|
Event
Telekinesis (Merge Records) + Say Hi (Barsuk) + guests
"No one ever talks about the fourth record.
We've all heard plenty about the astonishing debut and the "difficult" sophomore release. But let's pause for a moment to consider the role of album four in rock and roll history. A few key examples: Radiohead Kid A, R.E.M. Lifes Rich Pageant, Talking Heads Remain in Light, Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, David Bowie Hunky Dory ... you see where we're going with this. Album four is an opportunity for artists to reinvent, and frequently revitalize, themselves. The will- ingness to abandon familiar work habits and signature sounds can be risky, but it's often the difference between a safe, predictable career and a bold transformation that signals the beginning (to quote another pretty amazing fourth LP) of a new age for artist and audience alike.
When it came time to make the fourth Telekinesis album, drummer/songwrit- er/principal architect Michael Lerner found himself in a predicament that will sound familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the lore of rock bands. In just under five years, he had released three fantastic recordsTelekinesis! (2009), 12 Desperate Straight Lines (2011), and Dormarion (2013)each more ambitious than the last. He had toured all over the world, shared stages with great bands (Death Cab for Cutie, Portugal. The Man, Aimee Mann and Ted Leo's The Both), and enthralled fans of his infectious, ebullient power pop. Newly married and happily ensconced in the home studio he'd assembled in his West Seattle basement, Lerner found himself asking the question that has haunted modestly successful bands down the ages: What do you do after the rock and roll dreams you had when you were 19 have come true? The obvious answer was to make another Telekinesis recordthat was his job, after all, and he was grateful for it. So he got to work. It didn't go well. At least not at first.
"I went down to the basement," Lerner recalls, "and started playing the same chords I always play... I just felt like I'd exhausted everything I knew. I was not excited at all. I just could not make another power-pop album."
He sought inspiration in music that bore little relation to the familiar Telekinesis sound, and soon found it in the swooning, synth-driven pop of early '80s UK bands like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Glasgow's The Blue Nile (whose 1982 debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, Lerner had been given by Merge honcho Mac McCaughan), as well as more up-tempo numbers like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's 1977 disco master class "I Feel Love" and, even further afield, Drake's 2013 summer jam "Hold On, We're Going Home." Though Lerner is a drummer with a strong affinity for loud electric guitars, he found himself irresistibly attracted to the powerful atmospheres stirred up by the gorgeously inorganic sounds and simple arrangements of these wildly disparate inspirations. A new idea began to take shape, as did a somewhat obsessive collec- tion of old synthesizers and drum machines.
Lerner dedicated himself to learning the intricacies of antiquated keyboards with names like the Roland JX-10 (the very model Angelo Badalamenti used to com- pose the music for Twin Peaks), the Teenage Engineering OP-1, the Moog Sub Phatty, the Elektron Octatrack, and even a Speak & Spell. "If you buy a guitar," observes Lerner, "people always say 'oh, there's a song in that guitar.' That's how it was for every piece of equipment I acquired over the last two years." Finding the songs was one thing; making sense of the elaborate technical requirements that
would allow him to sync the multiple generations of machinery with digital record- ing software was another. There were plenty of easier ways to go about the process, sending MIDI versions of the vintage sounds and letting a computer do the heavy lifting, but that would have missed the point. There was joy in getting his hands dirty; part of the process was to invent the process. It took months of diligent effort ("pulling my hair out, for real"), but when the literal and figurative dust settled, what emerged looked and sounded like a legitimate breakthrough. The previous three Telekinesis LPs had been recorded fast, on tape, in professional studios with accomplished producersChris Walla on the first two, Jim Eno on the thirdat the helm. This new one had been painstakingly assembled by Lerner alone, work- ing without a map, using an entirely unfamiliar palette of sounds, and discovering an entirely different tonal vocabulary in the process. And though the total running time is a tidy 33 minutes, it had taken what seemed like forever to get there (hence the album title).
And yet, for all the new methodology and instrumentation, the DNA of Ad Infinitum is oddly familiar. The melodic hooks that have endeared Telekinesis to the world of pop music aficionados are flagrantly front and center. The pinging pong of an instrumental figure on album opener "Falling (In Dreams)" sounds almost like a permission slip for Lerner to let loose with a soaring head voice in the chorus. It's a chilling entrance to an album that soon veers into the much faster new-wave thrills of "Sylvia," the ironically technology-averse retrofuturism of "In a Future World" (which sounds like the missing link between Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode and the birth of Erasure), and onward. The hyperactive gem "Courtesy Phone" proves that no matter how many stylistic obstacles he places in his own path, Lerner's knack for perfect power pop is irrepressible. But the high- energy dance rhythms of "It's Not Yr Fault" and the gorgeous, McCartney II-esque polyphony of "Ad Infinitum Pt. 1" are totally unprecedented in the Telekinesis oeuvre. The whole album is a relentless marriage of old and new, memory and imagination, deconstruction and rediscovery.
While artists like M83 and Blood Orange (among many, many others) have made fruitful use of vintage sounds and production techniques in recent years, Ad Infinitum is a different animal. It's less like a time capsule and more like a time machine. In the movie version of the story, Lerner would stumble on his way down the stairs, hit his head, and wake up in 1983, and the only way he could get back to the present day would be to make a record using available instru- ments. Then he'd wake in 2015 to discover he'd been in his basement studio all along. And the record he'd made in that strange dream state would turn out to be Ad Infinitum, the most ambitious and assured Telekinesis release to date."
http://www.telekinesismusic.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Telekinesis/55685593658
http://www.twitter.com/_TELEKINESIS
http://www.soundcloud.com/user2596475
http://www.mergerecords.com/artists/telekinesis
________________________________________________________________
Say Hi-
"Vampires. Does there exist a species more mysterious, slandered, glorified and misunderstood? The answers to all of those questions and more. Tonight. In this bio. It was 2006 when we last checked in with vampire biographer and dad-joke comedian Eric Elbogen (he's mostly been devoting time to his slacker-guitar / synth- pop 'band' Say Hi). Back then he'd taken his exposé deep behind the trenches of post-Buffy vampire life (death?) with his record Impeccable Blahs. There, he found a culture ripe with individuals as complex, moral, stupid and romantic as their human counterparts. They just happened to get their sustenance from drinking blood.
But that was before the complications the Twilight series introduced. Suddenly, things were different. Garlic wasn't really a thing any more, mirrors couldn't be relied upon to not have reflections and, gasp, apparently the cloud cover of the Pacific Northwest was enough to give them a we-can-now-walk-around-in-the-sunlight loophole? Let's just say things didn't really sit quite right with the vast majority of blood suckers. They rebelled. Subtly at first. But, before us humans knew it, they'd infiltrated the very fabric of our society.
Bleeders Digest is their story. It's polaroids of their patience, resilience and wrath. In opening track "The Grass Is Always Greener," the vampires are content with coexisting until the song's protagonist cartoonishly hurls a giant boulder at them (thanks a lot, Jenny). By the time we reach the chugging anthem "Pirates Of The Cities, Pirates Of The Suburbs," the fang-ed demons have driven most of us from our homes in a bloody wash of brute force and Darwinian eminent domain.
But all is not lost. Behind closed doors, some vague but jovial remnants of humanity sprout anew. They'd never show it to the outside world, but mansion-roommates Aldo and Tina fill their daylight hours sailing sofas and penning crosswords for the New York Times in "Creatures Of The Night." It's a fun distraction from the necking they'll do once the sun goes down ... Which actually brings us to our next point.
Is there a better metaphor for intimacy than the vampire? The sharp teeth and fluids, the romance of eternity. Besides, it wouldn't be a Say Hi record without some good stories of lovin'. Throughout Bleeders, we see things from the vampire's perspective. On "It's A Hunger," our protagonist literally starves for what the female gender offers to all five of his senses. Elsewhere, as on "Galaxies Will Be Born," the seduction of immortality is eclipsed only by the tenderness of the act of turning, itself.
And so, from his tiny home-studio in Seattle, WA, Say Hi updates the vampire genre with another chapter via eleven rump-shaking vignettes and a giant still-beating heart.
Say Hi is Eric Elbogen. He lives in Seattle, WA and has been making records since 2002. His ninth, Bleeders Digest, is a record about vampires and the sequel to Say Hi To Your Mom's Impeccable Blahs. It will be out on September 18th via Barsuk Records. A co-headline tour with Telekinesis will immediately follow. All are welcome, but please check your fangs at the door."
https://www.facebook.com/umuhoh/
http://www.ilikesayhi.com/
https://twitter.com/ericelbogen
|
|
 |
LocationFlying M Coffeegarage (View)
1314 2nd st. S314 2nd st. S
nampa, ID 83651
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
|
Contact
|
