Monthly Archives for October 2006

LATimes' Ann Powers on Arthur Nights

October 24, 2006 Los Angeles Times

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Diversity is king at Arthur Nights
The counterculture magazine’s musical blowout packs a restorative punch with its sheer eclecticism.

By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer

Something strange happened to this critic’s ears on the journey home from this weekend’s Arthur Nights concerts at the Palace Theatre downtown: they pricked up. Every song flowing out of the car radio sounded fresh and full of potential. Forty acts sampled over three long evenings should have produced exhaustion, but instead the pageant was restorative, thanks to music that kept raising questions about what it means to make music at all.

This most ambitious public event so far from the Los Angeles-based countercultural rag Arthur showcased artists whose work is au courant enough to give rise to many irritating catchphrases — drone-rock, orch-pop, psych-folk.

Single-minded concertgoers might have found their specialty and clung to it. For fans of punky women rockers there were the Heartless Bastards, Be Your Own Pet, Effie Briest. Mystic song-spinners included Josephine Foster and Mia Doi Todd. There were knowing elders (Michael Hurley, Ruthann Friedman, the Watts Prophets), and brain-melting noise generators (Charalambides, Om). Hip-hop was the great absence felt; otherwise, the field was fertile.

This eclecticism allowed for unforeseen connections. What did Kyp Malone, the singer with the semi-ambient art-rock group TV on the Radio — who delivered a sweetly improvisational solo set Sunday, proving his talent beyond the sonic manipulations of his band — have in common with Jemina Pearl, the teenage screamer with the endearing punk revivalist quartet Be Your Own Pet? What might Marshall Allen, the 82-year-old custodian of jazz saint Sun Ra’s Arkestra, which closed out Saturday with a bang, say to Becky Stark, the dubiously wide-eyed chanteuse who performed with the Living Sisters upstairs at the same moment? The answer has to do with challenging frameworks, from pop songwriting to artistic identity itself.

On Friday, the duo Charalambides exemplified the Arthur Nights style of inquiry. Strumming instruments forcefully to produce resonating echoes, once-married duo Tom and Christina Carter raised a wall of intoxicating sound scaled, like ivy, by Ms. Carter’s almost ambient vocals. This beauty held dissonance in its hand, revealing the echoes within folk songs and the softer turns within minimalist noise-rock.

The Living Sisters, featuring Eleni Mandell and Inara George along with Stark, produced a more comfortable sound, crooning ballads that would suit a Martin Scorsese soundtrack. But the group’s slyly satirical performance was far more David Lynch. Dressed in matching sequined disco dresses, having fun with synchronized dance moves, the Living Sisters seemed like a joke — until they broke into those lovely songs, languid with harmonies, and blurred the line between making fun of the past and longing for it.

The Fiery Furnaces, led by the siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, smudged different lines by playing most of the new album “Bitter Tea,” as one long song. Propelled by the Talking Heads-like rhythms of percussionists Bob D’Amico and Michael Goodman, and guitarist Jason Loewenstein, with Eleanor intoning her brother’s lyrics like a Shakespearean dame and Matthew raising the dust of his prog and pop influences on his keyboard, the Fiery Furnaces seemed more like a “new music” ensemble than an “indie-rock” band. It’s the point of the Arthur scene to put such labels in quotes, as free-thinking musicians move determinedly between them.

The four-day festival did have some problems. The lovely, decaying Palace proved dubious for amplified music; as happens in many old theaters, a lot got lost in the rafters. Upstairs, quieter acts were challenged by chattering drinkers in the back. Some artists, including the dynamic veteran spoken-word ensemble the Watts Prophets, boldly overcame the technical difficulties. Others, such as the folk revivalist Josephine Foster, did not. “The harp and I are not making love tonight,” Foster murmured before giving up on that instrument during her disjointed set. It can be hard to get intimate with your own talent in a large, echoing room.

Despite these problems, Arthur Nights showed that the pop underground is still digging up and mulching old assumptions. The noisily brilliant rock band Comets on Fire made the perfect final statement. Its guitar turmoil, maddened by heavy drums and the sound loops produced by Noel von Harmonson’s vintage Echo-Electronics device, swept the crowd into a time-and-space tunnel where California psychedelia met English heavy metal, New York No Wave and Seattle grunge.

After such a trip, whose ears wouldn’t pop?

Variety on Arthur Nights, Oct 19

Variety
Arthur Nights
(Palace Theater; 1,967 capacity; $24, one night; $80, four night pass) Presented by Spaceland and Arthur Magazine.

Performers: Devendra Banhart, Bert Jansch, Espers, Buffalo Killers, Jackie Beat, Axolotl, Grouper, Yellow Swans, Belong, Numero Uno DJs. Reviewed Oct. 19, 2006. Also (with different line ups) Oct 20-22.

By STEVEN MIRKIN
You have to hand it to the publishers of Arthur Magazine. The (more or less) monthly [solidly bimonthly, actually-Ed.] is not only one of the most interesting reads out there — a consistently surprising mix of truly underground music, politics and art — but in a little over a year (with an assist from local club Spaceland) they’ve become a force on the Los Angeles concert scene, staging three multi-stage festivals that impress with their almost impossibly broad and well-chosen line-ups.

Arthur Nights is their latest offering, and the four-day event (held on two stages in the somewhat decrepit grandeur of downtown’s Palace Theater) once again covers a wildly eclectic range of music, with Thursday’s opening night line-up focusing on the “freak folk” movement the magazine has championed. As Noah Georgeson, producer and guitarist for headliner Devendra Banhart told the young and rapt aud, “We’re seriously laid back.” The evening’s three most intriguing main stage acts — Philadelphia psychedelic folkies Espers, guitar legend Bert Jansch and Banhart — rarely raised their voices or pushed the tempo, but each managed to make a distinct and satisfying impression.

With Meg Baird and Helena Espvall’s wispy, ethereal harmonies, Espers often has an eerie, otherworldly beauty. Their songs (from their most recent album “II” on Drag City) build slowly, almost imperceptibly, turning freer and more psychedelic as they go on; stretched out, they reach for a raga-like transcendence. At other times, when Greg Weeks adds his voice and plays the recorder, the songs sound like a stranger Jefferson Airplane crossed with touches of Fairport Convention and the Stooges.

They were followed by Jansch, who played the most satisfying set of the evening. His captivating mix of traditional folk and modern styles hasn’t changed much — the songs on his latest, “Black Swan” (Drag City) sound timeless. His playing looks almost effortless, but lattice-like interplay between his finger-picking and the movement of his left hand on the fret-board creates a cascade of notes is so sweeping, the counterpoint of melody and accompaniment so intricate, it’s hard to believe that the sounds are coming from one man.

Jansch was warmly received — members of the aud even whooped and applauded when he changed tunings on this guitar. A good deal of the credit for Jansch’s revival can be laid at the feet of Banhart. Jansch repaid the compliment and joined Banhart for two songs during the latter’s set, and “My Pocket’s Empty” had a focus and energy that was missing from most of the headliner’s set.

Banhart is an intriguing figure: with his long hair and beard he could have stepped from a late ’60s Laurel Canyon photo, and the early portion of the show, with three guitars and four-part harmonies, didn’t stray too far from folk cliches. But his music has a much broader reach, although the often feckless presentation blunts his ambition.

With his quivery, high-pitched vocals and Georgeson’s squirrelly guitar, the music often feels like a less jazzy version of Tim Buckley’s “Happy/Sad” (or, in the case of “Heard Somebody Say,” John Lennon’s “Oh My Love”), with Banhart presenting himself as a shamanistic seducer. In “At the Hop,” he wants his lover to “pack me your suitcase/cook me in your breakfast/light me with your candle/wrap me with your bones.”

The latter part of the set, when he stands up and straps on an electric guitar, starts to move further afield, as the music takes on touches of reggae, rock and, in a cover of Caetano Veloso’s “Lost in the Paradise,” bossa nova. But the entire set feels too meandering and laden with ideas that are too coy for their own good, including bringing up a member of the aud onstage to perform and an impromptu imitation of Al Jolson.

As might be expected from an Arthur evening, there were other styles of music to explore. Buffalo Killers opened the main stage perfs with a set of well worn, if well-played sludgy blues rock; an update of ’70s dinosaurs Mountain or Cactus. But they could surprise with a cover of Neil Young’s “Homegrown.” In the upstairs loft (accessible by an ancient manually operated elevator or a twisty staircase right out of a ’40s film noir mystery) Axolotl played an intriguing mix of tribal sounds with treated guitars and Grouper — a man [Actually, Grouper is a woman-Ed.], a guitar and a fuzz box — initially sounded like a noisy blare but his layers of feedback slowly built to something quiescently lovely.

LATimes on Arthur Nights Oct 19

Fringe-minded Arthur fest enlivens Broadway with a focus on folk.

By Richard Cromelin
Times Staff Writer

October 21, 2006

“I’d like to thank the cockroach who joined me for that one,” Greg Weeks said Thursday after his band Espers finished a song during the opening concert of the Arthur Nights festival. Weeks had been visited by the insect as he crouched on the stage floor with his electronic keyboard, adding some spacey trills to a folk ballad by the Philadelphia-based group.

Such are the perils of commandeering a faded downtown movie and vaudeville emporium on short notice. But despite this and other small drawbacks, the Palace Theatre on South Broadway proved to be a harmoniously funky setting for the most ambitious yet of Arthur magazine’s extravaganzas of esoterica.

Of the nearly 50 performers scheduled to play over four days through Sunday, only Devendra Banhart, who brought Thursday’s show to a joyous peak, and the Fiery Furnaces, on deck to play Sunday, have what would be considered substantial drawing power beyond the cult level.

So it’s remarkable that in the city where England’s similarly designed All Tomorrow’s Parties failed to establish an outpost after a couple of tries, Arthur has now mounted three significant showcases of fringe music in little more than a year.

Jarring juxtaposition is usually the operating principle, and it’s in force over much of the weekend, but the heart of Thursday’s concert amounted to a themed program spotlighting various facets of the underground folk movement.

Los Angeles-based Banhart is the standard-bearer for this thriving scene, but his hour-plus performance Thursday took him far beyond the acoustic roots and the image of the eccentric sprite that won his initial following.

His set progressed from light, lilting shuffles buoyed by four- and five-voice harmonies by his band members through classic folk-rock (David Crosby’s “Traction in the Rain,” Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”) to some hard-driving, rhythm-heavy versions of favorites from the Banhart songbook.

At the end, with the crowd finally on its feet, the strikingly dark-suited, dark-bearded singer was shaking maracas à la Jagger on “I Feel Like a Child,” and looking like a rock-star-to-be.

But the most Arthurian moment came earlier in the set, when Scottish folk-music icon Bert Jansch joined Banhart and his band for two songs.

Though it was a bit of a no-brainer (Banhart sang on Jansch’s new album, “The Black Swan,” and his guitarist Noah Georgeson produced the record), it was the kind of special mix you hope for at a festival such as this.

And the pairing conveyed a sweet sense of community and continuity as the generations met for “My Pocket’s Empty,” from the new album, and a song from Jansch’s influential ’60s-’70s folk-rock band Pentangle.

Jansch, who has been hailed as a hero by an army of rock guitarists, preceded Banhart with the kind of solo performance he’s been doing for decades. But he usually plays tiny rooms such as McCabe’s on his infrequent visits to the area, so this larger setting was a welcome showcase for his restrained virtuosity and modest personality.

Always aiming for harmonic invention and emotional statement rather than empty flashiness, Jansch, 62, moved from traditional folk songs to blues to originals, adding some political weight with “Let Me Sing,” about Chilean martyr Victor Jara, and “The Old Triangle,” about capital punishment in Ireland.

Espers are inheritors of Jansch’s pioneering work, and the sextet preceded him with a chamber-folk performance whose female vocals suggested both Pentangle and the Incredible String Band.

And what about the famous Arthur eclecticism? Well, drag performer Jackie Beat followed Banhart with a short set, and the main showroom opened with the heavy, power-trio riffing of Cincinnati’s Buffalo Killers.

Arthur Nights was originally planned for the Echo and its new sister club the EchoPlex, but when the latter encountered construction delays, it was moved to the 1,050-capacity Palace, which was colorfully thronged Thursday by a coalition of scenemakers and serious-music geeks.

They discovered that the theater’s second stage is on the fifth floor, requiring a ride in an antique elevator or a walk up many steps.

But the room, with its art-space feel, large windows and bean-bag chairs, was a perfect setting to bask in the experiments of such noise manipulators as Axolotl and Grouper.

And things figure to get much more eclectic these final two days, with Beastie Boys associate Money Mark and the Sun Ra Arkestra sharing the bill tonight with folkies White Magic and Six Organs of Admittance. Sunday’s highlight looks to be the rare solo performance by Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio.

Just watch your step.

ARTHUR EMAIL BULLETIN No. 0056

Tonight our lovelies,

(Above: Lead guitarist Wata of the mighty BORIS!)

ARTHUR NIGHTS NIGHT 2: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19 AT THE MAJESTIC PALACE THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES (630 SOUTH BROADWAY) 

*** TWO STAGES * ALL AGES * FULL SETS BY ALL BANDS! * ONLY $24 ***

Friday, October 20, 6pm – presented by Imeem 

BORIS

Co-ed Japanese doom/rock/blissout superpower trio in performance ahead of the Halloween release of Altar, their devastating new album-length collaboration with dronekings Sunn0))) 

TAV FALCO & THE UNAPPROACHABLE PANTHER BURNS

First LA appearance in 10 years! The truly legendary ‘Dorian Gray of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ from Memphis–admired by blues rock n roll luminaries like Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, The Cramps and The Black Keys, a man who’s been joined onstage by Charlie Feathers, Alex Chilton and hundreds of others who wanted to be near the flame–will remind you that ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS DANCE MUSIC. Get ready to get down. 

BE YOUR OWN PET

Nashville teenage action-punk quartet led by firecracker vocalist Jemina Pearl 

HEARTLESS BASTARDS

Walloping Ohio rock trio led by wailer/guitarist Erika Wennerstrom–new album just out on Fat Possum 

THE HOWLING HEX

featuring ex-Pussy Galore/Royal Trux guitarist/genius Neil Hagerty in harmolodic prog-jazz-rock-whatsit flight 

AWESOME COLOR

awesome garage-mantra rock in a Stooges/Spacemen 3 ancestor worship mode

TALL FIRS

mellowside Ecstatic Peace recording artists

FORTUNE’S FLESH

features ex-Starvations members; “Cockroach’s larvae stage of death doo-wop”

And, from the “Imaginational Anthem Vol. 2 Tour”:

* CHRISTINA CARTER

Texan matriarch of the current avant-folk scene/member of Charlambides in solo set

* SHAWN DAVID MCMILLEN

“Soporific, glazed” (sez ‘The Wire’) Texas psych

* SEAN SMITH

Berkeley-based acoustic guitarist in the Fahey-Basho tradition

INS & OUTS ALL NIGHT * YES THERE WILL BE ALCOHOL ON PREMISES * FOOD TOO * ALSO CHECK OUT CLIFTON’S CAFETERIA FOR AFFORDABLE AMERICAN FOOD FARE AND A DECOR THAT WILL GIVE YOU A CONTACT HIGH — OPEN ONLY TIL 9PM 

Tickets are $24 

Purchase tickets online at ticketweb.com, or buy them in person at Amoeba Music (Hollywood), Sea Level Records (Echo Park), Fingerprints (Long Beach) and Benway Records (Venice). 

Public transport to Arthur Nights: The last subway train leaves Pershing Square at 12:17am but buses run all night long. Street parking is pretty easy. Nearby parking lots are $5 or under — we recommend the Pershing Square Garage, located at 542 South Olive Street, directly across from the Biltmore Hotel. 

ALL SET TIMES SUBJECT TO CHANGE OF COURSE 

Fri Oct 20 Palace Theatre Main Hall 

6:00pm doors 

7:20 Awesome Color 

8:05 Howling Hex 

8:55 Heartless Bastards 

9:55 Be Your Own Pet 

10:50 Tav Falco and the Unapproachable Panther Burns 

~12mid Boris 

Fri Oct 20 Palace Theatre 5th Floor 

6pm doors 

7:30 Sean Smith 

8:15 Christina Carter 

9:05 Fortune’s Flesh 

9:45 Tall Firs 

10:30 Shawn David McMillen 

~11:15 Charalambides 

Last night was a dream,

Arthur Brain Donors

Philadelphia – Bushwick – Atwater

from David Byrne Journal

David Byrne Journal

…
10.13.06:

I am planning a public bike forum/arts and entertainment event in the spring with the help of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I imagine a meeting of ordinary people, biking advocates and city reps from the Dept. of Transportation, Parks, police and urban planning. Interspersed with this dream of reaching a compromise and progress on making the city more livable will be bike-related entertainment — to be announced when confirmed. I dream that civic work, improvement and action can be mixed with art and entertainment — that culture and politics can mix and be fun. Well, we’ll see.

As a result, the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives invited me to a meeting organized by Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer about transportation, held at Columbia University. I wasn’t able to stay for the whole thing, but was excited to meet Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá (Colombia) who revolutionized the transportation and parks in that city.

He created a new bus mass transit system, bike lanes, pedestrian streets — all of which had the effect of relieving congestion, boosting the economy and making Bogotá and its surroundings a better place to live. (Some inspirational credit should go to the Brazilian city of Curitiba, a town that made these kinds of changes some years ago and serves as an example. Unfortunately, Curitiba is, to me, a pretty boring town, but these changes have made it more livable for the residents.)

Here’s an excerpt from a piece Peñalosa wrote called “The Politics of Happiness”:

One common measure of the cleanliness of a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. [more than 20km!] It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important — not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

…

The Transportation Alternatives people arranged that we all meet on the west side greenway — very near where I live — at 7:30 in the morning. Peñalosa and the TA folks — then we’d all ride up together to Columbia University (116th Street) as a symbolic gesture. Moby and actor Matthew Modine were supposed to join as well, but they were no-shows. (To be fair, maybe they had never committed and their inclusion was just a publicist’s hopeful rumor.)

At Columbia I was introduced to some of the political players — taxi and limousine commission dept., dept. of transportation, borough president’s office, etc. It’s another world. Then there were short speeches from some of those — Iris Weinshall from Dept. of Transportation said some wonderful things. If those hopes and promises are fulfilled it would be wonderful for NY.

Peñalosa showed slides of Bogotá and talked about what he did.

Here are some quotes (paraphrased):

“If a bike lane isn’t safe for an 8 year old child, it isn’t a bike lane.”

“Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority is not always to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.”

“Building more highways never relieves congestion.” [This was not his insight, but he reminded us how true it is.]

“Transportation is not an end — it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life — the real goal is not to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.”

“A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.”

(Peñalosa tended to link equality with democracy — an idea that is anathema to many in the U.S. I am simplifying here.)

“Upper-income people have always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are public spaces, so this is not a luxury. They are the minimum a democratic society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist in society.

“Since we took these steps, we’ve seen a reduction in crime and a change in attitude toward the city.”

For New York, Peñalosa recommended first imagining what a city could be, what would one wish for, what could be achieved in 100 or more years. As with the great Gothic cathedrals one has to imagine something that one will not see in one’s lifetime, but one’s children or grandchildren may experience it. This also frees one from quickly dismissing ideas as too idealistic or practically improbable. Of course, like dealing with global warming, it needs political will to accomplish, something that ebbs and flows, rises and falls. So looking at the bright side, if there is precious little of that will now, that doesn’t mean there will never be any.

Peñalosa asked that we imagine Broadway, the longest street in the United States, as a pedestrian street. He asked that we imagine reclaiming contact with the East River and dismantling the FDR drive.

As an interim measure, we might turn one long street, like Broadway or 5th Ave., into a pedestrian street just on Sunday afternoons. (The fact that NYC businesses don’t rely much on car access and on having massive parking lots out front like in the suburbs makes this all within the realm of possibility.)

Imagine 42nd Street could be a pedestrian street… it almost is now, with all the stalled traffic and jaywalking. Imagine it as a long plaza, with theaters, restaurants, trees in the middle of the street, seats, outdoor cafés…free wi-fi.

KYP MALONE of TV ON THE RADIO performs a special solo set Sunday, October 22 at ARTHUR NIGHTS.

Kyp Malone of the great rock band TV on the Radio will perform Sunday, October 22 at the Arthur Nights festival at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

“Singing guitarist Kyp Malone [does] vocals redolent of Curtis Mayfield, Prince, and the Beach Boys(!)” — L.A. CityBeat

Other acts performing that night are Comets On Fire, Fiery Furnaces, The Sharp Ease, The Archie Bronson Outfit, Ocrilim feat. Mick Barr, The Nice Boys, SSM, The Colossal Yes (feat. Utrillo of Comets on Fire), the Chuck Dukowski Sextet, Effi Briest and C.B. Brand. Click here for Arthur Nights ticket info.