On the eve of the first Feast of Music Presents, I'd like to share this little essay penned by one Doc Pickles that pretty well captures what I hope this series will end up being about. Doc is one of the co-founders of Toronto's Wavelength series, which just concluded a successful 10 year run of weekly Sunday shows. He certainly has a way with words. (Note: I've replaced some of his local Toronto references with venues more familiar to New Yorkers.)
"Out of the ether of swirling collective creative chaos we
will coax out new music, safe to say it will be a familiar sound that we’ve
never heard before. Some music will be knockoff sludge, some of it will be
mind-alteringly good, some of it will be unique, some of it will be wallpaper,
some of the performers will mean it, some of the performers will fake it. Some
of the music will be performed onstage, some of the music will be hashing
itself out in rehearsal space, some of it will be all alone with a 4-track,
some of it will appear and dissolve entirely in an instant inside a single
person’s mind. On some rare wonderful occasions, music will be performed at sunset by local Kraut-inspired instrumental psychedelic improv bands running
out of juice in their rented car batteries at the foot of a lighthouse. Some of it will be played by a refugee to an audience of two in a
too-cold coffeehouse. Some bands will be broke and grateful for good $8 shows, some bands
will be gainfully employed and own cottages in the mountains. Some music will
be played by a laptop that skips when the club isn’t grounded well, some will
be played by Cuban music professors stranded in a cold-but-not-unwelcoming new
hometown.
Music is in the subway platform soothing the savage commuter
beast with displaced melodies, music is arranged in sequence in the afternoon
before a night of lovemaking and counting out time. Drums tuned or detuned
tones, a solitary bagpiper on the railway lands, a bird singing in a tree serenading
two friends in the park below peaking on mushrooms on a sunny summer afternoon,
two musicians courting further along in the same park sitting together on a
bench holding guitars, a stroller is wheeled alongside a busy sidewalk, and the
toddler inside is singing to the gulls sailing above. Graying parents line up
at 9 p.m. at Bell House or Bowery Ballroom (or, hopefully, Littlefield) to try to reach out to their
mysterious adult child and see a whole new person who might just make a good
friend and not just a son or daughter long departed from their nest. Lyrics are
scrambled out in subways scribbled on show posters and texted to home email,
whole undiscovered unarranged orchestras are hummed awkwardly in empty
elevators into worn MP3 player microphones.
There’s no end to this music continuum, no beginning or end, and these shows are a nebulous set of personal opinions woven together into a shared concept that has yet to be fleshed out into a shared idea. Out of the chaos of the unwritten future we will find new
patterns, new tones, new archetypes, new ways of seeing things, and that will
lead us to the next round. The possibilities are not endless but they’re flexible and there’s no telling what will happen if enough of us keep plugging ourselves in and making things happen.” –
Doc Pickles, Wavelength Co-Founder