Author: andrea Page 56 of 71

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]

I’ve had a rollercoaster of a week. So when I am actually listening to music (as opposed to hurriedly running around), I don’t want roars —I want songs that tiptoe and whisper. Or tiny whirlwinds, both glacial and immense. Mischievous songs that sound like rain on windowsills, the crackle of thunder in the distance, gathering speed and power. Wind-up toy operas. Spiralling violin, crackling static. Songs that could only have come off of an old wax cylinder, or from the future.

A few, s’il vous plait.

The Konki Duet aren’t a duo at all but rather a trio that sings in French, English, and Japanese. Their wry cover of the Visage chestnut “Fade to Gray” completely transformed the song (so much so that I barely recognized it). Their debut album exudes effortless charm, from the spidery Gorey-esque drawings that adorn the cover to the lovely harmonies and clever arrangements.

La Laque are a New York-based band with a marked interest in the Nouvelle Vague (check their website’s gorgeous Posters section for further proof). They first came to my attention with their gorgeously-designed split 12″ with Pas/CAL [available here —what a joy that website is! Happy design delerium]. They’re currently working on their first CD, but until then they’re offering free music on their MySpace page.

Le Volume Courbe is a very recent discovery. Charlotte Marionneau is a French expatriate living in London. Her music has a strange, otherworldly quality to it —she sings like an old soul and the music is a spidery yet tensile collage of fractured beats and guitar loops. Her cover of Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” is celebratory. Find the album if you can —it’s well worth it. And hopefully she’ll tour here eventually.

The Konki Duet | The Konki Shop | The Konki YouTube

La Laque promise a CD EP on the way soon —check their MySpace page for info.

le Volume Courbe on Myspace | Buy “I Killed A Friend” [Astralwerks] | Le Volume Courbe YouTube

The Konki Duet, “Cindy”

The Konki Duet, “Ima wa mori no naka ni”

La Laque, “La Sirene Dort”

Le Volume Courbe, “Papillon de Nuit”

IMAGE BY JOSEPH CORNELL, BASTARDIZED BY ME. SORRY, JOSEPH!

THROWING MUSES
August 11, 2006
Middle East | Cambridge, MA

COAT OF ARMS
August 12, 2006
AS220 | Providence, RI

Going to a reunion show is, generally speaking, a bittersweet experience. In essence, it’s about staying in place, retreating to a skillfully re-created illusion of comforting familiarity. When the show fails to deliver on that objective, you’re treated to the jarring realization that the past you remember so seemingly vividly wasn’t all that freaking great. When it’s all served up seamlessly, the illusion is complete.

Neither one of the shows I went to this past weekend quite fulfilled that tall order of illusory time-warp. But both were satisfying when taken on their own terms. Throwing Muses remain, as ever, one of the most powerful live bands I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them a lot (hell, I even braved the world’s crappest TV show in order to see them perform).

I’ve seen the Muses enough, and in such far-flung venues, that I no longer even truly associate them with Providence (or Newport), or think of them necessarily as being a local band. Coat of Arms, on the other hand, bring me right back to Providence, c. 1987. I’d just moved back here from California. I’d started to get into weird comics (the weirdest I got at the time was Love & Rockets —I know, NOT WEIRD. But, context is everything, and I lived in a tiny cultural wasteland) and I figured it was time to branch out into music. I became friends with the school’s lone acid freak, who got me into the Velvets and Eno. (That was a slow process, but I got there eventually.) Somewhere along the way I bought some cassettes by local bands like Sleep that Burns, Stained Rug Theory, and Coat of Arms.

I bought Stained Rug Theory’s tape because it came in a fur pouch. I was reading lots of Bataille and Bellmer at the time and this struck me immediately as a perfect willfully perverse gesture. (To this day I cannot resist cleverly-packaged music.) Musically they satisfied the proto-Goth in me. They had a deeply inconsistent, histrionic sound —flickers of industrial grind, TG-like tape loops and psycho-sexual ennui melded rather clumsily to over-emoted vocals. I loved them for their colorful, surreal juxtapositions of musical textures —they were far better collagists than songwriters. But, hell, I love Max Ernst for the same reason, so…

Coat of Arms was a far different beast. They weren’t dark and conflicted like Stained Rug Theory. Their sound was comparatively sunny-sounding and all-American, fitting in nicely with their contemporaries (fIREHOSE, Pixies, Muses, Lemonheads). Songs like “Common Ground” and “Indoor Poolz” were giddy and effervescent, equal parts power-pop and kitchen-sink glam. (“(When I) Touch You There” went all jangle-pop on us.) The band’s reach often exceeded their grasp, but that was part of the fun. And Saturday’s one-time-only reunion show thankfully didn’t add any gloss to the proceedings. (And no, the cheekily earnest cover of “Borderline” didn’t count.)

Rather than plunge me into sepia-tinted nostalgia, the show only served to remind me how culture-deprived Providence was in those days. But, like anywhere, there were beacons of hope around if you took the time to look for ‘em. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that comics and music got me through high school.

Throwing Muses did too, in their own way. I don’t know how many times I’ve played their first album, but it never fails to offer up something revelatory. Back then, in the socially awkward years of late high school, it was the most cathartic album I owned. Unlike the over-determined, overly dramatic Joy Division, Kristin Hersh’s humble, skewed narratives really spoke to me in their allusive, conversational way. I don’t think I’d ever seen a female songwriter write so matter-of-factly, and so un-self-pityingly, about some of the blackest, bleakest experiences of her life. And she did it with such wry humor.

I have a lot more I could say about how much Kristin’s music has moved me, but this is getting long enough. I leave y’all with a few live Throwing Muses tracks from 1985, and one each from Stained Rug Theory and Coat of Arms.

***

Throwing Music Free Music. Lots of great stuff there, including “Shimmer” from Friday night’s Muses set. They’ll be releasing the entire set online in September. | Coat of Arms on MySpace. I imagine you can order the career retrospective by contacting them there. | No idea if any Stained Rug Theory is available online, but you could always contact Maurice Methot.

Coat of Arms, “Common Ground” (from 2006’s retrospective, Ancients + Terribles, Selected Recordings 1986-1988)

Stained Rug Theory, “VU Meter” (1988)

Throwing Muses, “Not Too Soon” (Live at WRIU, 1985. Tanya Donelly, vocals)

Throwing Muses, “Dirt Is On The Floor” (Live at WRIU, 1985. Elaine Adamedes, vocals)

Throwing Muses, “Doghouse/The Burrow” (Live at WRIU, 1985. Kristin Hersh, lead vocals)

LEFT: COAT OF ARMS ROUST! CASSETTE TAPE, 1987. RIGHT: THROWING MUSES FROM LORI TWERSKY’S MUSIC ZINE BITCH(c. 1987?)