Southern Jukebox Music

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.

Around the end of summer 2017, Rob Noyes and Alexander (David Shapiro of Headroom, Nagual) needed a place to play in Minneapolis, and thanks to my roommate Steve, ended up in our backyard. It was a perfect summer night where the crickets were almost as loud as the music, and the music sounded all the better for it.

I had the last-minute idea to record the night on my old Radioshack Reel-to-Reel, and I was so pleased with the results that I decided to keep doing it and start this blog of live recordings. I’ve been sitting on this first one for a while now, and listening back when there’s five feet of snow piled up in the same backyard where we set up the show is a nice respite from winter. It also reminds me why house shows are so vital; some music truly cannot be heard in a better space than among friends, acquaintances, and strangers at someone's house, opened up to whoever’s interested.

Something is inevitably lost when you record a solo acoustic guitar performance. A skilled player can bring you somewhere beyond the patterns of their notes, subtly changing their tone and dynamics in a way that tends to never quite make it onto the tape. This is particularly true when you’re recording onto a rickety old reel-to-reel that you bought on craigslist and hastily set up without a lot of technical forethought. But inverse to whatever was lost in these recordings that night, something strange and surreal was gained. The hiss of the evening meshes with the tape hiss, growing softer as the player leans into the mic, then louder as they pull away. The overtones and harmonics of thick guitar chords get churned into a frothy hum. The tape warbles every now and then, chiming in with a quick vibrato like it’s meant to be there.

These recordings are not a sparklingly clear reproduction of either of these musicians. They are closer to a charcoal sketch than a photograph. I did my best to put the life back into them that I heard that night, but they’ve become something else entirely now.

Thanks Rob and David for letting me record your remarkable music.

Rob Noyes

Rob plays live with much more urgency and fire than he does on recording—at least more than he did on his fantastic debut LP The Feudal Spirit. He often finds these hypnotic, looping grooves that are hard to count, but settle comfortably in your ear anyway.

As a 12 string player, it’s tempting to compare Noyes to Leo Kottke, and his energy and speed is certainly reminiscent. However, there’s definitely something unlike his predecessors happening in his clamoring fingerstyle. When he really gets cooking, Noyes has a way of making you forget the individual strokes of his fingers, instead conjuring hallucinatory sounds that seem unattached to his strings. I noticed this especially in the last tune he played that night; he hammered away until the notes blurred into something that didn’t quite resemble guitar music as I know it. It felt more like some buzzing, whirring machine, cranked up so hot that it might jump off the ground, constantly flirting with busting open and spewing gears everywhere. Nothing of the sort happened, though, because Rob is a gentlemen and not a machine.

He's also a unique talent who's making new and exciting sounds while still somewhat resembling whatever American Primitive guitar is, and he's doing it better than almost anyone else in the game right now.

Alexander

Alexander’s recorded output varies from carefully crafted solo acoustic guitar to noisy, feedback-driven drone. Here he played the former. His pieces are often deceptively simple at the start and then slowly unfold into grand statements, blossoming upwards like a sapling growing into an old tree until it’s shimmering in fractal intricacy. When he finds his way back to the beginning, the same cadence he played earlier sounds changed, like it’s seen things on a journey.

The most stunning and bold thing about Alexander's playing is that he isn't afraid to hang on a few notes for a while, take things very slow, and gradually unravel intricate moments with the minimal rigor of a Japanese tea ceremony. His music was a perfect foil to the sheer velocity of his tour mate.

Alexander's pieces live in a place that you have to get up close to, cup your hands around your eyes and peer into in order to see, where you find a churning kaleidoscope once your eyes adjust. He draws your attention to the timbre of each finger stroke, often ending on notes barely played. You have to really get your audience's attention before you can pull off that kind quietude. He did that consistently. The people sitting close to the microphones will inform you of that with their breathless murmurs in case you're listening to this while checking your email and it didn't have the same effect.

If you're into this kind of music, expect to hear a lot of these two in the future. Both Rob and Alexander are playing the Thousand Incarnations of the Rose guitar festival in April in Takoma Park—John Fahey's boyhood home. Go to that damn festival and see them live if you have the chance. I'll see you there. Possibly with an unwieldy reel-to-reel under my arm.

Slow Clarity

Steve and I opened up the show as Slow Clarity. Here's something we worked on together from Steve's debut on Dying For Bad Music.

Thanks for listening, and check back soon for more music. I've got more shows in the can almost ready to post, and I'm planning on recording many more. Sign up for the email list or subscribe to the RSS Feed if you want to be in the know.

Spires That In the Sunset Rise & Friends, 1.24.2018