Excluding a shorthanded Tonic Tavern set during Arte Para Todos, Faux Fir hasn’t played out in a while. Following a show on June 6, the break is going to be considerably longer. Earlier this week, the Milwaukee synth-pop quartet announced a performance at Company Brewing would be its “farewell” performance, as singer-keyboardist Ryan Rupprecht (who was also part of the just-disbanded Castle Thunder) is relocating to Minneapolis. The band is familiar with dealing with displaced members, with guitarist Adam Bartell moving to Portland, Oregon partway through the writing process of Faux Fir’s excellent 2013 record, Fashionable Life, which we tabbed as the 23rd best Milwaukee album of the 2010s last year.
Faux Fir / June 6th @ Company Brewing from Kelly Michael Anderson on Vimeo.
Even with Rupprecht moving across state lines, the Company Brewing gig—with frequent collaborators The Fatty Acids opening, in a sort of reprise of the pair’s unforgettable dual release show at the Pabst Theater in 2013—won’t spell a definite conclusion for the six-year-old band.
“We can’t stop and won’t stop making music just yet because we have a buttload of songs that we were working on post-Fashionable Life that we need to see completed,” Rupprecht says. “But I have been in this canoe before, and it’s difficult to keep the momentum going with long-distance relationships. We will explode and die, but there will be some smoke and mourning and celebrating and haunting I’m sure.”
Whether that smoky, mournful, celebratory, and haunting death includes another show is unknown at this time, though Rupprecht says another release of “remaining Faux Fir recordings” is in the works, as well as an EP from his solo project, Rupees. So if you want to see Faux Fir again in the foreseeable future (or maybe ever), you probably shouldn’t miss this show.