Sunday Playlist #37
Ostrich Tuning will be celebrating the release of their new album with a party at The White House on Friday, February 8, 2013.
Sunday Playlist is a semi-regular feature that brings back some of this blog's previously-posted original live recordings for an encore. You can always click the tags below to see what I originally wrote about the shows these songs came from.
Artist: HVYWTR
Song: Dirty Tricks
Recorded at Double Double Land, April 12, 2012.
HVYWTR - Dirty TricksFull review to follow. VC + WG (who started exploring this terrain in The Deeep) are pushing further down into zones where the pressure changes liquid into something harder than steel — now ain't that a groove.
Artist: The Deeep
Song: I Am Stretched On Your Grave (Sinéad O'Connor cover)
Recorded at 918 Bathurst (Wavelength 516), March 13, 2011.
The Deeep - I Am Stretched On Your GraveMy notes for this set can be found here.
Wavelength 516 (feat. Eons / Hybrid Moments / The Deeep)
918 Bathurst. Sunday, March 13, 2011.
A Sunday night Wavelength is nothing new, but there was a sense of novelty in the show's location, the recently-opened arts space at 918 Bathurst Street. Built as a church and more recently a Buddhist temple, I'd walked past the spot's modest streetfront façade many times paying it no mind — and was thus quite surprised at the grandeur of the main hall. The wooden slats of the high-arched roof meeting a line of windows along the walls gave the impression that this should be at some rustic location by a lake. The room had a woodsy and warm comforting vibe, and my first thought was that I wanted all subsequent shows of any variety to be held here.
Plus, this was a seated show, something worth savouring for a Wavelength. And catering to the unseatable, there was a large open space to stand and mingle behind the chairs. The stage was decorated with loosely-woven cables of fabric in front of the large monolith-like structure at the back wall. The church-y atmosphere seemed to mellow out everyone in attendance, including host Doc Pickles, who was soon grooving on a lone tealight at the front of the stage as he started things going. All told, it was a pitch-perfect atmosphere for the debut performance from the "spectral folk" of Eons.
This trio maps out a newly-discovered fjord on the Bruce Peninsula, feauring three of that band's members, but most centrally Matt Cully, who developed this as an outlet for his songs while BP remained on hiatus due to Neil Haverty's medical leave. There was an element of sadness underneath things that a friend's misfortune was the circumstance that brought this about, and that might be one element accounting for the mournful loneliness that animated the band's laments.
Cully's vox and guitar were supplemented by instrumental shading (on guit, lap steel and keyb) from Andrew Barker as well as Misha Bower's harmonies. The latter was an essential factor here, not just embellishing Cully's voice (which is certainly proficient, but left unadorned might not be enough to carry a full set) but also in acting as sparkplug yin to Cully's more low-key yang, adding her usual engaging presence on stage.
The first song established the mood and fit everything just right into the churchy space before it segued into a cover of Michael Hurley's "Werewolf". There were five originals besides that — the best of the bunch was probably "Arctic Radio", described by Cully as being "about what songs sound like when there's no one there to listen to them", again invoking that sense of spare loneliness that suffused the set.
But still, this was more a celebration than a gloom-fest. There were lots of friends from the BP circle around — not just musicians, but also artists like Jeff Garcia, who had created a fab silkscreened poster for the show. And as the set closed with "Chair on Fire", probably the most uptempo of the lot, the moment felt about exactly right.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Filling up the space with a decidedly different sound was Hybrid Moments, the rawk/improv duopoly of Matt Nish-Lapidus and Wavelength founder Jonny Dovercourt (both on guitars). Showing some continuity with their past sets — which tend to include some off-the-cuff structured improvisations — the pair opened with the more song-like "The Pugilist", which works off a central riff, tossed back and forth between the two guitars.
Things were more experimental after that, like the follow-up that built up to a shred-y dialogue before imploding into a metaloid grind. The set's second improvisation found Nish-Lapidus treating his guitar with drumsticks, one jammed under the strings and another used for percussion while Dovercourt created a churning white noise underneath. That slowly morphed into a cover of their band's titular song, The Misfits' "Hybrid Moments", with vox from Dovercourt, who was rocking a Tardis pendant on a chain around his neck.
Just as the music surfs the line between songs and improvisations, it also exists on both sides of the "environmental" barrier: there was something here for the people who wanted to sit down and pay attention, but it also filled the space nicely for the larger cohort who were standing around at the back of the room, treating this as aural wallpaper decorating their social interactions.1
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
"We really advocate body movement... mind movement.... move however you'd like to." This was the opening foray from Isla Craig, T.O.'s 2011 face of positivity. As The Deeep2 got started, her own movement was limited, as she crouched on the floor above her loop pedal, building up layers of wordless vocals like pillars of clouds. Victoria Cheong was also down-low to the stage, twisting knobs while Wolfgang Nessel was a bit more mobile, wandering around with his bass.
There were three heads nodding as the music slowly built up, with the Deeep trademarks of looped skankin' riddims underneath Craig's vocals creating a slithering, watery vibe. Appropriate for a band celebrating the release of a 12" single, all the jams here felt like extended versions, with songs and sounds flowing back and forth.
During "Mudd", once the stew was simmering, Craig took her own advice, jumping down off the stage and walking up the central aisle to check on the sound from the floor. The mix in the room was, perhaps, a little too clear for the band's music, given its affinity for low-end glurp. Still, as the set progressed, it became more groove-friendly — though in a sort of molasses-y way — and Matt Cully led the charge to fill in the zone in front of the stage with dancers, Nessel quickly jumping down to join them.
With further ebb and surge, there was a break for the quieter reverse-warped mindscape of "Dreams". Ultimately, the set featured pretty much all of the band's repertoire, ending with a big dance jam leading into "Slow Coaster". A fitting celebration of the band's forward-looking vision.3
Listen to a track from this set here.
And as the show ended, the venue was nicely located for me to amble over to Spadina to go in the Kendal Avenue subway entrance, and nod hello to local hero Joyce Wieland's caribou before stepping on my train home. What more could you ask for?
Wave-heads have a lot to look forward to in the next couple months. WL 532 goes tomorrow night (Saturday, January 7, 2012) at The Garrison, sporting a rocking lineup with Del Bel, The Hollow Earth, Persian Rugs and RLMDL. A quiter, sit-down show, featuring Thieves, Giant Hand and Holiday Rambler, will be on hand at Placebo Space (one of the city's comfiest venues!) on Friday, January 27, 2012. All of that is leadup to one of the most wonderful times of the year, as Wavelength's annual festival is set once again for the Family Day Weekend (February 16 to 19). And if that weren't enough, longtime Wavelength MC Doc Pickles is reclaiming Sunday nights with a new series called Crosswires that launches on February 26th, the weekend after the festival.
1 No word on anything coming up from the Hybrid Moments camp, but I will note that This Mess, one of Matt Nish-Lapidus's other projects (who really nailed it at their debut show) will be playing the Silver Dollar on Thursday, January 26, 2012 on a bill alongside Cartoons and Hussy.
2 The extra "e" was for "extra long set", the band playing for over fifty minutes, including several new/unreleased songs.
3 Such deeep waters can not stay still. These days, you can still find Isla Craig being Isla Craig, as well as working in a whole armload of other bands. VG and WG, meanwhile, have been crafting some experiments as HVYWTR, with some early results emerging a couple months ago — word on the street is that some tapes and live shows are on the horizon.
The C is for Cure (matinée) (feat. Snowblink / Kith & Kin / The Deeep / Steven McKay)
The Music Gallery. Saturday, January 29, 2011.
This was, first and foremost, a concert that no-one wished was necessary. The sudden and shocking christmastime news that Bruce Peninsula vocalist/guitarist Neil Haverty had been diagnosed with leukemia felt like a blow — considering the vitality with which he always conducted himself it was a sobering moment of mortality even for anyone who knew him only as a fan. So I could only imagine the how it must have felt for his family, friends and bandmates. Besides playing alongside Haverty in Bruce Peninsula, Matt Cully was also his room-mate, a closeness which galvanized into putting together this day-long pair of shows as a fundraiser. The ticketed evening show would be more of a regular concert, pulling in some big-name friends, but the matinée was more of a friends-and-family affair.
It was also pretty rigourously all-ages, with babies and elders mixing in much greater numbers than you would normally find at a show. In fact, as I entered through the Fellowship Room, I was surprised at the robust turnout for a daytime gig. Two walls of the room were taken up with tables filled with food and crafts, all being sold as part of the fundraising effort, and the event very much had the feeling of an extended family gathering. There was even a poster-sized open letter from Haverty, explaining that because of his treatment schedule he wasn't able to be present, but expressing his thankfulness at the support he had received.
Heading into the sanctuary, I found the pews to be fairly full as well. It turned out I had missed Lake Vernon Drowning who had opened things up, but I did manage to catch most of Steven McKay's set.
I suspect that the Bruce Peninsula drummer is not a wild man of rock'n'roll, given how his solo songs tend to celebrate small domestic pleasures — sentiments like "we all need more soup on Sundays / we all need more movie nights" are not the stuff of outré hedonism. "Emma Comes Home", another one of those small-pleasures songs describing his joy in anticipating his wife returning from a trip, had the crowd clapping along to the song's coda.
Friendship is another value quietly appreciated in his songs, and "Andy's House" (about teenaged hanging out) even passingly celebrated the day's hero: "Boyce and Neil / sex appeal / is really rare."
"We weren't sexy guys," McKay explained in reference to that line. But he managed to raise some knowing laughs in the room when he told how Haverty had misheard the line as the more flattering "voice of Neil / sex appeal / is really rare" — so as a tribute, the band sang it that way.
As was the case with every time I'd seen McKay play, there was a slightly-shuffled lineup of friends playing alongside him. The most essential of which were stalwart backing vocalists Allie Hughes and Alex Samaras, both extraordinary singers who embroidered McKay's more basic baritone. Alongside them were Samir Khan on bass and Thomas Gill on guitar, neither of whom I'd seen backing McKay before, but their presence was no surprise given their participation in some other overlapping projects.
Given that McKay's songs could be as reliable (or dull) as the everydayness of his subjects, it's a testament to the power of the musicians that he plays with that they instead evoke the quiet magic of shared moments. The accompaniment (and especially the soaring vocals) led one habitué of the Music Gallery to comment to me afterwards that this might have been one of the best-sounding sets ever to rise to the Music Gallery's churchy rafters.
Listen to a track from this set here.
The middle act of the afternoon was sonically the odd band out, but The Deeep are still well within the same orbit of friends and musical collaborators as the rest of the performers.1 Echoing their earlier performance in the Music Gallery's courtyard, they once again brought a backdrop to put behind them on stage. But in the half-year since, the trio of musicians have come to sound a lot less like a project and more like a band. Souping up their sound, Wolfgang Nessel now had a bass, along with his array of samplers and other sonic toys, while Victoria Cheong was more tightly integrated as a part of the musical soundscape. Both worked in quilting together a patchwork of warm raggamuffin drones to serve as the palatte upon which Isla Craig — another in a string of astounding singers connecting the day's bands — could loop and layer her vocals.
As the mix of one-bar reggae loop, soaring synth line and looped vocals built up, a few of the older crowd members headed out to the Fellowship Room. Those that remained mostly leaned back and soaked up the grooves, three extended tracks, with statement-of-purpose and 12" single track "Mudd" sprawling out at the centre of it all.
Matt Cully, who had also been acting as the day's MC, ended his introduction of Kith & Kin by making a special appeal for quiet. Given that the trio's music is mostly a capella, any competing noise would definitely stand out. Composed of Bruce Peninsula's Ivy Mairi joined by the mother/daughter team of Kathleen McDonnell and Martha Farquhar-McDonnell, Kith & Kin play songs from the folk tradition. Some, like "Morning Tears", have passed through hands like Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie.
With all the tricks and noises that technology can bring to bear, I'm sometimes taken aback at how unadorned human voices added together can effortlessly create complicated structures of striking beauty, such as when the trio overlapped in and out of the round of an old Shaker work song, or a chillingly-beautiful version of the old sea shanty "Grey Funnel Line". Stunning stuff. For variety, there was one song accompanied by a hundred-year-old banjo, as well as a single original composition that saw Isla Craig return to the stage to duet with Mairi.
The group usually performs at christmastime, so this one involved finding a few new tunes for their repertoire. I'm as secular and un-xmas-y as they come, but after this I could easily see myself joining them at their next Wassail.
That set was followed by an emotional gathering on stage, as Neil Haverty's family passed along Neil's thanks as well as their own gratitude for the support they'd received. That set the stage for the matinée's finale, another band based around a radiant voice. Snowblink is an excellent band inasmuch as pretty much every time I see them I'm struck anew by how good they are. That's certainly a function of Daniela Gesundheit's vocals2, but it also reflects how her and musical partner Dan Goldman are continually striving to surround her voice with new arrangements. Here. the band led off with signature song "Rut & Nuzzle", as usual with some bells handed to out the crowd jangling along plus, for added audience participation, a well-timed crying baby joining in at just the right time.
They kept the focus off themselves in a quick set, playing just three songs before Gesundheit called up members of Bruce Peninsula "past, present and future" and spread them out along the stage. She led them in a slow, simmering version of Bruce Peninsula's "Crabapples" and "Satisfied". The song was mournful and filled with sad longing rather than the urgent energy of Neil Haverty shouting how he had never been satisfied. In fact, comparing this to my memory of Haverty running past me from the stage and dashing around through the crowd in this very same venue was a potent blow, and definitely the emotional climax of the whole day.
Listen to a track from this set here.
After that, a bit of a break was welcome as the crowd cleared out, allowing a whole other set of bands to prepare for the evening concert.
1 The extra "e" is for "extra friendship".
2 Daniela Gesundheit is a long-standing member of Bruce Peninsula's choir.
Artist: The Deeep
Song: Muddy Tracks
Recorded at Korova Milkbar, September 23, 2010.
The Deeep - Muddy TracksMy notes for this set can be found here.
Not the Wind, Not the Flag (Vagina Bison / The Deeep / Jonathan Adjemian)
Korova Milkbar. Thursday, September 23, 2010.
It was a good day for walking, on the 23rd of September. The sun was shining — the sun was shining. Had some time to kill after an in-store performance at Soundscapes, and it was an agreeable enough evening to stroll around some. Eventually, I made my way back down to College to head up to the upstairs space at Korova Milkbar, a new-ish spot. It turned out to have a very livingroom-like atmosphere, and indeed wasn't much bigger. The "stage" area was the floor in front of a big picture window overlooking College Street, the stage lighting some old desk lamps perched on the floor and on the ledge that ran the length of the long wall. Opposite that was the stairway up from the street, protected by a very precariously shaky-looking railing that I wouldn't want to lean too hard against nohow. On this night, the room was decorated with little cloth banners and feathers hanging from strings stretched across the walls. There was a smaller room in the back with the bar (PBR tallboys always on special!) that led to a smokers' deck. All told, rather cosy and inviting for this kind of show.1
Folks were milling around in a manner not unlike a house party, and one got the impression that this was very much an audience of people who knew each other.2 There was some time to linger as there was a bit of a struggle with the sound system, stuck in loudly-buzzing mode. Deciding to just play through it was Jonathan Adjemian — whose last name computer spell-checks want to change to "bohemian" — who suggested that the audience merely pretend we were in the tropics, surrounded by buzzing insects. A keyboard player with a fondness for zwipping analog synths, Adjemian has put in time in some local rock bands (he was a member of Jon-Rae & The River), but is probably seen more often amongst the improv/weird music crowd.
Here, he was playing solo, with keyboards, electronics and laptop on hand. "I typically apologize in advance," was his lead-in here as he started playing his first song, "Blue Gardenia". For the first several minutes he filled the room with a flippity-buzzy cosmic noise, part of it actuated by hand motions on a proximity-sensing microphone. Most of it was pretty gnarly, though the apology might apply to some of the sustained low-frequency blasts, which could feel a little unsettling as he held them at length. That melded into the vocal part of the song, appealingly crooned while the whirring drone of the keyboard parts continued, the whole thing stretching out over twelve minutes.
the second, and final, selection was "Some Liquidity For These Troubled Times", which was instrumental all the way through. This came off a bit more shimmering and less pulsating than previous, like the music that played in the background at the planetarium while something about supernovas was being explained. The four people sitting on the floor closest to Adjemian would be playing later that night and were listening intently — Isla Craig was nodding back and forth a bit, eyes closed, while Brandon Valdivia, as cool as a zen cucumber, looked like he might break out into some tai chi. Intriguing stuff — a bit of it was difficult to listen to, but generally likeable.
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
Struggling some more with the sound system and a notional sampler, it took a little longer than expected for The Deeep — with three e's, yes — to get going. A duo the last time I saw 'em,3 this time beat provider Wolfgang Nessel was joined by an extra keyboardist, mostly contributing to the bass grooves that are central to the band's sound, which is based on Marianas Trench reggae riddims, drum machine beats, and the glorious pipes of Isla Craig, multiplied by her loop pedal. Although you could think of this band as a stealth delivery system for Craig's vox, you also wouldn't think of this as being particularly lyrically driven — the vibe of what she's singing gives away more than specific words. From time to time you could catch a phrase here or there that'd help define the emotional terrain — one section looped the word "away", for example, and the music took it from there.
Listening to this, I was caught between thinking "I'm not sure where this song is going" and "this music is staying in exactly the same place". The music is normally pretty slow, based in drone and repetition — the two musicians sitting at their gear nodded along slowly like they were in a trance — and it's Craig's vocals that act as the transforming element.
Showing off their roots, the songs were set off with rub-a-dub interstitial breaks, and the second song leaned more towards being overtly groovy — I dunno if you'd want to leap up and dance to this, but it can make you shimmy a little where you're sitting down. The one after that removed the bass groove, leaving a sonic backdrop of shuffling percussion, synth loops and the occasional random noise-burst. That was a little too formlessly gauze-y for my tastes, but the set closed with the delicious "Slow Coaster" ("our ballad," Craig explained), which had struck me when I heard it in the Music Gallery courtyard. For a band based in loops and beats, it all feels very malleable, as if the songs could fold in and deconstruct themselves in real time.4
Listen to a song from this set here.
Meanwhile, setting up away from the stage were the possibly-unfortunately-named Vagina Bison5, a collaborative project between Andrew Zukerman (who runs local experimental label Bennifer Editions) and Montrealer Emilie Mouchous. With a couple tables of gear looking like a science fair project that had gotten out of hand, the pair produced the sort of stuff that Zukerman, after making blooping noises for a few minutes while setting up, had to explain to the audience "we haven't started yet". Once they were going, they provided a collage of muffled found-sound television samples, looped percussion that sounded like a game of Pong and bursts of static. Imagine, perhaps, a cassette of a John Carpenter score slowly being chewed up as an Open University lecture droned on in the next room. When it all paused for a second and someone started cheering, Zukerman looked up and commented, "we're not done."6
A bit of a mixed bag, then. As an experience, it was saved by the fact that the composers weren't taking themselves too, too seriously — one experiment involved an attempt to play a friend's hair with a bow, for example. And I suppose the best way to face this would be to ignore and notions of musicality and just try to appreciate it as sonic sculpture.7 It was in that frame of mind that I faced the final section, with percussion that sounded like the noise made by a child's bubble-blowing toy lawnmower combined with blurbering noises like something from a Jawa instructional language tape.
The set ended with a bit of a game of "are we done yet?" with Mouchous hitting play on a heavy metal cassette for a few seconds, which was followed by more popping, fritzing noisemaking, then more metal, and so on, which I found to be the most trying part of the set. But I know what I hate, and I didn't hate this. I wouldn't say it brought me great comfort or joy, but it wasn't charmless, especially in that "this would be more fun to do than to listen to" sort of way.
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
And then time to head down to the street for some fresh air — the room was getting a little stuffy — as the headliners got ready. Once the instruments were set up Not the Wind, Not the Flag — who were playing this show to earn some gas money for their tour — finished the preparation by lighting some incense. Colin Fisher even thoughtfully went down to the street and back patio to round people up before sitting down to play. And then he said, after looking through the window and greeting friends in the room, "we'd like to acknowledge the Moon for this set."
Such is par for the course for this musically versatile duo. Always taking their cues from the environment they're playing in, the pair's mood and intensity and even choice of instruments are always subject to change. Here, the full moon outside inspired a rocking groove at the start, Brandon Valdivia providing a solid beat while Fisher, on guitar, started off seated as he played a surging low part into a looping pedal, then standing up to play more on top of that. This gave the backbone for a fully righteous thrust, going about eight minutes before Valdivia came in in the flute, slowing things down as the guitar became more atmospheric and echo-y.
After exploring that for a bit, Fisher switched over to the drums and Valdivia picked up a thumb piano for the next section, which was dedicated "to the clouds around the moon". Exploring a gentle rhythm, this was very lovely, slowly building up to a logical conclusion without needing to get overly frenetic. Entrancing stuff and really worth staying up late for on a night like this. NTW,NTF never play the same set twice, but I would say they're always worth seeing.8
Listen to a song from this set here.
1 I'd feel a little bad if that description made you eager to check the space out for yourself, for it looks as if this venue is already defunct, the restaurant downstairs shuttered. When I walked by last week, there was a hand-lettered sign in the window that simply read, "WE LOST".
2 It could probably be expected that a night of "outside" music would have this sort of "inside" crowd. There's probably a graph to be plotted here, revealing an inverse relationship between the size of a crowd and its pre-existing social familiarity — at the opposite of a show like this would be a giant arena pop show, with a crowd of strangers.
3 The extra "e" is for "extra member".
4 The Deeep will be playing in the afternoon portion of "The C is for Cure" benefit show at The Music Gallery on January 29, and have plans for a special 12" release show for late February.
5 I must confess that to be sure I wasn't missing out on anything, I checked at Urban Dictionary to make sure this wasn't the name of something unmentionable in polite conversation, but as of yet, it is unclaimed as slang.
6 Random smart-ass comment from the crowd: "play the single!"
7 Taking a look at Zukerman's collage-based artworks, which feel like the visual counterpoint to this sonic experimentation, could also provide a sort of conceptual way in to what's going on here.
8 In what promises to be an intriguing night Not the Wind, Not the Flag are playing The Tranzac in February 2, 2011 with Khôra and Nick Kuepfer, who released two of the albums in Constellation Records' very tasty recent series called "Musique Fragile". Highly recommended!
Wavelength 504, Night 2 (feat. Pocahaunted / Doldrums / The Deeep / Wet Nurse)
The Music Gallery Courtyard. Thursday, June 10, 2010.
A pleasant June evening for the second of a set of four shows in the Music Gallery's lovely courtyard. Co-presented with Wavelength, this night promised an out-of-town headliner supported by three relatively new local acts, each playing a short set. Good crowd out for this, young-ish, and skewing more artsy than rocky, with folks settling down on the lawn for the first couple sets.1
The evening began with a four-song set from Wet Nurse. The gauzy scarf draped over the microphones was an apt metaphor for the veil of obliqueness projected by the band. Perhaps as part of that, there isn't a lot of information about the duo online2 but a bit of looking around indicates that the players are Rebecca Fin Simonetti (who seems to be involved with several semi-amorphous musical projects, on top of being a noted visual artist3) and Alexandra Mackenzie (also of Romo Roto, and a visual artist as well).
Those familiar with Romo Roto would recognize the sort of pummelling thrust Mackenzie brings to the music from her stand-up kit, but Simonetti tugged that in a different direction with her roaring, reverb-y guitar. Both added their shouting/howling voices, and there were some noisy backing loops, too — one track had discordant ringing bells underneath everything. Definitely an experimental/noise sound that appeals to the weird rock crowd with a penchant for uneasy listening. I dug it for its vitality, but it's not sort of thing I'd go out of my way for too often. Thankfully, there were enough flashes of tunefulness to keep me mostly on side.
Listen to a song from this set here.
Next up, in front of a macramé-styled sculpture, was The Deeep,4 a collaboration between Isla Craig (vox, twisting knobs) and Wolfgang Nessel (electronics). The set had the work-in-progress feel of a band still refining their tricks, but also as if they were tiptoeing further along a ledge just to discover how far they could go.
A rub-a-dub bassline filled the air as Nessel fiddled with his gear, and then the first song started with a speed-adjusted loop as Craig sang heavily-reverbed wordless phrases. As a spastic thwipping noise fuzzed in the background, Craig created loops of backing vocals. Not much to grab on here hook-wise, but obviously that's not the kind of excursion that this pair want to take you on.
The second song hit the mark more firmly. With a steady beat provided by a sample from Neil Young's under-appreciated "Mideast Vacation"5 Craig had something to hook her pipes to, providing a lovely vocal, again with a cloud of looped backing voices beneath her. At one point, she paused mid-vocal to say "have some fruit," and, indeed, she passed down a bowl of strawberries that made their way through the crowd. The third and final song took a tinny half-bar drum loop and an alternating two-note synth part for the bassline, all slowed down enough to provide a sense of languid ambiance.
All three of the songs were around the seven-minute mark, each of them a little excursion more innerested in exploring the sonic, er, depths than in providing any kind of concise pop buzz. The music essentially used the tools of dub reggae to create something decidedly un-reggae like. With an experimental edge, the music sometimes exhibited an uneasy formlessness, although some queasy uncertainty might well be the point here. At a couple points it was too amorphous for easily likability, especially in the first selection, but otherwise, this had a worthy sense of torpid drift, similar perhaps to a river of mud slowly crushing a forest.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Perhaps to keep one step ahead of those already jaded enough to think that a cassette-only release is no longer an event, Doldrums were playing this gig as a celebration of their first release: a VHS mixtape. Or maybe it's not just an empty celebration of an obsolete format — not only are they obviously fond of analog fuzz, it was clear that the visual part of the package is important to Airick Woodhead and his bandmates, as they delayed their set a bit trying to get a recalcitrant digital projector up and running.6 Rolling with the punch, they gave up and focused on their spazzy/psychedelic experimental pop music. Most of the crowd were still seated on the grass as Woodhead, standing at a table full of gear, let out alternating bursts of Jay-Z and buzzes to get people up on their feet.
I had seen Woodhead perform on his own in a more freak-folk kind of set earlier this year, but here, backed by members of The Miles and Heartbeat Hotel, the music was pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. The set started with a minute-long intro of looped vocals before the band kicked in, throbbing dual drums and more manipulated layers of vocals. The second song had a bit more of a melodic throughline, but the band wasn't going to let it go just at that, keeping things quaveringly off-centre. All of the songs sort of brushed up against pop structure, but were then twisted around with electronic manipulations and drums. This was another quick set, four songs/seventeen minutes, interrupted by Bill Cosby doing an anti-drug PSA. Homespun weirdness carried through by the band's artful enthusiasm, it'll be interesting to see where the band goes with this.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Closing out the evening were L.A. tribal-drone specialists Pocahaunted. The band — who have just recently announced their dissolution — have a complicated discography, full of limited-edition cassettes and singles. Here, however, they were mostly playing material from their recent album Make it Real. That focus possibly follows from the fact that the band went through some personnel changes and stylistic adjustments after the departure of co-founder Bethany Cosentino, now making waves with her band Best Coast.
There were a few moments where the music came across like a slowed-down version of The Slits, given the overlapping vocals and dubby sensibility. There was also a hippie-ish undertow throughout — you can fish around for whatever kind of "experimental" comparisons you want, but this is also a band that is descended from the musical excursions (though not so much the lyrical concerns) of The Doors. Starting slowly, the band built up in intensity, establishing the template on "Threshold", which then picked up a notch on "You Do Voo Doo" — mildly-drone-y psychedelic keybs from Leyna Tilbor decorated the collective, often wordless vox led by founder Amanda Brown, who ranged out into the crowd on the lawn as far as her microphone cord would let her. "You Do Voo Doo" was voodoo-y in a way that cocaine-era Miles Davis would understand, with bassist Diva Dompe hitting a Michael Henderson-esque repetitive groove.
Drummer Ged Gengras, meanwhile — the bumper sticker on the kick drum reading "ZZ TOP FOR PRESIDENT" — got shirtless in a hurry, perhaps a sign that the band were feeling comfortable in these surroundings. With General Chaos' visuals smoothing out the masonry's corners above them, it felt like a fitting environment — Brown commenting that this was the most beautiful venue of their tour. Vaguely space-y, mildly psychedelic jam-rock being popular with the youth of today, the crowd was all over this stuff. The band hit its sprawling peak on the final two songs "U.F.O." and "Save Yrself (It's Nice)", each of which stretched out to the eight-minute-ish mark. Both of these pushed the tensions of their songs to the limits — or, perhaps to those less into it, got caught up in some musical navel-gazing. I wouldn't go that far — by and large it had a good balance of being static enough to be pleasantly hypnotic while bring groovy enough to stay interesting.
Listen to a track from this set here.
A well-constructed night of facepaint and wilful artsiness and enjoyable times under the open sky.
1 There's often a slight moment of cognitive dissonance on looking around at Music Galley shows and remembering, "oh yeah, this is a church!" Which felt all the moreso with people relaxing on the lawn with their beers. It's also mildly strange that a church courtyard is the site of one of the relatively few gigs where people could smoke freely — which was fairly unpleasant given how it's sort of a confined space. Isn't it time that we moved ahead and banned all smoking at any sort of concert, whether inside or out?
2 As far as I can tell, for example, there are a couple other groups called Wet Nurse on myspace, but not this one.
3 Her solo show WHEN I GO DEAF showed at The Music Gallery earlier this year.
4 Although at this show the band was billed as "The Deep", they are, in fact, properly known as [sic]-inducing "The Deeep". I am assuming that the extra "e" is for extra deepness. They also don't seem to have much of a web presence on their own behalf, but the curious can find some audio here.
5 Those innerested in the idea of using Neil Young as the source material for sample-based musics should look here.
6 You can check the whole thing out on youtube.
Artist: The Deeep
Song: Slow Coaster*
Recorded at The Music Gallery Courtyard, June 10, 2010.
The Deeep - Slow CoasterReview to follow. Update: My notes for this set can now be found here. This is a new project featuring Wolfgang Nessel and Isla Craig. Inneresting sample on this one — "when they burned me in effigy, my vacation was complete!".
* Thanks to healing power for providing a title for this one.
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