16 january 2003

Pressing Record @Tonic

Welcome! I made this website in preparation for a project that would take me to Senegal, Okinawa, Russia, and Venezuela, where I would make field recordings of eclectic music fusions that are not well-known in the States.

Live performances by six different artists appear here. As I was going over the recordings I noticed commonalities among the performers such as the use of laptop computers to synthesize unusual sounds and the playing of reggae-influenced music. I am very excited at the prospect of spending many more nights recording new experimental music fusions in clubs and then introducing people to those places and sounds through webpages like this one.

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Tonic is a club in Manhattan. It's located on Norfolk Street between Delancey and Rivington on the Lower East Side of the island. My mother's grandparents lived there after immigrating from Poland-- not literally in the club, mind you.

You see, the Communist Red Star above indicates the location of Tonic, suspiciously on the Lower and Easterly Side of Manhattan.

I went there on Friday with a mission: to make my first live field recordings, put them on this website, and get permission to do so from the artists and venue.

What I love about Tonic is that it has an eclectic variety of musics that don't fit into one category. It's avant-garde without being pretentious, both affordable and accessible to everyone, with acoustics and ambiance conducive to my feeling happy. Furthermore, that particular Friday night, the lineup was headed by John Zorn, who I vaguely knew was cool. The downstairs lounge is 21+, so it would be my first night going down there as well.

Hogging my piece of wall

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The facade (pronounced "fake-aid" until I can figure out the key-strokes for a cedille) of Tonic involves naked metal and glass and that's about it; there are no signs or symbols indicating what's inside. The night was freezing, and I didn't want to act like an excited tourist, so you'll have to imagine what the physical building looks like-- think oversized ugly diarama.

I came to the box office early, and Pila, pictured at right, told me that Melissa, the owner, was around somewhere; she would point me to her when she appeared; the dj I was coming to see downstairs wouldn't arrive for another two hours; tickets weren't on sale yet, and the show was not sold out. So far so good. There was already a line forming behind the assorted personal friends and family who had shown up early for the benefit.

At least three generations of Jews had come early to see Zorn's avant-garde jazz. I reclaimed my wall-leaning spot from a departing usurper and chatted it up with a fellow who got turned on to jazz by an Art Blakey album, then hopped from venue to venue at the age of fourteen, hearing Sonny Rollins and his like in their prime. One thing we had in common: we had never set foot in the Downtown Music Gallery, the independent record store that this night's proceeds would be benefitting, in order to ensure a smooth transition to a Bigger Better Bowery Building in need of plumbing.

"It's ok, he's cool"

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Pila let me go down to the ((sub))tonic lounge before the show where a small group of musicians was chatting. To my great delight, Susie Ibarra, who came to Swarthmore last September, was among them. I introduced myself to Sabir Mateen and we chatted about the relative safety of New York to Philadelphia, where he grew up. We also talked about his choice to be a full-time musician and the difficulty in that.

Mr. Mateen was playing in a Dave Douglas ensemble that was different from the Douglas Sextet I saw perform at Swarthmore back in February of 2001. I followed the musicians through the audience to the stage. I didn't have permission to record, yet, but here's what I saw:

The Bunker Opens

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Downstairs, DJ Spinoza aka Bryan Kasenic started warming up the turntables with some house music. If you're not familiar with house, it's parts of old soul and disco songs mixed with techno at a fairly slow dancing tempo-- around two beats per second. What impressed me about Bryan was his excellent taste for catchy, but not saccharine, melodies and basslines. He branched out into some rap and other types of music later in the evening when more people arrived, but here's a clip of two songs from his early set:

First, please read Important instructions for listening to the sound clips.

Listen to DJ Spinoza:
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While Bryan was mixing that stuff, over by the bar Chris Sattinger, aka DJ Timeblind, was preparing his laptop for his set. Timeblind, who used to host the Polar Bear Club in this same lounge with Time Out music editor Mike Wolf, went back and forth between cerebral, almost ambient echoey soundscapes and a wide range of genres.

DJ Timeblind went from an ecstatic synthesizer track to a gorgeous funk classic:
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Yes, that was the Steve Miller Band. Timeblind also transitioned from some dense electronic sounds mixed with a woman's voice to a reggae song that resembled what Michael Blake's Rollie Pollie would perform upstairs at midnight:
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Acoustic Wallop

When I emerged from the bunker, I suddenly witnessed my favorite performance of the evening. I had never heard of Gary Lucas, and when he announced a song from Captain Beefheart, I didn't know at the time that that was his own band. However, he played a combination of a heavily blues-influenced musical vein and a heavily Judaism-influenced lyrical vein, both of which I could immediately relate to. I cautiously turned on the tape recorder. Later, Mr. Lucas generously gave me permission to put some audio on this site and might send me some of his CDs for the Swarthmore College Radio station.

When I entered the room, Gary Lucas was playing a beautiful bluegrass-sounding instrumental:
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I'm famliar with the Dobro-style resonating guitar Lucas used on some of the songs through blues artists like Catfish Keith, Taj Mahal, Corey Harris, and Fruteland Jackson. However, Lucas's style was different from anything I had heard because it wobbled between all kinds of folk guitar music-- not strictly blues or bluegrass or balladry or Eastern-European folk melody.

In "Jericho," a song that stayed in my head for days, Mr. Lucas smushed together three different styles of picking and strumming:
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He also played a song about Jedwabne, the Polish town where his Jewish relatives were massacred in 1941 and the subject of a book by Jan Gross.

Lucas gave a quiet, sweeping introduction to the song:
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Then he played "Jedwabne" itself:
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Lucas's final song was called "Dance of Destiny." It was an appropriate title for the instrumental because the music sounded deceptively simple, yet Lucas added a different intricate variation on the theme each time he played it and kept the audience riveted. The song could go on forever-- the same chord change repeats again and again-- but it doesn't because the human being playing the instrument gets tired. I got the feeling from Lucas that he often plays the song last as a kind of "rage against the dying of the light," to show the audience that he would play until his physical ability started to decline:

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Live Improvisation is Living

Most of the performances at Tonic are built around improvisation and experimental combinations of different instruments and musicians. The rest of the recordings veer sharply in that direction, relative to what we've heard so far.

Melissa had suggested that I might be able to record Mephista and had spoken to Susie about it earlier, so I was prepared to record as soon as the set started. Their first piece lasted fifteen minutes. Part of the power of the performance came from the sheer creativity of the three group members. They were incredibly concentrated on the tasks of reacting to each other and shifting the sonic landscape as soon as it became predictable.

Mephista's work is hard to categorize since it fuses a classically-trained jazz drummer who added East-Asian bells, cymbals, and other percussion on the fly, a classically-trained pianist who frequently played directly on the strings, and a live Powerbook electronic sound composer who used the computer to extend the range of the ensemble up to bird-like twitters and down to turntable-like mumbles. I suggest listening to each sample a few times so that your ears can get used to the combination of sounds. Note: the picture of Susie Ibarra linked in this paragraph isn't mine; see: yukatonic.

In this clip, you can hear how the three instruments are sometimes difficult to discern, since they can all be in the lower range and percussive as well as make various high ringing sounds, trading off each other all the while:
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You can hear a beautiful interaction of the different musical styles-- classical piano, East-Asian gongs, electronic peripherals, tom-toms, etc. However, the overall emotional effect is dark, macabre even, and more than the sum of its parts:
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Fast forward to two and a half hours later in the subtonic lounge. A man with an electric bass strapped around his shoulders and electronic tone synthesizers, modulators, effects, drum machines, etc. hooked up to a gigantic mixer is using a similar type of sound language that Ikue Mori on the laptop in Mephista was using. Yet, Single Unit, for that's the name that goes on his albums, fuses some metal elements, some drum machine beats, and electronic synthesized sounds that oscillate between melody and distorted noise.

Note that this type of music demands a high energy level on the part of the listener. It's the opposite of elevator music. You have to be alert and attack the act of listening or else it will be very difficult to get anything desirable out of it. I learned how to appreciate experimental/noise music in this way from my Swarthmore classmate Erik Osheim.

In this first clip of two songs, you can hear how the music exposes a sub-layer of electronic sounds that sound a lot like Ikue Mori's playing, then covers it with synthesized beats and adds live bass-playing on top:
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This second audio clip shows a song of sorts, an entire musical idea, from the initial lovely melody, through several waves of high-energy noisey beats and guitar playing, at the end of which you can hear the theme emerge again:
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Off-Beat Salve

As the weekly bunker DJs handed over the decks to guests mixing electronic beats live, upstairs, the benefit crowds went home and a younger late-night crowd casually took seats for Michael Blake's Rollie Pollie, whose reggae-tinged Roland Alfonso-inspired warm trombone and baritone saxophone harmonies celebrated being laid back. I think the music speaks for itself, combining arrangement of harmonies with a clear demarcation between rhythm section and lead section-- a more traditional band approach than those featured in the DMG benefit. For most people, these might be the most listenable recordings on this page.

Michael Blake's Rollie Pollie, with an opening theme called "Know Fari" and organ solo by Dred Scott:
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Michael Blake's Rollie Pollie, with a beautiful chord progression on "From Russia With Love" and sax solo by Blake:
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Outro

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The experience of making these field recordings, including talking to musicians, patrons, and managers participating in a night of support for a local music store, was extremely pleasurable for me, both during the actual performances and afterwards. Rather than getting tired of the recording process, I wanted to do it again as long as my vacation lasted. Making this site ended up sucking up the rest of my time, but that turned out to be a great experience by itself. I loved listening to the recordings over and over again, tinkering with them, finding the parts that I was most interested in, thinking about how I could improve my approach, and how to incorporate the music and photography into this website.

I am greatly indebted to everyone who helped me conceive and carry out this project: Norv Brasch, who asked me to demonstrate my field recording ideas, Mike Wolf, who gave me the contacts, Melissa Caruso Scott, who organized the event and helped me out on zero notice, my father, who lent me the DAT recorder and microphone, Harry Pierson, who found me a computer with the right sound card, cables, and software to encode the music, Eric Stephens and Branen Salmon, who assisted me with mp3 software, Justin Hall, who inspired my webpage design, and The Suni Project, who helped me with audio.

Most of all, I am grateful to the artists, DJs, and musicians who played at Tonic Friday night. I wish I could go to Tonic every night and record the music and listen to it and tell everyone about it, but they were there on the night that I chose to record, and they made it happen for me. I am indebted to them for letting me put clips of what I recorded here. I purposefully cut the clips short out of respect for the artists-- these recordings are simply roughs of what they can do live or on a CD. If you liked what you heard, please go to Tzadik Records and buy one of their CDs. Or buy a stunning compilation of live performances at Tonic.