Wordless Music Series: Grizzly Bear – NYC, 03/11/07

-

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]