Pelican
The Fireside is small, as a bowling alley or a rock club, and it’s not much of a challenge for a band to project all the way to the back wall. But it looked like Pelican had shown up planning to shake the paint off an aircraft hangar. I remember thinking: These guys had better be excellent.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg play bass and drums, respectively, and Laurent Lebec and Trevor de Brauw both play guitar. No one sings. The absence of vocals means they can turn everything else up to foreground volume, and they do. Every instrument is drop-tuned, and the guitar sound is about six miles thick. The riffs (when there are riffs, and not just a droning, chocolatey quarter-note throb) go to work not so much on the brain as on the body’s other soft places–the throat, the eyelids, the belly, the genitals. The music is neutron-star heavy, but it isn’t catchy, and there aren’t hooks. You won’t leave the venue humming these songs, and you don’t need to–not any more than you need to be able to remember a massage. You just feel better.
Niblock is a minimalist sound artist and composer based in New York. He works mostly with extremely loud drones. His installation in May 2001 at the Renaissance Society was a lot like an enormous sandbox–you could literally play in the sound, which consisted primarily of dozens of tracks of microtonally drifting cello (or flute, or hurdy-gurdy) amplified to skull-softening volume and pumped through a carefully calibrated configuration of loudspeakers. From down the hall it sounded like little more than a deafening test tone, but once you stepped inside you were immersed in a sea of overlapping and interweaving sound waves. Layers and layers of harmonics and overtones pulsed, pooled, and simmered–the best visual analogy I can make would be to the moire patterns you get when you overlap two halftone screens. I could feel the air moving, and I became acutely aware of being surrounded on all sides by molecules vibrating in intricate and invisible patterns. Different notes seemed to collect at different locations in space–sometimes such a node would be so tightly focused I could dip my head into and out of it just by nodding.
“Mammoth,” track two on Pelican’s EP, opens with a few bars of a stately single-string guitar figure, then lands on a thundering chord with all four feet–and then lands on it again and again, 64 times in a row. By the time the band finally changes notes, I no longer especially want them to. There is craftsmanship here, but it erases its own fingerprints; the spell would be broken if your attention were called to a technical detail. Ordinarily I get tired of music if it’s too repetitive, if it doesn’t develop a direction, if it isn’t taut with the push-pull of competing impulses–but Pelican breaks all those rules. Their music shuts my brain down. Critical listening isn’t just irrelevant; it’s impossible.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Chris Anderson.
