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Tarentel
: From Bone To Satellite
: Two Sides
of Myself : Split
7" with Rothko : Looking
for Things, Searching for Things |
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Live |
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30 September 2004, Tarentel,
Mono, and Fly Pan Am 
Warning – If you like well-organized concert experiences, or not waiting in lines for an hour, only to miss some of the first band, then the Echo is not the place for you. Unfortunately, they seem to venue du jour for a lot of great bands coming to the Los Angeles area, so hopefully this trend in poor customer service will slowly be rectified. Complaining now over… the rest of this review is mostly positive… mostly. Tarentel was pretty much the reason I trekked out to this show and decided to put up with the Echo’s Neanderthal-like staff. They have a new album, just out on Temporary Residence Limited, and a fresh new sound that I was anxious to hear. Gone are the crescendos and big sounds of From Bone to Satellite, and gone are the spooky sounds of the Order of Things. What remained were the stripped down sounds of a three piece (original members and multi-instrumentalists Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grody, along with drummer Jim Redd (from Sonna)). What remains is sound with no reference point, music with no antecedents, and sonic beauty without bounds. Tarentel played through most of the new album, leaving little space between the slabs of sound. Redd’s drumming served as the anchor for the whirling sea of samples and barely identifiable guitar work. Not what you expected from the Bay Area band that was once compared to Mogwai and other crescendo instrumental rockers, but who wants the expected. Owing more to the new laptop league of Manitoba (sorry, Caribou), Fourtet, and Prefuse 73, Tarentel’s music has become a seamless merging of the computer and the flesh, the recorded sound and the live sound. Fly Pan Am set up next, choosing to go before Mono (a wise choice given Mono’s incredible volume level). They took more than the average time to set up, but man, did they have more stuff to set up, compared to their last performance in Los Angeles. They played through almost all of their new record N’Ecoutez Pas, out now on Constellation Records. It is a completely new sound for Fly Pan Am, although it also feels like a natural evolution from their last record. Fly Pan Am has added the voice to their bag of tricks, focusing more on the sounds being made than the words being sung. With copious amounts of delay and reverb, the voices became as percussive as a snare drum and as warped as their samples. Add to this their increasing love of the disco dance beats and one might think that Fly Pan Am is setting its sights on becoming the next Public Image, Ltd. or Gang of Four. Lastly were the intense sounds of Japan’s Mono. They have a new record as well, which they played a great deal from, although without the accompanying strings from the recording. Mono plays music that may be similar to many other bands, but they play it with a fury and love that brings a fresh perspective to a potentially tired scene. Why the hell else would people still be discussing them if they didn’t make them feel something? All comparisons aside, Mono played through
their last two albums with a quiet strength
and assuredness. They muscled through the inept
soundperson at the Echo, someone who probably
should rethink his goals in life, or at least
how he treats people he is being paid to assist.
They pulled off a stunning set of music that
seemed to go on forever, but never felt forced
or old. They rocked. |
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3-4 December 2001, Six
String Object: Digital Guitar Microfestival
Exploring the relationships between club culture, music software and the guitar's role as interlocutor, Secret Excretion's Kenric McDowell recently hosted the premier edition of Six String Object, a 'digital guitar micro-festival' held on two consecutive nights. Though the performers were selected on the basis of their involvement with "digitally processed and prepared guitar", the six stringed objects in question, when not physically absent, took a backseat to the black plastic displays whose Apple logos glowed in the Stygian darkness of Cafe du Nord's subterranean performance space. Billed as Joshua Torres, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma from local out-rockers Tarentel fixed his inscrutable gaze on the Powerbook and conjured downward-swooping glissandi punctuating numerous layers of drones and pulsing bass harmonics. Random sweeps matched with rhythmic pulses yielded a sonic moiré, soon taken over by aggressive pink noise textures. Sophisticated polyrhythms announced the chord clusters and other tonal components that crept in towards the end of Torres/Cantu-Ledesma's set. Emanate recording artist Chris Degiere matched gesture to the varied dynamics of his music with the help of a homebrewed interface enabling the use of a Palm Pilot as a MIDI x/y surface. It has been a long road from the fullarm sweep of the late Clara Rockmore's theremin playing to Degiere's onsite penmanship, yet both technologies add gestural vitality to what otherwise might simply be a 'push to play' experience. The PDA traced the contours of filter modulation and input streams of note events. Degiere then picked up a bass guitar to accompany his mesh of sequences. In his set, as throughout the festival, the zeitgeist glitch quotient was met and then some. The first evening closed with a site-specific audio installation assembled and triggered by festival organiser McDowell. He then burned three CD-Rs of processed recordings culled from several Tarentel performances. These were played simultaneously as the club's mirror ball lit up, tossing disco's number one lighting cliche into the postmodern blender. The three discs synchronised to striking effect at points, the open chord twang and rapidfire samples muting as if by mutual agreement. Bowed strings met cricket drones in McDowell's rethinking of Tarentel's sound. Guitars - the actual instruments as played for their own sake - made a stronger showing on the second night. Daron Key, guitarist with Control R Workshop, stood apart from the crowd by eschewing laptop technology completely. The diffident performer preferred to modify the timbre of his six strings by mechanical and electronic means. Building cycling melodies with rapid fret tapping, Key resorted to affixing objects to the strings (lengthy springs creating their own unique reverb), bowing the Fender Mustang and then tweaking the guitar's output with ring modulator treatments and other pedal effects. Christopher Willets positioned himself and his electric bass behind both a Powerbook and a MIDI command station. Just shy of transforming into a Rube Goldberg mechanism, Willets addressed all three implements with the adroitness of a medieval harpist. The processed fragments of staccato picking came to resemble Steve Reich's work with the Pulse Gate and evoked the cyclical aura of his Four Organs. The festival's finale paired musician Chiara Giovando with video artist/Orthlorng Musork corunner Sue Costabile, under the collective moniker Hot Lixxer. Seated at centre stage, Costabile projected video images of vintage album art, their imagery (the smiling wolf from Steppenwolf Live) echoed and smeared via laptop application, with Costabile drawing onto the results. Her visuals shared little more than kitsch appeal with Giovando's dissection of a John Bonham drum loop; finally allowing the track to play through, Giovando swayed dreamily and played air guitar. This faint showmanship stood in bold relief against the desktop commandos that preceded Hot Lixxer, but it wasn't enough to erase the taint of selfindulgence from their set. Nor was Giovando's sluggish button-pushing on a toy guitar synth. The 70s references, both musical and visual, made a nod in the direction of a critique of male hegemony in arena rock. But then, maybe those old LP covers just look cooler on the big screen. DJing in the intervals, Wire
contributor Philip Sherburne spun a programmatic
ambience from discs featuring manipulated guitar
sounds. Among others, he wove the tuned fog
that was My Bloody Valentine's signature into
the reversed guitar of a Stone Roses track.
Even the canned music for Six String Object
showed more vitality than the city's established
avant music festivals have shown in recent years. |
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16 October 2000, Tarentel
and Sonna "Art Rock: Sonna, Tarentel" 
The buzz from Tarentel guitarist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's amp was louder than the music when he and guitarist Daniel Grody first begin playing, repeating a contrasting pair of spare, single-stringriffs back and forth to each other. The electronic hum and echoing strings alike were easy to make out, given the space and the crowd--the floor of the tiny H. Lewis Gallery was carpeted with quiet student types, sitting cross-legged or leaning against the art-lined walls. When multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Hughes sent synthesized drones from a Roland Juno 60 pulsing up through the music and bassist Trevor Montgomery added his own basso plucking to the fuguelike build of the first piece in a long, seamless set, the volume level rose, but the music maintained a contemplative spell. The San Francisco-based quartet is not always so low-key--the wide-screen instrumental sprawl of its most recent album, From Bone to Satellite, kicks up quite a ruckus at times, as the band does live under ordinary circumstances. But Tarentel was keeping it on the down low especially for this occasion, a joint gig with local quartet and current tourmate Sonna (both bands record for local label Temporary Residence Ltd., run by Sonna guitarist Jeremy deVine). Hughes finally sat down behind a drum kit two-thirds of the way through, but he mostly teased the cymbals with fuzzy mallets. Still, the overall effect of the band's subtle weave of repeating melodic patterns and shifting, spacey textures (at one point Montgomery underpinned a rich drone by stroking his bass guitar with a violin bow) was so entrancing that no one in the audience clapped until the set was over, when they clapped wildly. Tarentel ceded the gallery floor to Sonna, which offered its own take on mostly instrumental non-rock rock. The quartet, which featured deVine, guitarist Chris Mackie (who warbled on one song), bassist Drew Nelson, and drummer/keyboardist Jim Redd, relies less on textural variety and epic scope. Sonna tunes tend toward delicate, melodious instrumentals sprinkled with Rhodes-piano fairy dust, courtesy of Redd (who tied everything together with crisp percussion when not behind the keys) and Nelson. Again, the audience saved its substantial applause until the end. Ultimately, the H. Lewis Gallery
was the perfect setting for this show. In a
bigger room or a more standard venue, listeners
might have tended to lose focus, maybe wander
off and talk, and nothing would have been more
detrimental to this music than the sort of back-of-the-room
murmur so common to quiet sets in local clubs.
And if the two bands' music is a little static
for the average rock situation, the intimate
art-gallery setting framed it perfectly, as
the rapt patrons took in the musicians' creations.
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Deborah Giattina, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 5 April 2000 "Tarentel: Yoga for the ears" Tarentel, the stoniest, most mind-blowing of San Francisco's instrumental rock bands, shouldn't be judged for putting their laptop center stage at their last Bottom of the Hill show a few months back. The audience knew just as well as this five-piece that the real instrument is the mind and spirit. Each song seemed to be an aural meditation on space and its undefinable limits. From the resonance that came from John Hughes lightly tapping the symbols with mallets and the slow, extended notes Trevor Montgomery slid from his guitar to the tape loops and samples Jefre Cantu and Jeff Rosenberg pulled off the sampler and laptop, Tarentel's music loomed like shadows of the universe cast upon a cave wall. The first (untitled) number served as an introduction to "The Day You Have Given Us Lord Has Come to an End." Hughes worked up the volume by hitting the cymbals increasingly harder, and Cantu played some keyboard samples. As the intro segued into the song proper, Montgomery played slide guitar slowly. Hughes then abandoned his drum kit and stepped up to blow a lugubrious melody on the melodica. With all the black-clad members changing instruments mid-song and the brightest light onstage emanating feebly from that little laptop, it wasn't easy to pin down this fluid ensemble that operates more like an organism than a band. And perhaps that was part of the point. Tarentel's songs turned on a dime, and a cacophony of samples exuding the urban elegance of a Louise Nevelson sculpture could have either suddenly rocked out or turned into a mournful French pastoral. On "For Carl Sagan" Cantu set the foundation of the song with sparse chords on guitar that didn't initially seem related to Hughes's drumming and Danny Grody's guitar playing; then Montgomery joined in with a hook that brought the whole piece together - but only for a diaphanous moment. Somewhere between the last untitled song and "When We Almost Killed Ourselves," Hughes returned to the melodica to play a tune not unlike the bittersweet ditty that dominated the film Betty Blue. By the end of the set Rosenberg had moved from bass to drums and crushed that delicate melody into smithereens with the steady boom of the bass drum. Another catchy hook from Montgomery tempered the mighty throb, and from there the song just sort of evaporated into the darkness. The lights came on over an awestruck crowd that benefited from this beautiful music. |
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