Violinist Sana Nagano Releases a Pyrotechnic, Savagely Relevant New Album

Violinist Sana Nagano’s new album Smashing Humans – streaming at Bandcamp – is a feral, grimly picturesque suite inspired by Michael Ende’s 1973 dystopic sci-fi novel, Momo. Nagano’s narrative mashup is an incredibly timely parable. As she explains, “The Orange Monster and the Humans in Grey are taking over the Paradise Planet where Smashing Humans and Bunnies, Poops and Polyrhythmic Santa Clauses co-exist in a euphoric way.” This will resonate with fans of doom metal and the darkest side of art-rock as well as the jazz crowd.

The ringleader of this evil enterprise is the Orange Monster, a Bill Gates type who grew up in the wrong place at the wrong time. “His apple parents named him Orange for obvious reasons and told him he is ugly and they wished he was an apple. At school he was bullied for being the only orange in the entire planet. The universal criminal organization Timesaving Bank scouted him for his skillful negativity, which led him to sell his soul to the shadow side in return for a sense of belonging.”

Nagano gives him a whole track to himself toward the end of the record. She opens with a battle theme, Strings & Figures. The group – also including Peter Apfelbaum on sax, Keisuke Matsuno on guitar, Ken Filiano on bass and Joe Hertenstein on drums – march in cynical lockstep up to a searing, sirening guitar/sax/violin conflagration, Filiano maintaining a deadpan cartoon bounce. From there they coalesce with a jagged, vintage 70s King Crimson intensity. It’s amazing how tight this band remain despite the polyrhythmic complexity and relentlessly searing attack of so much of this music.

Track two, Loud Dinner Wanted pictures the Orange Monster about to enjoy his prey as an aspic. Insistent, hammering riffs and eerily dancing tritones give way to a horror interlude anchored by Filiano’s booming chords and Hertenstein’s minimalist stomp while the rest of the crew shrieks and struggles. Nagano glides uneasily as the dancing pulse returns; Apfelbaum flutters as Matsuno bends, clanks and wails.

Nagano loops a creepy chromatic riff while the rest of the band throw off dissociative shards and flickers to begin Dark Waw, a mini-suite depicting a shadow universe. Peevishly persistent skronk fades down into haggardly divergent, trilling voices and then some creepy math-metal.

Nagano and Apfelbaum introduce the Humans in Grey with a menacingly simple insectile theme: these cold figures immediately join in a macabre march. As a parable of consumerism – or as just an evil, loopy, noisy theme – it packs a wallop. The rhythm drops out; the group shiver around in an increasingly poltergeist-like atmosphere, Nagano leading them back up into an increasingly bellicose vortex.

She reflects on the concept of a shadow self in The Other Seven, the rhythm growing more lithe and then ceding to deep-space menace, Matsuno’s death star twinkling and then resonating morosely in the distance. Hertenstein’s terse, playful solo introduces Chance Music, which grows to a pulsing Butch Morris/AACM type massed theme. This is a pivotal moment in the narrative, so no spoilers.

The Orange Monster portrait is titled Heavenly Evil Devil. It seems he learns to jump through increasingly complicated, distantly Balkan-flavored hoops, but, be careful when you fight with monsters, etc. It would be a spoiler to give away the ending, which is fantastic: let’s just say that this might be the best album of 2021.

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Surreal, Occasionally Assaultive Epics and a Bushwick Brewery Gig from Bassist James Ilgenfritz

You’re going to want to turn down the volume on your device for the first track on bassist James Ilgenfritz‘s wildly uncategorizable new album You Scream a Rapid Language – streaming at Bandcamp – especially if you’re wearing earbuds. Some of this is assaultive, abrasive music, but it can be a treat for people who gravitate toward those kinds of sounds. The bassist’s next gig is a two-night stand with multimedia artist and playwright Sarah Krasnow at Honey’s, a mead brewery at 93 Scott Ave. in Bushwick on Jan 4 and 5 at 8 PM. Cover is $10; since this is happening over another L-pocalypse weekend, if you’re not in the neighborhood, it’s going to be a bitch to get to. The closest train that’s running is the M to Myrtle Ave; you could take your chances with the bus after.

Muted, pummeling beats anchor violinist Pauline Kim Harris’ sharp, shrieking, slashing upper-register riffage in the album’s first track, Terminal Affirmative. As usual, Ilgenfritz writes for every fraction of the available sonics, from nails-down-the-blackboard upper-register harmonics, to cello-like low-midrange washes, to pings and thuds from Alex Cohen’s double bass drum. .And just when you think this might be all shards and fragments, it turns into a witchy tarantella.

The second number, Apophenia III: The Index is a twistedly disjointed electroacoustic epic with lots of sardonic wah-wah, a talkbox, creepy, minimalist piano from Kathleen Supove, sepulchral wisps from James Moore’s guitar and Jennifer Choi’s violin, and a bit of a strolling stalker theme. How to Talk to Your Children About Not Looking at the Eclipse, a chattering solo tableau for Margaret Lancaster’s solo flute, is as ridiculously picturesque as the title suggests.

Freaky faux-operatic spoken word, fragmentary Joseph Kubera piano, flickering bass and lingering vibes from William Winant blend uneasily, sometimes edging toward horror, in Apophenia IV: A Bell in Every Finger. It could be a performance art parody, or maybe everybody just got really stoned before improvising it. Either way, it runs out of gas short of the twelve-minute mark. The album winds up with the five-part suite Fanfares For Modest Accomplishments, played by violin duo String Noise and spanning from chirpy, minimalistic acerbity, to wry conversationality, playfully adrenalizing rollercoaster interludes and a coy false ending.

Brandon Seabrook Will See You on the Dark Side of the Drum

Brandon Seabrook is one of New York’s great musical individualists. He made his name as a shredder – anybody who’s witnessed his neutron-beam attack on guitar or banjo can vouch for how accurately the bandname Seabrook Power Plant reflects his sound. Yet anyone who’s ever seen him play guitar in magically nuanced singer Eva Salina’s electric Balkan group knows how gorgeously lyrical and restrained his playing can be. Seabrook’s latest album, Die Trommel Fatale, is streaming at Bandcamp . As drummer Dave Treut, who’s played with Seabrook for longer than most anyone else, observed over drinks the other night at Barbes, it pretty well capsulizes Seabrook’s career so far.  He’s likely to become the loudest, most assaultive guitarist ever to play Joe’s Pub when he and the band show up for the album release show this June 8 at  9:30 PM. Cover is $15.

The premise of the album is what can happen when you anchor the music with two drummers, without cymbals. The result turns out to be less funereal than simply monstrous. Treut and Sam Ospovat rumble and crush behind those stripped-down kits, with Marika Hughes on cello, Eivind Opsvik on bass and Chuck Bettis doing the Odin deathmetal thing on the mic.

The album opens with Emotional Cleavage, which could be very sad or completely the opposite, depending on how you interpret the title. This one’s a mashup of free jazz, death metal and 70s King Crimson: squirrelly franticness side by side with lingering, Messianic unease. Clangorous Vistas begin with a wry car horn allusion, a high drone, then sudden insectile scampering into a dancing skronk that eventually catapults Seabrook into one of his usual feral, tremolo-picked assaults

Jungly electronics, eerily resonant jangle and warped, machinegunning squall alternate throughout Abccessed Pettifogger (gotta love those titles, huh?) Shamans Never R.S.V.P. is a real creeper, waves of stark strings underpinning Seabrook’s elegantly skeletal, upper-register stroll: it sounds like Hildegarde von Bingen on acid, and it’s one of the few places on the album where the percussion gets as ominous as the rest of the band. And then everybody goes skronking and squalling, with a tumbling duel between Treut and Ospovat. From there, the similarly shrieky Litany of Turncoats makes a good segue.

The Greatest Bile, a diptych, builds out of crackling, circling riffage to the most twisted march released this year, Seabrook radiating evil Keith Levene-esque overtones when he’s not torturing the strings with volley after volley of tremolo-picking. Opsvik’s calmly pulsing solo, and then Hughes’ far more grim one, reach down for something approaching a respite from the firestorm. The second part is just as dirty if a little less unhinged, like a drony Martin Bisi noisescape with the strings and drums hovering on the periphery. 

The sandy-paintbrush drum brushing of the atmospheric Rhizomatic comes as a welcome surprise, then the band goes back to Quickstep Grotesquerie (the next number, which would be an apt secondary album title). The final cut is a chaotic, cauldron sarcastically titled Beautiful Flowers. This isn’t exactly easy listening, but in its own extremely twisted way, it’s a party in a box. Lights out on the floor with headphones on! 

Object Collection Stages a Deliciously Noisy, Messy. Provocative Piece at LaMaMa

Longtime LaMaMa impresario Nicky Paraiso reminded last night’s sold-out crowd at Object Collection’s latest experimental opera, Cheap & Easy October, that the experience would be what used to be called “total theatre” back in the 80s – a description that really nailed it. With a tight, often scorchingly intense four-piece band playing behind a ratty knitted curtain of sorts and cast members scampering, leaping and chasing each other around the stage, it’s more of a concert with a cast acting out a dadaesque video of sorts than it is anything else. And what a show it is. As immersive and pummeling as composer Travis Just’s score is, it’s far less abrasive than it is enveloping: you are drawn into the heart of the cyclotron, violently thrust out or, surprisingly, cast gently into a starlit reverie. Earplugs will be handed out, hut you don’t really need them. The run at LaMaMa is coming to a close, with final performances tonight, October 17 and then tomorrow at 10 PM; tix are $18/$13 stud/srs.

The band shifts abruptly but strangely elegantly through dreampop, post-hardcore and Mogwai-esque nightmarescapes, with acidic mid-80s Sonic Youth close harmonies, furious percussive interludes that recall taiko drumming, moments of what seem to be free improvisation, and echoes of the cumulo-nimbus swirl of guitarist Taylor Levine’s quartet Dither. Violinist Andie Springer uses a lot of extended technique and nails-down-the-blackboard harmonics; she also plays bass. Explosive drummer Owen Weaver doubles on Telecaster, while keyboardist Aaron Meicht also adds the occasional trumpet flourish or joins the stomp on a couple of floor toms.

The text – drawn from Soviet revolutionary histories by Leon Trotsky and John Reed as well as conversations between writer/director Kara Feely and cast member Fulya Peker (whose butoh background informs the simmering menace she channels throughout the show) veers from lickety-split spoken word to a bizarre, falsettoey singsong. Sardonic symbolism is everywhere: there’s a zombie apocalypse subplot, a telephone gets abused, and swordplay abounds. The rest of the cast – Deborah Wallace, Daniel Allen Nelson, Tavish Miller and Avi Glickstein – take on multiple roles, some of them living, some of them presumably dead.

There’s some toying with poststructuralist japes, springboarding off the premise that if you control the conversation, you control the situation. “Do you think a revolution of words can be as profound as an actual revolution?” one of the cast poses in one of the performance’s less chaotic moments. Much of the iconography in the set is sarcastic and ultimately portends a lot of very gloomy endings: as Feely and Just see it, revolutions tend to disappoint.

No less august a personality than Robert Ashley gave this group’s work the thumbs-up. For those who need their ideas packaged neatly and cohesively, this isn’t going to work. And it raises fewer questions than it intimates – which by itself is reason to see this provocative piece, one more nuanced than its sonic cauldron might initially suggest.

Kimmo Pohjonen and Jeffrey Ziegler Battle With Noises from the River

You know electroacoustic? Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and ex-Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Ziegler’s duo show last month at South Street Seaport was diesel-acoustic. Positioned at the tip of a former shipping pier, possibly for the sake of approximating a nordic fjord, the two jammed their way through alternately rustic and assaultively improvisational themes against a rumbling backdrop of ferries, tugboats and water taxis. And it was totally punk rock, a style that Pohjonen seems to spring from.

When Ziegler wasn’t playing elegant washes of counterpoint to complement Pohjonen’s spiraling phrases, he was scraping on the strings, sticking a conductor’s baton under the bridge of his cello, wailing and screeching and shrieking to the point where it looked like something was about to break. Cellists from famous string quartets typically play ancient instruments from centuries past: this cello looked like it could have been a recent model, straight from the factory floor. Pity the musician who gets it secondhand: it’s been abused.

Pohjonen brought a pedalboard and played like a noiserock guitarist much of the time, with loops and distortion and also a setting that gave his squeezebox a majestic church organ sound. His technique was spectacular: blistering, machinegunning volleys of notes decaying to a drone or vice versa. Ziegler typically got to play good cop to Pohjonen’s viking madman when he wasn’t trying to burn holes in his fingerboard with his rasping attack. They hit a couple of big anthemic peaks, took a departure into a gracefully lilting dance that could have been Celtic – it’s amazing how much cross-pollination ancient folk music hints at – then a Middle Eastern-flavored interlude with a spiky acoustic guitar cameo from Gyan Riley and wound up on an ecstatic note. Props to the River to River Festival folks for having the courage to book an act this adrenalizing and cutting-edge.

Zeena Parkins’ The Adorables: Lively, Hypnotic and Creepy

How adorable is Zeena Parkins‘ album The Adorables? Not particularly. But it is very trippy, and often very creepy, and a lot of fun. In addition to her gig as Bjork’s harpist, Parkins has been a denizen of the downtown scene for a long time, beginning well before the Knitting Factory and then moving on to Tonic and the Stone. This album – with Shayna Dunkelman on vibes and percussion, Danny Blume on guitar, Deep Singh and Dave Sharma on percussion and Preshish Moments on electronics, sounds like a live recording from the Stone and is best appreciated as a whole.

A syncopated trip-hop beat with echoey Rhodes, skronky guitar and electronic blips and bleeps sets the scene, creepy and tinkling.  Parkins eventually emerges along with what sounds like a mellotron. Signaled by a jaunty percussion break, the ensemble rises to a hypnotically dreamy, twinkling groove. That’s the first number. The second builds along similar lines as textures grow more dense, Parkins’ insistent crashes against woozy synth; the third builds from sardonic vocals to a rattling interlude (is that a cimbalom?!?), to loopy anthemics.

An unease sets in at that point and pretty much never leaves, beginning with Parkins’ tritones conversing with weird, robotic effects (talking with a robot would make anyone uneasy, right?). From there the band takes it into whooshing Bernard Herrmann atmospherics, to skronk, and then back with a mechanical shuffle, Dunkelman’s distantly menacing vibes solo looming in from the great beyond. Parkins’ spiky, noir melody against the lingering resonance of the vibes and the jungle of effects is arguably the album’s high point.

From there, wry early 80s-style synth fuels a Halloweenish take on P-Funk in 6/8. Twinkles and booms rise to an uneasy, dancing doublespeed that eventually loops with a West African rhythm. And then it’s over. The album is out from Cryptogramophone; Parkins’ next New York gig is an especially intriguing one, on Dec 5 at 8 PM at the Miller Theatre, where she joins a chamber ensemble playing percussively hypnotic works by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.

Album of the Day 10/17/11

As we do pretty much every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album was #471:

Sielun Veljet – Live

Sielun Veljet (Finnish for “Soul Brothers”) are iconic in their native land. Their earliest songs set eardrum-peeling, trebly PiL-style noise guitar over catchy, growling, snappy bass and roaring punk vocals. The Finnish lyrics are surreal and assaultive as well. This scorching 1983 concert recording takes most of the songs off their first album and rips them to shreds. The best of these is Turvaa (Saved), with its ominous, chromatics and catchy, burning bassline. There’s also Emil Zatopek, a hoarse, breathless tribute to the long-distance runner; the primal, tribal Haisa Vittu; the surprisingly ornate Karjalan Kunnaila; the spooky epic Yö Erottaa Pojasta Miehen; Politikkaa, a macabre, reverb-drenched chromatic noise-funk tune; and the most traditionally punk number, Huda Huda (basically Finnish for “Yay, yay” – the sarcasm transcends any language barrier). Because of the album title (not to mention that it was never released outside Finland), it’s awfully hard to find online; in lieu of this, here’s a random torrent for their first album.

Album of the Day 5/26/11

As we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Thursday’s album is #614:

Live Skull – Snuffer

The best New York band of the 80s wasn’t Sonic Youth. It was Live Skull. They shared a producer, Martin Bisi, whose ears for the most delicious sonics in a guitar’s high midrange did far more to refine both bands’ sound than he ever got credit for. As noisy as this band was, they also had an ear for hooks: noise-rock has never been more listenable. By the time they recorded this one, guitarists Tom Paine and Mark C., fretless bassist Marnie Greenholz and drummer Rich Hutchins had brought in future Come frontwoman Thalia Zedek, but on vocals rather than guitar. It’s a ferociously abrasive yet surprisingly catchy six-song suite of sorts, Zedek’s assaultive rants mostly buried beneath the volcanic swirl of the guitars and the pummeling rhythm section. By the time they get to Step, the first song of side two, they’ve hit a groove that winds up with furious majesty on the final cut, Straw. Like Sonic Youth, their lyrics are neither-here-nor-there; unlike that band, they had the good sense to bury them in the mix most of the time. Very influential in their time, it’s hard to imagine Yo La Tengo and many others without them. Here’s a random torrent via Rare Punk.

Album of the Day 4/30/11

Brand-new May concert calendar coming on Sunday: check back with us then. In the meantime, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #640:

King Crimson – Red

King Crimson have played an awful lot of styles over their off-and-on forty-year existence – mellotron-driven symphonic rock, crazed acidic jazzy stuff, nerdy staccato new wave, ambient soundscapes. This 1974 album finds guitarist Robert Fripp at his loudest and most metal-oriented, with bassist John Wetton amazingly terse and tuneful. Side one runs through the tricky time signatures and offhandedly ominous tones of the title track, Fallen Angel, the menacing One More Red Nightmare and violin-driven Providence. The sidelong suite Starless, rips a riff from Olivier Messiaen’s Concerto for the End of Time and takes it to its logical, murderous conclusion in over fifteen minutes of increasingly brutal, slowly stalking, crescendoing intensity, including the best (and longest) one-note solo ever played on any instrument (that’s Fripp shrieking and firing off sparks over Wetton’s slowly ascending, growling bass). Here’s a random torrent.

Intriguing Conversational Noise-Jazz Jams From PinkBrown

Guitarist Xander Naylor made an impact with his completely unhinged, ferocious work on Ben Syversen’s Cracked Vessel album last year. He’s also a tremendously interesting writer, in an individual style that spans jazz, rock, funk and plain old brutal noise. On the expansive ep by his trio PinkBrown, he’s joined by saxophonist Johan Andersson and drummer Max Jaffe for an intuitively conversational, fascinating mix of composition and improvisation. Which is which? Trying to figure that out is a lot of fun. There’s so much going on here, yet so little in places: shifting from full-bore assault to wispy minimalism, the band deliver the kind of performance that you can play along to as you listen. It’s all about interplay rather than simply trajectory: they’re playing as a unit, rather than everybody shooting from the three-point line.

The first track here, Octagon begins with washes of feedback over a stiff martial beat, joined by sireening sax, skronky pinging Daniel Ash reverb droplets and then some guitar torture as the drums loosen and slide into funk. The sax joins the melee and suddenly the melee is over, replaced by an austere, minimalist section kicked off by Naylor, sax and drums joining in gingerly. The sparse atmospherics expand, a spacious mysteriousness pervades until Naylor makes his way back with big, sunburnt, sustained chords and the most memorably tuneful passage here. They wind it down gracefully and quietly. That’s the first eleven minutes of the album.

Track two, According to Taste is all about conversations and loud/soft contrasts. They begin wry and chirpy until Naylor’s frets catch fire and then extinguish by themselves. A single, simple noir riff appears; austerely chiming minimalism grows almost imperceptibly to a brief skronk interlude, then back down again, skeletal and whispery. A stomping anthem in disguise grows out of it, drums being the secret weapon here. They go out with a quick machine-gun volley. The third cut, Undisembowled, is a blistering instrumental that wouldn’t be out of place in the King Crimson catalog circa 1976. Beginning as staggered, metal-toned riff-rock, Andersson jostles Naylor tentatively and then a brief battle ensues, spacy feedback reverb guitar against sostenuto sax. Then Naylor trades 21st century schizoid riffs with the drums, sax and guitar go off into separate corners and bludgeon something and then return in unison to go out with a triumphant funk/metal chorus. Count this as one of the more enjoyably captivating albums so far this year. PinkBrown play an in-store show at Downtown Music Gallery at 7 on May 15.