[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?

Blithe Sons.

Hristina and i went to the rx gallery on 040227 for matt d'avignon's jiffy scuttler music series, to see Blithe Sons. The Blithe Sons are Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson, 1/2 of Thuja and the principal evocateurs of SF's Jewelled Antler Collective. While Thuja is more dense and has rhythm, Blithe Sons is similar to the sparse, ambient found-sound collages of electronic compositional art, only played with real instruments. The duo had a large setup with about 30 different instruments ranging from guitar and banjo to chimes and whistles and pipes and harmonicas, keyboards. They also relied on handheld taperecorders that played samples of birds and brooks and wind and other nature sounds. They created minimal whining drones with effects boxes/microphones (does this count as electronics?) and also a keyboard/accordian unit I've seen used by Cerberus Shoal (what's it called?) The music was slowly developing, and more like improv soundscape art. The collective likes to focus on nature and plant life but the bar setting quite diminished that.

Hristina and I have found that it is now impossible to enjoy hearing experimental music in a bar setting or anywhere other than a comfortable audience setting such as the loft at 964 Natoma that Quiet American's Field Effects Series takes place at. Drunk people were talking, there were vintage video games as part of an art installation that were making bleeping and ding-ding noises, people applauded at one of the lulls in the music, as if they were playing songs (it was soundscape rather). This last occurrence quite irked me as it forced the musicians to cut off the performance, as Loren rolled his eyes in disdain...

i hate to be all avant-snobbish, but the appreciants of experimental music really need to stick together in underground venues rather than public streetfront establishments in order to fully appreciate the experience of the performance. I've heard that the Jewelled Antler collective plays sporadically in gardens and warehouse spaces. Of course, then it becomes quite difficult for us to find out about these "special" events. The whole conundrum makes me rather sick, so perhaps listening to the cd's will have to suffice until the straights convert to hear the luscious tones of vibrating atmospheres.

Tarentel, Explosions in the Sky, & Lazarus at the Bottom of the Hill on December 7.

This show was both good and bad. I walked in just as Lazarus was beginning and the performance was very very poor. I wanted my money back immediately and thought to myself "why am I wasting my time listening to this wannabe artist, concomitantly supporting him?" He had all these self-deprecating lyrics that had the audacity to rub the word "poets" in your face many times. It was similar to really bad teenage "I hate the place I live in" poetry that was probably embellished in order to evoke pity. I dont know why so many females applauded with drool to this indie loser alt-folkster. To boot, his voice was whiny and the accompaniment was sparse. I think it's horrible when artists put their personal lives on the stage without something unique to comment about it. There are plenty of sad, boring people with nothing of consequence to say, and I really dont think it benefits anyone to see these people on a stage. Nevertheless, I furrowed my brow in amazement at how many people flockishly clapped and cheered. I pondered discarding manners and giving the thumbs-down; performers need to know when they are not reaching out to anyone, and mediocrity should not be tolerated. Of course the caveat to all this is that I personally did not like it, and subjectivity is just a boat but not the river.

Next was Explosions in the Sky. Their new material sounds great, but something was missing. The guys did have a lot of energy and seemed to enjoy fleshing out the crescendos and builds and plateaus. Nevertheless, I thought to myself, 'I could listen to this in my bedroom and save my money and time.' I did eagerly want to see this band perform, but i did not have a high-quality live experience, as that provided by Tom Carter or Bardo Pond (see below).

I soon realized what was missing upon Tarentel's set. What was responsible for a weak set by Explosions in the Sky was the lack of multimedia (which unbinds the imagination). Tarentel showed a film and it was incredible and inspirational. It was the clearest quality film that I have seen in a concert setting (sorry, Rachels, Godspeed, Subarachnoid, Sonic Youth). The film was somber and evoked lonliness, it showed waste and industrial ruin. Yet, there was beauty and order and stillness and serenity. This balance was played out even more with the rockdrums/avant instrumentation of the band. Tarentel used more loud, rock drums than usual (I have previously commented on the violence of rock drumming and my distaste for it), but there was a great balance as most postrock drums provide, paving the trail while the guitars and electronics fleshed out the vegetation all around it. There was a sense of hope (as their music always provides) and i felt like there was a real live experience there: thoughts going through my head, emotions brimming, ideas emerging for projects or things I wanted to write about. Overall, I loved it.

Now, I just want to see a band like Surface of Eceyon do something like that. All artists whose music evokes emotion should have film at their live performances. Oh, it was so moving, endearing. Explosions (as I've often thought) could have a powerhouse performance on a parallel with GYBE if they played alongside images that showcased the destruction, hope, abandonment, terror, helplessness, and immediacy inside their music. Any way they did it would have been powerful. But without the extra media, I was left to apply those emotions to my imagination; I am certain that most audience members do not see snare-drummers cadencing a batallion of soldiers in the music, do not see people fleeting through a city ablaze urgently trying to find their families, do not see skies filled with darkness and children reading charred fairytale storybooks in dungeons under ruins of skyscrapers. The immensity of these ideas (highly relevant to today's struggles and fears, despite what dot-com all-Americans like to believe) ought to be conveyed as a vision to be shared (as we know exist from the song titles and album art and interviews associated with Explosions in the Sky). People just bop their heads like indie dorks and thrift-store faux-poor hipsters (waving their digital cameras and smoking superfluous cigarettes), without any countenance of being struck aside by the immensity of this postrock music.

Tom Carter (Charalambides) & Six Organs of Admittance at the Hemlock Tavern on November 6.

Music, to me, is an expression of the seemingly-magical property of holism (or synergy). Usually I would apply this phenomenon to the notion that members of bands do not make up the sum of the whole band… That is, when musicians from different dispositions and talents and styles and behaviors and characteristics come together and play together, the end result is much greater than just the layering of track upon track of each instrument. There is an interplay between the musicians and what they influence in each other's decision to play a certain part of the music. (Another application of the phenomenon of holism is the burn-in associated with emotion that is intrinsic to music and where you first heard it and how you felt at the time, but I won't discuss that here, as I'm constantly talking about it). But nevertheless, I'm not aiming to talk about holism at all today. Rather, I want to point out that there are certain exceptions to this phenomenon of holism/synergy for which I am zealous. Ordinarily, because of the wonder of multiple musicians and their group dynamics, I loathe solo musicians. Some of them can construct pretty tunes and tower above you with poetics, but for the most part, they represent stripped-down austere silhouettes of themes that could otherwise manifest in dazzling landscapes of transcendental proportions. Solo musicians bore me.

However, there are certain solo musicians that are rarities. Instead of being one singular voice that could be reinforced and elevated with complementary instrumentation and depth, these individuals are enigmas within one individual. Often, like some of contemporary electronic soloists, they are able to surpass the sparse limitations of solo performance through overdubs and multi-tracking in the studio, or through compositions. Jim O'rourke, Aphex Twin, etc. Yet there are certain musicians that, even in the live setting, can fill a space with incredible dynamics and color and texture without the aid of complementary musicianship. Roy Montgomery uses reverb and delay loops to augment his guitar and create vibrational, shimmering textures and washes of emotion. (Though Hash Jar Tempo takes this a step further with the synergy idea.) Bjork is able to sing (and perform) in emotional tones that are so individual that they surpass all the talent of bluesy jazz singers like Nina Simone and folkstresses with adorable voices like Victoria Williams (though both are still top-notch, they are even better with a band. If Bjork made an a capella album, I would listen to it all the time). And then there is Ben Chasny from Six Organs of Admittance.

I've seen Ben Chasny play with Comets on Fire (see below), and I compared him to Bjork even. Since making that comment, I went back to his records, and while they are superb, I started to wonder if Ben could really captivate an audience in the way that the Iceland sprite can. Ben sings with a passion, but perhaps it is a pseudo-passion. After all, he is a hipster. Eyes occluded by moppish bangs, accoutered with alcoholic-beverage-in-hand, doubletiming in a psychedelic garagerock band. The guy even brings a caravan of hipsters with him, and the audience certainly did not seem to be the bearded, flowery zensters you might imagine devouring his ragas and eastern spiritual folk meditations. I wondered, after seeing that he wasn't the Ewok I expected, if he was genuine. But after seeing an official Six Organs of Admittance show, I think he's for real. I have no idea what books he reads, but I really believe he taps into the existential force of fireside ruminations on the structures of the cosmos and of life. I don't think it's in mock of hippy culture. The music is too dark and foreboding to be so. It's schizophrenic in that instead of celebrating the trees and the forests and how wonderful they are, he is warning us that the trees are all we have to approach reality; the rest is superfluity and illusion. I often think Ben is at the forefront of the neo-hippy spacefolk movement (does it really exist or have I just created it in my head). In my view, this wave of musicians (Thuja, Tower Recordings, Charalambides, etc) touch on the boldest topic of musicianship: the depressing, yet enigmatic and laudatory peculiarity of life: that we live, see beautiful things, and then die. That Ben Chasny is able to (almost) singlehandedly create this atmosphere in his recordings as a solo artist astounds me. Yes, Steven Wray Lobdell gives his music and audio THC high, but his recordings before working with Lobdell are still superior. And even his new album, Compathia, which has surprisingly little drone and much more "song structure" (whatever that means), still evokes the depressing aspects of living and how modern life ignores this important fact, compelling you to run to the forest and experience the full moon, the willows, the damp moss. You won't find that magic in a domesticated puppy and you won't find it in a skyscraper.

I must add (this is a live review, after all), that Ben's live show was sparse, drunk, inferior in audio quality (get this boy an acoustic pickup!), and short, yet it was very fulfilling. He commented that he's going to play a medley (as he pulls from his dark-brown drink) because he can only remember the lyrics to the first verse of all his songs, so he's just going to string a bunch of those first verses together. It was humorous, but shocking. This is Ben Chasny? Also, his entourage included a drunk friend, Matthew (someone in the Bay Guardian wrote of the concert and this person as if we're all supposed to know who he was), who hardly seems like the sort to listen to space-folk. Matthew kept shouting obscenities and sharp embarassments out loud between the songs, and during the songs he barely paid attention, but Ben treated him endearingly. While Matthew wanted him to improvise a song about some ridiculous city or street or something, Ben rhymed about Matthew falling asleep, hoping it would come true.

And, the opening act, Tom Carter from Charalambides. Wow. I quite like his band with wife, Christina, but there's something sparse about their music that puts them closer to the bottom of my good-spacefolk list (they still make it onto it, mind you). Sometimes their songs are too repetitive, but not transcendent and minimalist enough to merit avant-garde status. They sometimes seem stale and misleading. (Don't get me wrong, I've heard some fine moments of theirs, but their track was my least favorite of the Harmony of the Spheres tracks). What I did actually enjoy immensely, however, was this solo performance by Tom Carter. He played three extended pieces, the two bookends were lapsteel slide guitar pieces, and the middle piece was a strapped-on electric guitar. His dexterity is mesmerizing. He was able to form natural delay with his fingers, defining a new way to play the guitar as if it was a game, using every centimeter of the guitar to produce sound. He had an assortment of slides and also used one of those e-bow devices in addition to some pedal effects. He filled the space with such dynamic sound. I felt like this man needs to spread his vision as far and wide as possible, to collaborate with every musician he can, to build custom instruments to play. He creates music in a very different sense and the pairing of the two performers for this evening could not have been more perfect.

Bardo Pond, Kinski, Subarachnoid Space at Bottom of the Hill.
18-July-2003

There is something macho about the humanity that I currently perceive. All three bands that I saw last night are incredible musicians with a beautiful view of the textures of collaboration and collectivism. No better than with a band can we see the holistic phenomenon -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When the drum kit fell apart for Subarachnoid Space, the music became nascent of an entirely different band. While many people scoffed, I thought the dynamic change was spectacular.

Kinski is a band that particularly aims to be dynamic. While I prefer the subtle crescendo and evolution of dynamic music from the Godspeed camp than the Mogwai camp (to which Kinski belongs), there is a wonderful eclipse in the shift from subtle to energetic, if used correctly. My one complaint about the "be gentle with the warm turtle" album is that the lows are too low. I call this the "Terminal Pharmacy" phenomenon, named after Jim O'rourke's experimental album on Tzadik, where the intricate music is so low in the mix that you have to turn the volume up ridiculously high to hear it; unfortunately O'rourke sporadically inserts blasts of above-normal sound so that, with your volume turned up, if you don't break your speakers you will at least have a heart attack or ruin your ears. While the case of Kinski is not quite as dramatic or fatalistic, the bind is there. Even in concert, the unsettling slashes from krautrock subdued textual rhythm to POW-POW-POW chugga-garage sprays of sonic ammunition are painful enough to stab. I wish they would split and become two bands, or release separate albums and go through phases. Kinski appears to be getting louder, although the first track they opened up with was incredibly beautiful, topographic, and spacy, with the right balance and build of hard drums. The flute was wonderful too, and I'd wished the fellow would play it more often. The mix on the sound levels was appropriate enough to hear the flute but not enough to say "this is flute rock"... it was effects-laden, played like their tweaked electric guitars. After the show I spoke with some band members and was surprised at how amiable they were, for playing such art-rock. I like that about a musician; none of this Andy Warhol, pretentious indie art-snob crap that we sometimes get from our musicians. The same went for Clint Takeda from Bardo Pond; incredibly friendly and willing to talk candidly about the music; little ego. I felt as if the music was not something the individual artists made but something the listeners have a part in to because of this communication.

Subarachnoid Space was much better than I expected. In fact, I thought they were Kinski until the end. The snobbery of "needing a bass drum" and thus not continuing until it was fixed was a little beyond me, though. If they had continued the jam all spacy and improvised (which they are clearly masterful at), they would have made the evening highly unique. The drummer got all emotional and red-in-the-face. I thought he hit the drums too hard anyway. This is the machismo I'm talking of. Do we really need such cockheads playing percussion? We will never get over the term "post-rock" so long as people play drums like that. Nevertheless, the music was so much more impressive than the album I have with is just a reiteration of the evil jams that hippy bands have had since the 70s, in the King Crimson vein. This music was a little more divine. I felt there wasn't as much a chasm between the loud and soft, as with Kinski. I welcome the fact that their music is fleshing out to a higher plateaux, still under the sun but cognizant of its own landscape. I think in a few years they will be doing something incredible, if they keep at it. I would have loved to add little micro-clickings above all the washes of spacy distortion and fuzz and trebled riffery.

Bardo Pond. Wow. They started off on a weak foot, reiterating the "watching it happen" track from Dilate. Once Isobel brought out the flute I was sold. I really loathe their straight blues-rock approach, rather harsh and unimaginative if you consider the construction of the tunes (Isobel's vocals excluded). What is fantastic about them is that they hold this air the entire time without ever dropping it. I don't think anyone can play spacy versions of bad songs so well without ever conceding that the songs are inherently bad. They're only bad because I'm overly analytical. I was a bid distraught that the crowd settled into the grooviness headspace of the fuzzscapes so easily but were unable to respond (physically at least) to the space forays of the other two bands. (I thought the other two bands did spacy interludes much more colorfully, but the damn rock drums and garagey chugga-trainwrecks ruin it all for me. Give me Charalambides, not Comets of Fire!) Nevertheless, there is something hidden and gracious about the music of Bardo Pond, and I'm not even referring to Isobel's body language or intonations. She is a whole separate part of the music and this is evident during the instrumental parts when she is doing nothing audible, and of course in Bardo Pond's marvelous side projects (give me Hash Jar Tempo and I'll give you an apple pie). The band achieves this effortless slow-churning whirlpool of desert sands. There is no better music to exemplify that the sun can burn you too. Isobel looked so pained, and I think it's an expression of how difficult life can be, how we all don't really know that the graciousness of beauty is just a silver lining to the excremental ordinary life.

I sure hope all those indie-rockers perceive the tightrope of beauty, rather than just the macho expression of liking sludge-rock because it's a more-listenable form of aggro-metal. Somehow, I think a lot of listeners (and musicians) think of alternate rock forms as favorable because of the challenge of enduring the hammering gunshots of the rock format (pow! pow! pow!). I notice this draw for wanting to appear extroverted with musical taste, for wanting people to think one is rebellious because they enjoy the dirt of life with the dilute glitter mixed in, rather than seeking to harvest the treasure and distill it all. As I approved before of Kinski's offstage friendliness, the ego and non-show-offness of these musicians gave more value to the music I heard last night because it certified that this was a take-it-or-leave-it expression of the passion that has built up inside them. (There! There's my disclaimer for the subjectivity of art criticism! I'm an opinionated fool, and you should be too!) Unfortunately some people do not realize that there are so many more options out there for good music (I was stumped when I first heard Eyvind Kang recently, for instance) that we shouldn't settle for things that only move us halfway.

Final statement: I thoroughly enjoyed myself last evening, but I was in no way captivated like I've been watching Rachel's, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Sonic Youth's "anagrama", Ida, or listening to Six Organs of Admittance, Jackie-o Motherfucker, or Bardo Pond's "Sangh Seriatim"-- harmony of the spheres compilation -- do they ever play this live?)

Text as Instrument?
PROJECT: Find or devise a computer program to be used on a laptop that can take text and display it in a visualization format that can also be customized in real time. Project this on a screen during performances of musicians. Before the performances, discuss with the musicians ideas that are important to them and type simultaneously the words that arise in one's head in response to the music.

I was pondering, as I always am for my zine, Future Wave, about what is beneath the music that musicians make. It is important to unify all of one's experiences as arts and all of one's arts as experience. It is all a holistic, cyclical process; what affinities the artist has are manifested in the art. An acknowledgement of the ideas can only nuance and accentuate this presence in the music.

I would hope that the projection of the text could be spontaneous and quick to register, yet easy to manage. The computer program would have to have different levels of user skill so that someone familiar with the program coul easily sit down and just worry about the words and not about the imagery (yet let the computer take this aspect over to be sure that the presentation was not dull). This way, during a performance, different idealists could tag each other out and switch off, just as two musicians often will exchange instruments, getting up from the drums to play guitar. There should also be capabilities, however, for the more advanced text artist to decide if the words should flash, pan, or linger, and what flashes of colors and effects can be shown at what times. I would imagine that it would be similar to the visualization plug-in modules that can be downloaded for the Winamp multimedia players...

Sunburned Hand of the Man & Comets on Fire at the Hemlock Tavern.

Last night I went to go see a concert, which I haven't done in a while due to the fact that the price of a performance is often the price of a record. While musicians need to support themselves, I am satisfied with the ability to listen to music in a more relaxed anti-capitalist setting. A record is something you can take with you. Sitting in the back-most corner of the small intimate venue (my favorite place to sit when I go by myself to a show) I recollected that even the details of my favorite live music experience I'd attented (Godspeed You Black Emperor!, see below) have receded. I can rarely remember the progression of a musical performance, only whether or not I had enjoyed it. Well, I will thus document the little portion of last night's performance that stands out in my mind.

Sunburned Hand of the Man, a neo-psychedelic collective from Boston, manifested itself last night as a ten-piece rhythmic freakout, much like a rosebush. so many thorns, but so much color. While I own some of their more abstract older music (Piff's Clicks and Mind of a Brother), this was mostly a dynamic, looping, eloping rhythm between the percussion section that was laced up in the electric meanderings of gadgetboxes, manipulated microphones, and guitars unwilling to obey any formalisms of chords and scales; and the acoustics of hand percussions like bells, chikka-chikka spools (whatever they're called), djembes, and chanting. there was an electrically enhanced violin but i couldn't find it in the swirling mix. Unlike most collective jamouts that exceed six persons, you could pick out every instrument (except for the enunciation of the words that were utilized as instrument tones). There were multiple sets of exploration, and each had a common thread to it, but the group halted and switched instruments often, perhaps to allow diversity to the performance. Some jams, while stellar, are a waste of time because they languish so much. (see Phish, Subarachnoid Space, Sunroof!) The music climaxed with a pile-on of all the musicians that were not playing large instruments. It was wonderful to see a female participating in the group, but I wished she had found more to contribute than her sideline inaudible chanting and percussion.

A splendid factor of the performance was that a good third of the musicians did not sit on the stage but instead in the crowd. While this could likely be on account of ten people never fitting on the tiny stage, I spoke with some of the group afterwards and they told me of their loft in Boston where they often play. Apparently at these loft parties, the band will be spread out throughout the entire loft. The effect produced was that I felt guilty as a spectator. For certain, any beholder of art is in essence a participant, but I find the spectator's reduction of feedback to be inhibitory. So, the random musicians littered throughout the non-stage area made me feel less as a spectator because someone in the crowd was participating. I regretted for a moment being so far away from the stage, on my perch in the back corner (but I wouldn't renounce my perfect vantage!). It was funny that afterwards, the fellows in the band said that they had noticed me getting into the groove. Unfortunately, the crowd was full of the indie-snob variety that likes to drink beer and inwardly feel the music without ever sharing their passions. This inwardness was an affliction I used to have; back in my teenage years of rocketing through space, stoned cold during "washing machine" (SY), I would stand and gape at the stage in secret, deadpanned awe. I believe myself to have come out of the closet to music reactionism, and when not showing my emotion through my body language (why does nobody dance?), I can be found interminably ranting of my experience with the music. In short, the show would have been most inredible, had the whole group of nonmusicians metamorphosed into a throbbing throng, like the hippies used to do in those acid-lodged days of the Grateful Dead, probably not too far from the Hemlock Tavern.

A high point of the evening was when, during Comets on Fire's mediocre set, I was sitting on my "perch" and randomly found myself accompanied by John Maloney (of Sunburned) on my left, and Steven Wray Lobdell on my right (I was too shy to say hello to this revered spectator). Perhaps the only true musical moment I relish from the set by the hyped-up Comets on Fire was when stand-in Ben Chasny (of our beloved Six Organs of Admittance), during a lull in the marsh of bluesy space madness, leaned over the microphone and emitted an equisite sinewy snippet of a dirge that was on a par with Bjork. I am enamored of his vision. I have yet to see a Six Organs show, but this fancy young Californian (Dr. Chasny, as someone from Sunburned awed him with) is perhaps one of the most enigmatic indie performers I've encountered. The big let-down, however, was that the other 95% of the show involved a careless-minimalist rhythm section supporting loud incomprehensible dual electirc guitar psychedelic hendrix-sprawl matched with whammy-bar like shocks of electronic gadgetbox dopplers. This band's record, "Field Recordings from the Sun" has been hyped up more strongly than Sigur Ros, but somehow the music was ordinary. (Maloney, during the set, answered my question of what makes the band unique with "I've never heard anyone do anything like this these days!" -- now that Hendrix is dead I guess he meant). Personally, I think I've heard the sprawling thunka-thunka-skreeeeeeee! that this band played in numerous places... For one, check the purported "Southern Rock" quotient of the jamband scene (like Gov't Mule and Widespread Panic). Only thing is, these mediocre jambands actually travel from one point to another... I'd be willing to give the band another chance, so long as it's not out of my pocket, but I hereby reject the band on three accounts: (1) it was a waste of Ben Chasny's talent. (2) Rock and Roll is a patriarchal testosterone-driven expression and is only relevant in cases like Explosions in the Sky (who are angry about capitalism and the tragedy of living) and the Boredoms (who feel the importance of epicurean living in a symbolic, divine world). There was a lot of energy expressed here, which is always powerful, but I'm convinced it had a lot to do with drugs and testicles. (3) I've heard this ordinary, unemotional music before.

Check out my post, "Four Views of Collaborative Art" on my other, multi-purpose blog, Future Wave. In it I describe more ideas of conceptual music composition. In brief, one is a collaboration where one composer builds half of a loose piece of music, the second composer layers on top of the piece and then continues the piece onward symmetrically, and then the extension is filled in by the original artist. Another idea is to have a project like the collaborative ep series of Cerberus Shoal, where a piece is written, handed to a second artist who then reinterprets the piece. The same would be done vice-versa, with switched roles. I would extend this concept by returning the interpretive response piece to the original artist and have them re-interpret it themselves. A third collaborative musical project would be something anyone could do: construct a mix tape with a friend, where each person selects a song in response to the song before it, handing the tape back and forth until the tape is filled.

I had an interesting idea tonight about music to create. I'm reading a Philip K. Dick novel (The Martian Time Slip) and a character encoded a secret message and then disguised it as a piece of electronic music. In a later book of Dick's, Radio Free Albemuth, Dick's characters encode hidden, subversive messages in the lyrical format of popular music. As long as America remains true to the spirit of Liberty and free speech (sometimes I think we totter on the edge), there would be no need to encode any sort of radical ideas. Yet, there may come a day when certain comrades may need to communicate in the dark; perhaps forming a new system of code through sampled electronic music may prove interesting. Another interesting application of this would be the elucidation of a more ubiquitous emotional and informational experiential content of wordless music.

I possess a large amount of music that I have not yet listened to, and I'm in the process of digging into it. However, I would not like to review music here as I listen to it, as then I would be forcing reactions in order to find something to say. Rather, I would like to allow the music to sink into my skin and bathe my experiences in it. I am convinced that there is something complex about the tones and arrangements of music and how the mind perceives them that is able to extract emotions from them. This is how music engraves itself upon the experiences we have at the time we first hear it, like a good strummy guitar ballad to remind us of a fleeted summer love, or the chill sombre reverb to resonate with the barrier of the windowpane between a heated apartment and the snow outside. Music takes us places, and I hope to uncover here some of the music that has been able to take me somewhere. Perhaps the music that doesn't produce this effect was first listened to at the inappropriate time, or perhaps some music doesn't move people because they lack certain perspectives to coincide with what a music contains. However, the burn-in effect of most musics is a beauty of life that, in my opinion, transcends the emotional effects of other arts because of the inescapability of music's grasp.

I once was at a Godspeed You Black Emperor! performance by myself at the height of my panic disorder; terrorized by the shrill blares of sound and the ineffectiveness of the medication I'd just imbibed, I oscillated between the back of the crowd and the exit, as I contemplated leaving the show altogether because the feeling of calamity in the music was too intense and I began to have a panic attack. I stayed because a woman took me by the hand and brought me all the way up to the front row where we held each other tightly to withstand the emotional force of the experience.

Welcome to ATROCITY JUKEBOX. This is my second blog, and it is an extension of my first, multipurpose blog, Future Wave. I hope to devote Atrocity Jukebox solely to my passion for music. The name Atrocity Jukebox, in addition to Future Wave, is also the name of a song by Tower Recordings. I will lead off by saying that, despite the subjectivities of music, this collective of musicians has created some of the more colored music of the day, and although they contain many regressions to hippy culture, Tower Recordings is foward-thinking (as I purport myself to be) in that they are the epitome of what I call "space folk". It is both an expression of the folk of forest and tribal cultures and the space of science fiction. It is not a shiny technological hi-fi space of lustrous qualities, as much of the nascent electronica is becoming. Rather, the electronics involved are fractured, dirty, psychedelic and schizophrenic, unclean as the tragedy of industrial existence. It does not proclaim "hooray we space cadets are here!" Instead if proffers the conundrum of what living in a tragic delusion of postindustry's diversions is like. Where it is not dirty in its avant-experimentalism (some drone and noise excursions), it retreats into spiritual caverns. Spirituality is, apart from community and progress, the solace for the soul that may effectively claim to grant salvation. So, it is without further ado that I grant to you ATROCITY JUKEBOX; a collection of ruminations on the atroticties of musical culture. It is not to claim that the music I listen to is atrocious, but rather the injustice of coralling neo-psychedelia into the underground is despicable. Let me remind you that I, a lover of psychedelic music, am drug-free. It is unneccessary to embark on these fast highways to get where we intend to go, and it is for this reason I am writing this blog: to show you all that music is my drug that expands my mind with color.