Peter Murphy goes ‘deep’ into subjective experience of music and my “Miami New Times” story
April 29, 2013
When Peter Murphy talks about his experience with music, a small part of him fears he is over-intellectualizing. Over the course of our 45-minute chat he occasionally seems to have the tiniest inkling he might be stating things that might go over the heads of readers or may be misunderstood. Toward the end of our conversation, after a rare laugh he says, “It might go over people’s heads, but so what? They’ll get it later, like a hundred years later.”
I spoke with Murphy last Sunday afternoon, as he rode on a tour bus toward the first date of his Mr. Moonlight Tour, which features a set list comprised of only Bauhaus music. After talking about the start and end of the pioneering Gothic rock band and lots in between … much of which you will find noted in my in-depth article on his decision to tour with solely Bauhaus music in the “Crossfade” music blog from the “Miami New Times (jump through the logo below):”
Up-date: the interview was so long, it was broken up into two parts. Here’s is part 2 (that’s a hotlink).
Our conversation also included the subjective experience of art, specifically music. It came from a mutual appreciation of Brian Eno’s 1974 solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Bauhaus famously recorded a quite literal cover of that album’s “Third Uncle” during a BBC session, which they released as a single and also used as the opener on its 1982 album the Sky’s Gone Out.
“Those lyrics, they take you with them. Don’t they?” Murphy says
of the songs on Eno’s second solo album. “They’re not didactic. They’re not literal in that sense. They open up the creative imagination within the listeners. So it isn’t actually selfish. In a way, the audience is the reason. For music there has to be the listener. Otherwise, the singer or the musician doesn’t matter. It’s a shared experience in a very natural way. That’s not an over-arching idea. But that is art.”
He agrees that some of David Bowie’s most interesting songs come from a decoupage technique popularized by William Burroughs but pioneered by the Dadaists from the turn of the 20th century. “They leave the creativity to the listener, as well,” Murphy notes, who transitioned from solitary poetry composition to Bauhaus frontman in late 1978 when guitarist Daniel Ash introduced him to brothers David J (bass) and Kevin Haskins (drums).
The A-side of the “Third Uncle” track was Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Murphy notes something very interesting happens when he inhabits that song live, 
which he plans on playing on this tour. “Songs evoke very personal associations,” he says. “So I have my own experience with Bowie. You could have called me a Bowie fan or whatever, but when I met him I realized it was me creating my own inner world with that music. I was Ziggy Stardust. He’s just some bloke creating some theatrical thing, doing his own thing. It’s not him really. It is, but it’s beyond. It’s me really, hence the idea of doing ‘Ziggy Stardust.’ He just wrote it. We did our version, and we did it how it’s supposed to be done in our minds, and it was brilliant.” He pauses for a chuckle. “That was not a statement against him at all. It’s just the ultimate Bowie fan casualty that was sold. So I still become Ziggy Stardust in that three minutes, that seminal character in music culture, and I’m it.”
Watch the official video:
There was so much more we went over. It was a revelatory conversation. Bauhaus worked from a very primal pool of creativity, relying on their chemistry as musicians. He indulged me in an explanation of how they came up with the brilliant collage track that closes the Sky’s Gone Out: “Exquisite Corpse.” He said it comes from a surrealist game for children. Using a folded piece of paper a group sets out to draw a body but only a small bit of the end of the last drawing is visible to the next illustrator. The result is one exquisite corpse.
The band did something similar during the recording of the song that closes the album on a brilliantly abstract note. After programming a rhythm track, Murphy explained, “We each went in, and we gave ourselves a minute each to write whatever we wanted individually without any of the other members, and then the next person would play from the last five seconds, hearing the last five seconds of the previous person and continue, and then we’d all come in and gathered … and that was the result. So the title, ‘Exquisite Corpse,’ is exquisite. It’s the exercise in letting itself create its own venture.” You can hear the result right here:
Considering, backwards effects, the coughing, the snoring section and other bits, it will certainly make for a difficult, odd song to perform live, so I would not expect to hear it on the tour (did Bauhaus even ever perform this genius little oddity live?).
Only one day until the show (I had tons to transcribe and illness to battle) in Miami at Grand Central. Tuesday, April 30. Doors: 8 p.m. Tickets cost $26 / $60 (VIP) – VIP ticket includes a 7 p.m. pre-show, access to soundcheck, meet-and-greet with Murphy, exclusive edition T-shirt and a signed poster. All ages. There will also be a second post on the Crossfade music blog tomorrow morning, so be sure to check back there tomorrow.
Update 2: Show happened! To read my review click on the picture below by “Miami New Times” photographer Ian Witlen:
For those outside Miami, the tour will proceed as follows across the U.S., into Mexico, then Europe and back to North America:
Wed, May 1 – Tampa FL @ Orpheum Theater
Thu, May 2 – Atlanta GA @ Terminal West
Fri, May 3 – Charlotte NC @ Tremont Music Hall
Sat, May 4 – Washington DC @ U-Music Hall
Sun, May 5 – Boston MA @ Paradise Rock Club
Tue, May 7 – New York City NY @ Webster Hall
Thu, May 9 – Philadelphia PA @ Trocadero
Fri, May 10 – Toronto ON @ Lee’s Palace
Sat, May 11 – Buffalo NY @ Town Ballroom
Sun, May 12 – Pittsburgh PA @ Mr Smalls
Mon, May 13 – Detroit MI @ Magic Stick
Wed, May 15 – Indianapolis IN @ Deluxe at Old National Centre
Thu, May 16 – Chicago IL @ House of Blues
Sun, May 19 – Mexico City, MX @ Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli (to include Peter Murphy solo material, as well!)
EUROPE
Wed, May 22 – Bochum, DE @ Christuskirche
Thu, May 23 – Karlsruhe, DE @ Substage
Fri, May 24 – Zurich, CH @ Komplex Klub
Sun, May 26 – Rome, IT @ Orion
Mon, May 27 – Milan, IT @ Magazzini Generali
Wed, May 29 – Madrid, ES @ Sala Arena
Thu, May 30 – Lisbon, PT @ Coliseum
Sat, June 1 – Barcelona, ES @ Bikini Barcelona
Mon, June 3 – Brussels, BE @ AB
Wed, June 5 – Paris, FR @ Trabendo
Thu, June 6 – Eindhoven, NL @ Effenaar
Fri, June 7 – Hamburg, DE @ Knust
Sat, June 8 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen
Mon, June 10 – Stockholm, SE @ Debaser Medis
Wed, June 12 – Helsinki, FI @ Tavastia
Fri, June 14 – Nottingham, UK @ Rescue Rooms
Sat, June 15 – Glasgow, UK @ Oran Mor
Mon, June 17 – Birmingham, UK @ Academy 2
Tue, June 18 – Bristol, UK @ Academy
Wed, June 19 – London, UK @ Islington Academy
NORTH AMERICA II
Sat, July 13 – Phoenix AZ @ Crescent Ballroom
Sun, July 14 – El Paso TX @ Tricky Falls
Tue, July 16 – Denver CO @ Summit Music Hall
Wed, July 17 – Salt Lake City UT @ Urban Lounge
Thu, July 18 – Boise ID @ Visual Arts Collective
Fri, July 19 – Seattle WA @ Showbox Theater
Sat, July 20 – Vancouver BC @ TBA
Sun, July 21 – Portland OR @ Hawthorne Theater
Tue, July 23 – San Francisco CA @ Fillmore Theater
Wed, July 24 – Las Vegas @ LVCS
Sat, July 27 – Los Angeles CA @ Henry Fonda Theatre
Fri, July 28 – San Diego CA @ Belly-up
Last year, Pinback returned after five years of recording silence with the new album: Information Retrieved. Even bigger for this writer is the San Diego-based band’s return to South Florida for a rare live appearance coming up this Wednesday at the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale. The show marks only the group’s second appearance this far south since 2004, in support of the duo’s third album, Summer in Abaddon. Back then, the band travelled as far south as Miami to a space called I/O (now Vagabond), skipping this area during support of its 2007 album Autumn of the Seraphs.
Pinback formed on a lark in 1998 when multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Rob Crow and bassist/vocalist Armistead Burwell Smith IV’s found themselves with some downtime from other projects. The resulting catchy, crisp pop rock soon outshone any of their earlier bands in terms of interest and record sales. I spoke with Crow last month for a pair of stories in the “Broward-Palm Beach New Times.”
To read the print story, jump through the logo below:
To read a nice, long rambling tangent we took on science fiction movies and Star Wars in particular, jump through the logo below for this left-field story in the paper’s music blog, “The County Grind”:
As fun as it was to recall our mutual memories of watching the first Star Wars movies in the theater, I found it rather difficult to get Crow going about his music. Here is a back and forth that captures our repartee, where he recalls memories of the band’s first South Florida show, what to expect of the band live and his musical relationship with a man he calls Zack for short, and considers his opposite.
Hans Morgenstern: What do you remember about the Miami visit, the last time you were here, like 5 years now? This is your first return here since then, but in Fort Lauderdale.
Rob Crow: Yeah. We went swimming at dusk. I didn’t know why nobody else was in the water. It’s because it’s crawling with sharks.
That or everyone’s getting ready to hit the clubs. No partying for you guys?
Not for us. We’re the nice-guy band.
I was impressed with how well you captured these songs that are rather intricate and polished in a live setting.
I remember that room. If you could hear anything, that’d be amazing.
I’ve seen many bands there, and it’s always too loud, but I could actually hear the different parts.
(laughs) What a bonus when you can hear the parts!
How do you pull it off live now as a three-piece?
They’ve been our best shows, as a three-piece, as everyone has wholly agreed.
No keyboards?
Nope. They will still be there. They just won’t be seen. They’ll just be heard.
So they will be pre-recorded. I was sorry to hear about Terrin Durfey’s passing. How long was he a touring member of the band?
I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in those terms. The timeline gets confusing for me, and depressing, to be honest, so I don’t dwell on it.
I cannot help but notice a sort of poetic tribute of you all touring as a three-piece, without a keyboardist. Is that a sort of tribute to Terrin or out of respect?
In some ways, like there’s some things we don’t do anymore because he did on the desks, and nobody could ever do that. But we had other people doing his parts as well for years, when he couldn’t do it anymore (coughs) and they were nice, great people and everything, but everything just works better for us as a three-piece.
There’s this clean sound you guys have that seems to harken back to the first polished rock records that really started coming out in the mid-’70s and up, like the Police.
I like the Police. I mean, when we were making our first album, it was one of the few bands that both of us liked, that we listened to while we were dicking around or whatever. He and I have very different views on almost anything, so when we agree on something it’s nice.
Like what views are different?
I don’t know. They’re all different.
How about musically?
He doesn’t own any records. He owns maybe five records, and I own, and I’m an archivist. (laughs)
There’s never any indulgence in feedback in your music, like dominating a whole song.
Zack’s always trying to do that on his bass. It doesn’t work for me.
So you stop him when he pulls that?
We both stop each other from doing stuff. Yeah, I’ve learned that it would be bad to do on guitar, and I just kinda get nauseous when it happens on the bass that much (laughs). That doesn’t mean we won’t do something that does that sometimes. That’d be great to figure out how to make it work.
Where was the new album recorded?
We had a studio that we were both working at [S.D.R.L. Studios, San Diego, California]. But he doesn’t work there anymore, and we both have home studios.
Do you record to tape at all?
No, we used to try to do that, but it was such a nightmare. We just gave up. We had a 16-track, big old giant thing and all this stuff, and were like, ugh, it doesn’t sound better. And we literally cannot afford to keep it in shape.
Ever think of going into a studio?
There’s no way that the two of us could go to a studio where you pay by the hour [He pauses to think about it, and his voice even sounds exhausted as he continues] because it’s just a nightmare. Everything we do is at a snail’s pace… Everything.
* * *
Here are Pinback’s current tour dates (including an appearance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon:
March 12 – Orlando, FL @ The Social
March 13 – Fort Lauderdale, FL @ The Culture Room
March 14 – Jacksonville, FL @ Freebird Live
March 15 – West Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern
March 16 – Richmond, VA @ The Canal Club
March 17 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
March 19 – Late Night With Jimmy Fallon @ Rockefeller Plaza, NY (check local listings to watch the performance)
March 21 – St. Louis, MO @ Firebird
March 22 – Kansas City, MO @ The Riot Room
March 23 – Little Rock, AR @ Revolution Music Room
Finally, just for fun, here is all the room I had for the band’s first South Florida appearance in Miami, almost 10 years ago, which ran in print before web mattered as much as it does now. Again, jump through the image:
Local spotlight: Harnessing the monstrous “instru-metal” sound of Holly Hunt on vinyl
December 29, 2012
Whether the couple behind the music of Holly Hunt realizes it or not, they treat their instruments as channels into something beyond simple music. Their instruments are like ray guns. The tool emitting this spectral ray may look impressive or intimidating, but behold that psychedelic beam of light: a thing that exists beyond the object producing it. Guitarist Gavin Perry and drummer Beatriz Monteavaro are the architects behind the wall of texture that defines Year One, a brilliant if heavy vinyl record that will appeal to fans of metal, avant-garde, psychedelic rock and noise. 
Label genres also might include sludge core and stoner metal. You can go down that road, but this album’s possible appeal across several underground music scenes comes from a discreet tension between ambiguity and minimalism. I would take its DNA as far back as the early seventies when Philip Glass experimented with what he called “psychoacoustical” music like Music With Changing Parts.
It’s as pure and unique as that. It’s chaos that depends on discipline. The texture Holly Hunt deals in stands as something more than a random roar of guitars and a clatter of drums. The first note of Year One is an awe-inspiring thing to hear unfold. It’s a sizzle wrapped in a rumble enveloped in a zip coated with a thrum. Most of the album’s great moments come from Perry licking at his guitar slowly and methodically, allowing for the reverb to reveal the density within the tones produced by his playing. Monteavaro pounds along with minimal flair. She strikes skins, cymbals and peddles in halting unison, allowing space for Perry’s guitar to produce a sound of incomparable quality. Though the structure of the instrumental pieces that define Year One are often repetitive and droney, there exists a chaos in the notes, a sort of beautiful abstraction with each release that only slightly differs from one note to the next. Even if the same in tone, each note possesses as unique a quality as each successive ocean wave crashing into rocks along a shoreline.
Perry and Monteavaro allowed for a peek behind the curtain when they agreed to a meeting at Miami’s most uncompromising bar when it comes to bands like Holly Hunt, who also rely on ear-piercing volume for its overall effect: Churchill’s Hideaway. They nestled into the corner of an outside bar, while longtime local musician Henry Rajan strangled an electric guitar indoors—with his teeth. The screeches peppered our conversation. The 6-foot-plus, bushy-bearded Perry loomed over the spindly framed Monteavaro. 
The two have been a couple for 18 years now, though they only recently began playing together as Holly Hunt. Monteavaro says the band’s unique sound came into existence in February of 2011, after some sonic experimenting and jamming that included them playing other instruments with Nick Klein on guitar.
She parsed out the chain of events via a conversation on Facebook:
“We usually consider our first show at pre-INC [International Noise Conference] 2011 (February) to be the beginning on the band. We did have a noise piece called ‘Carrie Fischer’ come out on the previous December on a cassette, and although it was under the name Holly Hunt, we consider it more proto-Holly Hunt.
“I play bass guitar on that recording, Gavin drums, Nick Guitar. It was a jam. It was after I joined but before we moved to our rightful instruments. I started playing with them in October of 2010 … The band had no name, and the jams were not heavy at all.
“After we recorded the piece that would go on that first tape, Nick left town for several months. I can’t remember how long he was gone, but in January he told us we could play a pre-INC show. So we worked on making that noise piece, 
‘Carrie Fischer,’ more structured. That became ‘Cueva,’ and that’s what we played at INC. We played a few more shows with Nick, just playing ‘Cueva,’ or ‘Cueva’ and another version of ‘Carrie Fischer,’ but he lived in West Palm Beach. He was having a lot of trouble making it to practice, so that we could move the band forward. He then decided it would be best if Gavin and I go on without him. No mystery, geographic problems.”
Perry adds, “Nick is a good friend who helped me get up off the ground. He/we were invited to play our first pre-International Noise Conference show at a space called Cueva. We had this piece that was arranged around our current setup with Nick playing bass. The piece got its title from the space as I remember. That really started everything for us.”
There exists a brief testament to the performance at Cueva on video, which captures the layers of sonics distinctive to Holly Hunt before the poor videographer got overwhelmed by the thrashing crowd:
“We met Rat Bastard [aka Frank Fallestra, the brains behind INC],” continues Perry. “He invited us to play the next night at Churchill’s for INC proper. Shit really just kind of took off from there.”
Indeed the sound of Holly Hunt continued to flourish fine and healthy without a third member. Density in sonics like these cannot be restrained. Back at Churchill’s, Perry casually explained his set-up as the duo’s singular guitarist. “I play through two heads right now,” he says, “and that really sets up that dynamic that sort of feels like you could have multiple guitars playing. I have a sort of dedicated bass frequency, low, midrange frequency and a dedicated treble, mid-treb frequency, sort of rig, so I think that sets up a weird stereo kind of feel. You start to really feel like there’s a much broader sound, so it can’t possibly be coming from one instrument. Aside from that, all the oscillations and the buzz sort of develop other things.”
Just as Philip Glass admitted to having been tricked into hearing singing by his own layering of music during a 1969 performance of “Music In Similar Motion,”* 
Perry and Monteavaro both admit people have come up to them with notions of a vocalist on stage. “We get that a lot,” notes Perry. “I think in one of our early shows someone came up and asked, ‘Where’s the singer? Somebody’s got to be singing here. I can hear voices.’”
Monteavaro adds, some of the questions she usually gets include: “Is some of it pre-recorded? Is there a tape going?”
Within that chaos of noise and reverb, lies the open-ended magic of abstractions turned hallucinogenically concrete at an aural level by the duo. Though Holly Hunt writes songs with clear melody, albeit with a droning repetitive quality, there exists dynamism to every refrain, ocean waves providing that perfect metaphor. The members remain modest to their role in the Holly Hunt sound. “I mean, nothing special, I don’t think,” says Perry. “Maybe it’s in our songwriting too, maybe some of the harmonies, discordant notes that we’re playing, the rhythm structures kind of put you into a trance.”
Monteavaro, who has played drums in various hard-edged local bands going on 20 years now, including Beings, Floor and Cavity, notes her style of drumming may assist in shaping the dissonance. “I think maybe also because the tempo is kind of slow,” she says. 
“It gives all the oscillating things room to sort of build … It’s not like playing these kinds of beats is totally alien to me, anyway, from previous bands, but, when starting this band, and figuring what this band was going to do, I really thought, specifically about the really open, abstract drumming like the Goslings or the first EP of Earth, which is very, very minimal drums, but the ones that are there are just like the old-timey drums on Viking ships to get people to stroke.”
“I think it’s super heavy because there’s not all this flourish and fill,” Perry says of Monteavaro’s playing. “I think that just adds to the level of impending doom, crescendo.”
If you’re listening to Holly Hunt’s debut album on vinyl at a low volume, you are missing out on half of the band’s sound. The album is divided into four sides that spin at 45 rpm, which is important to capturing the subtlety in the “subtext,” per se, of the songs. The vinyl is also decidedly clean sounding, allowing for the chaos of reverb to rumble and the high-pitched whizzes to morph and undulate below the din at high volume without distortion. These notes are sort of auras that are never purposely produced but exist in the moment and come into being from loud volume, a manner Holly Hunt is keen to perform in as well as have its record played. The album was recorded by Torche bassist Jonathan Nuñez at his home studio deep in the Miami suburbs of the Village of Pinecrest.
Perry notes that seeing Torche and Harvey Milk play a show at Churchill’s led to an epiphany that became the catalyst to the Holly Hunt sound. “I just had a very visceral experience with their amplifiers,” Perry recalls. “Their tone really just sort of struck. I really just wanted to do that.”
Year One marks Holly Hunt’s debut on vinyl after releasing and selling out two cassettes (now only available in digital form: see Holly Hunt’s bandcamp page to stream all the band’s music from proto-Hunt to Year One). Two independent labels with ties to the Miami alternative music scene joined forces to make it happen: Other Electricities and Roofless Records. Though Other Electricities is based in Portland, Oregon and releases music from bands as far off as Russia and South Africa, the label’s owner, Emile Milgrim recently dropped roots in Miami, where she could not help but notice Holly Hunt. “Having heard so much and having seen them live, I was just mesmerized,” she says. “It spoke to me.”
Plans on a release began at Miami-based Roofless Records, an indie label well-known for working with heavier bands like Holly Hunt. Milgrim says, “I assumed Roofless Records was going to release it, so I approached Matt [Preira, owner of Roofless Records] and asked him, ‘So, when are you going to release that Holly Hunt record?’”
According to Monteavaro, Preira had already designated some funding from a Knight Foundation Grant the label had won the previous year in order to release something by the band. She says the label was considering a pair 7-inches or an EP until Milgrim volunteered her resources. “I think they complimented each other very well,” notes Perry of Preira and Milgrim, “and it’s been a pretty smooth experience.”
As a dual release by Other Electricities and Roofless Records, Milgrim says, Holly Hunt had an object that paid proper respect to its sound. After some waffling on the idea of carrying on the notion to release a single or EP, the decision for a full-length album was an easy decision for all involved. “We went back and forth on whether we were going to do an EP or a full-length,” recalls Milgrim, “and then it finally came to a point where we decided let’s just go for broke. Let’s do a full-length, let’s do a double-LP, let’s make it 45 rpm. Let’s make it as massive as possible because this record’s representative of what they’re doing, and it’s massive.”
As already noted, what pours forth from the speakers at not only a Holly Hunt show, but also this brilliantly produced record, released only earlier this month, is something beyond experiential. At first listen it may seem like power chords and head-banging sans singing. But the beauty lies in the details found on that psychoacoustical level, with discreet unintended textures born of chaos. Side C opens with a quavering sustain that lasts for nearly one minute. Before the aptly titled “Molasses” lulls you into thinking the band has veered into the deep-end of ambient music, Perry strokes his guitar strings and Monteavaro bashes at her cymbals sending the track lumbering away like a score to a Godzilla movie.
To Monteavaro, the idea of Year One and civilization-destroying dinosaurs is an apt comparison (the record even includes a track named after the Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters). Someday, when humanity passes on the way of the dinosaur, physical testaments should remain. Vinyl records could be one of those, including this thing called Year One. “It’s not like absolutely the world’s going to end anytime soon,” she says, “but there’s something really amazing about vinyl in knowing that you don’t even need electricity to get sound out of it. It’s an actual, physical recording that takes no technology. You need a pin, and it’s all there. That’s just so amazing to me. And it seems like the perfect record in case something catastrophic does happen.”
*Note: According to the liner notes on Music With Changing Parts by Tim Page.
Gabó brings back electro-scoring to silent film with Buster Keaton
December 4, 2012
Gabriel Pulido, aka Gabó, will once again bring his unique ambient music stylings to a silent film at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Last year, Pulido produced an experimental score of electronic noise for the silent surrealist film classics by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930) at the cinema (Gabriel Pulido brings soundtrack craft to the early films of Luis Buñuel). But now his visual will come from a decidedly different, though no less pioneering cinema artist: Buster Keaton.
The slapstick comedy of Keaton offers very different imagery from the surrealist works of Buñuel. However, Pulido states via email from his new home in New York, this does not mean either artist does not cross over into territories of humor. 
“Even as The Buñuel films I did music for had a comic edge, Buster Keaton has his unique universe,” writes Pulido. “Musically I am trying to cross the original (played in theaters back then) music’s melodic and harmonic language with kitsch seventies and eighties raw synthetic sounds. Those old Casiotone rhythmic machine sounds might also show up!! It’s going to be fun.”
Pulido has put in some impressive work— once again— in studying the film he will score, Keaton’s 1924 sea-faring adventure the Navigator. “I’ve been watching the film several times, spotting the important moments and moods, analyzing the existing music, and writing some ideas on different synth sounds for different registers (bass parts, mid-range, etc). I am also creating motifs to the main characters. I basically create frameworks and sound palettes with which I can play live.”
Pulido will appear for one night only at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, Thursday, Dec. 6, to offer his distinct musical stylings to a screening of the Navigator at 8 p.m.
So, a few weeks ago, I was hanging on the telephone waiting for Temper Trap’s frontman Dougy Mandagi (pictured above, center) to get on the phone. I was told he was in the shower, he was coming down the elevator and I got … bassist Jonathon Aherne (pictured above, far right). One would think, dang! But, no. Aherne was generous and insightful. The resulting profile was published in this week’s “Miami New Times.” Read it by jumping through the logo of the “Miami New Times” music blog:
Yes, the story focuses a lot on “Sweet Disposition,” that song from my favorite film of 2009, (500) Days of Summer. But I was curious about the effect of such a popular hit on an indie band now releasing records on one of the largest of major labels in the world: Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony Entertainment. It doesn’t get bigger than that. The label’s rep listened in on our conversation and told us when to get off the phone, but that’s how it goes. It did not stop me from asking polite questions about the psychological effects of— to put it simply— selling out, and Aherne seemed to have a healthy attitude about it. The band loves having a song as recognizable as “Sweet Disposition,” and you can expect to hear it live on their current tour for their new self-titled album. “There’s nothing wrong with that because we want our music to connect with people, for people to enjoy it,” he said. So here’s that song, once again:
Finally, the contest…
Now you’ve heard the song again, visit Independent Ethos’ Facebook page (yep, that’s the live link) and share where you first heard the song.
The band continues its tour beyond Miami at these following dates:
10/19/2012 Atlanta GA Center Stage
10/20/2012 Orlando FL House of Blues
10/21/2012 Miami FL Grand Central
10/23/2012 St. Petersburg FL State Theater
10/25/2012 Fort Worth TX Ridglea Theater
10/26/2012 Houston TX House of Blues
10/28/2012 Austin TX Stubb’s
Live review: PiL at Grand Central, Miami, Oct. 5, 2012
October 8, 2012
I’ve seen the unglamorous aging of punk rock and— wouldn’t you know it— John Lydon, once known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, is embracing it with down-to-earth charm. Before Public Image Ltd., i.e. PiL, took the stage at Grand Central in Miami last Friday, I was advised to get there on time. The group would start at 9 p.m. sharp. It actually started about 15 minutes later, but still damn early for a headline act (no opener) at Grand Central.
The band came out to the darkened stage with no intro music beyond what the DJ had been playing for the few dancers. “We’re pill,” said Lydon before the band kicked off its near two-hour set with “This is Not a Love Song.” It was pure, driving power pop propulsion, while Lydon’s voice shifted and morphed from warbles to buzz saw growls and barks. The power trio version of this song was a refreshing thing to hear stripped of the disco-stylings, like the horns, of its original version. Lu
Edmonds played an electric saz, a Persian instrument from the lute family, for the song. Though exotic to look at, it did not take the song to any strange places beyond its distinctive potency. What this band— which also included Bruce Smith on drums (another longtime PiL alum) and new bassist Scott Firth— did do well was groove along and indulge in the essence of the PiL sound: pure post-punk.
Edmonds, who went on to play in the Damned and the Mekons after PiL, before recently returning to a newly reformed PiL, shined as a talented guitarist during the grooves. The band highlighted lots of material from its new album This is PiL, which features some grand, unrelenting hooks. “Deeper Water,” one of the band’s new songs, followed “This is Not a Love Song” and rode a catchy guitar line laced with the reggae influence of so much British post-punk of the seventies, as Lydon delighted in his amorphous voice for an almost seven-minute duration. The band were tight and kept things interesting with some pre-programmed keyboard lines that joined in from the ether.
They also explored some old songs, and their sober, mature quality even made songs like the 11-minute “Albatross” a pleasant moment. The piercing hiss of the Keith Levene’s original guitar and Rotten’s once tired, melting voice were replaced by Edmonds’ rambling and roaring guitar work and Lydon sounded vibrant and awake. The rhythm section offered a solid drone, as the group reveled in wallowing in its minimalist punk until coming to a sputtering stop.
I captured a video of the next song, another new one called “One Drop,” where the now rather rotund and flabby Lydon sings, “We are teenagers” with a slight trace of irony:
The set went on in much the same manner, visiting old mainstays like “Disappointed” but also featuring new songs like “Reggie Song,” which fit comfortably in the band’s oeuvre. The songs had a repetitive quality and seemed extended longer than they needed, but that’s typical PiL. It’s like they drive a hook of a song in perpetuity in order to allow it to stick in your head.
The audience, composed of members of the aged punk generation of the early eighties and of the early nineties alternative nation years of MTV, mostly nodded along to the music and occasionally raised their fists. A few pogo-ed for a few seconds at a time. A 20-year break between albums can do something to your relevance, as few in the audience were current generation hipsters.
Lydon was an amenable front man. He spit on stage once— that I saw— and excused himself for using a big bottle of something for mouthwash and not swallowing. 
He even seemed to present himself as pro-Obama, lamenting the president’s weak showing at that week’s debate. “You couldn’t put that fuckin’ presidential debate to music. Believe me, I tried,” he said before introducing “U.S.L.S. 1.” Before the song’s grand chiming guitar line soared off, he said, “Here’s what would happen if Romney gets in” about the song with the line “The devil takes care of his own.” Again, the song sounded even grander live with this line-up of musicians, who delighted in new dynamics missing from the original.
After a few more songs, the band would take a five-minute break before returning to the stage for a lengthy encore that began with the 10-plus-minute closer off the new album, “Out of the Woods.” That song then dovetailed into the band’s biggest song, “Rise,” and Lydon encouraged audience participation by hanging the mic over the audience for the “Anger is an energy” line. PiL closed the show with “Open Up,” an early Leftfield song that Lydon sang guest vocals on. It was an apt indulgent turn that revealed PiL’s seemless connection to droning house music. The jam probably lasted 15 minutes.
PiL came across as a well-preserved relic of a certain era which— as it did in its early post-punk days— revealed scarcely a trace of Lydon’s punk roots as Johnny Rotten. These were skilled, mature musicians up on stage that night for a show made more tolerable by a mostly subdued crowd who were there for the music rather than to be “seen.” People mostly stood in rapt attention, and they were easy to walk among and never crowded up against each other (unless you were the tight, small bunch toward the front of the stage).
Set list:
This is Not a Love Song
Deeper Water
Albatross
One Drop
Disappointed
Warrior
Reggie Song
U.S.L.S. 1
Swan Lake (A.K.A. Death Disco)
Bags
Religion
Encore:
Out of the Woods
Rise
Open Up
North American tour dates for PiL continue thusly:
10/08 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
10/09 – Brooklyn, NY @ The Music Hall of Williamsburg
10/11 – Philadelphia, PA @ Electric Factory
10/12 – Clifton Park, NY @ Upstate Concert Hall
10/13 – New York, NY @ Hammerstein Ballroom
10/15 – Boston, MA @ Royale Boston
10/16 – Montreal, QC @ Club Soda
10/18 – Toronto, ON @ The Opera House
10/19 – Detroit, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre
10/21 – Chicago, IL @ House of Blues
10/22 – Minneapolis, MN @ Mill City Nights
10/25 – San Francisco, CA @ Regency Ballroom
10/28 – Los Angeles, CA @ Club NOKIA
11/01 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
11/03 – Austin, TX @ Fun Fun Fun Fest
Anyone who follows Independent Ethos knows an artist’s perceived popularity matters little to this blog. What matters is the work produced, though sometimes the circumstances under which that work is produced matters. Take Fiona Apple’s current tour. When it stopped into Miami Beach over the weekend, something felt … flat. I had last seen her perform in Washington D.C., during the heat wave of ’06 in an outdoor venue. Though sweat poured off her, she offered boundless energy (read a review by “DCist”). She also seemed happy, noting last time she was at that venue was in the womb of her mother, as her father performed in a play there.
But, my how news coverage of an arrest for hashish possession can change things. Sure, it must have been a bummer for her, but probably magnifying the clouds over the tour where several things that unfolded in the mass media afterward. First her mugshot in prison stripes was circulated by the higher-than-though gossip media machine. Later, she lashed out against the arresting cops on stage. The audience video went viral. Then, the arresting police department’s spokesperson had the tacky idea to comment publicly telling her to “Shut up and sing” and “I’m more famous than you are.” Adding more insult was one famous and longtime unethical blogger’s idea to analyze her appearance on this current tour.
In response to it all, Apple most recently felt inclined to preempt her second Florida show this past Monday night by sitting down to offer a diatribe of her experiences in this losing battle with the larger voices of the conglomerate monster of the Internet. Watch the unedited near 9-minute thing here:
What a shame that a few people abusing their big metaphoric bullhorns have affected Apple’s performance quality. If she feels inclined to start a show with a speech like the one above, it’s ignorant to think it is not affecting her. The show is a stripped down affair with minimal theatrics, which is all the more reason to skip the personal distractions and focus on the marvel that is Apple’s music. Her new album, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, was a welcome return after seven years of recording studio silence. The vinyl record was made for such a work. Her voice is pure and raw, and the recording captured all the wonderment of beating the heck out of a piano. From the moment her fingertips touch the keys to the reverb of the strings, the entire beast of the instrument is on fine display.
But the weight of all these superficial concerns of image, fighting for hits on pop culture blogs and Apple’s silly idea to take heed to what the bullies of the Internet have to say dampened the show in Miami Beach. It felt brief, especially after she sprung off stage and did not return for an encore. The house lights went up soon after she bounded off, so this was probably planned. Still little, if anyone cared, as all the cheering stopped soon after the lights went out and people shuffled out with little a care. It was a lackluster performance, as she went through the motions. Here’s one subdued moment:
As this latent post reveals, I almost did not even bother writing about the show, I felt so underwhelmed. I was the guy nodding off a couple of times during the set. I was able to stay awake enough to capture some clips, but my wife captured this last one:
Though the first minute of the song is missing, it offers an interesting moment on stage for the singer. She and the band extend the pauses in the song, creating a playful tension as Apple waits for cues from her drummer. Though she’s laughing at the thrill of anticipation, the moment she sings, her voice carries an impressive weight. Apple is still an honest, potent musician and God bless her for it. She will probably only get better as the superficial media gets bored and stops covering her silly stumbles, and she starts to ignore the coverage, so she can focus on her fantastic music.
I’d be dreaming to think this type of high school-level-type news coverage of art will ever stop. But, by coming to this blog, you support intelligent coverage of music and film that sticks to the art and keeps irrelevant personal coverage out of the mix. We can all learn from this and be better.
Her tour continues at these following dates:
10/05 – Louisville, KY @ Palace Theatre
10/06 – Cincinnati, OH @ Aronoff Center
10/07 – Columbus, OH @ Palace Theatre
10/09 – Buffalo, NY @ Kleinhans Music Hall
10/11 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE
10/12 – Montclair, NJ @ Wellmont Theatre
10/16 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5
10/17 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5
10/21 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE
