My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the twenty-seventh of hopefully 52 posts…
1July2019 75 Dollar Bill + Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society @ Roulette
Kicked off the second half of the year in a perfect meditative state with a deep, powerful double bill at Roulette.
First up was Joshua Abrams & NIS. Pretty amazing how they’ve gone from “band I’d really love to see live” to “band I’ve now seen 3 times” in a period of less than 6 months. This set was much like the other two that I’ve seen this year, which is to say radiant and penetrating and transcendent. It’s like some powerful vortex reached out through time and space and brought these four musicians, four people who seem to play such different instruments/styles/music and brought them together here in 2019 to make this music, somehow put together by the universe. There’s no good reason why a gimbri, a harmonium, a bass clarinet and percussion should work so well together, or why four musicians who play such repetitive, slowly moving, barely moving at all, riffs should create such sonic alchemy, but, my word!, it really is some sort of primitive chemistry. The thing that elevated this set a bit more than the other two I saw was that it was a seated show. The other two were two of the best sets I’ve seen this year, but somehow sitting down is the way this music is best appreciated. My mind wandered to places on its own and was never interrupted by a thought of “maybe I should shift my weight a little or anything so mundane as how my body was reacting with the physical space it inhabited during the music. As such, the subtle changes in the music felt heightened. This was especially true of the percussion/drummer, who would tap a bell or a chime, a minor thing here or there, and when he did this it felt like the room shook, that’s how deep the music was, how powerful small changes are in this sound, like quantum vibrations in a classical world. At one point during the latter third of their 45ish minute non-stop set, Jason Stein on the clarinet blew out some notes, louder, more intense than what had led up to that point, it was like the prophet Aaron blowing the shofar, leading the tribes into war or something, a glorious shift to the end. Totally mesmerizing set of music, I can’t get enough of these guys. They change you.
The show was ostensibly an album release show for 75 Dollar Bill was is a duo of Che Chen on guitar and Rick Brown on percussion and homemade horns. They played 3 pieces, one just as the duo, one with some strings and a bass clarinet and a bass and synth player and then a final one with strings (some same, some different) and the harmonium player from NIS and Joshua Abrams playing upright bass. Each one was an ecstatic, slow-build. Similar in ways to Natural Information, in its use of drones and repeating motifs and dense mindfuckery, but really a sound all their own. The big difference was Chen’s guitar which bounced around from ambient drone to shreddy blues to all sorts of psychedelic space in between. The guest additions were all serious augmentations to the sound, multiple vibrations on multiple planes, forming a big wall of sound that filled the room wonderfully. We were in the top corner of the room, in the balcony directly overseeing the stage and one of the speakers was actually kind of behind us, while we were also getting sound from the stage mix and however the room was reverberating… it was a soul-stirring, mind-pleasing almost quadrophonic experience, totally immersive in the best ways possible. Such a treat to see such bold, interesting, different music that’s also fucking brilliant in so many ways. Such a treat to live in a city where such a bill fills a room with people so attentive and awe-struck by the same things you are blown away by. A great night in Downtown Brooklyn.
2July19 Phish @ SPAC
Click here to check out my review posted at JamBase.
5July19 Phish @ Fenway Park
Click here to check out my review posted at JamBase
6Jul19 Phish @ Fenway Park
My 4th and final show of the summer was last night at Fenway. As you probably are already aware, the show was severely rain delayed and got squashed into a single set show. That’s kind of interesting and different so I was kind of excited to see what they did with a different sized palette for their artistry. I mean, they could have split the set into a sort of first set part and a second set part or they could have treated the whole thing like a second set or who knows what. In the end, they kind of just squashed the concepts of first sets and second sets together and made a bit of a mess of the flow of the show. I joked on Twitter that it felt like they were just spinning a wheel with all their songs on it and just playing whatever it ended up on. That’s absolutely what it felt like, the show had no beginning/middle/end, and no cohesion or flow whatsoever. On the drive home today I was thinking about bands that play 2+ hour sets in a big venue setting like that, the Radioheads and Pearl Jams and Springsteens of the world and how they manage to pull it off better than Phish did last night and the thing is, they more or less write their setlists out and in doing so can construct a set that has a narrative and builds to something with natural peaks and valleys. Phish doesn’t do that, but they have an innate feel in the first set/second set motifs so that it usually doesn’t kill them… they know that at a certain point in a set that certain songs/jams/lengths will work towards a successful set. Last night it really felt like quite the opposite.
That being said, I really don’t think anything they played was bad in any way. Everything was pretty good or very good or kinda good. Everything was fine, nothing was truly best version ever, but I was happy with almost everything that went down in itself…. it’s just that it was like this pick-up-sticks style of a show with things falling in random places and not connected from one thing to the next made that usual magic of a great Phish show all but impossible.
I thought there were a lot of moments last night when they kind of slowed down or played quiet that, for whatever reason, happened to be the best parts of the show. The latter half of the jam in Set Your Soul Free, the first half of the Reba jam, a minute or two in Simple and especially the transition from 46 Days to What’s the Use?, which I thought was a highlight of the night… the thing is, they do this quiet/soft/ambient thing very well and when they get there I personally wish they’d linger in it a bit longer. Still, those moments were great last night. A lot of what they did was “average great” versions of songs, which is still great. I liked the way they transitioned from funk to bliss in Wolfman’s quite a bit as well and the Split Open was ridiculously good, a full-blown sculpture of dark, chaotic Phish at its best.
A couple other notes: I think Fenway is a not-in-a-good-way ridiculous venue that everyone would agree was a clusterfucked shithole if we didn’t have decades of history telling us otherwise and I’ll leave it at that. I was on the turf both nights dead center and the sound and views were spectacular. Last night I was literally right in front of Kuroda, couldn’t get any closer and watching the lights from his vantage adds a half grade to the enjoyment of the show.
Had a blast, band sounds great tonight, I think the Connecticut shows are going to be the best of the tour and am a bit upset I won’t be there, but them$ the breaks. Enjoy!
