Everything moves. Vibration runs through everything…
These ideas are central to Ron Rege Jr.’s Cymatic Theremapy performances. In a fusion of science, visual art, and sound, Rege (often with the assistance of Diva Dompe) creates a truly interactive, often magical experience. The set up is relatively simple: a liquid (usually water, or water and corn starch) rests in a plastic bed in the center of a speaker. When Rege’s theremin kicks into gear, the liquid gradually starts to vibrate as the sound waves coarse through it. Over time, these movements become more and more visible, and as the audio reaches its peak, the liquids often take on absurd shapes, giving them the appearance of living organisms.
While it is easy to fantasize that Rege is some sort of Frankenstein-like mad scientist in this equation, he often seems just as startled by the way sound morphs the liquids as we are. These performances, which have taken place mostly at small art galleries and bookstores in the Los Angeles area thus far, feel much more like participatory teach-ins than demonstrations. Participants are often able to pass speakers around as the liquids dance, their minds widening with wonder as they internalize the vibration themselves. While Rege has not reinvented the wheel with these experiments, he has brought to light the undeniable and often wondrous relationship between sound and motion.
As the year winds down, talk turns to year-end lists and best records, tracks, music videos, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Everyone from major publications to the avid music fan wants to talk about the year in music as an event that can be summarized and critiqued objectively. I feel an obligation to form well-reasoned opinions about records I could care less about even hearing. The new music I spent the most time listening this year was a specific brand of drone and contemporary experimental ambient music. This music appears on established labels such as Type and the vinyl division of the Foxy Digitalis empire, but also smaller outfits that only put out a few releases a year like California’s Emerald Cocoon, Massachusetts’ Barge and the charmingly low-key DNT Records have all made crucial contributions to my personal experience of new music over the past year.
The year began with the final missive of a duo who loomed as large as any over the preceding decade, Yellow Swans. Going Places, Yellow Swans’ final full-length released on Type nearly two years after the group’s disillusion set a very high standard for billowing, psychedelic drone with noise and electronic flourishes. It’s always easy to credit a posthumous release with more meaning than it might deserve in a different context, but Going Places is a near perfect swan song. A distillation of the group’s distinctive approach that combines harsh feedback with beautiful melodies and a judicious use of processed vocals. The record bridges the gap between trailblazing psych-noise veterans of the British school like Skullflower and Ashtray Navigations and the daunting legacy of defunct 00s operators Double Leopards while showing the way forward for some of the fresh-faced (and not so fresh-faced) drone upstarts I would spend the rest of the year listening to.
Richard Skelton
Also arriving on Type at the beginning of the year was Richard Skelton’s Landings. This magisterial record, a tribute to the haunting terrain of Northern England, utilizes traditional string instruments, field recordings, and electronic processes to conjure a deeply felt atmosphere of strong, arch emotions. Landings is a classical record in certain formal aspects, but is immediately accessible to anyone with even a passing interest in drone, ambient, or deep listening music of all kinds. Both Yellow Swans’ and Skelton’s records demand attention and focus. The easy pull of pop music is absent, and in its place is a stark, subjective appeal. This appeal is rooted in the musicians themselves. Yellow Swans is a direct reflection of the chemistry that exists between Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman. Likewise, Landings puts some of Skelton’s innermost thoughts, hopes and longings to music (an artist’s edition of the record features a book of poems and essays by Skelton). Enjoyment of this music presupposes the desire for a genuine personal connection with the artist. I find myself drawn again and again to these records not just because of their sonic qualities, although they are uniformly compelling, but because the force of artistic personality comes through so strongly and creates a galvanizing feeling of affection toward the performers. It’s impossible to enjoy Skelton’s tour of the fraught geographical and psychological landscapes of Northern England without having a personal curiosity about it. When so much of indie rock, once revered for its thoughtfulness and sensitivity, feels like a po-mo put-on filled with recycled riffs, this idiosyncratic and occasionally pretentious music makes for a convincing antidote.
Next up: The sound galaxies of Emeralds and Expo ‘70
Yellow Swans, “New Life” (from Going Places) New Life by _type
“The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll.” Sometimes it’s the most counterintuitive statements that point us to what we’ve been intuiting all along. “Delicacy” is not a word I would ever use to describe what critic Dave Hickey calls the “dominant art form of this American century”– his, the 20th. But in its playful untruth, its insouciant “fuck you” to anyone who ever said rock was just a question of amplification and cheap chord changes, the title of his 1997 essay is rock-and-roll enough to grab anyone who really cares. The song Hickey sings here isn’t just about rock music; it’s about the relationship between art and politics, and it’s sweeping and ambitious and convoluted enough to recall the quixotic excesses of prog. It jumps from memoir to critical commentary, words like “contingency” to thoughts on why “order sucks”. It touches on everything from experimental film to the abstract expressionists to jazz, and it doesn’t satisfy with a melodic resolution until the last page or so– when Hickey actually starts talking about rock.
But his language is so grounded in the everyday, so free of virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, that Yes and King Crimson would probably be insulted. If “The Delicacy of Rock- and-Roll” locates the political character of art in a certain will to freedom, and tries to show how different types of art embody that will in different ways, Hickey speaks from the place where that freedom begins, and probably also ends– from the heart of the individual subject, recalling a particularly memorable encounter with art in a particular time and place. The essay begins with a story from his college days in Austin, TX. The young Hickey is attending “Underground Flick Nite” at a local YMCA; he is a member of a left-wing political group that meets there that same day, and he and his comrades are hoping for an evening of explosions and group sex. What they get is anything but earth-shattering: an abstract montage of colors by Stan Brackage, and a film by Andy Warhol, consisting entirely of a static shot of a man getting his hair cut.
Leaving Records is a Los Angeles based label run by Matthew David McQueen (also known as matthewdavid) and Jesse Lisa Moretti. The operation is based out of their pyramid, which is tucked away in the green hills of Mt. Washington. Their releases float in that immaculate space where the electronic meets the organic. I could throw a number of adjectives at you right now, but let’s go straight to the source, and get the story in Matthew and Jesse’s words:
Why did you start Leaving Records?
While I was working at dublab (for non-profit internet radio posse out of Los Angeles), there were daily encounters of untapped musicians from many scenes. I presented the label idea to my favorite artist Jesselisa, and she agreed to head all visual direction. We had been entirely dialed-in to the Los Angeles music and art scene at Florida State University, being head-on immersed in a wonderful art department and college radio station.
It was something that we started in our living room, cutting and pasting away at our new homie dak’s debut release. The silk screening, the tape-dubbing, it was all done as an art project. It wasn’t long until we realized the project was one we could let others see and hear through the pipelines of dublab, sort of re-injecting all of the amazing music we had come across through that very same community of world-wide listenership and art.
Nothing would have happened without the other, having complete confidence in Jesselisa’s craft and design being visual director of the label, and her having trust in my curation of unheard music, we began… It’s so valuable working closely with our artists to develop their first records, to develop the album art, it’s all an intensely personal experience for us, everything is seeming made together. we learned a lot from dublab, they exposed us to a lot of the artists we have and are currently working with. (more…)
Ask any 20-something indie rock lover in New York what they’re doing this weekend, and they’re bound to rattle off names of North Brooklyn concert venues that aren’t technically supposed to exist: Monster Island Basement, Secret Project Robot, Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, Party Expo. Check the show recommendations in The Village Voice, The Times, and even The New Yorker, and you will discover these cartoonish monikers sprinkled alongside trusty Manhattan standbys like Bowery Ballroom and Webster Hall.
Semi-legal concert spaces in Williamsburg and Bushwick are evolving from niche attractions to popular above-ground destinations. And yet they seem to have everything working against them, aside from their underground cachét: no budget, no liquor licenses, NOISE, far-flung geographical locations, and the passionate belief that quality live music should be accessible to everyone — even those too young to drink. So how are New York’s DIY venues staying open, despite all the economic and legal obstacles?
Truth be told, not all of these venues do stay open. Market Hotel, a dilapidated old bank building in Bushwick that once attracted up to 600 concert-goers at a time, closed its doors to the public last April after being raided by cops two nights in a row. Over on the Williamsburg waterfront, Paris London West Nile shut down this summer when its landlords increased the rent; neighboring venue Glasslands, meanwhile, became so popular that its owners decided to purchase a liquor license, weed out minors at the door, and go legit. (more…)
As of Tuesday, October 5th, The Social Network has 47 thousand Facebook friends and counting. Director David Fincher’s dramatization of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise from Harvard computer geek to Silicon Valley billionaire, the promotional posters inform us, is not only the “movie of the year”; is also “brilliantly defines the decade.” Whether we agree with Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers or not, we do not need him to tell us that the story behind the world’s most popular social networking site smacks of the generational. Facebook is a product of the millennium generation; along with Gmail, Twitter, and MySpace, it is bound to play a starring role in the history of a communications revolution tied to a specific time (the early 2000s) and place (the Web). But Travers seems to confuse history with its representation: is it The Social Network that is “definitive” of the decade now drawing to a close, or the flight of dorm-room inspiration it depicts?
In his choice of subject matter alone, Director David Fincher gambles on two basic assumptions, both asking that we suspend disbelief. First, he presumes that it is possible to recreate the past foibles and feuds of public figures — individuals who are still very much alive — and somehow resist the dual pitfalls of biased storytelling and historical inaccuracy. (According to Zuckerberg and other witnesses, he failed.) Second, The Social Network departs from the premise that it is possible — even desirable — to take stock in a massive social and cultural transformation when that transformation, to date, is still in its infancy. Mark Zuckerberg’s accidental brainchild may have a whopping 500 million friends and counting, but its ultimate impact on the quotidian of its subscribers — like the Facebook interface itself — remains as open to determination as it was in 2003, when the idea took seed. (more…)
Tomorrow at 5 p.m. ET music bloggers and writers convene at Newtown Radio in Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss blogger ethics and by extension, the future of music writing.
We encourage you to listen and call in with questions and comments! 347-725-4163.
Below is a basic outline of the discussion put together by myself and Friedlander of Visitation Rites. Questions we want to address come after a summary of why we are talking about this. (more…)
@MaxBurke just hacked the VR twitter! Greetings from the NY Eye and Ear Fest. View from the record fair/ chill zone.
3:55 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak (more…)
Simeon Coxe III as the Silver Apples, live at The Joshua Light Show Fest, May 18, 2010
In contrast to the younger, hip-looking crowd at the night’s previous Woods/MV EE show, the audience for the Oneida/Silver Apples bill was a bit older, with the air of serious-minded music fans. Due in large part to Mr. Silver Apples himself (Simeon Coxe), the theater was sold out for the evening. Oneida took the stage to expectant applause from the audience as wunderkind drummer Kid Millions sat behind his kit and kicked off his signature percussive assault in rare form. Drawing heavily on their single-track monster Preteen Weaponry from 2008 — while leaving plenty of room for improvised digressions and the organized chaos that defines their sound — the five-piece group were complemented by a light show that felt more frantic than the previous night’s. The strobe effect was generously deployed, and Oneida — minus regular member Bobby Matador, but with the rare addition of founding former member Papa Crazee — didn’t hesitate to respond by laying down a weighty wall of sound, complimented by a droning rhythm section.
The set proceeded through a series of distinct movements, with the light show responding to each shift in tone. First up was a hellish underworld, with cascading sheets of feedback and Millions’ propulsive drumming setting the scene as the screen flickered with dark reds and oranges. Gradually, Oneida ascended to an earthier plane, settling into a more brooding, downbeat mode as the harsh colors gave way to a lush green. Instead of cascading in all directions, the jam became more focused, steadily gaining momentum. Oneida’s career-long engagement with the possibilities of repetition in its various guises took center stage as loops of feedback ebbed and flowed, stretching and contracting time. Audience members’ heads bobbed in unison as the band locked into a psychic groove of monumental proportions. (more…)
Woods, live at the Joshua Light Show Festival, Abrons Art Center, May 13, 2010
Joshua White is a New York artist who began his career creating liquid light shows for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in the late 1960s and early 70s. The Joshua Light show was in residence at the Fillmore and provided visuals for all the major artists associated with the classic psychedelic and heavy rock scene of the era, from Hendrix to Joplin.
After the scene faded, White moved into professional television production. Although his trippy visuals were forever immortalized in the memories of clued-in boomers and the freaky party scene from Midnight Cowboy, White would not revisit his light show past for nearly 40 years. In 2004, he teamed with artist Gary Panter to recreate some of the light shows for a one-off at Anthology Film Archives. Renewed interest in the classic light shows has peaked in recent years, and White has been performing regularly with his ensemble of visual alchemists and artists to accompany acts like Yo La Tengo, as well as various iterations of the Darmstadt New Music series and one-offs at the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center.
The Joshua Light Show Festival, which premiered last week in New York, is a festival of contemporary psychedelic music, curated by Nick Hallett and paired with the light show’s distinctive visual component. The festival ran for over consecutive nights (the opening night with Steve Moore and itsnotyouitsme, and closing night with Dean & Britta and Spectrum) at the Abrons Art Center, a community center at the Henry Street Settlement, which has its own history as an incubator of avant-garde practice, including big name past associates like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham. (more…)
