the rock hall agartha branch played host to a final show of the year last night, decked out as it was with a variety of artworks and curios as well as a fine spread of food: miso soup, curried butternut squash soup, post-gumbo and homemade sushi.
amanda howland started the proceedings in the living room (as all sets would be, no trolling around in the basement this time). it's always a treat to hear amanda do an acoustic set. electric guitar enables and even encourages a certain amount of slop, but the acoustic is much less forgiving since any flubs will be immediately discernable. amanda was spot on as always and showed what an original and creative player she really is. plus her text was consistently intelligible, which an amplified set does not always permit. beautiful and bizarre images, not just lyrics but real poems.
jack smiley turned out one of the best solo sets i've seen him do. he had a mic in the bell of his alto sax run through some delay and out a small practice amp (i think - couldn't see it) and started off shaking a big jingle bell near the bell, playing the delayed signal off the original. this continued as he introduced the horn proper, first just the percussive pitches of the keys and pads closing the stops of the horn, then combining long rising and falling melodies with long sustained notes that were held and/or bent to interfere with the delay. powerfully, almost mournfully emotive.
daniel bellinger got much of the crowd involved in performing his poem-pieces. he explained his ongoing interest in looking at language on a fundamental level of dirt simplicity, stemming in part from the way (as fenollosa explains) chinese characters dramatize visually the basic unity of thing and action (noun and verb, which we see in the west as distinct). for example, "snow" is both an action and a thing, which dan encouraged us to enact and thereby experience. russian formalist victor shklovsky said the job of art is "to make the stone stoney," and kudos to dan for getting poems and words off the page and out into the open.
eric allman put together a spontanous company of performers to help out with his piece "consider the raven," which turned out to be something like a david lynch gameshow/talkshow as allman played host to a panel of three unhalfwitting suspects (rob rosin, nick traenkner and stephe dk). allman would lead the proceedings down a narrative rabbit-hole, then the spotlight would turn to a panelist for repsonse and comment, which yielded everything from further non-sequiteurs to traenknerian catatonia, culminating in a kuchnian crack-fuelled fit. add campy sax comping from mister smiley for particularly hilarious and bizarro results.
sleepy-deprived from many recent long and late hours behind the WRUW control board, jeff curtis busted out his acoustic resonator guitar for a rollicking set of old-timey tunes... anonymous folk stuff, a carter family cover, and even one of my favorite sea shanties ("haul away joe"). while jeff's logged many years on the cleveland scene largely if not exclusively a bass player, his modesty and self-deprecation when it comes to his acoustic guitar sets, tho endearing, really aren't warranted, as frequent and vigorous feet stomping from enthusiastic and joyous listeners attested. catch these sets of his at trio's open mics or wherever you can, whenever you can.
stephe dk plugged in his telecaster to take us all out with a great set of downtrodden rock-and-bluesy ballads. with medium-tempo verse-chorus structures based in solid chords and arpeggiated fills, dk stretches out and takes us for a ride in... i wanna say like a dodge challenger: not sleek or souped-up enough for a true muscle car but with shitty enough MPG and fuck-all for emissions checks. plus some rusty rocker panels and an empty sixer or two buried on the backseat floor. "life is cheap" indeed, but not the slowgrind flipper-kind: nope, straight up slow-rage rock with its heart squarely fixed on sleeve.
as dk pointed out to open his set, everyone in attendance was on a first-name basis: a true celebration of art and community...
[fb event page]
