The similarities between Kanye's new music video and Bjork's old music video are amazing. Also amazing is the way that Hype Williams is marshaling nature (here, Hawaii; Gondry did Iceland) behind a song about an ego. Though there is a nice Wordsworthian intimation of mortality about it, courtesy of Young Jeezy: "standing at my podium / trying to watch my sodium / die high blood pressure / even let the feds get ya."
Could this be the first step towards a Kan-jork collaboration? I bet she could do auto tune without a computer.
Bjork - Joga
By Michel Gondry
Music Videos - Video Playlists - New Music
By Hype Williams
Dan Deacon's New Record is Bromst
Illustrated:
We still can't hear what he's saying behind the omnipresent pitch-shifting and laser-guided drums, but Dan Deacon is making a grand argument on his new album. The gist is that he's not just a hip kid's party MC, making crrrazy neon-colored video music; there is a breadth and sophistication to Deacon's sound for those who choose to really listen to it. "Surprise Stefani," which may or may not be an ode to a pop star, trades in half the gear for a glockenspiel, to stunning effect; "Wet Wings" forgoes drums for layered female chanting; while "Build Voice" opens the record as it says, wrapped in a muted distortion that slowly melts away to reveal a chant and drums that could just as easily be the record's finale. Nearly every song becomes its own epic. If 2007's Spiderman of the Rings was the equivalent of one of Deacon's legendary Baltimore basement shows, Bromst is a more grown-up house party, encompassing the attic studio, the play room and everything else but the kitchen sink. Closer "Get Older" might have been the contemplative conclusion, but it turns out, thankfully, to be just as suited as ever to a sweaty, drunken party that tears the whole house down.
Animated:
We still can't hear what he's saying behind the omnipresent pitch-shifting and laser-guided drums, but Dan Deacon is making a grand argument on his new album. The gist is that he's not just a hip kid's party MC, making crrrazy neon-colored video music; there is a breadth and sophistication to Deacon's sound for those who choose to really listen to it. "Surprise Stefani," which may or may not be an ode to a pop star, trades in half the gear for a glockenspiel, to stunning effect; "Wet Wings" forgoes drums for layered female chanting; while "Build Voice" opens the record as it says, wrapped in a muted distortion that slowly melts away to reveal a chant and drums that could just as easily be the record's finale. Nearly every song becomes its own epic. If 2007's Spiderman of the Rings was the equivalent of one of Deacon's legendary Baltimore basement shows, Bromst is a more grown-up house party, encompassing the attic studio, the play room and everything else but the kitchen sink. Closer "Get Older" might have been the contemplative conclusion, but it turns out, thankfully, to be just as suited as ever to a sweaty, drunken party that tears the whole house down.
Animated:
Bluegrass Tabla: It Sounds Better Than it Sounds
Begin with the Indian tabla. Add bluegrass banjo in a contemplative mood. Cue the rollicking bass. Throw in some toe-tapping and jolly head-bopping for good measure. It sounds like a world fusion music parody -- or it sounds just awful. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie's cool Zankel Hall, the penultimate night of the "Perspectives" series, the experiment was being conducted by some of the world's finest musicians: India's most renowned percussionist (and the reason for the series), Zakir Hussain, was joined by banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and classical bassist Edgar Meyer. In their breathtaking hands, the resonances between American and Indian roots wasn't a gimmick. No: they were blending genres like a DJ with a mixer, and sometimes it was hard to tell what they were sampling, between the bright sitar invocations of the banjo, the tabla's classical bass resonances and the bass's echoes of both of those sounds. Somewhere in between their plucking and slapping, you could almost make out the undoing of fusion music, and the sounds of its wild rebirth.
To get comfortable with this genre-bending wasn't just a matter of previous experience in other sections of the record shop -- Hussain loves jazz, Fleck has a new album of African collaborations, and Meyer is an able bluegrass player. Their coherence has got just as much if not more to do with a deep and wide-ranging appreciation for and relationship with their instruments. Just as Fleck can bring his banjo's bright tones into darker places, so does Hussain make the tabla sing, turning its brooding stalk into a fleet-footed ramble though the woods of Appalachia (at one moment, over the strum of banjo, the brushing of a frame drum made the unmistakable sound of a locamotive in the distance). His tabla is as open, happy and effervescent as the man himself. As I watched his fingers and facial expressions, the only word that came to mind was -- I'm serious -- Chaplinesque. Hussain's spirit was the third crucial ingredient: it lubricated their lively interaction, which was less a jazzy conversation than a manage-a-trois, with lots of unusual positions. ("bluegrass tabla," anyone?)
It looked effortless, but this, their first full concert together ahead of a new album (they collaborated once before in 2006 with the Detroit and Nashville Symphonies), wasn't, said Fleck. "If you sense fear, it's coming from the stage," he said at the start. "In fact," Meyer chimed in, "you can probably smell it."
It smelled really good.
Paper
To get comfortable with this genre-bending wasn't just a matter of previous experience in other sections of the record shop -- Hussain loves jazz, Fleck has a new album of African collaborations, and Meyer is an able bluegrass player. Their coherence has got just as much if not more to do with a deep and wide-ranging appreciation for and relationship with their instruments. Just as Fleck can bring his banjo's bright tones into darker places, so does Hussain make the tabla sing, turning its brooding stalk into a fleet-footed ramble though the woods of Appalachia (at one moment, over the strum of banjo, the brushing of a frame drum made the unmistakable sound of a locamotive in the distance). His tabla is as open, happy and effervescent as the man himself. As I watched his fingers and facial expressions, the only word that came to mind was -- I'm serious -- Chaplinesque. Hussain's spirit was the third crucial ingredient: it lubricated their lively interaction, which was less a jazzy conversation than a manage-a-trois, with lots of unusual positions. ("bluegrass tabla," anyone?)
It looked effortless, but this, their first full concert together ahead of a new album (they collaborated once before in 2006 with the Detroit and Nashville Symphonies), wasn't, said Fleck. "If you sense fear, it's coming from the stage," he said at the start. "In fact," Meyer chimed in, "you can probably smell it."
It smelled really good.
Paper
ऑफ़ अन्गेल हिस्ट्री
"This is the time, and this is the record of the time," Laurie Anderson intones like a mantra at the start of her first big album, her Big Science, all the way back in 1984. As much an unsettling warning as it is a simple statement of mundane fact, it is a guide for all of her work: we don't just pass time, we record it by telling stories. And as she reminded us last Thursday at the Guggenheim, there's no one better at storytelling -- at recording the facts, and unsettling us -- than Anderson.
To be sure, her stories are less facts than artifacts, her performance a fanciful postmodern wonder cabinet of personal history and imagination. Like an angel in a dream, the spiky-haired postmodern icon appeared on stage in a cloud of fog and lights on the stage of the museum's downstairs auditorium. Once behind a bank of synthesizers that emitted her trademark unearthly music, Anderson unearthed some older stories and spun new ones, all vaguely hinging around issues of time. The performance, titled "Transitory Life: Some Stories," was occasioned by the museum's current exhibition on American artists contemplating Asia, The Third Mind, and the topic, she explained, has been filtered through her own adventures (and sometimes misadventures) with Buddhism. After sharing the details of a wacky upstate retreat, she guides us forward with a tale from medieval China. An exasperated emperor is interrogating a visiting lama. After a serious of cryptic replies, he finally asks, "Who are you?" The response: "I don't know."
As ever, her stories turn in circles, colored with confusion and an embrace of incompleteness, in love with the mundane. As birds of prey hover above him, her dog is introduced to a new set of fears from the sky (dangers from above is a decades-long theme), and though the story didn't need a direct allusion to New Yorkers after September 11, at least not before this audience, she offered it anyway. Recounting a stint working at the McDonald's near her house in Chinatown, she marvels at its delicious abundance of choices. "It was the first time in my life / that I could give people / exactly what they asked for," she said in that breathy, amazed voice. The audience, laughing always on cue, ate it all up.
The panoply of current concerns got their moment too, if only in brief, blurry bursts. "Americans saw it, and we broke it, and we bought it," she said. That Pottery Barn analogy was more personal too. In "The Dream Before," a chilling song about a down-and-out-in-Berlin Hansel and Gretel, Anderson brings up Walter Benjamin's angel of history:
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress
It was not exactly clear what blew us away in the darkened auditorium: those winds of Progress, or her attempts to read backwards through them by winding, wound-up and unwound turns. Either way, her hopeful cynicism came all came prefaced by a crucial paradox about storytelling, which she tucked quietly into the middle of her memorable show: "And every time you tell it, you forget it more."
To be sure, her stories are less facts than artifacts, her performance a fanciful postmodern wonder cabinet of personal history and imagination. Like an angel in a dream, the spiky-haired postmodern icon appeared on stage in a cloud of fog and lights on the stage of the museum's downstairs auditorium. Once behind a bank of synthesizers that emitted her trademark unearthly music, Anderson unearthed some older stories and spun new ones, all vaguely hinging around issues of time. The performance, titled "Transitory Life: Some Stories," was occasioned by the museum's current exhibition on American artists contemplating Asia, The Third Mind, and the topic, she explained, has been filtered through her own adventures (and sometimes misadventures) with Buddhism. After sharing the details of a wacky upstate retreat, she guides us forward with a tale from medieval China. An exasperated emperor is interrogating a visiting lama. After a serious of cryptic replies, he finally asks, "Who are you?" The response: "I don't know."
As ever, her stories turn in circles, colored with confusion and an embrace of incompleteness, in love with the mundane. As birds of prey hover above him, her dog is introduced to a new set of fears from the sky (dangers from above is a decades-long theme), and though the story didn't need a direct allusion to New Yorkers after September 11, at least not before this audience, she offered it anyway. Recounting a stint working at the McDonald's near her house in Chinatown, she marvels at its delicious abundance of choices. "It was the first time in my life / that I could give people / exactly what they asked for," she said in that breathy, amazed voice. The audience, laughing always on cue, ate it all up.
The panoply of current concerns got their moment too, if only in brief, blurry bursts. "Americans saw it, and we broke it, and we bought it," she said. That Pottery Barn analogy was more personal too. In "The Dream Before," a chilling song about a down-and-out-in-Berlin Hansel and Gretel, Anderson brings up Walter Benjamin's angel of history:
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress
It was not exactly clear what blew us away in the darkened auditorium: those winds of Progress, or her attempts to read backwards through them by winding, wound-up and unwound turns. Either way, her hopeful cynicism came all came prefaced by a crucial paradox about storytelling, which she tucked quietly into the middle of her memorable show: "And every time you tell it, you forget it more."
Byrne Down the House
 |
| From February 26 |
If “praise music” weren’t already a term for the insipid pop-rock used in many contemporary Christian worship services, it would be an apt description of what happened during David Byrne’s recent two-night stint at Radio City Music Hall. Listen and watch closely enough, and you're transported to an art rock tent revival, with Byrne as wriggly, silver-haired preacher man.
The concerts were part of the “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” tour, and featured selections from last summer’s heavenly Everything that Happens will Happen Today, 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and the three Eno-produced Talking Heads albums.
Once acclimated to the reduction in lushness that accompanied the disc-to-stage transfer, the songs stood up surprisingly well, and got the sold-out crowd to stand up, too. As if David Byrne’s jittery moves center stage weren’t enough, three modern dancers and four choreographers added ecstatic dance numbers to the mix, incorporating Byrne, the back up singers, and the band. At best the choreography brought a surreal but joyful spectacle, and at worst was still cute. The surprise ending, with dozens of dancers in pink tutus filling the stage and doing a Rockettes kick line, was both. Throughout the show, the audience rose and offered up its own modest choreography, especially during the funkier Talking Heads classics.
Pay no attention to the sad man behind the harsh New York Times review of the concert. As Byrne notes in his Journal, this is the same guy who accused My Life in the Bush of Ghosts of cultural imperialism for its appropriation of African music. (I’d hate to hear his thoughts on Cubism, or every genre of American music ever). To approach this show with such a jaundiced critic’s eye is to miss the point, and the today in which everything happens.
- NEIL ELLINGSON
If We Are Sleeping
Harlem Shakes, Valentine's Day, Southpaw
In Brooklyn, I have heard, there are legions of people like us: the kind of people about whom great big books are written, or who inspired now faded murals, the people who become the subjects of big Broadway shows because they are the ones, at various points in time, who wrote them. Dreamers, never really unemployed because always scheming something, always engaged, never bored, never sleeping very long, and when they do, doing it in the most rewarding way they possibly can, at whatever cost because now at least, costs can't be that high and benefits, they can be immeasurable.
(Harlem has the largest cathedral in the world. It's not finished.)
I tripped over the frame of a couch left in a shadow on the street and despite every effort could not help my body from landing flat on the ground. It was Valentine's Day. Somewhere around the single-minded swaying inspired by the song "Winter Water," the pain in my knee faded like a shirt. A mural. Probably a coincidence.
In Brooklyn, I have heard, there are legions of people like us: the kind of people about whom great big books are written, or who inspired now faded murals, the people who become the subjects of big Broadway shows because they are the ones, at various points in time, who wrote them. Dreamers, never really unemployed because always scheming something, always engaged, never bored, never sleeping very long, and when they do, doing it in the most rewarding way they possibly can, at whatever cost because now at least, costs can't be that high and benefits, they can be immeasurable.
(Harlem has the largest cathedral in the world. It's not finished.)
I tripped over the frame of a couch left in a shadow on the street and despite every effort could not help my body from landing flat on the ground. It was Valentine's Day. Somewhere around the single-minded swaying inspired by the song "Winter Water," the pain in my knee faded like a shirt. A mural. Probably a coincidence.
Birds
Lest readers think that we are only concerned with sound, and to celebrate the week anniversary of the end of Fashion Week -- during which no less than two photographers asked to take our picture in an apparent bid to pretend that they had encountered a real live model and/or to test their photoshop skills -- we luxuriate in the snug smugness of the Critical Shopper, a person who is paid by the New York Times whose actual play clothes are likely rarely chewed "by the rigors of daily motion." The subject is a shop called Bird, with saunas for dressing rooms.
h/t to Alexis
In “The Recognitions,” the famously undercelebrated doorstop by William Gaddis, the virtuosity of a painter who makes counterfeit “undiscovered” paintings by Flemish masters is the vehicle through which Gaddis questions the genuineness of other forms of art, life and religion.
Much of the clothing at Bird appears to be recovering from its too-adventurous lives. To live vicariously through the scars on one’s casual wear is an interesting kind of psychic trompe l’oeil, suggesting that one has been more kinetically active than one really has. It seems a bit perversely bourgeois to demand a patina of robust character from our clothes in an economy in which garments bearing the marks of age are not an elective style choice for so many. But if your leisure is too demanding to damage your play clothes through the rigors of actual motion, Bird poses an interesting conundrum.
It is possible to look at these pretrashed jeans as more than just a look that sedentary poseurs borrow to mimic outdoorsy virility. They may be viewed as a declaration of taste, to wit: “I may not have had to fight feral, screwdriver-wielding 9-year-olds in the Outback, but I am wise enough to appreciate the pants of those who have.”
As the ghost of Gaddis argues, there is such a thing as a counterfeit so well done that it can be, in its way, more authentic than the “real thing.” When Lord Ha gives you a jacket, its wear and tear has been earned, however artificially. To legitimize the fictional distress of designer jeans is to step through the dressing room looking glass and leave one’s brain behind ... but destruction, too, is a creative act, is it not?
Monk's mood
Meredith Monk, February 1, 2009, Whitney Museum
We once went to hear Clio Lane sing at the Regency. Her husband, John Dankworth, was on the keys, as always. It was a triple date then, with T-- and L---, and the other man in the group was my dad. Thinking about it now makes the base of my stomach tingle with nervousness, and it might have then, were it not for good vintage wine and, more so, her voice. It was rich and so deep and delicate but sharp too, qualities that seemed accented by her age -- not just because of its own vintage, but because all clues (the velvet setting, the velvet gown, the velvet skin, the air even) said she was a relic treasure, confined to the museum of the record, and somehow magically unearthed for this one performance. Her voice sang from another era, one I only hear on the radio or vinyl, which made it so much more deliciously unsettling to hear it in person, mouth to ear as it were. The sort of sound that made you not want to move, not because you'll interrupt it or unsettle it, but because all the moving in the room had been reserved just for that voice, and by an unsung law of physics, you simply can't move anymore.
Meredith Monk turns that equation on its head. She makes voices move with free reign, makes everything seem to move, tearing seams with sounds. Her choir, whether banging the doors that you're standing outside of, waiting to get in, or vibrating the air when you enter the room, is like a cult in a way. That way that everyone involved is channeling the same high, on the same drug, and they're hypnotizing you, and suddenly you are part of the song. And you see it is not a cult at all, nothing so superficial. It is an altered state of being, simply of breathing and not doing, and you are beating your chest, clapping your heart and even if you have no sense of rhythm now you have one and while it's partly improvised, the yelps and the woofs, the gibberish and beast calls, the roof raising and the twirling, all a matter of some great chance, you know there is only one way that it goes only, it is what it --
Who is it. She is there. Say it. I had to. She. Bizarro Monk, if that were possible. I am finding my seat. I am looking for a seat. Yes, I am about to finally get an Indian style seat on the floor before Meredith Monk and her clan, and we are all going to be transported to the deep colors that could only exist in the gray sixties, she with braids on, one behind her back, and something resembling overalls, we with hair needing to be cut, we needing showers, needing something, anything, because we take what we can get--but excuse me, excuse me, sorry, just trying to get my seat, just --. I'm not exaggerating things. I'm not being dramatic. Everyone there is a drama queen. Everyone is being dramatic, but not really about the things you should be dramatic about now. I hear a man going on about a sandwich. I hear a woman lamenting the 1 million dollar price of something. An apartment in DUMBO. A --
The woman is Bjork. She is wearing a black tunic, oval around the neck, the neck lined with white bone-colored shells that look like the skulls of exotic fish in cross-section. I am in cross-section. I am in sections. There she is. Miss Iceland. The video goddess of my adolescence, fairy of Faroe, a wizard who is accidentally living in this time and singing chanting from less another time than another place entirely. There she is.
I could touch her, I could interrupt her. Her, of the cardboard forests and massive bears, of the traipsing and the shattering and the jelly aura and one long ancient invisible blizzard, talking about schools for her children and living in Brooklyn.
She is not made of mountains and fjords. Her body is not radiating neon. She looks like a child grown up.
Having realized this perhaps, later, after the performance, I dart to her. (After that, even later, visiting the basement bathroom on my way out, a gaggle of girls is rushing up past me in some kind of happy shock, half looking back. In their wake comes the ice queen, and a classic parting: "Bye Bjork!" I raise my right hand while walking past, an oath and a sign of the gulf there. Sideways, demurely, she goes "Bye." Alex. Bye, Alex.)
But now I am fumbling through sentences, trying on costumes for her like a fool, like the fool, telling her I love her as best I can and referencing a concert in China (I videoed it too) and my trip to Tibet and the environment and a desire to interview her and all the while she is smiling as I knew she would and also folding into herself, biting her black hair even, delicately picking her words in an accent light on the edges but dark in the vague center, and she is terribly polite, not terrible, but so uncomfortable, and I see (others step in, inevitably, crassly, and reminding me of my own shallow invasion) she is already in hiding, as she always was.
But there she is.
And yet, during the finale I did not know I had come for -- a meditation on journeying across the earth and a dream of ascension -- I am forgetting she is there, and she is forgetting too, and I am forgetting too, about me being there, and then we see the others, and then all of us. And there we are, ears and vessels, bodies and floor and chairs, awakened by the sounds of voices, all of us moved but not moving.
We once went to hear Clio Lane sing at the Regency. Her husband, John Dankworth, was on the keys, as always. It was a triple date then, with T-- and L---, and the other man in the group was my dad. Thinking about it now makes the base of my stomach tingle with nervousness, and it might have then, were it not for good vintage wine and, more so, her voice. It was rich and so deep and delicate but sharp too, qualities that seemed accented by her age -- not just because of its own vintage, but because all clues (the velvet setting, the velvet gown, the velvet skin, the air even) said she was a relic treasure, confined to the museum of the record, and somehow magically unearthed for this one performance. Her voice sang from another era, one I only hear on the radio or vinyl, which made it so much more deliciously unsettling to hear it in person, mouth to ear as it were. The sort of sound that made you not want to move, not because you'll interrupt it or unsettle it, but because all the moving in the room had been reserved just for that voice, and by an unsung law of physics, you simply can't move anymore.
Meredith Monk turns that equation on its head. She makes voices move with free reign, makes everything seem to move, tearing seams with sounds. Her choir, whether banging the doors that you're standing outside of, waiting to get in, or vibrating the air when you enter the room, is like a cult in a way. That way that everyone involved is channeling the same high, on the same drug, and they're hypnotizing you, and suddenly you are part of the song. And you see it is not a cult at all, nothing so superficial. It is an altered state of being, simply of breathing and not doing, and you are beating your chest, clapping your heart and even if you have no sense of rhythm now you have one and while it's partly improvised, the yelps and the woofs, the gibberish and beast calls, the roof raising and the twirling, all a matter of some great chance, you know there is only one way that it goes only, it is what it --
Who is it. She is there. Say it. I had to. She. Bizarro Monk, if that were possible. I am finding my seat. I am looking for a seat. Yes, I am about to finally get an Indian style seat on the floor before Meredith Monk and her clan, and we are all going to be transported to the deep colors that could only exist in the gray sixties, she with braids on, one behind her back, and something resembling overalls, we with hair needing to be cut, we needing showers, needing something, anything, because we take what we can get--but excuse me, excuse me, sorry, just trying to get my seat, just --. I'm not exaggerating things. I'm not being dramatic. Everyone there is a drama queen. Everyone is being dramatic, but not really about the things you should be dramatic about now. I hear a man going on about a sandwich. I hear a woman lamenting the 1 million dollar price of something. An apartment in DUMBO. A --
The woman is Bjork. She is wearing a black tunic, oval around the neck, the neck lined with white bone-colored shells that look like the skulls of exotic fish in cross-section. I am in cross-section. I am in sections. There she is. Miss Iceland. The video goddess of my adolescence, fairy of Faroe, a wizard who is accidentally living in this time and singing chanting from less another time than another place entirely. There she is.
I could touch her, I could interrupt her. Her, of the cardboard forests and massive bears, of the traipsing and the shattering and the jelly aura and one long ancient invisible blizzard, talking about schools for her children and living in Brooklyn.
She is not made of mountains and fjords. Her body is not radiating neon. She looks like a child grown up.
Having realized this perhaps, later, after the performance, I dart to her. (After that, even later, visiting the basement bathroom on my way out, a gaggle of girls is rushing up past me in some kind of happy shock, half looking back. In their wake comes the ice queen, and a classic parting: "Bye Bjork!" I raise my right hand while walking past, an oath and a sign of the gulf there. Sideways, demurely, she goes "Bye." Alex. Bye, Alex.)
But now I am fumbling through sentences, trying on costumes for her like a fool, like the fool, telling her I love her as best I can and referencing a concert in China (I videoed it too) and my trip to Tibet and the environment and a desire to interview her and all the while she is smiling as I knew she would and also folding into herself, biting her black hair even, delicately picking her words in an accent light on the edges but dark in the vague center, and she is terribly polite, not terrible, but so uncomfortable, and I see (others step in, inevitably, crassly, and reminding me of my own shallow invasion) she is already in hiding, as she always was.
But there she is.
And yet, during the finale I did not know I had come for -- a meditation on journeying across the earth and a dream of ascension -- I am forgetting she is there, and she is forgetting too, and I am forgetting too, about me being there, and then we see the others, and then all of us. And there we are, ears and vessels, bodies and floor and chairs, awakened by the sounds of voices, all of us moved but not moving.
I Like This Song
Animal Collective, January 21, 2009, Bowery Ballroom
It was a small club, and even though the energized, psychidellic crowd gathered around them as if they were a campfire, and while they had parted with their animal costumes, the band somehow seemed to be hiding on stage. In my neon-and-wooden memory of December 2005, Animal Collective looked as devious as they sounded, and that one guy – Avey Tare, who does a good impersonation of an Animal Collective melody in dance form – was stalking about the stage, the way a criminal prior to a big heist, the way an animal might around his cage. As close as they were to us, the sounds – raspy brushes, spacey keys, oriental strums, an astral thump of shimmering drums booming through the wilderness, sometimes ghetto, sometimes glacial, all part of a vague life soundtrack then – turned the shoebox-sized club into the size of a museum hall. It was the natural history museum, the old air hanging like smoke, and, in my memory they were at the far end of the big hall, inside a display case of their own making, always there emanating something. And then, as he slithered in place to the music, Avey began rubbing his body with the microphone like a bar of soap, emanating hushed rushes of sound. Like a worm emerging from a cocoon, he began a bump and grind with the mic. Something naughty, something outside, far off.
So brooding-in-the-corner and modest was this band of artists – artists, not musicians – that at earlier shows of theirs, they had gone unnoticed by me altogether. My first Animal Collective show it turns out was at the Bowery Ballroom, but I didn't even know they played. (Admittedly, I arrived late, just in time to see the headliner, Mum) It was a famous show, a transcendental moment for me, but probably nothing like what Animal Collective might have been doing that night. Which is to say, simply making complex sounds, however they do it, whatever works.
(Something worked for Mum; one of the twin sisters is now Avey's bride.)
Fast forward, fast, past the ecstasy and tentativeness of the album Feels, my/the in-between-everything elegiac anthem “Swimming Pool,” to January 2009. Animal Collective, now three of them, is again playing the Bowery Ballroom. They have never seemed so high before – that is, three feet above the crowd, presiding over it, yet barely looking down at the mass of eager bodies ready to be awakened and yelp in response.
If the band had merely played their new CD, which may have been pronounced the best of 2009 even before 2009, the crowd would have eaten it up. And they might have played their CD, because this time little about their stage presence suggested spontaneity or improvisation or experiment. Instead they stayed where they were, behind their things (mixing board and pedals, keyboards, drums and guitar), seeming to abandon that sense of abandon that has always made their music so moving. And it still moves. But this time, they do not; they leave the fits up to the audience.
And the audience – many of whom had waited for this sold-out moment for months – were ready for the fever wave of kinetic pleasure about to wash over them. Already they were t-shirted and sweatered and sweating, a slice of a slice of a generation caught in a moment out of time between a hunger for hope (the new president had taken the oath of office the day before) and a millenial sense of economic doom. Those kind of pressure points can really make people want to dance, or go crazy, and that's just what they did at the slightest hint of “My Girls.” The sweeping pulsing synths began, and howls rose.
How appropriate that the song of this confusing, threatening year is not just epically orgiastic – shining synths, soaring harmonies, tribal drums – but also manages to state so clearly a desire for a quiet domestic life, and for this economy's most bedeviling and elusive possession:
There isn't much that I feel I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house
When the crowd went wild, were they ecstatic because they too, in the song's second negative, “don't care for fancy things” anymore, or because they like a nice reminder or because they just love the infectious sound, or because they were high? Probably somewhere in between all three. But the sentiment of the song is unmistakable, for the same reason that, for once, the audience could sing along to Animal Collective.
The chorus too starts with a reduction:
I don't mean
To seem like I care about material things
Like my social stats
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats
For my girls
This (“four walls and adobe slats”) is a formula for good living, and it, tellingly, begins not with what we want, but what we don't want. The sentiment seems to have struck the band first: in Las Vegas last year, when Avey Tare banged his influential drums on the song, the drum kit had turned into a lone drum, worth beating; And the band stood behind its equipment, nearly unmoving much besides heads, almost as if it were a rampart for the defense of the avant-garde.
If the audience were a mess of excitement, the band was content to be family, and in this flash moment, fixed firmly on stage behind their rampart, Animal Collective articulated so much awkardness and fear for us now. Two AC fans decided to leave halfway through, torn up as much by the weak familiarity with this kind of music as by the searing bright neon LED bars that blind everyone in the back.
In this moment of instability and uncertainty the band became us, scared. And we were them, excitedly, difficultly channeling hope and love and change. They stood still, contemplating their instruments and voices; we moved, improvised, experimented. In the wide gulf that has grown between the band and its listeners in the past years, in the club that night, there was a strange communion, an unspoken, imperfect, symbiotic bond. We know how we felt. How was it for them, watching us all flagellate and shift and grind, in the strange back and forth of this fleeting moment? To begin with, look at “In the Flowers,” which opens the record and opened the show to shouts, like someone throwing open the glass doors on an old white house, to an older meadow
My mind gets lost
Feeling envy for the kid who'll dance despite anything
I walk out in the flowers and feel better
If I could just leave my body for the night:
It is the wish of the listener, but in this entangled moment, isn't it also the dream of the singer on the stage, removed and stuck behind all his keys and knobs, wanting to move and marvel in this thing he's making? Think of how unexciting magic is for a magician.
(Ah: Keys and knobs. Again, the doors.)
Then we could be dancing
No more missing you while I'm gone
There we could be dancing
And you'd smile and say, "I like this song"
And when our eyes will meet there
We will recognize nothing's wrong
And I wouldn't feel so selfish
I won't be this way very long
To hold you in time...
What is this conditional dream if not a description of utopia? The flowers are an easy symbol of a drug hallucination. But this vision is not that. It's not "so selfish," and it's terribly conscious of its own temporariness. It's only temporal, the way music is, and in the strange case of these experimental sounds, is a hint of utopia, a non-place, a location that's deliciously contradictory: both out-of-body and so physical, where we are held, but not in the way we're typically held, in space, but rather in time. Five minutes at a time.
Video from Hove in Norway in June
So this is how new music comes about. How new things come. It sneaks up, no firm references to anything, commitments only to its own world, possibilities, a possible new moment – and only for a moment.
Severed Pig Head Mode
January 24, 2009, Bowery Ballroom
The night started off calmly enough: a toe-numbing cold, a fender bender on Delancy, and the all-too familiar bass thump of German electronic music. Unnst uunst uunst. After a conversation about Utopia downstairs, as if to keep things in balance, my danz partner and I decided to thrust ourselves into the Euro-clash throng that had come to bob their heads at theRoxbury Bowery Ballroom last Saturday. The d.j.s of the evening were Modeselektor, a duo from Berlin whose last album of electro-hop rave bangers, Happy Birthday!, is covered by a waxy painting of the two as Madonna and Child. That, combined with the imprimatur of odd-selektor Thom Yorke (whose collaboration with them by the way is lovely), should have been enough to warn us of just how Berlin this was going to get.
After warming up with more generic cuts in front of video projections that looked to be sponsored by BAPE, the duo turned off the bass on their "for girls" remix of "Dull Flame of Desire," and began to lip sync as if they were Bjork and Antony. Then, in a scary robot (and German) voice, the one with the pompidour demanded a bottle of champagne. He shook it in time to the raucus "Kill Bill vol. 4," and when the beat explosion came, pop, we were all covered in Veuve Clicquot (I was glad they did not copy Rammstein, who use what looks like milk and a hose).
And just as the crowd dropped their defenses and swayed and bobbed lazily again, the d.j.'s alter-egos climbed in front of the decks, dressed as a butcher and a chicken. (They were a performance art group called The Fantastic Nobodies.) The chicken generously tossed out feathers; the butcher, wearing a pig's mask, wielded a cleaver and a just-severed, still bloody pig's head. Sirens seemed to ring, lights flashed. Animal rights activists were notified. An inflatable gorilla looked down at us from the back of the stage. Suddenly we were all yelping and dancing like children stranded on an island.
Clearly pleased, the pig-butcher snuck to stage left for a moment, whispered something to a girl who was holding the bag of feathers, lifted his mask, and frenched her. But he was quickly back at the center, and the d.j.s were beaming behind him, and the pig's head was beaming in front of him, and the assembled was throwing their hands up in submission, and his cleaver waved like a glow stick.
The night started off calmly enough: a toe-numbing cold, a fender bender on Delancy, and the all-too familiar bass thump of German electronic music. Unnst uunst uunst. After a conversation about Utopia downstairs, as if to keep things in balance, my danz partner and I decided to thrust ourselves into the Euro-clash throng that had come to bob their heads at the
After warming up with more generic cuts in front of video projections that looked to be sponsored by BAPE, the duo turned off the bass on their "for girls" remix of "Dull Flame of Desire," and began to lip sync as if they were Bjork and Antony. Then, in a scary robot (and German) voice, the one with the pompidour demanded a bottle of champagne. He shook it in time to the raucus "Kill Bill vol. 4," and when the beat explosion came, pop, we were all covered in Veuve Clicquot (I was glad they did not copy Rammstein, who use what looks like milk and a hose).
And just as the crowd dropped their defenses and swayed and bobbed lazily again, the d.j.'s alter-egos climbed in front of the decks, dressed as a butcher and a chicken. (They were a performance art group called The Fantastic Nobodies.) The chicken generously tossed out feathers; the butcher, wearing a pig's mask, wielded a cleaver and a just-severed, still bloody pig's head. Sirens seemed to ring, lights flashed. Animal rights activists were notified. An inflatable gorilla looked down at us from the back of the stage. Suddenly we were all yelping and dancing like children stranded on an island.
Clearly pleased, the pig-butcher snuck to stage left for a moment, whispered something to a girl who was holding the bag of feathers, lifted his mask, and frenched her. But he was quickly back at the center, and the d.j.s were beaming behind him, and the pig's head was beaming in front of him, and the assembled was throwing their hands up in submission, and his cleaver waved like a glow stick.
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