Apologies for the recent publishing blackout here at the Den. It’s been a busy winter and more or less pretty tough to keep up with anything at all. Working on stories for the Boston Phoenix on Sebadoh and O’Death, coming in a few weeks, with a few other creative/fiction works in the oven as well.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken over booking duties at the classical/contemporary artist management group Ariel Artists, based in Boston and representing soloists and ensembles from Boston and New York City. The roster is a blast and, collectively, offer a super crash course in 20th Century music (from Debussy on to Satie, Stravinsky, Cage, Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, John Luther Adams, Mei-Fang Lin, John Zorn and Toshio Hosokowa, plus lots of brand new commissioned works), not to mention an across-the-board excellency with classical/romantic and earlier stuff. A website overhaul is on the way and lots of exciting stuff on the way from this group in general. I’ll try to avoid overzealous plugging of shows here all the time, but will let you know as they come up since they’re all great performances on their own, with or without my involvement. On the immediate horizon: a string of shows by solo pianist Oni Buchanan in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
I recently had a chance to catch one of three US performances of Tyondai Braxton‘s music by the Wordless Music Orchestra at Lincoln Center in New York. Full disclosure – a few friends were deeply involved in the project, so I can’t claim impartiality to the subject (do you care?), but the performances felt too big to let go without mention. Braxton recently left the avant-rock supergroup Battles to focus on solo work like this. Seeing that it made music like this possible, I’m glad he did so. For those familiar with this music, as released in 2009 on Central Market (Warp), the live performances probably didn’t offer too many revelations. Braxton’s compositions take most of the big-picture scores of orchestral engineers of the last hundred years through the paper shredder. The optimistic buzz-whiz of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the zany Mouse Trap contraptions you can trace from Danny Elfman on back to Bernard Hermann and Raymond Scott, kazoo and percussion pranks from Spike Jones, and the cautiously aware tonalities of Copland and Bernstein all play into Braxton’s compositional schemes. There’s also plenty of thorny guitar work which, depending on your frame of reference, might be either the most familiar or most alienating part of the music. It’s likely, though, that none of this stuff comes from way out of left field, regardless of what seems to be the easiest way to frame it (i.e. the clashing of indie and classical scenes). Ennio Morricone was pairing nasty-sounding surf guitar and harmonica with orchestras in Clint Eastwood westerns almost 50 years ago, and most of our grandpas never minded, so it’s kind of stunning that the concept of “genre-bending” still raises eyebrows anywhere. Nevertheless, it does, and seeing music that lives this far in between worlds get superstar treatment at places like Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress is . . . notable.
The group onstage set up in regular orchestra arcs of strings, french horn, trumpets, percussion, a couple electronics engineers, a small choir of kazoo players, and six guitarists (Braxton himself took first chair guitars), and were conducted by Caleb Burhans. Who knows how some of this stuff was constructed on record but, live, six guitars pulling off Esquivel-style rubber band slides in unison and thunking out low blasts sounded incredible. Disembodied beatbox loops started off a little awkwardly in the mix, but even those eventually made sense as the night went on. The percussion section broke out a few alien-looking pieces of equipment to saw across with a bow for eerie squeals, and yeah, the kazoos sounded appropriately goofy. In short, it ruled. The group performed Thursday in DC, and the material is scheduled for one more run in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Battles, meanwhile, has moved on as a three-piece without Braxton, who had ironically started out as possibly the least-known member of the band back in 2002. Their upcoming record, Gloss Drop, is on the way (also from Warp) in June. The band — Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and John Stanier — enlisted a bunch of tech-fetish superstar guests to round things out and possibly make up for Braxton’s absence in the music, everyone from Yamantaka Eye to Gary Numan). Prefix Magazine posted the track “Ice Cream” (featuring Mathias Aguayo) last week, and it’s interestingly straightforward. The sound is still builds off of plastic, computer processed and stunted guitars and tricky syncopated beats, but it’s all a little more compact and poppy. It’s not a step backward, exactly, but definitely a change in strategy toward a less curious path.
PURE DENIZEN 