Lydia then Outsound
improv music lovers gather for Lunch
First this … Correction: In an earlier story on The Non-Writer called “The Venues: Zebulon, Los Angeles” I mentioned an incident involving Giorgio Gomelsky that I said happened at the club Zebulon in Brooklyn before the club moved to LA. While the incident did happen, it did not happen at Zebulon Brooklyn or LA. The Non-Writer regrets the error.
Every so often I attend a gig that brings together a bunch of old friends that have been involved in the improvised music scene in the Bay Area for decades. This happened recently at The Ivy Room in Albany (near Berkeley) where No Wave icon Lydia Lunch was performing spoken word with her improv group called Murderous...Again. The two opening acts featured long-time Bay Area improvisers William Winant and Myles Boisen, both of whose time in the scene predates my own. Back in the day, it was my pleasure to recruit both of these guys, along with a motley cast of other characters, to stage what I believe is still the only “Battle of the Improv Bands” to ever take place in San Francisco. I still have the trophy created by the late, great improviser and instrument builder Tom Nunn. Alas, my vision for the Stanley Cup of Improv is still waiting for season 2.
If you’ve been following The Non-Writer, you know that I’ve interviewed many No Wave artists who are connected in some way to my research on music producer Giorgio Gomelsky. Back in 1978, Gomelsky and Brian Eno were trolling the bowels of NYC in search of the next new thing. Eno had already latched onto The Talking Heads, while Gomelsky was grooming a young Bill Laswell. Before 1978 was over, Gomelsky would stage his 12+ hour long Zu Manifestival, featuring many No Wave bands in the first half of the day-long event. And Eno would release the album No New York, showcasing four No Wave bands, including Teenage Jesus and the Jerks featuring Lydia Lunch.
I had a chance to meet Lydia briefly about a year ago when she brought her band Retrovirus to San Francisco. This band did a ripping set of heavy rock that was not what I was expecting. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was much better. In fact it was fantastic. I’d see them again in a heartbeat. As I was milling about chatting with folks after the show, Lydia happened to walk by, so I asked her, “Lydia, do you know who Giorgio Gomelsky was?” Answer: “No.” I thanked her and went back to my milling about.
In all of my research on Gomelsky I have yet to find any substantial contact between him and Eno. It’s as if they existed in parallel no wave universes that never intersected. To date I have only found one person from the 1978 No Wave scene who witnessed Gomelsky and Eno in the same room. That would be Howard Rodman from the band Made In USA. You can hear his account in my previous story “Howard Rodman Interview: sees Eno ejected from venue prior to gig”.
More recently, back at The Ivy Room, the place was filling up to see Lydia with her improv band featuring Tim Dahl and Matt Nelson. Tim plays electric bass in this band and Retrovirus. Matt plays sax run through multiple effects boxes.
Before things got started, the dominant presence on stage was a giant gong facing the audience. Willy Winant took a seat in front of the gong with his back to the audience. From the back of the room, all I could see were his arms moving ever so slowly at first with almost no sound coming from the stage. There was a long slow build up as his arms started moving more and more until the sound of the gong was so loud it filled up the space so completely that I swear I could see its density. Or maybe my glasses cracked.
Next up was Myles Boisen's KLANG!!, a trio featuring Myles on electric guitar, Safa Shokrai on upright bass, and Jordan Glen on drums. I hadn’t seen Myles get noisy in quite some time, so I was really looking forward to this set. They did not disappoint. I’m familiar with Jordan from his work in the Fred Frith Trio (see my story “Jordan Glenn & Jason Hoopes talk Fred Frith Trio: are they becoming a power trio?”). I was not familiar with Safa but he got my attention by taking the lead at just the right moments as Myles guided the improv with minimal hand cues. As promised, the guitar got noisy with volume levels that seemed tame by the standard just set with Willy’s gong. The power in KLANG!! is found not in the volume, but in the interaction between the players, which as with most seasoned improvisors can seem telepathic much of the time.
At the end of their set, Myles made an announcement about the upcoming Outsound New Music Summit, an annual event with multiple days of adventurous music that starts on Friday July 28. More on that in a minute.
It was time for Murderous...Again, with Lydia at one end of the stage behind two microphones and a music stand. Matt was in the middle and Tim was on the other end. No matter how loud this would get, I knew Lydia could handle it having seen her do so with seeming ease in Retrovirus. Decades of smoking may have altered the quality of her voice over the years, but it doesn’t seem to have diminished the power. Belting out lines of in-your-face poetry is clearly what she loves to do.
With one mic in each hand, and both mics still in their stands, she delivered most of her words through the clean sounding mic and would slide her mouth over to the reverby sounding mic when she wanted to emphasize something. In between stanzas, the boys would kick in the noise. This back and forth between words and noise would build up to a crescendo of extended improv between effects laden sax and equally distorted bass guitar. I had some brief flashbacks to my experiences with the noisiest sax duo in the world Borbetomagus. When I produced a live show with them a long time ago in San Francisco, they blew up my amp, complete with smoke! It was beautiful.
I don’t think Murderous...Again blew up anything, including my eardrums. I’m smarter than I was in my Borbeto days. I bring earplugs now.
You can get a taste of what this show was like in this video shot from the front row by Amanda Chaudhary of CatSynth TV: Lydia Lunch, KLANG!!, William Winant - Ivy Room (Albany, California)
This was a Sunday afternoon show, and now that it was over people were not in a hurry to leave. Catching up with old music friends is always fun. I especially enjoyed talking to Myles about what it was like for him to dive back into noisy improv again.
As I mentioned above, Myles reminded the crowd about the upcoming Outsound New Music Summit. He’s good at that. Myles Boisen has been performing and producing live shows for decades, as well as running his own studio where he has worked extensively with Fred Frith, including work on the highly regarded 2005 remastering of one of the greatest albums of all time “Killing Time” by Massacre.
So when I heard Myles from the stage, I thought to myself “of course, I need to let people know about this too”. This is another one of those “even if you don’t live in The Bay Area” you might want to check out the bands simply to discover some new music.
The Outsound New Music Summit has been an annual event since 2002. It’s been held at different venues over the years, but most of those that I’ve attended have been at the Capp Street Community Music Center in the Mission District of San Francisco. Of these numerous past performances, I’ll only mention one here, and that’s the 2018 Ralph Carney Memorial Ensemble. Ralph had touched so many people in the music scene and this was a truly beautiful event. You can find a list of all the past events at the Summit Archive page.
This year’s Outsound New Music Summit starts Friday July 28 and goes through Monday July 31 at a unique venue that I’ve been to once before called the Berkeley Finnish Hall. The space is beautiful, but when I first arrived I thought the cavernous size full of hard surfaces would make the room suck for sound, but I was wrong. Maybe there’s something magic about that curved ceiling, but the large ensembles I saw sounded great.
As in past years, these four days are packed with enough adventurous music to please any new music fan. I’d like to highlight the last day which features festival founder Rent Romus playing in what must be the most “rock” oriented improv band of the entire fest. They call it Actual/Actual and describe their music as improvised blues at the core with wide swath takes in swing, Latin music, fusion, doom rock, reggae, punk, and many other musical elements.
Closing out the festival is Myles Boisen's Ornettology. Unsurprisingly they use “Coleman's compositions as a springboard for re-interpretation, group improvisation, and free jazz exploration, always keeping a focus on Coleman's distinctive melodies.” Will Myles be getting noisy once again? I’m counting on it.