this week in music

TAMMAR

Bloomington band Tammar makes rare NYC visit this weekend for three area shows

Bloomington, Indiana’s Tammar is making a rare visit to New York City this weekend, playing three shows in three nights in support of their debut full-length, Visits (Suicide Squeeze, September 20, 2011). The seven-track, forty-five-minute disc bristles with epic-sounding psychedelic rock that soars with lilting, heavenly melodies, courtesy of lead singer Dave Walter, percussionist Josephine McRobbie, guitarist Evan Whikehart, drummer Sarah Wyatt Swanson, and keyboardist Ben Swanson (who also runs the Secretly Canadian record label, which features Jens Lekman, Antony and the Johnsons, Here We Go Magic, Yeasayer, and others). Tammar will be at Cameo in Brooklyn for a record release party on October 28 ($10, 8:00) with Heaven’s Gate and Spindrift, followed by visits to the Lower East Side at Pianos on October 29 ($10, 10:00) with Gross Relations, Little Racer, and the Rotaries, and Bowery Ballroom on October 30 ($15, 9:00) with Moonface and Talkdemonic.

HELL AT THE HALL

Webster Hall
125 East 11th St. between Second & Third Aves.
Saturday, October 29, $20, 6:00
www.websterhall.com
www.vice.com

One of the craziest live bands of the twenty-first century, Atlanta’s Black Lips have earned their reputation by putting on shows powered by great songs and plenty of mass destruction. From tearing up boats to taking part in fierce toilet paper wars to dancing with fans onstage who broke down security barricades, you never quite know what you’re gonna get at a Black Lips show, but you can always count on its being memorable. On October 29, the bad boys will be headlining Hell at the Hall, an evening of insane partying at Webster Hall, with Cole, Jared, Ian, and Joe being joined by appropriately named Puerto Rican punk rockers Davila 666, who kicked ass at this summer’s 4Knots Festival with a raucous set that included a Spanish-language cover of the Nerves’ / Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone,” and Brooklyn psychedelic goths Xray Eyeballs, who are afraid of nothing. Vice, who is throwing this wild shindig, strongly encourages costumes and plenty of TP; in addition, if you want to win a pair of free tickets, e-mail the best / worst / strangest / sickest / weirdest Halloween trick you ever pulled to Vice, who advise, “If you send us a story about actually beating up a child for candy, you will not win these tickets, and we hope you don’t win anything. Ever. Stories about egging people who give out walnuts are totally fine though. Fuck those people.”

ELECTRIC SIX: HELLO, DESTRUCTOR!!!!

Bowery Ballroom
6 Delancey St. between Bowery & Chrystie St.
Friday, October 28, $18-$20, 8:00
212-533-2111
www.boweryballroom.com
www.electricsix.com

Leaning more on the synth-heavy dance rock that has long made them a party-band favorite— who doesn’t love “Gay Bar”? — genre-melting Detroit funk-pop rockers Electric Six are back with an explosive new disc, Heartbeats and Brainwaves! (Metropolis, October 11, 2011). Their eighth studio album oozes hot sex, rife with single and double entendres while channeling Nick Cave, Prince, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Phil Collins. “Bodies bouncing on the floor / Everybody getting’ wild / Gonna show my dirty style / You better show me what that body’s for / You’re born to beguile / Hit the volume on your dial / Yeah, the dime is dropping on ya,” bandleader Dick Valentine sings on “It Gets Hot,” while on “Interchangeable Knife” he proclaims, “I’m gonna make you howl like a trailer-park wife / on the first day of her new life.” On “The Intergalactic Version” he might repeat “We write the same song over and over again,” but that is far from the case, with all six band members — vocalist Dick Valentine, drummer Percussion World, guitarists Johnny Na$hinal and the Colonel, bassist Smorgasbord, and synth master Tait Nucleus? — contributing to the songwriting process, which ranges from demonic goth rock and raucous heavy metal to ’80s MTV power pop and bootie-shaking funk. Electric Six brings its high-energy Hello, Destructor!!!! tour, named for a line in “Hello! I See You!” (“Hello, destructor! I’m yours for the destroying”), to Bowery Ballroom on Friday night, with Kitten and New York Rivals also on the bill. Perhaps Valentine says it best in this piece of promo copy about Heartbeats and Brainwaves!: “It manages to be so entertaining that you completely forget that your limits of time/space comprehension render you completely unable to answer why you are really here.”

OVAL

Markus Popp will be back in Brooklyn on October 25 at Public Assembly

Public Assembly
70 North Sixth St.
Tuesday, October 25, $10-$12, 8:30
718-384-4586
www.myspace.com/markuspopp
www.publicassemblynyc.com

Berlin-based electronic music pioneer Markus Popp is back recording as Oval, the seminal noise band he formed in 1991 with Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, who have both long gone on to other projects. But Popp has returned to reinvent the electronic music genre yet again, first releasing a limited-edition EP, Oh (Thrill Jockey, June 2010), consisting of fifteen tracks totaling twenty-five minutes that reveal Popp to be just as much a musician as a technician, incorporating guitars and drums into the sonic language he creates using a four-year-old stock PC with standard software and plug-ins. The glitch master has followed Oh with a double CD, simply titled O (Thrill Jockey, September 7, 2010), comprising another seventy songs, with twenty on disc one, fifty on disc two, ranging from thirty-two seconds (“Lonely”) to 4:42 (“Dolo”), mostly with one-word titles, such as “Ah!” “Shhh,” “Sky,” “Cry,” “Cinematic,” “Dyamo,” “Pomp,” “Blinky,” “Emocor,” “Voilà,” and “Goodbye.” Popp works inside and out of structure and melody, emitting engaging sounds that are as experimental as they are intoxicating. While O’s second disc has more going on sonically, both offer respite for music fans with ADD as well as those who are tired of the same old thing. Popp, who made a rare local appearance last year at ISSUE Project Room, will be playing the back room at Public Assembly in Williamsburg on October 25 with Oneohtrix Point Never and Burning Star Core, giving adventurous audiophiles another rare opportunity to see a legendary figure in the world of electronic music.

BERNARD HERRMANN

Movie music maestro Bernard Herrmann scored dozens of classic cinema scenes, including Cary Grant on the run in Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST (courtesy Photofest)

Film Forum
209 West Houston St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Through November 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.thebernardherrmannestate.com

Taking the art of the film score to a whole new level, composer extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann had an innate sense of how to make movies better through music. He wrote scores for more than fifty films in his too-brief thirty-five-year career (he died in 1975 at the age of sixty-four), including nine by the figure he is most often identified with, suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, whom he also had a well-known falling out with. Herrmann worked with a diverse range of directors, scoring classic outings by Orson Welles, Henry Hathaway, François Truffaut, Michael Curtiz, Martin Scorsese, William Dieterle, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Brian De Palma, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry King, Nicholas Ray, Nunnally Johnson, and others. Oddly, the New York City-born maestro, whose career began with Citizen Kane and concluded with Taxi Driver, was nominated for only five Oscars, winning for his second film, 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. He also composed concert pieces and scores for radio, television, and the stage in addition to his more famous film work, which is on display in a two-week series at Film Forum that continues through November 3. It’s an impressive body of work, including Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (October 23-24), Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (October 24), Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (October 25 in a double feature with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry), Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (October 26-27 with John Brahm’s Hangover Square), and Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (October 30 with Hitchcock’s The Birds). On October 28, Film Forum will be screening the inspired double feature of Taxi Driver and J. Lee Thompson’s original Cape Fear (in which Robert Mitchum shows Robert De Niro how it’s done), while the psychological suspense will be turned up a notch on Halloween with the pairing of Psycho with De Palma’s Obsession. The oddest double feature is November 1’s stop-motion duo of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, attesting to Herrmann’s range. “Herrmann would have been delighted, though perhaps not surprised, at the growing amount of attention attracted by his music in recent years,” his widow, Norma, writes on the estate’s official website. “There has been interest from a whole new generation who were not even born during his lifetime.” The series at Film Forum offers that generation a great opportunity to experience Herrmann’s work for the first time, as well as allowing those who’ve grown up with his genius another chance to see it (and hear it) on the big screen.

JOHN KELLY: FIND MY WAY HOME

John Kelly’s FIND MY WAY HOME has found its way home at New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts
Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
October 21-23, 25-29, $15-$40
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.johnkellyperformance.org

Over the past several years, innovative multidisciplinary performance artist John Kelly has been revisiting past works while also continuing to challenge himself and his audience in exciting new pieces, whether it’s a final restaging of Pass the Bluttwurst, Bitte at La MaMa last year or the world premiere of the highly adventurous The Escape Artist at P.S. 122 this past April. Kelly is currently revising his Bessie Award-winning Find My Way Home at New York Live Arts, the new name for the space where it was commissioned in 1988, by the former Dance Theater Workshop. (So one could say that is has indeed found its way home.) Set during the Great Depression, Find My Way Home, which recently held open rehearsals at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of that institution’s Risk + Reward series, is a reimagining of the Orpheus myth that also incorporates elements of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Featuring eleven dancers and singers and film projections, Find My Way Home runs at NYLA through October 29; there will be a preshow talk October 25 with Lucy Sexton and a postshow talk October 28 with Bonnie Marranca. Kelly is a mesmerizing performer with an endlessly creative mind who is always worth watching, no matter what he is doing, so we cannot recommend this show highly enough.

John Kelly reimagines the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in wonderful new production of FIND MY WAY HOME

Update: When John Kelly first presented Find My Way Home at Dance Theater Workshop in 1988, it was infused with the growing AIDS epidemic, dealing with the horrific loss being suffered particularly in the arts community. He brought it back ten years later, and he has revised it yet again, in a wonderfully fresh version running at New York Live Arts through October 29. Even though Find My Way Home 3.0 is set during the Great Depression, it is hard not to think of the current financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement, as the multimedia production opens with obscenely wealthy aristocrats (Daniel Squire, Cecelia Jones, Aaron Mattocks, and original cast member Marleen Menard) treating parlour maid Eurydice (Kyle de Camp, also returning from the original production) like a slave, the rich abusing the poor. Radio crooner Orfeo (Kelly) arrives and sings in front of a faux fireplace, focusing his attention on the maid, and the two soon run away together, Orfeo ripping off Eurydice’s French maid outfit to reveal a sexy red dress. But their love comes to a screeching halt when a car runs them over, killing Eurydice and blinding Orfeo, who then travels to the Underworld to try to get her back and rekindle their passionate flame. Find My Way Home features virtually no dialogue, instead playing out like an old-time silent film, going back and forth between black and white and color, with live musical accompaniment by pianist Alan Johnson, cellist Mary Wooten, and vocalists Philip Anderson, Amanda Boyd, Gregory Purnhagen, and Barbara Rearick. Carefully choreographed movement, Anthony Chase’s ghostly filmed projections, and Stan Pressner’s lighting design — which includes an effective strobe light scene and another in which Orfeo crawls across windowlike rectangles glowing across the floor — combine with popular songs by Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and George Gershwin and classical music and opera pieces by Alban Berg, Claude Debussy, Giuseppe Verdi, and of course, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice to create a stirring production that honors its past while still remaining relevant today. (To further that, a lobby exhibition displays several of Kelly’s 1988 preparatory drawings, a video of rehearsals for the original production, and the remaining section of set designer Huck Snyder’s backdrop; Snyder died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of thirty-nine.) It is absolutely thrilling that Find My Way Home has indeed found its way home.

CMJ MUSIC & MOVIE MARATHON: DAY FIVE

New Collisions should get CMJers parachuting across the dance floor Saturday night at Local 269 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CMJ enters its fifth and final day today, and we have to say we’re wiped out from yesterday’s exciting This Week in New York showcase at Fontana’s, where Jake Mehrmann of Tan Vampires, Rubber Kiss Goodbye, Our Mountain, Hank & Cupcakes, and At War With the 60’s put on a great show. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t ready to head out again to see some amazing bands in some very cool venues. Below are only some of the highlights of the marathon’s grand finale.

Nicole Atkins, Rockwood Music Hall, 3:30

The Front Bottoms, Highline Ballroom, 6:45

Radical Dads, Bruar Falls, 8:00

Wavves, Fader Fort, 8:20

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (Joann Sfar, 2011), Soho House, free with RSVP, 9:15

New Collisions, Local 269, 10:00

Jump into the Gospel, Bowery Electric, 10:15

Spell Talk, Dominion, 10:30

Turbo Fruits, Public Assembly, 11:00

Shinobi Ninja, Arlene’s Grocery, 12 midnight

Shonen Knife, Public Assembly, 12:30

Emil & Friends, the Delancey, 1:40