Vivid String-and-Piano Tableaux From Drum and Lace

Drum and Lace a.k.a. film composer Sofia Hultquist’s tantalizingly short album Semi Songs – streaming at her music page– comprises a quartet of bracingly tuneful, often hypnotically circling instrumentals for violin, two cellos and piano. You could call it minimalism, or new classical music: however you categorize it, this brief, verdant release leaves you wanting more.

The album begins and ends with a diptych, Outsider Complex. The first part opens with a burst of strings followed by some furious, machete-chop sixteenth notes. The piano joins the frenzy, then recedes with a brooding elegance; the strings follow as the song calms before a final volley. As terse and minimalistic as this is at heart, it takes serious chops to play. To wind it up, the piano rises to a loopy insistence, strings leading to a moody lull and tantalizing hints of what will eventually be a deliciously ominous return to tightly orchestrated savagery.

There are two other tracks. The swaying, summery Parhelion begins with a loopy contrast between stark, insistent cello and hazy violin; then the two switch roles as the harmonic web grows more complex, a rondo of sorts. Coyly bouncy piano suddenly leaps in; it ends brightly.

The epic, fourteen-minute Gardenia has a slower, more pensive sway, spacious piano chords and a steady, lullaby-like melody that begins to sound completely improvised. A light, echoey electronic drone moves toward the forefront as the strings echo each other; the piano kicks off the first of several successive rounds of circular riffs. Composer Matt McBane’s ensemble Build comes to mind, although Drum and Lace’s music is more springlike, closer in spirit if not in sound to Vivaldi than, say, Bach.

Saluting a Century of the Wacky, Versatile First Electronic Instrument

Now that live music – and movies, and sports, and museums, and galleries – in New York have been shut down by the coronavirus scare, what can a person do for entertainment? Spring is here: you could go for a good, long run…or listen to a creepy fifty-one track album of theremin music. Or do both at once – it’s on Bandcamp.

To be fair, the NY Theremin Society’s compilation album Theremin 100 isn’t always creepy. While Russian scientist Leon Theremin’s 1920 invention may be most readily recognized for its uncanny evocations of creaky doors in a million horror movies, there are thousands of artists from around the world who have mastered the granddaddy of all sci-fi instruments’ magical force field for both good and evil. A lot of them are on this record. And one of the best, Pamelia Stickney – who’s surprisingly not on it – had a scheduled gig on March 20 at the Owl, but like pretty much everything going on around town, it’s been cancelled.

The album’s first track, Christopher Payne’s Somnambulist is a loopy, swoopy, chromatic nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie: are those strings and bass real, or an expert theremin imitation? Other tracks in the same vein include Herb Deutsch’s Longing – one of many with just theremin and darkly neoromantic piano, and Ei and Kuli Schreiber’s surreal tunnel narrative Train Jumper, at the top of a substantial list.

Often the theremin will evoke a violin, as in Peg Ming’s Therexotica, a gentle, brisk bolero with retro 50s twinkle; About Aphrodite’s lustrous Membran Music; or where Gregoire Blanc adds just a hint of shudder over eerily glimmering piano in Waves – with a bridge that’s too gleefully grisly to give away.

Therminal C’s Sputnik Crash powerfully demonstrates the instrument’s vast range and little-used percussive potential, as does Thorwald Jorgenson’s epic seaside tableau Distant Shores. The theremin gets backward masked in Hekla’s Twin Peaks pop tune Indenderro, used for squiggles and ominous banks of sound in Aetherghul’s Fire in the Sky, and an imploring vocal analogue in Jeff Pagano’s The Ancient Sea.

Some of the acts here employ a theremin for laughs. The Radio Science Orchestra contribute Atom Age Girl, a wry space-surf theme; Everling throws in his droll, bloopy Playing Theremin Is My Madness. The joke is simpler yet subtler in Hyperbubble’s I’m Your Satellite, while Robert Meyer’s deadpan teutonic boudoir groove Taxi is pretty ridiculous. Matt Dallow’s circus rock theme Tailor Made Destination isn’t far behind.

A handful of these pieces are massively orchestrated, like the Nightterrors’ macabre, Alan Parsons Project-ish Megafauna. Others, including Dorit Chrysler’s atmospherically circling Murderballad and Elizabeth Brown’s desolate March 21, are more spare. Twenty-nine tracks in, an electric guitar finally appears in Veronik’s Anomala, which is sort of House of the Rising Sun with a theremin. Song number 38, by the Keystone, is a strangely drifting duet for lapsteel and theremin. The most atmospheric track here, Gabriel and Rachel Guma’s Balloons Tied Up in the Sky, evokes whalesong. The weirdest one, Aileen Adler’s Piezoelectric Dreaming, is a mashup of Balkan reggae and spaghetti western themes.

Much of the rest of this material is classically-tinged: Japan Theremin Oldschool’s take of Ave Maria; Tears of Sirens’ Under the Milky Way (an original, not the Church classic), and Lydia Kavina’s In Green, a pretty piano-and-theremin ballad that wouldn’t be out of place in the ELO catalog if that band had a theremin. Maurizio Mansueti does a great job getting his contraption to emulate bel canto singing in the moody Blindfolded, while there’s a real aria in Robert Schillinger’s Bury Me, Bury Me Wind. The compilers who put this thing together deserve enormous credit for the consistently high quality, vast scope and imagination of most everything here.

Twin Peaks Pop and a Bushwick Gig From Nicole Mercedes

Riding home from Barbes the other night, there was a girl on the train who’d gone to extremes to tell the world that she was the saddest person alive. She was about fifteen: ragged blonde bangs, raccoon eyeliner carefully streaked down her cheeks. Her glassy eyes drifted in and out of focus: she was definitely on something, probably Oxycontin. She wore badly distressed turquoise jeans over matching polkadot tights, plus an altered turquoise sweatshirt embroidered with the words “Boys don’t cry.” To which she or her seamstress had stiched in the word “BROKEN,” running vertically down from the letter “B.”

She was with a thin-faced boy sporting a sloppy, day-glo yellow hair dyejob. He was on coke, couldn’t stop wiping his nose or running his mouth. Hell-bent on trying to get her to change her gloomy ways, he pitched group therapy, he pitched drugs. She tried pushing him away – as vigorously as a petite woman who’s zonked on Oxy can push away an obsessive cokehead, at least. It was hard to resist the temptation to go across the aisle, give her a pat on the arm and encourage her to go home and listen to Joy Division. That would have made her feel better.

In reality, she probably didn’t have Joy Division on her headset at that moment: Nicole Mercedes might have been a better guess. The former Debbie Downer frontwoman sings Twin Peaks pop: disembodied, distantly melancholy vocals over a coldly twinkling, techy, atmospheric backdrop where the guitars tend to blend into the keys. She’s a lot more energetic than Julee Cruise, infinitely more interesting than Lana Del Rey. She’s got a new solo album, Look Out Where You’re Going, which hasn’t hit her Bandcamp page yet. She had a gig on March 19 at 8 PM at the Sultan Room; which has been cancelled due to the coronavirus scare.

The opening track, At Ease, sets the stage: catchy four-chord changes, distinct guitars and then a starry synth riff at the end. The song title seems to be sarcastic to the extreme. The second cut, Filters comes across as a mashup of Casket Girls, Michael Gordon and late-period ELO, an unexpectedly tasty blend.

Just when Last Hike seems to be a wistful vacation reminiscence, there’s a grim plot twist: no spoilers! Nicole Mercedes is a dead ringer for early Linda Draper in Mediterranean, the next track, right down to the watery acoustic guitar. Motel has a slowly waltzing resignation that shifts in a more anthemic direction.

Haphazardly minimal, echoey guitar rings through the string synth ambience of Stoop. Thumbalina is album’s most icily orchestral, anthemic number. The closing cut, Watering is a steady, drifting spacerock gem. Beyond a general sadness and sense of abandonment, it’s never clear what Nicole Mercedes is singing about. But this is all about ambience, and she really nails it.

Iconic Violinist Alicia Svigals Brings Her High-Energy Erudition to a Familiar East Village Haunt

Pretty much every Thursday night, there’s a dance party in the spacious social hall at the Town & Village Synagogue on 14th St. just east of Second Ave. For over a decade, the New York Klezmer Series has featured a vast range of music from across the Jewish diaspora, the connecting thread being energy. And it isn’t just the same old shtetl, either: the groups tend to be on the original side, with string ensembles, brass bands, the occasional rock act or Yiddish song night. Showtime is 8 PM; cover is $15. There’s also a dance lesson beforehand and a jam afterward for those who want to shell out for the whole megilla.

This Thursday, March 12 promises to be exceptionally good since the woman widely considered to be the world’s foremost klezmer violinist, Alicia Svigals, is joining forces with similarly exhilarating accordionist Patrick Farrell. Svigals is fresh off an absolutely delightful show late last month, when she teamed up with a frequent collaborator, pianist Donald Sosin for a live score to E.A. Dupont’s 1923 German silent film The Ancient Law at Temple Ansche Chesed on the Upper West.

Beyond the movie – which is very sweet, and progressive even by the Weimar era’s avant garde standards – what was most impressive was what a fantastic classical violinist Svigals is. Following the film’s narrative, the music begins in a little village somewhere in the Pale (Sosin starts out on accordion, appropriately), then suddenly shifts to cosmopolitan mid-19th century Vienna. That’s where the plaintive dirges and bristling freylachs suddenly make way for melancholy Schubert ballads, lively Mozart and, for verisimilitude, a few detours into Johan Strauss cheesiness.

It was there that the split-second change in Svigals’ intonation and attack was most striking. All of a sudden those bracing overtones, and doublestops, and glissandos disappeared in favor of a crystalline, legato approach…and then made a welcome return when the plotline shifted back to the ghetto. Those old Jewish folk tunes have survived for a reason: they’re just plain gorgeous. Beyond the action onscreen, the moments when the duo were obviously jamming out solos over familiar minor-key changes were arguably the evening’s most adrenalizing, entertaining passages. That kind of intensity is most likely what’s on the bill for this week’s show, with a focus on wedding and party music from the early 20th century catalog of musicologist Wolff Kostakovsky.

Svigals and Sosin have been touring their live movie score along with a screening  since shortly after the film was rescued from oblivion, digitized and sequenced to match the original print during what must have been a daunting restoration process. Without giving too much away, the main story concerns a rabbi’s son who runs off to the big city to become an actor. Tensions between father and son, tradition and modernity simmer and bubble, but the movie is basically a comedy: the moment where the rabbi finally picks up the forbidden volume of Shakespeare that the fiilm’s Falstaff character has smuggled in is priceless. Could it be that dad is kind of jealous of his son? Maybe that particular apple didn’t fall so far from the tree after all. No spoilers here.

Cinematic Instrumentals and Surfy Dance Tunes From Retro Instrumentalists the TarantinosNYC

The TarantinosNYC are one of New York’s most entertainingly cinematic bands. With a name like that, it would be pretty pathetic if they weren’t. In the spirit of the Ramones, all four Tarantinos – lead guitarist Paulie, bassist Tricia, keyboardist Louie and drummer Tony – are a rock family. They started out back in the late zeros playing Quentin Tarantino film music, then began writing originals. Their latest album, simply titled III is streaming at youtube; they’re headlining the monthly surf rock show at Otto’s tonight. March 7 at around midnight.

It’s a good lineup, starting at 9 with the deliciously creepy, Balkan-tinged Plato Zorba, then Link Wray cover band the Wraycyclers and at 11 Atomic Mosquitos spinoff Killers From Space. For anyone shuddering at the prospect at spending a Saturday night in the East Village, consider that these surf shows tend to draw an older and less Instagram-obsessed crowd, compared to the shrieking frat/sorority clusterfuck at the surrounding watering holes.

The band open the new album with a cover of Link Wray’s The Shadow Knows which with the organ is more elegantly enveloping than it is Frankenstein-ish – although that jaggedly tremolo-picked guitar bridge is spot-on. You’re Gonna Lose That Curl, the first of the originals, is an upbeat early 60s-style go-go surf tune with roller-rink organ and Wipeout drums.

With a luscious blend of twelve-string guitars and keys, their instrumental version of the Grass Roots’ Midnight Confessions – from the Jackie Brown soundtrack – blows away the original. After that, (Please Don’t) Dead End follows a familiar series of progressions, like a slicker take on classic-era Ventures.

The group put a surreal latin soul spin on a sentimental old Beach Boys ballad and follow that with Shaken Not Stirred, a mashup of Balkanized Ventures and crime jazz that weirdly works much better than you’d think (this band do that kind of thing A LOT). They wrap up the record with the moody Vegas noir ballad Holding You in My Mind, with an aptly enigmatic vocal by guest Elena Barakhovski. If you like your surf sounds on the diverse and surprising side, you should also check out their fantastic 2015 release Surfin’ the Silver Screen.

A Picturesque, Symphonic Instrumental Suite From Marty Willson-Piper’s Atlantaeum Flood

Marty Willson-Piper is best known as this era’s preeminent twelve-string guitar player, and also as a witheringly brilliant songwriter. He’s also a composer. His latest album, One Day, credited to his Atlantaeum Flood project is streaming at Spotify. It’s his first all-instrumental suite, a day in the life of the planet from before sunrise to the wee hours of the next day. Willson-Piper’s bandmates here are Dare Mason and Steve Knott on guitars, Olivia Willson-Piper on violin and Lynne Knott on cello, rising together to an often titanic grandeur.

From a simple, fingerpicked four-chord acoustic guitar theme, Willson-Piper slowly builds a gentle predawn scenario into a blazing sunrise, adding layer after layer of guitar. It brings to mind a previous, epically brilliant Willson-Piper production, the lusciously jangly My Little Problem, from the 1994 Sometime Anywhere Album by his long-running, previous band the Church.

Mid-morning takes shape with another four-chord theme, ascending to an eagerly pulsing peak before the group bring it full circle, verdant and concise at the end. Then Willson-Piper completely flips the script with the pre-noon theme, his resonant David Gilmouresque electric leads and his wife’s airily soaring violin over an industrial percussion loop and an artfully rising and falling backdrop.

This particular afternoon is a simmering one, an elegant acoustic twelve-string theme anchoring rather wry backward masked and then wah-wah leads that finally give way to a lush violin break. The ensemble follow the fiery, flamenco-tinged sunset scenario with delicate dusk ambience balanced by spiky mandolin and horn-like electric guitar swells.

Before midnight is where Willson-Piper most closely evokes the Church’s densely echoey spacerock. This day doesn’t go out quietly til the very end, although the closing theme has a wistful, distantly elegaic quality,

A Brooding, Indian-Tinged Silent Film Score From Guitarist Rez Abbasi

Guitarist Rez Abbasi‘s score to Frank Osten’s 1929 silent film A Throw of Dice echoes the movie’s Indian milieu, shifting moods on a dime along with the narrative. The soundtrack is streaming at Bandcamp. Abbasi’s next gig is Feb 26 at 8:30 PM at the Bar Next Door, leading a trio with Rashaan Carter on bass and Luca Santiniella on drums; cover is $12.

The movie opens with Mystery Rising. which is more opaque than outright mysterious, a jazz waltz with distant carnatic tinges from Pawan Benjamin’s bansuri flute and percussionist Rohan Krishnamurthy’s flickering accents, Abbasi’s acoustic guitar and Jennifer Vincent’s cello adding somber contrast. There’s even more of a sense of foreboding in Hopeful Impressions, a strolling trio piece for guitar, cello and Jake Goldblas’ drums.

Abbasi hits his sitar pedal for the bubbly Love Prevails against Goldblas’ wry faux-tabla rustles. Likewise, the guitar-sitar voicings and swoopy backward-masked riffs of Facing Truth seem to be played with one eyebrow raised. Abbasi goes back to acoustic alongside Benjamin’s spare soprano sax for a miniature, Amulet & Dagger, then picks up his Strat again for the unexpectedly catchy, uneasily art-rock tinged diptych Blissful Moments. Anchored by Vincent’s hypnotic bass pulse, Seven Days Until News keeps the brooding ambience going.

With its moodily descending and then circling chromatics, Duplicity is one of the most haunting interludes here (full disclosure: nobody at this blog has seen the film). Jugglers, a lively little bit of carnatic jazz, is more straightforward than the title implies. As for Snakebite, it’s a brief, tectonically shifting tone poem.

The way Abbasi orchestrates the cello/sax harmonies to mimic a harmonium in Moving Forward is especially artful. Wedding Preparation turn out to be less harried and stressful than simply straightforward: even as the rhythms diverge, it’s the album’s most recognizably postbop jazz moment. A relaxed pastoral feel recedes for more anxious tonalities in Morning of the Wedding, lingering throughout the quiet foreboding of Gambling Debt.

Dissociative individual voices flutter throughout Boy Changes Fate, giving way to the tensely anthemic, pastoral stroll of Falsehood. Vincent picks up her cello, Benjamin his bansuri for a bit in Changing Worlds, obviously a key moment with its understated syncopation and troubled sax crescendo.

Abbasi grafts a Terry Riley-esque loop atop the crescendoing stalker theme Chase For Liberation and brings the score full circle with True Home. Fans of the Brooklyn Raga Massive‘s small-ensemble adventures in jazz, or guitarist Jonathan Goldberger‘s more cinematic work ought to check this out.

Disquieting, Translucent Noir-Tinged Tunes and a Barbes Gig From Brian Shankar Adler’s Fourth Dimension

Said it before, time to say it again: good drummers have the best address books because everybody wants to play with them. Drummer Brian Shankar Adler‘s latest album Fourth Dimension – streaming at Bandcamp – is the latest to validate that argument, a darkly syncopated collection equally informed by minimalist 20th century music, Indian sounds and noir cinematics. Chances are he’ll be airing out plenty of this material at his gig at Barbes on Feb 20 at 8 PM. The eclectic, funky Sugartone Brass Band play after at around 10.

The album opens with a minimalist indie classical-style variations on a simple 1-5-octave piano riff from Santiago Liebson. Mantra is where vibraphonist Matt Moran and guitarist Jonathan Goldberger come in: it’s a syncopated take on ominous Twin Peaks jazz, guitar in place of the faux Miles trumpet that Angelo Badalementi would undoubtedly use here.

A Goldberger drone offers a backdrop to eerily dripppy vibes and piano as Rudram coalesces, then bassist Rob Jost loops a tasty Indian-tinged chromatic riff followed by blippy exchanges among the band: Rez Abbasi‘s more concise work comes to mind.

In Pulses, Goldberger holds down the lows while Moran balances the top end and the bandleader gets blustery, up to an unexpectedly windswept, sirening outro. Windy Path is less gusty than just oddly and creepily stairstepping: a cut and pasted take on broodingly catchy Britfolk, maybe. Gowanus – for out-of-towners, that’s the stinky Brooklyn canal, reputedly home to many, many corpses – rises from an acidic pool of sounds to a hypnotic, grimly funky groove lit up by the interplay between piano and vibes.

Watertown has a suspiciously bouncy, quasi nursery rhyme theme bookending a careening guitar break. Goldberger busts out his flange for Nuearth, a lingeringly woozy pastoral tune that Adler very cleverly syncopates around an enigmatically Romantic piano interlude. Petulant polyrhythms dominate the staggered mash of ideas in Pendulum, while the similar Rise and Fall leans toward the careeningly bucolic material Tom Csatari was writing a couple of years ago.

Thw band wind up the album with Alternative Facts, another bouncy metric maze that’s too crazy to believe despite hints of calypso and a ridiculous vibraphone solo. Fans of artists as diverse as the aforementioned Mr. Badalamenti, Kneebody and Chris Dingman should check out this strange and individualistic crew.

Distantly Creepy, Bite-Sized Cinematics From Pianist Akira Kosemura

Pianist Akira Kosemura‘s has a darkly resonant new ep of brief, memorable solo pieces, titled Romance, streaming at Bandcamp.

The title cut is an elegantly brooding, chromatically incisive, somewhat minimalist waltz. It’s an opening theme for a suspense film waiting to happen…and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Kosemura takes its series of precisely articulated broken chords and makes more of an angst-fueled ballad out of them with the second movement, In the Middle of a Bridge. The clouds lift somewhat with the more enigmatic yet hopeful harmonies of the final movement, Reach Into the Sky. Third time’s a charm: about nine minutes of first-class grey-sky music from an expert in the field.

 

A Darkly Picturesque Double Album and a Carnegie Hall Debut by Cutting-Edge Bassist Sigurd Hole

Sigurd Hole gets more sound out of his instrument than virtually any other bassist alive. He’s made a name for himself as a purveyor of brooding, envelopingly minimalist themes, but he also uses the entirety of what his instrument can produce. He has a picturesque, vastly dynamic solo album, Lys/Morke, recorded outdoors on a desolate island off the coast of his native Norway. He’s making his Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Hall on Feb 3 at 8 PM, performing many of these pieces. Cover is $25; the record hasn’t hit his Bandcamp page yet.

The first disc begins with the epic Lys. Over sounds of wind and water, Hole employs his bow for harmonics from across the audible spectrum, steady, hypnotic microtonal arpeggios, shivery shards, steady, peacefully minimalist washes and cautious, low-register footfalls.

That template describes much of what Hole does throughout the rest of the record, with frequent, bracing close harmonies, percussive moments and a pensive sketch or two. There’s a breathtaking display of extended technique that would make Charles Mingus proud, where Hole plays what’s essentially a bagpipe dance using high harmonics.

A lively, hypnotically circling theme evokes West African mbira music. In one of the album’s lighter moments, a lumberjack meets considerable resistance in the forest, or so it would seem. The most amusing vignette sounds like a reel of tape winding. Behind Hole, there are moments where the waves or the wind seem to pick up, adding to the general sense of desolation.

That really comes to the forefront as the second record coalesces. Increasingly otherworldly, eerily reverberating, pulsing variations on a stygian drone lead to more discernible, suspenseful melody, beginning with an unexpectedly catchy, gloomy chromatic theme. Hole goes down to his tailpiece for keening, scraping, brushy textures. Hypnotic echoes give way to slowly shifting cloudbanks, low/high contrasts, and a dirge of sorts that morphs into what could be Philip Glass.

Increasingly agitated, sawing phrases grow calmer and more enveloping. The slowly crescendoing vastness of the disc’s title track leads to a spare, spacious conclusion. This isn’t just a showcase for Hole’s fellow bassists to admire: fans of metal, the dark side of psychedelia and jazz improvisation ought to check out these strange and unique creations.