this week in music

TICKET GIVEAWAY: ELLIOTT BROOD AT PIANOS

Elliot BROOD tells poignant stories of war on gorgeous new album

Pianos
158 Ludlow St.
Wednesday, March 14, $8, 11:00
212-505-3733
www.elliottbrood.com
www.pianosnyc.com

Inspired by a five-day trip to military cemeteries and Juno Beach in France while on a 2007 European tour, Toronto trio Elliott BROOD has just released the dazzling Days into Years (Paper Bag, February 28, 2012). The follow-up to 2008’s highly acclaimed Mountain Meadows, the new record tackles issues of life and death during wartime on ten jaunty, rollicking tunes rooted in folk and country, filled with sweet harmonies and expert musicianship from Mark Sasso on guitar, banjo and harmonica, Casey Laforet on guitars, bass, mandolin, banjo, and lap steel, and Stephen Pitkin on percussion and piano. “When we got here we were young men / What we’ve done has made us old / Left to die out in these frozen fields so far away from home / And if I live to see the end / I’m gonna make a brand new start / But I’ll never be the same again without my youthful heart,” they sing on the gorgeous “If I Get Old” over a bouncy, infectious melody. Songs such as “Hold You,” “Will They Bury Us?” and “Northern Air” set the darkness against the light as characters search for home while the grave beckons. “All they sold me was a lie / All they owed me was mine / Still lost in the moonlight,” they sing on “My Mother’s Side,” powered by driving guitars and a fierce beat. A beautiful, poetic tribute to Canadian war veterans and casualties without getting maudlin or preachy, Days into Years is one of the best albums so far of 2012, a stirring collection of roots-based rock that is a must for fans of Neil Young, Railroad Earth, old Wilco, and other country-folk standouts.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Elliott BROOD will be headlining Pianos on the Lower East Side on Wednesday, March 14, on a bill with Pet Lions and Pack Ad. We have two spots on the guest list to give away for free to see this amazing band. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite war-related song to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, March 13, at 5:00 to be eligible to win. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.

ARBOURETUM / RHYTON

Oh, sorry. Were you waiting for us? Over the last few days we’ve been trapped in “St. Anthony’s Fire,” a killer of a track from the upcoming album Aureola (Thrill Jockey, April 10, 2012), a dual effort from Arbouretum and Hush Arbors. Dave Heumann just cuts loose on the acid-rock epic, one of three tunes that bode well for the Baltimore band’s next disc, the follow-up to last year’s The Gathering.

Oh, did we drift away again? This time we haven’t been able to pull ourselves out of “Pontian Grave,” a massive twelve-minute psychedelic freak-out from Rhyton’s eponymously titled debut record (Thrill Jockey, January 2012). And just when we thought we’d gotten out, the Brooklyn band sucked us back in with “Shank Raids,” with Dave Shuford leading the group on another far-out, improvisational, psychedelic sojourn into the unknown and beyond. Arbouretum and Rhyton will be teaming up on Saturday night for what should be a mind-blowing experience at Death by Audio in Brooklyn.

THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE

THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE takes audiences behind the scenes of a very unusual love story

THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE (Marie Losier, 2011)
Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Opens Thursday, March 8
212-691-5519
www.clearviewcinemas.com
www.balladofgenesisandladyjaye.com

Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye opens tonight at Clearview Cinemas in Chelsea, with Losier and Genesis P-Orridge on hand for a Q&A following the 7:00 screening.

LAURIE ANDERSON’S DELUSION

Laurie Anderson’s DELUSION is an engaging multimedia examination of the personal and the political (photo by Leland Brewster)

Pace University
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts
3 Spruce St. between Park Row & Gold St.
March 9-10, $30-$65, 7:30
www.pace.edu
www.laurieanderson.com

Examining the twenty years of her life she has spent sleeping, Laurie Anderson’s Delusion, playing this weekend at Pace’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, consists of approximately twenty short mystery plays that move smoothly between the personal and the poltical, an intimate multimedia work about dreams and the state of the nation. Commissioned for the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, Delusion features some of Anderson’s sharpest writing in years, performed in her unique talk-singing style either as herself or as deep-voiced alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Anderson glides between several microphones on a stage that includes video projections on a loveseat, shredded paper, a small scrim, and a large screen in back, depicting leaves flying in the wind, smoke drifting endlessly, a chalkboard filled with hard-to-decipher words and images, moonscapes, a child witnessing her mother’s death, and giant live shots of Anderson herself, playing her specially made violin. When we saw the show at BAM in September 2010, Anderson was joined by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind King on a more traditional violin, both men primarily seen in silhouette, with Anderson, dressed in her trademark white shirt and thin black tie, telling jokes and stories about age, memory, Iceland, nineteenth-century Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, punctuation, and her own heritage. The centerpiece of the show is “Another Day in America,” from Anderson’s 2010 album, Homeland; “And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era, the start of a brand new world,” she sings as Bergamot. “And now what? How do we start? How do we begin again? . . . And so which way do we go?” Throughout the ninety-minute performance, Anderson was warmer and friendlier than ever, filled with charm and good humor, making strong eye contact with the audience as she delved into fascinating topics with a wink and a knowing smile.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: TIM FITE

Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Tim Fite has completed his “Ain’t” trilogy, which began with 2005’s Gone Ain’t Gone and continued with 2008’s Fair Ain’t Fair, with the utterly delightful Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t (Anti-, March 6). “I’m a bully / A big badass bully / Do what I say / or get thrown the fuck out the way / I’m a big old bully,” Fite sings on “Bully,” but he’s nothing of the sort, as seen in the above short about his creative process. The visual artist and musician, who has also written storybooks and hosted the video series Gunshow!, goes back to his high school years on Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t , incorporating the ironic, acerbic wit of Randy Newman with the vocal phrasings of Craig Finn to create a mournful yet loving song cycle that deals with puppy love, the thrill of going joyriding, bullying, and other teenage jubilations and disasters, steeped in playful percussion and offbeat sounds. “Let’s live while we can / ’cause we may never be teenagers again,” he sings on “We Are All Teenagers.” Fite will be celebrating the release of Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t, which also includes such exquisitely arranged tracks as “Hold Me All Night,” “Telephone Booth,” and “Talking to the Air,” on March 8 at Union Hall in Brooklyn with the Woes.

THINKSWISS: GENÈVE MEETS NEW YORK

Foofwa d’Imobilité will pay tribute to Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, and Michael Jackson as part of ThinkSwiss festival

A FESTIVAL OF GLOBAL IDEAS BORN IN GENEVA: JEAN CALVIN, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, ALBERT GALLATIN, HENRY DUNANT
Multiple locations
March 6-12, free – $35
212-599-5700, ext 1061
www.thinkswissny.org

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless,” Geneva philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote nearly three centuries ago. The Social Contract author’s native country is celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the master thinker’s birth with a series of events around the world, including this month’s ThinkSwiss Festival of Global Ideas Born in Geneva. Examining issues that impact both America and Switzerland, the week-long festival includes live music and dance, panel discussions, literary readings, film screenings, and art exhibits, most of which are free but require advance RSVP. Things get under way on March 6 ($10) with a screening of Swiss director Jacob Berger’s 2002 feature film Loving Father (Aime Ton Père) and his 2002 short I Think About Alain Tanner (Je pense à Alain Tanner) as part of FIAF’s weekly CinémaTuesdays series, with Berger on hand to participate in a Q&A at 7:00. On March 7, the American Red Cross will host “Can the Geneva Conventions Still Protect Civilians and Non-Combatants in Contemporary Warfare?” a roundtable with Philip Gourevitch, Colonel (ret.) Dick Jackson, Roger Mayou, and Gabor Rona, moderated by Walter A. Füllemann. On March 8, the exhibition “L’Esprit de Genève by Its Posters” will open at Posters Please, and the NYU Presidential Medal Ceremony will include a conversation between honoree Michel Butor and Lois Oppenheim examining “L’Esprit de Genève: From Albert Gallatin to Michel Butor.” On March 9 ($35, lunch included), Adam Gopnik will moderate the discussion “A la Table de Rousseau: What Is Progressive About Education Today?” at FIAF with Butor, Megan Laverty, Jean-Michel Olivier, and Shimon Waronker, followed by “How to Read Rousseau in the 21st Century,” led by François Jacob. Also on March 9 ($25), Pascal Couchepin, Thomas Kean, Eliot Spitzer, Benjamin Barber, Guillaume Chenevière, Victor Gourevitch, Amin Husain, Laura Flanders, Nannerl Keohane, Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Simon Schama will occupy the Celeste Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library for “Occupy Rousseau: Inequality & Social Justice,” which seeks to answer the question “What would Jean-Jacques Rousseau say about our democracies if he were among us today?” On March 10, pianist Louis Schwizgebel, cellist Lionel Cottet, and violinist François Sochard will perform the U.S. premiere of “Variations on a Theme by J.J. Rousseau” by Friedrich W. Kalkbrenner and André-François Marescotti, Ravel’s “Ondine,” Brahms’s “Scherzo in C Minor” and “Hungarian Dances Nos. 1, 2, 6 and 7,” Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 49,” and Liszt’s “Les Cloches de Genève” in the program “Soloists from L’Orchestre International de Genève” at Merkin Concert Hall. On March 11 at 4:00, Foofwa d’Imobilité will pay tribute to dance legends Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, and Michael Jackson in “Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam” at the Kitchen, and the Marc Perrenoud Trio will perform at 7:00 at the Allen Room. And on March 12, Rebecca MacKinnon will moderate “Breaking Through Internet Censorship” at the Cooper Union with Stéphane Koch, Ebtihal Mubarak, Thérèse Obrecht, Anas Qtiesh, and a surprise guest, and journalist and writer Jean-Michel Olivier will give a lecture in French at the Haskell Library at FIAF.

TICKET ALERT: NEW YORK METS 2012 SEASON

The Mets are looking for David Wright to get back in the swing of things this season (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Citi Field
123-01 Roosevelt Ave. at 126th St.
Monday, March 5, 10:00 am
718-507-TIXX
www.newyorkmetscom

Fifty years ago, Casey Stengel’s Mets were not quite so amazin’, famously going 40-120 in their inaugural season, still a record of futility for America’s pastime. They’re currently in the doldrums again, finishing 70-92, 79-83, and 77-85 the last three years, a lot closer to last place than to first each season. Mired in a financial crisis, they let their best player go to a division rival and brought in the fences at Citi Field, hoping to increase the power numbers of such players as David Wright, Ike Davis, and Jason Bay. But much of the 2012 season will depend on the ability of lefty ace Johan Santana to pitch at the high level he’s accustomed to — as well as his ability to take the mound at all. And even with ten of the thirty Major League teams now making the playoffs, it’s still highly unlikely that the Amazin’s will be playing past the October 3 finale against the Marlins. Single-game tickets for the Mets’ hopefully celebratory fiftieth anniversary season go on sale this morning, but don’t expect the servers to crash like Kraftwerk playing MoMA. Among this year’s giveaways and promotions are texting gloves on April 7, a Tom Seaver bobblehead on April 22, a Rusty Staub bobblehead on May 26, the return of Banner Day on May 27, a Keith Hernandez bobblehead on June 17, fireworks on July 3, a Mr. Met poster on July 8, Merengue Night on August 24, and a Mike Piazza bobblehead on August 25. In addition, the Friday-night concert series includes postgame shows by REO Speedwagon on June 15, Cheap Trick on July 20, and MercyMe on August 10