Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° listen ° available 10-28-08
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
“Too Kind of You to Be So Nice” (Stars of the Lid, Good Shepherd Faith Church, 5/2/08)
This isn't working for me. Or at least I think it isn't. Thinking might be the problem.
Stars of the Lid (myspace) makes ambient music built on slow surges and recessions. Their last CD, And Their Refinement of the Decline, topped my 2007 Best-Ofs but a lot of what I liked about it was its lack of immediacy. Its size was overwhelming, its world alien, its movement out of reach. So naturally there's going to be something different when the work's chopped apart and served up right in front of you.
SotL's Brian McBride and Adam Bryanbaum know this, obviously. Before the performance - the band's first in New York City in something like seven years, and the last Wordless Music plans to schedule in this venue - they ask for total darkness in the unelevated performance area and tell us to "take some drugs if you have them."
And now they're making their music. But there are things other than music here, and they're sort of in the way.
You, you're here, at least a couple hundred of you are. Every time I open my eyes: People! Sitting around me! Respectful people, bless you for that. I've heard a single cough, haven't seen a single camera flash. But you're all here, and that's very disorienting. We're sitting on seats which aren't particularly uncomfortable, but people shift around because they're trying to get a better view or their asses hurt or whatever. (And we're in a church, and there aren't pews, for whatever reason, and that's its own distraction.) Luke Savisky's globby lightshow is being projected on to the curved recess behind the pulpit, and for the most part the images aren't the ones from my dreams at all.
What I can make out of the musicians, because you look at musicians when you're a concert: One is rather neatly dressed, slacks and dress shirt, with short hair that seems prematurely gray; the other's in a bright yellow hoodie pulled tight over his head, Unabomber fashion. Both stand in front of keyboards with guitars slung over their shoulders, though you rarely hear anything that sounds specifically guitar-like. A string trio camps between them, facing each other like the three weird sisters; thanks to the lights on their music stands, their sawing's the only thing you can clearly see.
I don't notice any laptops. I suspect they're in there somewhere. But it's nice not to see them.
Because of the strings, which play throughout, the timbre of the music's so much warmer than it was on record. I don't remember ever wishing before, at any other show, for things to sound more electronic. But if they were, two of the most beautiful acoustic touches - both from Yellow Hoodie, who surprises by playing at a baby grand that had seemed abandoned detritus from an opening act, who starts banging away at his electric guitar while it is unplugged at a place in the music where that tinny jangle stands out precisely - would mean more.
If anything surprises or stands out during this sort of music, it had better come with some sort of meaning. What I loved about Stars of the Lid was losing myself away to their work. Here I am very much in the moment. This is the type of music that makes you conscious of the most basic of concert contrivances. There are people are making this music. There are other people listening to it.
The sound only gets LOUD during the last number of the main set ("December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface," which YH introduces as "a song about a fucking asshole I knew" (Hey! We're in church!)) when the band is joined by Savisky. He grabs a guitar and stands behind a keyboard and the volume pushes out and up. The projections against Good Shepherd Faith's stained glass solidify into something perfectly angelic.
Magic, later, just how it ought to come. As I walk along an empty 65th Street, through the fog, towards Central Park West. From some balcony above, I couldn't see where. Wind chimes.
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Also there:
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But what I really wanted to talk about was one of the openers, that night. Face the Music (myspace) is a group of public school kids between ages ten and fifteen that focus on late 20th-century/early-21st century classical music. Which, you know, cool. Or... is it?
Their part of the program (and yes, there were printed programs) started with John Adams' Hallelujah Junction for two pianos. Pretty impressive. Stumbled a bit when the instruments had noticeable exchanges between each other, but y'know, they're ten to fifteen years old (and one pianist was twice as tall as the other). I'm not going to pee on their collective lolly. Even if their take on Michael Gordon's "Yo Shakespeare" broke yonder in a big fucking mess. Everyone S.O.'d and cheered encouragingly. BNM!
But should elementary school kids be playing John Fucking Adams (and that's John Coolidge Fucking A., not John Luther F.A.)? My initial reaction was, opening minds, canon, great. I don't remember what we played in our high school band (in elementary school, we played dodgeball), but I know when All State Auditions rolled around material rotated pretty exclusively through the Mozart Horn Concerti. (I played French horn, suck it.)
Something wasn't sitting right.
Why only stuff like J(CF)Adams'? "New works played by teens and tweens" is their shtick, and perhaps they get their classical bran elsewhere, but it feels backwards to separate new from old when it's all really one big thing.
And crawl-before-walk concerns? Though I really don't know if, when it comes to technical know-how, there are more steps separating "Mary Had a Little Lamb" from "Einstein on the Beach" or Bach. It's not like you need - though these kids might be getting it - a pervasive knowledge of theory to play music. Just read what's written, just toot x note at y time.
It was during "Yo" that I realized from whence my reservations sprung. Watching the ensemble's flautist juggle a flute, piccolo, and different groupings of pan pipes, I realized that this was America's Future Indie Rock Death Squad. Overcomplicated, fundamentally questionable, not particularly engaging. Let's drag all of Kaybee Toy & Hobby on stage but forget to write a decent melody. Not that the onus of any of this should be placed on the (yes I know 10-15-year-old, yayTommy) children.
There was a laptop in this band. As I suppose there would have to be.
What's going to sound "normal" to these kids? It's a crotchety get-off-my-lawn thing to say. Especially when, after being raised on John Denver and Brahms, this sounds pretty fucking normal:
Gilbert Kalish - Ives Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass, 1840-60"), 3rd Movement ("The Alcotts")(mp3) (buy)
Yaysegue. That's the first piece in the most recent redo of the muxtape. Largely instrumental, this one errs toward noise and dissonance. There are songs about abstinence and serial killers and sexy car accidents and growing old. There's prog-bluegrass, free jazz, Kurt Cobain, Alfred Schnittke, Alan Vega. Makes sense to me.
It was pretty easy, with only a few secondhand facts, to adopt Charles Ives (1874-1954) as a personal hero. One of America's greatest composers sold insurance all his life, listened to the premiere of his Second Symphony over the radio a half-century after he'd composed it. Prescient genius toiling in blue collar obscurity!
Only not so much. He went to Yale, he founded his insurance franchise, focused on estate planning, he retired sort of early to focus on his music only to decide that "nothing sounds right." One of the last things he worked on was this sonata, though that was only to make revisions in 1947 on a piece he'd originally completed by 1915.
I love Ives' music as an active mental process. He'll rework traditional melodies - here Beethoven's Fifth and a dash of "Dixie" - in skewed ways. Sometimes, because you imagine it's what happened right at the moment of the writing, a marching band will parade through (his father was a bandmaster). Somewhere, I'm sure there are wind chimes.
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If you enjoy ambient stuff, or electro-collage, or, y'know, music - you should seriously soak up the new Paavoharju album, Laulu Laakson Kukista.
Paavoharju - Pimeänkarkelo (mp3) (buy)
Gorgeous, varied (there's a dancier track at Gorilla vs Bear) stuff. Finnish born-again Christians piling up sounds at the top of the world. This one is less... underwater than their last, the also lovely Yhä Hämärää. (Amazon has each available as mp3 downloads for $8.99; the actual CDs are pricey imports.)
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YayLOVE IS ALL tour dates. Though that Cake Shop show will be unmanageable.