Ridiculously clever and frequently funny, What We Know So Far‘s performance piece, nay, “lecture in one act for two vocalists, chamber orchestra (or pre-recorded music), and slide-show,” called The Hannah Complex, is one of the freshest time-based live AV pieces I’ve seen in a long time. These kids (well, one of them did have to wait for his mother to arrive from Massachusetts before they started) are onto something that in a couple of years is going to be blazing away, I think, at the front of a new performance style that has just been waiting to explode. Using something as simple as an overhead projector but timing it exquisitely with a live laptop sound performance that was obviously highly composed beforehand, combined with virtuosic readings, also highly composed and subtly theatrical, they’ve created something that a lot of people have attempted in a more lazy and unconvincing fashion. It’s not that the components of what they’re doing are new, it’s just the discipline with which they’ve constructed it and the musical sense of timing imposed upon it all that makes it head-and-shoulders above anything I’ve seen along these lines. It’s as if, by saying no to improvisation and yes to a lot of rehearsal, the group has taken what could be boring and stupid to a level of mastery. And we’re just talking form and structure so far.
(pic via Dumbo Books of Brooklyn)
As far as the actual content is concerned, it’s a little overly bombastic in its uber-cerebral locutions for my taste. Yes, they’re some smarty-pants and they like everyone to know it, and hey, that’s great! I like a good intellectual high as much as the next PBR-sipping hipster, but there are some ways they could take a bit of the alienating edge off. Overloading the audience with post-structuralist deconstructions of Disney’s Hannah Montana, combining Dada with information transfer speeds that make the internet look slow, they create a heady rush of gibberish that feels truthy and revelatory while in fact being nonsense. I just love it.
In a sudden and surprising string of good shows, I saw dogr perform last week at Trophy Bar. I first learned of David’s music through my dear friend Seamus when I was living in Holland. I loved the little self-made CD Seamus gave me, totally getting lost in dogr’s vulnerable vocals and melodic yet resistant lines of tales that seemed to revolve around Korean rivers and strange, possibly sexual, secret rendezvous between characters that sounded terrifyingly and seductively innocent.
I hadn’t heard him play live so when I found out he was going to be at Trophy, I was happy (I love that bar). We walked in and they were playing Arthur Russell, always a good sign. Finally David started, and it was just as haunting, vulnerable and smart as the self-released CD. Congratulations to him for getting a proper Sonig release.
All-in-all, this past week renewed my faith in what New York is capable of. Yeah, Manhattan can be, and often is, obnoxiously affluent, plastic, and snobby. But there are still a few more burroughs out there, and some fine work being done in them.
