunculi slamming from left to right over and over, moving this strange inverse path from my lens. Heat, oh Lord, white heat painted my fingertips, by now bustling around as though I was being chased; “It’s fucking hot out here.” You had these deep, brazen emo stylings reminiscent of self-aggrandizement, cast deep from a slurry of generalized anguish and catharsis. As it always has, as it always will, the pit erupted like Mount Semeru, explosive ash rising from the depths of a person or two at first, though slowly the footsteps of what seemed like thousands. High-octane, adrenaline in a bottle chucked so fast I could taste the blood in my mouth: “It is hot as hell.” Hoping for some sense of reprieve in the lambast of sol, I ducked neatly under a tree to the far back of the crowd, watching a crowd swarm to the microphone at the mere inklings of a Title Fight cover, belting lyrics as though life itself was at stake— an array of men playing hackeysack greeted me as I re-entered the concrete jungle. In my search, I’d seen a flurry of moving, whipping arms as miracles of physical ability; endless photo-ops, if you will. A man swinging his fist upright as to signal a plea to God himself, or maybe challenge him in the ring. A set of exponentially increasing shirtless boys becoming one, then two, then four, tussling in the center like rolling tides. I’d opened my eyes once more to see kicked up dust, and what appeared to be horseback rides, slippery as teflon, one pair then two swinging for dominion. I’d earned the unspoken approval of an older man donning sun-colored glasses and Birkenstocks, as I blitzed all through like a lit match. Shaking, aching, begging for the end, the band’s lead vocalist nearly melted into the microphone. Pardoning a chariot emergent in the middle, built off of the kicking shrieks of endless spinning circles, became a dashing outfit of seven boys I nearly collided with; the crowd was dazzled, and it was only the second band. Thankfully, the feeling was mutual: “Thank you all so much.” Cut Through was no longer.

From a patch of grass closer to the children’s playground, hidden from golden rays and unintentional audience to what appeared to be a marching band rehearsal, loose strands and sparks of Prevention Society flew out of the amps like firecrackers. As before, small multi-color dots danced up and down the hill towards the nearby 7/11, a kind of refuge from what was the inevitable. Following the path of a young boy kicking up off of the sidewalk on a green dirt-bike, I’d been caught in a bit of a search by a group of people about the same age as me— “You guys seen anybody with a cigarette?”. The peculiar thing was the search for a singular one, to me at least, but it’d become a real backscratching ordeal once I’d noticed one of the boys had been donning, cheek-to-cheek, a real smattering of glitter like a tiger’s stripes— we struck a deal: cigarettes for those beautiful, shimmery whiskers. At the behest of a voice rising from the stage, me and Audrey, alongside our little group of soon-to-be smokers, hurried on down back towards the sound, towards Prevention Society. The fascinating thing was the energy of previous sets seemed to multiply into the innumerable, as each band shuffled on through; a real sight in the center was the endless sets of spinning concertgoers morphing into circling ovals, crashing all out like waves on the shore. Between snippets of conversation and the falsetto-ed coos and lightning-hot ease of lead vocalist Harrison, my eyes turned to observation once more. There were a set of boys: one an eager, curly-mopped doorstop draped in a Jimi Hendrix shirt, another long, dark-haired blonde— the two joined hands, joined souls, maybe, and danced the endless tango in the center, knocking into the others like bowling balls hitting pins in the alley. Haze, blowing dust kicking up again, and: “Nothing’s ever new”. It seemed as though nothing was ever new, no new nothings under the same blazing spectre. The energy never stopped, it seemed, and the blitz drove the crowd ape shit, song after song. Rolling, rolling, rolling crowds struck like tides, and a topless dude bathed in the sun as the audience hurried itself into position. As he fell on his back, he couldn’t do much but giggle, before switching places with a man held up like Simba against the heat. From above, the crowd was eye-candy, a swarming, self-indulging circle of crowdgoers horseback, topless, even the young boy on the green dirt-bike in an unidentifiable mix of swirling legs and arms. Even to its end, a spinning boy lurched forward like a zombie inducing a bit of horseplay once more, the drummer sprung upright and launched a drumstick into the ground. Victory was in the air, and the smell was golden, dry earth. Prevention Society cast a smiley kind of veil impossible to ignore.

The taste was saccharine, it was, a delicacy as much as it was addictive, making an imminent slurry of energy and memory. The organizer chatted some with the young boys, clearly dazed in the mix with these eyes of steel staring out thousand-wide, and Audrey and I bustled on out through the gates and dark-colored fences towards some form of reprieve. 7/11’s bright white, fluorescent haven, a crammed set of five or six aisles, blew a cold sheet over every bit of sweat-ridden mass in the store; all two cashiers seemed swamped in the midst of it, or, more accurately, the swaying breeze of it. Catching my eyes on the countertop was this beautiful bit of cardboard hiding, nestling tight within, “Swag Blunt Incense Sticks”, and the similarly rainbow-draped scratch-off tickets hidden underneath the left side of the counter where we had our things rung up. I stared out the window, ears gently nudged towards what I could trace of setup, and an unspoken queue to get back to professionalism. Shifting out from the society to a band anew, we burst from the doors into the beaming hot sun once more to hear my queue. Fuck, man!

Fascinating thing about it was the manner by which the organizer struck up a new façade in the flesh, donning that special gleam under the sun, tucking his head by the amplifiers. In a brisk pace across the street, I could barely really catch the middle, my eyes caught by a swarm all around its circular perimeter. The energy fanned itself tenfold into tenfold, flirting with the emanating beams of the sun and forcing them down the audience’s ear canals like kayaks. Vocals scorched and razed the earth, the kicked up mess it had become under itself. The thing I’d realized was the seemingly inexplicable nature of the energy, of the tenfold into thousand, was a channeling of all the audience, all the bands, every second spent writing or practicing or melding the instrument into the self. In the waves, in the heart, I brought myself to this mantra I’d heard echoed, echoed, echoed out like telepathic hypnosis: “And now, you do what they told you”. Exhibition, in its bliss, exhibited a brazen embrace of all the shit I’d needed, of all the reprieve I’d searched for in the 7/11 or in the daze of those damned incense sticks. The crash of cymbals were earth-shattering, barely keeping me upright as I moved from the crowd to an exotic view up above the crowd in a tree, kicking off a guy in these sun-blown sunglasses before snapping a few shitty pictures and keeping it pushing. Catching a screeching belt out in the epicenter, I slammed back a few swigs of Strawberry Lemonade Monster before rolling inward, tucking the camera into my arms like a cradled baby. In the first few moments, I’d been nearly swept off my feet by a tall, lanky skateboarder emerging from someplace. We’d been made husks in the endlessness of it all, feeling the heat enveloping every presence in the moment, tasting the sunset hit the fence of the bowl above. With a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”, the crowd exploded, set strangely in tune to a marching band practicing in an open space just past the skatepark, and Exhibition had been no more.

The best part of writing an article for any show is the eavesdropping. I try to move my ears up, perk them a bit, and catch whatever ounce of drifting hearsay I can quickly enough take note of. I could taste the anticipation for Headboard like the painterly sweat in the air, like it had climbed the roof and was belting out into nothingness. I talked to a guy tacked onto a handycam with a fisheye lens strapped on, about his footage; an orange glint pervaded the top right corner, speckles of sun as blazing spectres. Jokes here and there, a sprawling youth bursting out of its own seams, and a rocky shift on in. The band’s bassist made sure to thank the practicing drumline with a nod to the right as the crowd surged forth. Innumerable crowd-surfs, rippling masses of colored hair and dampened sky, and the whipping crack of lead vocalist Ben as he scurried foot-wise across the ground. Surge, it did, as a man donning a ushanka, the glasses of maybe a librarian, marked with pins, grasped the microphone— my eyes widened. The crowd, too, kept the momentum, and the man yelped… unintelligible slurs? I watched a flurry of hands fly forward, swatting the microphone away, chants of “Fuck You”, all sorts of frustrations, as he was swept up into the eye of the storm and shuffled on back to the bowl. What could have been a million jumps, kicks, swift joints click-clacking into place like plastic, all swung up and out and down, all over, really. When bits got real close, members of the audience took turns screeching “HEADBOARD”, “HEADBOARD”, Headboard! With two songs left, the guitarist and bassist had this unanimous swing like Siamese twins, with a rather adoring fan donning a red-rooted mop doing his best to mimic the two. Tapping a blinking, then winking Geek bar, the crowd and band’s voices became one, and they had a few words for the crowd: “Get the fuck up”, and, “Make some fucking noise for Headboard”. A Trojan horse, a true summit, it was, as the people seemed to flood above me. Two surfers morphed into one, it seemed, crashing into the earth below and re-emerging as spinning circles. Contingents of the crowd chose different paths for themselves amidst the band’s explosivity, lost in the drawn-up smog, drawn-up haze, super-sized endlessness. Members of the band snuck sneaky little glances at a paper set list underneath a stand, the vocalist beckoning the crowd ever, ever closer. As it peaked, as the room to breathe was paperclip-thick, it had ended.

As with every show, and every good thing, there must come an end. Begrudging as it may be, tucked deep in the midst of sonic bliss, endless evenings, it was hard to let go of summer’s prelude, of sunshine on the silver strip. So Near, So Far chose to lambast that childlike stubbornness with a blast the size of a thousand single-file craters, or maybe dog piss on a picket fence. Moving on down originals, and into covers, the angst exploded. However, not everybody was in on shit; you could catch faint whispers becoming blankly uttered words from the show’s organizer— “You guys are gonna have to end your sets early”. Disappointing? Ridiculous on the end of the police? Diesel for a crowd ready to blow a hole through wet concrete? All of these statements are true, charging an assault I couldn’t’ve helped but embracing, head on, full force, concussed by love. Shoving my camera into Audrey’s hand, relinquishing my notes, dare I say my inhibitions, I felt a rather gross rain hit my skin. I felt the uninhibited, unleashed souls of people I’d talked to once or twice smatter me in unfettered joy. Lead vocalist Jay, accompanied by a real army here, belted lyrics of pained, planned obsolescence of the skin— the crowd followed suit, filling in his gaps and tugging gently at the microphone. As it took its turn through the crowd, I could feel the ferocity of a thousand lions tenfold through the amps. And as it came, as swift it overtook me, as hard the crowd begged for more, the show was over. The red-blue repeated flashes in the distance were warning enough for them, and for me. Moving back on towards the right side of the crowd, I’d found Audrey. It was time to go home.

Under orange streetlights, and fogging tinnitus, the world appeared four-dimensional. It wrapped and warped in sewage openings, rang in the endless silence of suburbia, and pushed against my vision. Under orange streetlights, I bathed in the memory of the blazing spectre, of summer’s prelude, of my return to Hampden’s skatepark.