Mountains, Live at Le Poisson Rouge, Unsound Festival, February 10, 2010.
The first major snowstorm of 2010 in New York City occasioned one of the most noteworthy nights of the Unsound Festival. The festival, which originated in Poland and is making its stateside debut this year, is a two-week series of concerts, film screenings, talks, and other special events in Manhattan with a focus on experimental dance and electronic music. Tonight’s concert took place at Le Poisson Rouge, a relatively new downtown venue that seeks to bring classical and experimental music to the beer-swilling masses in a club setting. LPR is relatively small with an impressive sound system suited to avant garde musics, which often hinge on subtle gestures and deep listening for success.
Tonight’s show was a revue of four international artists currently redefining what it means to be “post-rock.” Although there was a flurry of activity and excitement around post-rock in the mid 1990s, the term has since become synonymous with antiseptic exercises in predictable soft/loud dynamics and a profusion of tiresome acts with increasingly pretentious song titles — not to mention a willfully opaque aesthetic that is comically arch and tedious (see: Pelican, and pretty much the entire Temporary Residence catalog). Drawing equally from ambient, laptop improvisation and left-field experimental electronica, a handful of innovators at the fringes of the genre are pushing post-rock into new territory.
First up was Mountains, the Brooklyn-based duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg, known for their unique brand of guitar and loop-based ambient music, and as the guys behind the Apestaartje label/collective. They released their first widely available full-length — the superlative Choral — on Chicago’s venerable Thrill Jockey last year, and have toured widely in Europe and the States. Holtkamp and Anderegg’s interaction as a guitar duo forms the core of Mountains’ sound; the group began their set in this mode, typified by Anderegg playing more traditional chord-based guitar as Holtkamp improvised in a more abstract way, at times approaching a prepared guitar technique. As Anderegg held down the melody, filling a role similar to that of guitarist Mark McGuire in Emeralds, Holtkamp began weaving in a variety nontraditional sound sources, including a loop of an eggbeater in a metal bowl, an antique accordion-like device, and a vintage electronic keyboard. Soon enough, waves of distortion began to shudder though the mix, barely audible but insistent, producing a tension with the dominant ambient beauty. In the second piece, which inverted the dynamics of the first, this distortion came to the fore. Beginning with loud, atonal distortion, Holtkamp and Anderegg peeled away layers of sound until they arrived back to where they started, concluding the piece with a fragile and gorgeous guitar duet.
The overall impact of Mountains’ music is deceptive simplicity. Piled high with layer upon layer of samples, their music is not unlike the “laptop folk” artists who rose to underground prominence in the early part of this century, primarily through the efforts of Peter Rehberg’s Vienna-based Mego label. But whereas those artists explored the harsh and static sound of the digital, Mountains — who rely on more traditional instrumentation — are brimming with organic warmth, subjecting their sources to the rigors of electronic manipulation without allowing them to become sterile. At one point in the set, Anderegg put down his guitar and intoned softly into the microphone: a wordless hymn of the human voice, distinct and powerful and clearly audible amid the surrounding electronic hiss and layered sounds. Mountains set the bar high with their opening set, and affirmed their status as one of the most ambitious and emotive electronic acts working today.
Tape
Next up was Tape from Sweden. The group, usually a trio but appearing today as a quartet, has been exploring the intersection of jazz and the post-rock sensibility on the Häpna label for nearly a decade. Their latest full-length, Luminarium, refined a sound at once more and less engaged with post-rock aesthetics than that of their contemporaries. This may sound like a slight, but let me explain: Tape strikes me as one of the most self-aware bands in the entire post-ambient/instrumental electronica scene. In a field crowded with preposterous groups making even more preposterous claims about the epic sweep and depth of their music, Tape aspire to a minimalist line of thinking, treating each song (of all the artists performing tonight, they come closest to crafting traditional songs) as something of a trifle. This is due mainly to their perfunctory keyboard melodies, which often take center stage; some of them are ridiculously simple, but they never last more than a few seconds. Indeed it is difficult to tell exactly what, if anything, has “happened” over the course of a given Tape track. While most post-rockers engage in a tired loud/soft or dissonance/melody dichotomy, Tape is happy to barely engage in traditional rock dynamics at all. Wielding a makeshift instrument consisting of cymbals suspended by rope, percussionist Tomas Hallonsten stuck to a straightforward rhythm — when he was actually playing, that is. At the end of one piece, he picked up a trumpet and delivered a brief, seemingly haphazard solo. Despite their intense focus, the members of the group barely acknowledged each other’s presence on stage.
If anything, Tape has succeded in removing the rock from their titular descriptor – they are merely “post,” reducing the genre to a series of gestures and notions. And appropriately for their brand of concise, conceptual music, theirs was the shortest set of the night. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might not have noticed they were playing at all – and that’s a genuine compliment.
Radian
Tape’s response to the challenge of deconstructing rock music — which amounted here to a shrug — stood in stark contrast to Radian, whose method of attack is more like a punch in the face. Perhaps that’s going a bit too far, but the group’s ability to knock the ground out from under the listener is breathtaking. Live, the band manages to reduce a variety of standby rock maneuvers to their simplest form, then effortlessly reconstitute them into something new. Drummer Martin Brandlmayr is particularly crucial to Radian’s success. His ability to juggle his signature out-of-step drumming — using both traditional sticks and subtler wire paintbrushes — with the sampler attached to his drumkit was simply supernatural.
Radian’s first few songs were aggressive numbers with muscular percussion complimented by rudimentary but precise attacks from bassist John Norman and the synthesizer work of Stefan Németh. As the set wore on, Radian pursued their sound to its logical end. Their second to last piece was a standout with a structure so complex that it threatened at times to crumble under its own weight; just when when we thought that something in the composition had gone terribly awry, however, Brandlmayr would trigger a sample or come through with a quick percussion move and everything would fall back into place. By this time, Németh was playing guitar; although technically closer to a traditional rock band than any of the other performers that night, Radian had veered far out of the realm of recognizable pop/rock dynamics. In fact, they seemed to have more in common with the sample-heavy deconstruction of artists like John Oswald, or the glitch techniques of Markus Popp’s Oval project.
The notoriously imprecise designation IDM hung over the proceedings at Le Poisson Rouge that as much as the abused notion of post rock, and the night’s final act, Tim Hecker, brought this dialogue front and center. Performing with a relatively straightforward set-up (a laptop, a mixer, and a keyboard arranged on a table), Hecker began unceremoniously about twenty minutes after Radian left the stage. His arrival, however, was impossible to miss: the venue went pitch black and the sound was all-encompassing. The sight of fans gathered in a circle around the blue glow of Hecker’s Power Book – the only significant light source in the room – seemed fitting for the demanding exploration of ambient electronica to follow. The audience was immediately engulfed in an oppressive wash of ambient sounds, expertly manipulated by the acclaimed Canadian artist. In a set that ebbed and flowed like a precisely composed classical piece, brevity proved to be one of the most effective weapons in his Hecker’s arsenal; the piece ended right when it seemed like it might stretch into oblivion. When the lights came up, the crowd seemed bewildered. After tromping through the snow on a day when many businesses were closed and other concerts canceled, they had been rewarded by transporting performances from some of the most innovative electronic musicians working today.
Words: Max Burke
Photos: Max Burke
Tags: Brendon Anderegg, John Norman, Koen Holtkamp, Le Poisson Rouge, Martin Brandlmayr, Mountains, Radian, Stefan Németh, Tape, Thrill Jockey, Tim Hecker, Tomas Hallonsten, Unsound Festival