BANANA - LIVE
Pitchfork 66
In March of last year, six musicians congregated in a house in Los Angeles, intent on making something original. Their band, BANANA, originally assembled as an opening act and backing group for the singer Cate Le Bon, included members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint as well as Le Bon herself, coming off of her excellent 2016 release Crab Day. The ensemble was helmed by Josiah Steinbrick, a producer and fixture of the L.A. music scene who’s collaborated with Devendra Banhart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Tim Presley of White Fence.
The musicians had gotten familiar with each other while touring Crab Day, and it seems that they were in an even looser mood than usual when they came together to record what would become LIVE, a mix that uses original compositions by Steinbrick as a jumping-off point for the rest of the musicians to improvise over. Influenced by the recordings of the trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell and incorporating the work of Arthur Russell, the playful, energetic LIVE was originally recorded as a special for the online radio station Dublab. But it proved to have staying power, so Leaving Records has issued it as a standalone album this month.
LIVE is comprised of four tracks named for the first four letters of the alphabet, and runs 24 minutes its length. Its tracks are predicated not on guitar, piano or drums, but on loops of vibraphone and woodwind, with other instruments chiming in wildly, a rainforest cacophony layered over the slower, deeper patterns of a lush musical ecosystem. Tracks don’t develop in a linear fashion but instead grow outward in strange, unexpected directions. On “A” and “B,” this growth is segmented, as a second loop tags in to replace the first at the midpoint of each song. “C” and “D” are more coherent and as a result, more easily digestible.
Depending on the listener’s mood, the record’s early going can be frustratingly chipper. All those plinking mallets and that farting brass come to feel grating, a forced smile that stays on too long. But occasional moments of shade dull the insistent sunshine, providing some relief as you delve further into the record. Plaintive strings on the back side of “B” and the sudden jangle of piano two and half minutes through “C” cool things down, and “D” by far the shortest track here, is decidedly the darkest, introducing a somber note that anchors an otherwise escapist record in the real world.
The compositions here forsake Western divisions of major and minor keys. This gives all the tracks a modal, somewhat hard-to-place flavor, particularly the baroque “B,” which makes use of ceremonial music from Southeast Asia and incorporates a minimalist piece from the Estonian composer Heino Jürisalu, before morphing into a tribute to Arthur Russell’s ’70s work that includes a yearning sample of electric piano from Russell himself.
Steinbrick has said that he wants the music to sound “exotic” and “pleasant,” both characteristics that LIVE nails easily. But after a half dozen listens, despite some of its more outré qualities, LIVE starts to sound familiar, even tightly controlled. The members of BANANA know each other well, and on the record, they seem capable of anticipating their tourmates improvisational tendencies, like a conversation at the family dinner table where it’s always obvious who’s going to speak up next. That makes for a strikingly coherent improvised album. But it also dulls some of the surprises that LIVE might have otherwise offered, making something that was supposed to feel fresh and alive, seem occasionally, if not unhappily, predictable.
Thu Feb 02 06:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 60
BANANA
LIVE
[Leaving; 2017]
Rating: 3/5
“For those in search of a bath, a rinse, a departure, or an expansion.”
– Josiah Steinbrick
a bath, a rinse
It is a kind of transhistorical rule that modern music is unclean. It is either shrill or indistinct, lacking in a principle of the right mixture of things. It has been, is being, corrupted by foreign peoples and influences. If there is an undying image of the music critic, it is of a figure at least tacitly committed to this rule. Every music critic I know is an atheist — not an agnostic — when it comes to that image, but in spite of and partly following from this fact, it is an image of them, an image of me. We don’t like it because it isn’t hospitable. History is unkind to criticism. Secondary texts come to be read as primary texts or fall away into obscurity, and we don’t have the courage to write the first kind. We offer only a textual companion, pronouncing modern music incomplete. And though people complain about what the internet has done to the way criticism is produced and consumed, is the endless feed not the essential formal innovation of our obtuse cubby of the culture industry, we nervous children of “and, and, and?” Of the footnote, of a cool and sorrowful hieroi logoi?
Josiah Steinbrick’s sextet BANANA, first assembled as a band for Cate Le Bon, can’t cleanse us of the dirt of modern music’s destitution, which is a lie. The logic of separation underpinning the purity lost to modern music is undermined in the group’s practice, which has more to do with mixture. Their desired cartography knows no binaries, but from where old Mercator is standing, they are faced south. We accuse them of fraternity with something foreign and, if we are especially sinister, primitive. But it’s much easier and more helpful to talk about the relationship LIVE establishes with its listener than the one it establishes with the world in whose being they share. No, listening to LIVE, I feel rinsed of something other than the terrible present. I can hear the room ringing, distorting the vibraphones a tiny bit. I can hear a smallness, the closeness of the players. If anything, I am only rinsed of the little dread of a sprawling and disenchanted world.
LIVE by BANANA
a departure, or an expansion
The easiest thing to point out about LIVE is the pulsing, Reichian repetition. “Repetition” has never been particularly descriptive of minimalist music, though; “repetition” is a part of all music, and as in minimalist music, here it is an opening, a departure, a channel of passage, and in that respect a denial of what we know about it. BANANA meditate on the paradox by way of which the same becomes a medium for difference. But open still is the question of to where we are delivered across the chasm of repetition, and there is no right or reasonable answer to that question lurking somewhere in form or genre, as if in a higher and more logical place. If you were criticizing minimalist music, you were usually either naïvely certain you didn’t like where it was going — throwing your hands up in the fashion of The New York Times critic who wrote of composer John Adams that he “did for the arpeggio what McDonalds did for the hamburger” — or merely asking where.
“A” begins with the clang of mallets and deep woodwind belches — a little human cacophony that can’t help but evoke, in caricature, the meeting of musicians in the session. “B” is, like “A,” an accessible song, though with some esoteric subtext. Its marriage of Southeast Asian and Estonian source riffs with electric piano Arthur Russell references is a juxtaposition with some complexity lost to a game of formal association, carrying with its semi-conscious spontaneity a slight resonance with exotica, but one of a legibly postmodern sort, without any image or narrative. “C” is like a very tall tower of arpeggios, with only a farty clarinet blast for relief. “D,” the shortest and most subdued track, moves with the innocent quiet of practicing in private. At 24 adventurous minutes in length, LIVE is a garden of vectors, an explosive possibility, and, in that regard, not even very minimalist. It is a welcome jam session at a time when we could all use a bath, a rinse, a departure, or an expansion.