Buke and Gase’s General Dome: Newer Name, Grittier Sound
Album cover for Buke and Gase’s “General Dome.”
Sometime after the release of Buke and Gass’s Riposte in 2010–a striking first impression of a record—the industrious DIY duo did something confusing: they changed their name..slightly…to Buke and Gase. On General Dome, the second full-length album released on January 29 via Brassland, what seems like a simple cosmetic change for pronunciation’s sake is emblematic of the band’s fuller realization of its own sound.
Buke and Gase’s music has always been what one could loosely call “avant-garage rock.” But that term is deceiving and overly reductive, and does nothing to explain what has made the music so compelling: the interlocking edginess of the instruments—Arone Dyer’s amplified baritone ukelele (“Buke”) and Aron Sanchez’s versatile guitar-bass hybrid (“Gase”)—combined with exuberant, groove-laden melodies and serpentine rhythms that expand and contract like pulsating organisms.
Arone Dyer (buke), left, and Aron Sanchez (gase).
Apparently, the musical feel of Riposte was merely an approximation of the ideal Buke and Gase sound, and not its full manifestation. As noted in a recent press release, Dyer made the switch from the wooden ukelele heard on the debut record to a new instrument made, at least partially, from re-purposed car parts. The more one listens to “General Dome,” the more dramatic the resulting evolution of the band’s sound comes.
There is part of me that misses the anachronism of the old “Buke,” a humble acoustic instrument supercharged with amplification and effects pedals. Its odd quality lent itself naturally to idiosyncratic hooks that churned with tension and shimmered pungently with equal measure.
From the album opener “Houdini Crush” onward, the homemade instruments sound like they’ve been welded together, their individual timbres now completely in sync. If Buke and Gase created dense compositions with prog-like tendencies before, the music of General Dome boasts a crunchier core of harmonies and more streamlined song forms now. “Hard Times” is as concise as it is catchy, featuring a chorus that is as undeniably pop as you’re likely to find.
Elsewhere, the band employs triple meter liberally, in songs like “Twisting the Lasso of Truth,” which projects a buoyant waltz before it begins to snarl with sudden rhythm changes. The instruments mimic sardonic laughter, and the whole thing threatens to derail like a beautifully deranged carousel ride.
As a whole, General Dome is absolutely stunning in its rhythmic variety—the downbeat is constantly being disguised, obscured, and altered—without ever losing the continuity or momentum of each individual song. To that end, the use of tambourine, bass drum, and jingling feet percussion are still integral to the sound; they lend a march-like quality to the propulsion of the music, particularly in “Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard.” Clever time changes populate the witty “Hiccup” with infectious results.
The musical chemistry showcased here, as in Riposte, is awe-inspiring. With this new collection of songs, however, Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez have trimmed their sound–focusing on a meatier overall timbre and in the process, becoming a leaner, darker and grittier band.
Courtesy of NPR Music, this Buke and Gase concert at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge in October 2012 features the band’s honed sound.
Setlist is as follows: “Hiccup” –>”Cyclopean” –>”Misshaping Introduction”–>”Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard”–>”Sleep Gets Your ghost”–>”Tending the Talk”
“3 Men and a Baby”: When Macaulay Culkin Forms an Art Collective with Adam Green, Toby Goodshank
In the living room of Macaulay Culkin’s New York City apartment, canvases occupy the space like so many peculiar yet irresistibly magnetic house guests. The room—converted into an art studio—is congested with the vestiges of creativity at work: bottles of paint huddle together in bunches, and paintbrushes spring up like wild vegetation.
What began in earnest in February 2012 as collaborative art-making between Culkin and two artist-musician friends Adam Green and Toby Goodshank—both formerly of the anti-folk band The Moldy Peaches—has coalesced into an art collective affectionately dubbed Three Men and a Baby, or 3MB. The collective’s first art show, a group of frenetic, eclectic, and irreverent paintings entitled Leisure Inferno, opens at Le Poisson Rouge (LPR) in New York’s Greenwich Village on Thursday, September 13.
The 3MB Collective: Macaulay Culkin, Adam Green, and Toby Goodshank; photo by Dima Dubson.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, the prevailing motivation behind the making of the paintings was fun. That motivation naturally lent itself to a work environment rooted in playful camaraderie. Culkin—who goes by the name “Mack”—explains the open-ended process of beginning a painting: “We would take two or three words—‘disco’…’luau’…’Hellraiser’—and we’d all just kind of giggle about that. ‘Alright, let’s do it.’ We have no idea really what it’s going to look like, or what our grand vision is, but we would have a good old laugh and just go for it. And I think the results speak for themselves in a certain kind of way.”
Hellraiser Disco Luau; 5′ 6 1/2″ X 5′ 5 1/2″; acrylic, mixed media on canvas. Photo by Dima Dubson.
The collaborative dynamic at work, while much more common in music, is rare in visual art. “Certainly we all have different techniques but we found it fun to paint together at the same time, explains Green. “Just literally three people standing in front of the canvas with paintbrushes and painting at the same time.” Perhaps this distinctive process can be linked to the brotherly bond between the artists. “The connection I feel with them is pretty extraordinary,” says Goodshank. “It’s lovely to get together with them all the time.”
The show is populated with canvases wrought with wild colors ranging from bright quasi-fluorescents to darker, muddier hues; the style of shapes and brushstrokes vary with each new figure in the painting. Most of the works either incorporate multimedia collage or strongly hint at it. In “Hellraiser Disco Luau,” the cartoon-inspired pig and mouse do the hula near a grass-skirt-wearing Pinhead and a highly abstract , serpentine version of Garfield—all underneath a glittering disco ball, ocean-side. While this hyperactive melange of pop culture references and visual eye candy can be dizzying at first glance, a cohesiveness emerges amidst the seeming nonsensical and disparate elements. “I think we took a slant with it where there were really no mistakes,” says Mack. “There was nothing wrong with a piece. I might have painted that corner differently than him, but it looks right. There are no mistakes in a show like this.”
Even with all the thematic non sequiturs and “low brow” imagery—and perhaps because of it—Three Men and a Baby seem acutely aware of their distinct interplay with highbrow art and the implications of that relationship. Mack elaborates:
You go to the Met or something like that, and you see some of the paintings from the Renaissance era. A lot of those were probably the most technically proficient paintings in the entire museum. However, when you go to the Modern wing, they might not be as technically proficient, might not have as much skill—but those are the kind of things you want on your wall. Well, what do we want to put on our wall? It’s not necessarily about technique, it’s more about the ideas. It’s more about just what you want to look at.
Green has a decidedly more tongue-in-cheek perspective. “We didn’t have a lot to compare it to,” he says of 3MB. “We didn’t feel like we were competing with other three-men collaborative painting groups.”
The ideas in Leisure Inferno are zany, sometimes edgy, but brimming with satirical affection. “RBI” portrays a baseball game in which Luigi pitches a fireball to former New York Yankee Don Mattingly. Elsewhere, Mario wanders through a gloomy expressionist landscape as Jean-Michel Basquiat and JonBenét Ramsay look on from distant perches in “Jean Benet Basquiat.”
Jean Benet Basquiat; 24″ X 30″; Oil stick, acrylic on canvas. Photo by Lippe.
In “Cast of Seinfeld,” Jerry and Kramer stand on the set of “Wheel of Fortune” as they serve as nude models for the artists He-Man and Orko (Masters of the Universe). While these fabricated scenes are undoubtedly bizarre, there was an intriguing layer of reality that only added to the surreality. “There was some awareness that even Mack could be in a Leisure Inferno painting, you know?” says Green. “I think that is interesting.”
Cast of Seinfeld; Oil stick, acrylic on canvas; 6’ X 5’. Photo by Lippe.
The first manifestation of what would become the 3MB Collective goes back to 2010, during the making of Green’s independently made feature-length film The Wrong Ferrari. Shot entire on an iPhone, the movie starred both Green and Culkin, with Goodshank shooting much of the film; all three collaborated on the set designs. Featuring ample amounts of provocation and pop culture, thoughtfulness and blistering self-awareness, the film was later made available for free online. “[Leisure Inferno] was more of a holdover from making the film…And it was just like, ‘Why don’t we try to focus that into a group art show?” Culkin explains. “ ‘Why don’t we keep this momentum up, [this] creativity?’ Next thing you know we’re doing Leisure Inferno.”
For Culkin, Goodshank, and Green alike, this art collective debut marks several milestones in their respective careers. Goodshank, a skilled draughtsman who had previously worked primarily with pen and ink, was new to the medium of painting prior to the collaboration. “I find that working with Mack and Adam, they’re constantly inspiring me and encouraging me,” says Goodshank of his foray into painting. For Green—a voracious painter who has had two solo shows this year alone—Leisure Inferno represents his first official group exhibition. The exhibition at Le Poisson Rouge will be Culkin’s public debut as visual artist. Green seems to sense an adventurous, risk-taking spirit inherent in the collective’s work. “ I do think that that attitude of just doing something for fun benefited the show a lot,” says Green. “It allowed us to be prolific and to work without fear.”
The Leisure Inferno exhibition at LPR continues through December 15, 2012.
Dogs Playing Poker; Vinyl paint, mixed media on vinyl; 5’ ½” 7’ ¼”. Photo by Guy Eppel.
No Sleep ‘Till Berlin: Toby Goodshank and the Waking Dream of Truth Jump Fall (EXCLUSIVE–VIDEO PREMIERE)
A Post-Post-Rock Exclusive! The video premiere of “The Journey Back Down Jump Truth Mountain,” directed by Nathan Gulick, from Toby Goodshank’s 2011 album Truth Jump Fall. This premiere and subsequent review of Truth Jump Fall is the first in an in-depth series of three articles about the life, music, and visual art of Goodshank–a “TG Triptych,” essentially.
After amassing a more-than-substantial solo discography of over 15 albums (not to mention numerous other collaborations), in October 2011 singer-songwriter/NYC anti-folk mainstay Toby Goodshank released what would be his last solo record stateside before his forthcoming move to Berlin. At eight songs, this collection entitled Truth Jump Fall combines the length of an EP with the thoughtfulness and serious intent of a full-length.
The genesis of the album is an intriguing one. After recurring nightmares related to the passing of his father a few years ago had subsided, Goodshank began to have a series of vivid dreams instead, from which Truth Jump Fall would emerge. Rather than dreaming narrative scenes, the artist envisioned melodies, lyrics, and instrumental passages. One gets the sense that Goodshank had no other choice but to sing these songs and document them for the world at large.
The video for Goodshank’s “The Journey Back Down Truth Jump Mountain”–directed by Nathan Gulick, with costume design by Liz Abbot–is a narrative snapshot of a young social outlier making her way down Hollywood Boulevard, an area Gulick refers to as “like a seedy shopping mall.” “Toby mentioned to me that a lot of the writing of the album came from dream imagery so I wanted it to be dream-like, nightmare-ish [sic] really,” explains Gulick. “The back story is of someone that maybe got a little bit of a break, overplayed it and alienated her friends, moved to LA and then blew it, and ended up lost on Hollywood Blvd.”
In casting the video’s protagonist, Gulick explains the choice of Pepper Bridge:
We had a small casting session and found a couple actresses that looked cool but not rough and vulnerable like Pep. They had to be able to rock the Elvis shades (which were for a long time a Goodshank staple) without looking too ‘rockstar’ – they had to be more like they were a pose or a shield.
Pepper Bridge’s character is estranged from the world in which she finds herself, yet is undeterred by her troubled presence in it. She comes across as an extension of the characters that steadfastly trudge through Goodshank’s songs–the real-life embodiment of the experiences and feelings expressed in the music.
Produced, arranged, engineered, and mixed by Jack Dishel—a former bandmate with Goodshank in The Moldy Peaches—the album Truth Jump Fall is a group of tightly coiled, highly personal songs that showcase a solo artist brimming with maturity. There is a sweet vulnerability throughout, tempered with an unwavering resolve lying just under the surface. As with all Goodshank songs, the songwriter’s voice is the nucleus around which the other musical parts move. An endearing nasal tone that hints at The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy intertwines seamlessly with the melodic phrasing and corporeal lyrical sensibility of Jeff Mangum (formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel). The resulting alchemy yields a deceptive musical concoction with a rather paradoxical taste: an ethereal, nonthreatening mouth-feel at first sip, it finishes with raw earthiness. It’s all very bittersweet, and it works. A perfect encapsulation of this signature quality of the Toby Goodshank persona can be found in the opening lines of the album closer “My Reflection”:
Horrible companion, you mean to do me harm/Disenfranchised concubine, catch a bullet scar/ Within you, jacked off to the desert sand/ We’re both failures clutching ruined plans
Goodshank’s world is populated with weathered yet beautiful souls—his among them—mangled in their circumstance; but the artist’s take always avoids judgement. He is reverentially honest in his insightful takes on the fragile human psyche and its simultaneously conflicting emotional states, a fact evidenced even in song titles such as “Baby I Feel Like Just Got Cut in Half.” As stated in the incisive “Prelude to Fire,” an album highlight, the prevailing philosophy of the album seems to be “When truth collides with revisionist attitudes, we will not place blame, we will seek a higher plane.”
Given the melancholic focus of the singer’s words, this higher plane is in part only achievable through the potency of Goodshank’s musical accompaniment, with its carefully crafted combination of propellant power-chord riffs, and folksy “comfort food” finger-picking—which possess a kind of mystical life-affirming power of their own. In this way, what otherwise could have been pessimistic songcraft dominated by its indebtedness to the lyrical legacies of post-punk and grunge instead evinces a sobering hope without detracting from unwavering emotional realities.
The vitality of Jack Dishel’s contribution to the record can’t be overstated: he provides the bulk of the additional instrumentation with understated atmospherics and economical, somehow intimate arrangements that closely hug the minimalist, lo-fi songwriting of aesthetic of Goodshank.
Truth Jump Fall can be found at Toby Goodshank’s Bandcamp site.
Basia Bulat: Remembering to Us Our Songs
When Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat takes the stage each night in support of the headlining folk rock band Bowerbirds, she does so without a setlist. This seems rather akin to a trapeze artist performing without the aid of a net. It also reveals an unselfish attitude toward the songs themselves, a conceit that the songs are what ultimately compel the artist’s performance to do what it does, and that the artist can choose to embrace or reject the inherent danger in that vulnerable, “netless” feat.
At a recent Thursday evening concert at The Tralf in Buffalo, N.Y., there was an earnest patience, an indefatigable generosity running throughout her performance. Owning a voice that sounds as if it’s been burnished by the glowing sunrise, she combines youthful exuberance with a knowing gravitas. The multi-instrumentalist’s songs often dwell on memory, specifically the recollection that we’re ultimately beholden to the people and things that hold our hearts captive. “Snakes and Ladders,” the heart-rending but uptempo ballad that arrived early in the set, reinforced this lyrical theme with Bulat’s stirring yet simply stated admission: “I love the way we come undone.” At the heart of the set was “Gold Rush,” a melancholy and restlessly eager song in which the narrator conveys the loss of a loved one who leaves in an ultimately vain search for an unspecified treasure.
In speaking with Bulat prior to the evening’s concert, it seemed that telling tragic stories through song was inexorable, and that there was something inherently beautiful about that reality. She recalled a story she was once told about the First Nations of Canada:
When the Klondike Gold Rush began, one of the tribal leaders at the time went across the river down however many kilometers away to a related tribe—not the same tribe, neighbors pretty much—and said, ‘Here are our songs and dances. Remember them, pass them down to your people because we’re gonna forget our songs. And when we’re ready, teach them back to us’….[the song] ‘Gold Rush’ is more about not forgetting a story even though it’s not the nicest story, even though maybe it’s about greed, and it’s about your own greed, possibly.
Throughout her music, Bulat maintains an awareness about the existence of selfishness embedded in one’s love for another. Her songs unfurl all the complications of love and then repackage them in a three or four-minute span. For all its mystery, an explanation is simple and forthcoming. “There are certain things that I can only express in a song,” she says. “I can’t really say it any other way.”
Bulat doesn’t shy away from the things that only others can express in song either. In her cover of the indie cult classic “True Love Will Find You in the End,” the plaintive simplicity of songwriter Daniel Johnston’s original remains intact. But whereas Johnston sounds detached—as if reinforcing someone else’s hope while implicitly abandoning his own—Bulat imbues the song with warmth it was previously lacking. In talking about her attraction to a particular song or artist, she invokes a fittingly musical analogy.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m just this string, and when two strings are in tune, they kind of vibrate in a different way than when they’re out of tune,” she explains. “Sometimes I feel like I pick whatever I’m most attuned to.”
Basia Bulat’s current North American tour, in support of Bowerbirds, concludes with a show at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Saturday, June 23. Visit the Music Hall of Williamsburg website for more information.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival and the Invisible Architecture of Musical Taste
As I left the Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival on its closing night, Saturday, May 5, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had wasted so much time—not at the festival itself, but long before.
I had grown up listening to music oblivious to the domineering constructs of ubiquitous genre definition, the invisible architecture of non-substantive taste. I’m not sure which attitude was worse—contented ignorance of how the conventions of constant classification had put unnecessary limits on my musical discoveries, or my more recent belief that the use of genre labels to separate real/perceived differences in music was a necessary evil.
Guitarist Bryce Dessner performs with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus; photo by Mike Benigno, courtesy of BAM.
Upon experiencing Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,however— the New York City festival that Bryce Dessner and Aaron Dessner of the band The National were commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to curate—genre distinctions emerged more grossly superficial than ever before.
Conceptually, the approach of the brothers Dessner seemed straight-forward and unadorned—invite artists and musicians whom they liked and respected to perform. The performances throughout the three-day festival, which began on Friday, May 3, were distributed among three separate performance spaces at BAM: the intimate Rose Cinemas, which hosted both musical sets and the screenings of nine short films by Bill Morrison, Matthew Ritchie, and others; the versatile BAMCafé, the site of performances by a truly eclectic mix of musicians—the Jack Quartet, Buke and Gase, yMusic, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Oneohtrix Point Never among them; and the Howard Gilman Opera House, which functioned as a “main stage” for such artists as So Percussion, The Antlers, Tyondai Braxton, St. Vincent, My Brightest Diamond, and Beirut.
Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond; photo by Mike Benigno, courtesy of BAM.
Above all, the genius of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry was in the logistics. The performances in each of the three venues overlapped with one another, with festival patrons moving freely from one space to the other. By design, one could catch the beginning 15 to 30 minutes of the film screenings, catch the middle of an Opera House performance, and then head upstairs to the café for the open bar and the end of another set.
The formality that audiences may have come to expect at performances by composer Judd Greenstein and The Yehudim, violist Nadia Sirota, the NOW Ensemble, and others was jettisoned. And by having three simultaneous options at any given time, the experience of the listener/viewer felt varied and organic. Yet because all of the scheduled performances are staggered, as opposed to scheduling acts during approximately the same block of times, the festivalgoer had more genuine choices with which to craft an individual experience of musical discovery. Instead of the masses herding themselves from one stage to the next at the pre-appointed time, it seemed impossible that any two people had the exact same experience.
Apart from Bryce Dessner’s annual MusicNOW Festival in Cincinnati, the Ecstatic Music Festival, established in 2011 by the above mentioned Judd Greenstein, is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’s most immediate and relevant predecessor. The creative circles of both Ecstatic and Brooklyn Ferry are essentially concentric; several artists, including My Brightest Diamond, So Percussion, Buke and Gase, yMusic, Missy Mazzoli and Victoire, Jherek Bischoff, and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire have contributed to both festivals.
Arone Dyer, left, and Aron Sanchez of Buke and Gase; photo by Rebecca Greenfield, courtesy of BAM.
Such artists are inherently uninhibited by the dichotomy of vernacular versus formal, to which I had subconsciously adhered. And both festivals are excellent environments in which to be stylistically unencumbered.
But while each festival begins with the premise “Let’s have makers of great music all play on one bill,” the central conceits that Ecstatic and Brooklyn Ferry each project to their audiences differ in telling ways. The qualitative difference lies not in the music itself, but in the way the music is presented.
The Ecstatic Music Festival has from its inception clearly delineated which artist was more “classical” and which was more colloquial in each of its collaborative performances: So Percussion with Dan Deacon, Anonymous 4 with The Mountain Goats, composer Rhys Chatham with Oneida, etc.
But the mere acknowledgment of these genre distinctions lend them a validity that I sense is unintended. The result seems to be a contradictory concession of sorts that says using genre distinctions are vital to explaining why genre distinctions are unnecessary. The paradox is typified in the festival website’s heralding of “contemporary ‘post-classical’ music.” If labels were truly inconsequential and ultimately irrelevant, there would be no reason to employ them in the setup. Somehow, it undercuts the authenticity and dynamism of Ecstatic, and credence is given to the invisible yet still perceptible wall between classical and non-classical.
From left to right, Adam Swilinski, Jason Treuting, and Josh Quillen of So Percussion, photo by Rebecca Greenfield, courtesy of BAM.
The Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival seeks to showcase the aforementioned borough’s music scene , but makes no effort to address genre at all. This approach suggests a way toward ensuring that the once obtrusive architectural eyesores of musical labels are not merely just invisible, but altogether intangible.
