If you’re in New York on the 14th, consider checking out Charlie Looker’s release event for his first solo album.
Over a decade of various bands and projects, Charlie’s made a reputation for himself as a singer and songwriter blending the personal preoccupations and melancholia of prime alt.rock angst posterboyhood with other forms. The precision and force of heavy metal has been the other main component – when working with Extra Life this has merged with classical influences and art-pop; when Charlie’s been part of the Psalm Zero duo, it’s been extra industrial touches and an ’80s synthpop twist; with The Zs, avant-jazz; and with the more recent Seaven Teares, the metal’s been mashed up with Early and Renaissance music.
Whatever the extra ingredients, the results have been very much a product of the New York kiln (with a few extra ghosts of the hell-in-a-handbasket No Wave times, when the city was particularly inspired but a lot nastier). Band names notwithstanding (and bar well-received stints as guitarist for Dirty Projectors and Tyondai Braxton), Charlie’s generally always led. ‘Simple Answers’, however, is the first record formally going out under his own naked name. Commensurately, he’s stepped up his development to deliver “a highly ambitious concept album, written for seventeen-piece chamber orchestra, singers, and electronics”, over six years in the making.
While ‘Simple Answers’ was initially planned as something much more extreme – “the vocals were going to be more irregular, the compositions unfolding really asymmetrically, dealing with the flow of time and events in a really unpredictable, modernist-classical-music kind of way, like Nono or Lachenmann or someone” -the final form of the record is a refinement of the dark pop that’s always underlaid and informed Charlie’s work. Coloured and transformed by the influence of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century classical music (most notably the Spectralists) and informed by a contradictory intertwining of French feminist psychoanalyst/philosopher Julia Kristeva and the late American comedian Patrice O’Neal, it explores the rise of fascism via themes of “power, masculinity, Jewish self-hatred, addiction, brainwashing, and the occult.” Along the way, it incorporates “drones and dissonance… dramatic post-punk vocal hooks, lush nineteenth century romanticism, medieval choral beauty, horror film score cacophony, and even some rhythms and textures from trap rap and R&B, all com(ing) together in dark, cinematic epics.”
Here’s Puppet, the first song from ‘Simple Answers’ to go public back in May…
The concert itself will feature the album’s full ensemble (including personnel from New Music groups Mivos Quartet, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, plus pianist Kelly Moran, sopranos Daisy Press and Megan Schubert) and conductor David Bloom of Contemporaneous. Special guests Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon) and Zohra Atash (of Azar Swan) will each also take the helm in turn to perform “radically re-imagined cover versions (of) beautiful complex songs” arranged by Charlie for the occasion.
As well as singing in the ensemble, Daisy Press will also be playing a support slot blending her own preoccupations as a leading American experimental classical singer, a synergistic voice teacher, prime mover of cross-cultural healing ritual Voice Cult, a former electro-funk backing singer/dancer for Chromeo, and extravagantly tattooed principal vocalist at House of Yes (Brooklyn’s fabled “temple of expression”). She’ll be performing a solo set of twelfth-century songs by Hildegard von Bingen, mystical mediaeval polymath and feminist icon (whose work was also recently reflected upon and interpreted in a Filthy Lucre night back in London during February, into which Daisy would have fitted right in…)
Meanwhile, here’s Daisy performing some Hildegard in an empty swimming pool (apologies for the slender little image), plus a performance of her own ‘Treebreathing’ piece for HOY a while back.
Charlie Looker presents:
Charlie Looker + Daisy Press
National Sawdust,80 North 6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, New York 11249, USA
Thursday 14 June 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Misfit City 
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