Bang On A Can

I hadn't attended any of the Bang on a Can shows at Mass MoCA before. They sounded interesting in principle, but it was always, like, OK there's a music piece about railroads; it's got a banjo, a clarinet, a cello, two harmonicas, a pile of bones, and a kazoo. Could be great? Could be excruciating? Who knows?

But now I've got friends in high places, or at least with access to employee comp tickets, close enough; and oh look there's Jim Jarmusch on the program, he's cool -- Down By Law, that one episode of Fishing with John, what the heck let's try it! Ended up bouncing hard off the Jim Jarmusch piece, I just wasn't connecting with the whole improvised-echoey-guitar-feedback-use-ALL-the-effects-pedals thing.

But the piece that opened the night -- Julia Wolfe's Steel Hammer -- was honestagawd the most visceral, gutwrenchingly ecstatic all-consuming experience I've ever had in a theater or with clothes on. (You can quote me on that, Mass MOCA marketing department. That one's on me).

Three vocalists doing a sort of variegated philip glass / robert ashley thing but playing around with this just _lickable_ dissonance, vocalized beat frequencies without ever quite going atonal, a piano played like a harp and a clarinet played like a chinook and a five-string banjo played like a four-string banjo and one guy carefully hammering out a steady 13:4 beat on a chunk of metal over the top of it all. Listing out the ingredients isn't really explaining it much, sorry, but the combination hit me exactly where I live.

Now, admittedly I was primed for it: often in the week or two after Spiritfire that trance state is still really accessible and close to the surface. This music was tickling a lot of the same signals I tune into at the fire circle, and there were a few times I was sitting there feeling that shiver try to climb its way up my legs into my brain and trying to think through ok, if I pop now, how am I going to explain to these people that it's not a seizure and I'm not high, I'm just really into the muuuusic, y'know?

So, yeah. Pretty good stuff. Recommended. Plus I can now say I've walked out on Jim Jarmusch. Added bonus