Night at the Improv

I'll start with apologies. Apologies for not updating this as regularly as Fern and Sam, but more than our dearly missed foil, Vertical Phil. Why you may ask? It's not that complicated. Nothing happened in this Elliott Brother's life in the month of August. So why post the banality? My days/mood have been predicated by the constant flux of the Cincinnati Reds and their struggles to find the post-season. If you wanted to get a hold of me, you could probably find me in front of a radio, with a Molson in my hand.

Last weekend was when things finally started to get interesting. My friend Rodrigo, of the famed Uruguayan punk band 8, decided to visit for the final Nash show and the explosive 3rd Annual Slum-B-Q. Thank your local webmaster/wizard Bob Miller the next five times you see him. This man has a instinctual knack for pulling off the impossible. The Nash can now die happy.

Anyways, the highlight for Ro, was seeing Thurston Moore. And not the heroic Thurston Moore perched in front of thousands during Monday's Sonic Youth show (though we saw that Mr. Moore as well), but the lanky, aloof, king dork, Thurston Moore who made a surprise performance at Cafe Bourbon St. the Sunday before.

But this night was about more than, eh, Moore. The intimate audience was privy to a host of improv stalwarts, thus making Columbus a burgeoning cultural crossroads of all things fringy, noisy, and off-kilter.

We walked in on the Graveyards set, a duo of cello and drums, that tonight featured violin from the Burning Star Core's C. Spencer Yeh. At first I was underwhelmed, itching for the marquee, but was soon engulfed in their string torture. Yes this was improv, bonified free music, each of the trio bouncing off of each other's damaged plucks and bows. Graveyards started skeletal, then grew into the decomposed remnants of some eerie Bernard Herrmann score, torn to shreds and laid to waste in a garbage disposal of soft teeth.

Next was Lambsbread, whom I've heralded previouly in this here blog. They tackled more of the same electrified cacophony that I've seen in the past. If they could only harness some semblance of rhythm, some structure that gives each player a higher sense of purpose, they might just rule the world. In the waning minutes of thier set, there was however a cohesion of chords, even miniscule pauses in between full-blown riffs, a signal that for once they were all teetering on the same plane. This is hope. This is power.

Times New Viking? Well, they were the only act to play actual songs, with actual vocals with actual lyrics. So they don't fit, right? Puzzling why they hang with such a crowd. Then it dawned on me, on any given night Jared Phillips guitar caterwaul may be the closest thing to improv in the room, only refined and magnified. Pavement meet Blue Cheer. Blue Cheer meet Swell Maps. And on and on the links in the chain begin to form. Songs are merely a sidebar.

All this talk about the inner-chamber of Bourbon Street being surreal this night is lost on me. Even with Thurston sulking around, clad in a silver-plated cassette chain, or Kim Gordon dressing like a lot-lizard twenty years younger, the bar seemed as normal as could be. In fact, they fit in just fine, almost like they were regulars.

And the other talk about being dissapointed by Thurston Moore's brief noise burst is also lost on me. Did you expect the guy to play acoustic versions of "Silver Rocket" and "Sister"?

If you ask me, he was only here to accent Leslie Keefer's primal loops and electronically altered musique concrete. The Athen's artist held her own on the stage, equipped with a chaos pad, a 12-track mixer, her calirvoyant voice, and pedals of varying shades. Most of the set, she was at war with herself, channeling black sludge throbs vs. angel/demon echoed screams. Thurston was her opposite, the organic tone farmer, sawing through that cement with piercing shards he produced from his own pile of feedback wreckage. Though he would occasionally come to fore wildly gesticulating up and down the neck of his guitar (the closest thing to Sonic Youth all night), he spent most of the time nuturing the fuzz with a magnetic cyllinder that found its way to the back of his amp and into archaic circuitry. In the noise heirarchy, Thurston really is King, a sculptor of sound, he can honestly do no wrong.