Open Journal Montreal

by Risa Dickens

Singing is hard, man, that shit ain’t easy. My friend Emilie got back into singing with a band the other day. She hadn’t gotten up in front of a gang of musicians and had to throw in her thoaty two cents in years; not since back when she was 19 or 20 singing with Kobayashi. So it took a couple of tries, she said, to get the mental math of when to come in right, let alone the equations involved in pushing out an interesting melody from muscles dry and consticted with a justifiable bit of fear. She described it as a kind of free falling. Standing there in a pocket of people making measured sounds, dolling out lengths of rhythm like bolts of cloth, and it’s your job to just release a big sound with your breath and your body, I can see how it could feel like a leaping letting go.

Nadia Bashalani of Shoot the Moon made a powerful statement last night about the place of voice in a loud and complex wash of sounds. She pushed her pure gypsy wail to harder, scratchier edges then I’d ever heard her claim before, and it was good. Jonah, the friend I went to the Main Hall to see the band with, watched her sing and said: “I wonder how you find out you can sing like that?” And it’s true that it’s funny to imagine the day that she let that huge and painful and lovely a thing come out of her- it must have been a bit like falling.

At another point the band attempted a song they told us they’d been deliberating about- one that, for now at least, features only Nadia’s singing and Louie on the keyboard. I was distracted by people in the crowd, but something in the sound was tugging at me when Jonah (perceptive yet again) pointed out that the line of melody she was singing was very different from what Louie played. “It puts you in a whole other world” he said, when the sounds pull against each other like that. It’s almost as though the natural hum and frequency in our bodies and brains that music comes from and wants to speak to is startled by that kind of beautiful complexity. And when it works, as it did last night, it sets something in you thrumming. Some under-challenged, quiet place in your brain’s long chains of nets, memories and rhythms sits up and pays attention.

If you don’t know much about music, if you’re like me and just delightedly embarking on all kinds of new conversations about how music works… If until now you’ve mostly only been able to hear the singer and the guitar, then when musicians begin to do something theoretically complicated like this you might just notice a different feeling in the room, or a different look of focus on their faces. The look of a free falling descent becoming flight in mid air, maybe. Or maybe just of craftspeople being good at their jobs. Either way, I expect all kinds of unfolding coolness from this band. I love the way older songs are aquiring grit, and the way newer sounds are making their way in. I love the tone of Dan Schachter’s voice, as I said in this earlier review of Shoot the Moon, although I’d like to be able to hear the lyrics he sings better. All I want now is to see both him and Nadia grab hold of their singing instruments and push them more bravely and clearly out the plane’s door. You know what I mean?

Another high highlight of the night was the climatic gospel peak of opener Lil Andy’s lil set. Lil Andy bellows and strums in a way that makes my cowboy-booted toes tap and makes me want to holler cheerfully along. He’s sunny country with a bit of a dark, sarcastic urban twist. But last night he did something particularly cool- maybe it wasn’t all that new for him, but I’d only seen him once or twice before and it was entirely new to me. He launched into a preachin’ song with the caveat that he didn’t usually attempt this, but he had a feeling we were the right crowd for it; “This is a song,” he said, “that’s about a Higher Power, and it’s gonna need some Amen’s!” We were a decidedly hybrid crown in terms of religious background, not to mention language and origins, but we followed where Lil Andy led and gave him back increasingly loud, happy and emphatic Amen’s to his passionate declarations of the existence of something higher than ourselves. It was a bizzare moment. And thinking about it now, the strangest thing is; in that moment of shared delight in good music and fearless performance it did make perfect sense to me to testify to the existence of some things that are great and good.

I was bummed out about politics and the state of the planet yesterday, but in a dark, smoky room at night I was convinced, for a little while at least, to believe in the possibility of purpose and good news. Enough to yell “Amen” anyway.

I wonder what it means that I also willingly yelled “haul ass” when he asked us to?

(that idea bout music and frequencies was what i was trying to get at in this earlier project. it doesn’t quite look like what i’d like, but i still think the writing is ok, and the song (the bottom button) i made with the aforementionned Emilie, is kind of interesting…you need flash for this one, sorry guys)

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[ originally posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Events, Everything, Media, Writing. ]