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Saturday, December 9
Admission: $5, $10 minimum
Showtimes: 7:30 and 10pm
reservations
are recommended
Flying
Stylus had this to say about the band they call Flying...
"Flying member Sara Magenheimer said in an interview once,
"It's all about the process." At the time she was referring
to the future of the group, but it's a quote that also very much
describes the band's debut record, Just-One-Second-Ago Broken
Eggshell. Recorded in crowded Brooklyn apartments, wide-open wilderness,
and on darkened beaches, the anything-goes group’s only
constant is that the process leads the way.
That’s why you get songs like Pond Life, which
wrap first-time guitar strumming, aqueous synth effects, and drum
sticks pounding away on a table into a neat two-minute package.
It's the sort of song that, when taken out of context, reveal
the group to be the awkward newbies they are. Self-consciousness
abounds on the record: the twenty-five second spoken word Calvary,
Coventry, Critical, the production flourishes that obscure
the solid grooves that they sometimes/somehow fall into, the epic
Ben Folds ending to "#1 Chariot." But this blundering
is the endearing glue that makes Flying one of the more interesting
ramshackle psych-jazz-carnival bands working today."
Robert
Stillman
Though Horses is Stillman's debut recording as a leader, he is
no newcomer to the music world. His woodwind-arrangements and
piano playing can be heard on friend and labelmate Luke Temple's
recent release, Hold A Match for a Gasoline World. Robert
also lends his drumming skills to the New York rock foursome The
End of The World and continues to make his presence felt as a
saxophonist on the improvised music scene throughout the U.S.
and Europe.
In December of 2004, Stillman and a group of his closest friends
from Maine and New York holed up in Seattle's Avast Recording
Company with engineer Troy Tietjen (The Decemberists, Death Cab
for Cutie) to record the Horses repertoire for Mill Pond Records,
emerging a little over a week later with the seven beautifully
haunted-sounding tracks that comprise Horses. From one listen
it is clear Stillman took full advantage of the recording studio's
resources to shape a production that is at once delicate and urgent;
the sounds on Horses seem to live and breathe as distinct characters
in a wordless musical narrative. One would be hard pressed to
pin the music down in terms of genre; though the shrewd listener
may be able to pick out hints of Stillman’s variant musical
influences, (among whom he counts Kurt Weill, The Band, Milton
Nascimento, Miles Davis, and Maurice Ravel). It's clear the music
on Horses exists on its own terms, a detailed musical territory
unto itself.
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