Bernhard Fleischmann at the Austrian Cultural Foundation, April 27
Bernhard Fleischmann is on a great compilation album I have from a few years ago of German and Austrian IDM groups covering Slowdive songs, so when E. Tan said he was playing a free show as part of some wholesome European state-sponsored arts goodness, I was happy to go.
Our group got there not long before he went on. One great thing about the Austrian Cultural Foundation, which is housed in a pleasant little Modernist building in Midtown: beers are only $3. Score one for mitteleuropean nanny-statism.
Fleischmann stood on a low stage behind a couple of laptops and a mixer. Two young female musicians joined him, one on violin and the other on cello. There should be a strong presumption against young women playing violins or cellos in electronic or rock combos; they signal wankery ahead.
The result was completely boring. Fleischmann seemed to play his songs mainly by triggering loops and adjusting a very few parameters on his computer. It wasn’t any kind of improv, and the girls on strings simply played like additional tracks in Fleischmann’s sequencer. The songs would have made a pleasant soundtrack for a contemporary lounge, but they couldn’t hold their own as the focus of attention.
There was one moment when some part of the software went awry and Fleischmann had to scramble; I actually hoped that was part of the song, a deliberate destruction, but it turned out not to be. Another song toward the end of the set had some fun rhythmic things going on, but nothing that wouldn’t have been better on my home stereo, never mind the $3 beer.
I should make clear here that I’m actually one of the few people who has enjoyed a number of laptop music performances. A Richard Chartier improv session at G Fine Art in DC stands out in my memory (he was opening for William Basinski, who gave a less interesting performance), but there were others. What I enjoy about laptop music is a sense that the performance is riding an edge between order and chaos. There’s tremendous risk of failure playing a regular instrument, and computers can be programmed to eliminate that risk; to the extent they do, they’re not worth hearing live.
The Major Stars at Southpaw (WFMU Free Music Series), April 28
Bryan and I made it down to Southpaw in Park Slope late after a record club meeting in Queens. The series is funded by a grant to WFMU of money that Elliott Spitzer won from major record labels in a payola lawsuit. Score one for do-gooder lawyers with political ambitions.
We caught the last band on the bill, The Major Stars from Cambridge, MA. They’re a six-piece progdeathpsychfolkmetal combo whose evident spiritual leader is the 40- or 50-something second guitarist, a woman with long, wavy, gray-rooted hair and a fierce strut. The band rocked harder than early Black Sabbath but 37 years late. “They’re a very WFMU band,” I said to Bryan. “Yeah, a bunch of highly proficient fuckups,” he replied. Satisfying.
Yo La Tengo with Oneida at Webster Hall, April 29
The only tracks I’d heard by Oneida sounded like Yo La Tengo, but people always used one word to describe their live shows: “loud.” As in, “They’re just … [long pause while searching for le mot juste] … loud. I mean, loud, you know?”
And yeah, that’s the best word for them. Very tight trio — guitar, electric piano, drums. Exuberance restrained in form but not in volume. Loud.
Yo La Tengo was on the tail end of months of touring for their new album. I’d seen them in Jersey at the beginning of the tour and they perfectly walked the tightrope between experimentation and rocking out that they’ve spent so much time establishing. This evening at the end of the tour they were if anything more self-assured, starting their set with the quiet and heartbreaking “I Feel Like Going Home” before moving on to awesome displays of rock.
Ira Kaplan’s talents for freakout-improv on the guitar still surprise me after I’ve seen them live a dozen times. The sold-out crowd was unusually absorbed by the performance — the whole hall went pindrop-quiet during the quiet songs. And we were rewarded with two memorable encores, including an acoustic version of “Tom Courtenay” with the guitar tech and the mixing-board guy on drums and a mistake-filled “My Little Corner of the World” that Ira dedicated (before the mistakes) to his parents, who were sitting against the wall behind me.
The Books and Real Quiet at the New York Society for Ethical Culture (Wordless Music Series), April 30
The idea behind the new Wordless Music Series is to bring classical and contemporary composed chamber music together with indie or electronic groups for a genre-eroding antics. Real Quiet is a nwe-music trio of percussion, piano, and cello. They played an overwrought piece about the 2004 World Series by Annie Gosfield and then some pretty enjoyable Minimalist stuff by Phil Kline and Marc Mellits.
The stars everyone had come to see, of course, were the Books, the electronic cut-and-paste duo behind several refreshing albums since 2002. Their aesthetic is homemade and microscale, blending found sound, field recordings, and samples of themselves singing, talking, and playing the guitar and cello. Exciting, innovative stuff.
Unfortunately, the performance made clear that the Books’ working methods, which involve months of labor to make a single track, don’t translate to live performance. They had the electronic parts of their whole set recorded to DVD; they’d hit “play” on a track, then sing and play along on guitar and cello, with video from the track playing behind them. More than karaoke, but less than what I expected from a live performance. There was no danger of really fucking up, especially since the tracks depended very little on the live instruments for their effect. The crowd ate it up, it seemed, but I was bored. E. Tan compared it to going to see an author read from her own material, and maybe so. But next time I’ll just listen to the recording.
What we really want from rock music, from popular music in general, is exuberance. We want the moment of pure energy, of surprise, of abandon. It can come at any tempo and at any volume. It is not common. But it is the most worthwhile thing, the justification, of popular music since the middle of the 20th century.
Hearing live music is a chance to find a special incarnation of this moment. The quintessential rock/pop performance moment is half planned and half spontaneous, surprising even to the performer. It is not the same as youthfulness, though youth can often disguise a lack of it. In my four nights of going to hear live music, the two oldest groups gave us in the audience a number of these moments, while the youngest groups disappointed.
Going to hear a pre-programmed concert? Sounds lame. Have ya’ll heard the new Wilco album? I just uploaded it last night, am excited to check it out.
I’m going to argue with you, Dave– on the Books’ set. I saw it at the beginning of their last tour at the Getty here in L.A. You’ve acknowledged that it takes the band months of labor to make a single track — and remember there are multiple tracks– and you know that they’re very much a band that functions on samples. The amount of work and energy used to align video clips (hundreds of video clips, hours of research and editing) to their samples takes the place of teaching a bunch of not-in-the-band techies how to hit the right sampler button at the right time, don’t you think? The Books are a two man show, and I’m not sure how they could have pulled it off otherwise; in fact, they went far beyond what I was expecting. I loved all the guys taking on and off their hats.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a sweaty, heavy live show– and I’ll admit that the energy output and audience vibe at an electrelane or Seawolf show is a whole different thing, but I cant see how you can diss the Books. They’re like sound art.
Lisa, I like the Books a lot. I just ordered a t-shirt from their website (more for the graphic, but still). It’s just that I didn’t get anything from seeing them live that I wouldn’t have gotten seeing a DVD of the same videos with the same soundtrack at home. It was cool video and cool music, and they had made it months or years ago in their bedrooms or whatever and they get mad props for that. But the live participation by the band was so minimal — in particular, Nick Zammuto’s guitar playing was barely audible and seemed hesitant and unskilled, fine for sampling in the home studio but lame on stage.
Obviously the Books face a choice when performing live of either sounding like their albums, which involves using mostly pre-recorded material, or sounding different in order to decrease the proportion of programmed to unprogrammed material. They chose the first route and it was boring. I don’t know if they could pull off the second route, but it could at least be an interesting attempt.
dave — loved these reviews. i was skeptical about major stars based on the few songs i’d heard on fmu, but so many DJs lined up behind them and now we know why.
monday night i had a pretty cool live music moment: 20 years (!) after i first saw jesus and mary chain, my friend nicole got up on stage with them and sang on “just like honey.” she did it again last night — and her band opened for them as well. woo-hoo!
Pics here.
later this summer they’re touring with Great Northern, friends of LA’s TGWers. it’s a weird small world.
b
other cool moment from JAMC show: looking across at the other balcony & seeing a trio of 70-year-olds rocking out. I’d like to imagine that’s me and my friends someday.