Title: Sonic Demons
Artist: Lucio Menegon
Label: Edgetone Records
Format: CDR
By Chad E. Williams
It’s hard sometimes to listen to instrumental music and not create movies or
stories in your head. For me that’s often the best part. Lucio Menegon’s
album “Sonic Demons” does the work for you by providing a short story in
conjunction with the music. I’ll let you discover the story on your own as I
don’t want to ruin it, but with or without this strange backdrop the album
is a beautifully executed collection of free-jazz-ish-noise and ambient
pieces that can take the listener to many unusual places.
Menegon performs on all the tracks here with his ability to mix effected
guitar with electronic and atmospheric sound elements to create a unique
aural picture. Sounds range from spacey layered guitars as in the opening
piece “Lucifer’s Meltdown” to harsher improvisations with enough squeaks and
screeching to satisfy any noise fan as on the track “Shrunken Head”.
Additional yummy layers of interest added by a fun vocal piece with Laurie
Amat (The Residents), Jonathan Segel (Camper Van Beetwhovern), the fantastic
drumming of David Grollman, guitarist John Hanes, and others. “Sonic
Demons” has a bit of something for anyone with open ears and is certainly
worth checking out and creating some fantastic dream-movies to.
(Kingtone editor corrections: John Hanes plays drums and laptop, Jonathan Segel plays with Camper van Beethoven)
Tonight is a special show. My first conducted composition for large ensemble. It’s big. It’s beautiful. Piece to Celebrate the Proximity of Pearl Harbor Day and the Death of John Lennon on the only date it can happen – Mon Dec 7 @ The Makeout Room in San Francisco.
Rehearsal last night was very productive. I discovered that conducting is a rather rigorous affair and will continue to cling to the notion that notation software sucks in general (the sprawling score required good old scissors and glue to paste sections together properly). Aided by a stack of cue cards for the maestro to hold up, the musicians were able to get through the piece and it was fantastic to hear it come to life.
It is in four sections and scored for 10 guitars, 3 bass, 2 percussionists and 1 vocalist. It incorporates my favorite things from some of Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and Moe! Staiano’s work.
The guitars are unison tuned with two low E strings, one middle E and three high E strings. Sections one and two make use of specially prepared spent bullet casings and scraping technique across specific strings to achieve the dramatic sound of planes approaching and departing.
Section 1 – The Sun Also Rises
Section 2 – TORA! TORA! TORA!/The Sleeping Giant Awakens
Section 3 – Helter Skelter
Section 4 – The Sun Also Sets score.pdf
The piece was conceived in New York City in August of this year. After booking a gig on Dec. 7 for large ensemble and having no idea what to present, the date struck me as significant. Pearl Harbor Day followed by Dec. 8, the death of John Lennon – two events that managed to wake people from their collective stupor for a moment. More than anything else this piece is about that, but the analogies are endless.
Members of the Orchestra include:
Suki O’Kane, Pat Spurgeon, Eli Crews, Dave Jess, Geo Kitta, John Shiurba, Nils Erickson, Daryl Shawn, Wayne Grim, David Slusser, Bobby Ray, Brian Good, CD Cummings, Reid Johnston, Dylan Champagne and Katherine Copenhaver.
UPDATE:
The show was really great! Good vibe and crowd. We powered thru the piece and received so much positive feedback and encouragement. Thank you, thank you. It was a cool night of music overall – both Ross Hammond’s trio and Michael Heullits’ trio were smokin’!
Video of the first 10 minutes from Ross H (Section one, The Sun Also Rises and part of Section two, Tora! Tora! Tora!):
…off to the The Makeout Room for the Snowball Pond Orchestra performing Piece to Celebrate the Proximity of Pearl Harbor Day and the Death of John Lennon, the first conducted composition by kingtone (aka Lucio Menegon). (Some readers my recognize Lucio as the host of the Ivy Room experimental-improv series.) The piece is a a surround sound minimalist-meets-mayhem piece to celebrate the proximity of two events that managed to wake people out of their collective stupor for a moment or two.
The first two sections appeared to focus more on Pearl Harbor and the last two more on John Lennon. The opening section featured the guitars, as described above. Later on, much darker guitar and string sounds were set against snare drums that sounded at once militaristic and like a clip from a rock solo, followed by long sustained guitar unisons and complex chords. The music gradually took on more of a rock feel as the narrative moved from Pearl Harbor to John Lennon, with quotations from Helter Skelter (from the White Album) towards the end.
The 8th annual Starry Plough Murder Ballads Bash this past Halloween eve was really great. I was there with the Bodice Rippers performing, Tigerero our tale of death in the jungle and Options, a klezmer inspired song that muses upon all of one’s post mortem options. Great sets by Dylan Champagne, Penelope Houston, John Shiurba, Loretta Lynch, Suki O’Kane, Luther Monday, Happy Clams, Maurice Tani, Blunderbusst and Whore. ‘Twas was just the beginning of an epic Bodice Rippers evening that went until dawn by the waterfront of the 5th Avenue Marina in Oakland…
micheal zelner’ s photos:
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and a cool short iPhone movie made by Francine and starring Ms Anna Gramme and the Curve:
Played a wonderful show at The ResBox Series, curated and hosted by Hans Fjellestad, at the classy Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood.
Andrew Pask and Jim McAuley put in a cool first set culminating in a final bit of mayhem on a seven foot long 12 string instrument played by Jim with metal batons. A screening of Nightsoil followed, then my quartet with Motoko Honda, Emily Hay and Scrote. We performed Screen, an improv score by Fred Frith which involves each player cycling through an improvised figure in two measures of 5/4 and each player taking a solo turn. We followed with a game piece I originally wrote for Split Lip called Pass the Baton, which involves each player improvising either a long, slow, wide figure or short, fast, thin figure and passing it on to another player (or players) to ‘interpret.’ A pretty scored improvisation by Scrote titled Craving Beauty followed and we closed with a chaotic free improvisation. The night was capped off by composer Bruce Friedman (from whom I purchased a very kewl book called Notations 21, a collection of modern graphic music scores) and his cast of fine LA musicians interpreting a graphic score.
Prehistoric Horse (David Grollman, Valerie Kuehne, and Lucio Menegon) are an improv trio from NYC and Oakland who generate spasmodic bursts of clatter and skree via cello, drums, and guitar, typically played in ways that would make conventional music teachers shudder in horror.
Seattle Stranger
Very experimental music…like psychotropic microdot jazz disharmony mesmerandum
Ivy Room Hootenanny fan after hearing Prehistoric Horse
Performed a solo set at the Flux 53 venue in Oakland this past Saturday evening as a result of Rent Romus graciously sneaking me onto the Edgetone Records Mudwagon CD release show – even though I do not appear on that fine slab of plastic. I followed a very good set by Jay Korber (of Ettrick) with a short blast of solo guitar hystrionics.
Here’s a little something:
1. Flux-o-rama
Wandering around the space, I stumbled upon a group chores breakdown matrix posted on the wall. This entry was from a gig @ Flux with Prehistoric Horse on this past July at the start of our US Tour. I can report that most of the applicable chores were done, including the cleaning of the bathroom. Thank you nice people of Flux 53.
The Overdub Club is proud to announce the completion of the HD video version of Nightsoil. We have worked long and hard to bring this former performance piece to a place where it can be screened. The premier is slated for Sept 30 at the The Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Nightsoil is a single channel video by filmmakers Thad Povey and Alfonso Alvarez with music by Lucio Menegon, collectively known as The Overdub Club. Derived from a triple projection, live performance piece, Nightsoil utilizes found footage that has been physically reconstituted using hand-processing, tinting, and other hands-on filmic techniques and features a powerful new audio score and soundtrack.
Nightsoil is a layered and evocative display of humanity’s ability to create both beauty and destruction, whose title echoes the archeologist investigating abandoned human latrines. Coming at a dramatic time in America’s history and created in the spirit of this zeitgeist, Nightsoil calls out with an appeal to “think what you’re doing” before choosing violence as a solution to humanity’s problems.
The music for Nightsoil was developed in a series of jam sessions where musicians Lucio Menegon and Mark De Gli Antoni improvised over a series of test reels and live presentations, mixing and matching sounds, manipulating and exploring audio textures – taking ideas from the morphing images and giving ideas back to the film-makers – until a dynamic three section composition coalesced. The move from the live presentation format presented a golden opportunity to re-compose and fully arrange and orchestrate the original score. Along with the musical contributions of John Hanes, Suki O’Kane, Jenya Chernoff, Rebecca Seeman, Jonathan Segel and Laurie Amat, a final soundtrack and score emerged that matches the intensity and emotion of the visuals – at times in syncopation with and at other times cutting against the multiple image presentation.
After deciding earlier in the year not to be a part of the redux for Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail for 200 guitars at Lincoln Center (was to be on tour and not in NYC), a change in plans and a last minute cancellation allowed me to see this adventure through from last year’s rained out disappointment.
Because of a Prehistoric Horse gig on Wednesday night, I was unable to make the first rehearsal and was hence relegated to repeating last years rather boring Alto 1 part (they are all pretty minimalist easy, but the Alto 1 is particularly so). Rehearsals on Thursday and Friday were very good and I will echo the sentiments of other 2008 veterans that the changes made to the score and group organization/planning were a big improvement. Fridays full rehearsal in the FIT Hall was really stunning and perhaps the peak of the experience. The enclosed environment and excellent acoustics brought out incredible overtones – at times it sounded as if it were hundreds of human voices chanting rather than guitars chiming, interspersed with moments of delicious, wall-shaking volume. Very pretty, yet very powerful. May I present this recording of a section of Part II at Friday’s rehearsal as evidence?
Unfortunately, I found the actual performance to be a bit lacking in comparison. The execution did not seem as tight and the open air reduced the resonances that were present at Friday’s rehearsal. The effect was still large, the crowd certainly loved it (standing O) and it is always exhilarating to be appreciated by thousands of people! Couldn’t stick around for Liquid Liquid and the after party though as orchestra colleague, Scrote and I needed to rush off to a gallery gig in Queens right after the piece (more on that in the next blog entry). Overall it was a worthwhile experience – despite the amount of time required and the sometimes over-simplistic direction. But heck, got to play at Lincoln Center, make some connections and hang with some really cool people. Well, that’s alright, mama.
Music Emissions. This reviewer pretty much nails my intention with Sonic Demons:
“Sonic Demons, at least if the titles represent the intent, is an instrumental exploration of the darkness we invite into us, the demons we flirt with until it is too late to send them packing. This electronic divine comedy is pulled off with grace and grit.”
“Sonic Demons would be intense and impressive without the dark night of the soul motif. With it, it allows Lucio Menegon to let it rip with purpose, a goal of exploration into the uncomfortable. He wins on all counts.” full review
Music Extreme
Experimental guitarist Lucio Menegon shows pure experimentation with sounds on this recording. Going from free jazz up to almost noise or ambient within the same composition, he shows great technical and improvisational skills. On the recording he is joined in some of the tunes by other fellow musicians that interact cleverly with Menegon´s guitar phrases. There is a strong knowledge of intensity and volume here and that is evident in many of the compositions where Menegon goes into a crescendo of sound before exploding at the end of the tune. There are good combinations of sounds with some melodies and phrases that surprise the listener. This is an album for open minded people who are into sound exploration and improvisation. full review
Downtown Music Gallery NYC Here’s an interesting one from their weekly newsletter (btw, I’m an American citizen by birth):
LUCIO MENEGON – Sonic Demons (Edgetone 4092; USA)
Italian guitarist Lucio Menegon is currently a Bay area-based musician, as well as a friend of local drummer David Grollman, a friend of DMG who shows up almost every week for our in-store performances. Hence these live performances feature most west coast players except for Grollman, Rob Price & Valerie Kuehne. ‘Lucifer’s Meltdown” opens with a solo guitar & loops excursion that on the verge of coming apart as it throbs to an intense ending. “Shrunken Head” features Lucio & Rob Price on guitars & electronics & Dave Grollman on drums. It sounds as if there are layers electronics & static erupting together into a brooding storm. I can’t really hear the drums but the results are scary nonetheless. It is often difficult to tell that Lucio is playing guitar since the electronics and distortion is more prominent than any plucking. On “Gasping for Air” Lucio plays tortured noise guitar fractures with intense drumming of Laurie Arnat. Lucio inserts four solo guitar and/or electronics pieces in between the small group improvs and each one is different, sometimes twisting the feedback or noise sounds inside out. Each piece is quite effective yet occasionally disturbing. Overall there are some impressive bouts of well selected noise segments and it all fits together. – Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
Paper Cuts Magazine Sept 2010 issue
LUCIO MENEGON – Sonic Demons (Edgetone 4092; USA)
It’s hard sometimes to listen to instrumental music and not create movies or stories in your head. For me that’s often the best part. Lucio Menegon’s album “Sonic Demons” does the work for you by providing a short story in conjunction with the music. I’ll let you discover the story on your own as I don’t want to ruin it, but with or without this strange backdrop the album is a beautifully executed collection of free-jazz-ish-noise and ambient pieces that can take the listener to many unusual places.
Menegon performs on all the tracks here with his ability to mix effected guitar with electronic and atmospheric sound elements to create a unique aural picture. Sounds range from spacey layered guitars as in the opening piece “Lucifer’s Meltdown” to harsher improvisations with enough squeaks and screeching to satisfy any noise fan as on the track “Shrunken Head”. Additional yummy layers of interest added by a fun vocal piece with Laurie Amat (The Residents), Jonathan Segel (Camper Van Beethoven), the fantastic drumming of David Grollman, John Hanes, and others. “Sonic Demons” has a bit of something for anyone with open ears and is certainly worth checking out and creating some fantastic dream-movies to. In the Sept 2010 issue of full review
Lucio Menegon is an experimental artist, guitar player and some sort of electronics wiz. He gathered a bunch of guest artists to add “improvisational” elements to his journey.
This type of “music” is a bit hard to appreciate and is not for everybody, neither is it the thing you’ll most likely spin at any time. I found the compositions mostly cohesive in their own experimental way. Off course improvised parts came into play to bring touches of surprises and variation. Some of this music carries an ambient feel, while other parts are more psychedelic or even totally hectic. I can feel inspiration coming from bands of the seventies like: Egg, King Crimson and the Mothers of Invention. I can hear Dave Stewart going nuts over the tone generator in a few instances, such as on ” Shrunken Head” and “Experiments with the Force”. Ian Underwood seems to be “wipping it all” on the sax in “Shrunken Head”, while the hectic drumming of the Mothers is quite present on: “Resident Tourette” and “Killing Green”. Lucio’s guitar playing is pretty un-orthodox too. He deliberately de-tunes his guitar in some way unknown to me, in a number of places. Examples of this could be heard on “The Debigulator” and “Vulcan’s Wish”. My personal favorite tunes are: “Lucifer’s Melt Down: (dark/psychedelic) , as well as tracks 10 to 12, namely “Vulcan’s Wish”, ” Scattered Brain” and “Sonic Demons”.
Prehistoric Horse plays a very intense and dynamic form of improvisational music that sometimes borders on sheer noise but also incorporates the dramatic and absurd. Our sets morphed with the miles logged and the tenor and pacing changed dramatically from the first chaotic show in Albany CA to the final mellow moments in NYC. There were many good shows on our 13 gig cross-country run with Oakland, Seattle, Minneapolis and New York being particular highlights.
Since my last post in Madison, we played Louisville, KY (where I managed to leave the power supply to my laptop – thanks to Mateo for mailing it back), Pittsburgh, Toronto, Baltimore and NYC. The lack of laptop partially explains the drop off in the tour blog, but in truth, the last few shows were difficult, involved much driving and were not necessarily inspired. The NYC show was the exception, so I will wrap up a brief description of it.
The gig was in hipster Williamsburg at a place called Monkeytown, a space that boasts four walls of projected imagery, with musicians in the middle and comfy low-rise couches behind spartan japanese style tables on the perimeter. In response to said surroundings and perhaps inspired by a terrific quartet improvisation featuring cellist Okkyung Lee, we upped our game (New York does that to you) and performed a rather ‘cinematic’ set, quite different from others we have done before. David used a stripped down percussion setup and the overall tone was much less frenetic, with more melody and ‘playing’ from Valerie and I. The audience seemed to appreciate it and despite some of the usual second guessing, this feeling was verified a few days later when a gent stopped me in the street to favorably comment on the performance 🙂
Below are some links to videos, pics and audio. Plans are afoot for more shows/tours in the next year. Enjoy.
Here is a particularly interesting section of improv from Toronto, Canada. A gig with the dubious distinction of having ‘not a soul in attendance.’
July 22
Nottingham Coop, Madison, WI
Picture this: A gorgeous Italianate castle/villa perched on a large lake in the midst of sprawling modern university buildings. Expansive rooms filled with random couches and chairs in various states of decay, desks, nooks and crannies, filled with books, filth or notes, messages, threats and/or suggestions to other members of the cooperative. A large kitchen, a filthy bathroom with door graffiti expounding on the subject of eggs.
As we are a trio self contained, no PA needed, thank you, we decided to set up amongst this predetermined chaos, near the large stone fireplace in the main room. A room that felt heavy, restricted. One that had seen many things – like the accumulated energy of all the parties and shows that had gone on before (even Husker Du played here back in the day). We were happy to have this gig as all things coop apparently must be voted on and Jeremy, the gent who set up the show managed the politics in order to make this happen. Thanks Jeremy.
A very nice opening solo set was performed by Chris (part of the band following us) and featured some great textures produced on sax and mangled/processed/looped. From where i sat out on the porch, the sound was three dimensional, flying out the windows and ricocheting off surrounding buildings to where i lay staring at the sky. very nice.
We followed with a set destined to echo the agreed upon vibe of the room. Delicate, building, longer tones and pieces, punctuated by our usual dose of mayhem. David’s theater moment included a discussion of waking and having a vagina and wondering about the fate of his penis (and mine). The set was well received and the only disappointment was the failure to record the set – one for the gods as my friend Suki would say.
The Bastard Trio followed up with a great hard edged set of guitar, drums and sax – Jeremy’s guitar volume swells and a great bass/guitar low/hi end juxtaposition against Tim’s furious drumming and sheets of sound from Chris’ sax.
We finished the evening with a group collaboration that was fine and good, but a bit of a drop in creativity and energy and eventually evolving into several loud drumming duets between Tim and David. And then everyone sort of evaporated and the place was ours.
July 21
Minneapolis, MN @ The Art Of This. Great gig in a nice art space very near our host’s (la familia Porter) house! There were 30 or so people there – such a rarity to have such attendance at a new music concert – on a tuesday nite no less! George Cartwrights trio of fine players roared thru an hour of continuous improvising and we followed soon thereafter with our bursts of noise. Our sets have been morphing towards shorter pieces and we performed two @ under a minute length. The opening piece was a graphic score i came up with just before the set, titled ‘Muerto Corto’ intended to be fast and furious. And just so, it was. We followed with some longer bits and at some point did a piece intended to fit with in the confines of my point and shoot camera’s 30 sec video capability:
July 19-20
Driving. All about driving. We put in a long day of driving thru some gorgeous Montana mountain country, the rushing streams and the every-present Burlington Northern railway line on our side. We reached the lovely town of Bozeman, Montana, where we once again scored a nice hotel room on priceline.com for a third of the advertised rate of $150. Crashed out and woke up refreshed, took an early morning jacuzzi and swim in the hotel pool and split for the local food coop where we filled up with healthy snacks for the long trip ahead.
After a lovely first few hours of driving along the Yellowstone river (spotted a Bald Eagle perched on a dead tree limb), we began the looooooong drive across the prairie lands of North Dakota. Stopped in Bismarck, ND for dinner at a ‘mexican’ cantina-style restaurant, during which a sudden hail storm accompanied by a freight train roaring right by the place drove everyone off the patio but us (we found the experience rather exhilarating…city folk, ya know). With the change to central time, the sky stayed light well into 10pm. took this video from the back of the van to commemorate it (with John Cage’s ‘Two Pieces & Two Pieces for Piano):
As we approached Fargo and our 11th hour in the van, we began the search for a motel only to find every one of them booked up. WTF?! Turns out large wind farms were being put up all over the area and the rooms were filled with construction workers. We finally found a dirtbag motel at a Flying J near Fargo and crashed hard. the next morning, we ventured into Fargo to say we’d been there, found a cafe with some wireless and then promptly got the hell out (as far as i’m concerned, the next ice age won’t come soon enough to scrape the place clean) and headed for our much anticipated gig in Minneapolis with George Cartwright (of Curlew).
July 18 Seattle WA Been looking forward to this show playing with our friends in Pink Mountain and Eyes. Shortly after our arrival in Seattle, we met with the gang for a nice meal at Thai Tom in the U district and then proceeded to get lost trying to find the venue. Relying on GPS, we ended up in front of a nice house in a residential neighborhood. Turns out the address was NW 65th St not N 65th st, just a 1/2 mile down the same street, but amongst a small strip of buildings down the hill from the Phinney district. May I digress a moment? This GPS thing is wonderful, but you tend to lose your sense of place as it seems you are taking orders from a dispatcher who knows your every movement and change in direction and politely tells you what to do (our GPS, named Matilda speaks with an educated English accent). And when she melts down (like she did when we were on Bainbridge Island), you resort to asking the nice policeman for directions. I feel a little naked without an actual paper maps. AAA here we come.
Back to the point…So the venue was punk-squat-like and the nice creatures living there sort of wandered around the place very used to the hustle bustle of touring band load in and text messaging, moving about, etc.
We played a good set. I must say we are feeling like a band more than a collaboration and the sets are changing and developing new things. Of late shorter pieces. this night we did three: a scritchy-scratchy one, a mayhem loud one with much theatrics, screaming from Val and David (David’s extended theater moment including a discussion of lactating and a desire for breast milk ice cream) and a high-pitch whistley thing that finished with a Branca-like tension filled ‘big ending.’
Eyes rocked out a quick set and Pink Mountain kicked it all into high gear. Sadly, their set was cut short just as they were really grooving. The PA wasn’t very good and the vocalist for PM apparently wasn’t having a very good time and put and end to the evening early.
Headed back to the cool little bar at the end of the street called The Dray (why don’t we have any neat little corner pubs like this in Oakland???) with John Shiurba, listened to the bartenders consolidated life history and were soon joined by Gino Robair and Justin and Aaron from Eyes. Prehistoric Horse had decided to start the drive east immediately rather than deal with taking a ferry out to our hosts, The Snapp’s house and inevitably getting a late start. This strategy paid off handsomely as we put in a solid four hour drive east to the outskirts of Spokane. the next two days are going to be all about driving…
July 15 Eugene, OR
The gig in Eugene was at the Jazz Station, a small publicly-funded art space on the main pedestrian drag. Our good friend Jeff Kaiser helped set up the show and he and local artist Sabrina Siegel opened the evening with a wild set, Sabrina using her voice and controlled-feedback-guitar-played -with-rocks (yes rocks) effectively against Jeff’s trumpet/voice and Max MSP sonic manipulations.
Our set was a crazy one, the first long piece going to some very interesting places and contained a entertaining David dialog – complete with a french accent – about ‘the stinky man’ (you take him home, you put him in your bed, you sleep with him). Our second, short piece took things further and came completely off the hook when one of the audience members hurled himself onto the floor and writhed around screaming with his t-shirt wrapped around his head. Seriously – audio evidence coming soon…
July 17 Portland, OR
After a sweaty, hot van stop and go traffic van ride from Seattle, we barely had time for the required Powell’s Books stop before heading over to our gig at a Portland New Music Society fundraiser. The venue was an upstairs room in an old brick artist loft warehouse. Which like many spaces like this excelled at retaining the days heat well into the evening.
We performed first and played a very good set with the usual longer first piece, but followed up with several shorter pieces as well for a forty minute set. Each of us had a great time performing and there were some very cool moments, but the vibe when we finished up felt really strange. Sort of like we played at a funeral. A couple of the musicians in the next act stopped by and complemented us, but for the most part the remainder of the 25 people there were rather stone-faced. Dunno, maybe the chaos we delivered wasn’t what they were expecting or up their alley. And the chaos: it included a water gargling bit by David and Valerie, an intense second piece with valerie singing out of a dictionary and of course, David’s spoken theater moment which revolved around the idea and statement that “I could have been a Rabbi’ It was very cool. Afterwards we headed down to Backspace to catch the last few songs by our Oakland friends in Pink Mountain – which was some crazy rocknroll mayhem for sure…
Big Blue is our Tour van. He rocks. He has a cassette player and we have a stash of them to play. Of course, we have a iPods and CDs with one of those cassette converter dealies, but there is something about cassettes that rock. One is the vintage of the music and the other is the physicality of the format, you have to handle it in some way and that is cool. of course they take up some space, but hey – we can just listen and discard and buy more at thrift stores i suppose.
(The first two gigs of the tour were with the original PH quartet of David, Valerie, LM and John Hanes)
July 13 Albany, CA
The first at the Ivy room was sort of a chaotic mini-hoot, with guests Mr Dorgon and Laurie Amat. Different combinations of people collaborated to make some crazy sounds. Prehistoric Horse did play an actual set at some point and it was fairly chaotic.
July 14 Oakland, CA
The second gig @ Flux 53 space in Oakland was more in a format and style we originally coalesced around with a good sounding room (in this case a blackbox theater) to allow for more dynamics and acoustic/electric interaction. We played exactly twenty-one minutes and the set had plenty of dynamics and David’s theater as well. Afterwards, a member of the opening act turned down the invitation to do an encore group collaboration (something to do with a bruised and/or overinflated ego), but that was just as well as we needed to pack our things, get in the van and drive as far as we could that evening on the way to our next gig in Eugene, OR.
Suki O’Kane and I have launched yet another new project: Delicate & Destructive. We played at the Sacramento ‘In the Flow’ Jazz festival this past Saturday. 105 degrees in Sacto that day and driving to the afternoon gig in a AC car sans AC, I thought I might melt. The festival featured ‘jazz’ (and the majority of the audience) in a main air conditioned fancy venue and ‘noise/improv’ in a warm, funky record store full of vinyl – quite perfect, really. We went for a completely different feel than any of our previous improvisations and sculpted a sonic build that went from, well, delicate to destructive.
Prehistoric Horse provokes audiences through spasmodic bursts of snare drum (david grollman), guitar (lucio menegon), cello (valerie kuehne) and occasional unprovoked dramatic outburst. A very intense and dynamic form of improvisational music that sometimes borders on sheer noise and incorporates the absurd. A mashup of Bennink/Nakatani/Frith/Frisell/Bach/Britten/Bi-polar disorder punk rock sounds. “…spasmodic bursts of clatter and skree via cello, drums, and guitar, typically played in ways that would make conventional music teachers shudder in horror.” (Seattle Stranger)
…played the Boise Creative And Improvised Music Festival this past weekend. Did one set as Strangelet (with John Hanes on electronics) and another as Prehistoric Horse (a new collaboration with John, LM, drummer David Grollman and cellist Valerie Kuehne). The Horse did a lot of wandering about Boise and had a lot of fun just hanging out. Our intense thirty minute set on saturday night started off an evening of incendiary performances by Emily Hay/Motoko Honda, Colter Frazier/Rob Wallace, Jim McAuley and Kribophoric.
The venue for the festival was The El Korah Shriner Hall (entertainment unto itself with a kick ass grotto-bar, prop room and fully costumed group portraits). Attendance was better than past years (it was free), but slim at times and there was the feeling that most of Boise had no idea or care that this was going on. However, the audience was polite, attentive and given what must have seemed like pretty confusing music to the majority, appreciative.
john hanes & lm
We attempted some guerilla promotion tactics during an outlandish visit to the 8th street pedestrian, which was mostly met with polite smiles and the occasional offer to stop by the festival. During the promotion blitz, we were approached by a photographer for Boisestyle.com – perhaps attracted by our thrift store furry puppet accessories (that he chose a picture of just me & my monkey over one of myself, the monkey, Valerie and her Wooly Mammoth puppet is baffling).
Boise is a vanilla kind of place. It’s pretty small and it doesn’t take long to walk back and forth across the downtown and we did so several times – not much else to do. We stopped in for pizza and beer at our favorite joint and discovered the salvation of the saturday late-night streetcart shawarma guy (doing our best to safely run the gauntlet of staggering frat-party drunks filling the sidewalk).
woolly mammoth & wylie monkey
All together an odd setting for such music. So how is it we end up back here in this high desert potato town playing crazy-ass improv and experimental music year after year? One: the performers. Many of the same players who made last year a highlight were there and it’s fun to hang out with them. Two: Kris Hartung & Jeff Kaiser . Kris is the guy who has made great efforts to put together the Creative and Improvised Music festival for four years running and Jeff has been responsible for curating and raising the level of talent. Bravo, guys.
…played a cool gig last night at the Temescal Arts Center in Oakland. The trio of myself, Morgan Guberman and Pat Spurgeon (spawn of the Ivy Room Hootenany late night jam) have now officially played two gigs. For this second one we actually had a name, Impish Lizard – quickly pointed out as already taken and then appropriately mangled by the second act’s drummer, Jacob as Fisted Lizard – which I rather like.
The first act was John Shiurba and Gino Robair (purportedly in his birthday suit) rattling out some inspired improv as always.
Fisted Lizard followed and because there have been noise complaints from a neighbor who lives in the fancy new condo across the street, we pulled back a bit on the volume but still managed some punch.
We did three pieces, the middle being the most intense with only one moment where you think, ‘shit this is going nowhere’ at the beginning, but patience prevailed, something caught and didn’t let go for a good long while. To set the vibe, we each had a sheet of paper with Thelonius Monk quotes to guide us – two different ones highlighted for each – which was kinda cool.
Up last was the duo of Ava Mendoza and Jacob Felix Heule. Ava is the coolest guitarist and one of best of this style in the Bay area. I always get to steal some tricks from her (thanks Ava!). Jacob is a monstrously powerful drummer – sort of a Ches Smith on steroids. Together they put in a torrid thirty-five minute set of continuous rock/noise improv that worried not about volume. The cops didn’t show up, so it must have been well received…
