Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Bandshell, one of New York’s best outdoor venues, is a summer institution.  It was only a matter of time before the ever-expanding Wordless Music series came, saw and conquered this historic venue.  And the weapons of that conquest on Friday night were San Francisco’s spastic noise-makers Deerhoof and local electro-acoustic chamber orchestra the Metropolis Ensemble.  The latter played an arrangement/recomposition of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring called The Rite: Remixed and scored for electronics, brass and percussion. Continue Reading

Wordless at the Whitney, a series of concerts curated by Wordless Music for the Whitney Museum of American Art noisily ended last Friday with a set by lo-fi favorites Times New Viking and Jefferson Friedman’s third string quartet as performed by members of the American Chamber Music Ensemble.  Times New Viking’s latest album, Rip It Off, out on Matador records, has received a lot of recent critical praise for its affecting combination of noise and pop.  Jefferson Friedman, a former member of the punk band Shutter to Think, has become a highlight in contemporary classical music.  The two were well matched, and not just in the context of Wordless Music’s brief to bring the classical and indie music worlds together.  Both halves of the program had a highly developed sense of how to balance two extremes: dense textures and sweet melodies. Continue Reading

We are a lucky generation, really. And the latest installment in the Wordless Music series, held last Wednesday and Thursday night, is my exhibit A. Held in the massive and beautiful Church of St. Paul the Apostle (site of a previous Múm show for the series), the show featured the works of three living composers: Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity, and Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver.

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Múm are from Iceland. They are exceptionally polite, exceptionally attractive, and exceptionally gifted. Over their two day stint for Wordless Music, they attracted some of the largest crowds ever to the series. They have a dedicated following, completely in love with and absolutely willing to succumb to the band’s hypnotic pep. Where fellow Icelanders Sigur Ros are ominous and glacial, Múm are shiny and bright, the sun that glints off of white ice rather than the dark blue shadows.

As Wordless organizer, Ronen Givony, stated in his introduction of the band, Múm are a perfect band for the series. As an attempt to mix up and smash up generic boundaries from a curatorial level, Wordless thrives not just on the juxtaposition of different types of music but also on those bands that already embody the interzones of classification. Múm absolutely do so: electronic music, folk music, children’s music, “classical” music, ambient music, rock music: each of these categories can describe some part of their sound, but not the complete picture. The whole is certainly more than the sum of its parts. They have an unplaceable, sui generis quality, as though their influences are right on the tip of your tongue, but then you just can’t figure them out. Continue Reading

Watching Grizzly Bear on Saturday night—visibly tired, grizzled even, after more than a year touring—execute their complex, inundating songs with a surfeit of ease was, to put it too flatly and too simply, one of the best experiences of my life.  There was a kind of hallucinatory joy that attached itself to people as the evening progressed. I say it that way because it felt like a disembodied emotion that just seemed to float down from the rafters of Society for Ethical Culture, unleashed by the beautiful clouds of sound emanating from Michael Harrison’s and Grizzly Bear’s mutually enforcing worlds of reverberation. I don’t believe I was the only one to experience this in the audience, judging from the looks of happiness and openness on people’s faces after the set.

Composer and pianist Michael Harrison began the transformation of our standard atomized audience into a harmonious blob of sonic joy with selections from his work, Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation.  He played—with his fingers, with his elbows, with his fists—for nearly forty minutes with only a two stops for movements.  While his persona exudes a cosmic mysticism (he was a student of La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath), the effect of his playing was intensely physical.  Harrison’s elegantly throbbing tone clusters filled the room just as much as Grizzly Bear would in the second half of the concert (with full amplification).  He progressively increased the energy until he reached a violent, percussive, and inundating conclusion that simply left the audience in awe.  Every inch of space seemed to vibrate and pulse; I remember reading a review long ago that described how a certain very heavy band could “turn an audience into zombie pod people through sheer heaviness;” if any “classical” music could so ingratiatingly do the exact same thing , it would be this music. 

A large part of the mystery of this music stemmed from his use of just intonation on the piano.  Rather than tune the piano to the (now) standard equal tuning, he tuned the strings of his piano with Pythagorean perfect ratios (for instance, 3/2 for a fifth).  Equal tuning slightly readjusts every ratio so that every interval sounds just about right but not completely so.  The effect of this is that the overtone series of each interval does not ring out as completely.  The just intonation solves this problem, but at the same time because of some cosmic screw-up, whenever an entire scale is tuned in this way, there are gaps called commas that occur between enharmonic notes that should be the same (e.g. A sharp and B flat).  This is a problem that Harrison’s work turns into a solution. Rather than shying away from the dissonance created by these non-matching notes, he played them up, creating a positive sonic discomfort.  So while we were lost in a sea of resonating tone, there was also a vague sense of terror and foreboding.  Overall, he forced us to listen inside out, that is, from the perspective of overtone and timbre rather than old fashioned pianistic virtuosity or simple melodic contour.  We were not listening to or for “what’s next” but just listening: and without getting too metaphysical, this is a truly wonderful, almost cleansing experience. 

The sublimity of this spectral noise daze was actually intensified by Grizzly Bear’s set.  The power of noise largely stems from the possibility—when you listen with depth—of hearing ghostly melodies rising out of the mists of tone. You hear overtones and harmonics open up into intricate, impossible sets of sound (this is what you hear in the best moments of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth).  Grizzly Bear’s own polyvocal, echo-chamber sound world works the same way, but they give expressive vocal presence to those ethereal sounds.  Intricate vocal melodies and harmonies arise perfectly from an aural landscape in which the band members electronically manipulate every standard rock instrument—drums, bass, guitars, vocals—and some not so standard ones—a Wurlitzer, flute, clarinet, toy keyboard, and autoharp.  Grizzly Bear make amazing albums (and they have a new one released on Nov. 5 entitled Friend), but their live shows are much louder and more powerful than one might expect.  The guitars and noises come alive in an implosive way: we were caught in a swirl of sound that was not about destruction or pyrotechnics but inundation and seamlessness. And live, the sheer vocal fullness—an aspect of their sound that drives nearly every commentator wild— comes to the fore. But the amazing aspect is not simply that they easily executed such vocal complexity on Saturday night but that they never forced their voices onto a song.  Every element of each song, including the singing, seemed to come organically from the surrounding instrumental/electronic blend.  The song “Knife” perfectly illustrated this sensibility: Chris Taylor’s ridiculously catchy girl group background line mixed with Ed Droste’s “main” vocal line mixed with Chris Bear’s and Dan Rosen’s harmonies mixed with the sonic world created by Chris Taylor’s effects mixed with the regular pulses of Rosen’s guitar playing mixed with Chris Bear’s digitally effected drums…all to create not a wall of sound that kept us out but rather an ocean of sound that sucked us in (to return yet again to that metaphor of an all-encompassing sonic reality).  Or take “Colorado,” a vocal effects masterpiece (one of the catchiest melodies in indie rock today) that then gave way to Rosen’s tremolo-picked waves of guitar intricacy.  Or take how Taylor’s clarinet transformed into a bass that shook me in a way I’ve never heard or felt a regular bass shake me.  Every sound was powerfully THERE but also self-effacing; it made itself known and then melted away into the revolving mix.

This self-effacing quality is not just a sonic phenomenon.  The band has a perfectly nonchalant and unpretentious stage presence.  Droste at one point: “I’m not doing a very good job as the stage manager this evening. Well, I guess you have your on days and your off days.”  Overall the band seemed perfectly comfortable and even-keeled and, perhaps, relieved that this was their last show for a long while.  And in another self-effacing move, the last two songs of the evening were covers.  Rather than play a “hit” (of sorts) like “Deep Sea Diver,” the band chose to give respect to their antecedents.  Rosen and Bear came out alone to play “Graceland” by Paul Simon, a truly beautiful rendition that contrasted nicely with the band’s full sound in its folksy whimsicality but not in its almost desolate tone of inevitable departure.  Then the full band came out to sing “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss),” formerly a staple of the Phil Spector girl group, The Crystals (and a favorite of feminists everywhere, I’m sure). This song about the strange (and perhaps not totally healthy) interplay between violence and love fits nicely into the Grizzly Bear oeuvre where knives, betrayal, and absence are constantly at play.  This kind of lyrical content combined with the band’s oceanic noise made the evening as a whole reminiscent of a line from Jorge Luis Borges: “All was vast, but at the same intimate, and somehow secret.”

Links
Wordless Music Series [official site]
Photos [chris owyoung]

The first of our collaborative pieces with the Wordless Music Series in NYC, guest writer John Melillo covers Beirut’s recent double gig as part of this brilliant series of concerts. 

The Wordless Music Series is dedicated to a seemingly obvious but never-acted-upon truth: that the worlds of music we call “indie rock,” “classical,” “improvisational,” “jazz,” “electronic,” “folk,” etc. are not impenetrable, absolute, or self-contained. They do, in fact, intermingle and mix. Each installment of Wordless Music (a slight misnomer since words are allowed) brings this mix to life, and we get the chance to hear some wonderfully strange and amazing combinations without having to feel self-conscious or out-of-touch (or having to pay a ridiculous price). Even in organization, the shows are a blend: some sort of bastard child of Lincoln Center (programs!), your standard small venue, and your friend’s do-it-yourself basement show. There are no frills here: it’s all about the music.

It is perhaps for this reason that the series has attracted some of the most innovative acts out there, from Nels Cline to Andrew Bird to A Hawk and a Hacksaw to Explosions in the Sky to Amiina to Real Quiet to the Books to Do Make Say Think to… The latest band to add its name to this illustrious list is Beirut. Perhaps their friends from A Hawk and Hacksaw, who helped Zach Condon (the original whiz kid behind the band) get his start and who also perform on Beirut’s latest album (The Flying Club Cup, released this week in the U.S.), told them about it and they couldn’t wait, or perhaps they just wanted to play two New York shows before they embarked on an album-supporting world tour. Either way, we got the benefits.

The first show, on Thursday September 20, took place in Fort Greene, Brooklyn at the beautifully worn and majestic Brooklyn Masonic Temple (DIY, right? Who has shows at masonic temples but punk rockers and the neighborhood accordion band?). The elegantly decaying space was the perfect embodiment of the band’s sound: a mélange of melodic plenitude, folk instrumentation (particularly Eastern European folk), and gypsy carnival drums with a dash of amateurish naivete. Old world refinement and folksiness meets new world brashness and exuberance. After all, despite the fact that we want to imagine this band in a village folk festival and despite all those waltzes and acoustic instruments, they rock. Beirut attracts an audience not just through novelty but through good old-fashioned move-to-the-beat dance music.

Thursday night’s crowd—initially full of trepidation—stood up by the second song (with a little nudge from the band and a loud, dancing, drunken guy standing to the left of the stage) and proceeded to swirl and sway with the rolling rhythms of the pan-European popular music before them. In this setting particularly—small and intimate yet somehow spacious and encompassing—their music took on a life of its own: it wrapped around us in a warm, fuzzy embrace that—through the medium of Condon’s voice and melodies—still retained that necessary, beautiful melancholy. By comparison, their show in the much larger, open-air McCarren Park Pool a year ago seemed dispersed and lacking in energy. The band needs a small space for their lackadaisical yet affecting stage presence. They are what one might call a “loose” band—at one point they stopped a song to teach the accordion player the rhythm he forgot, only to stop the song again when the guitarist forgot the chord progression—but their looseness becomes an advantage through the intimacy of their demeanor, understated charisma (not just Zach, ladies), and great songs. This casual demeanor provides an invitation into the band’s world (“Welcome to Beirut rehearsal,” said Zach). After all, it all started as the bedroom musings of a teenager…

The youthful spirit of Beirut paired well with Fifth Veil, a group of students from the Bard Conservatory of Music who proved to be an excellent match. Also young, and perhaps a little surprised at what they had got themselves into, Fifth Veil bravely performed the The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind by Osvaldo Golijov. Conor Brown’s Klezmer style clarinet playing—the core of the piece—was intense and virtuosic, but the seductive harmonics from the string players gave the music its real character and provided a creeping sonic counterpoint to Condon’s vocals later in the evening. One could imagine these “empty” strings as a kind of photographic negative of his voice.

Beirut’s second show for Wordless (Monday, Sept.24), this time in Manhattan at the Society for Ethical Culture, was a bit different. The setting was just as beautiful (sans dilapidation), and the sound was perfect (as expected: this is the room where The Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center performs while their usual hall is in disrepair). But the audience, bound by fixed pews rather than flimsy fold-up chairs, did not stand up to dance until the encore. Still, the show still had an amazing energy. The songs were clearer, more pristine, and tighter this time around; one could really hear the batch of new influences that are at work in Beirut’s new album. There are the familiar Eastern European traces, but these are now combined with strains of “classic” French popular song, in particular Francois Hardy, Charles Aznavour, and Jacques Brel.

In this more Apollonian setting, the two major strengths of their live show still came through: the band’s zany multi-instrumentalism and Zach Condon’s full voice. Ukuleles, mandolins, violins, acoustic guitars, an acoustic bass, an electric piano, a drastically reduced drum set, an accordion, and a multiplicity of trumpets and horns are variously strewn about the stage, to be picked up at any moment by almost anyone. Each song has a unique flavor of instrumentation, while at the same time retaining a very specific home-spun, do it yourself sound. The comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel are founded in this sense, but at the same time, Condon’s voice is vastly different than Jeff Mangum’s. While Mangum’s voice was dry and nasal, Condon’s is probably the definition of mellifluous. It seems to contain a multiplicity of little Zachs within it. He’s a chorus all to himself, even when there are those moments—and there are many—when the band jumps into full-voiced sing-a-long mode. In particular, a new song “A Sunday Smile” lends itself to this kind of participatory excitement. The chorus melody invites everyone in, and many people attempted to sing along despite not knowing the songs’ lyrics. I kind of wished for a turn of the century music hall, where lyric sheets were handed out before the shows to encourage sing-a-long sweetness.

The need to sing probably stemmed from a build-up of energy ever since the opening half of the program. The first artist on the bill, Colleen, a French musician who plays the viola da gamba and looped electronics, was brilliant. In a pristine mix of simplicity and complexity, she would play gorgeous, stately lines and then loop them to create a contrapuntal wave of sound. Every now and then, she would add a tinkling set of wind chimes to her electronic loop-created canons. These are truly haunting, wind-swept, alien-baroque pieces.

Katya Mihailova and Colin Jacobsen (pianist and violinist, respectively) performed in a similar if more traditional vein. Katya played some Chopin and Scriabin, and then they combined forces to play the highlight of their part of the program: Arvo Part’s Fratres. If you haven’t heard this piece, find a way to listen to it. Repetitive, emotional, dramatic, spooky: it’s everything a fan of Beirut and rock music could want in new classical music. Really, it’s everything a fan of music in general would want. In the piece, Jacobsen used spine-tickling violin harmonics to great effect while Mihailova sometimes hammered, sometimes caressed the piano as the music moved between violent dissonance and whispering repose. After all this intensity, Beirut was a much-needed relief!

Photos: Brooklyn Masonic Temple courtesy of Diana Wong, Society for Ethical Culture courtesy of Kathryn Yu.

Links
Wordless Music Series [official site]
Beirut [official site] [myspace] [the flying club cup review]