We welcome new blog contributor Valerie Kuehne, a Brooklyn based cellist and composer, who will write for The Deli about experimental/performence music. Valerie curates the live experimental series "The Super Coda" out of Cafe Orwell in Bushwick.
When I first moved to this city I took a Craigslist job working as an 'assistant' for The Human Carpet. This meant attending happy hour at a handful of dive bars and lesbian clubs, helping roll The Human Carpet into his carpet, standing on top of "it" for the next 2 hours, encouraging everybody within 10 ft. to do the same. The compensation was 20 bucks plus drinks. So it seems this is the fate of performance art.
But then there's Borts Minorts. Borts plays a ski. Borts dresses in a head-to-toe spandex suit that walks a distinguished line between condom and intergalactic time capsule. You kinda want to reach out and pet Borts. You want to take Borts home to meet your family. You are also vaguely afraid that Borts might eat a kitten. Clearly Borts carries the torch once ignited by Laurie Anderson and Klaus Nomi, god rest his soul. However Borts is living dissonance, and while you might see him accompanied by dancers, they are less exuberant and more scary, scantily clad or dressed in burkas depending on whatever zeitgeist he's feeling by the hour. His songs rarely span more than a minute and there is darkness. His eyes burn with a nostalgia hungering for the grit and freaks of old New York, leering behind the scenes of Taxi Driver and scarcely escaping that fated commute in The Taking of Pelham 123..
The resurrection of Borts Minorts (it's true, he started a family and briefly left the circuit) took place at Cafe Orwell, during a Super Coda show 6 months ago. Borts was summoned by Little Band of Sailors (in the picture), the brainchild of Rachel Mason, a Yale graduate whose degree was underwritten by gay porn and whose press kit is staggering. Ms. Mason's Band of Sailors includes a revolving cast of personalities and a dizzying sequence of costume changes that pay homage to as many star-struck figures and iconoclasts as will fit into a 40 minute set. (Lately Ms. Mason has been spotted dressed like Borts). In the spirit of all tortured heroines her sound pulls P.J. Harvey out of quicksand by the hair while recounting a rich tradition of witchcraft. She is soothsayer, harlequin, medicine woman, demolishing any accountability to history through terrified hysteria and incongruous outbursts. Before the resurrection, I helped her roll Borts up like a mummy. I have no idea who inherited the Human Carpet gig.
Both Borts Minorts and Rachel Mason will be featured at this years Experi-MENTAL festival at Goodbye Blue Monday, August 5-7th.
We've always been big fans of Luke Temple, and it's good to see that, together with the Here We Go Magic crew, the man is keeping at it with increasingly beautiful records and videos. The band's new album "A Different Ship" (stream it here) will be out on May 8, and betrays at least a partial return to Luke Temple's more intimate and melodic sound from his solo repertoire - in this regard, lend a ear to "Hard to Be Close," "Alone but Moving" and "Over the Ocean". This is welcome news for fans like us who always thought that in most HWGM material Luke's noteworthy songwriting skills seemed a little sacrificed on the altar of textural experimentation. This doesn't mean that the band's signature hypnotic, impressionistic sound is lost - it's just that these two elements work together better than they did in past records, and this is what makes this album one of the NYC highlights of the year so far. Indeed, this collection also features songs more in line with the band's past releases ("Make Up your Mind", "I Believe in Action"), which follow on the steps of brainy-pop icons like Brian Eno and The Feelies, but there's definitely a balance here, also betrayed by the almost perfect alternation of melodic songs and less traditional ones.The just released video of "How Do I Know," telling the story of a rejected dancing robot that ends up revitalizing an older man's appreciation for life, seems to reflect on this brain/heart, mechanic/organic dichotomies and somehow bring them to unity. - PDG
