Tuner melt
Music and art get cozy at Eyedrum
Eyedrum, Jan. 25 — The centerpiece of Eyedrum’s current art show, L’Objet Sonore, offers an arrestingly symbolic totem. Splashed on the floor of the downtown art and music space is Atlanta artist Marshall Avett’s “Tidal Pool,” an installation of melted LPs and CDs, from artists as disparate as Bobby Brown and Burl Ives, emitting a variety of pleasant and jarring tones from concealed speakers.
Fittingly, the night’s musical performance echoed the exhibit’s vibrations of sound and sight, melding familiar and experimental sounds into a unique and genre-defying aural exhibit.
Well past the scheduled 9 p.m. show time, opening act Sound Doesn’t Travel Through Nothing warmed up by playing a portion of a Radiohead tune. They hadn’t started the show officially, but by unknowingly breaking the venue’s “original songs only” tradition, they set the tone for an evening of new, subtly rebellious uses for familiar material.
As each new visitor entered Eyedrum’s doors, waves of freezing air filtered in — and the bone-chilling cold was the perfect conduit for Sound Doesn’t Travel. Lit only by candlelight, the group began its official set at 10 p.m., gently easing into the three-act bill with two decidedly chilly instrumental pieces. The reverent crowd warmed to the band by its third song, as Brian Bourque’s vocals blended seamlessly with his beautifully subdued guitar washes. Michael Lewanski’s piano, laden with understated computer effects, glistened like the fine mists of frozen precipitation falling outside. Using shredded elements of classical and jazz, the group’s compositions were refreshingly unpretentious despite prog-rock leanings.
The youthful seriousness of Sound Doesn’t Travel soon faded into to the wisecracking world of scene veteran Bill Taft’s thrift-store-chic duo, Hubcap City. A fixture of Atlanta’s underground scene for over 20 years, Taft clutched a battered acoustic guitar and expounded on the band’s assumed identity for the evening.
“We’re an electronica band from Antwerp, Belgium,” Taft smirked. “My name is Leopold the Second, and this is Wilheim,” he said, nodding toward bass-drum-pounder Will Fratesi. Riffing on the group’s imagined “American tour,” Taft improvised hilariously profane between-song monologues skewering a spate of American icons, from the lowest common denominator (Carson Daly) to the highest-ranking official in the country. “Your president is a fucking asshole,” hissed Taft, as Leopold.
Hubcap City’s songs, rich with gritty cinematic realism, feature collages of pop-culture references presented as a ragged cabaret of street life and ideals. Taft’s narratives evoke stark absurdity, such as his image of a homeless person with an obsessive collection of tattered People magazines.
Envie, the evening’s headliner, featured yet another collaborative twosome, the music of multi-instrumentalist Renee Nelson paired with non-performing member Michael Overstreet’s words. Live, Nelson’s band is an ever-changing cast of friends and associates from some of Atlanta’s finest underground bands. Saturday’s configuration constituted a supergroup of locals: cellists Diana Obscura (Aphelion, The Living Jarboe) and Deisha Oliver (American Dream), violinist Susannah Barnes (American Dream) and drummer Chris Jensen (Myssouri).
For the keyboard-driven lead-off “Passage,” Nelson’s vocals were ably augmented by harmonies from Obscura, performing in a supporting role without her trademark theatrics and costumes. Clustered at stage right was a mini-orchestra of strings, with Obscura and Oliver’s dueling cellos refereed by Barnes’ effects-laced violin.
Nelson and company offered a sonic chamber of subversive yet catchy melodies, steeped in suites of layered sensuality. As in many of her other projects, Nelson gracefully alternated between keyboard and harp. “Home Free” featured all the string players in a tension-building march-time rocker — bows sawed mightily as Oliver provocatively beat the strings of her cello into submission.
Again ignoring Eyedrum’s no cover-song policy, Envie’s wonderfully soaring reading of R.E.M.’s “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” suitably capped the event. When Nelson sang, “You can’t do this; I said ‘I can too,’” it was like she was speaking for Atlanta’s entire DIY underground scene. Thanks to art and music incubators such as Eyedrum, it seems even “Gravity” can be defied.