I know how different a touring headspace can be from a composing and recording headspace, and it was a cold and haggard night. Owen performed admirably, but I came for the ideas, not just for the new material, but the songs I've seen live 7 times in the light of tomorrow, wherever that is. I'm trying to make sense of what I'm hearing, and from this concert, there's a lot Owen's been putting on the table for a while, lots of projects on top of his arrangement work, that'll be swept up into whatever happens next.
SETLIST
- Scandal At The Parkade (solo)
- In Conflict
- Midnight Directives
- Soldier's Rock
- Tryst With Mephistopheles
- Infernal Fantasy
- The Riverbed
- This Is the Dream of Win and Regine
- Lewis Takes Off His Shirt
- The Great Elsewhere
- E is for Estranged
- The Man With No Ankles
In Conflict
Swelling, rotating arco+pizz pattern in close intervals with an incredible amount of momentu. Diving through dirty synth swells, sparse at other times. There's a funk-styled freedom to the bassline, but also one shifting under the weight of a high pedal tone. There's definitely polytonality (a la Ives, for example, mixing the same or recognizable figures in different keys, lending itself to a disorienting but not overly unpleasant sense of collage) and quarter tones in there somewhere.
Having seen Owen play with Les Mouches before, nothing here felt very new to me; for my thoughts from last year's Toronto performance, go here. However, I did not before appreciate the freedom the band grants Owen. Just in the form and in the technology, looping requires a basis of some figure which informs, if not determines, the tonality of every other passage you play. When Owen goes on the fan forums talking about repetitive music, I think that implies using smaller, and therefore more flexible, nuggets of material. Less melody and more pedal point or cantus firmus. The band is there to turn it into a song, of which the looping is an integral but on-its-own-powerless part.
Midnight Directives
I remember that MD used to be the last track of Heartland under a different name and title; there's still something very different about it from the rest of the album to me, something I think Owen's exploiting. The piece is a collection of moments, in relation to the 5th/tritone drone and the quick/unreachable pizz, but still fractured. On the recording the strings swoop in arco, pop out, come back pizz, leave room for a bassoon scale, none of it in a unit until the final moments. It fits together as a disoriented expansive mess.
Building off of IC, the band gives Owen a powerful but flexible means with which to create distinct moments from the loops. With less orchestral material to fill in, the song strips down into a collage of these moments, taut and flinging near each other. The buildup to "bit of meat" should be a climax, but it's a false peak, a structural deceptive cadence, probably leading to the most cacophany of most of his songs; the band does a lot of extra repetition of the next climax in order to bind it back together aesthetically enough to finish. The music becomes about the exchange between subdivisions, of the smallest moments refusing to be tied structurally to a monolithic whole. This is small music.
Soldier's Rock
The lyrics changed! And everything changed a little bit. Matt was onstage with a Mopho synthesizer, which increased the depth of the synth play around the song. Still linear, still funky, but the outro took that regularity and smashed it up against the wall. Owen was ripping at the violin (did a bowstring come off at this song, or earlier?), tearing away at antitonal passages. More than anything, the song gives an insight into the violence of Owen's lyrics and writing. There are bits and pieces being posted on the fanforums' sticky, and they're juicy juicy bits.
Tryst w/ Mephistopheles
So, what are the artistic implications of krautrock? What are the challenges and the flexibilities of the genre, what does the m.o. do to the material which lives within it? There's something common to both Jazz and to classical music that minimalism in its broadest sense, some kind of stripping down or stripping away, had to happen before new complexity could be built. I'm thinking of Sun Ra's unrestraint and the Marsalis family, or the vogue of minimalism which is now diffused into pop film scores and the cogs of overwrought compositional cathedrals alike. I think Krautrock takes that crisis, leans toward minimalism a bit, but adds the drums to make it fun.
Tryst begins with a fifth and a drumbeat and a bassline on the root. Everything else has a time and a place to remove itself from that order. The band accented the sense of entrapment this approach to material can generate. We'd like there to be a lyrical breakout of song, but the melody will keep on descending until it reaches hell, or repeat itself dancing in circles to its eventual death (and lack of interest), but everything is too carefully controlled. The most powerful moments for me, when the violin recasts that open fifth into major and minor modes at a stroke, and when the breakdown bass pattern returns to close the song, are moments which just barely seem to break out, but get caught back into the fold.
Infernal Fantasy
There's a romantic energy to the piece, the arpeggios feel inspired from the accompaniments to lieder. There are moments of breakout rock to punctuate, but this is a very short song which makes its tense and charged point as quickly as possible. It's maybe the most cousin (if not by blood) to Midnight Directives on the stock of new songs. The dissonances mixed between those streams of notes sound even more disturbing
Riverbed
I really don't know what to say. This song came out of nowhere, it wasn't even "Dark Behind The Sky" which was performed in Japan. It begins with a drum machine, setting expectation and crescendoing but dropping out before the violin enters. The violin pattern...okay. Take "Wake Up," and marry it shotgun. Fill it with booze and pills and the violent monotony of your daily life, corrupt it slowly with promises of love. Ruin it and everything it stands for, slash its voice, and leave it stuck and cold on the street when you're done. Supply bass and drums and let it sing. That's what you're working with here.
Win/Regine
The clearest thing about this crowd-pleaser for me is that, if the band wanted it to be so, it could sound exactly like the recording on Has a Good Home, all the hand claps and swells. But it don't, and it won't. Rob's to thank I think (his astonishing percussion work is everything I want to be in a backing performer). He pays attention instead to rhythmic density and intensity and interchange, not the clearer romantic sweep of timbre and pitch that accompany some bands' crescendos.
Scandal / ... / LTOHS + Elsewhere + Estranged + Ankles
I stopped taking notes and wrote "TOO BUSY MOSHING" once "Shirt" started. What that meant was "too busy moshing with myself," which meant more of "too busy navalgazing and mouthing lyrics to function." I had a lot of fun and couldn't really pick out much to say. In retrospect, Owen knew where to put the new stuff for maximum effectiveness, and despite all the innovations in dissonance and everything else, Owen kept these ones pretty straight. It was heartening. No matter what work he does, he wants to perform and have his work performable, and is willing to end sets like this. And even then, Ankles didn't exist two years ago, and now it's the crowd-pleasing finale.
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So: polytonality, pedal points / cantus firmi vs. ostinati, collage, subdivision, violence, entrapment, rhythm, dissonance. Another thing, from listening to the recordings above (thanks to vestenet), it's all really fucking fast. The best thing to get your ear ready might be Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931. Crawford Seeger worked a lot around dissonance, working in a style called "dissonant counterpoint" and proposing systems where everything tonal was replaced with something antitonal, i.e. dissonances are good and consonances are meant to pass between dissonances but not take focus. The logic of her 3rd and 4th movements (linked) are strict in their logic much in the way that looping forces a strict logic; they are also wildly inventive and disturbing, powerful in their closeness to something that sounds just barely natural. If you don't like it, play along with a maraca and see how you feel (dat tactile pulse).
It was only after I got back from the show that I saw Owen had posted a few of his own comments about the music and setlist for that night. Choice: "very loud and distorted but in a soothing beautiful way," "Old songs sound exploded like "you set Heartland on fire and a phoenix emerges" - Kevin. New songs sound "better than your old songs, like, kill them dead." - Ben." The new tunes are part of a handful that'll supposedly be on the record out next year. There's a lot to prepare, for all of us, I think. If we're into what's happening, then we shouldn't neglect thinking about what's gotten Owen there, the events and travels and other kinds of festivals and performance engagements. He's been gathering widely from the opportunities presented, and I think we'll be all the richer for it.
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