Month: January 2006 Page 2 of 3

Lisa Crystal Carver
AS220
Providence RI

Lisa Crystal Carver is a fearless cultural adventurer, an endlessly optimistic raconteur who’s always followed her own idiosyncratic path —ever since the fateful day she first took the stage at age seventeen as leader of the infamous anarcho-performance troupe Suckdog. From there it was one adventure after another, some more harrowing than others but all grist for Carver’s incisive, easy wit and droll, conversational tone. Her new memoir Drugs Are Nice [Soft Skull, 2005] chronicles her early years, starting with the day her drug-running, grifter father told her he’d killed a man and ending with her working her way back to her own version of normalcy.

The “reading” at AS220 is anything but normal, but that’s hardly a surprise. Lisa’s co-conspirators for the day (her friends Rachel and Erik) are stuck in traffic, so we play Lisa’s version of Truth or Dare until they show. The Doctor is in, and she’s asking questions we may not be all that comfortable answering. Embarrassing, embarrassed confessions have a way of tumbling out when Lisa’s in the room. Even better if the answer is unsettling or awkward or just plain icky —because our foibles, our flaws are what make us human. They can even be beautiful if looked at through the right lens.

In this way, Lisa’s interest is humanist and brilliantly democratic. “See?” she seems to be saying. “We’re all the same under the skin, equal. We’re all freaks in our own special ways.” She doesn’t sit in judgment. Rather, she helps us illuminate all the dark spaces we’re afraid to look at. And shealways shares her own stories first, with the same unflinching candor that she expects in turn. And that’s what makes her so refreshing. She’s like your psychotherapist and agony aunt all rolled into one ebullient package; the Cookie Mueller for our apathetic, post-irony generation. And she doesn’t have time for all that bullshit Gen-X pose. She’s not post-modern or post-anything. She doesn’t subscribe to any philosophy other than her own. In her warts-and-all confessional zine Rollerderby and again inDrugs Are Nice, she seems at home everywhere —even if, sometimes, her fearlessness is feigned and she’s really just making it all up as she goes along. She’s her own muse, wildly optimistic even at the worst of times.

After all the confessions are blurted out, the rest of Lisa’s troupe finally arrives. They end up acting out scenes from Drugs Are Nice. Lisa acts as MC. There’s copious amounts of ketchup blood and bad fake French and death by potato peeler and a date with GG. Erik, who’s playing GG with unerring accuracy, right down to the leather jacket and jockstrap ensemble, won’t sit in the puddle of ketchup leftover on stage from the death-by-peeling incident. “GG wasn’t afraid of any damn ketchup!” someone from the audience yells out. Chagrined, Erik sits in the goddamn ketchup. Rachel plays Lisa. She and GG half-heartedly make out, until he gets annoyed and cuts open her white flapper dress. Afterwards GG goes to heaven and comes back with angel wings and a halo. We all have a moment of silence for poor old GG, before chaos erupts again.

There’s never a dull moment when Lisa’s around.

Afterwards I buy a copy of Drugs Are Nice from Lisa. I tell her how much I miss Rollerderby. “So do I,” she says, a bit wistfully. Suddenly an old friend tackles her in a big hug and, not wanting to interrupt, I turn to leave. Rachel and Erik and Co. are having a smoke out in the chilly Providence air. “You guys get hazard pay for this?” I ask. “Nah,” Rachel says. “In real life I’m a biologist. So, I love getting to act out once in awhile.”

We all have Lisa to thank for that.

Celebration/The Double
AS220
January 6, 2006

This double bill by Baltimore-based trio Celebration and Brooklyn-based foursome the Double promised a lot and thankfully, delivered. Although, frankly, I wasn’t sure anything could top seeing the Double play a blistering, frenzied, and focused set on a sweltering summer night on a cramped and crowded sunken ship moored in New York harbor, but this show came tantalizingly close.

The pairing offered a study in contrasts between two bands with certain aesthetic sensibilities and influences in common, but a marked divergence in their use of tone and texture. Not that this is a bad thing —far from it. Too often I go to shows and all the bands on the bill have a certain monochromatic style palette in common. In which case: next stop=Dullsville.

Celebration’s Katrina Ford is a powerhouse. Before the start of their set she wandered aimlessly through the thin crowd, nervously alighting on stage. Then drummer David Bergander and multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis (who’s also Ford’s husband and collaborator with her in previous bands Jaks, Lovelife, and Birdland) launched into the first song and —bam!— Ford sprang to life, howling and cooing and shrieking into the mike, a whirling dervish of boundless energy and restless movement.

In fact, the whole band is about frenetic energy. Largely thanks to Antanaitis’ organ fills and fevered guitar, Celebration’s overall sound is loose-limbed, rollicking, and eerily carnival-esque. (Imagine Fourwaycross chopped up Tzara-style with “From Her To Eternity” and Coil’s “Ubu Noir.”) With the addition of Ford’s sensuous, rich vocals, it becomes irrepressibly sexy, sensual, playful. It’s deceptively simple, this music, but the seemingly inexhaustible energy of the players and vibrancy of their playing gives the music a full-bodied, irresistible pull. This is one group that makes the most of its minimal means, creating something lush and heady that never once lets up in intensity.

Setting one’s textural focus so narrowly can get a little samey after awhile. Thankfully the band’s short set was well-calibrated to build in intensity, culminating in “War,” an anti-Bush paean that ended the set with a real sense of emotional (not to mention percussive) catharsis.

Although Ford vented some serious spleen in “War,” the music itself swung and swaggered with sexy insistence, sounding subversively kicky and freewheeling, like a long-lost post-punk Busby Berkeley number. As Ford’s howls grew increasingly fervent (“got more guns than any-bod-yyyy!”), she punctuated the ramped-up, almost feverishly sped-up finale of the song with some aggressive percussion of her own (in addition to Bergander’s dogged backbeat). (The tambourine ain’t just for the Archies anymore.)

After the bold, brassy strut of Celebration’s raucous set, the Double came off as introverts in comparison—detailed, exacting, their music reflective and downtempo. But that’s not the whole story. While they are a very detail-oriented band, expert at layering sounds and playing them off one another (they utilize negative space as expertly as the positive), they’re hardly dour. They’re wry romanticists, too post-modern (post-post-modern?) to buy into all that letters-and-sodas bullshit, making music that —while hardly dryly ironic— is subtly wary. An Escher-esque sense of imbalance and foreboding informs songs like “Standing on a Levee” and “Firecrackers in Sawdust”; the near-constant sense of disorientation underscored by ringing keyboard trills and distortion skittering back and forth. Their influences may be hard to pin down —echoes of dub here, some Jean-Jacques Perrey synth-cheese there, some Joy Division (more “Decades” than “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), Eno, United States of America and of course the Smiths— but with music so texturally variegated such trainspottery is almost beside the point.

Live, much of this textural detail was lost by necessity. The band seemed a little sloppy and even a bit muted compared to when I saw them over the summer. Tour fatigue? Possibly. But they gained momentum and surety as their set built towards songs off their recent Loose in the Air —the jittery, melancholy “Hot Air” crackled with longing and languor, while the echo-laden, feedback-drenched “Up All Night” brought us all back to the dance floor.

Celebration’s debut is out now on Beggars/4AD. ¶ The Double’s Loose In The Air is out on Matador. Or you could visit their their website. (Nice use of Flash, by the way).

It’s been three long years since the last Terrastock. And almost ten since the first festival, which took place in Providence and brought together bands as disparate as the Silver Apples, Pearls Before Swine, Flying Saucer Attack, and thee Hydrogen Terrors (among others) in an incredible venue (the Rogue Lounge on Manton Avenue).

This year’s festival —which will run from April 21-23, 2006— is again taking place in downtown Providence at two venues: AS220 and the Pell Chaffee Performance Center. Tickets are $110 for the entire event. They are available from the Ptolemaic Terrascope or by PayPalling $110.00 toterrastock6@secreteye.org.

Providence is actually a friendly, lovely city in which to spend a long weekend. It’s small and very walkable. There are tons of reasonable food options in walking distance of the venue —and (for you coffee addicts) there’s a Dunkin Donuts next door. (Coffee snobs, there’s a better class of coffee to be had nearby as well.)

I’d advise getting hotel reservations early because there are not enough hotel rooms to go around.

LINEUP SO FAR: Avarus, Bardo Pond, Black Forest/Black Sea, Charalambides, Cul de Sac, College Girls Gone Wild, Damon & Naomi, Fursaxa, Ghost, the Green Pajamas, the Kitchen Cynics, Kinski, Sharron Kraus, Landing, Larkin Grim, the Magic Carpathians Project, Major Stars, Marissa Nadler, MV/EE, Paik, Jack Rose, Salamander, St. Joan, Spacious Mind, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Tanakh, Thoughtforms, Urdog, Windy and Carl.

If Lightning Bolt turn out to be the “Special Guests” I will be really, really annoyed. I can only hope for Matt Elliott. Or Foehn. Or Pram. Or His Name is Alive…

A girl can dream, can’t she?