#bill nace

[dustedmagazine]

Myriam Gendron — Mayday (Feeding Tube/Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Justine Latour

Quebecois folk singer Myriam Gendron is far from the first artist to turn in some demos expecting them to serve as a rough draft, only to decide that the results stand on their own. Since that debut collection of Dorothy Parker’s poetry set to music (2014’s Not So Deep as a Well), Gendron’s only put out one further record (2021’s justly attention-getting collection Ma Delire: Songs of Love Lost and Found), but she’s been busy with literally life and death. It was only after having kids and then putting together Ma Delire that Gendron really started touring consistently, and then that was sadly halted because of her mother’s sickness and eventual death. That experience informs Mayday, an album of firsts for Gendron; first more traditionally “studio” recording, first time she’s made her music her day job, and first time she’s written most of the songs herself. Despite all those changes, though, Mayday is just as exceptional, intimate, and timeless feeling as anything Gendron’s done before.

On Ma Delire Gendron brought in Bill Nace and Chris Corsano for a song apiece; here she widens and deepens her net (and Nace is back too). A mutual admiration society between her and justly-lauded performers Marisa Anderson and Jim White resulted in the three working together on three songs here, about a third of the total running time. The results are stunning; Anderson and White have worked together to great effect before and Gendron’s richly crestfallen voice fits in perfectly, whether the duo are calm and reflective on “Long Way Home,” foreboding and restless on “Terres Brûlées” (with Nace), or exploratory and elegiac on “Lully Lullay.” The former two also feature Cedric Dind-Lavoie on double bass, and it’s hard not to wish for more from that particular grouping.

That’s not because the rest of Mayday is lacking, though. Gendron eases the listener in with the Fahey-homaging instrumental “There Is No East or West,” and although the title references a gospel song, here it seems to speak more to the feelings of doubt, uncertainty, and grief that course through Gendron’s songs. Whether adapting Parker again on “Dorothy’s Blues,” turning out gemlike instrumentals like “La Luz,” or leaning into the soaring sadness of “Look Down That Lonesome Road,” Gendron continues to be a singular voice (figuratively and literally).

The title of the closing “Berceuse” translates to “Lullaby,” and gentle tone and lyrics match. Until Zoh Amba’s saxophone squeals surge in, playing the track off as Gendron’s electric guitar slowly gets quieter. It’s a striking moment, and after a few listens on that it’s hard to imagine the song and the album without, as if the messiness of life is bursting in to remind us why we need to sing children to sleep in the first place. As always, the beauty of Gendron’s music feels both hard fought and carefully wrought, something worth sharing and protecting.

Ian Mathers

[jacobwren]

Bill Nace on taishōgoto

[jgthirlwell]

12.01.23 Bill Nace at Public Records Brooklyn

[mxdwn]

Kim Gordon Releases Surprise EP As Body/Head

https://music.mxdwn.com/2023/05/07/news/kim-gordon-releases-surprise-ep-as-body-head/

[bandcampsnoop]

7/31/23.

I was record shopping the other day, and ran across a couple of Samara Lubelski LPs. I've enjoyed Lubelski's music since her debut "The Fleeting Skies".

Lubelski (New York) is still quite active musically. She played as part of a duo with Bill Nace last May. I own three solo LPs and they all are quiet, contemplative and melodic. Every once in a while there will be a more upbeat song. Often I think of Vashti Bunyan or Diana Darby when I listen to her music.

Lubelski has quite a varied music background. She's played violin with Thurston Moore, and engineered recordings of Ted Leo ("Hearts of Oak"...one of my favorites). And on "Parallel Suns" she works with Hamish Kilgour. I also bought "Spectacular of Passages" - again Kilgour plays drums, but Gary Olson (Ladybug Transistor) also joins.

"Parallel Suns" was released by The Social Registry (Brooklyn, New York).

[whtaever]

[eraseer]

Listen/purchase: Secret Cuts by Body/Dilloway/Head

[persistentvisionz]

June 15, 2024

Aaron Dilloway & Bill Nace - Mr. Smalls Theater - Pittsburgh PA

[sinceileftyoublog]

Six Organs of Admittance Interview: More Than a Couple Chairs

Photo by Kami Chasny

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When Ben Chasny dives into something, he usually dives deep. Upon answering the phone in February, when I called him to talk about his new Six Organs of Admittance album Time Is Glass (out today on Drag City), he seemed a bit scattered. Despite mentally preparing himself all day for the interview, he got distracted by a "What are you digging lately?" Bandcamper compilation Drag City asked him to put together to advertise his record release. (A music fan with a voracious appetite, Chasny was rediscovering music he had purchased a couple years prior and forgot about.) Six Organs records often occupy the same dedicated headspace, Chasny setting aside blocks of time to think about nothing else. That is, until Time Is Glass. On his latest, Chasny blurs the lines between his outside-of-music life and the music itself, the album a batch of songs that reflects on the magical minutiae that sprout during a period of needed stasis.

The last time I spoke to Chasny, he and his partner [Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers] were still settling in from their move to Humboldt County in Northern California. "When Elisa and I first moved here, we didn't have any friends," Chasny said. "But there's a group of us that live in Humboldt now. A bunch of my friends moved up since the last time I talked to you." That includes fellow Comets on Fire bandmate Ethan Miller and his partner, fellow New Bums musical partner Donovan Quinn, and folk singer Meg Baird and her partner. "Every New Year's Day, if it's not pouring rain, we take a walk on the beach," said Chasny. One such photoshoot on January 1, 2023 yielded the album cover for Time Is Glass: That's Miller and his poodle, along with Baird's Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. This unintentional artistic collective meets up often, whether for coffee or as Winter Band, a rotating cast of area musicians who form to open up for musician friends when they come through town, like Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls. As such, according to Chasny, Time Is Glass is a celebration of community.

Perhaps the supportive strength of his artistic family gave Chasny the willpower to incorporate elements of his daily life into Time Is Glass, something he couldn't avoid. He didn't share with me exactly what in his personal life made it impossible to separate the two, though he mentioned his dog, a difficult-to-train puppy that was a mix of three traditionally stubborn breeds. Said dog inspired "My Familiar", a song that uses occult language to inhabit the mind of his obstinate canine companion. "And we'll burn this whole town / No one says there's good," Chasny sings, alternating between his quintessential hushed delivery and falsetto, his layered vocals atop circular picking exuding a sense of sparseness. Indeed, you wouldn't expect a Six Organs record about home life to sound totally blissful; Time Is Glass is at once gentle and menacing. The devotional "Spinning In A River" portrays the titular carefree act as lightly as the prickle of Chasny's guitar or as doomily as the song's distortion. "Hephaestus" and "Theophany Song" imagine their respective mythological characters as gruff and voyeuristic. "Summer's Last Rays" indeed captures a sense of finality, Chasny's processed guitar and warbling harmonium providing the instantly hazy nostalgia before the fade-out. The album is bookended by songs more straightforwardly hopeful, the opener "The Mission" a dedication to friends falling in love with their new place of residence, the closer "New Year's Song" a twangy ode to dreaming. But it's the moments in between that Chasny was forced to capture on Time Is Glass. And thankfully, what was born out of necessity yielded, for him, new ways to interpret the same old, same old.

Read my conversation with Chasny below, edited for length and clarity. He speaks on domesticity, mythology, playing live, and Arthur Russell.

SILY: You've lived in Humboldt County for a bit. Is Time Is Glass the first Six Organs record in a while you made while situated in one place?

Ben Chasny: I did do a couple records here before. The first one, I was in the process of moving here, so I wasn't really settled. The second was at the beginning of lockdown. This is the first one I felt like was recorded at a home. Everything was settled, I have a schedule. When I was doing the first one, I didn't even have furniture in the house. I had a couple chairs. [laughs]

SILY: Do you think the feeling of being recorded at a home manifests in any specific way on the album?

BC: I started to incorporate daily domestic routines into the record, more often. A lot of the melodies were written while taking the dog for a walk, which I've never done before. There was always stuff to do as I moved in. The times weren't as separate. Before, it was, "Now I'm recording, now I'm doing life stuff." There was a merging of everything here. I would listen to it on my earbuds while taking walks and constantly work on it for six months.

SILY: It definitely has that homeward bound feel in terms of the lyrics and the sound, like you've been somewhere forever. There are a lot of lyrics about the absence of time, and there's a circular nature to the rhythms and the guitars. Does the title of the album refer to this phenomenon?

BC: A little bit. Time does seem, in general, post-lockdowns and COVID, different. The lyrics on the record have a bit more domesticity. It always seems like there was something that had to be done, that would normally keep me from doing music, that I tried to incorporate here. Maybe I'm just getting older, too. I'm getting more sensitive towards time. I'm running out. [laughs]

SILY: Was there anything specific about your domestic life that made you want to include it in your music?

BC: Just that I had to include it in order to do anything. It was no longer separate. The way life ended up working out, I could no longer separate my artistic life from other life. I had to put the artistic aspect into it in order to work. Instead of getting frustrated, I brought [music] more into the house.

SILY: Did working on the record give you a new perspective on domesticity?

BC: I don't know. A little bit. I was just trying to come to terms with basic life things. Let me look at the record, I forgot what songs are on it. [laughs] The song "My Familiar" is about my dog. I got this book called Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, which was sort of taken from transcriptions of witch trials from Scotland in the 1500's. A lot of dealing with things like witches' familiars and demon familiars. I found a very strong similarity between that and my dog, which seemed like it was maybe a demon. She's a Husky-German Shepherd-Australian Shepherd mix, so as a puppy, she needed a lot of work. So that became a song. That's a more humorous way everyday life made its way into the music.

[With regard to] the last song, "New Years Song", Elisa and I have a contest on New Year's Eve when we're hanging out where we go in separate rooms and have one hour to write a song. We come out at 11 or 11:30 and play the song for each other. We've done it for a few years now. This was the song I wrote for New Year's Eve going into 2022.

SILY: You talk about God on Time Is Glass and delve a little bit into mythology. Was that something you were thinking about on a day to day basis when writing?

BC: The “Hephaestus” song was just a character. That was a rare song for me in that I was trying to make sounds that particularly evoked a mythological figure. I've made nods to mythology in the past, but the titles were almost an afterthought. This particular song, I was trying to make the sounds of that character in their workshop with the fire and anvils. I was trying to evoke that feeling. That was kind of a new one for me.

SILY: Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but you also seem to talk a bit about your state of mind on "Slip Away".

BC: It's funny you caught onto that, because I wasn't really expecting to bring it up during interviews. I wouldn't say that I came close at times in the past couple years to schizophrenia, but I could see way off in the distance and horizon what that would be like. I...was trying to write about that. At the same time, the lyrics that have to do with two minds and the splitting of the mind are also somewhat of a reference to the idea of a celestial twin or Valentinian gnosis, how you have a celestial counterpart. That idea [is behind the concept of] someone's guardian angel.

SILY: On a couple songs, you sing to someone or something else. "The Mission" you've mentioned is for a friend and their new partner. What about on "Spinning in a River"?

BC: Maybe it was more of a general idea. It wasn't so much to a person as to a general concept of Amory.

SILY: What were all the instruments used on the record?

BC: I had some guitar, I was singing, and there's some harmonium on it, which I did a lot of processing on, lowering it octaves. I've got some really basic Korg synths. Electronic-wise, there's a program called Reactor I like to use a lot. I do it a little bit more subtly than electronic artists. I use it more for background.

SILY: I picked up the harmonium on "Summer's Last Rays"! I feel like you never truly know when you're hearing a harmonium unless it's in the album credits. Sometimes, that sound is just effects.

BC: There are two different harmoniums. When the bass comes in, that's also a harmonium, but I knocked it down a couple octaves and put it through some phaser. It has a grinding bass tone to it. This is actually one of the few Six Organs records with bass guitar on it. Unless it's an electric record with a band, there's never really been bass guitar. I was really inspired by Naomi Yang's bass playing in Galaxie 500 and how it's more melodic. I told her that, too.

SILY: On "Theophany Song", are you playing piano?

BC: Yeah, that's at my friend's house. I just wanted to play a little melody.

SILY: Was this your first time using JJ Golden for mastering?

BC: I've worked with JJ before. He did Ascent and a few others. I particularly wanted to work with him this time because I had just gotten that Masayuki Takayanagi box set on Black Editions and saw he had done that. I have the original CDs, and I thought he did such an amazing job that I wanted to work with him again.

SILY: Is that common for you, that you think of people to work with and you dig a record they just worked on and it clicks for you?

BC: That's the first time I had just heard something and thought, "Oh, I gotta work with this person." I usually have a few mastering engineers I work with and think, "What would be good for them?" or, "What does this sound like?" I usually like to send the more rock-oriented stuff to JJ, but I was just feeling it this time.

SILY: Have you played these songs live?

BC: The instrumental "Pilar" I have been playing since 2019. That's the oldest song on the record. I did do one show last September where I played a couple of these songs live. I have some ideas on how to work it out. It will be a solo acoustic show, but I [hope] to make some new sounds so it's not so straightforward. One thing about this record is I tried to write songs in the same tuning. On previous records, I used a lot of tunings, and it was a real pain to try to play the songs live. I did write this record with the idea that most of these songs would be able to be done live.

SILY: What have you been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

BC: I just got the Emily Robb-Bill Nace split LP. I just saw her live a couple nights ago. The latest one on Freedom To Spend from Danielle Boutet, which is awesome. Freedom To Spend is a go-to label for me. Also, this split with Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis.

I've been reading Buddhist Bubblegum by Matt Marble, about Arthur Russell and the systems he developed, which I knew nothing about. His compositional systems have almost a Fluxus influence. The subtitle is Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell, so it's also about his Buddhism as well. When I first heard about the book, I didn't know if I needed to get it, but I heard an interview with Matt about the detailed systems Arthur Russell came up with. It gives me a whole new level of appreciation for him. It's so good.

SILY: Did you listen to Picture of Bunny Rabbit?

BC: It's so good, especially the title track. It seems like when he has us plugged into some kind of effects or delay, he's switching the different sounds on it, but it makes the instrument go in so many different areas. To me, the title track is worth the price of the entire record, even though the whole thing is good.

SILY: What else is next for you? Are you constantly writing?

BC: This is gonna be a very busy year release-wise. I have a couple more things coming out. It's hard to write stuff because I always think it'll take so long for it to come out. I'm halfway working on something, but I have no idea when it will come out.

[thesearenotphotographs]

Kim Gordon with Kelsey Lu, L’Rain, Circuit des Yeux and Bill Nace duo, plus more at Knockdown Center

On Saturday, March 23, 2024, Kim Gordon’s “The Collective” tour came to Knockdown Center in Maspeth, NY for a sold out show. The evening featured performances by Gordon, Kelsey Lu, and L’Rain on the main stage, while Matt Krefting, Full Size, and Circuit des Yeux with Bill Nace (performing as a duo) did sets in the Noise Room, which was curated by Nace.

I covered the fantastic bill for BrooklynVegan and images covering the whole night are now available on that website here.

[alanlicht]

Chris Brokaw, Alan Licht, Bill Nace triple bill at Tubby's Kingston Feb 1

Looking forward to this triple bill with perennially cool cats Chris & Bill. Tickets and all info here.

[ave-studio]

VALISE performing in Philadelphia on 17 November 2023 with Universal Cell Unlock. flyer by Bill Nace

[radioactive-cloud]

i'm gonna go to london and kill myself in front of joker out and damon baker to change the trajectories of their lives. btw

[dustedmagazine]

A good year for music if nothing else: Jennifer Kelly’s 2024 review

Ben Chasny came to VT in 2024, go figure.

Things have been feeling very end of the world for a few years now, and 2024 (especially from November on) only intensified my sense of doom. It’ll get worse, too, in 2025. The vilest, stupidest people on earth are in change, and oh boy, do they have a lot of ideas, all of them bad.

But you lived through last year, too, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to experience whatever hell 2025 brings. It’s scary shit, but also deeply tedious, so let’s talk about music instead.

Because music came through in a big way this year. There was so much of it, and so much that was great.

Live music, for instance, continued to flourish, even in very small markets like Western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire. Bang, right off the bat, we caught Makaya McCraven in February holding court at Brattleboro’s Vermont Jazz Center. With Junius Paul, Brandee Younger and Marquis Hill, he hit the highlights from 2022’s In these Times, mixing up trad jazz, improvisation and hip hop in an intricate mesh, and it was wonderful.

Makaya McCraven and friends

Now let’s jump ahead to May and the always remarkable Thing in the Spring, where Myriam Gendron (with Jim White and Marisa Anderson), Mark Ribot, Earth and many others visited Keene, NH. Wadada Leo Smith played an astonishing set with Shazad Ismaily…even more astonishing, he had to yell at the crowd for quiet.

I even had the chance to see a couple of bands that rarely play live. In August, my friend Chris Liberato booked the super-ish group Winged Wheel to play at a nondescript bar near Springfield Mass. It was revelatory, worth getting lost trying to find 91 in the middle of the night afterwards.

Winged Wheel

Then in November, right around the time, things started getting dark, I hit the lottery. First Haley Fohr and Bill Nace raised the spirits in Keene, a day later the NYC post-punk legends Love Child with Lupo Citta in Easthampton, and a couple of days after that, Ben Chasney and Tashi Dorji in Brattleboro in front of the towering pipe organ at Epsilon Spires.

Love Child

Tashi Dorji

Recorded music came in an avalanche in 2024, just so many good records, month after month after month. I narrowed my favorites down to a list of 42, harder than you’d think, and there are plenty of discs I enjoyed plenty that didn’t make the cut.

Top Ten

Rosali—Bite Down (Merge) My favorite all year long for Rosali’s lovely voice, the instant classic-ness of the songs and the kicking band in Mowed Sound.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Wild God (PIAS) What I’d really like is another Grinderman, but this lush, string-heavy iteration of the Cave art form is very fine in its own way, not least because it leans on the Bad Seeds more heavily than the last couple. Time for joy indeed.

The Cure—Songs for a Lost World (Polydor) It is not easy to crack my top five in November, but Robert Smith did it with the bleak, soul-stirring grandeur of this late-life epic. It doesn’t hurt that he still sounds exactly like he did in my misspent youth.

Oneida—Expensive Air (Joyful Noise) Oneida has been my favorite working band for decades, and this one follows the song-structured Success with more bangers but also more weirdness. Thalia Zedek sings on two tracks with her signature ragged power.

Miriam Gendron—Mayday (Thrill Jockey) These are just surpassingly beautiful songs about love and death, gorgeously played and sung.  Gendron continues to get more comfortable with her art, taking a few more well-worth-it steps from her folk music origins.

PYPY—Sacred Times (Goner) Unhinged post-punk from one of the best in Montreal’s thriving scene. “Lonely Striped Sock” crosses ESG with Delta Five and contains the craziest keyboard lick I’ve heard this year.

MJ Lenderman—Manning Fireworks (ANTI-) One of 2024’s consensus favorites, and for all that, more idiosyncratic and complicated than you’d expect. Genuinely intriguing writing coupled with an incendiary rock roar.

Cassandra Jenkins—My Light My Destroyer (Dead Oceans) A bigger, denser, more accomplished sound for Jenkins than on her magical debut, but no less quirkily intelligent for its beauty.

Mdou Moctar—Funeral for Justice (Matador) Mdou Moctar is maybe the best guitarist in rock music right now, and here’s the kicker, he’s not really in rock music. Searing, wrenching, politically charged Afro-rock from the master.

Another Dancer—I Try to Be Another Dancer (Bruit Direct Disques) This charmingly odd Brussels ensemble skips from detuned Lewsberg-style minimalism to glowing Stereolab raves. Unexpected and intoxicating.

The rest

Winged Wheel—Big Hotel (12XU)

Uranium Club—Infants Under the Bulb (Static Shock)

E—Living Waters (Silver Rocket)

Luppo Citta—S-T (12XU)

Six Organs—Time Is Glass (Drag City)

Des Demonas—Apocalyptic Boom Boom (In the Red)

Guided by Voices—Strut of Kings (GBV Inc.)

Weak Signal—Fine (12XU)

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Hear the Children/The Evidence (No Quarter)

Yasmin Williams—Acadia (Nonesuch)

Bill Mackay—Locust Land (Drag City)

Hard Quartet—S-T (matador)

The Bug Club—On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System (Sub Pop)

Black Pus—Terrestrial Seethings (Thrill Jockey)

Dummy—Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)

Horse Jumper of Love—Disaster Trick (Run for Cover)

Itasca—Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)

West of Roan—Queen of Eyes (Spinster)

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg—All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors)

Workers Comp—S-T (Ever/Never)

Jessica Pratt—Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)

Aluminum—Fully Beat (felte)

Mary Timony—Untame the Tiger (Merge)

Mount Eerie—Night Palace (P.W. Elverum & Sun)

Penny Arcade—Backwater Collage (Tapete)

Rail Band—S-T (Mississippi)

The Softies—The Bed I Made (Father/Daughter)

Thine Retail Simps��Strike Gold Strike Back Strike Out (Total Punk)

Unknowns—East Coast Low (Drunken Sailor)

Ava Mendoza—Circular Train (Palilia)

Ned Collette—Our Other History (ever/never)

Amelia Courthouse—broken things (Spinster)

The Osees—Sorc 80 (Castle Face)

[ana-chronista]

Made up fic title: Planes to catch and bills to pay

I mean, we say made up, but now I kind of want to write this... JO ensemble fic, the SSF airlines AU nobody asked for apart from everyone who wants to see Nace in a suit again, so at least three of us. General crack and slice of life, featuring but not limited to:

Bojan having a weird almost-relationship with a pilot from a Finnish airline who he keeps bumping into in various locations. Rumour has it they've never even had a full conversation, instead communicating via facial expressions and in jokes. It's debatable if they even know each other's names.

Jure running a side business shipping and delivering random items as he's saving for his own plane. Anything from kitchen knives to exotic animals to ananas lonkero (that last one didn't have far to go, as it was Jan who ordered it - his hand slipped and he ended up with ten times the amount he wanted Jure to pick up...)

Jan and Nace thinking they're being super subtle and secretive about their new relationship, while being 110% blatantly obvious to all and sundry because absolutely no work is getting done at any time and there's only so far that the cramped conditions of the plane can go to explaining why they're so up in each other's personal space the whole time.

Poor Kris spending most of the fic like this running gag from Airplane:

It's on my list, anyway 😂