Protest Projections with Robin Bell

Name: The Knocks
Start: 2019-2-17T19-19-00-00
End: 2019-2-17T23-23-55-00
Location: 9:30 Club

Brandon WetherbeeMay 10, 2018ArtBYT Radio

ArtBYT Radio 31 min read

Robin Bell is a visual artist working on the facades of building. His work appears live for minutes at a time. It lives on via social media forever.

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💩💩💩 Sh*thole Projection on Trump Hotel #Resist 💩💩💩

A post shared by Robin Bell (@bellvisuals) on Jan 13, 2018 at 7:39pm PST

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17feb7:00 pmThe Knocksw/ Young & Sick Blu DeTiger7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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The first seconds of The Knocks’ New York Narcotic album dumps listeners square in the midst of Manhattan. A subway car bustles as the boom-bap of the Big Apple’s core rises from faint background noise to the thriving pulse of opener “2008.” There, production and vocal duo Ben “B-Roc” Ruttner and James “JPatt” Patterson personify the town, making her the most gorgeous and intriguing of women. “I know you want to meet her,” JPatt says. As the track concludes, their interaction with her becomes less of a romantic relationship and more of an inescapable draw to a drug that promises thrilling peaks and gut-punching lows.

“New York can be shitty sometimes,” says B-Roc, “but you’re still high on it. Our power’s been cut off in our apartment. We’ve been dropped from labels. New York keeps fucking you up and you keep coming back to it.”

In about 10 years, The Knocks’ slow grind has transformed them from a scrappy East Village pair who met at The New School and produced wall-rumbling tracks in their apartment to a formidable 1-2 punch who can create genre-blending dance projects with the likes of Harlem rap icon Cam’ron or pop-sensation Carly Rae Jepsen (as they did on their debut album 55 in 2016), rock festivals every summer, and get the party started for Justin Bieber during the European leg of his Purpose World Tour.

Though their success is apparent, The Knocks still wrestle with the idea that they have. Compared to Jay-Z,” JPatt begins, “we’re not shit. But we’ve done a good job of creating a cult fanbase. Our fans fuck with us because we’ve been as real as you can possibly be. We never sold out to get that instant glory.”

“Sipping on the fame until the taste’s gone,“ B-Roc says on “Big Bills” from their sophomore set New York Narcotic (out Sept. 28). They know what it’s like to feel major, but also know there’s much to accomplish before the glitz glues to them. “We went on tour with Justin Bieber and performed for 20,000 people a night,” Ben says. “And then we got off that and we’re still doing shows where we’re performing before everyone else. Our goal is to do these big things but never let it get to our head.” The Knocks are as likely to be found performing for an arena crowd as they are to be DJing for a handful of music-lovers in a rundown bar.

“This is our first time having a song on the radio,” Ben says of their Foster The People-assisted cut for nightlife junkies, “Ride Or Die.” It has been streamed over 28 million times so far (boasting #1 on iTunes Electronic, 16 weeks on Billboard Alternative and 22 weeks on Billboard Dance charts.). “All of these big things are happening over our spans of time. It doesn’t feel like it’s happening all at once. So we were prepared for it.”

Cool funk cut “Shades” is currently featured in Hyundai’s ad campaign (SEE HERE), making it ubiquitous. Its smooth bassline and horns on the hook make it a track fit for the dance floor, but don’t let the obvious mask its story of a man using sunglasses to protect the joy and soul in his eyes from the opposition.

Like “Shades,” New York Narcotic is a thoughtful effort that balances the cheer of ideal New York nights with the sobering realities that sandwich them. Outkast’s Big Boi joins them on “Big Bills,” a song about the deep desire to be rich—or at least make rent—that rides on candy-sweet guitar rifts. “‘That is how everyone feels,” B-Roc says. “I want the big bills to see how it feels,’” he sings.

A feeling that fans will get used to on Narcotic is hearing JPatt rap. His potent bars strike ahead of Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man on “Goodbyes.” James, the rapper, might be a new look for those following The Knocks, but he’s been spitting for years.
“When I met J-Patt,” Ben recalls, “he had albums of him rapping and singing on his own. And we were all like, ‘Oh, it’s funny. J-Patt’s rapping. But he’s not a rapper. So we can’t do it. But now it’s like, ‘Why the fuck not?’ J-Patt is stepping out of the background, singing much more and rapping.”

Quiet as kept, JPatt grew up wishing to be both a lyricist and a producer. Inspiration provided by Kanye West powered him. “He really changed the game for me and made me believe it was possible to be both,” James says. “I had so many notebooks that were filled with lyrics that never got to get spit. I definitely put my 10,000 hours into rapping.”

Those who might question The Knocks’ genuine love for rap should fall back; Boasting records with AZ, Cormega, Lil Wayne, and G-Unit, they clearly are true Hip-Hop fans. “If someone does step to us step to us,” B-Roc starts, “like, ‘Oh, you guys are making rap music now?’ I’ll be like ‘Yeah, check our rap credentials from when we were 18.’ We’ve been doing this.” An album dedicated to the birthplace of Hip-Hop needs rap as much as it requires odes to its lesser-known nooks and novelties.

Narcotic goes across the bridge to Brooklyn on “The Wizard of Bushwick,” where James resides in his “psychedelic palace.” The bouncing bop was inspired by a crazy picture of him snapped on his Bushwick roof wearing garb from his buddy’s Burning Man costume collection, walking stick included.

The album wraps with “Fung Wah Bus,” named after the now-defunct N.Y.C. to Boston line known for its cheap tickets and wonky schedule. The gentle closer stars Sleigh Bells songstress Alexis Krauss, who quietly exits the city. It’s tough to tell if she got her ass kicked by Gotham or if she’s just exhausted from hours of overindulging. “All good things end,” she sings while waving goodbye to her friends. It’s one of the purest moments of the set, where euphoria and sadness meet. Whatever she experienced during her trip was clearly too much for her to handle—enough for her to swear she’ll never return. Though Manhattan, as The Knocks know, is addictive. She’ll be back.

Time

(Sunday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$30

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17feb7:00 pmMLK Tribute Concert: Living the Dream, Singing the DreamWashington Performing Arts' Gospel Choirs7:00 pm The Kennedy Center

17feb8:00 pmMASTERS OF HAWAIIAN MUSIC8:00 pm Wolf Trap

18feb7:00 pmMadeinTYO930 and Trillectro Presents ... 7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

19feb6:30 pmLP6:30 pm Lincoln Theatre

19feb7:00 pmJulia Holter9:30 at U Street Music Hall Presents ... 7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on October 26 via Domino, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.” It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void.

“Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it’s hard to find one’s foundation,” says Holter. “I think this album is reflecting that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person—how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace. Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future.”

Fittingly for an album about the chatter of the mind, most of the songs on Aviary grew out of “cathartic solo improvisations” with voice and synth, recorded by Holter at home throughout 2017. Where Wilderness showcased her knack for writing immaculately constructed pop ballads, she describes Aviary as an exercise in letting her subconscious show her the way. “I was really trying to have fun and make a daring record. I found myself drawn to certain things that would happen when improvising—surprise utterances and slips.”

Holter then took her favorite parts of the home recordings and expanded upon them, writing lush arrangements for an ensemble of frequent collaborators. In early 2018, she recorded their contributions at Hollywood’s Band House Studios, with executive producer Cole MGN and co-producer Kenny Gilmore. Aviary combines her slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of violin and viola (Dina Maccabee, Andrew Tholl), double bass (Devin Hoff), and percussion (Corey Fogel). Drawing inspiration from the medieval world, she added trumpet and bagpipes into the mix, played by Sarah Belle Reid and Tashi Wada, respectively.

To evoke an overwhelming swirl of voices, Holter indulged her love for wordplay, often combining multiple languages and temporal tenses in a single phrase and embracing phonetic sound over meaning. “Chaitius” playfully combines her own words in English with lyrics from a medieval Occitan troubadour song. “I Would Rather See” borrows its references to chariots and steadfast footsoldiers from a mesostic poem she made using an Anne Carson translation of Sappho; “Why Sad Song”, the album’s ruefully meditative closer, is an English-language phonetic translation of a song by Nepalese Buddhist nun Choying Drolma. But Aviary also elevates the “babble” concept to a compositional principle. “A lot of the songs play with hocketing, which is something you have in medieval music, where melodies are shared by different interrupting voices,” says Holter.

On Aviary, we travel a world populated by birds, angels, and ghosts—at once characters in a mystery of uncertain denouement and a stand-in for the memories and thought-images that seem to fly through the mind on their own volition. Inklings of impending doom (“Everything Is an Emergency”) hover side-by-side with ecstatic professions of love (“Turn the Light On”) and moments of triumphant solidarity (“Voce Simul”). Like other recent projects—composing and performing a live score to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, as well as arranging her album Tragedy for opera, in 2017—Aviary sees Holter juxtaposing ancient and contemporary reference points. Time collapses, with references to the deep past—Joan of Arc, the Christian Crusades, the mass hysteria of the dance of Saint Vitus—seeming to double as metaphors for our hopes and anxieties in the present. Jetting between medieval chamber music and proggy jazz-rock transports, plaintive balladry and android robotics, it’s a journey full of wild twists and turns—but it’s one that seems to cling to a sense of radical hope, even in its most somber moments.

Back in the 5th century, North African theologian Saint Augustine envisioned the trajectory of human history in terms of an ongoing conflict between the City of God and the City of Man, aka “the earthly city.” As Thomas Pinsky describes it in his translation of Dante’s Inferno, the City of Man “may also be thought of as a radical representation of the world in which we live, stripped of all temporizing and all hope.” When the world you live in starts to feel more and more like a hell, it can be hard to know which way to turn—and while it isn’t art’s job to show us the way, what it can do is offer us glimpses of what defiance looks like. On “Words I Heard,” a melodic standout full of swirling strings, it’s there in a simple line of text: I love you in the City of Man.

“In a lot of the songs, when I mention love, it’s about a seeking for compassion and humility in a world where it feels like empathy is always being tested,” Holter says. In Aviary’s case, that search for sweetness—that bridging of the gulf—becomes a metaphor for the creative process itself, cutting through the hierarchies of history, language, and musical form to offer something more fluid, more inclusive, more idiosyncratic. “For a long time in music, there has been a discussion about what ‘dissonance’ and ‘consonance’ actually are,” the artist explains. But what, Holter asks, is the sound of empathy?

Time

(Tuesday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$17

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19feb7:00 pmJacob Banks7:00 pm 9:30 Club

19feb7:30 pm10:30 pmCurling Tournament at The Wharf7:30 pm - 10:30 pm DC Wharf Ice Rink

Protest Projections with Robin Bell

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