A new Seven Count album, a month of shows, open call from a new microcinema + a bonus review
How will I know if I overpacked if the zipper hasn't popped?
A dense month of musical performances lie ahead, but THAT’S NOT ALL. This missive ends with a review I wrote of a terrific new record by Oropendola, and also I also helped launch a microcinema: scroll down for our first OPEN CALL
Let’s start with the shows
JULY 10
With my newest improvisation project Beni Adam (Adam Elabd and I on telepathic electronic clarinets, as recently featured live at the Avalon Lounge, Improv Spaces, and WGXC-FM’s Infinite Contact), at CollarWorks in Troy!
JULY 13
Pittsburgh’s Average Joey w/ Adam Tinkle & his Long-Awaited Wrinkle/ Nathan Meltz and the House of Tomorrow/ at the James Connolly Social Club - a leftist bar that’s usually only only open to members and their guests, but will be open to all guests for this special appearance by touring “UnAmericana” folkster Joey. The club has asked two of its hometown troubadours - myself and dear kindred spirit Nathan - to support with songs of social commentary and resistant joy.
SEVEN COUNT ALBUM RELEASE & TOUR: JULY 15-20
This month, my longest-standing collaboration drops its 5th full-length album, Hybrid Vigor, its first to take the compact diskform. This feels like our most fully realized music to date, the titular hybridity a reference to blend of acoustic jazzamatazz and thick electro soundscaping that we’ve managed to crossbreed on this one (which also features a guest feature from Ken Edelson). I played sax, guitar, clarinet, bass, synthesizers, and probably other things on this. I also engineered the dayslong sessions of improvisation and careful cut+paste composition through which these sonic journeys came into being, and mixed the hell out of them. I’m proud to say that, though it’s infused with the influence of innumerable jazz and electronic artists, it sounds like nothing else out there. First single here
We’ll unveil this new effort to the northeasterly world with a run of shows in locales both new and olde to us:
Tue July 15 Mojo’s Cafe and Gallery, Troy NY. Release Run: Night One
w.s.g. Abu Zeyn 7pm $10$
Wed July 16 At Mojo’s AGAIN for release rave-up THE SECOND
w.s.g Jessica Bowen 7pm $10$
Thurs July 17 Dawnlands, Westerly RI
w/ Will Mason/Isabel Castellvi duo
Sat July 19 RIVEN Studio Burlington VT
w/ Broncos, Greg Davis 7pm
Sun July 20 “Sunday Night Swim” @ Avalon Lounge Catskill NY
w/ Lechy 7pm
Birth of Picture Lock One
Along with 2 fellow Trojans (filmmaker Emma Baiada and multidisciplinarian Angus McCullough) I’ve launched a microcinema - upstate NY’s first, we think. After a beautiful launch season culminating in the screening of the entire program of the 70th annual Flaherty Film Seminar, we’re now heading into our summer season, including our first OPEN SCREEN event.
Are you, like approximately 80% of humans, constantly making videos and sharing them via The Platforms? Any interest in seeing them on the Big Screen? In a Small Room? We’ve been screening Films, but we’re open to any and every sort of motion notion, of any length up to 10 mins. Please consider sending us something here (deadline is Friday).
Also - follow our newsletter and/or our !n$t@ if you want to follow along with this exciting new DIY effort.
I’m trying my hand at album reviews
This is even more left-fieldy, but it feels desperately important. I know so many wondrously talented people making unbelievably good music, and yet it’s never been harder for us all to break through the noise, find new listeners, and simply connect with people around our efforts.
So here’s a notion, inspired by what others are doing with their newsletters. I’m ending this missive with a review essay I penned about Swimming, the brand-new album by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Oropendola. I think that if you love music, you’ll love giving it a listen. And maybe reading my thoughts on it will inspire a deeper engagement? If you do, and if it does, would you please drop a line and let me know if this is a pursuit worthy of stuffing into my suitcase?
Dropping the proverbial needle on Swimming, the new LP from Brooklyn’s Oropendola, is to be shrunk down to the size of a doll and gently set down into a rickety upright piano: likely a hundred year-old wooden box, likely in a home, likely a family heirloom that could use a dusting, or if not, a Craigslist score whose alternate timeline surely involves the dump. The tempo is free, the situation is “live,” the encounter direct. When greeted by a voice - extraordinarily loud and incredibly close, to quote another Brooklyn exponent of self-reflexive ars poetica - of Joanna Schubert, she tenderly chides her own songwriting process, dagger-diggingly rueful for failing to freeze in sound the actual presence, pure and holy, of that emotion around which American Popular Song is organized:
I have never written a song about
I have never written a song about being in love I have never written a song about the being Only wanting or leaving
It seems we’ve been brought into this little space in the spirit of retreat: to take a moment away and apart, to rest in the comfort of music that moves at the pace of thought. Though the arrangements do ultimately swell around her over the course of the album’s seven-track slow-build, there are daring swaths of the album’s 41 minutes where we contend with hardly any other elements besides those that first greet us: a songwriter-pianist doing her morning stretches and meditations, patiently warming up fingers and voice with these confessions, reflections, quips and interludes.
The piano is a partner in this, a friend who she meets in a spirit of dialogue. When a particularly devastating lyric is echoed wordlessly in the piano, it creates a kind of line break - a repetition of an idea that’s also a pause in the flow of ideas - that poetry-on-the-page hardly can fathom. In such moments, when voice and piano braid together, it’s hard not to think of two songwriters with whom Joanna Schubert shares half her name: Newsom, and Franz. The debt to Newsom, and especially her Laurel Canyon-perfumed 3-disc magnum opus Have One on Me was already manifest on Oropendola’s previous full-length Waiting for the Sky to Speak, but it has become clearer still: the questing, sectioned-up experimental songforms, the non-quantized tempos, the flourishes of twee toy piano and sylvan harp, the puzzle-box fabulism (I imagined the furry, acorn-collecting hand she sings of on Swimming’s “Palace of Sunflowers” as belonging to one of the ambiguously creaturely protagonists that people several of Newsom’s tunes).
The link to Franz Schubert is perhaps more of a stretch, but Western Art Music’s acknowledged master of the lied (that’s German for “song,” duh) earned said distinction because of the sensitive manner in which he “painted” his texts with his music - giving them melodies that accentuated their meanings - and how he wreathed them with piano writing that fully transcended the role of harmonic accompaniment. Famously, his piano parts sounded like the horse clip-clopping beneath the singer’s rider, or like the spinning wheel to the singer’s lovelorn weaver. In his time, early in the piano’s heyday, this marvel of industrial revolution engineering and manufacturing brought a new scale and grandiosity to the music-making possible in the home: a whole orchestra under the fingers of one player. The piano means something so different to us nowadays: now, it’s a kind of relic of pretechnological musicking, a sound whose pathos inheres in the frailty of its materiality and mechanism. But linked by the same 88 keys across the centuries, both Schuberts harness the accretion of power, meaning, and imageability of a good riff: repeating, varying, and departing from the riff as tools for painting scenes in song. And it’s those departures in particular which distinguish Oropendola from the vast majority of songwriters working today. For most of them, the sort of Nina Simone boogie-woogie bass that grounds “Palace of Sunflowers,” or the Sufjan Stevens rippling arpeggios under “Moss Covered Alder Tree” would be plenty of musical fuel to get from start to finish of a song. Instead, like Franz S and J Newsom, Joanna S loves a well-timed hairpin modulation. Under the hands of the pianist (and here is a key difference from the options available when writing on the guitar), each of 12 keys is always just as available as any other - why not make a departure? But to know how to dwell in the key-groundedness and riffy repetition that is the standard issue of song, but then to move - sagely, with a purpose! - is a compositional feat: it takes us to another place, or shows us the same place in a new context. Theodor Adorno, writing in 1925 of F. Schubert, likened his way with a harmonic modulation to the work of a lighting designer:
“ It is not for nothing that the moods in Schubert, which not only revolve, but can also collapse, are bound up with harmonic shifts, with modulation, which sheds light, at whatever level of profundity, on things that are always the same. Those sudden, nondevelopmental modulations occlude daylight like camera shutters.” Such a shuttering shudder - of recognition, revelation, seeing anew - is what I felt at a crucial harmonic pivot at the album’s midpoint, in the midst of “Lobotomy.” In the album’s back half, starting with that track, we slowly zoom back from the confessional writer at her piano, the vocal performances become less candid and more theatrical, and with densifying arrangements - a little bass, the odd flute flourish, some inside-your-psyche vocal descants, the drama rises and the lights come up on a grander stage - before Swimming, I’d never before clocked the aesthetic terrain that Taylor Swift and Stephen Sondheim in their approaches to dramatic storytelling-in-song.
Production can be an ally to such storytelling and world-building, but methinks it hits harder when when it’s less leaned on. Hearing the chugging synth-harp of the “biggest sounding” track, “Pyre,” (video here) I envisioned a Legend of Zelda world by way of Stranger Things: nostalgically retro and epically medieval, with plucky protagonists imperiled by something monstrous, yet empowered by their emotional depth and the pathos on the soundtrack. (When the Zelda IP inevitably comes up for the episodic treatment, I hearby nominate Oropendola to write that soundtrack.) Adorned with celestial washes and played to strict tempo, this the track that most evokes Oropendola’s previous effort. The album pulls in two directions: “back” towards the the candied sonics of the previous record, and also onward, towards a fierce, almost confrontational intimacy, where bare-knuckled soul-baring finds its sonic ally in austerity.
How to understand: why, one year, an artist would commit themselves fully to “production” - to ever-shifting sections and sonics, and then so shortly thereupon would step so far back from it, towards these naked invocations of inner life from within the womb-like shelter of her family upright piano? Hard for me not to see such a shift in light of the pressures and promises with which the streaming industry assaults today’s independent artists. Artists have always asked: How might I express myself in ways that might reach people? Today, though, this question simplifies to: how do I do so in ways which will be algorithmically advantageous? Once written, tracked, produced, mixed, mastered, uploaded to all 31 platforms (now including Roblox, according to my last glance at my own Distrokid Dashboard), I next need to wonder which 30 seconds of this best slaps as a Reel? Which instant of ear candy will grab the ears of scrollers, and how many such moments should a song be cut up into? If the beats I underlay shimmy just right, will the tweens assign it the status of a bop? Waiting for the Sky to Speak, swirling with hypermodern, ear-accosting sonics, was full of bops, as my own tween will attest. It was her top record of 2023, squeezed between her year of Eilish obsession and her momentary sweptness in Taylor’s Era’s tidal wave. It can’t have hurt that she had the opportunity to see Oropendola perform twice in an extremely intimate DIY venue, one which, full disclosure, I was at the time booking. I imagine her disorientation at the “flatness” of music as experienced on the internet: she can throw Oropendola and Taylor on her playlist; back to back bops. Yet one comes to your town to play in the living room; tickets for the other are unobtainium. For her, “middle tier artists” - the ones who you might discover in mass culture spaces and then go see at a mid-sized venue, the ones whose fandom was the bread and butter of my emerging adulthood - might as well not exist. As with so many aspects of life at this late stage in capitalism, the sorting - of bazillionaires and other big winners from everyone else - impoverishes our lives and culture. As sweet and lucky as it felt on a cozy couch, hearing Oropendola lean into every twist and turn of their labyrinthine and kaleidosonic tunes, the tight brilliance of the performance merited a much bigger room and crowd.
According to the liner notes, such performances on the last tour were precisely what motivated Swimming’s inwardness. Unfolding between big ideas and and small rooms, towering ambitions and the underground, live music remains a face-to-face encounter between humans. Swimming sounds to me like a recording that tries to learn from how liveness feels today, to fit and feel at home in an intimate encounter that is deeper than the internet and longer than its attention span. Space and time move in opposition here: stepping back from the internet’s vastness, might there be an expansion available, of the volumes of shared attention? As we age out of the core demographic of TikTok’s juvenocracy, still bopping along to new tunes in our heads and in our phones, we come to realize that we’ve learned things not easily captured in a bop, truths that wish to be revealed only inside a trusted circle, one in which open-hearted listeners are willing to give an artist at least a song’s worth of their attention, perhaps even a full set’s, or a full album’s communion. What to call that circle? Call it community.
Swimming was released June 27 on Sprit House Records.
Thanks for reading, and be in touch,
Adam