Why do you listen to music? For entertainment? Hipster cred? A way to fill in dead air? Because silence is overbearing? There are as many reasons for listening to music as there are people on this overpopulated planet; there are as many musical artists, groups, collectives, ensembles, etc, to fulfill each of those reasons.
Some musicians, though, make it their artistic mission not to fill these slots, but to push, tug at, stretch, and collapse the very definition of music as we hear and know it. Sometimes these artist take elements of accepted noise and teaches them new tricks, confounding our expectations of what a chorus, harmony, or guitar melody can do. Others take disparate piece and sculpt them into a surprisingly unique whole. And yet others force us to confront seemingly new aspects of noise that stretch our ears and elasticizes our aesthetic tolerances.
Three such groundbreaking artists will be playing at Duke this weekend: avant-rock experimentalists Gastr Del Sol and legendary minimalist composer Tony Conrad this Sunday at the Coffeehouse, and eclectic art-rock ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic this Friday in Reynolds Industries Theater. These three artists have very little in common musically, but all make a fine noise that rejects the conventional restraints of traditional song structures and conventions to make noise that is iconoclastic, intriguing, and always challenging.
Gastr Del Sol hail from Chicago and occupy a shifting, mercurial place in the musical landscape, a place eons away from the more well-known Smashing Pumpkins (okay, much more well-known), Liz Phair, and Veruca Salt. Musicians tend to float through, leaving a memorable contribution, but the core members are Dave Grubbs, a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago and the highly regarded avant-garde guitarist Jim O'Rourke.
It is exceedingly difficult to describe Gastr's oeuvre. Grubbs and O'Rourke often collaborate using the traditional rock instruments: guitar, piano, drums, bass, the occasional hushed vocal, but the results are always unexpected. Songs move restlessly through complicated, precise structures a long way away from the traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus schtick, structures that sometimes unravel into chaos, then recoil into a totally new form. The noise surprises listeners with exaggerated dynamics, moving surreptiously from drone to dissonance, melody and rhythm, adding and subtracting layers of textures that coalesce then disintegrate. The result is like a song writing itself: composing, erasing, revising. However, the music is never haphazard, but always calculated to evoke surprise and tension.
Gastr Del Sol ignores pop convention, but takes familiar elements like chords, riffs, or song phrases and explores their abstract underpinnings. Subtle and polished, the music feels like late night, occasionally erupting into dissonant noise. Grubbs also delivers fractured piano/vocal songs every now and then that highlight his oblique lyrics and eerie piano tinkling. Previous work includes Crookt, Crackt, and Fly and the ep Mirror Repair, both on Chicago label Drag City. Here, Gastr often takes rock elements and exaggerates or isolates them, recontextualizing expectations of the listener. Lately, Gastr Del Sol have begun expanding into orchestrating for larger groups, adding more layered instrumentation to their work. Their latest effort, The Harp Factory on Lake Street, on Atlanta's Table of the Elements label, shows within the first few moments of noise Gastr's progression to the next level. Alternating between quiet space and a dense din of brass, strings, and winds, the work announces its disregard for any limitation and aligns itself strongly in the avant-classical vein. Dissonant, the tones at times grate, at times hypnotize, and the intensity ebbs and flows seamlessly, though with a clear, set path. The second half of the piece features a piano/vocal composition, a little silence, and some crashing on the keyboard. Noise? Yes, it is, and there's really no reference point for me to get you to hear it without actually listening. Gastr Del Sol demands full attention of a listener, one open-minded enough to accept the fact of zero limitations. Go hear for yourself Sunday night at the Coffeehouse.
Opening for Gastr Del Sol is the legendary Tony Conrad, an influential minimalist composer and one of the most mysterious figures in twentieth-century music. Conrad consistently destroys all notions of normalcy as applied to organized noise, and practices his own version of sonic sculpture with a highly extended, amplified droning on his violin.
Conrad is legendary for his work in examining aesthetic boundaries. In 1962, he was a pivotal part in the most important minimalist ensemble "of all time," which included La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise, and John Cale, who most know was a part of the seminal Velvet Underground. Creating some of the most interesting experimental music at the time, delving into a complex world of harmonic structure and tones, this ensemble, known as "The Dream Syndicate," has a far-reaching influence whose work is echoed in such bands as Sonic Youth. However, Conrad remains maddeningly obscure in many music circles, since most of his work in the Dream Syndicate has been strictly controlled by Young, who maintains complete composition and publishing rights to the material recorded at the time.
Now in his fifties, after Young relegated his work to a hidden history, Conrad pursued a fruitful career in experimental film, emerging once to work with the German band Faust. A professor of media study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Conrad has now resurfaced twenty years later entitled Slapping Pythagoras, on Table of Elements label. The mathematical reference is not surprising, considering that Conrad graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics.
On this release, Conrad contests the normalcy of celestial harmony, which reflects in his eyes the way society and culture are organized. Rather, the piece is about stretching the tolerances of tone. With an extended drone, Conrad's violin at times snaps at your ears with eerie harmonies (I use the word loosely) that are reminiscent of classical Indian music. The rhythm of the drones are barely, if at all, discernible - they seem to come and go unobtrusively. It's not guaranteed that you'll like this; I had a very hard time putting any frame of reference on it. But Conrad's work is confrontational with its refusal to conform to normal notions of harmony or even dissonance. Slapping Pythagoras turns the whole of Western music on its head and forces the blood to rush into the brain.
Birdsongs of the Mesozoic gnaws at our categories, but does its subversion in a more sneaky way. This Boston-based "chamber music ensemble" uses polyrhythmic percussion, synthesizers, distorted, drony guitars and enough hooks and recognizable song elements to create the impression of listening to something normal and familiar. However, Birdsongs sends the familiarity crashing to the floor, taking the music into a totally different direction.
Birdsongs, based in Boston, combines diverse instrumentation such as saxophones, guitars, car hubcaps, and something called the abbreviated clarinet to create truly progressive music. Saxophonist Ken Field's playing tugs the group towards a definite avant-garde direction. Songs often begin with incredible verve and energy and take on an epic feel as they progress, fusing elements of rock, jazz, and classical into an invigorating whole. Their latest release, Dancing on A'A, on Cuneiform Records lurks between the boundaries of prog rock, jazz, and chamber music; at some moments, the music threatens to verge into Nine Inch Nailsesque industrial noise. However, instead of grinding the listener into submission, Birdsongs veers onto an unexpected path, going into free-form jazz improvisation or sinking into softness. A sense of playful humor also enlivens proceedings in Birdsongs' unexpected repertoire; the group has been known to reinvent such songs as the themes to "The Simpsons" and "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" with astonishing results. Friday's show in Reynolds should prove to be quite the musical experience that will surely stretch your expectations of where music should go.
Gastr Del Sol, Tony Conrad, and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic make music that does more that entertain. Their compositions are not meant to soundtrack your life, to provide background music to your studying, playing, or sleeping. This is noise that demands your full attention, and your undivided mind. So let the passive listener beware, and let the active one take note: these artists will not only stretch your ears, but may even blow your mind.
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