Author: andrea Page 56 of 72

I’m not even sure at this point when or how I stumbled across the Occasion. But I do remember the precise moment that I heard “I Can’t Stop Falling.” It’s a song so compelling you just fall effortlessly into the little world it creates, this pocket fiction you want to take with you and study with rapt, slightly stunned attention. The refrain “I can’t stop falling,” repeated often and with a slowly escalating sense of desperation, is punctuated by sharp, startling whip-cracks of percussion. It is by turns quiet and poetic, furious and tense. “Sooner or later it will come to me,” singer Jordi Wheeler whispers, sounding like a man resigned to a peculiar sort-of hell that he both fears and welcomes.

After some investigating, I found out that “Falling” was off of their self-titled debut [Say Hey, 2004]. Their second album, Cannery Hours [Say Hey], is equally intense, building on similar timeless, enigmatic lyrical concerns and playful sense of sonic experimentation. Musically, the band paints in watercolors —sometimes in broad, dusky swathes, sometimes with bright, pointillist delicacy. Equal parts fitful and elusive, songs like the epic “The Maiden” and the stoic “Register My Complaints” evoke parched soundscapes —deserts where one or two hardy species of plant survive, seemingly against all odds. “You May Know Me” is touched with a rare, effortless sense of grace and buoyed by double-tracked, gentle harmonies and Brent Cordero’s plangent piano. In addition to the somewhat formal, elegiac quality, there’s also a subtle, surreal sense of whimsy at work. “What is this?” Jordi sings on “Register My Complaints”, “Is it the work of some imaginative florist?”

Loosely speaking, The Occasion traffic in a kind of pastoral psychedelia. Psychedelia is, at heart, about freeing music from earthbound limitations, and in turn invoking a trance-like state in the listener. And the sum total of the Occasion’s music offers no such balm. Songs often begin with undulating, gentle waves of sound, lulling you into a false sense of complacency, only to stun you with distortion and rumbling basslines. From there, it builds to these incredible crescendos, pulling you effortlessly to the top of a massive swell and leaving you there, slightly stunned and wondering how in the hell you’re going to get down to Earth again.

The band is, in some ways, a bit of a Frankenstein creature —the push and pull of influences is sometimes internal, and they’re a better band for it. While their sound certainly has some antecedents in the 60s and 70s (the Velvets, Cale, Tony Conrad, echoes of the motorik mantras of Can, Amon Duul II, and Neu!) it also has the crisp single-mindedness and emotional raggedness of post-punk, post-rock groups like Savage Republic, Slint, and Scenic. (The S’s in a row were purely coincidental.) They manage to incorporate three singers —Brent Cordero (vocals, Rhodes piano), Charles Burst (vocals, drums), and Jordi Wheeler (vocals, guitar)— without compromising individual songwriting styles. Yet, somehow, everything coalesces in this incredibly organic way, aided and abetted by the equally impressive contributions of bassist Marlon Sporer and tape loop guru/percussionist Sara Shaw, whose deft way with splicing gives the songs their tenacious, slightly windswept quality.

I’ve caught the band live twice now —once during CMJ at Sin-é, and recently at Boston’s Middle East, where they were opening for Acid Mothers Temple. Both shows were impressive in different ways, The first because the band took their limited time and ran with it, giving us a concise set that never once let up in intensity. Seeing them a little over a month later at the Middle East, it was clear that touring with loose-limbed collective Acid Mothers Temple had liberated the band in some crucial ways. Songs that were organic to begin with became even more freeform, ebbing and flowing with a newfound confidence and innate sense of trust. That, and they seemed to be having a lot more fun.

Long story short: live or on record, they’re a fantastic band and you would do well to have a listen to the MP3s posted on the Say Hey website. Or over at Beekiller.

“Cannery Hours” and “The Occasion” are out now on Say Hey. | The band hopes to be playing some dates soon —check the band’s site for details. | Their MySpace page has their recent BBC session (which they promise on vinyl soon!).

The Occasion, “A Dulcimer’s Fancy”

The Occasion, “Register My Complaints”

Rhys Chatham’s ESSENTIALIST
HEATHEN SHAME
September 9, 2006
MassART | Boston, MA

When a piece of music begins with sheer, obliterating noise it sends me into a panic. I’m constantly looking for narratives in music —patterns and emotional cues— and noise initially puts up a wall of pure hunger, of force, that is not only daunting but difficult to reconcile with. You want to ask of any piece of music: Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you trying to say? but the pummeling wall of sound hurls you backwards, scrambling your logical brain and frying your synapses before you can even begin the inquiry.

There’s catharsis to be found in something so pure. Saturday night, Heathen Shame —consisting of Kate & Wayne of Major Stars/Magic Hour on guitars and Greg Kelley on amped trumpet— began their set with feedback so loud I started to wonder if I could jam multiple sets of ear plugs into my ears. But once the noise settled down to more manageable levels, I was free to engage their performance on its own terms. On the one hand, the group created a palpable sense of tension, echoing Kate and Wayne’s intricate pas de deux of aggression between the guitars with exaggerated, orchestrated movements. As the players stalked intently around the room with mechanized precision, their bodies silhouetted in near-darkness, the forbidding (and foreboding) noise gradually gave way to patterns. Patterns and ritual. The guitars were no less frenzied, but the chaotic bacchanalia of notes began to sound like Indian ragas. Something delicate was there, buried but audible, like the last shred of Hope in Pandora’s box. The piece built and built to a strangely cathartic finale. It was emotional and exhausting.

I’d heard that Rhys Chatham’s new band Essentialist was inspired by the glacial, drone-laden metal of groups like Sunn0))) and Earth. The performance certainly started out that way —with a beautifully orchestrated slow burn, tension ramping up with carefully calibrated precision. Then, BAM! The drummer let loose all that coiled energy and suddenly we had a very different beast on our hands. Not a slow, lumbering beast of burden but something lightning-fast and sleek. It also reminded me of nothing so much as speedy metal in the Pantera vein, albeit played with a sociological sense of detachment. (What the Brits would call “po-faced,” I believe.) Riff-o-rama heaviosity without all the attendant clichés like adolescent posturing, macho bluster, and ridiculous genuflecting at the Church of Satan transmutes into something else entirely —something pure and almost new. (I say almostbecause man, dusting off Monsters of Rock dinosaur metal is a tall fucking order.) If you think about how Rhys has previously performed his alchemical straw-into-gold with punk rawk (applying avant-garde techniques to rock n’roll structures) this new outfit makes sense. Appropriately enough, Saturday night’s show led, full circle, to a blistering performance of 1977’s “Guitar Trio,” a work that never fails to strip the paint off the walls and remind you how vital the sound of three guitars can be.

***

Essentialist will be recording later this month, with an eye towards releasing an album in mid-2007. Chatham’s “A Crimson Grail” will be released in December 2006 on Table of the Elements. Visit Rhys Chatham’s site or that of his record label Table of the Elements for more info. “Guitar Trio,” which is taken from the recently reissued compilation of early works entitled Die Donnergötter (The Thundergods) is available online. | Buy releases from Heathen Shame, Table of the Elements, et al.:Twisted Village. | More info about other NonEvents here.

Rhys Chatham, “Guitar Trio (1982 Version)”

Rhys Chatham is currently in the midst of a tour of the US. If you have even a passing interest in visceral, textural guitar-based music you should go out of your way to see one of these shows. There are a variety of co-headliners along the way, including electronic duo Pan Sonic in New Haven. (If only they were playing together in Boston —if only!) The tour culminates at the Wire-sponsored Adventures in Modern Music festival in Chicago [Sept. 20-24th at the Empty Bottle]. If you’ve ever had a yen to see Coughs AND Jandek at the same time and live to tell the tale, this may be your only chance…

09-05 Knoxville, TN – Bijou Theatre
09-06 Asheville, NC – Orange Peel
09-07 Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506
09-08 Philadelphia, PA – Community Education Center
09-09 Boston, MA – Mass Art
09-10 New Haven, CT – BAR
09-11 Brooklyn, NY – Issue Project Room
09-12 Purchase, NY – South (Purchase University)
09-14 New York, NY – Tonic
09-15 Buffalo, NY – Soundlab
09-16 Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
09-17 Detroit, MI – Bohemian National Home
09-20 Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle (Adventures in Modern Music Festival)

I won’t be attending the Wire-fest (alas) but I’ll most certainly be at the opening night ofWunderground, an ambitious show at the RISD Museum that attempts to chronicle the city’s radical underground art scene from 1995 to the present. There will be eight artists-in-residence (including Lightning Bolt’s own Brian Chippendale) working on a sculptural centerpiece rising up through the soaring 30-foot high main gallery. There will also be a show devoted to poster art.

The show promises to be (nearly) as colorful and raucous as the scene it documented. Before the city was overrun by yuppie development, there was plenty of space to be found in sprawling, often run-down, quasi-legal warehouses and mill buildings. It was the perfect atmosphere to fuel an intense, diverse, and collaborative local scene. Fort Thunder was the chaotic eye of the storm —a collective founded by artists Chippendale and Mat Brinkman that grew into a mini cottage industry (Lightning Bolt, Load Records, and comics tabloid Paper Rodeo all got their start there).

Sadly, Fort Thunder was demolished in 2002 to make way for a strip-mall (not without a long and vocal fight). If you go to the group’s website, you’ll see the rubble. And yet, the spirit lives on. In the most obvious sense, because these artists are all still working and collaborating. But spiritually, too, because Fort Thunder stands as an inspiration (alongside other like-minded but less vaunted underground collectives that sprang up around the same time —the show’s poster lists what seems like hundreds of them, most sadly departed). Not just for its staunchly iconoclastic, DIY-ethic. The group’s stylistic diversity, confidence, and radical experimentation set the bar for other young artists in the city, and also serve as a touchstone and jumping-off point for anyone interested in pushing the boundaries of not just comics or music but any art-form.

All my hoarded copies of the Fort Thunder in-house publication, Paper Rodeo, have gone missing. I still have a stack of Boredoms posters I snuck down off Thayer St. telephone poles the day after the show —they were printed on cheap butcher paper in short runs of different colors. I think I snagged six of them, my favorites done in rich plum tones. It’ll be jarring to see them framed (?) on a museum wall.

I leave you with a crazed mini-Fort Thunder mix-tape. For more check out the mysterious ft.thunderRealSlowRadio. More mixtapes here.

Rhys Chatham | Table of the Elements | “Fort Thunder Forever” —fantastic article about the group. |Fort Thunder home page | Lonelyville is an Eyesore | new Coughs record soon, yo. | Wunderground

Olneyville Sound System, “Waste Away”

Ninja Vs. Wrestler

Wolf Eyes, “Wild Thing”

Many Tentacled Splendor

ARTWORK BY BRIAN CHIPPENDALE, Eagle Square [detail]