Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, October 2, 2016

As if there weren't already an abundance of wonder in Atlanta, last night, two wonderful musicians provided a wonderful performance at one of the coolest venues in town, downtown's Mammal Gallery.

"It's like déjà vu all over again," Yogi Berra famously once observed, and last night, we saw our second harp performer in less than a month (after Joanna Newsom's performance at The Buckhead Theater back on September 11).  Sometimes, years can pass between harp performances.  What's more, last night we saw the wonderful Julianna Barwick for the second time in less than a month (she opened for Angel Olsen at Terminal West back on September 9).  Hey, not that we're complaining - we'd do it all over again tonight if we had the chance.

We've seen Mary Lattimore before, too, although way back in 2014 at Raleigh's Hopscotch Festival, where she held her own in an improvisational duet with Thurston Moore that at times was more of a duel than a duet.  Last night, though, was a very different affair as she performed solo, using her harp to weave intricate patterns and an effects box to create loops and to occasionally alter the pitch and tone of her harp to create trippy electronic effects, as demonstrated on her great LP, At The Dam.

Julianna Barwick played a long set, a seamless, non-stop selection of compositions that all melded one into the other. With her ethereal vocal loops and emotive keyboard playing, she constructed castles and mountain ranges of sound and then echolocated through the canyons and corridors of her sonic structures. 

She played in a near-dark stage, illuminated only by a single screen that projected monochromatic colors that slowly changed as the mood and timbre of her sound evolved.

Actually, words are as insufficient in describing her sound as is the label "ambient."  It's best to hear for yourself, and to get you started, here's as good as any sample: 

It was easy to lose track of space and time during both performances.  Mary Lattimore took the stage at around 9:15 and Julianna Barwick left it around 11:00, but anything in between those two reference points is anybody's guess.  It was a beautiful show by two very talented performers, and the rapt Mammal Gallery audience gave both musicians their full attention throughout.

Mary Lattimore

Mary Lattimore at Hopscotch Festival, 2014

Mary Lattimore will be opening tonight for Juliana Barwick at The Mammal Gallery.

James Harrar and Marshall Allen at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, September 5, 2016

After an uncharacteristic six weeks of not experiencing any live music - no shows since the July 22 Swans' show at Terminal West - we've finally come to the end of the drought with a veritable deluge of good shows, starting with last night's performance at downtown's Mammal Gallery by James Harrar's Soloriens Native Unity Quartet, featuring Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Atlanta's The Convergence opened with a set of inspired improvisational jazz reminiscent of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis.  The Convergence is Marquinn Mason on alto sax,  Rasheeda Ali on flute, Majid Araim on mandolin, Rafael Villanueva on guitar, Maxwell Boecker on bass, Zach Dawson on drums, and Paulino on percussion.   

In many ways, The Convergence stole the show.  I've never heard or seen them before last night, but damn, they are good.

We saw James Harrar and Marshall Allen perform last year as Cinema Soloriens, and this year they return backed by drums and bass as the Soloriens Native Unity Quartet.

At 92-years-old, Allen was a revelation, as spry and as energetic as during the Sun Ra years.  He really did most of the performing, carrying the evening on his back as it were, and unleashed some fiery solos that would have left a man half his age breathless.   

A lot of the evening was all just bloop and bleep, although the most stirring moments came when both men picked up their saxophones and squonked instead.  Here's a sample of the bloop:

Although Allen did the heavy lifting, Harrar contributed and also provided the projector show.  Sun Ra's legacy has nothing to worry about with Harrar's show, but the evening was worth it just to see living jazz legend Marshall Allen one more time, perhaps for the last time.

Hinds at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, March 13, 2016

Three fun bands played the Mammal Gallery Sunday night, and despite temperatures which felt like the dog days of summer, I think everybody had a good time.  I know I did and it seemed like the bands on the stage did, too.

The first band up was called Really Sorry.  I honestly believe this was their first time playing on a stage, and I truly mean that in the kindest and most supportive way possible.  Look, I won't deny they still have a lot of work cut out for themselves, but you have to start somewhere and opening for Hinds at the Mammal Gallery is not a bad way to begin at all.  Plus, they're a fun band, a lot of their songs were actually pretty funny (Spider consisted almost entirely of screaming and shrieks of "Get it away"), and they certainly didn't take themselves too seriously.  I'm reminded that The Coathangers started as a party joke band and then somehow got good.  

Bonus points for the audience, showing the band a lot of love and enthusiasm, including some raucous applause at the end of their short set.   

The next band up, Goodbye Honolulu, is a garage rock band from Toronto who played all of their songs with the fun dial turned up to 11.  Volume wasn't far below that either, but they got the audience dancing, including the girls from Hinds, who were dancing with the rest of the audience throughout Goodbye Honolulu's entire, 45-minute, sweaty set.

Which brings us to the girls from Madrid.  Hinds is a female garage-rock quartet from Spain (they sing in English) who actually play live with much more proficiency than their debut album, Leave Me Alone, would suggest.  Not that they weren't fun, too.  They had the audience dancing through most of their set, and inspired at least one crowd surfer and some friendly rushing of the stage.  

This isn't their first American tour (they were here and played SXSW last year) but it was their first time in Atlanta and they were clearly enjoying themselves, hanging out with the audience when they weren't dancing to Goodbye Honolulu.  Singer/guitarist Ana Perrote wore an Atlanta t-shirt and posted a picture of herself (below) on Instagram the next day.  Before the show, I even got to chat, albeit briefly, with Hinds' drummer, Amber Grimbergen (along with a lot of really interested young men), who was just hanging out in the audience and said that the band spent the day before at Six Flags and that the next day, Monday, she would be celebrating her 20th birthday in New Orleans before they went back to SXSW.

The happy news in all of this is that Hinds truly seem to be happy and healthy and normal Spanish girls who are having the time of their young lives, even if it was 40 degrees (Celsius) on the stage. And I don't think I'm the only one in the audience who fell in love with all of them.

The Chris Childs Orchestra, The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, September 25, 2015

On a momentous night for the advancement of Atlanta's downtown rejuvenation and growth of it's artistic community, the alternative weekly newspaper, Creative Loafing, celebrated its annual Best of Atlanta issue with a block party on South Broad Street.  South Broad, formerly the home to mostly abandoned shop fronts and a few marginal businesses, is being transformed with the assistance of The Goat Farm into a new arts district, with The Mammal Gallery and Eyedrum already operating in the area and new enterprises, such as Murmur and The Downtown Players Club, starting up.  The block party served not only to celebrate the Loaf's selections of the city's best but also as a formal debut of the Broad Street Arts District.

There were numerous events as a part of the party, including dance, gallery exhibits, and music, but the highlight was the first performance of the Chris Childs Orchestra in The Mammal Gallery.

The performance was originally scheduled to take place on the rooftop of Eyedrum, but due to inclement weather was moved to inside The Mammal Gallery.  The misty rain of the evening did not seem to dampen the mood of those celebrating the Creative Loafing event and the debut of the Broad Street Arts District, or take anything away from the Chris Childs' performance.

Before the orchestra played, Childs led a quartet of marimba, flute, oboe and percussion through a chamber piece to set the mood for modern compositional music.  Introducing the piece, Childs said it only consisted of four bars, but was set in 100/4ths time (so you try to figure it out). 

25 or so of some of Atlanta's best musicians (I recognized members of Faun and a Pan Flute, Hello Ocho, and Little Tybee) took the stage as The Chris Childs Orchestra and performed his composition /ˈsīlən(t)s/, a study of tones and moods in three movements. 

Little Tybee's Nirvana Kelly (left) took a very short solo.

I hesitate to provide a clip, as the whole composition was so varied and dynamic that any segment taken out of context does not at all represent the whole.  But, whatever, here's 30 seconds of /ˈsīlən(t)s/.

It was a breathtaking and wonderful performance, and in keeping with the DIY ethic of the Broad Street Arts Center, it showed how even orchestral music can be composed, performed, and presented outside of the mainstream by self-motivated artists.  

I on't know what the future plans of the Orchestra are, but Atlanta would be a far more interesting city if music and art continued to be presented in settings like The Mammal Gallery and the new Broad Street Arts District.

Thee Oh Sees

Thee Oh Sees at Terminal West, Rocktober 2013

We missed Thee Oh Sees at The Mammal Gallery on Monday night, and by all accounts the show was every bit as incredible as one would expect the hardest-driving band on the road today to be in the tiny Mammal space.

That's Mammal Gallery founder and Hello Ocho vocalist Chris Yonkers surfing the crowd.  Photo found on Facebook.

Here's Thee Oh Sees tearing up the Bowery Ballroom in New York on September 8:

Rocktober?

The weather outside is already noticeably cooler than it was last month, and football has officially begun.  More significantly, today is one of those embarrassment-of-riches days like we get in Rocktober (which technically might already have started this year) where one has to choose between a number of great shows on a given night.  Specifically, appearing at The Mammal Gallery this evening are Thee Oh Sees.

 

Meanwhile. at The Drunknen Unicorn, we have Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), with Adron and Deradoorian opening.

But wait, there's more!  Over at The Earl, Jenny Hval is performing.

And finally, Chelsea Wolfe has a sold-out show over at Aisle 5.

There are many, many evenings where there aren't this many good shows on one night in New York City, much less Atlanta.  Alert readers already know which show I'm going to, which may or may not be the best of the night but the first one that had tickets go on sale.

James Harrar's Cinema Soloriens featuring Marshall Allen at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, April 25, 2015

If you have the time and interest, there's an excellent article over at The National Journal on the artistic revitalization of downtown Atlanta as exemplified by venues such as The Goat Farm and The Mammal Gallery. The article opens (like this post, apparently) focused on Atlanta percussionist/composer Klimchak, above, who played drums and other percussion during last night's performance of James Harrar's Cinema Soloriens at the The Mammal Gallery.  The article describes The Mammal Gallery as an art space that brought "a hipster crowd" to an otherwise uninhabited block and says that the gallery founders look forward to the day when the barren street on which the gallery sits will have all the amenities of an art district, where people could do some window shopping, get coffee, and look at used records. 

Last night represented a baby step in that direction.  Before the performance by Cinema Soloriens, the warm-up act, an ad-hoc collection of Atlanta jazz and fusion musicians (including Eric Fontaine, Chris Alpiar, Marquinn Mason, Majid Araim, Zach Dawson, John Greg, Max Boecker and Rafael Villanueva) performed as Dreaming of the Open Door in a separate storefront space across from The Mammal Gallery. 

The audience was encouraged to walk back and forth across the street to look at the exhibit of photographs by and of James Harrar and supporting musician Marshall Allen (of the Sun Ra Arkestra) set up in a make-shift gallery in the storefront space and listen to the opening band, to sit and wait in The Mammal Gallery for the main performance to begin, or to just loiter out on the street. I chose the latter, at least until Dreaming of the Open Door started their set, and watched a large number of balloons and lanterns float over the downtown skyline.  It says something about the amount of art space downtown that people on the street couldn't decide whether the balloons and lanterns were coming from Eyedrum, another downtown gallery and performance venue, the Castleberry Hill district, the latest lantern festival, or some combination thereof.    

The Dreaming of the Open Door performance was, as befits an ad-hoc collection of musicians, a single extended improvisation, with different members each getting an opportunity to solo.  Together and individually, they made a grand and glorious sound, setting an appropriately adventurous mood for the rest of the evening.

The Cinema Soloriens set started around 9:00 pm in the Mammal Gallery space.  The band is led by composer, multi-instrumentalist, and film-maker James Harrar, and includes the legendary alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 91, of the Sun Ra Arkestra.  Formerly, the band had also included prog-rock legend Daevid Allen of Gong and Soft Machine until Allen's recent passing.  For last night's performance, guitarist Mitch Esparza filled the Daevid Allen spot, and Atlanta's Klimchak was on drums.

The band performed several numbers, each a mix of composed and improvisational passages as is typical in jazz, while Harrar's abstract and impressionistic films were projected behind the band.  

I don't think I'm alone in saying that a large part of my reason for attending was to see Marshall Allen.  I've been fortunate enough to have seen the Sun Ra Arkesta several times while Sun Ra himself was still alive, including sets in various Manhattan clubs and an epic, five-night stand in Boston's Orpheum Theater in the 1970s, as well as after his passing when the Arkestra was under Allen's creative leadership, and I was looking forward to another chance to hear his dynamic musicianship.  But with the lights down low and the stage lit only by the films and a few discrete lights, it was difficult to see anyone on the stage, other than Klimshak who was silhouetted in front of the screen,  But Allen was seated in a rear corner of the stage behind Harrar, who also took most of the solos, and if it weren't advertised that Marshall Allen was going to be a part of the show, I don't think I or anyone else would have recognized or even noticed him.  He was allowed to let rip one terrific, fiery solo, showing no slow-down due to age, but otherwise, when one has arguably the greatest living alto sax player alive in the band, it seems a shame not to showcase him more.

Here's a 30-Seconds video of last night's performance:  

Regardless of Allen's low-profile role, as you can tell, the set was an intriguing amalgam of jazz, Eastern, tribal, outer space, and classical elements, set against the evocative images of Harrar's films. The performance lasted some 90 minutes and although sparsely attended was still a major step forward in the invigoration of downtown Atlanta and the credibility of small venues like The Mammal Gallery to provide world-class artists in an intimate, urban setting.

Dan Deacon at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta - April 18, 2015

My wristband for the Sweetwater 420 Festival was still valid for Saturday, but rather than return to Centennial Park and the mud, the blood, and the beer (to quote Johnny Cash) and see Gov't Mule, Primus, and Cage the Elephant, I instead packed it in with what seemed like a thousand other people at The Mammal Gallery to see Baltimore's Dan Deacon.

Atlanta's Shantih, Shantih opened.  Shantih Shantih is a four-piece, all-woman band playing "fuzzed out, desert dusted rock n roll" featuring Anna Kramer of The Lost Cause.

It was a nice start, and after that things got weird.  First we got - I don't know what to call him (comedian?  guru? motivational speaker?) - Ben O'Brien, or as he likes to call himself, "Earth Universe."  "I am not a spiritual guru who travels the world convincing people to join my wicked sweet cult," he claims.  Earth Universe explained how he became awakened by reading a mint Dr. Bronner's bottle while seated on the toilet.   

"I used to be a really inspiring cool filmmaker, but I gave all that up the day I became enlightened," he explains.  He may no longer be a filmmaker, but he spent most of the rest of the evening videoing Dan Deacon's set.

More cosmic truths, but ones you could dance to, came next when sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson, aka Prince Rama, took the stage.  For those of you keeping score at home, this was my fourth time seeing the band after previous appearances at Farm 255 in Athens, at The Earl, and at the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh.  Ironically, the sisters' parents have also been at every Prince Rama show I've attended as well.  The band has added a third member, a keyboard player, freeing up Taraka to focus more on vocals and guitar, and with interacting more with the audience.  They also had a lot of new songs in their set as well.  

By this time (I'm not sure what hour it was as I had lost all track of time), the venue was packed and it was getting incredibly hot in the under-ventilated, non-air-conditioned Mammal Gallery.  But as soon as Dan Deacon took the stage, he brought the energy level up to a fever pitch with his manic music, dance contests, guided meditations, and general insanity.

I'd like to say it was as hot as the surface of the sun in there, but I always think of the sun's surface as being arid, so let me say instead it was as hot as, oh I don't know, Venus?, in The Mammal Gallery during Dan Deacon's set.  It was a swampy, sweaty, down-on-the-bayou kind of hot, and condensate was dripping off the pipes along the gallery's ceiling.  It was so crowded that some people were standing of the backs of the few furnishings in the gallery, and others were literally climbing the walls.  It got so frantic that the floors were literally bouncing as people danced.   

In other words, it was a perfect Dan Deacon performance - a sweaty, pipe-dripping, floor-bouncing, wall-climbing, lights-flashing night of insane music.  If you think I'm exaggerating or improperly using the word "literally," here's video proof, part of my very occasional 30 Seconds of video series (very few of which actually are 30 seconds in length).  

In all, it was a great show, and to enjoy it you just had to go with the flow of it all, no matter how ridiculous, how outre, how manic, it all became.  But one of the best parts of the evening, to be honest, was finally stepping outside after the show at what turned out to be 1:00 am and finally getting a breath of cool, fresh air.

Christ, Lord at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta, May 31, 2014

As discussed elsewhere, the power at my house went out last night due to a fallen tree down the block, and after two hours or so it got so warm and sticky indoors that I had no choice but to go somewhere, anywhere, else for relief.  As it turns out, Saturday night was a fairly good night for live music here in Atlanta, so it's not that I was without options.  The Candler Park Music Festival, where we saw Edward Sharpe last year, was going down and included performances by Trombone Shorty, Lucero, and Frank Turner. However, it having rained earlier in the day, I didn't trust the weather enough to spend the evening at an outdoor event.  Meanwhile, Atlanta's Quiet Hounds were performing at a restaurant, Le Maison Rouge, but that show had sold out before I got a ticket, so that was out for me as well. 

Coincidentally, last night also marked the final performances by two other Atlanta bands.  The funk-rock collective Noot D'Noot are calling it quits after eight years, and were playing their last-ever show at the MJQ Concourse (basically, the  other side of the bar at The Drunken Unicorn).  Meanwhile, Christian Ballew, accordionist, singer, and frontman for the band Christ, Lord, is moving to Wyoming (of all places) for some reason, and last night also marked their final-ever performance.  Given that I was never that big a fan of Noot D'Noot anyway, and that Christ, Lord's finale was being held at the Mammal Gallery with the venue proprietors Hello Ocho opening, I headed downtown to the MG to escape my dark, hot, powerless home.  

The doors at the Mammal Gallery opened at 9:00 pm but the music didn't start until 10:30.  However, having nothing else to do what with the power outage at home, I arrived at The Mammal Gallery just a little after 9:00 and was one of the first people there.  I waited, alone, leaning against a wall and playing with my cell phone until the battery ran low (another power failure!) to kill the 90 minutes before the show began.  I was not in a good mood and in the back of my mind I kept wondering if the power had been restored at my house yet and if I shouldn't just head back home and call it a night.  I decided to pace myself, though, and wait until after the opening act, Tantrum, finished before I left.

Tantrum is Michika McClinton, who started her set solo singing over loops and keyboard, before adding a bass and guitar to the mix.  My mood, still sour over the loss of power at the house and the 90-minute wait, didn't allow me to enjoy her set, until she was joined on stage by members of Hello Ocho and other friends to perform a perfect, note-by-note over of Tom Tom  Club's Wordy Rappinghood (which, by the way, I first heard on WRAS Album 88).

It's interesting how one song can turn your whole attitude around.  In no time at all, I and the whole rest of the audience were dancing and jumping up and down and singing along, even to the tricky "Ran-san-san a ran-san-san, Ku-ni ku-ni ku-ni ku-ni ran-san-san, Ai-ka-ye yoopi ak-ka-ye, A-roo, a-roo, a-ni-ki-chi!" Michika and company covered the song faithfully and perfectly, including all of the raps and even the conga solos.  I was in pure veridical heaven. 

That one song turned me and my evening around ("turned my frown upside down"), but I realized later that much of the young audience didn't even recognize the classic 1981 song.  Hell, most of the audience hadn't even been born yet when the song first came out and at the time, I was approaching 30 (okay, I was 27). So, for those of you who don't know, Wordy Rappinghood was the B-side to the single Genius of Love by the Tom-Tom Club, a spinoff of The Talking Heads fronted by bassist Tina Weymouth.  The two songs on the single marked, if not the first hip-hop/rock fusion - the 12" single version dropped February 17, 1981, a month after Blondie's Rapture had come out - certainly the most ebullient and joyful.  If I have to choose my favorite recording of 80s white girls rapping, it would have to be Tom Tom Club over Blondie, who sounds rigid and scripted by comparison.

In fact, the loopy, unhinged rapping of Wordy Rappinghood is probably a lot closer to The Slits' post-punk deconstruction of hip-hop than to Blondie's slick disco-glam.  I'd love to hear someone attempt to channel the late, great Ari Up someday and cover In The Beginning There Was Rhythm, also from 1981:

But I'm rambling (as old men tend to do) - and also up and dancing to the videos I just posted - but meanwhile, back at the Mammal Gallery, the audience was pumped up by Tantrum's performance, and Hello Ocho, about the only band that could harness that energy, took the stage for a terrific performance of their original songs.  

I've used the term "Zappaesque" in the past to describe Hello Ocho, and while the band sounds nothing like the late Frank or the Mothers of Invention, they share a common enthusiasm for mixing and subverting genres and for tricky time changes.  The "I want to take you grocery shopping" break in Orange Peel owes as much to Cruising With Ruben and the Jets as it does to the doo-wop it satirizes, and they even have a Ruth Underwood-caliber marimba player.  From about 1972 to 1975, my friends and I were heavily influenced by Zappa's unique, jazzy brand of prog rock fusion, and Hello Ocho are exactly the kind of band we kept unsuccessfully trying to form at that time. 

But this night was all about Christ, Lord, not about Tantrum or Hello Ocho, or, for that matter, Tom Tom Club, The Slits, or The Mothers of Invention.  The Atlanta music community had shown up to send Christian off, and I spotted members of Little Tybee in the audience, as well as Georgie Seanny (No Eyes) and Davy Minor (Deer Bear Wolf), among others.  I even got a chance to chat with Nirvana Kelly of Little Tybee, and bought her and guitarist Josh Martin a beer.  It wasn't until well after midnight that Christ, Lord took the stage, but it was well worth the wait.

Christ, Lord's gypsy-influenced, Balkan folk rock sounds somewhere in between the band Beirut (but without the mariachi flourishes) and Gogol Bordello (but without the punk intensity).  In a city with any number of idiosyncratic stylists (Adron, Jeffrey Butzer, Takenobu, etc,), Christian Ballow and Christ, Lord have managed to contribute their own unique flavor to the musical stew.   They will be missed.

Christ, Lord was joined on stage for several songs by members of Hello Ocho, who've played with them before, including a stint as the brief-lived Ocho Lord Orchestra, while the audience proved that yes, you can in fact mosh to a waltz.  It was a wonderful set, and at the end Ballow declared, "That's all the music that we know," but still somehow managed to come up with one more number to perform for the ecstatic crowd.

The night ended with earnest hugs all around the stage as the band realized that was it, it's over, and it was time for the musicians to move on to whatever it is they choose to do next. Personally, I'd love to hear a fusion of Hello Ocho with the remaining members of Christ, Lord to hear what Hello Ocho would sound like with horns.

It was about 2 am when I finally got back home, and the electric power had been restored.  The clocks were flashing "1:30," indicating that the power hadn't been restored until 12:30 am or roughly six hours after it had gone out and just as Christ, Lord was taking the stage, so it's a good thing (at least for me) that I turned my mood around and stayed for the whole event.  A-roo, a-roo, a-ni-ki-chi!

March Madness: Talking Heads, Phantom Fest, and More

March Madness began last night. No, not the collegiate basketball tournament that goes by the same name, but the overabundance of musicians and bands that seem to come through the City of Atlanta in March of every year.  My theory is that the bands are either heading to or from SXSW, the first major festival of the year, and picking up a gig in Atlanta on their way between Austin and Brooklyn or Chapel Hill or wherever, or if they're coming from the Left Coast, making a tour of the trip by playing up and down the East Coast. Either way, Atlanta's strategically located between Texas and the big Bos-Wash cities of the East.  There's even a festival down on the coast called Savannah Stopover for bands en route to SXSW, but almost all the bands playing the Stopover are also stopping over in Atlanta at some point or another for a show here in town.  So, welcome to March Madness!

However, last night's kickoff of March Madness had nothing whatsoever to do with the annual indie-band migration.  One of the other curious things about Atlanta is that is seems that the big touring acts rarely play in town on weekends.  Sure, there are exceptions, but by and large, the national artists seem to play here on Mondays through Thursdays (way too often on Mondays for my liking, as that's the one night of the week it's difficult for me to catch a show).  There must be an economic reason for this - perhaps the bands can draw bigger crowds on weekends at college towns like Athens and Knoxville and Gainesville, and every band manager from Seattle to Austin to Brooklyn knows this and purposely plays elsewhere during the weekends and only plays Atlanta during the week between gigs in the college towns. I'm just speculating here, but that's what it feels like.

This leaves all the stages in town open on Friday and Saturday night for the local musicians, which is no problem as Atlanta has an excellent local music scene.  Case in point:  last night, the Atlanta collective known appropriately as The ATL Collective put on a show at The Goat Farm featuring two terrific bands, Atlanta's Hello Ocho and Athens' Reptar, supported by vocalist Natasha Williams, performing The Talking Heads' classic album Speaking In Tongues in its entirety.   

From my perspective, Talking Heads' artistic pinnacle was their previous album, Remain In Light, but Speaking In Tongues still holds a special place in my heart.  I was 29 years old when the album came out in 1983, and for some reason, it's always felt to me like "my" Talking Heads album - the one written and recorded by the band with me in mind. This is purely projection, I know, but it was released when I was at that precipice in life when I was finally old enough to critically discern and select among the bands to which I listened but still young enough not to feel self-conscious about my enthusiasms, and to believe that the band was performing, if not for me directly, at least with someone like me in mind.  In any event, I loved the album and played it incessantly for several months of 1983.   

Thirty-one years later, both Reptar and Hello Ocho took the Goat Farm stage together, and fronted by Ms. Williams, belted out the album opener and Talking Heads' most successful single, Burning Down the House.

They played the tracks in the order of the album, with Reptar and Ms. Williams leaving the stage and Hello Ocho performing the next two cuts, Making Flippy Floppy and Girlfriend Is Better.

Reptar took the stage next to cover Slippery People, followed by I Get Wild/Wild Gravity accompanied again by Natasha Williams. Both bands did a fine job of walking the line between performing purely imitative covers on one extreme and totally subverting the material for their own purposes on the other.  Except for the addition of Ms. Williams on some of the cuts, all of the songs from the album as performed last night sounded like the way either band would have chosen to cover the song if they had otherwise decided to include that song as a cover in their sets, and not just for this one-off event.   

My only complaint about the night is that for some reason, after about 20 minutes of performing the first five songs from the album, the bands took about a 30-or-so minute break before coming back on stage to play the B-side of the album.  Why two bands need a 30-minute break after a mere five songs is beyond me, but as is so often the case at concerts, as soon as the music started again, all was forgiven.

Hello Ocho kicked off the flip side of the record with Swamp, followed by Reptar performing Moon Rocks and Pull Up the Roots.

For the finale, both bands took the stage again and performed the album's closer, the lyrical This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).

Reptar got the headline spot in the billing, and reportedly played a set after the album tribute was over, but I didn't stay around for it.  Nothing against Reptar (quite the contrary), but I wanted to get downtown to catch the end of something called Phantom Fest, an day-long celebration showcase of Blood Drunk Records artists and the EP-release party for Atlanta's DAMS. 

I've talked here before about the two music-processing systems in the human mind, the veridical system that responds to familiar sounds and lights up when, say, a favorite song comes on the radio, and the sequential system that responds to new sounds and likes to anticipate the next note or tone in a new composition. Everyone has both systems in their brain and no one is all one way or the other, although the two systems might also describe two separate musical experiences as well as two different sets of music fans.  Last night provided a workout for both system - the familiar, veridical experience of hearing those classic Talking Heads songs over again, and the sequential adventures of Phantom Fest. 

The Mammal Gallery is the newest venue in Atlanta, located way downtown in an otherwise desolate part of the City, and serves as both a stage for music and an art gallery. I understand the club is run or co-run by Chris Yonkers of Hello Ocho, who apparently couldn't make Phantom Fest as they were obviously otherwise engaged at The Goat Farm.  When I got there, the band Bees and Enormous Tigers were on stage, making an enormous amount of feedback-generated, post-rock sound.

DAMS were up next, taking the stage sometime after midnight (I was starting to lose track of time by this point).  DAMS are something of an Atlanta super-group, made up of young but veteran members of the Atlanta music scene.  Fronted by the soulful vocals of  Kace Brennan, the band also features powerhouse drummer Sarah Wilson, arguably the best drummer in town, the twin guitars of the talented Brett Reagan and David Carter, and the fine bassist Bret Phillips.

DAMS' music is complex and large, incorporating as many genres as possible, often in the same song, often at the same time.  Here's a pretty good sample:

Their set at The Mammal Gallery was nothing short of a triumph, but left me too emotionally drained to stay around for the closing set by bizarro-band Dip.  One thing about the sequential processing system - it takes up a lot more effort than the casual experience of the veridical system.

As you can tell by the show listing over there on the right, there are a lot more concerts this month - a lot more this week - and one could probably go to a worthwhile show every night of the month and still miss some good sets.  I'm going to have to pace myself (damn that gainful employment!) and see how much March Madness I can take in.  Wish me well.