Collection of artists and bands who's photos taken by music photographer Tony Vasquez will be on display at the 411 Gallery in Columbus, Indiana on February 28, 2018.
I have new photography work featuring my concert photography on display at the 411 - A Project of the Arts & Entertainment District Gallery in downtown Columbus. The exhibit will be open to the public tomorrow from noon to four. Here is a Spotify playlist with the featured artists in the show.
I made a music video for On Fillmore (The duo of Glenn Kotche from Wilco and Darin Gray) for their song “Jornada Inteira” from their album “Happiness of Living” on Northern Spy Records.
On Fillmore continually creates dreamlike, imaginative worlds through its music, which pairs an airy lightness with a textured, suspenseful underbelly. This Chicago duo, made up of percussionist Glenn Kotche of Wilco and bassist Darin Gray from Tweedy, made a previous album Extended Vacation (Dead Oceans, 2009) that felt like an eerie abstraction. Happiness of Living, by contrast, sounds rooted in a specific place and time, like your favorite memory. Happiness of Living is a beautiful tapestry of sounds, which weaves in and out of different motifs, conversations, instrumentations, voices and ambient noises, capturing a live (alive) energy full of excitement and experimentation.
Laced into album’s opening notes, which come from a thumb piano, is a voice that calls out, “OK Pepe one more. … Are you rolling, Pepe?” These textures immediately set the listener into the hazy and playful world of the recording sessions from which this album was made. While the sounds are wonderfully recorded and may or may not be improvised, the album keeps you on your toes, all while retaining an intimate and collaborative atmosphere. Even though its elements sound tightly controlled and manicured, the energy is surprising, buoyant and free.
The track “Jornada Inteira” curves around and around in its melodies and sounds like a labyrinth. It starts with dialogue, then enters with lively percussion, which has a higher intensity than most of the other tracks, but thirty seconds into the groove, there’s a pause. The track switches again, adding in a bass line and a singer who sings in Portuguese. Just when you ease yourself into the poppier progression of the track, the bass line drops off and choral singing layers itself over the Portuguese singer. The bass line returns within a minute, but a soon after the poppy track dissipates, making room for a guttural humming and cooing over a gurgling percussion, which eventually returns back to the poppier bass line. The montage quality of the song creates a dense whirlwind of feeling, which straddles between the outward expression of joy and something more internal, full of solitude.
Like all memories retold and resculpted, Happiness of Living seems to warp around itself, and it feels like a living, breathing thing forever changing each time it is reimagined. This is best represented in the track “Bota Fogo,” which switches between two main motifs. Each time it switches between them, things are slightly changed and altered, with added noise or distortion, becoming sort of different but still kind of what you remember. It almost feels like switching between frequencies on a temperamental radio. Once you leave the original dial, you just can’t get it to sound the same as it was.
The final track, “Despidida Suspensa,” will remind you most of Extended Vacation. It’s the moodiest of the tracks and has a similar suspension to it. Sometimes the electronics sound like they’re under water, or they have the whirr of the wind within them, and the reverb on the vocals also emulates the wind. Of course, around the two minute mark, new instruments and sounds enter, becoming gradually louder. It’s the calm before the storm, the anticipatory, slightly anxious moment just before the memory fades and plops you back into reality.
I deserve whatever sort of karmic retribution I receive for neglecting to getting to Glenn Kotche’s best band (yeah, I said it! Come at me!) since Loose Fur isn’t around anymore (yeah, I did it again! Come at me!).
Hopefully that opening only serves to remind us that living is indeed happiness, though all the shit we go through in our daily lives doesn’t seem to make that an easy philosophy to…
