A Hawk & A Hacksaw – husband and wife duo Heather Trost & Jeremy Barnes performing at the Bronson club, Ravenna as part of the Transmissions Festival they curated.
Father Murphy, A Hawk & A Hacksaw, Mouse On Mars at the Bronson Club, Ravenna.
The juxstaposition of styles presented during this concert showed how sonic transmissions in our technically challenging (and challenged!) age can be by turns nostalgic, alienating and invigorating.
In Keywords (A vocabulary of culture and society) Marxist academic Raymond Williams wrote that, in the 18th century, the verb ‘to modernize’ was mainly applied to buildings and was not automatically regarded as something positive. Nowadays, modernization is generally associated with improvement and forward thinking. Williams noted that when we say modern now we generally refer to something which is “unquestionably favourable and desirable”. It signifies that you are up with the times and at one with the contemporary world.
Compare this to words like ‘tradition’ or ‘traditionalist’ which are commonly used to dismiss something as quaint yet old-fashioned and contrary to notions of innovation or change. We associate these terms with the work of artisans and craftsmen and think of outdated skills handed down from generation to generation.
When applied to music, ‘tradition’ is usually linked to an analog philosophy while to describe sounds as ‘modern’ is to say the artist is making a break with the past. However, an incessantly forward momentum has its pitfalls. The fact that discerning listeners will still seek out vinyl releases or lossless audio is a sign that the ‘modern’ day digital revolution is regarded in some quarters as a step backwards.
On the third and final day of Ravenna’s Transmissions festival the stark contrast between the old and the new was very evident. After being gently wooed by the Balkan-influenced folky charm of A Hawk And A Hacksaw (+ special guests) we were abruptly wowed by the uncompromising techno beats of German duo Mouse On Mars. Continue reading →
A cold Tuesday night in Emilia Romagna, Italy. Not quite freezing but chilly enough perhaps to discourage citizens from leaving the cosiness of their homes. Maybe for this, or possibly due to the woefully scant publicity, this intriguing triple bill at Teatro Rasi, Ravenna was a sparsely attended affair, under 100 brave souls venturing out. This made for a fairly flat atmosphere for these three bands to contend with. As none of them trouble much with between song banter, the songs are interspersed with pregnant pauses lending the performance a stilted feel. “Is anyone out there?”, asks Carla Bozulich’s bass player at one point with a hint of desperation. After our half hearted response she concludes “There’s two at least”! Carla Bozulich herself seems disconcerted by the fact that she can’t see we the punters; pitching her performance into an unquantifiable void was clearly troubling to her.
Bozulich’s set focuses on the songs of anguish and rage of last year’s atmospheric ‘Evangelista’ a radical shift from her critically acclaimed reinterpretaion of Willie Nelson’s ‘Red Haired Stranger’ that marked her solo debut in 2003. There’s nothing remotely country orientated about her new material, as you would expect with collaborators who include members of apocalyptic post-rockers like ‘A Silver Mt Zion’ & ‘Godspeed! You Black Emperor’.
Clad fetchingly in all black designer rags and 16 hole boots, Carla Bozulich paces the stage like a caged animal or else jumps frentically like a child throwing a tantrum (breaking a guitar string and almost losing her knickers in the process!). It’s an energetic display that craves for more than the polite applause than she achieves and in this regard I can appreciate her frustration. I get something of the same feeling when teaching unresponsive students in a language class – groups known in the trade as ‘the living dead’. The desire to stomp and curse to generate some (any!) reaction is strong.
Still, casting a critical eye on Carla Bozulich, it is also plain that she pushes a bit too hard at times. The subdued tension of a slow building track like ‘Pissing’ contains more menace and attitude than more primal explosions of feeling. What she achieves best, assisted by her highly accomplished backing band, is the ability to integrate noise dynamics with a controlled and poetically charged intensity. Atonal walls and wails of sound compliment her emploring voice perfectly. The two songs that close her set – ‘Baby,That’s The Creeps’ and ‘Evangelista I’ – are prime illustrations of the balance between stretches of abstract free-form with relatively structured content. Both these are both scary and original pieces brought to life on stage by the virtuoso playing of Thierry Amar (?) on double bass.
(A rough video of Evangelista can be viewed on my YouTube recording:
Accompanying Carla Bozulich’s headline slot are a somewhat incongruous foursome from California who trade under the name of Gowns. It’s not hard to see why there’s quite an Undeground buzz about their brand of psychedelic Velvets style rock meets drone. They are fronted by the attention grabbing figure of Erika Anderson whose length and legginess is emphasised by mini skirt and luminous white tights. Aside from her looks, she also demonstrated some impressive guitar abuse and cool Kim Gordon-esque vocals. In marked contrast, looking like an Indie-rock love child of Woody Allen, Ezra Buchla looks postively nerdy. His electro-noodling, violin droning and general vocal raging all sounded more mannered and less convincing and more self consciously arty. My favourite. however, was Jacob Felix Heule on drums. I was particularly taken by the energy of his playing and his neat trick of balancing extra cymbals on his kit to create a shimmering and sizzling backing.
It was a good night for drummers. The opening act had one Vittorio Demarin showing off the original art of playing violin (more drone!) with one hand and pounding out a tribal beat with the other. He makes up one third of FatherMurphy whose name sounds Irish, whose music sounds English but who are in fact Italian. Not that you’d guess their nationality from their performance. The songs are sung in a cockneyish drawl and singer Federico Zanatta takes nervous gulps of water in between songs rather than risk destroying the enigma with banalities like band name or song titles. The ghost of Syd Barrett looms large over Father Murphy who blend his quirky style with more expansive psychedelc tinged tunes.
All in all, a good night of new music but also proof that bands like these are more at home in the turmoil of sweatier and noisier venues than the stiffer formality of theatres.
