Om, Daniel Higgs at 529, Atlanta

On Monday night, the 26th of November, the band Om played at the 529 club in Atlanta, Georgia.  Daniel Higgs opened.  The warm-up act was Atlanta band High Bias, but unfortunately I arrived too late to catch them, which is really saying something given the late hours of the 529.  I usually don't go out to hear music on Mondays due to my obligations to Monday Night Zazen, but when the truly worthwhile band comes through, like YACHT for example, one just has to make exceptions. The price one pays, however, is a late arrival and the probability of missing the warm-up act.

How can one describe a Daniel Higgs performance?  I thought a solo acoustic musician was an odd choice for a drone-metal band like Om; actually I still do, even though it clearly worked.  Higgs, probably best known as the singer for Lungfish, played alone, accompanied only by his banjo, on which he played hypnotic arabesque runs and almost flamenco-like passages, while occasionally singing what sounded like improvised lines ("I work on the Sabbath every day of the week").  The spell-bound crowd, and it was probably the most crowded I've seen 529, was hear-a-pin-drop quiet as Higgs descended further and further down a rabbit hole of his own imagination.  The applause on the rare occasions that Higgs paused to calibrate his trajectory was warm and sincere.

Om's set was plagued by some manner of technical problems that I didn't quite understand, but it took them a long time and many stage visits by their roadies to get started, and even then microphones dropped out during vocal performances and the band seemed pretty ticked off at times.  Not that it got in the way of an excellent performance, however.  

Om recently expanded from a duo to a trio, and in concert it's hard to imagine how they could ever have been anything but the lineup on the stage.   Their music is every bit as hypnotic as Higgs', although they employ different techniques to achieve that state.  Their usual method of attack was to layer Eastern-sounding synth lines and samples over a throbbing, fuzzed-out bass pattern, and then pin the listener to the floor with an unexpected drum attack.  But they had many variations on this theme, which kept the whole show very interesting.

Photography was near impossible during the show for several reasons, chief among them being the fact that I forget my camera, without which it's hard to take anything more than a mental impression.  But I did have the camera app in my little Droid, but the next challenges was the crowd of tall young men pressed toward the front of the stage, between and above whom one had to jockey for position in order to take any kind of picture.  Then there were several "Absolutely No Flash Photography" signs taped to the walls around the stage, further limiting one's options.  So crappy as these pictures are, it's actually amazing that I got anything at all.

The exceptionally attentive and quiet audience remained exceptionally attentive and quiet during Om's set.  During one long drone composition at the end of the set, as keyboardist and effects man Emil Amos was wailing some sort of Arabic-sounding chant, several people toward the rear of the club began hooting and hollering along, until someone near the front of the club turned around and shouted "Shut up!"  Surprisingly and  somewhat uncharacteristically, they did.

One other note:  it must be mentioned at some point that the side wall in the tiny performance space at 529 had apparently been demolished, and the club has expanded to two or even three times its former size, which was tiny so even with the wall gone it's still a small club.  But this expansion would still be a major improvement, and if they reconfigure the stage so that more than five people can stand abreast in front it, it will be a much needed and much appreciated improvement of a club that increasingly is getting some of the best bookings in town, even giving the nearby and redoubtable Earl a run for its money.