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No matter which calendar you follow, as of this weekend, it is officially fall in Baltimore. This can only mean one thing: more events, festivals, and happenings that one could possibly hope to attend. It was the weekend of the High Zero Festival, the Book Festival is up next, then the New/Next Film Festival the weekend after that… a great problem for an event attendee to have.
On Friday, September 20th, I chose to attend a show at Current Space, and I do not regret my choice. The evening began with Tonie Joy performing solo, building guitar loops and drones live with a reel to reel tape machine running. We were encouraged to talk, hang out, meditate… but most found the sounds being created to be hypnotic, the analog quality of the loops adding a warm warble and hiss to the performance.
Tonie Joy
I have seen Duncan Moore perform many times over the years in different bands and in other incarnations, but I have gotten used to him performing recently in a different style. As he played the bagpipes, walking slowly around the venue, it was easy to start to draw a “drone theory” about the night’s performances. A-ha! The theme is drones and what one can build on top of them.
Duncan Moore
Lexie Mountain Boys
But it is unwise to form such theories or through lines when Lexie Mountain Boys are back in town again. Their performance, involving a bank of window fans, created moments of delightful cacophony and cohesion. After an interval of what reminded me of that moment when you are a kid and figure out how cool talking through fan sounds, the performers seemed bent on repairing, conferring, measuring… it is always a great privilege for me to see Lexie Mountain Boys in action, a great earthquake of the best kind of disruptive force, never the same but always inhabiting a planet that is uniquely theirs to roam, wild and free.
Twig Harper
photos by Dave Iden
Of course, all shows have an organizing principle, and the occasion for this one was the return of Twig Harper to Baltimore. I have written about Twig before, a few years after he first moved to town, and it was great to check in on where his music is leading him. Now California-based, his set reflected an accumulation of years of making music my iTunes tended to mark as “uncategorizable”. He spent much of his settime manipulating an instrument that I could not identify, perhaps one he designed himself. One awed spectator remarked that his set was like “Bitches Brew in Outer Space.” I couldn’t agree more.
So, another event-filled weekend has come and gone in Baltimore. I will continue to try to lock in and do my best to make it out as often as I can. As things change in Baltimore, I can count on the folks I have been running with for three decades now to be up to something interesting, different, and worth my time and attention. That is one reason why I keep going out to shows.
