Joanna Boools

“Hi am, hi am Joannna Boools, Joanna Boools, I’m going to start right now…” Her voice echoes over a drum track. Soprano tweets like bird chirps, something like a machine gun underwater in the background.

This is the voice of a woman, strong and mellifluous. The whole experience and event has the quality of a voice. Now the sample is a keyboard, sounding like a harpsichord, the very low notes repeated.

She plays in a dingy basement, but the sonorities are grand. You could be at an opera house. Spectral, ghostly, haunting liquid chimes. This feels so good. She embraces you with a soft wall of tubular metal, you are somewhere and nowhere. You just like being here.

The tone changes. Funky metallic beats. Subdued, sinister shouts. The funky beats get spacey with repetition, hovering and circling around your mind. Could be a flying saucer, spinning like a hovercraft above a sea.

Joanna has fractured soul. It blends and splits with the music. The echoes on the computer and of her own voice swirl. They mix with the shuffling beats, and the rhythms carry the voices, which carry the rhythms, which sand down your own spirit till you can only receive, and accept what she has to offer, which is spiritual, raw, and unendingly sweet.

The Channels

Ian is on bass guitar. He hits hard. The beat is some weird funk, spacey but not out of control. On drums, Nick is playful and rollicking and rolling, bowed like the wood of the hull of a boat. Wes is eking out sharp sparks from his electric guitar. This has a no wave feel, coming out of the same strains where we found GToss, but the rhythms are simpler, and the tunes more melodic.

Wes says Sonic Youth but this is different. More driving. Experimental, yes, but with metal grooves, and dips and dives. Nick’s drumming is very subtle, sometimes hitting very lightly. But it’s cast like wrought iron, and ornate.

Each musician contributes equally, one of the nice things about this band. What bass does works with what guitar does, rounded out and capitulated by the drums.

Wes gets some really cool liquid, elastic twangs by holding the notes way up by the bell. He works with these, and it sounds almost like a synthesizer.

The Channels is a classic band, they have a classic feel, the classic feel of a band always reaching out into the future, into the feel of their youth, so you can imagine groups doing stuff like this way back in the sixties, maybe Red Crayola. This is Red Crayola wrung with early eighties New York, but perfectly molded to the basement they are now playing in, the millennial Make Out Point.

Silk Purse

Silk Purse is a NYC band, with members of The Sightings. The first thing you notice is the bassist, Richard, who is choogling (if that’s a word), or that’s what it sounds like; repeated patterns of deep dark woody booms.

Mark is singer and guitarist. His short bursts of shouts sound like electric dog barks. On synth and electronics, Justin echoes these effects, and it’s a wall of noise, with classic metal rhythms.

Mark has played with Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes, and you can hear the latter’s vermin-ridden sound in this band, but this is a straight rock band, very noisy, but still with polish and control.

It’s exciting. The rhythms go places. The songs are short, and there’s always a new adventure. Mark has a series of pedals in the floor, and there’s as much action on these as on the strings.

Silk purse is shatters and fragments, soldered together into stained glass panels from a church of the devil. The queer, squeaky, eerie light shines, and you hover around the infernal lips of the goat-footed beast, but you flutter away back like a butterfly, in the beams piercing the glass, or out the window into the light of the new summer.

Brendan Murray

Microdots in color. Murray’s music puts you in a mellow trance. Very pleasant. Sonic frames getting larger, within other frames, dissipating in the distance, disappearing, reconfigured bold in the foreground, orbits within orbits of a solar system.

Steve Norton

Steve Norton is divided between the celeste on his right hand, and the electronics on his left. Then he just leaves the knobs buzzing and picks up his bass clarinet, with his signature liquid notes, somehow reminiscent of Eric Dolphy but more classical, like Luciano Berio’s Sequenza, perhaps. He uses harmonics, splitting his reed into two concurrent notes.

There is humor, aggression, but it is as mild as tea. Chromatic arpeggios, rumbling held bass notes.

Muffled recordings of serious voices from a radio, sped up and slowed down. Somehow this is disturbing. But it’s funny. It becomes abstract. Almost just like the timbre of the alto saxophone he is about to pick up.

It is very disconcerting, the way the sax loops and hops, dives with the distorted voice recording in the background. If you listen to him carefully, the sax is very inventive, bright, spirited, spritely and free. But the strange, low voice is a disruption. Then things become strange, strangely pleasant, with his tinkling on the celeste, diatonic, echoing, like a Night Gallery soundtrack.

Steve picks up the contra-alto sax. The lines he plays are mellow and playful. They swing, like Barney Bigard from Ellington. This is the nicest part. It makes you feel calm now, just classic jazz, bent into an avant-garde mold.

Michael Rosenstein & Arkm Foam

The mood, tense, immediately dissipates as Michael’s gears hum and click. They rotate, like a lawnmower engine. It’s just like my grandfather’s three-acre estate in Connecticut, where I used to ride with him on his sit-on tractor. Foam is liquid, bubbling, and scraping. This is a duet now, sonorous as church bells. Amazing how electro-noise can put you in the mind of nature, especially with Foam, who loves nature, working with it, living with it, a nature boy.

Then there is more tension, tension of a night forest, with owls on the prey. Everything is dark, except where moonlight strikes a stray branch.

It’s a boiling cauldron of emotion, though still quite quiet. Glimpses of calm, but no sense of clear direction. We wait. Blurred, scattershot memories. Harder still to believe we are in a different place now. It’s a road stretching into the sun. It goes on forever.

Life in the sun: there are dogs barking, there is a farm, chickens clucking. The sun sets. All is quiet. The wind blowing the beams of the barn, the creaking, the sounds of passing autos. They take you to the quick and the raw, the headaches and the knots in the flesh, the whole body frazzled; then healed, whole again as the leaves blow in the dark.

Two musicians, sitting still behind boards of electronics, white space with a gray floor, scattered speakers, snare drum, antique keyboard against which a bass clarinet rests. We have been nowhere but inside. But it takes us outside.

Sissy Spacek

Sissy Spacek was John Wiese, master and monster of noise, who’s played with Merzbow, and avant jazz sax great Evan Parker. He’s got a duo now, with drums, and a beard, and he plays guitar. It’s just one straight shot of noise, with double screams, rolling drums, and guitar scratched to blood. Then it ends.

Sissy Spacek has done all kinds of things in the past, encompassed on a four disc retrospective a few years ago, so you never know what it’s is going to do, or how long it will play. Wiese is actually an electronic virtuoso, so the key tonight was surprise. Just a blast in your face, and stop. You could say fourteen-year-old kids could do this, and maybe they could; but maybe that’s the point.

Eatin’

The first thing you think about this quartet, with the funky intro, is Red Hot Chili Peppers. The singer’s got those loose, lanky moves, swaying about in front of the stage, but this is another kind of metal as it moves on. Short bursts of barely controlled noise, relentless.

Then the melodies develop. Dark, minor things, but still with abrupt stops, lightning drums and guitar riffs, caveman vocals, dark and husky. The cumulative effect is the wash of a tidal wave on a California beach, leaving the surfboards and babes in bikinis with a primal stretch of sand.

Dour

Dour starts with a tom rolling over off the stage. They introduce themselves: “Thank you. We’re Spinal Tap.” And they are: this isn’t hair metal from the ’80s, this is classic metal, with a clean, contemporary steel edge.

They vary their tempos, from rumble to race, bass, guitar, and drum. The bassist, tall blonde with short hair, screams in short bursts. The music is largely instrumental. It’s about the juxtaposition of rough textures, the crisscrossing and crashing as the guitarist loops chords like a Blue Angel jet, and the drums gather steam and stop in turn.

This is a metal crowd, lots of black, guy with a shaved head, no moshing, just serious absorption of the hypnotic trance the trio induces with their glacially shifting patterns. This is the venting of rage. You’ve got to vent, and Dour does.

The Nextet is a snap perfect jazz rock fusion unit, actually a sextet, with electric guitar and bass, sax, drums, trumpet, and Aronow on electric piano. The sounds come straight out of the ’70s, the height of fusion, but with Latin and R & B flavors, and the music is completely contemporary and fresh.

There are geometric patterns to the band’s interplay, like shifting circles that break and turn into squares and stars and rectangles, laid one on another in a shimmering architecture.

“Ode to the Bicycle” is a title that says it all, the physical, fun exhilaration, the rhythm of the pedals as they ride into a mellow breeze. Aronow raps the lyrics, and it’s funky, with sax punctuations evoking Maceo Parker. The guitarist outlines the tune with octave intervals, and the trumpet puts on the brakes to end the song, like someone pushing the horn on a car.

The next number is soft Latin, with sax dropped for flute. We see why it’s called “Nextet” now. We’re always on the edge of our seats, elbows on the table, anticipating what comes next.

Aronow’s keyboard style is understated. He favors lower and upper ranges, a gentle charm, simple, subtle syncopation, warm, sticky melodies. This is a band of cohesion and flare. It feels good, it’s complex, but you always get what’s going on with an easy ear, open to the mutating patterns and effervescent color changes.