Though I had romanticized it a bit in my mind the night prior, going to see a show at a bookstore isn’t really any different than seeing one at a more conventional indie venue. If you don’t manage to score the perfect real estate you’ll still be staring at the backs of heads, and the vast majority of those heads will belong to white men. The only difference, which may be a big one for the well-read aesthete, is that if the low-end gets especially heavy there’s a possibility that it may rattle the bones of some dusty text such that it jumps off the shelf and into your hands. Aside from absorbing some interesting sounds, I walked away from the night with a copy of Louis Althusser’s The Future Lasts Forever, the memoir he wrote about accidently strangling his wife to death during a routine Sunday morning massage.
Zomes is the recording project of Asa Osbourne, who used to play guitar in Lungfish alongside Daniel Higgs. As on his 2008 Holy Mountain Records debut, Osbourne’s performance gear consists of a series of pre-recorded percussion tapes and a keyboard run through several effects pedals that distort, fuzz, and sustain the phrases. The consequence is a mesmerizing and head-nodding pop world stripped of all frills; minimal, and confidently basic. The beats and simple pop phrases conjoin in a sonically sophisticated and architectural way, and while there may be better comparisons, the repetitive sounds instantly reminded me of Jackie Mittoo. Osbourne’s bare sound structures leave much space for autonomous thinking, namely for the listener to imagine the possibility of additional pop fills that the artist cleverly denies due to his well-practiced restraint and allegiance to pop minimalism.
Daniel Higgs has a sage presence that warms up a room. He’s some sort of hyper-spiritualized and worldly warrior/comedian who has returned from outside places to deliver coded messages, warnings, laughs, and blessings. Armed with a profound understanding of oratorical power, his mostly improvised parables and chants fully absorb the listener like opium. His banjo sounded like it was played through an amplified radiator, jagged and brushed with steel wool, transitioning between folk phrases and violent raga outbursts. While his stories and lessons are enticing, they quickly become preachy. Given our constant bombardment with persuasive language – the politician, the preacher, the monsters of advertising, the boss, the culture industry, and so on – silence and non-verbal sound may be more appropriate for healing and learning. Higgs’ aesthetic, though, is deeply rooted in the oral tradition.
The crowd significantly thinned during and after Higgs’ performance. By the time Stellar Om Source, the sound project of synth-lord Christelle Gualdi, juiced up her sound stations and got the green-light waves swirling around the room it was possible to see her furiously spinning and tweaking the countless knobs and pedals. Gualdi has created a sizeable discography over the past 5 or so years, though I’m most impressed with her 2009 self-released CDR, Ocean Woman. The moods and sounds are concurrently meditative and intense, flirting with New Age sound without falling into sweat-lodge-dehydration ridiculousness and pounding the keys toward some unrealized past or future world like fellow hypnagogist Daniel Lopatin. Her synth waves delicately washed over and pulsed through the room, soothing and blasting minds out into other spaces. Without being restricted by time and beat, the rootless sounds are free to linger and float, searching for some curious ear. Seeing this music performed live only increases the joy: leaping and grooving behind the multiple sound-stations like some deranged astronaut who’s attempting to remember which button delivers the ship to eternal bliss. Regardless of whether you prefer to call this recent return to the synthesizer h-pop or neo-Kosmische or something else, Gualdi is constructing some powerful sound-worlds that deserve exploration.
[Photo: Dan Cohoon]
