Every single person I invited to this show declined for one reason or another: anniversaries, brothers’ birthdays, cousins’ weddings, TTRPG nights; apparently every event in the county had to occur on this particular Veterans’ Day weekend.
Whenever we reluctantly return from one of our trips up to the Bay Area — eternal host of an unending surplus of bonafide cultural happenings, from well-attended rep screenings (Dirty Harry on a boat! Hi, Condor!) to concerts of everything from screamo to new music, to say nothing of the various timely Halloween- or election-related events — Hannah and I find ourselves stricken anew with the sensation we’re from nowhere. Facing round rejection by almost all my friends really did not help.
(P.S. If anyone is reading in SF — and of course I acknowledge it’s pure folly to imagine anyone reading at all anywhere — the Beat Museum is holding a free screening of Dog Star Man in full on 16mm on the 20th, followed by of all things Rear Window and Dmytryk’s The Sniper. North Beach: truly God’s country.)
But onto the show: The Brown Building is a a new venue which started putting on shows in the last year or so. I’ve wanted to play there since catching local favorites Year of the Dead Bird and Band Argument this summer. Of course, the best part of playing small venues is they look packed no matter how many people attend; shoutouts to Russell, Connor, Mykey and a handful of other freaks and weirdos for making it out where no one else was able.
I’m still on a quest to break from my overly-guitarristic habits, so this was another cello set. Knowing at least half the bill was playing unamplified, I hoped to differentiate my set by leaning further into the electronic side of my new material. Points of reference named afterward by the audience: War of the Worlds, Red State (“The Kevin Smith movie?” “Yeah.”), the literal Rapture, “a computer,” and “America right now.” (I’ll take it.)
Ryan Ebaugh’s name has been popping up on flyers around town for a little while now but we had never never actually met. Somehow I was under the impression he lived out in Vista but I must have misheard “Chula Vista” because he’s right across the bridge in Barrio Logan. This kid’s been hiding right under my nose the whole time? Squealing, shredding, tearing walls of screeches punctuated by heavy tongue blasts, cut through by soaring melodic arcs and some truly unique uses of techniques you think you’ve heard before. Seriously, what rock have I been under? We will be recording.
In my mind Dylan is first and foremost a guitarist; I met him in that capacity when he was playing in Vaginals and the only times we’ve played together were on a handful of occasions when I blew sax in his psychedelic funk group Peymaar. It’s wholly unfair to him that I mentally pigeonhole his wide-ranging talents, but even more unfair to me that I end up ignoring the simple fact: the guy rips on drums. For his set tonight he played drums from behind crashing waves of dubby echoes somewhere between Zach Hill freakout histrionics and Can’s farthest-out explorations.
Rob Magill and I have both played with everyone from Patrick Shiroishi to Tatsuya Nakatani but until tonight, the penultimate show of a two-month nationwide tour he began by throwing out his back, had never met before. At this point I’m “connected” enough I can’t remember the last time I played a show where I didn’t know half the bill.
Given my unfamiliarity with Rob’s extensive discography I was already going in with an open mind, but nothing could have prepared me for the two pieces he played on sheng and tenor sax. Rob’s was the shortest set of the night, but in that time he flowed effortlessly between tranquility and dissonance, blaring low tones and agile, gliding melodic lines before closing with a sense of subtlety and understatement too uncommon in improvised music. “Sometimes you give all your expressions and need to get out of there,” he said.
We closed out by improvising as a quartet. I’ll confess: I was totally lost in this group. Rob and Ryan have played together before and found their groove immediately, but my cello had trouble competing with two monster horns and Dylan’s powerful drumming. When I tried engaging my pedals at first I could produce only feedback. Eventually I think I found some sort of groove into which my playing could slide… I don’t know. Dylan recorded everybody’s sets; when I listen back I’ll play Monday morning quarterback to myself.
Improvised music is always a gamble, and playing with anybody for the first time doubly so. Add in the audience variable and the whole thing is almost unimaginably daunting, but of course we pursue it nonetheless. I can’t remember his exact words, but Nathan once said of playing in the moment we need always give credit to the collective ghost of improvisation haunting the room. It took a hard-fought battle to remember I needed to surrender to that spirit.
Five (seeming) contradictions from Lacan to close:
- “The unconscious is exactly the hypothesis that one does not dream only when one sleeps.”
- “They… awaken, in other words, they go on dreaming.”
- “I re-enter just like everyone else into this dream that is called reality”
- “We never wake up.”
- “Absolute awakening is death.”
Next up: Bikes Del Pueblo courtesy of Stay Strange:
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