Sadie Dupuis and Dylan Baldi bring horrors real and fantastical to Two Dollar Radio HQ

In the early Covid years, Sadie Dupuis and Dylan Baldi developed a Halloween tradition in which the two watch the entirety of a different horror series, with past spooky seasons having been invested in streaming the likes of “Scream” and “Saw.” “Which I had a good time with,’ Dupuis said.

This October’s entry, though, has so far been more of a mixed bag, with Dupuis describing Jason of “Friday the 13th” as lagging in her rankings of “the big, scary mask guys,” at least in the earlier films. “But now that he’s zombie, unbeatable Jason, I’m having more fun,” she added.

The slasher flicks have also been redeemed for Dupuis by the second film having been shot in the Connecticut town where her mom lives, which afforded an opportunity for the movie’s killer to track her (patiently) down memory lane. 

“It’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s the building where I had my 13th birthday party,’” she said. “And then my friend worked at a plant shop … and the owner retired and she bought the business. And I was like, ‘Hey, did you know your shop is in the first scenes of “Friday the 13th: Part 2”?’ And she was like, ‘I did not know, but I bet Rob Zombie does, because he came in a few days ago.’”

These cartoonish horrors have served as a welcome escape from the real-life atrocities that helped to shape the most recent albums recorded by the two musicians, including Dupuis’ 1331, released in July under her Sad13 moniker, and Baldi’s forthcoming album with Cloud Nothings, dubbed What Kind of Hell Did You Survive? and featuring a gnarlier sound rooted in hard rock and metal. “The songs deal with cruel governments, the importance of community, and occasionally a general rage at the state of the world,” Baldi wrote in a press release accompanying news of the LP, which is due in late January on Pure Noise.

Dupuis’ 1331, in turn, sports album cover art inspired by a photography book gifted her by Baldi and featuring images of someone dressed in a grim reaper costume at a variety of protests. “But the thing that I thought was really interesting in the book is that [the costume] is a message that’s so applicable across a series of different protests and causes,” she told Post-Trash earlier this year. “A protest could be about police brutality, it could be about climate injustice – and dressing as a grim reaper at any of those is a reminder not only of mortality, but of the seriousness of the issue, and of the murderousness of the folks who are often the subject of the protest.”

Expect some mix of real-life reflection and Halloween escapism when the two visit Two Dollar Radio Headquarters for a 7 p.m. concert on Saturday, Oct. 31, with Dupuis anticipating her time onstage as a more straightforward Sad13 set and Baldi planning to come equipped with an acoustic guitar and a smattering of seasonally appropriate covers – an admitted departure from pummeling new Cloud Nothings single “Death Keep Me Alive.” 

“I contain multitudes,” Baldi cracked. 

The rare duo appearance will double as a fundraiser for Two Dollar HQ, which recently reopened under a new ownership structure following extensive renovations, and which Dupuis first discovered not long after the bookstore/cafe opened in 2017 while passing through Columbus on tour with her band Speedy Ortiz.

“And then whenever we’d come through town, we’d go there to eat and buy some books, and we’d put whoever was working there on our guest list,” said the musician, who has made multiple appearances at the Parsons Avenue shop, including a 2018 visit during which she read from her debut poetry collection, Mouthguard. “There are wonderful people who work there, they curate wonderful books, and they publish amazing things. … [As a publisher], they just have very unerring tastes and they’re not afraid to get more into the experimental side with some of the fiction they publish, and there’s not like one consistent corner they focus on. … If it’s something that Two Dollar has published, I’m likely to appreciate it.”

Baldi described a similar experience, saying each of his visits to the city tend to encompass stops at Two Dollar (for food and literature) and Ace of Cups (for a show). “And that’s my Columbus experience almost in its entirety,” said Baldi, who like Dupuis cited Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X, from 2019, as an early Two Dollar discovery and a continued standout. “I just don’t know many places that are like that in Columbus, or anywhere actually.”