This review is a little late, it's been a long week. But, my memories of the show are still pretty fresh. Cameo Gallery is less a gallery and more a hole behind a restaurant and bar. At least it's a good-sounding hole, though. Beer on tap might cost you as much as the cover charge ($7) but I thought it was worth it for Brooklyn Winter Ale. There was a small merch table set up near the bar, and I got a chance to ask a band member if they have any old tapes left - they're all out of Rejoice, and Kaddish was a CD-R, so if anyone was hoping to pick those up, it's too late. However, Rejoice was recently added to Spotify, along with the new album.
Andrew Cedermark opened, and I was pleasantly surprised. I had seen this band play a few months ago at Union Pool, at what was supposed to be a Secret Mountains show in December, canceled due to illness. Cedermark still played, but poorly. I don't know if they were nervous being the de facto headliners, or if the sound was just off that night, but they were a lot better at Cameo last week. You can check their stuff out on bandcamp. Day Joy, the second opener, had some sound problems initially, but once they were set up, played an enjoyable and competent set. Their stuff can also be found on bandcamp. Both bands play good, if slightly uninspired, shoegazy rock.
Secret Mountains took the stage more or less on time, and they seemed a lot more sure of themselves than when I saw them last summer at Mercury Lounge. They opened with the new album's title track (which I had definitely heard live before, I think most likely at their Mercury Lounge show) and seemed set to play the record straight through - until their bassist snapped his first string on stage in all their four years together as a band, towards the end of Weepy Little Fingers. They didn't have any spare strings and he's a lefty, so there was a lot of downtime while they fixed it, by stealing a string off someone else's bass. At first, they told jokes. After they ran out of jokes, this happened (sorry for the terrible audio quality, it's my phone, not the sound at the venue). When people ask me why I bother seeing the same bands play live over and over, the answer is that it's shit like this that keeps me coming back.
Soon after the end of their improvised version of Rejoice, the bass was back in action, and so was the show, but they were now short on time. Still, they didn't seem too rushed, taking High Horse nice and slow, and jamming out a little on Golden Blue. Most of the live performances that night sounded very close to the versions on the record, which makes a lot of sense, since I imagine they've been rehearsing these songs this way for quite some time to get the record done. Here's hoping these songs will continue to evolve live, and diverge from the studio version in the future. The band was out of time after Golden Blue, but the crowd heckled the staff into allowing one more song. They played Remainder, finishing out the album. It's one of their only songs I haven't heard live or seen live myself, it's my favorite on the new record, and hearing it close the show was pretty much all I could have asked for from their first full-length gig (that both I and the band have had a chance to attend). Here are some more pictures from the gig. I have two more videos, of High Horse and Remainder, but the bass overwhelms my poor phone's mic. If anyone has a recording of this show, please contact me!
The bedroom musicians of today have the unique position contrary to most arena-centric bands and artists out there to forge their own world within the comfort of their aesthetically moulded environments and harbour some measure of success and merit for their work. American one-woman operation Julianna Barwick has garnered some high praise from critics and spellbound fans alike for her ethereal incantations.
The title of her last full-length, 2011’s The Magic Place, conjures a dream-like state that could so easily allude to her own space of music-making. The same concept is analogous to Cafe Oto, a relaxed, stylish coffeehouse-cum-music venue with an authentic atmosphere of a vintage jazz club. Instead of solely focusing on jazz music like its neighbour, the Vortex Jazz Club, its eclectic nightly programme makes this a popular venue.
Tonight’s sold out event begins with Silver Pyre, pseudonym of Gary Fawle, who challenges the crowd to some minimal folktronica. His sound inhabits a similar aesthetic to Thom Yorke’s solo glitch-rock – with laptop, pre-programmed sequencer, guitar and an aura of abandonment, he paints intimately-bound layers of rough, stuttering beats and tones. Lyrical vocals too, but these lack the rounding punch. The climax of the set arrives with a distorted Lou Reed-style vocal performance grinding together with processed chimes, scattershot buzz tones and a sludgy bass pulse to deliver a swaggering post-industrial heaviness.
Julianna Barwick is the cheerleader for DIY ambient folk. Where her cousin contemporaries (Julia Holter, Rachel Evans (Motion Sickness of Time Travel) and Grouper’s Liz Harris) are caught in the claustrophobic rut of abandoned loneliness, Barwick’s sonic pedigree is a rich and cleansing experience elevating our emotions to heavenly heights.
With her head gracefully poised upward, as if delivering a sermon to the Gods, Barwick opens her set immersed in dreamy projections of tree-flecked skies. Within the enveloping washes of harmonies and gushing reverb, rewards begin to greet the patient audience members. I feel transfixed, and pretend to hallucinate enchanted spirits that dwell within the trees whispering through the crepuscular glades. She turns an East London coffee shop – that most intimate space – into an Arcadian idyll, a majestic cathedral.
In spite of her arrestingly original approach to composition, the same method is used time and time again in each piece: a build up of mainly wordless vocal loops, interlaced with thickly blanketed instrumentation which all reach some kind of euphoric plateau where Barwick can then inject some more of her own unearthly vocal decorations before fading back into stillness and silence. These multi-tracked mantras evoke a spiritual feeling that chimes the all too familiar resonances of Enya’s atmospheric fairylike folk, or the cosmic touchstones of Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending’.
I could not fault the sound, which I assume plays a critical role in her own enjoyment of performing live. Tonight she is as sweet and modest as her music would suggest. Barwick’s dependency on her loopstation and pre-programmed effects occasionally dispels the magic, but her talent is in that crystalline voice. One gets caught in a resonant web, created by the vast layer of vocal phrases and these build up with interwoven delicacy. The weighty presence of reverb is the glistening touch for the IMAX of musical experience. The elevated intensity reaches a climax in ‘Bob In Your Gait’ where the soaring resonances shaped by Barwick’s controlled vocal decorations around leisurely refined pulse of guitar and piano juxtaposition lets the song drift off into the ether with poise.
I think we should be beaming Julianna Barwick’s music out into space if heaven was a place on Earth. As we all float away from the sacred space of dreams, one would hope Barwick can cast her net wider on her next stride towards creative ambition. On her forthcoming album (out in 2013) which features guest vocalists and musicians, it will be intriguing to know whether her unique aesthetic combines effectively with collaborative minds to coexist with this meteoric ascent of her talent.
