Chris Forsyth, Cassini, IOSIS, 7.11.19

August 16, 2019 by Matt Beachey

In early July 2019, Chris Forsyth pulled three lauded Chicago musicians together to rehearse for a single day before they set out on a short three-night tour—Doug McCombs of Tortoise on bass, Jaime Fennelly of Mind Over Mirrors on synth, and Areif Sless-Kitain of the Regulator Watts on drums.

Before hitting Acme Records in Milwaukee and finishing at the Hideout in Chicago, they made their first live appearance together at the Fraternal Order of Eagles #34 in Powderhorn, Minneapolis, the fabled meeting place of young punks and irritated townies confused at the noise coming from one of the ballrooms that’s drowning out Karaoke at the bar. (I once saw Marrisa Anderson play an intimate set here and she had to fight over the Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock rendition coming through the door.)

Forsyth wanted to make ammends with the bar denizens from the start, so just before his set he bellied up to the karaoke station and sang Blue Oyster Cult’s Buring for You as only a a deep BOC fan can.

Time is the essence
Time is the season
Time ain't no reason
Got no time to slow

Time is always on your mind when recording a set on tape. You don’t have the luxury of of gigabytes of space like you do on a portable digital recorder. Chris estimated that the set would go 50-80 minutes, which meant I’d have to use the only reel of tape with 90 minutes of recording time I had available (which I’d already recorded on more than a couple times) giving this recording a nice grimy sheen. In retrospect I like it better for that though. There are a few dead spots on the tape where the iron oxide is wearing thin, and the band crumbles out of the air for a moment, but I’ve come to like those weird spots on repeat listens. The set still sounds incredibly vital, and the band eager to explore together, particularly once they really gets cooking on Dreaming the Non Dream.

Chris Forsyth

Chris Forsyth - guitar, vocal
Doug McCombs - bass guitar
Jaime Fennelly - synthesizer
Areif Sless-Kitain - drums

If you wanna check out some other sets from this run to compare, you can hear them play the hideout a few days later here.

Cassini

Opening the set was Cassini—a new band born out of a desire to play live-band versions of some of Steve Palmer’s recorded tracks, but which has quickly evolved into its own independent vehicle. Full disclosure, I also play in this band, and this was our first show. We played interpretations of a couple of tracks on Steve’s upcoming release, as well as one from his first (which is also our namesake).

IOSIS

IOSIS is a conjurer of deep, haunting drone, driving modular synths through ungodly pedal combinations and occasionally getting a singing bowl screeching in harmony. His stuff rolls out slowly, like a snake quietly rising out of a cave in the dark until its towering above you before you realize it. He’s also my old neighbor, a Drone Not Drones regular, and a fixture of Minneapolis experimental and noise music. He made for a nice contrast to the guitar-centric rest of the set. I thought of it as the Drums/Space portion of the evening.

It’s been a while since the last Southern Jukebox Music post. Fortunately I’ve got something else in the can ready to go very soon, so look out for something else in a week or so.

John Saint Pelvyn, 7.7.18

January 14, 2019 by Matt Beachey

John Saint Pelvyn is one of the singular voices of underground music in the Twin Cities. A regular tourmate of legendary denatured banjo exorcist Paul Metzger, Pelvyn is someone who sounds unmistakably like only himself the second he picks up his instrument. His combination of behind the bridge picking, rapid whammy bar shaking and churning feedback is a subtle dance that rivals the abilities of many greats, from psychedelic improvisational noise to piedmont-picking fingerstyle acoustic—but one he alone inhabits.

His recent outstanding solo release A Clerical Error In Shasta County Shouldn’t Have to Ruin a Saturday Night is brimming with guitar inventions that are contained in their own musical vernacular. It was one of my favorite releases of last year, and features a handful of other musicians including Ka Baird, who did an amazing set with Paul Metzger which you can check out here. The set below was at Pelvyn’s record release show at Dead Media, a fine seller of records, tapes and books.

It was a noisy, hot summer night in an alley of a neighborhood full of life and loud children, and John had fallen from a ladder earlier in the day setting up some stringed lights. His shoulder was hurt and he was having a bit of trouble supporting his guitar. But as he always does, he walked around and hurled his guitar around his amp while he played, alternatively lifting it to his face to amplify his voice. Pelvyn’s vocals sometime contain words, and sometimes come out as a proto-language cry that becomes indistinguishable from his guitar. Either way they evoke a foreboding and ineffable story.

When I listen to this set now, I forget that I'm listening to one person playing a single guitar, or singing, or even a performance that ever happened. It sounds like flowering shapes moving in my minds eye, a soundtrack to a closed-eye hallucination. There’s also something undeniably wintery about it to me, like Pelvyn is scoring a tundra-western, following a lone icicle-covered gunslinger across a barren, frozen landscape, punctuating the crunch of snow underfoot with harmonic string plinks and riding the howling wind with distant feedback.

Half a year later, looking out my frosted window into a snow dusted street, this music feels as at home as it it did on a hot night in a dusty alley. But maybe more than that it feels placeless, and it asks you to go somewhere in your head, somewhere you haven’t been in a while and maybe somewhere you’re not sure you want to be. But like all good trips, it’s best to just let your guard down and follow where it leads.

Oscar Tengo, 7.23.2018

October 26, 2018 by Matt Beachey

This summer I saw my friend Miles McClain (also known as Shit God ) play a solo guitar set at a house show. I knew him only for drone and noise music beforehand, so I was thoroughly impressed to see him play an amazing set on an acoustic guitar. Unfortunately my reel to reel was busted at the time so I couldn’t record it, but Miles will be on the site someday.

The house show was part of a series called Airplane Mode, put on by Nick Baker with the goal of creating a musical experience akin to that before smartphones and facebook; all promotion is done via email list or word of mouth, and no phone use is allowed during performances. I asked Nick if I could play an Airplane Mode show, and he put me on a bill with an outrageously young math rock band touring from New Jersey and a two-person improv comedy troupe. I had my cranky old machine working by then, thanks to a step-by-step tutorial from some generous guy in the U.K. via video chat.

Buy the Tape

This recording is also available on cassette as an edition of twenty-five handmade tapes for the reasonable price of five dollars. A mostly-filled C60 tape, it includes all of the live set above and more. This means Southern Jukebox Music is a tape label now, I guess. I’m planning on getting at least to SJM-002. Stay tuned.

Side A is Live at Airplane Mode. Side B is something else that isn’t available for download. Is it a long, accidental phone recording from my pocket of me at the drive thru? Is it Steve Palmer covering Dave Matthews Band? Is it an audio-only version of the pee tapes? In a way it’s all of these things. But you’ll have to buy the tape to hear it.

You can order the tape here, (or just look at the gratuitous product photos) or if you’re in Minneapolis you can pick one up at this show at the Eagles 34 this weekend.

photos by Zola Pineles

Bitchin Bajas, 2.14.18

June 15, 2018 by Matt Beachey

I was feeling a little weird about hauling my reel to reel into the 7th Street Entry, as it’s not exactly a portable recording rig. The door man gave me some weird looks but ultimately let me in. Once inside, I saw that Minneapolis taper extraordinaire and all around mensch Tom Michaels was already set up and ready to capture some serious tones and zones. I was immediately jealous of the tiny footprint of his double mic stand and portable pro digital rig as I carried in a box full of antiquity. But like any taper who’s been doing this for 30-plus years like he has, he was eager to share his knowledge, and to gawk and my reels a bit.

Quick aside about Tom Michaels: the guy is seemingly at every single show in Minneapolis with his recording rig. He has permanent recording rigs set up at several locations in Minneapolis ready to record at a moments notice. He gets out to more shows far more than anyone I know. He’s solely responsible for more recordings of fledgling Minneapolis bands than the entirety of the recorded live Grateful Dead.

Outside of his work with Bitchin Bajas, synth lord Cooper Crain is also responsible for producing some wonderfully dreamy-sounding records from his Chicago buds Circuit Des Yeux and Ryley Walker, and he and the rest of Bitchin Bajas are just as skilled at creating lush soundscapes live. Everything feels a bit more spontaneous and liable to run off the rails than on record, but they still keep you in a deep trance the whole time.

I wasn’t able to record either of the great local openers IE and Magnetic Ghost, but check them out if you like Bitchin Bajas.

Bitchin Bajas mostly played their fantastic 2017 release Baja Fresh at this show (plus one track I couldn’t place—let me know if you now it), turning their ambient cloudburst of an album into a driving gut-rumbling live experience. Their first song Jammu got cooking to a nice boil when technical difficulties stopped it short, but everything from there was a thick and heady trip, best taken in lying on the floor of the Entry.

Marshall Allen’s flute and sax playing are spry and fluid in a live setting, and draws a line to avant jazz—particularly in the Sun Ra cover Angels and Demons at Play and the final track Be Going. The latter the two is definitely my favorite of the set. The sax and organ combination is bursting with white-hot overtones, and sounds simultaneously mournful and hopeful.

Spires That In the Sunset Rise & Friends, 1.24.2018

April 13, 2018 by Matt Beachey

Shortly before the fifth annual Drone Not Drones¹ in late January, Jonathan Kaiser (photo credit above) and MirrorLab Studios put together a show of several improvisational luminaries: Ka Baird and Taralie Peterson—both seminal experimentalists of Spires that in the Sunset Rise who were in town to play Drone Not Drones—alongside some of Minneapolis’ most prolific and interesting free improvisors Paul Metzger, John Saint Pelvyn, Elaine Evans, and Tim Glenn.² This kind of one-off spontaneous meeting of musicians is precisely the kind of thing I’m trying to capture on this site, so I gladly hauled my rig to the White Page to record.

They played in pairs, and then together as one overgrown ensemble. A couple sets involved musicians who’ve rarely, if ever, played together. That’s not necessarily an issue when you’re both improvising, but it made everyone’s remarkable musical chemistry all the more impressive.

It’s a bold thing to make a noise with your instrument or voice with someone else, not knowing how they are going to fit in with the choice you’ve just made. It requires all involved to commit to a shared trajectory that doesn’t have anything to bind it to the familiar. It requires moving like birds in a flock, reacting and following more than directing, yet a direction arises. It is a skill, as much as it is a willingness to relinquish the idea of your own skills, that allows this to happen.

As a listener, free improvisational music of this sort requires you to deliberately push yourself out of the role of familiar emotional response from music and become part of the process yourself. Your mindset greatly alters what you’re hearing; you might find that something sounds completely different upon second listening. At one point the music might seem meandering and aimless, and you might catch your mind wandering. The music becomes the background of a deep thought reverie, when suddenly you wake up and realize you’re enveloped in a strange, unsettling texture of sound.

The especially weird thing is when you listen to an improvised piece enough times that you become familiar with each fluttering twist, and you begin to anticipate it the way you would any composed music you know well. What was once a fleeting whim of someone else’s subconscious now occupies a permanent place in your tonal memory. Fragments that at first seemed atonal and abstract take on a significance beyond traditional melody. At that point you likely now know it more intimately than the performer themself ever did.

There’s something inherently playful about this music, even when it sounds gripping or frightening or austere. It can’t rely on standard musical tropes to elicit a particular emotional response; it has to invent its own language on-the-spot and you have to be willing to try and learn it along with the performer.

I hope you take a moment to close your eyes and experience these performances. They’ll take you somewhere, and you’ll forget where you started by the finish.

¹ Drone Not Drones has become the premiere experimental/improvisational performance of the midwest (Chicago included, prove you’ve got something better, you soggy deep-dishes) not only bringing together legends like Nels Cline or Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth alongside fledgling basement projects, but literally letting them play one continuous piece together for 28 goddamn hours. Go if you can.

² I know this is a lot of names—If you are unfamiliar with any or all of them, I apologize for the arcane nature of this sentence. I include them all (with links) for the sake of giving credit and paying reverence to people I admire or have just learned of, not to name-drop or intimidate newcomers with a slew of artists they feel like they’re supposed to know. I often experience the latter when exploring new music, but I think being warm and welcoming is especially important in weird-ass, unapproachable music. I agree with the dad in this American Choppers meme.

Taralie Peterson and Elaine Evans

These two played the first set of the night, weaving tense and trembling musical lines from alternating cello, modified autoharp, terse vocals, bass clarinet, regular clarinet, clarinet without a mouthpiece, clarinet with only a mouthpiece, and simply mouth. Also some children in the audience piped in half way through.

Evans and Peterson create passages that sound like a delapotated chamber orchestra, climbing quietly until they quickly break apart into chaos. Peterson’s vocals are chilling, and give the entire performance a darkly spiritual quality. I especially loved when Peterson picked up her autoharp at the end. (you can hear a lot more of that specifically in her great Drone Not Drones set a couple days later.)

Ka Baird and Paul Metzger

Baird and Metzger’s improvisation pushes deep into a thicket of darkness, and then ignites the whole brushpile into fiery oblivion. Then they let the embers settle back down into the earth until they gradually cool to nothing.

I’ve seen Metzger many times around Minneapolis, but only solo, so it was great seeing him interact with another musician. Baird’s percussive flute and possessed vocals seemed to conjure a more tranquil side out of him.

Ka Baird, Taralie Peterson, Elaine Evans, Paul Metzger, John Saint Pelvyn, and Tim Glenn

This set bordered on the wild, freer side of psychedelic jazz of the likes of Pharoah Sanders or Alice Coltrane. This one gets especially dense and otherworldly; all six musicians did an amazing job weaving around each other to create something pretty alien.