Fists With Your Toes

"Let it be printed on every t-shirt in this land."

Guest Blogger Max Power writes in: How could someone so great get even greater? AB & Co. killed Emmanuel Lewis Hall last night. The massive high ceilings, the overbearing security, the beer hawkers elbowing through the crowd, the spastic clapping drunk broad, the constant din of bottles crashing into the trash from the bars - all that dried up and blew away at the first pizzicato gust.

The FWYT community knows I've had my socks knocked off by Bird many times before, but he really somehow transcended himself last night. The man's really dropping the next level shit with regular Martin Dosh and bassist Jeremy Ylvisaker.

What's new is the way they're looping more phrases than ever on more instruments than before and stretching the songs way, WAY the fork out. We're talking rhapsodic instrumental sonic landscapes of The Beyond.

And hat tip to AB for his commitment to forward motion to the ocean. He must know he could wow the crowd with a set ladened with songs off Weather Systems and Mysterious Production, but it's all about the fresh joints for him. The only older songs were a particularly ballsy mid-set solo Why?, a rare "because it's Spring" rendition of Masterfade (YES!), a set-closing Skin, Is My and a final Tables and Chairs, with the audience complying with his "rule-breaking" request for a sing-along where his violin usually fits. (The evening ended with the song's last ironic line, "Don't you worry about the atmosphere" chased by AB's little muttered, "But of course you should; the world's ending.")

Other highlights? The entire 105 minute show. Cataracts got me. A swinging, down-tempo Fiery Crash. And Armchairs was devastating. At the end of one particularly ecstatic wall of looped sound - I forget the song it started out as - a man was heard to yell, just as the wave rolled back, "CASE IN POINT!"

Some Canadian made AB a sock monkey named "Night Hanger", clothed in a sharp little suit with trademark fancy socks. (Where do they find the time?) He showed us the violin case on its back, saying, "Oh look! A little violin inside."

I interviewed Andrew Bird for Gothamist last week and got to the bottom of the sock thing. The Beev has more sock porn.

(Andrew Bird at Webster Hall Photo Cred.)

Bjork Rocks the North Pole

We decided it would be fun to ride bikes from Billyburg up to 175th Street for Bjork's show at the United Palace Theater. There's a bike path along the Hudson River the whole way up - way, WAY the fork up - and it was a gorgeous crisp Spring Saturday. Why not?

Well, not only was it fun, but it was also Epic, Grueling and, by the ride home, Exhausting. (A two hour tour each way? Respeck!) And I would do it again as long as I get one of those thick gel bike seats and some reconstructive knee surgery.

May 2007 A.D. trees were in full olfactory bloom and the view along the river was a knockout . Perhaps the best part of the ride occurred on the way home when, around midnight, my companion ran down a live rat that was scrambling across the path. HIT AND RUN. One down, 8 million to go! (And let me tell you we're going to have some feast tomorrow night once I skin that rat, boy!)

And Bjork? I just got back from another bike jaunt up to 59E59 to see The Receipt - which was brilliant - and I'm so knackered now that as I was describing the show a few minutes ago I referred to Bjork as Beck. Yeah. At least twice before being corrected. So grains of salt all around people, but the show was at turns magnificent, jaw-shatteringly unbelievable, impersonal and overwrought (Declare Independence? Um, I think I'm sticking with the Union.)

God bless her little Icelandic heart for having the stones to reach for the supernatural; when it works there's nothing else like it and you're helpless to resist. Songs like Hunter, Wanderlust and Pluto left me twitching, drooling and finding myself standing inexplicably in the aisle. Of course, the downside of that is the occasional grandiose overreach, and Declare Independence is Exhibit Eh.

Bjork doesn't "do" political; she's too evocative and surreal for that.  Declare Independence, her STINGY one song encore, screeches on and on in the form of an interminable, simplistic techno diatribe that sent this blogga nitpicking into the night. (S/FJ dips his oar into this in last week's New Yorker.)

I know you all think it always comes back to Fugazi with me, and perhaps you're right. But strong men also cry. Strong men also cry, and for me the final word on flags and nationalism is a little song called Facet Squared. You know, the one that climaxes with the lines "We draw lines and stand behind them. That's why flags are such ugly things that they should never touch the ground!"

Listen UP! Facet_squared.mp3

Fine, perhaps I am being a quibbling little beeatch. There is no mo Fugazi but there is Bjork and there were enough perfect moments in her set to make me feel like I got my EIGHTY DOLLARS worth, and that's no small task with me. She brought out Antony, whose exquisite voice went to waste on a strangely unaffecting Dull Flame Of Desire. But still... When she told us she was bringing out another guest I thought, "could it be... please... I've been SO good... THOM YORKE!?!?!"

No, but it was Min Xiao-Fen who ABSOLUTELY KILLED on the pipa, or "Chinese lute" or, as I referred to it last night, "whatever the fuck that was it blew my fucking head off OMGWTF she SHREDDED that thing!!!" My rat-slaying companion said something about the lute being the favorite of opium smoking dilettantes in the Oriental days of yore. Hell, I would have payed 80 bones just to hear Xiao-Fen go nuts on the pipa solo for 75 minutes. With or without the opium. (Ok, $80 with, $70 without. Final offer.)

And last but not least there was ample video projection of the absolutely fascinating Reactable.

Yeah, that's an instrument. (Though not played by infants last night.)

"Reactable is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language." (Read more about it on Boing Boing.)

Music Slut was there and I stole his/her photo of Bjork. (Just trying to cultivate my Bad Boy image.)

"We'll fight for your music halls and dying cities."

Andrew Bird on Letterman. Get it while it's hot.

"I dreamed you were a cosmonaut of the space between our chairs"

I was sick as a dog last night and had to send friend of the blog Max Power to the Andrew Bird show at the miniature Union Hall. (Which was fine because had I seen the way they misspelled "tonight" on the chalkboard outside the bar I would have CRACKED SKULLS.) Here are his reflections:

Spellbinding. This is the fourth time I've seen AB (myspace) and somehow I always forget to bring a bib; all I can do is stand there entranced and slackjawed, T-shirt damp with drool.

I was right in front of the stage for his set at Bonnaroo (watch the high water mark of my song-requesting career here; that's me Bird's talking to) and front & center last time he played Bowery Ballroom. But nothing can really top seeing one of your favorite bands in a space smaller than a basement rec room. You could have stood in the back by the bar and played ping-pong with AB from there.

Indeed, AB quipped that the stage was so small someone was probably going to get decapitated. (Why couldn't it have been the girl in front of me who kept chattering on and on and on to her boyfriend during EVERY song about how/why she LOVED the very song she lacked the attention span to actually LISTEN TO for more than 20 seconds without COMMENTING/YELLING. "Someday we'll get back at the all. / With epoxy and a pair of pliars".)

Fortunately I was close enough to the speakers that her blathering was reduced to 'ants at a picnic' level irritant. Personal highlight was probably Armchairs, off the new album. Oh and Dear Dirty, which was devastating. Not to take anything away from the overwhelming Scythian Empire, either. And how could I omit Plasticities?... Okay, the highlight was everything. AB & Co. shit Tiffany cufflinks.

It's interesting that despite the near-masterpiece that is Mysterious Production of Eggs, he seems to have pretty much abandonded his older material. The new album is exquisite, so no complaints. But a ballsy move, nonetheless, especially from a guy who seems to have such a shy, self-conscious personality.

Andrew Bird plays Letterman tonight. Someone in the room asked him if he was excited about it, and he said, "Yeah, if by excitement you mean pure terror."

(After the jumping see the set list & more photos by Roboppy, who wrote about it on her weblog The Oh So Quiet Show. Daily Refill was there; a big thank you to her for annointing Max Power her Plus One. I'd steal her pics but GIFs don't agree with my deal here for some reason.)

"Five-day forecast brings black tar rains and hellfire"

Since you last heard from me, I've been submerged in the sensory deprivation tank listening to Andrew Bird's new album, Armchair Apocrypha on repeat. Just briefly surfacing here to deem it sublime.

Listen: Scythian Empire.mp3

It's something of a departure from his previous album, the whimsically masterful Mysterious Production of Eggs. Armchair Apocrypha is more reflective and tinged with traces of sad, fin de siècle weariness. Elegant. Sumptuous. An album to get lost in the woods with.

Purchase.

I also interviewed playwright Adam Rapp (here) and liquid light pioneer Joshua White (here). White's Joshua Light Show is what you see happening in every photo from the Fillmore East.

(Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, property of Joshua White.)

The occasion for the latter interview was the revival, of sorts, of his light show at The Kitchen Wednesday night. He was joined by video artist Bec Stupak and music duo Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom.

I made it to the late show and loved it. The music was sort of throbbing, repetitive trance-synth, some of which got a little, you know, repetitive. Or, to put it another way, repetitive. Am I a square? Was that the point? That said, for most of it, particularly the up-tempo parts, the epic vibration really had me. Man.

And the visuals were a thing of ever expanding cosmic beauty. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I went into the show utterly sober and still found it very engrossing. Oddly, the thing White is commonly associated with - the oil and water "liquid light" effect - was, to me, the least interesting. (Sort of a glorified lava lamp, no?)

But everything else out of his other psychedelic bag of tricks was really mesmerizing. Now, if I had gone into it with a head full of acid, or high on reefer, or out of my mind on Special K, or even a glass of wine, I'd probably be toiling away on a dense monograph about how SIGNIFICANT and FAR-FUCKING-OUT the show was!!!

Or, as Otto once observed while gazing up at a dazzling meteor shower: "I don't need drugs to enjoy this... Just to enhance it!"

So we can be thankful there wasn't time for any of that. It was just a lovely show. Boldface names in the house included Radiohole and a guy I was convinced was Sam Shepherd until he walked by me on the way out. Now I'm not so sure. Would Shepherd wear a really depressing looking sweatshirt and awful, baggy jeans?

DID YOU KNOW: Joshua White went on to direct one of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld? Read the interview to find out which one! (Hint: It wasn't the one where Kramer salvages the set from the Merv Griffith show and installs it in his apartment. That was a good episode, though.)

Jonny Greenwood is the Controller

Guess who's coming to dinner? Natty Greenwood.

One of albums I've been listening to a lot lately is a reggae compilation assembled for Trojan Records by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. It's been quite the antitode for these frigid New York winter days, an eclectic mix of rich, weird dub reverb and smooth soul sounds from Jamaica.

TITANIUM RESPECT EVERY TIME!

In the liner notes, Greenwood admits that he's been listening "exclusively to reggae for the last six months, and am still discovering Jamaican artists, new to me, that really should have been included here... How could all this remarkable music come from one small island, with a population less than 2 million in the 1970's?

Jamaican reggae is the style of music I always reach for when ranting to friends about there being so many great recordings in the world, and how you could listen to one style of music exclusively for the rest of your life, and it all be great, and varied, and worth hearing."

The standout tracks belong to Gregory Isaacs, Junior Byles and Lee "Scratch" Perry. (I've caught Perry a couple times live in town and it's always a delirious experience.) But it's really one killer joint after another; pick it up and you won't want to set it down for a while.

That said, my favorite song on the compilation is definitely Perry's Bionic Rats, which is about vampires, Satan and "super traps" set by Jah to catch bionic rats. Yeah, Lee.

Bionic Rats.mp3

Black Panta.mp3

You can buy Jonny Greenwood is the Controller here. (It's also available on shelves today... and here's Trojan's myspace too, my brethren.)