Sxip Shirey at City Winery 7.24.10 – More than meets the ear
On Saturday night, I attended Sxip Shirey‘s CD release party at City Winery. Thank God I took a pen and a piece of paper with me because the night turned out to be one of those rare musical experiences that I can’t not write about. By the end, I’d filled with notes every scrap of space on that paper, the back of my bar tab receipt, and much of my left forearm. And I still feel like whatever I write about this performance is not going to do it justice. But here goes.
Sonic New York is a solid experimental album, but to discover the real joy in the songs, you must experience them live. Seeing how the bizarre sounds on the album are made, hearing Sxip explain the process before playing each piece, and then witnessing sounds that seem, on the album, unrepeatable actually being replicated onstage is nothing short of astonishing. It’s like watching a magician explain how he’s going to perform his next trick, seeing the trick, and still not being able to fully comprehend how it’s humanly possible. A marble in a glass bowl and several puffs of air into the mike become church bells. A few duct-taped penny whistles become a pipe organ. Add some bicycle-bell-like jingles, and, incredibly, we’re listening to a recollection of the Munich Glockenspiel. Truly marvelous.
Many of these effects are inventively achieved with a Moog pedal. For example, Sxip runs a harmonica through the Moog. He plays a harmonica riff, loops it like a backbeat, then plays a melody over it. Suddenly we’re in what sounds like a circus tent rave DJ’ed by an elephant on a calliope. It’s whimsical; it’s beautiful; it’s danceable. Sxip the ringmaster conducts–with the hand not holding the harmonica–in gestures suited alternately to a hip-hop artist and a symphony maestro. It would not be an overstatement to say that, with his multi-layered combinations of carefully timed playback and concurrent melodies, Sxip is kind of the Brian May of instrumental toys.
Not all the songs rely on this playback method, however. When Sxip is joined onstage by world-class beat-boxer Adam Matta, singer Rhiannon Giddens (of the Carolina Chocolate Drops), and tuba player Don Godwin, the melding of talent is organically seamless, and Sxip’s collaborative strengths are easily apparent.
During the set, Sxip points out that toys that appear to be identical can have different pitches. Evidently, he’s able to memorize the pitches produced by these toys (plastic bells, for instance) that are differentiated only by color or their position in a group of replicas held together by duct tape. He hears potential chords among the toys and with them creates an accompaniment; then he whistles a melody in the same key. Having a good ear for music is one thing, but having the ability to hear music in a collection of gadgets–and to remember which gadget makes which noise at which pitch the next time you pick it up–goes beyond having a good ear; it reveals an ingenious creativity and a keen knack for identifying and recalling patterns. Playing the songs is as visual as it is auditory, which is why seeing Sxip perform in person adds an entirely new dimension to the music.
The energy from the audience was almost tangible, and by the end of the show, everyone was on their feet, dancing. Strangely, though, before the concert, the atmosphere felt like a reception. I got the feeling that many people either knew or recognized each other. (AFP and Neil Gaiman were among the guests, and I sat across from Rima Fand of the Luminescent Orchestrii.) When he took the stage, Sxip remarked about the familiar faces in the audience, “I feel like I’m either at someone’s wedding or someone’s funeral.” There was an air of both celebration and loss about the evening; if it wasn’t a funeral, it was at least a sort of climactic closure to Sxip’s time in New York. He seems dead-set on moving to Berlin within the next couple of months, though Saturday night he said, “When you try to leave New York, it doesn’t want you to go.”
