*Still* Room for *Shining Wizard*

Not being in Montreal is a very pressing issue in my life right now.  So is having a commensal at best relationship with art/media. That said, hearing Montreal duo *Shining Wizard*’s church-shaking new release is definitely activating the parts of my brain that can’t distinguish between envy and enjoyment (all of them).  Farley Miller and Alex Pelchat (of every band in Montreal [see also: the world]) bring tight dynamism to free jazz abstraction, toeing the line between creation and destruction with every free and freaky extended jam.  Miller’s drumming is tight and driving; Pelchat’s guitar is original without venturing into soloist solipsism.   Both know when to hold back and when to fucking go for it;  the serious musical chops so often associated with auto-canoodling are the with (mostly) none of the masturbation.  It is that tension between the high (re: those mathy song names! Like easily DFW chapter titles, tbh) and the low (re: grown men who happily discuss/name their band after WWE moves) that makes *Shining Wizard* brilliant.    Closer “Cling to the Fillibuster” runs through each of the genre tags in its bandcamp arsenal (“loud” may be an apt descriptor, but never a critique), going from straight-up sneering grime to jazz freakout in a matter of (well-times) seconds.  No Room for *Shining Wizard* is free jazz for even the uninitiated, a punk takeover of a music-snob genre.

Cold Foamers: All Cold Everything, v. Esoteric and Incoherent

I’ve been a fan of Alex G. since Jack told me Greg cried listening to him [references to personal life as legitimate journalism].  Consider the torch passed, tearducts.  Cold Foamers’ All Cold Everything is recorded and produced and played on by Alex G. so I kinda knew I was gonna like it, but this is delightfully Cold-Foamers-as-an-adjective.  This is late-to-early saturday music (sad and sorry) for late-to-early saturday people (sad and sorry).  Dirty basement and cold breakfast, love-loving and self-hating, close-the-blinds-I’m-tired music.  Vocals come in whispers and wails and screams, and are embarrassed and embarrassless.  Q: “Where’s your tantrum?”  A: Right here, big guy *shakes fist, speaks to father for first time in years*

Being in your early twenties and with friends who get you and why you are sometimes sad and sometimes happy and can help you make this into music is a really nice situation.  Right there, this is it. The ennui eats its tail and its a forever ouroboros but instead of that you make nice-sounding music (re: RAWKNROLL).

Screaming Females Interview: out of the vault, sophomore year edition

I did this interview in 10th grade (lol see “what advice do you have for a hs band” see also, all other questions) but this was at a time when I was too scared to publish anything that didn’t have a pitchfork corollary.  So, four years in the making: Hannah vs.  Screaming Females.

 

Hannah: Jersey bands often get a bad rap, because, well, 90% of what people know from Jersey sounds like Bruce Springsteen.  How much do you guys consider yourselves a strictly Jersey band and how does that affect your sound?

Jarrett: We are strictly a Jersey band because we were all born and raised in New Jersey.  Judging by what I read on the Internet, it’s really cool to be in a band that sounds like Bruce Springsteen right now…maybe we should sound more like Bruce Springsteen.  I feel like all of my life experiences added up to what my music sounds like, so I guess it has to sound like Jersey.     

 

Hannah:You guys started out in the New Brunswick underground.  Are there any other really cool bands from that scene?

 

Marissa: Sure.  There is a great band from New Brunswick called Mattress.  There is a great new band about town called Lost Weekend.

 

Hannah: Since your first album, you’ve signed to a label and opened for Arctic Monkeys and the Dead Weather. How has the band changed since its earliest days?

 

Marissa: Our label, Don Giovanni Records, is a very small operation run by two guys out of their apartments.  We were added onto the Arctic Monkeys and Dead Weather tours completely on our own accord by playing good shows, being seen, and getting offers.  Not much has changed in the way we operate.  We have a tiny network of cool folks who help us out with our band, but we still travel in our own van, carry our own gear, sleep on floors, and the like.  Only tiny nuances of change have popped up within the last couple years… 

 

Hannah: You guys tour an awful lot. do you get tired of being on the road?

 

Jarrett: Yeah, sometimes I get tired of being on the road but then I go home for a little while and get tired of being home.  I guess I’ll just stick to the cycle until I’m dead. 

 

Hannah: Half of the bands today can be fairly described as twee.  Do you have any particular reasons for your decidedly edgier style?  (It’s very refreshing)

 

Marissa: When we first began playing, the whole reverb-soaked twee craze hadn’t really exploded.  Even if it had taken off already, we’re not the type to jump on a bandwagon.

Mike: It’s because we grew up in New Jersey and it’s not a very cute place…

Jarrett: We didn’t just copy the latest new “cool” sound…

 

Hannah: A lot of people, outside of it and its residents, hate New Jersey.  Do you have anything to say in its defense?

 

Marissa: New Jersey’s residents run the gamut between sophisticated metropolitan moguls and genuine Jersey hillbillies.  It’s eclectic.

Mike: No.

Jarrett: No, I hate most of its residents as well.    

 

Hannah: Marissa, you shred fairly hard.  Really hard.  How did you first get into guitar?

 

Marissa: I picked up a guitar when I was about 14.  My dad plays a bit of guitar and offered to show me a couple chords since I had just started listening to rock music.  I spent a lot of time printing out tablature…  

 

Hannah: As an example of d.i.y success, do you have any advice for high school bands on getting heard?

 

Marissa: I was never in a band in high school…anyone who manages to get a band together in high school oughta construct a time machine and offer advice to a 14 year old me. 

Jarrett: If you’re looking for success, don’t follow our example.

Mike: If you’re looking for success, do anything but play in a band.  Go to Lincoln Tech and get a job as a mechanic.

Jarrett: Yeah, don’t bother with regular college…learn a skill…

Mike: Yeah, go to a trade school, get a job that pays well, settle down, and live a sad, sorry life. 

Image courtesy (?) phillypunk.wordpress.com

 

 

Hey! It’s a Movie: (1)

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller, Don’t Look Now, operates on a variety of planes, imitating fragmented reality through the lens of cinematic mosaic.  As onscreen couple John and Laura Baxter grapples with the loss of a child and the disintegration of reality as they know it, the formal features of film parallel the indeterminateness of the real, the fantastic and the phantasmic.  Reality within the film is not linearly legible, and therefore, neither is its space. The mathematical certainty of geometry falls prey to the disjointed logic of the occult, with surrealistic line and form expressionistically rendering the unsettling dissolution of truth.  These sharp angles are underscored by the ebb and flow of (uncontrolled) liquid, which navigate the many currents of reality in Roeg’s uncanny cinematic world.  In the opening sequence of Don’t Look Now, Roeg fills his filmic space with untamed angles and liquids to create a vision of reality both skewed and fluid. 

            Harsh angularity perforates the opening scene of Don’t Look Now, visually manifesting the film’s skewed depiction of reality.  The scenery of an idyllic, poetically meandering country estate, is cut and mangled by jagged lines, suggesting a fractured reality lurking beneath.  Mist enshrouds the landscape, but does not soften its edges; the hazy greens and grays of the English country are punctured by the sharp angles of action on screen.  Contrast comes in motion and direction: a girl ambling across screen and the cantering horse that passes her, her brother biking diagonally down-screen, the girl marching in a path perpendicular to his, a ball thrown to crisscross all lines of motion. The diagonal paths in contrast with the fixed verticality of the forest etch a veritable cinematographic pentagram onto the pleasant backdrop. With each cut, a new, diametrically opposed line of action enters the screen, visually mirroring the contradictions within the film’s reality.  Like the crisscrossing veins of reality within the film – where the probable intersects with the supernatural – filmic action and mise-en-scene evade the navigability of linear motion.

This motif of angles and their association with the occult formalizes as the scene shifts indoors.  In this space, the walls, beams and human figures that occupy the home replace the outside’s trees and household items balanced at irregular angles stand in for the sloping of the outdoors.  A slanting table and the copy of (the revealingly titled) Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space thrown haphazardly on the sofa indicate that John Baxter is an architect — a profession indebted to regularity, blueprint, line.  For Baxter though, this geometry certainly is fragile.  He is surrounded by variations on normalcy, both in his topsy-turvy surroundings and in their implied surrealism.  A canted shot of a kitchen island suggests that even the flatness of the quotidian can easily be skewed.  When he places a slide of a church to-be-restored on his viewer, he puts the negative on crookedly and must correct it, that is to say, he must upright it to restore the reality of the image.   To a man who deals in erection and symmetry, misappropriated angles can be read as blunders of Pisa proportions.  Yet in this cinematic space overrun by illusion, vertical – or upright – rarely meets its horizontal counterpart; instead, it intersects with diagonals and curves, crafting a jarring visual labyrinth rather than a fixed grid. This skewed mesh expressionistically reveals the anxiety between the real and the illusory. Everything on screen is in constant threat of being literally overturned, easily extrapolated as the possibility of the objective inverting itself.   When an object loses its normal incline, it becomes illegible, thus skewedness is irreconcilable with the canny.  Yet in the opening scene, glasses are precariously placed, tables are slanted, books and photos are flung but never stacked.  Matching shots of glasses falling, liquids spilling, books and slides being tossed all lead to the eventual implied tumble of the young girl into the creek.

This innocent’s fall, the culminating piece of the opening sequence, underscores liquid as an otherworldly danger.  The laws of physics cannot tame water; as Laura pithily notes, even frozen lakes bend to evade the reassuring orderliness of linearity.  Liquid poses a threat to the film’s reality in its very lack of containment.  When Baxter spills his drink onto his photo slide, the captured form of the cloaked figure oozes into a red blur, ruining the veracity of the image.  The photographic image – read here as the real – becomes formless and subjective when seen through a liquid lens. As the waterlogged photo flows into a visual match to the girls’ red rain slicker, water’s visual association with the solubility of the real reappears.  The bleeding image becomes a portent for the girls’ death; just as the photograph, a supposed shield against death, bleeds with moisture, the girl, despite her impermeáble, is still the current’s victim.   The physical motion of her fall into a watery grave is unseen.  Instead, a matching shot links the seeping photo to an image of the drowned girl, heightening the agency of the water rather than the human.  Thus, characters in the film are mere conduits for the more powerful currents and undercurrents at play in this wild vision of reality.  As John Baxter plunges underwater to recover his daughter’s lifeless body, Roeg breaks continuity to have the two figures emerge again and again.  The repetition of the tragic both reinforces the melodrama of the moment and reiterates the rippled surface of reality, so fragmented that it can reemerge in endless splashes. 

Roeg’s depiction of reality, broken into shards or distorted through a liquid film, is prismic, shifting between the illusory and the real in fractal form.  The planes of the occult and the apparent might intersect diametrically, but the possibility of so clear a distinction is dissolved by the relentless current of what-lies-between.  Reality here can function as a construct, but not feasibly as a construction, — lest one designed by Escher or the mad planners of Venice’s traversing waterways.   The truths we are left with are slanted and sinuous, either puncturing the confines of geometry or flowing around them.   Despite its title’s warning, Don’t Look Now requires a close viewing, so that Roeg’s chilling visuals can reveal their uncanny verisimilitude.