San Francisco

ReCardiacsFly and Tim Smith Benefit at Cafe Du Nord

With the launch of our ReCardiacsFly YouTube channel, it seems like a good time to look back at our ReCardiacsFly performance at Cafe Du Nord, part of a benefit concert for Tim Smith, leader and founder of the UK band Cardiacs that took place in May.

In this video, you can see Polly channeling Tim Smith, along with Chris Broderick and Marc Laspina getting into their respective rolls:


[Videography by Josh Wolfer.]

The keyboard and marimba parts didn’t come out so strongly in the videos, but you can hear a bit of my attempt to get the original sounds in “Hello Mister Sparrow.”:


[Videography by Josh Wolfer.]

We did receive a great audience reception, undoubtedly some from Cardiacs fans who were familiar with the songs and performance style but perhaps from people hearing for the first time as well and taken in by the intensity of the performance.

We did get a little worried early in the evening as attendance was sparse. But by the time we got on stage and looked out, there was a full and enthusiastic house – when you see and feel something like that, it always makes it easier to get through a set, even something as complex and intense as Cardiacs covers.

Over all, it was a great experience, and we hope to perform again sometime soon!

ReCardiacsFly consisted of members of Rennaissance Fly (myself, Polly Moller, and Tim Walters) together with Moe! Staiano, Chris Broderick, Marc Laspina and Suki O’Kane. Although we were the unofficially dubbed “tribute band” for the evening for our accurate musical renditions and costumes and makeup, all the bands performed Cardiacs covers, each in their own way.

Amy X Neuburg opened the evening with arrangements infused with her trademark “avant cabaret” style. In a humorous gesture, she invited the audience to “sing along” to Tim Smith’s often difficult-to-follow lyrics.

Before Weiner Kids came on stage, there was an arrangement that I described on twitter as a “cool riff with four on the floor bass drum and household metal items. Very danceable by #Cardiacs standards.” Even in the midst of a prog-and-punk-rock night, I am still drawn to my particular musical roots.

Weiner Kids (with Jordan Glenn, Cory Wright, Aram Shelton) performed an arrangement for percussion and saxophones that made the often odd rhythms and meters of Cardiacs music very transparent. This is both the fun part and the biggest challenge of playing this music.

Grex, a duo of Karl Evangelista on guitar and Rei Scampavia on keyboard, performed purely instrumental arrangements. The interpretations were much freer, and in particular gave Karl the opportunity to apply his virtuosic guitar style to the music.

Inner Ear Brigade (featuring frequent collaborator Bill Wolter with Chris Lauf, Stevo Wright, Ivor Holloway, Melody Ferris, and David Shaff) also performed their own meticulous arrangements with their own personal stamp – their music tends is often itself an intense and energetic blend of jazz, experimental and art-rock influences. It was sometimes hard to tell where the Cardiacs’ influence ended and Inner Ear Brigade’s own style began, which I think made this performance all the more successful.


[Inner Ear Brigade.]

The concert concluded with Dominque Leone and his ensemble for the evening performing an “epic” arrangement of a Cardiacs song, building up towards a final climax that seemed almost religious in nature, with a full chorus of voices and loud frenetic keyboard and guitar (from Leone and Ava Mendoza) – this is one song that you can tell is the final song of the evening even before it ends!

So what is next? We are certainly hoping to do more performances as ReCardiacsFly, and welcome suggestions for Bay Area venues and programs that would be appropriate. And we would like to send “Healing wishes from everyone to Tim Smith and love and respect to all past, present, and future members and fans of Cardiacs.”

Outsound Music Summit Benefit Dinner, June 27

The 2011 Outsound New Music Summit is about a month away! For those not familiar with this event, it is a weeklong series of new and adventurous music that has been happening every summer in San Francisco for the last ten years. “Every year the Outsound New Music Summit showcases some of the most innovative and pioneering new music that is happening in California and beyond.” You can read my reports from last year as a reviewer and as a participating artist.

This year we are hosting a benefit dinner on Monday, June 27 at the Numi Tea Garden in Oakland, with music by Vorticella, and dinner by chef Miles Ake. I invite readers in the Bay Area to support new music and consider attending this event. You can find info and tickets at http://www.outsound.org/summit/11/outsound_benefit.html. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from our chef statement that reads like a statement one would see at an art exhibit or concert program notes:

The a list of ingredients when put together form a classic Gazpacho. This will function as a prompt or an armature that dishes can be built upon. The root of the word Gazpacho is derived from a Mozarab word caspa, meaning “residue” or “fragments,” which refers to the small pieces of bread and vegetables in a Gazpacho soup. throughout the meal the gazpacho as an entity wil go through a series of fractured movements. This fracturing is not a means to disconnect, but rather as a process of extraction, distillation and isolation of distinct parts. The structure of the menu is an anagrammatical game or a rewinding (moving backwards in time to replay a track) while simultaneously moving forward without redundancy in form/texture/taste using to compositional terms (verse, refrain, notes, scale, etc….) to build a lexicon of culinary elements.

I quite like the visuals, architectural elements and references to language and pattern matching.

Of course, beyond the benefit dinner, we want people to attend the performances in July and support this artists!

Doug Rickard: A New American Picture (Stephen Wirtz Gallery)

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture series at Stephen Wirtz Gallery is a “snapshot” of both technology and society at a particular moment in time. More and more of our landscape is being captured in online images and connected to the rest of the world. At the same time, more of our communities are falling behind economically and socially and seem distant from the technology that makes them more visible than ever.

[39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

Most readers are undoubtedly familiar with Google Street View. It’s the feature on on Google Maps where you drop the little stick figure guy onto the map and get an immersive street-level view of the location. Some readers may have also seen the Google vehicles with their roof-mounted vehicles on the street taking new pictures for this ongoing project (I have seen them on several occasions). Both the product and process can seem a bit voyeuristic at times as one sees people going about their daily lives in these images. As such, it brings to mind the recent EXPOSED exhibition at SFMOMA (which closed in April), which focused surveillance, voyeurism, and the presence of both unintended subjects and witnesses in photography.

[#39.937119, Camden, NJ. 2009.  Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

For this project, Rickard, who is perhaps best known for his website American Suburb X, has poured over thousands of locations from Google Street View from around the United States, focusing primarily on the decaying edges of cities and rural communities. The cities featured are among those hit hardest by natural disasters, foreclosures, unemployment and other challenges.  Large cities, such as Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans are represented, as are smaller towns such as West-Helena, Arkansas.  This was clearly a massive undertaking – even if one focuses on specific neighborhoods of specific towns and cities, that is a lot of data and imagery to cover.  It can be in a way compared to covering the real life distances and capturing particular frames and angles and daily life continued unabated. There are echoes of Walker Evans and other noted photographers who documented cross-sections of American life, but the technological mediation, particularly with its implications of distance and anonymity, is very contemporary. Rickard acts as a real photographer in a virtual world, re-photographing the images from the computer screen.

[#29.942566, New Orleans, LA. 2008. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

In the gallery setting, the images which are most often seen in miniature on computers and smartphones are displayed in large format (some as large as 44 inches wide). The low resolution artifacts from the stitching algorithms used to piece together the source photos make the technology apparent. It looks like Google probably rolled out higher-resolution source images during the course of this project, as some seem to be of significantly higher quality. But the grainy and imperfect quality remains and provides an interesting contrast between imaging and data technology and the aging streets and buildings of these communities. There are interesting visual elements, such as brightly colored buildings against muted textures, which may be exaggerated by the cameras and image-processing techniques, but may also reflect the real scenes.

[#83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009.  Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

Not surprisingly given my own photographic work, I was drawn to many of these images with their decaying urban landscape – for example, the straight lines and gritty texture in #39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008, or the patches of color, texture and text in #83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009. However, the composition and intention here is very different. These images are not meant to be pretty. And the inclusion of people to the scenes does make them a bit jarring. Google does automatically blur the faces of all the people, but one still cannot dismiss their presence.  And thus we have to consider what it is like to live along these streets, not just visit them. There is also the interesting question of people becoming unwitting elements of one of the largest image databases and 3D virtual environments, and then through Rickard’s process of deliberate selection find themselves on the walls of a gallery.

[#42.418064, Detroit, MI. 2009. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

The exhibition will continue at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco through June 11.

No Fooling, We Mean It! – McLoughlin Gallery

“No Fooling, We Mean It!” at The McLoughlin Gallery is a show that is simultaneously playful and serious. The cavernous space of the gallery plays host to several large-scale works by sculptors David Middlebrook, Jeff Schomberg and Doug Thielscher. Each of the sculptors has a different focus, Schomberg on metal, Thielscher on stone, and Middlebrook on mixed materials. But all three present very serious well-constructed and polished piece (“no fooling”) with a sense of humor and fun (“fooling”).  Additionally, all three are local artists, working and residing in the extended Bay Area.

The overall presentation has a sparseness, with lots of empty space and exposure of the gallery’s bare concrete walls that make it easy to focus on a single piece at any given moment. Even the larger stone works are not crowded and blend with structure of the space. I was most immediately drawn to Schomberg’s metal work, and in particular his pair of geometric wall pieces, Hinged and Unhinged.

[Jeff Schomberg, Hinged (2009).  Found metal objects in steel frame.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.]

[Jeff Schomberg, Uninged (2009).  Found metal objects in found frame assemblage.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery. Click to enlarge.]

The rectangular frames serve as a boundary between the space of the gallery and the empty space within the pieces. Inside, each object is given room to be seen separately, such as the large circle in Unhinged or the intricate thin metal lines in both pieces that remind of my street maps. Indeed, the combination of geometric elements and metal coincide with my own focus on urban landscape and infrastructure. (See the similar elements in yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday post.) The circular elements seem particularly prominent in contrast to the mostly straight-line shapes of the found-metal components. Still other objects manage to retain their original functional shape and industrial history from before they became art. His mixed-media piece Trumbull takes the industrial theme one step further. An old rusted fuse box has been combined with a video of a fireplace and reassembled into a new piece of machinery. It is futuristic, in that delightful dystopian sort of way, even as it looks back on earlier electrical technology.

[Jeff Schomberg, Trumbull (2011).  Fuse box with video.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.  Click image to enlarge.]

These pieces, however, do stand apart within the overall exhibit. If there is one theme that cuts across all of the artists, it is “human-like forms that really aren’t human.” Among Schomberg’s metal sculptures are a series of small human-like figures with heads shaped like pipes or other pieces of hardware – probably the most humorous of his offerings. David Middlebrook’s assemblages have an organic look about them and some such as King of Things seem like they could get up and walk around. Think of Terry Gilliam’s cartoons or some of the creatures from the 1970s animated film Fantastic Planet.

[David Middlebrook, King of Things (2010).  Bronze, aluminum, Indian gibble, cast expoxy.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.  Click image to enlarge.]

The bronze box that serves as the base for the large stone egg in Middlebrook’s Carbon was an interesting touch. Doug Thielsher’s stone sculptures are the most directly figurative, but even here the figures are quite distorted, as in the two marble heads of The Ninth Circle that melt into one another. Thielsher’s sculptures were most noticeable for their use of the gallery space. From a distance, they seem like well-placed classical sculpture in a traditional art museum – and indeed they all draw from biblical or mythological themes. Up close, one sees the more surreal and humorous nature. Again, the one that most resonated for me was the most geometric. In Cain #3, the detached hand is almost lost underneath the large white cube and the black dot.  Similarly, the hand seems to disappear into the large black cube of Cain #1.

[Doug Thielscher, Cain #3 (2006).  Carrara and Belgian black marble.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery. ]

The exhibit opened, appropriately, on April 1, and will remain on display though May 21. For more information about the exhibition and visiting, visit the gallery’s website.

Cordelia, Theatre of Yugen

Cordelia is a Noh adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear presented by Theatre of Yugen at NOHspace. The play is a combination of old and new. It draws its structure and performance elements from the tradition of Noh and its source text from Shakespeare, both centuries old. But the actual text by Erik Ehn, music by Suki O’Kane and production directed by Jubilith Moore are wholly contemporary. They draw heavily from the traditional sources, but are in no way limited by them. Enh’s text is a rearrangement of lines from the original Shakespeare but focused on the point of view of Cordelia (King Lear’s youngest daughter) minimized to fit within the constraints of Noh. Polly Moller performs on standard concert and bass flutes and a bagpipe chanter, but expertly invokes the attacks, pitch bends and timbral shifts of traditional Japanese music. Sheila Berotti plays the tradition role of the chorus, but as a single voice with a shruti box (a drone instrument usually found in Indian classical music). The main element of the set, a bridge that folds into to descending segments, seems very contemporary and industrial – but it is in fact an adaptation of the traditional hashigakari from Noh theater.

In the first act, Cordelia (played by Moore) appears as a member of a royal court and recounts her refusal to flatter her father, the king, with words, which leads to her being disowned and exiled. In the second act, she returns in the form of a warrior, reflecting her return to England at the end of the play in an attempt to save her father that ultimately ends tragically. In the interlude, we meet the Fool (played by Lluis Valls), who both recites lines from the original play and provides a synopsis of the story. He serves as a comic counterpoint, and as a practical guide for those either unfamiliar with the original King Lear or new to structure of Noh theater. (One particularly fun moment was when he relates the marriages of Cordelia’s sisters, he pauses with a slight look and sound of disgust for the rather creepy Duke of Cornwall.)


[Click to enlarge.]

Overall the elements of the performance, the music, the set design, the text, the movement all have a very minimalist quality. There is a lot of empty space in the slow and deliberate movements of Moore as Cordelia and chanting of the text. Similarly, the music is very sparse. The flute lines are composed from small sets of notes that explore timbre, dynamics and abrupt rhythmic changes. The silence between the flute, text and motion is occasionally punctuated by loud hits on the snare drum (performed by Anna Wray). The space left me ample opportunity to escape from the narrative of the play and instead focus on specific details, such as qualities of the flute performance, the text on wall of the set, the occasional harmonic swells of the shruti box, or details of the lighting.

The main exception to the overall minimalism was the costume design by Risa Dye. Cordelia’s two costumes are both quite elaborate. They combine the multiple layers often found in Noh costumes with rather ornate and highly textured elements reminiscent of Elizabethan England (at least as seen in paintings from the time). The costume of the Fool was something else again, a hooded suit covered entirely in text (taken from another play by Ehn). It helped to emphasize the character of the Fool as a “word artist”, and also contribute to his more frenetic character in contrast to the rest of the performance.

The words were also present on the wall of the set (designed by Joshua McDermott). The wall was inspired by memorial walls, in particular from the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. Phases from Ehn’s plays were used in place of names. In addition to its direct meaning, the wall evoked for me a sense of urban space with graffiti, which is central in my own visual work.

It is interesting to reflect on how easily the minimalist and non-linear elements of Noh seem to translate into a contemporary work of art, and also provide opportunity for reflection and meditation. At the same time, the structure provides enough space for contemporary visual and musical elements to poke through. As such, it provides some ideas and inspiration for future work.

Cordelia continues with additional performances at Theatre of Yugen tonight (May 5) through Saturday May 7.

[All photos in this article courtesy of Theatre of Yugen.]

ReCardiacsFly at Cafe Du Nord

I have been busily preparing for the next show, coming up this weekend:

Members of Rennaissance Fly (myself, Polly Moller, and Tim Walters) are teaming up with Moe! Staiano, Chris Broderick, Marc Laspina and Suki O’Kane as “ReCardiacs Fly”, a tribute cover of the UK band Cardiacs.

It is been a bit of a challenge to learn our four pieces, approximately note for note and also capture the energy of the originals.

One fun bit to re-create was the synthesizer line from “Hello Mr. Sparrow.” We found this video on YouTube, featuring a Mellotron and Sequential Circuits Pro One:

Well, I don’t have either of those devices, but I can approximate the Pro One with the Dave Smith Evolver (it is essentially the successor to the Sequential Circuits instruments):

The most challenging song we are doing is R.E.S., you can get an idea of what we are up against in this Cardiacs’ video:

It has been great to hear things coming together in our rehearsals, and it should be a good show next weekend. Polly photos from our most recent rehearsal.

Official info below:

Sunday, May 8. 6PM-10:30PM
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market Street
San Francisco, CA
$10 donation at the door

This is a benefit for Tim Smith, leader and founder of the UK band Cardiacs. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiacs):

Cardiacs are an English alternative rock/psychedelic pop band formed in 1977 and led by Smith. Noted for their complex, varied and intense compositional style and for their eccentric, theatrical stage shows, they have been hailed as an influence by bands as diverse as Blur, Faith No More and Radiohead.

In 2008, Smith suffered a stroke, and has not been able to perform or finish the new Cardiacs record. From the official website (http://www.cardiacs.com/):

Since the accident Tim Smith’s body has become his enemy. He is in a great deal of pain and is experiencing difficulty with the finer points of control with regard to his extremities so obviously perfected prior to the unhappy event, but Tim Smith, his family and those so called friends, (with whom he keeps counsel), all assert that his mind, however, has been sharpened by the episode. THE ALPHABET BUSINESS CONCERN can confirm that no part of YOUR favourite pop star’s intellect or personality has been found to be absent WHATSOEVER.

Last year, a tribute CD Leader of the Starry Skies was released (http://www.thegenepool.co.uk/items/597.htm), with all proceeds going directly to Smith. Our plan is for the May 8 concert to have all funds go to Tim. Our friend Kavus Torabi is the lead guitarist in Cardiacs, and he is our contact for making sure the funds reach Smith.

Performing will be Dominique Leone, Wiener Kids, Inner Ear Brigade, Grex, Amy X Neuburg, ReCardiac Fly, performing the music of Cardiacs/Tim Smith.