33 rebellions per minute
"No guarantee that I won't get restless"
October 23, 2000
Ida
I'm writing a concert review because I went with friends to see a very impressive concert by two bands, Ida and Low, that I knew a combined total of three songs by (Ida's "Poor Dumb Bird" and "Turn Me On", Low's "Mom Says"), and because while I certainly intend to own at least one CD by each band fairly soon, I don't yet. It is not clear, of course, that I will like the albums in the same way I liked the concerts. People who attend clubs a lot often complain that an album doesn't capture the intensity or the magic of the band's live performance, and from sheer musical terms I tend to be very much a skeptic: studio soundsystems have huge advantages over bars or even, in this case, auditoriums, plus I tend to be in favor of the right to go back and edit. But of course, a live concert offers something an album doesn't: a chance to watch the human beings who created the music provide a context for it. Trying to preserve this context in memory for later use doesn't always help -- My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, for example, _really_ depend on smoke machines, their own virile bodies, unhealthy decibels, stunts, and the company of 700 fans who'd spent 2800 combined man-hours on their spectacular haircuts. Nonetheless, here, for whatever future use can be gleaned, are what I now know of Ida and Low.
Both bands, let us be clear, are just the sorts of bands one would expect to be watching from comfortable movie-theatre chairs. Ida are a seven-piece, and they filed onstage with the charisma and seating arrangements of a junior high school orchestra. The double-bassist and the violinist sat right down in folding chairs in back for everyone else to clamber over, and the first notes of music awaited the seating of Karla Schikele and Elizabeth Mitchell behind their electric pianos, both holding what may well have been acoustic guitars. Mitchell is pretty and tall and fragile-looking with long wavy blond hair, looking like someone who'd recite Sylvia Plath poetry with eyes wide; Schikele, brunette and compact and also pretty, has more of a drama-club (but not melodrama-club) air. Daniel Littleton, on guitar, looks like Jakob Dylan scaled to Billy Corgan's shape and dimensions, and when playing has many of Jakob's earnest-to-pained mannerisms and facial tics. The double-bassist is male, tall, skinny, dark-haired, bespectacled, and hopelessly geeky-looking, a body type I approve of for self-centered reasons; the drummer and the guy who wanders around doing miscellaneous instruments and sound engineering both have unfashionable-looking, trim-but-scruffy facial hair, which I similarly applaud. The violinist I notice later. (Ida's website is giving me too much hassle to look the names up properly; I apologize).
They look around at each other, a throat or two is cleared, and the string players and synth-player Mitchell start playing eighth-notes, as does one of the hairy guys on mouth accordian. The same minor key eighth-note, over and over, intensely, a hypnotic drone. Littleton flicks a guitar string on a different note and watches it reverberate; then he flicks another note. He's playing maybe 1/10 as loud as the (quiet, chamber-music) drone, but an eye can be caught by the sudden darting of an insect, too, if the giant threshing machine covering the rest of the field of view hasn't done anything but thresh for a while. Littleton's melody -- it slowly becomes a melody -- is, at any rate, far prettier than an insect. So is Schikele's piano, when it joins, a note at a time; and soon Littleton is singing, in the hesitant Midwestern tenor Jakob Dylan conceivably used back when he was afraid his voice would suddenly crack. The drone itself shifts a bit, intensifying and splitting, but the eighth-notes don't leave; the song shapes itself more by wind resistance than by verse or chorus. Now I notice the violinist: she is, for one thing, beautiful, poised and delicate and precisely built, much like Olivia Williams (the kintergarden teacher in Rushmore) and with a similarly tomboy haircut. But she's also engaged in a remarkable exercise in self-restraint, perching her body and arcing her arms so as to let her most precisely saw the same tiny motion 1000 times in a row. Mitchell edges in for a harmony, her country-ish alto voice (Emmylou Harris comes to mind, but less consoling and more inquisitive) drawn to held, textural notes. At some point the song seems to be over, so the band winds it quickly down. The members get up and look at each other. The double-bassist and mouth-accordianist drop behind the stage.
Thus invisible, they are ready to futz with knobs. So is Mitchell, and I might be missing some sources of cacaphony. The second song is similarly cautious in its development, but the vocal harmonies are louder and more central, and one reason for this is the newer difficulty of being heard. This is a _good_ thing: these are interesting noises, noises for abstract machines that one might design for NEA grants in a world where the notion of machines actually shaping things, destroying and reconstituting, had never occurred to anyone. The intensity fades in and out, and the ending is again prompt. Song three, with one of the behind-stage guys returning and a bit of seating reshufflement, is gentler, but also more songlike in its meditation. Ida remind me of Hum, if you remember their alt-rock singles (the "she said she missed the train to Mars" one, the "a love song for everyone I know" one), but Hum with chamber strings and a haunting female voice (she _sounds_ like a Plath fan too....).
Karla Schikele takes the lead on piece four: it's her song, her Broadway-earnest voice, her blocky piano playing, like she's learned that she'll never be able to co-ordinate more than six of her ten fingers and four is better, so she writes the song to use that. The next piece I recall, though, is the one (the sixth song?) that broke the spell for a moment. Karla again was singing a vocal line, over band acoustic guitars this time, that hesitantly sung "Down, down, down" in notes that followed the word's cue, and all I could think was "Where have I heard this?". I placed it as Regina Lund's haunting "By This River", which made no sense (Ida covering a nine-month-old song by a Swedish TV star?), but a little research identifies Regina as having covered a Brian Eno song. At any rate, having heard the song as fragile and electronic, I wasn't ready to hear Ida do it in an atypically straight, crooned version (especially since Eno's own voice, slow and seemingly doubled through a bit of digital delay, and his synth-woodwinds seem to take the song with more of Ida's seriousness than Ida do). Perhaps I'd feel completely different if everyone knew who Lund was; did it bother me to hear Mono Puff cover a Cars song in concert? No. Of course, "Just What I Needed" isn't supposed to be "haunting". Ah well...
Another of the noisy pieces regained my interest for good, and then they performed "Turn Me On", a song I had been under the mixtape-based impression I didn't much like, an impression which died the moment I caught myself singing quietly along and air-drumming, my right hand taking the quarter-notes and my left hand filling in the intricate cymbal triplets. Daniel also started talking to the audience as well as to his bandmates, softly muttering "Hey, let's make some noise here" to which one audience person yelped an absurd "Whoooo!". Daniel smiled and an erratic wave of individual "Whoooo!"s flowed among the audience. Daniel pulled the microphone to him and mumbled "Thanks, Mom".
Ida are not the sort of music I usually listen to; even in quiet music I have a bias towards verse-chorus songs over evolving ones, though a lot less of a bias than before Veda Hille and Mecca Normal came into my life. Ida's vocals are lovely, but civil and polite and arguably stand-offish. The odd way their songs meander, intensify, relax, and stop could be hard to follow on disc. But you see, I got to watch this music being made by human beings. Ida are an earnest band in presentation; they are pretty clearly _not_ starting and stopping at random. They coordinate, they talk, they miscoordinate and pause and grin and figure things out right. To hear unearthly machine noises, be watching the humans making them, and _still_ not be able to tell who or how, that's impressive. To hear drones and watch people who care enough about the drones to turn themselves into little clockwork-driven figurines just to make the drones happen, that's to realize the drones matter. I do like the music: pretty and flowing and sad and intense and just a little bit off. It's good to know it's supposed to be that way.
Low
The Low concert, on the other hand, was an example of how a layer of expectation can make it impossible to know what one might've experienced withOUT expectation. What I was told to expect, with Low, was a demonstration of human immobility: three human beings collectively making music, good music, while showing less combined energy than a typical senior citizen on intravenous feeding. And maybe in 1997, when glenn (one of my co-attenders) saw them and reported back, that was how Low appeared; I don't know. Low are a trio, and certainly Mimi Parker, the drummer, stands remarkably still except for her arms, which, on the first song, did indeed invest fewer calories into the cymbal brushstrokes than I would invest in, say, rubbing my hands for warmth because my cheapskate roommates refuse to turn the heat above 60 and I live in the northwest room of the house, with big windows for exposure. But Zak Sally, the bassist, who does indeed play with his back 3/4 turned to the audience, shimmies back and forth in time to what he plays, loose-kneed and seemingly content. And Alan Sparhawk, on guitar, at least stretches his muscles from time to time. Yes, he looks like Nick, the curly-haired drummer from Freaks and Geeks, if Nick's only facial expressions were the ones he uses when his shyness and disappointment are busy knocking his bravado down for a few seconds; and yes, on the 8th song, Alan looks directly at the audience, and I decide that from straight-on he really doesn't look like Nick at all, but then he turns and shows left profile again for the rest of the night and the resemblance returns. So they're shy -- but a small part of my mind that could've been helping watch a concert was busy muttering "THIS you call a freak show?!?".
The songs are certainly small and spare ones, sounding very much like Ida reduced to a three-piece. It's a less empty sound, to be sure, than the quiet songs on Veda Hille or Priya Thomas albums or the solo bits of EXILE IN GUYVILLE, because Ida and Low guitars do reverberate and fill decent shares of the sound spectrum, but they're far from rock. Same minor keys, same harmony between fragile guy and stronger girl alto, same tendency for songs to ebb and flow and abruptly fade to end, less in Low songs that's technically happening. More showmanship than Ida, oddly, though still of a mumbled sort: Alan started the set promising "this a cover, been done before a little band out of Los Angeles, called Rage Against The Machine: this piece is 'Mike Check'", at which point the members tested their microphones and Mimi requested a huge low-end roll-off. A few songs in Alan smiled and said "We're going to do some new stuff. You seem like a cool audience. You probably won't yell out 'Hey. You didn't play "Words"'". (Although radio-played or not, Low and Ida did sell out the theatre). They did a real cover, of the Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl", which everyone in the audience made happy noises at the start of, only I didn't know the song and found my mind hopelessly analyzing what I could tell was an old chestnut into time-misplaced component parts (TMBG's "Extra Savoir-Faire" transformed with the urgent pathos and guitar triplets of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts", kind of). Even I grinned, though, when Zak started singing softly along, far from a microphone, and we could hear him fine.
I got the impression, from some bits of audience interaction and band speech, that glenn was _not_ wrong about their 1997 presentation: that the band wasn't used to being this relaxed in public. Maybe they had just as much fun being motionless in the olden days -- Cyndy related a story of seeing them play in a loud club, where one of the audience members told another member "Shut up!" and Alan himself answered "But we're playing as quietly as we can". But I don't know. "Mom Says", an old song of theirs, is a fairly panicked and unnerving song; they didn't play it this time. Low are Mormons, ones who recently released an album of original Christmas songs, and the lyrics I made out tended to be comforting. They're playing a tour with a band they're friends and musical kindred spirits with, and they were even at tour's end, giving us a special guest appearance, some join Low/Ida perfomances near the end.
If I don't buy a Low album after all, here's the logic: that when Ida joined Low on stage adding chamber
strings, I liked that song better. And when Low played next a song involving guitar distortion and odd
noises (and chamber strings), I liked that even better. My body responded to the extra layers of churning;
my toes tapped harder and busier rhythms, I leaned forward and ruffled my fingers more complexly. Maybe my body was right.
But I'll tell you this much: I'm an abnormally active listener to music, physically, and Alan and Zak, for
all their calm, were moving more than I was. My head didn't shift much, and my eyes always rolled in
compensation to stay locked on the stage. Mimi hit her drums hard on a few songs, but glenn, he didn't
move more than most I.V. patients; nor did anyone seem to. For an hour and a half, music mostly
consisted of a few ringing guitar notes, a few taps and thuds of drum, bass lines that creaked along almost
inaudibly, and long harmonized vocal notes. I noticed the possibilities of having more _when that more
appeared_, but I didn't see anyone, even me, distracted by its absence. Maybe that's why Low were able to
relax out of statue-hood. If motion is not strictly required by their songs, so be it.
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