Part One of Several
All Words by Michael Byrne
Full photo set by Josh Sisk.com right here
While the Charles Theatre is so fantastically perfect for Thursday’s Whartscape opening day lineup, sitting in a movie theater for some seven hours is harder in practice than theory. So, please forgive the gaps in photos and words for what is at least tied for best night of Wham City’s celebration of neon and noise.
Teeth Mountain is a small, warehouse dwelling—some of them, anyhow—tribe that plays shows in Baltimore with almost as much frequency as the Monday Peabody Jazz band. It’s three drummers, one person on electronics, and another member on strings or saw. The drumming is rudimentary—tribal, hypnotic–meant more for zoning than gaping. The electronics and strings/saw are sidelines, somewhat, adding textures that get just a few very calculated steps above incidental. It’s peculiar and almost satisfying trance music. Whatever is missing from Teeth Mountain’s performance it is very small and I hope they find it soon. That said, every time I see them play, they get better, and tonight was no exception.
In a movie theater, Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche’s “Ultimate Reality” is fantastic. After seeing it done at the Charles, I have to insist it never be performed anywhere else. The music is very Dan Deacon, with the exception being that he’ll lay off the gas for longer passages and let the drummers or the psychedelic collage piece on screen—chopped and spliced Schwarzenegger flicks with heavy doses of trippy filters and mirror effects—or Roche awkwardly shouting subtitles from the screen without a microphone, take the fore. Ponytail’s Jeremy Hyman and Video Hippos Kevin O’Meara on drums killed like only mogul skiers and boxers know how.
Baltimore (and way beyond) noise institution Nautical Almanac, Carly Ptak and Twig Harper, put on the best show I’ve seen them do since I’ve lived here. There’s a tent on stage and two people silhouetted inside with nighttime landscapes projected on the outside—she is talking calmingly assuring us everything is OK over and over while circuits fry through another channel. He makes an extended sound into another microphone that sounds like he’s dying. More skonk ensues. A good many silly, silly people make for the exit.
Matmos almost skipped their adopted Baltimore home on their summer tour and after getting shit on at a fundraiser earlier this year—sorry, but why go to a warehouse when you really want to be at a fucking bar?—I couldn’t blame them. But, Wham City wrangled something and got ‘em here and, good g-d, it was the local show they deserved. Still some chatters, but the theater was sold-out and for the most part people (fans!) sat and appreciated. They played a very strange and effective guitar song—with Martin Schmidt on an acoustic and a guest I couldn’t ID from the back of the room on electric guitar—that really reinforced that Matmos could sound natural doing almost anything. It opened with a swirly yet rhythmic track off their recent synth fetish album Supreme Balloon. I’m not sure where the third track came from, but it was a similarly synth heavy drift that featured a Geiger counter (I think).
Negativland’s Mark Hosler was in the mix tonight, too. Basically, he gave a lecture that outlined some of his band’s better pranks over the years—the “fake” U2 album cover, the fake cease and desist letter from the FBI that suggested Negativland was indirectly responsible for a mass murder in the Midwest. His discussion is a bit didactic, making a strong case for protecting the concept of public domain, which is attacked with greater ferocity every week but you’d never know it because you might not know what that even is or how important it is to have public domain in art. I think Hosler’s a tad full of himself, but I appreciate what he’s doing with these lectures. The idea that there is a public contract in making art (and making it public) in that you’re implicitly sacrificing some your rights to it in letting it leave the house—for good reason–is a valid one and I wish the case was being made louder than it is. Girl Talk doesn’t count
MUCHO MAS TO COME. SHORTLY
The photo of the person in the DIY Cyclops costume is BLUE LEADER, a member of Wham City. He performed two of his pieces: A History of Video Games Part 3: Fatalities, and A History of Video Games Part 4: First Person Shooters.
Each of these pieces involved Blue Leader reciting spoking word related to the topic while a heavily edited video montage of actual game footage played behind him.
I had never seen Blue Leader before, and honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was interesting. The spoken word aspect of the pieces were insightful, a mixture of critique and artfully spoken jokery about video game culture and video gamers themselves. The backing videos were well edited and seemed to go along with his speeches, so the imagery behind him would underline elements that he was speaking about.
This sounds really boring, probably, but it wasn’t all - if you are at all interested in video games (which are a huge part of pop culture these days), his pieces were pretty interesting stuff.
July 22, 2008 at 1:49 pm