Lubelski and Nace both have extensive musical histories as solo artists, improvisers and collaborators, including with members of Sonic Youth (Lubelski with Thurston Moore in, among other formats, Chelsea Light Moving; Nace most recently in Body/Head with Kim Gordon, but also with Moore and Lubelski). This format — in which the duo have released a self-titled album and recently toured the U.S. — finds Lubelski on violin and Nace on guitar/effects. It’s clear from the cohesiveness of this 28-minute piece that the pair have a natural interplay with each other, as they weave together a piece that you’ll find thought provoking no matter how you choose to interpret it.
I recorded this set primarily with a feed from the soundboard, with the Schoeps MK5 onstage mics providing additional atmosphere. Enjoy!
The Chris Forsyth residency at Nublu throughout this month got off to a great start last Friday, as Chris was joined by the most excellent Garcia Peoples for the third time in NYC this year. It was back at Nublu in March when this magic combination saw its first incarnation and the results were incendiary. The group later collaborated on a magic night at Market Hotel in July. This night offered a final local hook-up and the performance of all parties was unsurprisingly also en fuego.
Chris Forsyth released perhaps his most comprehensive work in April, and All Time Present material comprised the entire main set before the band reached back a few years for the non-encore track. But as was joked during the set, Garcia Peoples seemed to have rehearsed this material maybe even more than Forsyth, and the quintet was ready for every twist and turn and peak that their protagonist led.
Chris Forsyth returns every Friday this month to Nublu for what promises to be an historic residency. This week will feature Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate) and Linda Pitmon (Minus 5) in a two-set affair that will deliver some never-before-heard iterations of band material and covers.
I recorded this set with the Schoeps cards mounted back about 20 feet from the stage and pointed at the stacks. The sound quality (other than some chatter) is quite excellent. Enjoy!
Setlist: [Total Time 1:16:20] 01 Dream Song 02 Mystic Mountain 03 Tomorrow Might As Well Be Today 04 The Past Ain’t Passed 05 Techno Top 06 [no-encore break] 07 Dreaming in The Non-Dream
Over the course of these residency shows (plus bonus Queens show), I’ve said my piece about Ryley Walker and “who” he is musically, so I won’t belabor the point. Suffice it to say that even if you follow all things Walker, this unique collaboration is a standout, something not likely to be repeated. Walker made it known what an honor it was for him to play with these musicians. It was equally our honor to have heard it.
I recorded this set in the same manner as the other Union Pool shows, with Doug Graham’s outstanding house mix leading the way. Enjoy!
Thanks to Union Pool and Will S for continuing to book and host interesting and experimental music in north Brooklyn.
Those in the know around these parts have probably seen Garcia Peoples a handful of times or more by now — they’ve maintained a hyperkinetic schedule of local and tour shows that would be the envy of any hungry young band.
Listen to this set from Trans-Pecos a couple Sundays ago and you can understand why no promoter ever says no to these guys . This band is absolutely on fire right now, its players dialed in to a level that normally takes years. Being a private event, this was a “play what you want” set for the band, and they took that to heart, leading off with an extended improv that transitioned into their cover of “Laila Pt 2” by Agitation Free (which we first heard at Union Pool) followed by “High Noon Violence” from their brand-new breakout album, Natural Facts. After a spot-on “Total Yang,” the band were joined by Ryley Walker for an extended 16-minute improv that found Walker joining Tom Malach and Danny Arakaki as a third guitarist. Adding to the special nature of the proceedings, the band was joined by semi-regular member Pat Gubler (aka P.G. Six) on keys.
As the writer Jesse Jarnow memorably puts it, Garcia Peoples are “your heady, friendly reminder that it’s alright to let the sunshine in”. Arakaki, Malach, Derek Spaldo (bass) and Cesar Arakaki (drums) are after something here that’s so much more than being a Grateful Dead-referencing tribute band. In fact, their principal resemblance to a musician named Garcia is that each of these guys are skilled musicians with a hot improvisational streak, rarely playing a song the same way twice. Their sound lives in a zone all its own, and seems sure to cast a wide net far beyond the GD/Phish crowd. It’s no accident that they cover the likes of Agitation Free and Relatively Clean Rivers more frequently than, say, this alchemical rendition of “The Other One” with Chris Forsyth.
So yes, New York-based heads will probably end up seeing Garcia Peoples whether they specifically plan to or not. But really, you ought to plan to. A band this good should be top of mind for anyone who cares about how the best live music should sound.
I recorded this set with a soundboard feed and Schoeps MK5 cardiod microphones onstage. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!
Making music is an act of generosity — the sharing of your inner self with a public that may or may not appreciate or understand it. The music in the world that is great is also the music in which the artist is most honest with her/himself. Honesty often means getting close to the dark places inside you.
Ryley Walker’s music has always embodied a certain conflict. When Walker takes a fairly straightforward folk-rock album track and turns it into a live 15-minute jazz-psych freakout, I don’t think the change is just about the “freedom” of the live setting or a fundamental dislike of the album track. Maybe that’s part of it, but I see a contest of impulses — to be a commercially approachable troubadour or the more esoteric, improvisational player he’s been since his career began. Do you want to be the guy who wears British tailoring in leafy photo shoots, or do you want to be the guy who uses his trio show with Ryan Jewell and Steve Gunn to play 50 minutes of psych jams? Walker is both of those things — he’s good at being both of those things — but one gets the sense that he isn’t totally comfortable living solely as either. I get it: A lot of us want to be more than our headline.
There’s a well-known paradox of the “sad clown” — that people who are funny are often people who aren’t happy. Anyone who has caught Ryley live or read him in Viceor reads his Twitter knows that he is certainly the former: he can be very, very funny. Listen to his lyrics as sung, and you might be surprised: Most of Walker’s songs are varying degrees of melancholic. Even a whimsical-sounding tune like “Summer Dress,” if you listen to his delivery, is more anxious than it seems: for a person with a belly full of wine singing about green pastures of desire, the narrator sounds ill at ease. The song is especially vivid for me because it’s the first one I ever heard Ryley Walker play. That very first song lacerated me; I believed the voice I heard.
Generosity. It’s sharing those darkest places in yourself, but it’s also playing a huge fan’s birthday party at Trans-Pecos in the middle of the day, even though you’ve got another show in town that Tuesday (which ends up being a jaw-dropping improv set with Jewell, David Grubbs, and C. Spencer Yeh—check back here soon). This set (a duo of Walker and Jewell) encapsulated all of the different sides of Ryley Walker at once — from his best-known song (and total live jammer) “The Roundabout” to the not-often-played-anymore “Summer Dress,” to the ending jam, which hews closer to his most recent Union Pool shows — and also kills.
That Walker puts his conflicts out there for everyone to see is not a flaw, nor is one choice he makes more true or “real” than another. They’re who and what he is — honest to the point of ache, always pushing to be something more. The late 2010s don’t feel like a moment for generous spirits, but you don’t choose when you’re born, anymore than you choose to whom, or where. Yet here he is: a generous spirit, one for whom, on this particular day, I was especially grateful.
Listen to this recording for the in-between song comedy, if nothing else.
Huh? Oh, right, but this is Ryley Walker we’re talking about — the Very Serious Musician who writes Very Serious Songs and does Very Serious Things like 55 minute psych-improv blowouts with Steve Gunn and Ryan Jewell. This is Ryley Walker, who does a 2LP song-by-song cover of an unreleased Dave Matthews album as his second record of the year — a cover album so good that it convinces music snobs that yes, Dave Matthews is actually a pretty darn great musician. Come for comedy if you must, but become lifelong believer because of the music.
This was Ryley’s second of four residency shows this month at Union Pool. In addition to a truly hilarious extended riff about garage bands at SXSW circa 2009 (with a note-accurate parody song included) and Chicago bands who fail to get picked up by Touch N Go (with a note-accurate parody song based around the riff from June of 44’s “Dexterity of Luck”), Ryley and drummer Jewell delivered a new jam (title TBD), a very familiar cover (“If I Were A Carpenter”), songs from the exceptional 2018 LP Deafman Glance, and “Primrose Green,” from the 2015 album of the same name that seems like aeons ago musically. Whether or not certain naysayers at the time made lame Van Morrison comparisons (based as much on the album’s cover art as its sound), many of those songs are really good, and it’s a joy to see them coming back in the rotation.
As I’ve mentioned before, what feels like the biggest difference from the 2015-era shows is how Walker’s live renditions more closely match the album’s style. Sure, it’s still “sad acoustic guitar indie folk man” music in a sense (as Walker put it), but “Telluride Speed” and “Spoil With the Rest” were played here more or less in the style of the album versions, versus the 14-minute jam version of “Halfwit In Me” that’s long been a tour staple. I don’t know if it means that Walker feels more comfortable with the Deafman songs as the band played them in the studio, or if these songs are just waiting their turn for the extended treatment, but either way, it’s working.
This show also features a hilarious story about taking acid in relation to a King Crimson concert (listen to the story) and some self-deprecating musings about Primrose Green. This might be the first show I’ve witnessed by a serious musician that almost seemed to spawn a new genre: sort of a Yo La Tengo Hanukkah set with a comedian, except that the comedian appears during the set.
There are two more Tuesday nights this month where you can catch Ryley Walker at Union Pool, with more special guests promised. Based on the first two, it’s pretty clear that you shouldn’t come with any preconceived notion of what you’ll hear, but be prepared to enjoy yourself. Tickets for next week’s show are here.
Doug Graham once again outdid himself behind the board. Combined with my Schoeps MK5 mics, it’s yet another excellent recording for you to enjoy.
Tracks [Total Time 1:04:03] 01 [intro] 02 The Halfwit In Me 03 [diaper rap] 04 [new jam 1] 05 Spoil With the Rest 06 [garage rock and Thrill Jockey rap] 07 Telluride Speed 08 [King Crimson rap] 09 If I Were A Carpenter [Tim Hardin] 10 [primrose rap] 11 Primrose Green
Back in the last decade when every sub-genre of music had a silly moniker, a particular type of intelligent polyrhythmic punk was clumsily called “math rock”. These days there aren’t really blogs around anymore to invent awkward genres in lieu of actually reviewing the music, but the descendants of the bands who got tagged as “math rock” are having a heyday of sorts. Boston’s Pile seems to be the granddaddy of this little movement, which also includes bands like Spirit of the Beehive, Palm, and Brooklyn’s Dodgeball. In the several weeks since this September show where the band exhibited the best traits of the current crop of mathies — strong sense of rhythm, challenging but rewarding melodic structure, and a great songcraft — Dodgeball released a new four-song EP, three tracks of which appear on this recording. The EP Turns Out I Was Just Really Bored continues the evolution of a band we expect to continue to grow in stature to the point where these cozy nights at Trans-Pecos will likely be a thing of the past.
I recorded this set with the Schoeps capturing the onstage sound mixed with a solid board feed. The recording really captures the energy of the set quite well and we think it sounds great. Enjoy!
Pylon’s influence on their contemporaries is indisputable. Indeed, over the years REM has consistently cited Pylon for their positive impact on the 1980s Athens scene. What’s become more clear in the intervening years is that Pylon’s influence is more vast than their local time and place — their revolutionary sound can be heard in new bands even today. Pylon was enjoying a bit of a renaissance in their third reunion period of 2007-2008 when tragically guitarist Randy Bewley suffered a heart attack and passed away at the age of 53. At that point, the band was formally retired and it seemed as if Pylon’s music would only live on in recordings.
After a few one-off local performances, in 2014 lead singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay re-formed the band under the moniker Pylon Reenactment Society. With the blessing of her two former bandmates Michael Lachowski and Curtis Crowe, Vanessa compiled a group of performers from the Athens scene who were both intimately familiar with the music and personally known to the band. Guitarist Jason NeSmith and bassist Kay Stanton were not only members of Athens mainstays Casper & the Cookies, but were also bandmates with Vanessa in Supercluster. Drummer Joe Rowe was a founding member of Athens greats the Glands, who suffered their own deep loss with the 2016 death of leader Ross Shapiro. Vanessa also added a new touch with this new configuration, as her friend and University of Georgia music professor Damon Denton fortifies the sound of PRS with skillful keyboards. So with friendship, familiarity, and a common ethos, its easily understandable that Pylon Reenactment Society has generated universally positive reviews as both an tribute and a celebration of Pylon, and a contemporary band with its own story to write.
Pylon Reenactment Society doesn’t come North very often, but we were fortunate to catch this month’s appearance at Mercury Lounge, a venue where I captured the original band in 2007. With a full crowd there to party, PRS brought the goods — an animated set of old Pylon classics and two new numbers all performed with the precision the songs require but this a new touch from a different skilled set of performers, all fronted by the inimitable Vanessa Briscoe Hay. The set began with “Driving School” and “Volume” from the first Pylon record, 1980’s Gyrate. Indeed, the show would include almost all of the first album and the entirety of Side A of the band’s second album Chomp. The set even included uber-rare b-side “Altitude”, a song with which we were unfamiliar until the fantastic release in 2016 of Pylon Live (Chunklet). With a twenty-song, ninety-minute set, Pylon Reenactment Society gave the crowd of old and newer fans all that could have been asked for — a chance to relive the old classic material in a new configuration with plenty of heart. We hope they’ll be back North again soon.
I recorded this set with the Schoeps cards set up next to the soundboard and mixed with an excellent feed and the sound quality is superb. Enjoy!
Setlist:
[Total Time 1:28:45]
01 Driving School
02 Volume
03 Look Alive
04 Cool
05 Messenger [new song]
06 Precaution
07 K
08 Italian Movie Theme
09 Human Body
10 [band introductions]
11 Working Is No Problem
12 Danger
13 Altitude
14 Buzz
15 Crazy
16 Try To Do That [new song]
17 Feast On My Heart
18 Beep
19 [encore break]
20 M Train
21 Dub
22 [banter – thanks]
23 Stop It
One of the most advantageous aspects of our involvement in this site is our access and exposure to the world class music at a time before those bands hit it big. When it comes to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, we were there at Day One of their time in the US, including seeing their first U.S. show at McCarren Park, a series of shows at Baby’s All Right, a semi-private Halloween party in a loft, their first show at Bowery Ballroom, and the “secret show” at Baby’s later that week. The three King Gizzard shows we saw in 2015 corresponded to the new music that would eventually become their major label debut and breakthrough album, 2016’s Nonagon Infinity (ATO Records). But it was in 2017 when The Gizz took their career to the next level, accomplishing a feat that will likely never be repeated — the release of five quality albums in one calendar year.
Its been two years since I last saw them in NYC and while much has changed, King Gizzard are still very much the same band. Although it wasn’t Baby’s, the three sold out shows at Brooklyn Steel were very much fan-friendly affairs with the band playing a very democratic selection of material. The show we recorded was the middle night of the three and fortunately for us contained an homage to the “old days”, a long “Head On / Pill” segue that contained long bits of three older numbers and a few other teases. We’d like to think it was the Gizz’s acknowledgement of how important those early days in New York were for the band’s career, days we captured here and remember well.
I recorded this set with the Schoeps cards set up inside the soundboard cage and mixed with a superbly mixed and well balanced soundboard feed. The resulting blend yielded another superb recording from this excellent sounding room. Enjoy!
Setlist:
[Total Time 1:29:17]
01 Rattlesnake
02 Greenhouse Heat Death
03 Digital Black
04 Vomit Coffin
05 The Lord of Lightning
06 Alter Me I
07 Altered Beast II
08 Crumbling Castle
09 The Fourth Colour
10 Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet
11 The Castle In The Air
12 Muddy Water
13 The Wheel
14 Robot Stop
15 Gamma Knife
16 People-Vultures
17 Head On-Pill
18 Cellophane
19 Sea of Trees
20 Am I In Heaven
21 Pill (Reprise)
The phenomenal Brooklyn band Guerilla Toss graced the hometown crowd with a monthlong residency at local haunt Union Pool that found the band trying out new songs and compelling covers, and generally driving the locals wild. This band’s bread and butter has always been the live setting, but these shows put the band at a new level. Against the backdrop of sick visuals from Macrodose, Kassie Carlson whipped the room into a frenzy, culminating in a room wide mosh pit during set-closing “Polly’s Crystal.” Whipping from one song straight into the next for almost the entire hour, the band served up sixteen songs that included an ESG cover and the new numbers “Come Up With Me” and “Green Apple.” In case you were worried, I think we can expect their next release to meet or exceed the outstanding GT Ultra.
This recording combines engineer Doug’s awesome house mix plus my Schoeps MK5 mics from the center of the balcony. The sound is excellent. Enjoy!
Tracks
01 Betty Dreams of Green Men >
02 Erase You [ESG]>
03 TV Spell>
04 Operate >
05 Come Up With Me>
06 TV Do Tell [Jane La Onda Cover]>
07 Grass Shack Pt 1>
08 Green Apple
09 Diamond Girls>
10 Skull Pop>
11 Drip Decay>
12 Multibeast TV>
13 Billy Blood Idol >
14 Dog In The Mirror
15 [encore break]
16 Polly’s Crystal
nyctaper.com is a live music blog that offers a new paradigm of music distribution on the web. The recordings are offered for free on this site as are the music posts, reviews and links to artist sites. All recordings are posted with artist permission or artists with an existing pro-taping policy.
All recordings and original content posted on this site are @nyctaper.com as live recordings pursuant to 17 U.S.C. Section 106, et. seq. Redistribution of nyctaper recordings without consent of nyctaper.com is strictly prohibited.
nyctaper.com hereby waives all copyright claims to any and all recordings posted on this site to THE PERFORMERS ONLY. If any artist posted on this site requests that recordings be removed, those recordings will be removed forthwith.
Recent Comments