Portland, OR
30 April 2014
Seeing Thee Silver Mt. Zion, the most famous off-shoot of post-apocalyptic prophets Godspeed You! Black Emperor, on the eve of both May Day, the most famous of socialist holidays, and Beltane, a Celtic pagan festival halfway between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, often associated with “popular and often raucous celebrations.” Note that I said EVE, as in the night before the big festivities. The air seemed infused with the riotous energy, but minus the pomp and ceremony, without the parades and the buttons and the banners and the labels. One often wonders, is the anarchy that can be spoken the real anarchy? Instead, 4.30.14, an almost already sweltering night in Portland, and it seemed like the REAL celebration. Like we were getting away with something, when no one was looking.
Gary Oaks, my lovely companion for the evening, wandered off, sitting on a tire swing in a mounded vacant lot, staring out at the neon skyline. Wandering around, hatching harebrained schemes as we constructed potential comic books about clone wars and acid rain, made fun of all the people who would be tweeting Marxist slogans the next day, the people that wanted to skip work but “just couldn’t get away.” We sniped a cup of coffee from the laundromat where he works, and were good and caffeinated and in the mood by the time we entered the beatific confines of Mississippi Studios.We arrived for the latter half of opener Jherek Bischoff‘s set, just the perfect amount to fall completely under his glamour while still having energy for the headliners. Bischoff is a composer, arranger and pop musician from Seattle who plays a gorgeous strain of ambient classical minimalism. He was raised on a sailboat and is a largely self-taught musician. He has collaborated with the likes of Amanda Palmer, Xiu Xiu, The Dead Science and Parenthetical Girls, and has been compared to “the missing link between the sombre undertones of Ennio Morricone and the unpredictability of John Cale” by the NME. I had only heard a couple of tracks on the way in, and was expecting some form of freak folk Chinese opera: not bad, but not essential, either.
Turns out I was very, very wrong, and Bischoff’s music is very, VERY essential!
For the occasion, Bischoff was leading an augmented string quartet: two violins, a viola and cello, mixed with clarinet (both regular and bass) and himself on guitar. They played in a gorgeous, longform droning style, with the violins falling after each other like shooting stars in a meteor shower. That’s when it hit me; that we were in store to hear some classical music this evening! Bischoff’s classicism definitely sticks to the minimalist camp, which is to say it deals heavily with repetition. He has described himself as “writing more in pop song form than most composers as I come from a more rock background than anything else.” Honestly, this simplicity works in his favor, as most “serious composers” have something to prove, and a need to justify the $75,000 in debt from their stay in the conservatory, and have a tendency to fill every square inch of temporal space with sound.Bischoff’s tones were studied and considered, giving full and free rein for the sounds to curl and pirouette around one another. Several of the album pieces were recorded in an underground cistern somewhere in Washington, with a 45-second natural delay. It was unclear, to me, if there was some sort of delay unit or pre-recordings in action, but I don’t think so. Instead, the natural sonority of the stringed instruments were drawn out in elegiac detail, playing what he termed “sad major,” the notes of a C Major scale looped and arranged into bittersweet shards of sunlight, soot and dust.
Bischoff proved himself to be a remarkable performer as well as band leader, with a wry and warm demeanor on-stage, witty and self-deprecating then flipping a switch and becoming mighty and impassioned. His electric guitar playing showed the potential of true heavy metal minimalism, eking out sparse low baritone notes from the bottom strings; a model of restraint, with every note used to maximum efficacy. It was not all classical filigree, either, with the ensemble playing a rendition of “Kule Kule” by the Congrotronics band Konono No. 1, earning at least one disbelieving gasp. Tribalism was in full effect this evening, coming from the most unlikely of sources.
Here is a world-class performer who writes blog posts about having an anxiety attack after receiving a phone call from the Kronos Quartet, and talks about “writing from the heart.” He is the true inheritor of minimalism, stealing the fire of classicism from the ivory tower of the academies and bringing it back into the night clubs and galleries, back to the streets and forests and fields that spawned it. Bringing it back to life.I tend to get kind of tense when I hear really sparse or simplistic droney music played life. It’s some of my favorite music on earth, and I will gladly find a Persian rug to lounge about on for hours, but a lot of people expect a spectacle live and get kind of belligerent when confronted with patient and intentional music. I am happy to report that this was not the case for this sold-out evening in the vaulted, vaunted interior of Mississippi Studios. The crowd was enraptured, hanging on every vibrato and glissando, being transported to God knows where. I was truly proud of Portland and of fans of what was once called post-rock, indicating that people have good taste, after all. I highly recommend you check out Jherek Bischoff’s albums, particularly Composed and Scores, until he comes to yr shores, to transport you to the Emerald Isles.
The mood was mightily set for Thee Silver Mt. Zion.
It seems almost impossible to say, but at this point, I might even prefer TSMZ to GY!BE, at least live, having had the opportunity to see them both in the last 12 months. I’ve listened to GY!BE longer and more frequently, and their orchestral blitzkrieg has become a formative part of my DNA. Maybe it was just the performance, or the circumstances, but this May Day Eve seemed exceptionally dialed in, probably the tightest live performance I have seen in ages. The complete focus and control allowed the band to actually be MORE human, as well as suprahuman, with the ability to summon colossal megaliths of orchestral power with the flick of a switch. It was beyond impressive, more akin to the traditional usage of the word awesome.The band played a large percentage of their most recent LP, Fuck Off Get Free, with staggering renditions of the title track “Austerity Blues,” “Rains Thru The Roof At Thee Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez),” “What We Loved Was Not Enough” and encored with “Little Ones Run,” which I was not lucky enough to see, as my companion and I had to run ourselves, sprinting like gazelle in the springtime air for three blocks to catch a bus. The set also featured an older favorite, “‘Piphany Rambler” from 2010’s Kollaps Tradixionales, about “rushing a loved one to the hospital in the middle of the night” and dedicated to all “nurses, and anybody working in front line social service,” and a new song, the tremendous “All The Kings Are Dead;” a declarative sentence because “if you say something enough, it comes true.” These quips illustrate what is so amazing about TSMZ; they intersperse their elemental orchestral fugues with humanity, and make it that much more relatable, able to be taken in. It’s like a poem about a mountain, rather than a mountain itself.
Efrim Menuck proved to be a very charming spokesperson, with quick-witted banter, jokes and even a Q&A session where one person asked “How do you make love last?” which managed to leave him stumped and speechless for a change. Or like, when introducing “Austerity Blues,” because “most of the people in this room will die penniless,” when Efrim announced: “It’s like Crass said, far better and with far fewer words, ‘Do They Owe Us A Living? Of Course They Do, Of Course They Do;'” to which I heard a person to my left mutter, “these guys are punk as fuck.” That’s one of the many amazing things about both TSMZ and GY!BE: they are ultimate anarcho-punks, played with catgut gypsy orchestral instruments. It’s so punk, they don’t call themselves punk, nor do they play “punk music”, which, to me, is some of the only punk worth listening to.
The band has been playing almost the same setlist for the entire tour, which is probably how they’ve become so tight and refined. My jaw hit the floor during “Fuck Off Get Free” when they switched from a howling maelstrom of symphonic noise to slow, leadened, deadened doom metal in a nanosecond. They go from screaming to whispering in the beat of a moth’s wing. Impressive is an understatement. If someone were a musician, Thee Silver Mt. Zion would make you cancel all yr social engagements for two weeks to practice yr ass off.
I would like to give special mention to first of all, the drumming of David Payant, which was even (no joke) heavier than Neurosis, with every possible subdivision of the beat, hammered like a napalm combustion engine. He switched from the heaviest tribal thud to a motorik Velvet Underground rock trance to a light, brushy jazz shuffle in an hour. One of rock’s heaviest hitters: more people need to hear about (and study) this man. Secondly, shout out to the bass playing of Thierry Amar, who fluctuated between stand-up and electric bass seamlessly, and has some of the heaviest bottom end this side of Sunn O))). Thirdly, the twin violins of Sophie Trudeau and Jessica Moss, which was like watching an aerial ballet between some flaming phoenixes at sunset, and made me weep openly at least once. And lastly, Efrim Menuck’s guitar playing, as he proved to be an exceptional noise guitarist with a real feel for tone, mood and texture, frequently playing only feedback or some choppy, metallic percussive rhythm that brought to mind legendary anarchist free jazz noise punks The Ex.I don’t know why I didn’t think about it more ahead of time, maybe out of the habit of avoiding expectations of live shows, but Thee Silver Mt. Zion blew my expectations out of the water. They played at least six different styles of music during their set, but there were several moments that were like the crashing, falling crescendo of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada, drawn out and elaborated upon. That was when it hit me: here I was, drinking in the sounds of some of my musical heroes, that made me who I am, and writing about it. The weight of miles, and of history, of hope and of victory, fell upon my shoulders.
The sound at Mississippi Studios was absolutely perfect this evening, and I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic, gushing way, but to say there was not one flaw. The reverbs, the bass frequencies, everything tailored and fit together perfectly to create a gleaming Kandinsky sculpture in the air, to get lost in, to be mesmerized by. I had some reluctance towards Mississippi Studios, for some odd reason, but at least the last four shows I’ve seen there have been beyond sublime, with amazing sound, friendly staff, and great crowds. If you’re ever in Portland, Or., find an excuse to go there.Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Jherek Bischoff on the eve of May Day was the epitome of “punk as fuck.” Punk without labels or explanations. The art seemed wild, free, alive, electrick. It’s the kind of thing that gets in yr nerve endings, and makes you stay up all night reading Paul Auster. Breaking down walls in yr mind, inhibitions in yr soul. Breaking down social conditioning that tells us all to conform, to be just like everybody else, to fall in line. Fuck that. True wildness, true passion, true art, has always come from the margins. So, like they advocate, “Fuck Off, Get Free”. Welcome to the wild.
-J Simpson-
