On Saturday, April 7 we are proud to present experimental electronic musician/composer DREKKA, experimental electronic musician Timber Rattle, and music producer Dr. Zapata (CMH). Doors 7:30pm, all ages. $5-$10, BYOB.
About the performers:
Working under the name DREKKA since 1996, composer Michael Anderson has toured, traveled, and collaborated extensively; collecting memories and building a very personal archive of sound that dates back to the mid-1980’s.
DREKKA has released a large body of work on labels such as Dais, Auris Apothecary, Morc, Silber, and Anderson’s own label, Bluesanct. Anderson has also recorded and toured as a member of such as projects as Turn Pale, Jessica Bailiff, In Gowan Ring, Stone Breath, Annelies Monseré, Rivulets, and Dylan Ettinger. DREKKA owes something to the soundscapes and non-linear impressionism of Cindytalk or COIL, the industrial gravity of Einstürzende Neubauten or Hafler Trio, and the cinematic collaborations of Edward Artemiev/Andrei Tarkovsky or Simon Fisher Turner/Derek Jarman. But his work is very apparently unique and personal.
Throughout years of performing and recording, DREKKA has explored early industrial tape culture, fragile bedroom noise-folk, and expansive cinematic textures. His work and performances touch on themes of silence, memory, and forgetfulness. But rather than obscure himself, as is so often the effect of experimental music, DREKKA functions as a direct line into Anderson’s mind and his tenuous cache of memories. These personal aspects and this fragility are clearly on display, rather than being obfuscated by poetic abstractions. While “haunting” and “hypnogogic” are words often used to describe experimental music and art, DREKKA unequivocally occupies and deals in those dark spaces which comprise the tenuous province of memory and dreams. Those are the real ghosts of time and sound. But just as prominent, particularly in the live setting, is a sort of confrontation; a wrestling with frenetic energy that approaches mania or ecstasy. Just as DREKKA’s recordings serve not to obscure but to exhibit Michael Anderson’s mind, his performances serve to exhibit his person, his body. DREKKA’s audiences behold not an anonymous face in the glow of a laptop, but a man riding his flimsy card table strewn with tape players, bells, trinkets, metal, and pedals. They behold a man’s spirit riding him, contact microphone in mouth, hands shifting cassettes collected over time and distance. DREKKA’s audiences behold a confrontation of spirit, body, memory, and sound.
TIMBER RATTLE is a kind of “pyche-pastoral” hymnal which seems to be as informed by noise shows in west coast basements or the revolutionary spirit of poet Jean Genet as it is by a panoply of North American landscapes, such as the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Virginia, where its members grew up. It is spatially both vast and intimately spiritual, seeking to create a reflective space within which to contemplate an individual and mutual encounter with nature; with the mountains, the forests, the deserts, the oceans… and the phantoms of experience and memory that haunt us in these places. While never straying too far from a pastoral/folk sound that celebrates the environment and the arcane wild that surrounds us, the music also incorporates primordial elements of drone and psyche experimentation which focus on an intuitive exploration of tone, pattern, scale, and palette. Lyrically, the layers of harmonies present a willful abstration on the relationships between land and bodies and life and death and magic and language and ritual and myth and space and cycles and animals and plants and food and poison… the sound and the shape of the words being equally important to any ‘meaning’ discerned from the lyrics. A cohesive and quintessential offering, ‘Phantoms of Place’ is a meditation on physical space, place and tradition, and an exploration of the meaning of being human in the garment of living nature.
Unlike the typical bio you have read before, Dr. Zapata did not start showing off his musical talents when he was still a fetus, he did not get his first piece of equipment when he was in pre-k, he is not the son of a recognized musician, he did not get influenced at an early age by a prodigious artist. Dr. Zapata’s introduction to music was painful and dull. He developed a fairly irrelevant musical taste, comprised basically by the commercial material that were floating around on the radio waves with further reinforcement by close friends with similarly irrelevant musical taste. Several years passed until one night, in the middle of a dance floor in a crowded club, he felt for the first time the sound, the lights and the vibrations on the floor generated by a talented DJ. From that day, all changed, up to his incursion as a producer. Dr. Zapata’s tracks are composed to challenge listeners, genre is optional.