Brendan Perry and Robin Guthrie in Concert at the Metro

As noted here and tweeted last night, Kate and I were at the Robin Guthrie/Brendan Perry concert last night at the Metro, with Scary Lady Sarah DJing.

We arrived right at 8 pm and Guthrie was just beginning his set.  As we entered.  We found our friends, as Guthrie stood a  corner of the stage (as promised) and video projected on a screen behind a drum set.  After the first song the drummer and bassist came on stage.  If you aren't familiar with Guthrie's solo work it is all instrumental haunting guitar paining an aural landscape of sound.  Guthrie's performance is an immersion experience.  Without the attending movie I am not sure I could have sat through the whole set.  Yet, it seems to me that the visual projection is in a sense the words to his songs.

As I settled in and let my self take in the performance taking seriously Guthrie's own cue about his live performances, I found the music and video coming together to elicit emotions and thoughts in myself.  Thoughts and emotions would be called up and then taking the cue from music and video, move on.  It was all very meditative, even at moments transcendent.  Guthrie finished his set with a smile and gestures acknowledging us the audience and left the stage.  The set and Guthrie's presence elicited the experience of being invited into his musical living room and to just settle down, or wander about, come in and out.  We didn't need to give him our entire attention through out, yet we were invited to settle in and listen.  But if we took the full invitation then we were transfixed.  I can understand some critics of Robin Guthrie who say he is in a sort of musical rut, I could sense that if there wasn't the video projection I'd have gotten tired of the haunting guitar after a few songs, but I have a suspicion we are both supposed to see and hear, Guthrie's music.

Brendan Perry was a parallel but radically different experience.  Perry is very present on stage, and he had a full band two keyboards, drums, bass and he on guitar.   Perry was giving us a Rock show, and we were to pay attention, and he and the band were riveting and powerful.  He began his set with Dream Letter, (I am not sure though he played it early in the set.), and the first song of the encore set was Severance.  I heard in this a certain acknowledgement of the significance and transitory short lived nature of the concert.   So bounded we were to enter in and be spell bound by our gracious host.   The show and Perry's music weave together longing, sorrow, grief, loss and scraps of joy into a great ecstasy.  This is what has made and makes Perry in my eyes someone I point to when I wish to describe what is goth and why I find the aesthetic appealing and something with which I wish to identify.

Guthrie and Perry together created a meditative exuberant evening that lead me to contemplate the joy in a life that has happiness, and sorrow, struggle and ease.  It was an exquisite evening, one I think I will long remember.

mewithoutyou Concert and a bit of personal history with Tooth & Nail Records

This Past Saturday I went to see mewitoutyou at the Metro. mewithoutyou can be described as a Christian Punk band, though one can argue that their most recent album and thus their show at the Metro departs from Punk. Certainly the band is not simply recycling a particular sound one would immediately recognize as "Punk", but then I would argue that to do so is not truly Punk. I say mewithout you is a Punk band and while they may go beyond what is typically Punk they remain so. Their blurb about their new album on Tooth & Nail Web pages describers their "distinctive sound" as "post-hardcore". But then I still see Goth as dark and gloomy Punk. So, perhaps I make use of these labels loosely and without precision. Punk like Goth transcends a narrowly conceived musical style, that is at least how I understand it.

However I digress. The mewithoutyou concert was an all Tooth & Nail Records concert with three other bands signed with the record label opening for mewithoutyou. So, I found myself in a world I had not really engaged for some 13 years: the world of Christian Rock music. The one opening band I saw were certainly having fun with Rock elements and were fun to watch there was nothing about it that grabbed me. In a sense it is what CCM has sort of become approximate the sound of something popular be sure there is some form of Christian lyrics to it and viola, a Christian Rock band. the opening band was not that formulaic. They were just up their having fun but nothing all that inspirational. The crowd at the concert felt very familiar and at the same time somewhat alien. It was also a little odd because as the edgy Christian rock scene in LA finally died in the early 90's, Tooth & Nail was born.

Mewithoutyou played a set mostly from their new album. It was powerful, I was so drawn into the music that I have a little difficulty describing the concert. I did not feel like I was at a "Christian" concert listening to a Christian band. I saw undercover a couple of times, the quintessential Christian Punk Band, this was very different. Even with undercover the music, the art was secondary to the message, Christians concerts were often tinged with mini-sermons, trying to get people saved. Certainly mewithoutyou had something to say but they let the music and the performance stand alone. No intrusions of "This song is about..." that turn into sermonetes. I danced (well as much as one can within a crowed standing shoulder to shoulder) for most of the concert, and a small mosh pit did form for several of the songs.

I was reminded of the concerts I would go to in late high school and then during college in LA, usually in independent evangelical churches either their main auditoriums or their gymnasiums. Most of the bands were never signed by a label or were signed by Michael Knott's defunct label Blond Vinyl, so even if I remembered their names you would not recognize them. Though the most memorable were the AOTC (Association of the Cross) concert I saw, which was the last time a Punk band played at a Calvary Chapel. I think I became a lover of Punk at that show, I was in High School at the time. The other was a show with Breakfast with Amy and Violet Burning(at the time my friend Bill Sammons was a guitarist for the band). Memorable in Part because the lead singer for Breakfast with Amy came out on stage in drag. The LA Christian Rock scene in the mid to late 1980's into the early 1990's was not a preachy scene it was Christians wanting to play rock-n-roll. The concerts were places Christians of various stripes gathered and hung out with non-Christians. The "Christian bands" often had members who did not identify as "Christians" and certainly not "Evangelical" as one might expect in a CCM scene.

The demise of the scene could be attributed to a number of causes one being the behind the scenes drama that often existed in bands between bands, or simply that eventually things pass, or the "sex drugs and rock-n-roll" and/or that if you wanted to be signed on a Christian label there was the pressure to tone down become evangelistic and you best be sure all your band members were good upstanding evangelicals who didn't drink or smoke (or at least were good at pretending). Mike Knott attempted to create a space on a record label for the type of Christian bands that emerged in and out of this scene with Blond Vynal Records, but the label was defunct by 1993, when Tooth & Nail was founded with a similar vision. Michael Knott produced an album or two for the new label and attempted to sign a band called Delirium Blue. My friends Alex and Jamie Makarzyk,Chuck Rodriguez and Neil Vorndran had formed the band and had been playing clubs around LA often and on for several years and all had been in the LA Christian rock scene. Jamie had been the bassist for the infamous AOTC. Chuck refused to sign with Tooth & Nail believing that if they signed a record deal with a Christian record label they'd have to be evangelical in image. Knott and the rest of Delirium Blue couldn't convince Chuck that Tooth & Nail would be different. Ironically Tooth & Nail has been able to keep something of the spirit of that LA scene and has even signed bands that have not identified as Christian and whose members both identify and and don't identify as Christians.

One funny side note: Until reading the Wikepedia articles on Michael Knott and Tooth & Nail Records I had thought Michael Knott had helped found the record label. However he was only on the label and produced some of the first albums put out by Tooth & Nail. I believed this because my friend Alex would say when Delirium Blue was considering signing with Tooth & Nail, "Knott's lable wants to sign us." Since I knew he had run Blond Vinyl and that it had gone under I had assumed he was also behind Tooth and Nail. As it turns out he was just recruiting some of the early talent for the label as well as being on the label himself, which is probably what Alex meant by "Knott's label...".

Osvaldo Golijov meets Funky Buddha

Weather has turned chilly again in Chicago, after several days of unseasonably warm days. Last night though it was turning cool it was a very pleasant night to head over the the Funky Buddha Lounge. Since moving to Chicago I have heard of the funky Buddha Lounge but while I appreciate Hip Hop as the titel of this Blog would suggest I do not frequent Hip Hop clubs.

What brought me and a good number of people to the Funky Buddha last night wasn't Hip Hop but the Accende Ensemble performing Osvaldo Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. No not what one would expect to find at the Funky Buddha, some might even say (on either side of this fence) that such chamber music doesn't belong there.

I found it to be an wonderful experience. To place this Chamber music peice that is itself somewhat ecclectic in the context of a night club suits my own ecclectic and boundary crossing aesthetic. The performance was at 10 but there was a hosted bar from 8-9 PM so there was the whole experience of being at a club for performance sitting and standing around house music playing as people talked and drank. Then a hush (briefly) as the Accende Ensemble took thier places and began to play.

I heard Accende Ensemble first play this peice in a slightly more common venue for such a thing at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Edgewatter. The place and the crowd had the dignity and the solmnety one associates with classical music, which encourages a certain form of listening, letting the music flow over you engulf you become the only reality for a time. It is in a sense meditative, and I think especially with this piece.

Hearing this peice in a club, where people will continue to talk as music plays, and as people come and leave throught the time the club is opened, is different, it is listening along with, it is aware that there is a crowd that there is a world outside. One does not listen in a club without interuption. One may argue that some of the subtlety of the piece is missed in such a setting, that one will not hear as well various aspects of the piece. However, in a sense those things are heard differently, they in fact come alive as they are forced to meet the bustle and noise of our world. I felt the piece lived in away it did not in a more "ideal" setting where everything was controled. Somehow I felt that it was especially appropriate that this piece was played in this setting, for it is not simply about contemplation but how contemplation, the spiritual and religious- prayers and dreams- are in the midst of a world that seems contradict them.

After last night while I had contemplated the piece previously it came alive at the Funky Buddha Lounge, it spoke of life and asked us to listen even when other voices threatened to drown it out, but just when one thought the crowd noise would overwhelm, either something of the music hushed the crowd or the piece itself became loud again. I was amazed, and I wonder what Funky Buddha's regulars thought as they arrived to chamber music playing in thier club.

BTW, met the owner of the club Mark, very cool and insane guy, I am not sure many other club owners would have risked this but that seems to be who he is.