Welcome to the working week

I'm in the middle of a pretty action-packed week for music here in Buffalo--and, alas, a pretty action-packed one on the work front, which means I haven't had time to write much about any of it here, let alone the many albums I've acquired lately. A few quick notes must suffice:

1. Last Thursday was the annual John Lennon tribute show at Nietzsche's. I didn't see much of the actual concert since I was busy elsewhere in the room with the Real Dream Cabaret's re-enactment of John and Yoko's Montreal Bed-In for Peace. (Celia White has posted some images of the entire night on Flickr, and if all goes well we should be adding some to the Cabaret site soon, too.) Anyway, I could hear the main show over the PA, and there were many fine moments (along with the usual straightforward cover-band versions that never do much for me). Too sleepy now to be able to name names.

2. Last Saturday the same venue sounded completely different during a late show programmed by Pam Swarts. When we arrived, the front stage (site of the Bed-In two days earlier) was the setting for some nicely minimal glitchcore stuff by GregGreg, who'd rigged up something thereminlike on his keyboard which multiplied the effects he was able to get with a wave of his hand. (Sorry I lack the vocabulary to describe this accurately, but it was pretty impressive to watch.)



Next on the bill was Dimetrodon, who have played in Cabaret shows a couple of times over the years, although they've definitely evolved (in a really good way) since then. The flyer described their sound as "honest-to-goodness surf klezmer," and that seems about right to me. It's all-instrumental dance music, and they packed the floor. (The only cover I recognized was Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet's theme to Kids in the Hall, which I always liked more than the actual series.) I think my friends who loved the music in the film version of Everything is Illuminated would enjoy these guys. I also hope they tour someday, because I want more people to hear what they're up to. As always, pardon the super-crappy cell phone snapshot:



Pam herself ended the evening with her latest band, Weather Machine, a trio on the more accessible side of her aesthetic. I've always appreciated Pam's comfort with both weirdass experimentation and fairly straightforward rock--that's something you don't see very often, and she's got both the musicianship and the voice to pull it off. "Hey, Ron," you now ask, "Didja happen to take a crappy cell phone picture of Weather Machine?" Ah, but of course:



3. Earlier tonight, an outstanding triple bill at the UB Center for the Arts: the Magic Numbers, Feist, and Bright Eyes. I hope to say more about this one later, so let's plunge boldly into the future:

4. This coming Wednesday--Thanksgiving Eve--two of the most highly praised new(ish) Buffalo bands will be playing at Mohawk Place: the Old Sweethearts and Sleeping Kings of Iona. (The first people to arrive evidently get a newly minted CD of rareties, which is pretty exciting, given how great the two Sweethearts albums are.) Of the two, I've only seen the Sweethearts, though I continue to hear great stuff about the Sleeping Kings, and this one is high on my list. Alas, I missed the Sweethearts when they opened for Kathleen Edwards a month back, since they played way earlier than I expected--but, again, that's another evening I plan to write more about sometime when things calm down.

Head Games

So there I was, a few days ago, raking leaves and listening on my Walkman to Gal Costa's 1969 album (one of two eponymous releases from that year, confusingly enough). Now, if you're not familiar with Ms. Costa, you need to know that she was one of the major forces in the Tropicalia movement (and has continued to release music of varying styles and quality ever since--as always, Joe Sixpack's Slipcue site has a great intro/discography). I've heard her described as the Janis Joplin of Brazil, which is only useful, as far as I can tell, as an indicator of her energy level and perhaps her standing in her home country during the sixties. But trust me, Janis never recorded anything anywhere near as wild as this album. I doubt that many people on any continent have: the songs shift from pop-py Burt Bacharach-style arrangements to ear-shattering screaming, guitar feedback, distortion, reverb, you name it, usually in midsong. I'd say the album art does a fairly good job of conveying the general atmosphere:



Take Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Yoko Ono, lock them in a room with a large amount of hallucinogens, and then soak the resulting master tapes in acid, and you've got the basic idea. You sort of have to be in the right mood to listen to this thing (and when you are, it's the perfect thing). Needless to say, I haven't been in that mood very often lately, but leaf-raking--a task I hate--felt like a good time to listen again. Plus I've been on a real Brazilian psychedelia kick, spurred on by my recent discovery of Secos & Molhados (more on them later), which also led to a closer listen to Os Mutantes (ditto), and Gal seemed like just the ticket.

I got to song three on the album, "Meu Nome É Gal" ("My Name is Gal"), and witnessed the moment where she starts wailing in this totally gutteral, Diamandas Galas-style voice over a fairly accessible pop-funk string and horn section; from there, it was on to track four, "Com Médo, Com Pedro," which brings in the echo chamber and more crazy shrieks. Then things started to get really bizarre--even farther out there than I remembered. Dear lord, I thought, she's doing all this amazing stuff with dub effects and changing the speed of the tape, even slowing it down to total inaudibility--it's incredible! And it just kept going and going and going, getting more metallic, almost painful even, as time went on.

After about fifteen minutes of this, it dawned on me that maybe there was something wrong with the Walkman. Lo and behold, that was exactly the case; even a Debbie Boone album would have sounded like Lee "Scratch" Perry had gotten his corrosive mitts on it under these conditions.

The scenario reminded me of the night I played a new Radiohead 45 (a bonus with my copy of Hail to the Thief) for the first time and marvelled at the utterly outrageous experimentation those boys were up to: the melody buried under layers of sonic fuzz, the pitch distorted wildly, and so on. A brilliant assault on bourgeois convention! It took me at least five minutes to realize that
a) there really was a layer of actual fuzz on the needle, and
b) I was playing the 45 at 33 rpm.
When I heard it the way it was recorded, it was a real letdown. I mean, how conventional can you get?

On another occasion, I walked into a hipster coworker's office to find out what cool underground noise band he was playing, only to find out he was vacuuming the carpet. (Even so, I would love to have a copy of that sound--it was fantastic!)

So, yes, it is possible that I have been ever so slightly damaged by art, and maybe I take John Cage just a wee bit too literally with that whole anything-goes aesthetic. If it's any consolation, I get misty when I think about Seals & Crofts and Loggins & Messina, and even though we all know John was the best Beatle, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Wings. So please, please, do not write me off as a total avant-garde aesthete. I just appreciate a well-tuned vacuum cleaner and/or broken tape player every now and then; what right-thinking person doesn't?