Local News & Reviews

[October 4th, 2006]

^Strategy, Thursday, Oct. 5

Paul Dickow gets off the dance floor and takes a seat.

[SIT 'N' GAZE] Maybe you've shaken your ass to DJ P. Disco, a.k.a. Paul Dickow, on one of Portland's dance-club floors. Maybe you've shaken your ass with him. Well, this Thursday, his tunes will be going after your head and not your ass at the second installment of Vision + Hearing at Holocene. Assuming his Strategy moniker, he'll be dropping a new set of original destroyed disco beatscapes backed by the 'hood-centric video work of Marc Fischer and Savannah Teller. Last week, Dickow and I sat down at our computers and talked about this rare foray into live experimentation.

—MICHAEL BYRNE.

WW: The context of this show is different from how I've seen you perform in the recent past, and what you've told me that you're going for musically, which was to make people dance. This is total sit-'n'-stare music. Are you excited for the change?

Paul Dickow: Playing "head music" for sit-down shows was something I did for years and years. I think as I got asked to DJ more and more, I think I must have gradually become "more known" locally as a dance DJ or something. Which is funny; dance sets are what I love to do in a club or party setting—and I go out dancing a lot—but at home I'm mainly working on music that does not require a physical response. My favorite music is that which functions in both environments. I think there are a number of artists and DJs in town who have this split musical life, and the dance side tends to get more recognition.

Do you have a particular philosophy on audio/visual performance? Is this something you've spent much time with before?

My ideas about A/V performance are still forming. My main collaborator so far has been E*Rock. I really like the kinetic, line-art, colorful vibe of his work, and that's enabled me to work on some really brash, spontaneous and improvised music. Video content is a great determinant of composition, i.e., it will impose a series of changes in density, mood, and tempo on me that I would not automatically assume. I love this imposition.

Will this be an improv set? How does the visual element affect that?

No. However, I will be generating the audio and making my choices completely live, like a band does. If anything, the A/V context heightens my sense of risk-taking because there is some danger of falling out of sync. If I wanted to feel safe and perfect I'd just give my videographers a CD-R of original music for them to dub in as a soundtrack.

Strategy plays with Unrecognizable Now, Flora, and Deelay Ceelay at Holocene. 9 pm. $5. 21+. Visit Localcut.com for the full text of this interview.

^Chris Corbell, Star Like A Swallow (Green City Records)

Songwriter asks more questions than he answers on new EP.

[FOLK] There are a lot of bad songwriters in the world. While they might be able to pull together a melody and rhyme their way through a series of couplets (and maybe sell millions of records along the way), these artists (John Mayer, Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Geoff Byrd) are so blunt in their storytelling as to inflict a unique kind of head trauma on their listeners. This trauma results in a loss of curiosity. Good songwriters, on the other hand, inspire curiosity through storytelling that is filled with gaps that beg to be filled. These artists (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Karen O, and, in this case, Chris Corbell) don't pander to their audience, but rather often count on them to finish the story.

Corbell's latest EP, Star Like a Swallow, is filled with such wonderful gaps, the result of a writer who does not pretend to have all the answers. On "Ghost of Whitman," Corbell sings, in his Cohen-esque baritone, "Ghost of Whitman kiss your comrades/ sing your iron through the dead lands/ All your heirs who lost the heartland/ Follow wires beg the screen:/ Can you free me?/ Here's my money/ bleed my body." Now I don't know what the hell that means, but it's a passage that is just begging to be explored. Such oblique, curious lines abound on this album. There are no narratives here, no clear character sketches and no lesson songs. Corbell, a veteran songwriter with years behind him as a busker in New Orleans and a studio musician here in Portland, seems content just to explore ideas in his songs, and isn't afraid to leave those ideas half finished. The problem with Corbell's compositions is that they leave very little breathing room for his queries to be considered. Lyrically, this album is arresting, but Corbell so often clutters the proceedings with vocal effects (both overdubbing and his own overwrought affectations) and breathless instrumentation that the trueimpact of his words is lost. Lyrically, "Medicine" has the potential to be a great track, but by the time Corbell starts screaming, "Sick sweetheart, I hope you get well soon," you wish the disease would just end it all.

—MARK BAUMGARTEN.

Chris Corbell plays with Colin Spring and Bright Red Paper, Thursday, Oct. 5, at Towne Lounge. 9:30 pm. $5. 21+.

^Studio 415

A small chapel of Northwest rock is given a proper makeover.

Cindy Lindahl hadn't been to 415 SW 13th Ave. since she was 10 and her father brought her and her sister into his recording studio to blast the master recording of the Kingsmen's "Louie, Louie." An FBI obscenity investigation into the indecipherable lyrics of the song had made it a hit, and made the producer, Bob Lindahl of Northwestern Incorporated, nervous, so he thought fresh ears could make sure he wasn't missing anything.

Like everyone else, his daughters couldn't make any sense of Kingsmen vocalist Jack Ely's mumblings. Shortly after Mr. Lindahl's experiment, Northwestern Incorporated relocated and Cindy Lindahl never saw the inside of the studio again. Until June 18, 2006—Father's Day—when, after a dinner with her husband and children downtown, she noticed that the door to 415 SW 13th Ave. was open.

"Of course the place looked totally different," she recalls, "but it was interesting walking in there, and it was emotional because my father had died in January of this year. It was almost uncanny that we happened to be across the street from his first studio on Father's Day."

It's also uncanny that the building, which spent much of the past four decades vacant and at other times enjoyed stints as a sex club for men as well as an auto garage and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting hall, was undergoing renovation to once again become a recording studio.

Jim and Carol Meyers began hosting live music in the space they've renamed Studio 415 this summer, and plan to roll tape once again in the room where the Kingsmen and Paul Revere and the Raiders both recorded "Louie, Louie." When I stopped by the Studio's office to get the story from Meyers, the place was filled with rock history books and photocopies of historical documents, including a decree declaring July 28, 1985, to be "Louie, Louie" Day in Portland.

Jim Meyers urged Lindahl to bring any photos she had of her father in the studio so that he could mount them on the wall, and Lindahl shared more of the studio's history with him. Apparently the studio was the location of various now-collectible rockabilly recordings and the work of Bonnie Guitar, who would later become one of the first successful female rock producers.

"Louie, Louie" was always a mixed blessing for Lindahl because, although it was a huge success, tales of poor recording techniques—including mikes hanging from the ceiling—are part of the lore of the song. Lindahl frequently cited the crystal-clear Raiders version as evidence that he knew what he was doing. Vancouver, Wash., rare-vinyl collector and dealer Jim Blatt attributes part of the roughness to the fact that Ely wore braces, and that he had been up all night partying before the session.

Blatt also stopped by Studio 415 to take a look around, and discovered that the Meyerses were already working on something not too far from what he'd hoped: "I always thought it would be great if somebody would take that building and turn it into something...like the Hard Rock Café only local—all Northwest rock."

—JASON SIMMS.

^Smegma Sept. 29 at Food Hole

Three decades later, Smegma again proves the heart of noise is freedom. And it doesn't have to hurt.

[FREE NOISE] Go forth into the noise world and seek out the slightest trace of humor, quirk or goofiness and bring back what you find. It won't be much: a small handful, if anything. Most purveyors of noise music lean heavily toward dark self-seriousness. Blame the genre's dominant bleak, abrasive aesthetic. Yet, at noise's birth somewhere in the mid-'70s, there was Smegma, whose members take themselves only as seriously as members of a band named after "a thick, cheeselike, sebaceous secretion that collects beneath the foreskin or around the clitoris" can. Go ahead, use it in a sentence: Smegma was all over the place last Friday night! Which it was, and it was grand.

Frankly, the members of Smegma look like aging hippies: gray beards, long hair and colorful clothes. It was as if the industrial music movement never existed for them. Mostly from Portland, the members of the band carry a breezy aloofness that increased the distance between band and audience by miles (which is, normally, a rough task in the narrow hallway that is Food Hole). This is fine, but is definitely an odd occurrence in the noise community/asylum, where the crowd often shares breathing space with the band. One dude got pretty close, but his obvious possession/supplication (twitching, contorting) was an exception to the rest of us 20-odd souls.

The five-person crew—which has shifted many times over Smegma's three-decade existence—counters the above mentioned band/audience rift with an anti-tech performance. Since Smegma's 1973 birth in Pasadena, it's hard to believe that the band has updated their equipment even a bit. Smegma's arsenal of horns, drums, rubber bands (or something similar) and garage-sale turntable defies the knots of wires, contact mikes, recorders, looping stations and rewired effects pedals that make up a "standard" noise arsenal. Moreover, the show didn't hurt a bit: As always, I forgot my earplugs, but didn't miss them for a second. At moments it was creepy, but chalk that up to the "scary fun" disc spinning on the turntable (really).

But, almost until the end, it was cacophony: There was little discernible relationship between the players, save for impromptu recorder and horn choruses. Less than a half hour after the set started, we got a climax: drums and guitar tuning into the same crescendo, cutting, and that was it.

It's tempting to exempt Smegma from noise altogether, despite many "legendary noise band" tags, and just call it free-improv. But the noise is there in the disorder, if not the method or attitude. Seeing Smegma play is to see the moment when absurdity meant noise and noise meant freedom.

—MICHAEL BYRNE.

Smegma plays with Grouper, Thee Scarcity of Tanks, and Health, Wednesday, Oct. 11, at Rotture (formerly Loveland). 9 pm. Cover. 21+.