LIGHTNINGBOLT: AGAIN?
AGAIN&AGAIN&AGAIN&AGAIN&AGAIN& AGAIN.
AND DONT TELL ME YOU DONT LIKE IT!
I had not heard these fellas since the new years eve party prior to the fall of fort thunder
and was completely thrilled by every moment of this "appearance" of BRIAN G AND BRIAN C-
from their sound check to the last brass ring fell outta my ear halfway down Broadway.
Dare I presume to deconstruct THE VOICE of this mad, flailing duo of super-sophisticated youthz, OTHER THAN TO SAY
THAT THEY SEEM TO BE POSESSED OF THE ENTIRE SYMBOLIC LEXICON OF ZEUS
(and not just the electrodynamic exclamation marks)
HOWEVER, on this lateliest occasion, I WAS STRUCK, (*as if by lightning) BY A NEW ASPECT OF THIS OLYMPIAN NOISE.
I was scribbling on an installation in an adjacent gallery at AS22O on the night in question. So when I grew weary of the crowd
I simply withdrew to the space where I was drawing, which allowed me to actually LISTEN to the sound! As opposed to BEING SMITTEN by this ungawdly outpouring of jovian punctuation marks and THE SCENE I've come to expect surrounding it.. And thus I was amazed how marvelous it sounded, AS MUSIC- - in the absence of the
combination of theatrical Sturm und Drang and primal alpha male display behavior which I had previously mistaken for the art of this
duo. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT IM A FUCKING FIFTY YEAR OLD MAN, SO when I attend a concert featuring bass, drums n noise so loud that it appears to make my ears subordinate to my solar plexus as far as being the primary receptive apparatus, AND where a hundred odd 20 year old boys are responding to the "play" like an electrode has been inserted directly into the area of their brains which provokes "sexual display behavior" , I CAN'T HELP BUT THINK IMMEDIATELY THAT THIS IS A RITUAL "ACT" & NOT A CONCERT.
Hence I had previously described LIGHTNINGBOLT as a POST MUSICAL PHENOMENON.
AND IT IS, but it is also music, which, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, IS NEWS TO ME.
THERES GOTTA BE A POINT WHERE ART IS SIMPLY TOO EFFECTIVE TO REQUIRE ANALYSIS OR CRITICISM.
Ideally I suppose this would be all the time but it just aint. Fortunately for me the real purpose of writing about music is to get to a point where I can just shut up and listen. AINT I LUCKY.
Ok, so in the general metaphorical realm of "listening to lightningbolt", Id like to note that I also READ a very interesting interview with Brian N Brian on-line recently, and was absolutely astounded by one of Mr Gibson's comments.
Asked what effect (if any) the study of visual art had had on the music of LIGHTNING BOLT , he replied "It taught me the
importance of using a limited palette". LIKE WOW!
I DONT CARE IF BOTH OF THESE SUPERANNUATED TEENAGE LUMINARIES CONSPIRED TO CONSTRUCT THAT REMARK FER A DECADE, its a fantastic perspective on their art!
Given the amount of intolerable background noise incessantly created by the rest of the human race, I am consistently amazed by
the intelligence manifested by these 2 fabulously urbane and articulate gentlemen.
BABY STRANGE!
HOW CONVIENIENT, I just got a new bitch the night I heard this band!
(YES! that's correct, a new female puppy, you stupid, uptite,
politically-erect nipplehead! N man IS THIS BABY STRANGE!
Kind of a cross between Ms PACMAN and a furry piranha.)
Ok, but meanwhile BABY STRANGE (THE BAND) IS WHAT I REALLY WANNA
RAVE ABOUT!
It is an amazing effort!
Their (LITERALLY)awesome fusion of word-play n classical power pop
composing GOT ME OFF AND ROCKING OUT FULL TILT SO FAST.. it forced
me to lock my ancient hippy ass in the basement for the majority of
their set. HEY ITS ONLY FAIR!Im scary if I aint dancing with a wife or girlfriend and even then they hafta do alot of apologizing on my behalf. & I did not want to scare the gurls that hadn't started dancing yet. Hence I bounced off the walls in the basement so they could let themselves go...& Fortunately they did. THE GURLS THAT IZ. THESE GUYS MIGHT HAVE BEEN BORN IN THE EIGHTIES AND ARE DRESSING LIKE THE KNACK ON CRACK but their act is slicker than shit and totally legit!
Their tune "NOBODY KNOWS YOU LIKE I DO" is half true love ode a la mode and half a subliminal suggestion of a nasal sex act! Given the presence of a certain house manager that evening, I couldn't help but think the subliminal suggestion of a "NOSE JOB" was prolly the dominant half of the connotative baggage being thrown around to this
terribly modern yet simultaneously very sixties type of sound.
Sure! I like to do those "head dances" that post musical hardcore noise bands inspire, but the rest of me needs to be entertained as well. (Maybe i should say the rest of me-ziz the way Rhode islanders say youses)
Anyway BABY STRANGE GOT ALL OF ME OFF,
FROM my toes to the part of me that knows.
GRANDIZER PUNCH!
"UH OH!"
Theorize all the fuck you want about about why I like things or dont, or even werse why I let myself rave about some things in type & just turn other subjects into gusts of noxious hot air?
Why do some things deserve to be transformed into the sound of myself TALKING (AND/or LAFFING) and other things MERELY CONSTRAINED to patterns of subliminal homicidal ideation?
Its all a side effect of having UN-DETACHABLE ORGANS. So Go figger.
Wunt it be great if you could just CHECK YER HEAD LITERALLY, or maybe just, yer cerebral cortex, when a band like this can just suspend your disbelief by the casual fun they generate instantaneously?
My ancient Irish pappy, now lost in the delirium of octogenarian dementia in North Carolina, condemned me as a yung man when he said "PETER JOHN, THE PROBLEM WITH YOU IS THAT YOU ACTUALLY LISTEN TO PEOPLE!"
Fortunately for me, I do not find it a problem as often as he did.
Pertikularly when the people in question are the fellas in Grandizer Punch because, well, their brand of smart-ass pop music is really what I like, And, on top of being marvelously competent at whipping that out, they are also some pretty damn civilized & swingin cosmopolites what can actually hold a pretty fucking decent conversation when they aint, you know,rockin da house.
THE BEST TEN MINUTES OF
THE WIMMENZ NOISE FEST
There were an awful lot of missed opportunities at the
womens noise festival, way the fuck back in October it musta been.
I wrote about it originally as a piece of my homo-erotic whirled
series edition of the very very oxymoronic sub zinette
AS22O CAFE SOCIETY
but then I took it out of that in order to take that thang to another
conclusion.
WHAT? I CANT?
If I had realized that all you had to do to qualify for a slot on this bill, was to put yer big boys ass in a dress, and do yer same old, all male act, I mighta taken a few of my existential biker porno movies from 1989 and redubbed a soundtrack of my very favorite WIMMENZ NOISE from classic video smut (running the gamut from Vanessa del Rio to the 21st century chipmunk gurl) over the top and it mighta been as strange as seein the TFO fellas dressed like the spice gurls in kindergarten. But I dint.
So there wunt nothing to this "FESTIVAL" except guy groups in drag.....EXCEPT FOR
ONE, ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT OUTBURST BY THE EX-ELEKTRA COMPLEX GURLS (AND FRIENDS,) given a name that was three letters that I cant recall.. (P.M.S with A.D.D.?) But fortunately I do remember that There are a couple of MAJOR innovations in this group (E.S.G. on L.S.D.?)that transformed this effort, from "the diary of a mad counter gurl" (E.E.G. of K.K.SCHMEE?) into.... "MAD-AS-HELL COUNTERGURLS-KICK-ASS" which is just one of the endless rubrics I could (and have) floated above my memory of this incredible OVER THE TOP SPECTACLE. (P.J.B. re: double-X O.D?)
First off, the two woman drum team of Melanie and Niki provided an endless rolling thunder to propel Marcella into a frenzy of dancing, strutting and shrieking WHICH WAS ABSOLUTE GENIUS ON WHEELS!
The relentless beat of them two gurls playing ensemble created a flowing thumping hysterical cascade which made me wonder to myself
"which one ovum is gonna change their name to Butch Trucks?"
Having blissfully abandoned lyrics in favor of PRIMAL SPONTANEOUS VOCALIZATION, Marcella K also managed to fuse Mick Jaggers "rooster walk" with an indian war dance and created a ritual space in which the bass and guitar wielding babes in this group could comport themselves in a brilliant melange of self-absorbed tedium and awkwardness thats, like, a hybrid-mutant mix of Sid Vicious and Courtney Love ignoring eachother while simultaneously asking "where are the drugs?"
The chemistry amongst these five gurlz is so volatile, that, naturally they haven't reconfigured since, but god I really hope they get synchronized again!!
At least once more fer posterity and a global satellite feed!
BECAUSE IN THE FUTURE, "GIRLS GONE WILD" IS GONNA LOOK LIKE THIS!
Whether or not this particularly fab, five woman band makes it happen for themselves is irrelevant. The reincarnation of this phenomenon is inevitable!
NOISEY
WOMEN:
OLD SCHOOL ECSTACY?
OR NEW GENRE?
In a related story; The concept of WOMENS NOISE, as somehow exclusive
of the racket being made by penis swinging, punk rocking "puntz", which
was recently (see above) brought to my attention as a somehow suppositional
"NEW GENRE", is, to my mind, certainly not new. IZZIT OR AINTIT?
Puzzling thusly in a co-emergent maze of rhetorical connundrum, I spent
a part of my time in November engaging female members of the beatnik league with the
following bizzarro interogative:
IF MEN SEEM TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO QUALMS,
RESERVATIONS OR INTERIOR CONFLICTS GENERATED
FROM A PREDISPOSITION TOWARD BARKING AND
GRUNTING AS A MODE OF SELF-EXPRESSION....
IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAY THAT
WOMEN SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED TO
"MAKE NOISE" MORE OFTEN AND "TALK" LESS?
OR HAVE I STUMBLED UPON THE ULTIMATE
"MOOT SUBJECT"?
BESIDES GENERATING NEW REASONS TO BE "VILLIFIED BY THE WOMEN OF AS22O",
this enquiry earned me new GLANCES ASKANCE from them what I dared to
inquire of regarding this mad notion. Not to mention the fact that
"WELL OF COURSE it was" unanimously proclaimed "rhetorical"
very loudly (AS OPPOSED TO....dare I say *wat?)
But, I was generally assured that it wasnt any more offensive than
the sound of my voice in general. Plus I actually got some intrigued and/or ambivalent looks from this generally sphinxy and ambitiously inscrutable
demographic sector.
I only mention it because, with the emergence of post-feminist pop sentimuntz
in the past thiry or forty years, the insistance of the female mind upon
men folk "articulating" or "expressing themselves" has been somewhat
excruciatingly one sided. Its only fair that men should begin to
encourage women to embrace the immaculate and irrational gestalt of
"noise making" ,as they seem to have overlooked how brilliantly
expressive they are in the absence of language.
THE WILD MOOD SWINGS OF
THE BUTCHERINGS
I saw this band in the midst of a long evening of tepid performances a few months ago and took away no impression at all...THEN LAST NIGHT
I WITNESSED THE SAME POWER TRIO THROW DOWN A SET FULL OF SUCH RELENTLESS, FULL TILT slommin n bongin RHYTHMN AND SCREAMING BALLS-TO-THE-WALL-LES-PAUL that, well I thought it musta been the guitar players alternative effort and not just the same combo on the opposite end of the arc of inspiration. I was pretty glad to learn that the same gang of instrumentationalistes/bicycle mechanics were endowed with such wild, swangin karma that they could become background sound in a moment when their artistical pendulum was at ebb tide, and then come back with all the momentum of the universe and play so wild and brilliantly that I was looking for doctors and nurses administering
the IV drips of norepinephrine that, IT SEEMED TO ME, shoulda been standing among the amplifiers! I CANT HELP MYSELF, sometimes I just want some absurd, "hard science" (rational) phenomenon to explain why one performance is so turribly UNPLUGGED and the next is a non-stop, seamless stream of blistering, ballistical, flat-out-fobulous flailing n wailing.
I guess they was inspired by the crowd, who were packed into AS22O on this particular occasion, ostensibly, to see the headliner MAHI MAHI (a band I dont git atoll). But this show was all about THE BUTCHERINGS, except for the last bit of the Mahi Mahi set which featured a reprise of JAMES IN FLAMES fanning his screaming les Paul like it was possessed by a couple o crazy horses.
THIRD STORY CONGRESS
MEETS M.I.A?
THE THRILL IS
GOIN ON!
AN R&B ROOTS/FOLK / HIP HOP FUSION
OF HISTORY AND NAIVE VOICES
GOES STRAIGHT TO MY "INNER, INNER LAND"
Huh whutt? Just when you thought the cross pollination of musical/performance modes "IN-HOUSE" on empire street had finally been given a rest with the death rattle of the neo-non-entities dance band, T.F.O started featuring a viola (plus metropolitan opera attitudes), Chris Warren filled a "waterbed" with home-grown jello shots of 70's funk rock and finally, the collective blues/folk archive of impossibly inventive and authentic players,assembled around Chris Monti under the banners of Third Story Congress and the Killdevils, put themselves at the service of the best intentions of the in-house, hip hopsters collectively called MIA.
First of all let me say that ALL THESE FUCKING NAMES HAVE GOT ME IN APOPLECTIC SHOCK. The MIA "group" is approximately three or four or five or so familiar faces.. PLAN B aka Josh, B.C. aka Harmony, POET aka Kevin, V-Eye aka Vinny- with enough supporting players to make it like a Gilbert and Sullivan opera where-in "THEIR SISTERS AND THEIR COUSINS WHO'LL BE RECONNED BY THE DOZENS AND THEIR AUNTZZZ" are all kickin it in some supporting capacity. Of them I only caught two names DNA aka Damian and TWIGGZ aka Chris. BUT HAVE MERCY! It just aint fair to expect an ancient hippy & longwinded & toothless typewriter tapper like me to make sense out of who says "yo" when.
As far as I can tell this miracle is primarily the brainchild of PLAN B, though obviously there is a mad conspiracy afoot between Harmony Boyce and Josh and Kevin, that is WAY beyond my tiny imagination. Besides the fact that by the time this set was done there was not a soul in the room who wasnt adding something to the mix
Maybe I should try imagining PLATEAUS OF CONSPIRACY, instead of trying to give credit or consequence to specific personas? HEY! NOW
THAT COULD WORK! Because as much as the rappers had to conspire so also didnt the musicians. (How much more rhode island can it get?)
ERGO:This night was as much the creation of Chris, Francis, Ed and Jake who conspire on their own as THIRD STORY CONGRESS AND THE KILLDEVILS and who have impressed me over and over as being the most impossibly gifted instrumentalists (& players) in both their abilities and their willingness to be avant guardians and servants of the muse.
But basically "The miracle" is that my response to hip hop jabbering of this inexplicably popular gangsta genre, WAS COMPLETELY POLARIZED,
FROM THE MOST NEGATIVE TO THE EXTREMEST POSITIVE AFTER HEARING IT PERFORMED WITH TWO DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED MODES OF "ACCOMPANYMUNT" on either side of a BLUES/ROOTS set by the "kildevil congressmen".
From hearing it performed at first, with pre-recorded "beats" (which I find practically intolerable 99% of the time) to simply by having musicians of the sublime quality of third story congress ACTUALLY EXCECUTING the loops of melody, bass and beats which the MIA gang had mixed onto a CD via the conventional modes, and then lent to the musicians to learn from.
Forgive me my pedantic blurbology but this was really an amazing feat.
The final song of the evening featured a loop sampled from BB KINGS
"the thrill is gone" but it was actually re-created live (OVER N OVER N OVER) immaculately-in-real-time, without the rappers having to compensate for anything irregular in the tempo or for that matter experiencing anything other than delight and an access to their own souls which mere technology cannot offer. Did I actually just say "anything other than delight"?
That just shows how far I will go in abusing significance to create
subliminal assonance donnit?
I only hope that mixing it up with musical genies of this "caliber" inspires the rappers involved to write something more glorious and remarkable than the run of the mill rhymes you hear in this genre- which, you might be amused to hear, I CAME TO THE RECENT CONCLUSION, ARE ACTUALLY GHETTO VERSIONS OF WHATEVER THAT SONG IS JEWISH BOYS GOTTA SING AT THEIR BAR MITZVAS. My logic being that the content amounts to proclaiming "today I am a man" over n over n over.
And I have no doubt that the musicians involved will find their consequent renditions of the classical aspects of folk, blues and soul
just a little bit more outta control FOR EVER N EVER AMEN.
If you missed this moment of miraculous musical worlds in collision Plan B has sceduled another evening with the Third Story Congressmen Feb 16 2005
TINY HAWKS
OUT OF THE BASEMENT AT LAST!
I should thank Steve Ventura for letting me stand around all night waiting to hear Maria sing without bothering to tell me she had already performed before I arrived at this very strange benefit last friday. The reason I should thank him, is that, as the result of waiting, I actually got to see the two man band TINY HAWKS perform IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE, after spending many hours previously listening to them, pseudo-surreptitiously within earshot of the AS22O practice room.
Its amazing how much music I get access to just because I spend so much time "lurking" in the as22O basement for such a panorama of motives. And each time I get priveledged to catch a "private audience"
my reasons for lurking get more numerous.
But as far as deconstructing or interpreting the greatness or actual teeny tiny hawkishness of this bands play, Im going to just refer back to the place in my blurb about lightningbolt, where I said THE purpose of writing about music is to quicken the rate at which you get to a place where you can just shut up and listen. CAPICE?
Ok, so MAY AY BEEEE maybe maybe maybe, IF I PRAY EVERY NIGHT, next time Ill get to AS22O in time to hear Maria Ventura sing "maybe" agin. But, as it turned out, I got an earful of some very MIGHTY METAL and a very lofty view of the CLOUDS of JOY via them man/boys in Tiny Hawks.
There is just one thing I do not understand about bands like this:Why do they play so furiously and with such brilliance, yet feel a need to tell you what "THIS SONG IS ABOUT" before they play it?
Do they think they are not successfully conveying an entire universe of feeling and conviction in their art??
BECAUSE THEY ARE! THEY ALL ARE!
