Concert Diary I
Roomful of Teeth, SUM SUN, Brooklyn Rider, Editrix
August 3
Seagulls, crickets, distant laughter, and a summer breeze accompanied the superhumanly virtuosic vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth on West Side Manhattan’s Little Island last Sunday evening. The hour was late for the Lord’s Day (10:00pm start time). The sky was clear. The moon was bright. The air was cool but still unmistakably summery. Before the show, as I waited in line and gazed East, I saw disco balls flash around the purply windows of a penthouse club at the top of a hotel and marveled at the feeling of being surrounded by quiet while staring at a roomful of booming bass.
On the Island, in what they call The Glade, there were so many wonderful moments when the singers noticed the sounds around them and reacted. After the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s song cycle, The Lights, a tuneful seagull gulled in time, prompting Mingjia’s face to light up. (I love Mingjia’s record star, star.) Aucoin’s piece—he characterized this premiere to the audience less as a fancy debut and more in terms of a band trying out new material which might grow into an album—was operatic and jerky. Irregular time signatures and stunted speech patterns made it hard to really settle into the sound.
The text of the song cycle is by Ben Lerner. I remember one text in particular called The Readers, which is about raising kids when you’re an artist. Aucoin described it as a reflection on what it will be like to show your kids your art and reveal to them your crazy ideas. One line mentions Lerner (or the narrator) hiring a nanny to take care of the kids so he can write in peace. The next day, I watched Prince of Broadway, the 2008 film by Sean Baker. It’s about a father in the Bronx whose ex-girlfriend drops off a baby who she says is his and he has to take care of it for several weeks and he gets frustrated because it’s interfering with his work selling bags illegally out of the back of his Lebanese-Armenian buddy’s store and then he gets a DNA test and it says that he’s the father and then he realizes he loves the baby and takes care of the it with his current girlfriend. It’s a beautiful ending. And it made me think, if an illegal bag salesman can take care of his own kid, why can’t a poet? By the same token, if Matthew Aucoin can tap his foot (which he did) to the rhythms of the texts he’s reading, why are the songs in The Lights so out of touch with the natural cadence of human speech patterns? This bothers me.
As jet planes whooshed overhead and mufflers popped on 11th Avenue, the musicians may have thought how this might be one of the rare times when “hearing crickets” after a performance is a pleasant thing.1
August 6
“Hold on a second, I accidentally followed you from my popular band’s Instagram.” I will not say who said these words tonight at Union Pool, but I will tell you that it was not a member of the duo SUM SUN. The speaker was, however, a member of a different band—a band that exists in the world, a band that is apparently not as popular as the other vaunted mystery band.
What is not a mystery is that SUM SUN’s sound is just as sunny as their name. And despite a sparse crowd, their set sounded probably as close to how it feels to pop through the sunroof of a Hummer and wave your hands in the air as you cruise down the Los Angeles coastline as I can imagine. In fact, this is likely the closest I will ever get to feeling this way, since LA in the summer entices me as much as a wet towel.
Ilan Pomerance, on keys, and Nick Benton, on guitar and vocals, just want everyone to have fun. Their feel-good pop rock (think Del Water Gap), with reggae tastefully sprinkled into one song, makes your head tilt from side to side like a little kid excited to eat a piece of candy. I am biased; my roommate, Matteo Scher, writes with Ilan and Benton. But, as I told Benton after the show, perhaps the highest compliment I can pay to the duo is that I even enjoyed the two songs that Matteo contributed nothing to.
That said, Matteo’s turns of phrases (haven’t we all been in a car with a lover at night and “danced to the headlights”?) and surprising rhythmic excursions (give me a chorus any day that starts on beat two instead of beat one) are always welcome. Rhythms like these make my body move like one of those drawing mannequins, my waste jerking and my arms twisting as if manipulated by some invisible hands.
The back room where the bands play at Union Pool is always too damn loud. Tonight was no exception, but the musicians were balanced well enough (and the mixing guy was adept enough, if evidently hearing impaired) that I was willing to let my ear drums be murdered. One of the killers was the guitarist, Mike Hubbard, who’s new to SUM SUN. Benton met him because he works across the street from him. Mike is 37 but he looks and shreds like he’s 22. The other killer was the drummer, Jake Dau, who was telling people after the show how much he enjoyed himself up there, crashing cymbals like he was stuffing steel wool into our ear canals.
Even though feel-good summer pop isn’t usually my vibe, it’s nights like these that remind me, there’s nothing wrong with sometimes yelling internally at yourself to focus on the music and extract the stick from your ass.
August 7
Holding back tears, standing on the stage in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider violinist Johnny Gandelsman expressed his love for his fellow ensemble members and introduced the next piece by telling a story: He was playing a festival; one day, a man came up to him and told him that he, too, had been in a band, a long time ago; when he told Gandelsman what band it was, Gandelsman was shocked. The band was A-ha. The piece was an arrangement of “Take On Me.” Reader, I cringed.
As I told my seat-mate, publicist Gail Wein (my favorite person in New York City to run into), this song was so memeified by that one video of the ponytailed girl who looks back at the camera with sunglasses and a tie-dye shirt—you know the one; I’m not going to link it for you—it was so memeified that it feels extremely weird to hear someone take it seriously. But that’s just what Christina Courtin and Magos Herrera did, the one belting like a singer-songwriter, the other annunciating like an opera singer to the point that the words were blurred. A nonet of musicians—Brooklyn Rider string quartet with bass, drums, clarinet, and guitar (help, I’m missing one)—backed them, making for a discomfiting finale to an otherwise blast of a show.
Classical musicians should not try to do pop, full stop. Sorry. Not. Sorry. I can’t help but be reminded of those hideous arrangements of pop songs that the Vitamin String Quartet played for the Bridgerton soundtrack. (Don’t make fun of me! An ex-girlfriend made me watch it!) Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” is the one I remember. Ariana’s original is a sensual banger, in all its electronic, processed glory. It feels legitimately insulting to drain the oomph out of it by acoustifying it into a sonic representation of celibacy. Funny how that works. As the aforementioned Matteo reminded me after I got home and complained: Pop musicians don’t try classical, so why should classical musicians try pop? I suspect the answer is: To make money.
Luckily, the real money-maker (hopefully) tonight was WNYC, which received all the proceeds from merch. As tonight’s emcee, New Sounds host John Schaefer, reminded the audience, we’re living in a “weird and difficult time.” That’s putting it mildly. Congress has slashed federal funding for NPR, PBS, and many more public media outlets, which means WYNC will lose $6 million over the next two years. Donate here.
Hearing John Schaefer riff with musicians on stage is like hearing a great jazz musicians improvise. For example: A siren went by. Schaefer paused his line of questioning to one of the musicians. “A little John Cage moment for ya there,” he said. The audience laughed. “Who’s John Cage?” I asked Gail. She looked at me dumbfounded. “He was the composer who—.” “Oh my God, I was thinking of Nicolas Cage.” So, you see in this contrast of wits why it is so essential for us to support emcees like Schaefer and his overlords at WNYC. (While you’re at it, how about you donate to my own overlords at Radio Free Brooklyn.)
August 8
Transferring from the L to the Q at Union Square, I pass a massive man singing opera with a sign behind him that says “Opera Collective.” As I walk down the stairs to the sweaty platform, I hear someone else singing “Ave Maria” over a prerecorded track of piano arpeggios. I head Uptown. Eating a slice of pepperoni pizza at a joint in Lenox Hill, I see a guy look down at his phone then say to his friend, “Another shooter,” as they walk out the door onto the street. My friend shows up and we argue over who’s more obviously an only child. She stole my pizza crust and ate it (she disputes this telling). Later, at the wine bar next door, the bartender runs out of wine glasses. He doesn’t know that I know his name is Dmitri. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest plays on the TV behind the bar. Dmitri just bought all the James Bond movies on DVD.
August 9
Here I am at Union Pool for the second time this week and I’m talking to some people and we’re talking about Pitchfork magazine but we should probably stop talking about Pitchfork because someone realizes that Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork, is standing right by us. He looks like the kinda guy who’d start Pitchfork. White shirt, thick eyebrows, baseball cap. Yeah. But we sort of keep talking about Pitchfork anyway. I say that if I have one more gin and tonic I’m going to go up to him and tell him he looks like the kinda guy who would start a magazine. I was pleaded with to refrain.
I’m here to see Editrix. It’s the release show for their new album, The Big E. When I Googled “editrix,” expecting to find the band’s website, I found a definition for the word, which means a female editor. “Editress” is an alternative. Until now, I’d been referring to the band as “ee-dee-trix.” I thought it was a made-up word. But now that I know it’s not, it makes sense as a band name. After all, Wendy Eisenberg, the composer and guitarist who’s the frontman (Steve Cameron is on bass and Josh Daniel is on drums) loves words. They said so themselves several times between songs. And the lyrics prove it. I’m listening to “What’s Wrong,” a song from The Big E, and Wendy is singing, “She thought I could be something to try / She’s showing me the way that she wants it / She thought she would be hard to deny / She wanted me to would be a distraction.”2 And as I hear it I’m being reminded of Fiona Apple singing, “Shameika said I had potential,” over and over again in that song from Fetch the Bolt Cutters. And as Wendy is singing, her guitar is singing the same melody. I love this hyper-emphasis on melody. I feel like this contrast between beautiful melody and hardcore accompaniment is something you don’t usually see in loud noise bands like this. It gives it a gentleness that calms me even though I’m awash in noise. In another song—“Real Fire”—the melody seems to be taken straight from “Funkytown,” when Lipps, Inc. sings, “Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me.”
Wendy’s voice is like a thread of silk with some dust on it. It’s fragile, immature, sounding like some frustrated little girl who’s just finding her voice after getting into a fight with her parents and going into the basement in a tantrum and then banging on the drums and scrawling out lyrics on a sheet of paper like she’s Beethoven crossing out the dedication to Napoleon in the manuscript for the Eroica symphony after Napoleon crowned himself emperor. At times, like in “The Jackhammer,” Wendy’s masculine side comes out and they sing rough like they mean it. Pseudo-screams? But I like when Wendy sings quiet. In “Another World,” she whispers, “What.” Pause “Did.” Pause “You.” Pause. “Want.” Pause. “Me.” Pause. “To.” Pause “For-.” Pause. “-get?” Then BOOM the band comes in. The angel voice sunrising over the dark noisy dawn. It’s this great feeling of the amateurish colliding with the masterly.
Editrix is rock and roll. It’s a lot more than that, and people will describe their sound as “experimental” or “punk” or something like that. But the most important thing is that their fundamental spirit is rock and roll. And that’s important because the ethos of rock and roll transcends all those other labels that don’t have nearly as powerful ethoses (forgive the plural).
Tonight I learned what a “Pitchfork 10” is.
August 10
I’m at McNally Jackson and I overhear a girl telling her friend that she prefers to watch Real Housewives instead of reading because she’s usually too tired to read: “That shit massages my brain in a way I can’t even describe.”
“Teeth tunes” is what Roomful of Teeth bass singer Cameron Beauchamp called the pieces they sang. The other tunes were the “Allemande” from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, whose polyrhythms the singers sometimes stumbled over, but that didn’t change the fact that I grooved the whole time, bobbing my head and being so happy to finally hear some of the Partita live; Missy Mazzoli’s Vesper Sparrow (Beauchamp called Mazzoli “New York’s favorite daughter”), which died out with each singer slowly dropping out one-by-one like they were lowering us into our cradles; Leilehua Lanzilotti’s on ctochastic wave behavior, which was perfectly suited to the ensemble because it calls for some whack sound effects; and the fourth movement of Peter Shin’s Bits torn from words, which I don’t really remember even though it impressed me—maybe I remember thinking it sounded like the singers were singing in a made-up language.
I might not be allowed to print these lyrics here because of copyright stuff. Sorry in advance. Don’t sue me. I don’t have any assets anyway.
It's "Nicolas."