[051105]

Thuja // Axolotl // Skaters – Jewelled Antler Greenhouse - Berkeley, CA

Arriving at Rob Reger’s (Thuja) house, on time at 9 pm sharp (I’d once missed some of the first set for arriving in “California space-cadet time”, ie 30-40 minutes late) I stepped into the backyard where the garden and greenhouse seemed more tidy than usual (mind you Rob put up the greenhouse under a year ago). Various young hipsters were drinking beer and chattering, none I knew. For this performance, I invited everyone I knew that might like the music (I wondered if I’d gone overboard) and surprisingly none of them showed up. A person actually recognized me from a previous show and said hello; it was Spencer from the Skaters and I apologized for not recognizing him because I had never gotten to see his face when he performed. There’s a running joke about the Skaters that you end up watching their undulating asses when they perform, crouched over boxes of electronic thingies. I opened my bottle of wine, sat strategically in a corner, and shortly the first set began.

Thuja did not sound out-of-ordinary this night, but their manner of playing was different from usual. The last time I’d seen them play, they did something interesting where each member started out from a different part of the garden, creating a quadraphonic stereo effect. However, they had shortly converged to the greenhouse and played the rest of the set from a central location. This time, Rob and Glenn were set up and remained on opposite sides of the yard with separate amps (although this was also plugged into a soundboard, a first for them I later discovered). Steven and Loren played inside the greenhouse. Rob and Glenn had each threaded a guitar string between the branches of trees, with a contact mike to serve as pickup. I couldn’t see much of what Glenn had been doing because he was far away, but near me I saw that Rob used various techniques like bowing the string, plucking it, and using a giant plastic gag comb, all the while utilizing the fact that the tree’s stature was limiting the length and hence pitch of the guitar string. Pushing the tree caused the pitch to wind and unwind like the grumbling of a stomach. He even shook the tree at one point, softly capturing the rustling of falling leaves. He had other peripheral instruments like a guitar and an oil drum nearby that he also utilized. Glenn seemed to be doing something quite similar but I think he was causing the tree-violin sound to sustain for a bit longer, creating a modest drone. I couldn’t see a thing of what Steven was doing except when he appeared from behind an amp to play a thumb-piano (one of those African gourd things, a Mbira?). I suspect that Steven was also contributing to a sparse drone that fed in and out, almost like the electronic hiss of the amplifiers. Meanwhile, Loren was using various instruments including rubbing two bricks together and matching the nearby train whistle with a harmonica. Overall, this was a sparse Thuja landscape, unlike the fuller opaque drones sometimes made by the Blithe Sons or Of, and not necessarily traveling to any particular musical destination. It was almost like an exercise for their cultivation as avant garde musicians; I have yet to hear tones by Thuja that make me weep or well up with joy. Nevertheless, their music does alight a world of truth inhabited by the majority of life, excepting the civilized human and its fabrications and myths. The music was quite similar to their latest records, but I felt that in synthesis they had progressed as a team with their approach. Another thought I wondered about was whether some electronic musician would remix Thuja – there were various unique sounds and very little of it (none?) manipulated by effects boxes, perfect for sampling.

After a break, where I remained in my lonely corner, blond-mop-headed Axolotl came to play a solo performance. Unfortunately his set only lasted about 7 minutes before he gave up at a pause. He commented that he was having problems. Perhaps if it wasn’t a free show he would have felt inclined to figure the problems out. Should we have persuaded him to keep going onwards? One of the interesting things about artist performances is that the artist is attempting to channel something that emanates from their mind or desires. However this latency rarely comes out in pure form, especially for improvised musics, and often the artist is dissatisfied. On the contrary, the listeners have no fore-knowledge about the source of the emanations, and thus the audience is often satisfied despite the artist’s shame. I wish there was a way we as listeners could encourage and embolden the artist to walk forth strongly, perhaps blindly, and trust their instinct and be proud of what they are currently capable of. My experience of the short Axolotl piece, I will humbly admit, closely approached tears. He had created a buzz, static white noise, perhaps a drone but I wouldn’t go that far. All the while he was humming or playing violin and manipulating that too on top of the buzz. The static crackled as he adjusted it, and one could discern gaps and that it was not a continuous drone. This made me think that our lives are not some flowing lifeblood but rather the result of the stepped pumping of our hearts, the synapse-jumping or our circuitry. The music was both sad and triumphant; I thought to myself that this is not the music in the minds of babies being born, but rather the soundtrack to our recollections of being born. As a couple affectionately snuggled one another beside me, I thought to myself how sad it is to walk the earth alone.

After another break, sound came from inside the basement as the Skaters began their set. People hobbled into the dark room, lit only by a candle beside the amplifiers. With the swelling and moaning music made by the Skaters, the sound felt as it must have when ancient humans performed rituals in caves. The music bordered on haunting, never was appalling or annoying, but still consisted of amplified and manipulated reverberating moans, with minimal percussion such as a conga prostrate like a cannon. I likened the music in my mind to a male version of Fursaxa. The music ballooned until its crest subsided and then the set was over. Because the set was so short and consisted of only one such excursion into the holy territory of the mind, I was a bit disappointed. Not because their albums are so dynamic and this performance had a clear trajectory, but rather because I wondered if they had anything else in them. Could they produce diverse soundscapes or was their voice so haphazard that it would always sound the same way. Another parallel drone would have made their performance phenomenal.

Jack Rose Dream.

Perhaps this dream is derived from having seen Jack Rose perform the night before, but the context of the dream is irrelevant. It contained a wonderful idea I think friendly musicians ought to consider.

In the dream, Jack played a show in a very comfortable barn-like room. At the close of the show, instead of an encore, he brought up nine musicians well-known in the space folk scene (I remember one was Matt Valentine, whose music was playing at the time of the dream). Jack announced that they would jam for five minutes. Then, for the following five minutes, the band would sit silent, the lights would come on, and the audience was asked to talk amongst themselves for five minutes. After this, the ensemble of musicians began playing again for five minutes, then five minutes of talking, then a final round of five minutes of playing.

Space Folk Manifesto.

I have been using the phrase “space folk” ever since I first discovered the album, “Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles” by the Tower Recordings. It seemed logical to grab these words in an attempt to describe the meeting of electric feedback and post-psychedelia noise with acoustic folk instrumentation and Eastern dissonant harmonies. Later delving into other groups in a recent wave of experimental music, my listening attuned to a trend of post-rock electric takes on traditional folk styles or rhythms (eg, noise jamborees, tribal beat accompaniment, and colorful stabs at eastern and near-eastern folk instrumentation). However, it seemed that there were a handful of groups focused more on the ambient-noise free/space element of modern experimentalism than borrowing from traditional folk styles. I had an intuition that there was some sort of confluence of mental-wiring that evoked similar emotions in these diverse styles, (before I came across any propaganda tying these groups together; mind you, in my lonely adventure towards counter-culturalism I still have yet to meet a person independently in the flesh that enjoys the same music as I). My favorite in silico music files are heaped into three folders: post-rock, space, and space folk. While I consider the genre “post-rock” to be nebulous in definition, I keep musics there that are highly evocative and use rock instrumentation compositionally, more in the manner of painters and poets. Yet, the boundary between “space” and “space folk” is quite arbitrary.

I intend with this plate of words not to categorize music, but instead to sharpen the blades of readers by encouraging them to embark on an adventure in music. This is not to say that any genre of music is superior, and I am well aware that experimentalism is esoteric. What is uniting about folk music – and much of experimentalism – is that it is latent in every person. Experimentalism breaks the rails of directionality and convention, but folk music dampens the need for proficiency and technical skill. For some, folk music is just past-time (in which case, quality of performance is unimportant so long as the musician is sufficiently amusing theirself), and for others it is a community event. For many, all music is folk music because they are not concerned with the outcome but solely with the act of releasing the swirls of passion (that is, the artistic act). So you see, much of non-erudite experimental music is indeed folk music. And because there are no traditions nor rules in this field, no one need fear they might perform poorly. Surely, the great American folk singers had terrible voices, and rock was more about sex appeal than ingenuity.

Now, what is troubling to me is that we still treat experimental music like rock music. Records are released as items to covet and collect, with spontaneous melodies we might memorize. I often wonder how I would nourish my spirit if the power went out for days, and I am befallen by woe when the batteries end on my portable music player as I ride upon my twenty-minute bicycle commute (the perfect length for the ebb-and-flow of a long, developing jam). It is these moments without our technology that embark me on the cultivation of my personal muse, who has sat huddled in my toychest ever since I first learned about embarassment. I tend to hum a repetitive melody to myself and slowly embellish on the theme. What is lacking is contrast and external input to respond to, and also community. I still lack the confidence to go out and seek musical rendezvous, but I no longer think I’m incompetent. (On the contrary, I feel my outlet to evoke my passions is fragile, and I fear expectations of audience may rupture the delicate flow).

The other great tragedy of modern folk music is the lack of community involvement. I recently was at a musical gathering in the backyard of a fellow, opened freely to strangers to share a certain musical moment. What was remarkable was the first intonations of the performance: scattered throughout the corners of the yard, each musician invoked the quadrophonic toppling of place-sensation, with the tones mingling like musk and fog. Okay, no poetry – the music surrounded you in every direction but you could not tell where it was coming from, nor who was playing what. No longer did it matter in what direction the stage was, nor the countenance/identity of the musicians. Music was an envelope for your mind at that moment, incontrovertibly. I felt faint as an individual person, attacked in the most splendid way. Unfortunately, this did not last long and the musicians soon converged upon an edifice containing amplifiers and troves of instruments, commencing a standard posture of musician performing towards audience (rather than around them). In the end, the audience dealt the final blow and applauded.

I always imagined that the great hippy drum-circles that hide among dim firelight (where no one could identify you anyway if you played a foul note) would lend a hand to modern artistic music (which still behaves similar to rock with its merchandise tables and situations in pub establishments). How glorious it will be to rid ourselves of the lingering stench of John Cage, finally settling the problem of reflexivity in performance art (artist is influenced by beholders who are influenced by the art). We must strive to gather in dynamic, musical activity as a transcendent community act, rather than passively allow ourselves to be molded by only what some unreachable, external person plays for us. While the current paradigm of performance and artistry crystallizes scenes and new genres, it deepens the mote between human beings by carving insular monuments of artistic preference. (Conspiracy Theory: In such a fractured world, “experimentalism” will always remain fringe and thus pop music can maintain its role as a method of sociopolitical control).

May we tear down the walls to music, or must we learn to scale them?