Googie’s Lounge
154 Ludlow St.
Thursday, October 28, 8:30
212-533-7237
www.livingroomny.com
www.geoffreyarmes.com
Teacher, producer, arranger, engineer, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Geoffrey Armes will be holding a CD release party for his latest album, INSIDE A WALL, on October 28 at Googie’s Lounge on the Lower East Side, the follow-up to 2008’s STRETCH AND BREATHE 2: BERLIN DANCE WORKS and SPIRIT DWELLING: MUSIC FOR YOGA AND OTHER SOUL TRANSFORMATIONS. The British-born, New York-based Armes, who plays piano, electric piano, toy piano, synthesizers, bass, percussion, and guitars on the record, developed ten songs “from fragments first mooted in West Berlin” in 1982. His jazzy, lounge-y, atmospheric world music mixes Bryan Ferry with Donald Fagen, to both good and not so good effect. “Stealing out into the night / This is how I plan my flight / Watching others fight their fight / I really care unless it’s my plight,” he sings on “Things Are Strange,” not necessarily one of his more poetic passages. Better is the end of “Café Einstein,” on which he laments, “You on the sugar / Look across at me / You tell me it’s over / And I am free / Oh stand to go / Please please leave it easy / There’s nothing else I can say.” Armes’s stated goal is “to create a safely adventurous creative acoustic space so that a kind of spontaneous ordering of sonic inspiration can take place”; the Googie’s gig should be filled with plenty of sonic inspiration amid his ambient soundscapes. Also on the bill are Tajna Tanovic at 7:30, Shayfer James at 9:30, and Llana Stampur at 10:30.