Local Reviews & Previews

[March 8th, 2006]

^Ethan Rose Monday March 13

Ethan Rose introduces his computer to its great-grandparents.

[ANTIQUE AMBIENCE] Ethan Rose's Ceiling Songs, a bewitching album of gently pulsing ambient drones, gurgling melodies, rhythmic scratches and reborn sound machines, began two years ago with "Jingle Bells." It was the only tune an antique music box that the 28-year-old had dug up could play. It's still there, entwined deep in the album's marrow, beneath countless layers of effects and missing more than a few notes, lost in a pile of discarded tines.

For Rose, who also plays in local instrumental outfit Small Sails, finding the box was a score. It was the result of a long hunt, not for the holiday standard but for the machine itself, a device archaic enough to provide Rose with the materials to create a proper juxtaposition of musical and technological eras. It was the starting point, along with a player piano found at a repair shop in Southeast Portland, for Ceiling Songs. Rose has transformed those elements into unrecognizable source material for a record that serves as a centuries-long bridge between the bottomless modern technologies of ProTools, looping stations and effects pedals, and those devices' predecessors—the music boxes and player pianos that are relics of the years before sound met binary code.

Yet Ceiling Songs is no more a homage to the player piano than was Kurt Vonnegut's dystopia named for it. In fact, Rose is more concerned with subverting these old machines: The splices and effects found in Ceiling Songs' digitized versions are completely improvisational, liberating the instruments' original set songs with human randomness, and Rose's own free-form musical ideals. There is scarcely a piano sound on the record, and, in the end, the only hint of the original material's age is in its magnified imperfections, the paper scratches Rose uses to set the rhythm of the compositions.

For Monday's live set, Rose has built another little machine, a sort of player piano/music box hybrid. The box produces its own unique organic sound—it doesn't matter to Rose what that sound is so long as it carries pitch—programmed in player-piano fashion with long strips of hole-punched paper. And on stage, Rose will rebuild those layers and layers of effects, chopping and looping them into, hopefully, the scratchy sublimity of Ceiling Songs. That might be impossible, though. But give the man a break; it would require four player pianos, several music boxes and a few banks of electronic effects to re-create the album. Considering that the player piano used on Ceiling Songs never left the store, that's just not going to happen.

Ethan Rose will be accompanied by the film work of Ryan Jeffery, who will debut his film Fallen before the set. Unrecognizable Now will open. Holocene. 8 pm. $4. 21+.

^Punk Rock Faggots come under fire

A band of high-school punks inspire ire with online activists

On Saturday, Feb. 25, www.PDXPress.net sponsored a benefit concert at Reed College that raised $900 for Oregon Books to Prisoners. A product of the punk website's altruism, the event hardly seems objectionable. So how did it become a flashpoint for online social activists? Seven words: Wolfgang Williams and the Punk Rock Faggots.

A local high-school band that was set to open the show, WWPRF raised the ire of a man who called himself only Topher. The man was allowed to take the stage to share his views after organizers refused to boot WWPRF from the bill at his request.

Witnesses report that Topher, who later turned down WW's request for an interview, argued that an all-white band would never call itself the Punk Rock Niggers, so calling a band of straight guys "faggots" was just as offensive. Twenty or so hecklers out of the crowd of 200 did little to dispel accusations of homophobia, taunting the activist. WWPRF's bass player, Andre Fortes, thanked the activist for sharing his views, and then the band played, starting its set with the song "I'm So Straight."

Fortes later explained to WW that the band played that song—featuring the lyrics "Punch me in the face and give me a beer/ I gotta prove I ain't a queer"—"to point out the fact that everything we're about is satirical."

But the satire fell on skeptical ears at Portland Independent Media Center (www.portland.indymedia.org), where Topher published an account of his experience at the show that elicited more than 50 comments, almost all verbose and angry in their support of the activist.

In that article, Topher relayed a response from Fortes claiming that the band was simply carrying on a punk-rock tradition, adopting the moniker as a challenge to high-school bullies who called the band members "faggots." Topher countered that apparently "they were entitled to perpetuate this hate speech beyond their high-school walls."

Band leader Wolfgang Williams disagrees. "We were trying to reduce the power of the word by calling ourselves faggots," Williams told WW.

Since the performance, show organizers and the band have apologized for the actions of the crowd, and Oregon Books to Prisoners even posted an open apology on Indy Media. The apology is understandable, but Indy Media's rejection of WWPRF's wordplay is a little more puzzling, considering that community's history with slippery semantics.

In 2004, an Indy Media author praised Patti Smith for her Crystal Ballroom performance, citing her encore as "the best" part of the show. The song the white punk legend performed was "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger," which culminated in a group chant of "Everyone's a nigger!" The article garnered four comments, all of which were supportive.

^John Weinland March 1 at Doug Fir

Adam Shearer gets a little help from his friends, as if he needs it.

[INDIE FOLK] John Adam Weinland Shearer is a songwriting force. When he sings, "You're standing in a photograph/It's really good to have you here/Even though you never move" on an early demo of the song "Piles of Clothes," you can feel it. But hearing the bespectacled balladeer sing those same words last Wednesday night at the Doug Fir was different: It was penetrating. Live, as the man fronting the band John Weinland, Shearer cradled the song's poignant lyrics in a haunting atmosphere created by Aaron Pomerantz's chirping mandolin mimicking the melody, keyboardist Alia Farah's backing vocals and the whisper-light, brushed drums of Ian Lyles shuffling in the background.

Though Shearer's lovely folk-pop songs are affecting on John Weinland's simple, self-titled debut recorded in 2003, the four musicians he's playing with these days—Pomerantz, Farah, Lyles and bassist Rory Brown—are helping one of Portland's most gifted singer-songwriters realize his full potential. The fact that JW just finished recording a new album—soon to be released as John Weinland's first "full band" effort—is damn exciting after seeing all they gave last Wednesday.

This is not to say Shearer's songs don't stand on their own. One listen to "In Which Case," from John Weinland, for example, displays his knack for picking an eerie, sorrowful guitar and working his voice into a sweetly troubled rapture. His personal lyrics seep into your psyche and reside there long after his songs have ended. So when Shearer bellows, "Put your eyes back on the road!" over a simple strum on "The Letters" and later tears into a harmonica solo that resides somewhere between crying and screaming, it's Shearer alone, and sometimes that's the way it should be.

But the group he currently plays with has transformed an otherwise impressive solo act into the 10-armed beast of instrumental bliss that is now John Weinland. On the night's closer, "Scene 30," for instance, Brown's bass stepped lightly in the background as Alia Farah's keyboard danced around Shearer's guitar before breaking into the strong, deep chords that launch the chorus: "I am here for now/But maybe not for long."

His humble stage presence is as endearing as the performance is powerful, as he pauses only to say the names of songs and once mention CDs available at the merch table. For those who don't yet have John Weinland, that's pretty exciting, but—thanks to a batch of new songs like "Friends and Family" and the growing dynamic of the band's sound—the real excitement will come when Shearer announces that John Weinland's new album is for sale in back.

^FBCCADE - TIC CODE (Sick Room Records)

Tic Code debut delivers metal for the more heady.

[MATH METAL] I had to learn to love instrumental math rock. I've probably seen Chevron, Portland's most heavy-hitting math rock outfit, 40 times in the past six years (the band plays with a lot of non-instrumental non-math rock bands I love), and it wasn't until the 20th or so that something inside me clicked. I started to grasp the awesome anti-sensibility of that group's twisting time signatures and the intense artistry of its largely audience-alienating live shows. The reward was, and continues to be, huge.

Tic Code's FBCCADE takes the rare moments of tangible rock found in slivers of Chevron's music and spreads them out into whole songs, and indeed, an entire album. The band delivers a barrage of massive drum fills ("Canker Sore City"), dueling Iron Maiden-esque solos ("Swedish Fish"), and in-and-out-of-sync choruses ("Brainbuster"). The result is a bit like ice cream for dinner—it tastes great, but what do you do for dessert? There is no time to contemplate the subtleties of Tic Code's songs, because despite a purposely off-balance delivery, this is really a balls-out metal band in manic-depressive indie-rock clothing.

Now, is there anything wrong with that? For the love of god, no! FBCCADE does its job as an ass-kicking rawk album for recovering metalheads who would rather be thrown a few curves and catch their breath every once in a while than receive a tired tongue-lashing from some 50-year-old manchild who dyes his hair black and still uses the word "bro." It's love-it-or-hate-it stuff, and while FBCCADE might not be as rewarding as learning to love an arty outfit like Chevron, it also won't take you six years just to figure out that you can.

Tic Code plays with Chevron and Prime Meridian on Wednesday, March 8, at Holocene. 9 pm. Free. 21+.