This is a slightly edited version of my concert review that appeared in the October 2023 (Issue 476) edition of The Wire magazine.
Ross Hoyt/Leila Abdul-Rauf/Ryan Honaker/Ed Lloyd + Cecyl Ruehlen + Michael P Dawson + San Kazakgascar
Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, US
July 5, 2023
The Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street sits a few doors down and a few flights up from a corner, at Sixth Street, that veered toward dissolute long before the pandemic turned cities into targets for end-times rhetoric. The interior stairwell is festooned with scrawl and stickers, visual chaos that channels the exterior urban disorder into something willfully beautiful. You emerge, after a climb, into the stark space of a single large room. At one end, floor to ceiling windows would overlook the street were the glass not lightly frosted.
The Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series takes place there nearly weekly, programmed by Outsound Executive Director Rent Romus, who lends context to experimental acts by coordinating — or simply creating a sympathetic venue for — shared themes, approaches, vibes. On a seasonally cool Wednesday night after U.S. Independence Day, four sets manage to explore expressly different corners of ambient drone music with a touch of noise. Each of the first three creates a moment that concentrates its unique capacities.
First comes the quartet of Leila Abdul-Rauf (trumpet), Ryan Honaker (guitar), Ross Hoyt (keyboard), and Ed Lloyd (double bass). For them, the key moment is when Abdul-Rauf switches, after the midpoint, from electronically mediated trumpet, à la Arve Henriksen or Nils Petter Molvær, to intoned voice — and the band don’t miss a beat. Their consummate ambient chamber jazz allows for a shifting of source materials, including some found vocals and even an exclamatory shout from Hoyt.
For Cecyl Ruehlen, a fantastic saxophonist who performs through and along with a synthesizer rig, the moment is when a certain stratagem solidifies. There is a gating effect underway, a man-machine sidechain by which his horn, when loud enough, pushes the synth down in the mix. When he rests for a moment, the synth comes back strong, only to subside again when he next blows. Combined with Ruehlen’s effortful breathing, this method lends vibrancy to the synth, positing it as a natural force unto itself.
Michael P Dawson’s moment occurs when he simply stands up. He initially sits with a tiny modular synth box in his lap, coaxing muted signals patiently with a professorial demeanour. Quite suddenly, he rises, places the box on his seat, walks toward the audience and recites poetry. Instantly, the sounds the audience had focused on become background music, a setting for his recitation. It’s WB Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” — the poem from which, back in the late 1960s, Morton Subotnick borrowed the title Silver Apples of the Moon. Later those same words emerge, fragmented, from Dawson’s instrument.
The final act, San Kazakgascar, take on the role of drone band. They launch with a single such clarifying moment, a textural tone — then seek to hold it in reverberant stasis as long as possible. Tonight the members of this ever-shifting ensemble are guitarist Jed Brewer (guitar), Kevin Corcoran (percussion), Rachel Freund (clarinet), Greg Hain (synth), Colleen Kelly (six-string electric cello), Matt Kretzmann (synth), James Jaroba Barnes (bass clarinet), and Brian Lucas (guitar). The most impressive result from a large drone band is to hear more musicians producing seemingly less music. By those standards, tonight is a major, if at times loud, accomplishment.
