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Sunday, August 26, 2012
Aranya, Ix, and Cerebral Cortez
Who:
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When:
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ubik. left Beer Metal Summer Camp on Saturday afternoon because we had booked a show that night before we knew the dates for Beer Metal-- no one wants to leave half way in, but like I've said before, you play the shows you book and that's that. We booked this one well in advance because we played a good show with Aranya in Portland as the closer to our most recent tour, and wanted to return the favor and give them a good Seattle show in return.
Things just shook out that it was on Beer Metal weekend... so we rolled back into town a little exausted, not too sunburnt, and several days unshowered to meet up at The Rat & Raven. This was our first show there, and, though we felt a little unfaithful playing across the street from The Kraken (and popped in there for some food and the celebration of Iron Maiden day), the venue was cozy, accomodating, and well-set-up.
The pictures are going to be a little spotty and culled from the internet because... well... I never seem to have my cameras at shows I'm playing. Apologies for that; I ought to be more prepared.
On to the show...
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| Cerebral Cortez From the Rat & Raven Photos Page |
Cerebral Cortez
I'm generally skeptical of one-man bands, but Cerebral Cortez's opening set quelled all of my fears immediately. Cortez plays a full drum kit, wearing a microphone-equipped painter's mask for vocals, and with a pair of keyboards on his left (his hi-hat side) for melodies and vocal processing.
His set is a sort of outer-space experimental rock with hints of mad preacher and mushroom swirl. There's a synth gate pedal at his left foot that will let him trigger stabs of synth bass while his hands are busy drumming... and he'll quickly reach over, without dropping the beat, key a different bass note on the synth; the foot pedal controlled synth stabs are fluid and varied as Cortez reaches over and selects notes that become his basslines.
Similarly, the drums sometimes go one-handed as the synth chords or lines need to be played. If the piece calls for it, he'll simply have the kick drum and pedal click from the hi-hat hold the beat, freeing both hands to really dig into the synthesizers. The vocals are processed and sort of unintelligable, which I'm pretty sure is the point: every now and then, the mad Cerebral Cortez will drop some science the audience is not prepared to comprehend.
I'm told a Cerebral Cortez set is improvised-- I haven't researched that-- but the songs are fluid and varied. They rise and fall from charging beats to grooving bass and drum breaks, pulling back into quiet minimalism and jumping forward into big, almost-choral, slabs of harmony. These are big, adventurous songs that go many places.
| Three Bands mini-documentary Featuring Nasalrod, Ix, and Aranya |
The Portland bands were up next. We'd obviously played with Aranya before, but I hadn't seen Ix yet... though I knew Dan, their guitarist, from some of our visits to Portland. He lives in the same house as Justin (of Nasalrod and Lickity), so I've crashed on his floor more than once. The last time we were there, we hung out late into the night along with Aranya...
Which makes this a fine place for this particular digression: there's a fine little group of creative, interesting, outside-the-box bands in Portland right now that leads to a lot of community and support. Ix and Aranya came up to the Rat & Raven together, they share time in this fun mini-rockumentary I found (along with Nasalrod, with an assist from Marmits), and Uta's (from Aranya) viola is a large part of Ix's current demo.
I find the whole movement pretty inspiring... which isn't really part of a show review, but I wanted to mention it, and I wanted to post that video.
Digression complete. On to Ix...
| Good luck trying to find photos of Ix ... I really should have brought my camera to this show, so I'm just embedding their TARDIS song. |
It's said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, a quote that sticks in my brain every time I try to compose a few paragraphs explaining a band's sound, and even more so with Ix, who inspire very design and architectural thoughts for me-- the songs are specifically constructed, sometimes with sleek elegance and sometimes laid so bare you can see/hear the girders and beams. Those kinds of breaks are some of my favorite parts of Ix, where the rigidity of the locking pieces of the rhythm of the song is exposed and the piece reveals the skeleton of the whole construction.
An Ix song isn't opposed to charging forward for a bar, only to twist around itself, root down into a complete stop, jerk violently for a second, skitter off into a new direction, drop, roll, and break out into a run... which may be complicated, but it's so expertly performed that it all makes sense as one, precise movement. If I had to pin it all down, I'd say they do the technical changes of Hatross-era Voivod with the lockstep rhythms of older Jesus Lizard (but that's as close as I can get to it, and I'm still fudging the numbers).
The rhythmic manipulations are precise, but Ix can get frantic and chaotic, too-- Dan's guitar solos can be a whirlwind when the song calls for some lunacy, and (for at least one song) his voice is pitched up into a glitchy digital squawk. Rus (on a sweet 5-string steinberger bass) shares vocal duties, and his basslines are often fractured-sounding, slamming key phrases and then leaving space, contributing a lot of the propulsion of an Ix song. Jark's percussion is complex but fluid, keeping the spiraling song structures coherent, and some of his fills seem built to lead a listener through the breaks of a labyrinthine song.
Ix, like many of my favorite bands, are versatile-- they're not opposed to flat out rocking; they're not afraid of being melodic. There's a lot of heart-pounding, brain-throttling rhythm work, sure, but Ix can drop down into a mosh groove and swing up into a big, shiny chorus. There remains a unique core personality to Ix that is completely unmistakable-- they always sound like Ix, in a way no one else ever really will-- no matter where a song takes them, but a song can take them anywhere.
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| Aranya Photo pulled from their Facebook page |
Like Ix, Aranya aren't afraid to play in odd times, but their musical hearts are in a different place, layering interlocking melodies together. Aranya are the only band I can think of that, the first time I heard them, the songs went where my internal monologue urged them. From the crowd, I would think to myself "Adding counterpoint to that melodic line would be cool," immediately followed by Aranya developing a contrapuntal phrase.
Mae's bass, Tyler's guitar, and either Uta's guitar or viola work through a lot of creative, elaborate interplay, weaving through parts to create something that sounds almost symphonic. Their songs can be incredibly varied, sometimes having Uta simply rocking the mic as Tyler, Mae, and drummer Joseph locking into a straight-ahead charge that sounds almost punk. Similarly, they can drop down into the heavy pulse of a traditional metal groove... they're not likely to stay in any one place too long.
The melodicism in Aranya sounds somewhat Irish to me (personal impression), and somewhat folk... a lot of that is both Uta's delivery when singing (as opposed to shouting, screaming, roaring-- different parts of songs, different delivery) and her viola. That viola stands out; Aranya had the only viola in the line-up, but then again, they had the only viola I'd seen at any live show this year. Similarly, there's a lot of variety in Tyler's guitar and the collection of sonic toys on his pedalboard... which is, to date, the only board I've seen larger than my own. With all of the tones available to them, Aranya can compose dense multi-part compositions that progress from big riffs to shimmering spaciousness to off-time mathiness soaring melodies to crushing stomp.
So much can happen over the course of one song I was actually a little shocked to see the majority of their recorded songs are under six minutes-- most Aranya songs sound so huge, accomplish so much over what feels like such vast ground, they feel longer. A five-minute Aranya song can have the heft of a ten-minute epic. These are expansive journeys.
Epilogue
We played last-- it's bad form to make out-of-town bands close out a night-- and ubik had a great set (just a small brag...). The whole night was pretty fantastic; my only regret is that we couldn't bring a bigger crowd. Our audience was pretty damn great, but with a lot of Seattle's night life at the Capitol Hill Block Party and most of ubik.s friends at Beer Metal Summer Camp, we couldn't generate too big a turnout (which is on us, as we set up the show. Well, Michelle did, which is as close to “ubik. set up this show” as things tend to get.) The Rat & Raven did us a solid and cut down the rate for the room so that Ix and Aranya could have a bit of gas money at the end of the night.
At the time of this writing, ubik. doesn't have anything on the books with Aranya in the near future, but we're playing with Ix again in September-- we're making up our failed tour dates in Boise and Spokane by playing a quick 5-day run with Nasalrod, and our closing date is Nasalrod, Ix, and ubik. in Portland.
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