THE PLACE: Citarella Market
THE PLAYERS: A male employee speaking to a female employee
MALE EMPLOYEE: Oh, I got a Prince Albert while you were away.
ON THE OCCASION OF LADDIO BOLOCKO — LIVE AND UNRELEASED 1997 – 2000
One fortuitous evening in the autumn of 2000, I walked into the Bowery Ballroom in New York. I was there to see Trans Am. But I happened to get there early and caught the entire set by the opening band. They were all pallid, malnourished guys in black turtlenecks; they looked like characters in a Beckett play or a painting by Egon Schiele. And they were amazing: pounding, odd meter rhythms that would be the envy of any prog band, but with a brutal sense of sex and violence that very few prog bands ever attain. Savage and brainy, they grooved so hard that you could dance to even the craziest rhythms.
They would play motifs, as in jazz, then riff on variations on them, then move on to a new section. They were listening to each other like jazz musicians, and with the extraordinary technique of jazz musicians too, but with the incantatory repetition of the so-called (I hate this term) krautrock bands. Those German bands called their music "motorik" — expressly designed for driving — but I'm not sure you'd want to drive to this music. You would wind up zooming off a cliff and hitting the ground in an earth-shaking fireball.
It was freakin' intense. I was blown away.
Afterwards, between sets, they were hanging out in the audience, in front of the stage. I really wanted to know who they were. But I also didn't want to know who they were — I kind of didn't want to hear them speak, because I thought it might ruin the spell. I couldn't even figure out whether they were American or not, because they didn't sing, or even say anything between songs. They seemed maybe Eastern European, but only because they were so pale and dissipated-looking. But curiosity got the better of me and I worked up the nerve to walk up to one of them. "Man, you guys are great! Do you have a mailing list? When's your next gig?" And the guy said very flatly, in straightforward American-accented English, "That was our last show." There must be a German word for feeling both lucky and sad.
I had the foresight to buy the CD they were selling at the show, which was great because in the months that followed I was able to find very little information about the band, and it was nearly impossible to buy any of their records. They had no website, there was no current contact information on their CD, and there had been very little written about them. So I had to satisfy myself with the memory of that mind-roasting set, and until now one single CD would have to be my souvenir.
Later, a couple of them formed the Psychic Paramount, who are jaw-droppingly amazing in a different way, and I have since made it my business to see them whenever I can.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: always catch the opening band.
Laddio Bolocko's Live and Unreleased 1997-2000 is available on the redoubtable No Quarter Records.
THIS IS NOT (JUST) A PHOTOGRAPH: DEERHOOF'S DIY APOTHEOSIS
When things get so big, I don't trust them at all
You want some control — you've got to keep it small
— Peter Gabriel, "DIY" (1978)
What you see in the photo below left is the camera that took the cover photo (above) of Deerhoof's excellent new album, Breakup Song. The camera also happens to be Deerhoof singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki's cellphone. She took the picture one night this summer on her street in Greenpoint. On the face of it, it's kind of not a big deal. But really, it's a definitive expression of a DIY movement that began with punk rock, and traces back before that by more than a century.
"That is so punk rock!" In the most interesting sense, that doesn't mean someone is wearing a black leather jacket and a mohawk, it means that they've taken matters into their own hands and made a nervy and resourceful end-run around the usual way things are done. The beautiful thing is, anyone can do that, and in just about any field of endeavor.
In the early days of indie rock, advances in technology were beginning to make possible just such defiant ingenuity: the photocopier became accessible to just about anyone, which wrought an explosion of fanzines. Quarter-inch eight-track tape machines enabled more economical recording; soon, four-track cassette recorders appeared, letting anyone easily make multi-track recordings and thereby ushering in the lo-fi movement.
Now, digital technology has advanced DIY exponentially further, to a virtually global reach and a virtually unlimited scale. Photoshop, Protools, MP3s, blogs, podcasting, etc. have empowered the music underground beyond the wildest dreams of the '80s indie community. It's now possible to record music, and distribute and promote it around the planet without prohibitively expensive equipment or the meddling of pricey professionals. Musicians can be more truly independent than ever before. Now an inspired indie musician can use her cellphone to take the lo-fi but undeniably artful photograph for her band's album cover. The future is here.
ENO'S APOLLO MUSIC AT THE WINTER GARDEN
When Brian Eno made his classic semi-ambient 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, he probably didn't mean it as a requiem. But that's how it came off Friday night at a live performance of the album at the Winter Garden in New York City.
Composed for a documentary about the Apollo space program, the music was originally recorded by Eno on a variety of heavily processed synths, accompanied by his protégé, pedal steel virtuoso/guitarist Daniel Lanois, and Eno's brother Roger. This time there was a core band of pedal steel guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, violin, and a vintage Yamaha DX7 synthesizer (which host John Schaefer pointed out now qualifies as a historical instrument). As a large screen behind the band displayed stock footage of space missions and lunar landings, some guest guitarists — David Torn, Noveller, and Tortoise's Jeff Parker — wandered in and out of the soundscape.
The vast, reverberating Winter Garden is tailor-made for long, slow tones such as these, and the music produced apt sensations of weightlessness, distance and stasis. The accompanying footage of spacewalks and booster rockets looks quaint now, and although the musicians were funneling their instruments through what must have been a battery of digital effects, the gesture of painstakingly rendering this synthetic music by hand seemed an appropriate way to evoke a thoroughly bygone era.
Apparently some of the Apollo astronauts brought along Buck Owens and Merle Haggard tapes, hence the pedal steel, played by session ace and longtime Dylan sideman Larry Campbell. But the instrument's distinctly country flavor also recalls those Texan accents from Mission Control and the uniquely American nature of the achievement. More profoundly, it conveys a sense of, appropriately enough, wide open spaces, the frontier. As that quintessential rural American sound brushed up against the otherworldly, Campbell's pedal steel softly sang like a space cowboy.
But that night, the pedal steel, along with the Apollo footage, seemed even more poignant than it usually does. The last manned lunar landing was in 1972. Well over half the current population of the United States was born after that, and has no memory of people walking on the moon, or of any really colossal feat of human exploration. The Apollo music, with its long, tolling waves of sound, became an elegy for the ghosts of American astronauts.