They just can't, just won't stop
Posted // September 6,2012 - It’s
nigh impossible to imagine now, but yes, there was a time when a
Lightning Bolt performance did not immediately mean pure frenzy. In
2004, the noise/punk-rock duo played their very first concert while
attending the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I., the
city that still serves as the home base of drummer/
vocalist Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson. Chippendale recalls
stray details of the inaugural show—a TV displaying red static sat in
front of the bass drum for lighting, a Walkman played a noise loop to
supplement the band, the set consisted of three songs played to maybe a
dozen friends—but by and large, it was remarkably unremarkable.
“People
just sort of stood around and checked us out. It wasn’t wild in any
way,” Chippendale says. “The shows got wild quickly, though.”
Since
then, Lightning Bolt’s reputation as a preeminent live outfit has been
their most attractive trait. The pair immerses themselves in blaring
volumes, high-speed playing—Chippendale is a particularly savage
presence, thrashing away at his kit and screeching through the mic
lodged in his homemade mask—and the audiences themselves. More often
than not, an opportunity to witness the group in person means focusing
your attention on happenings on the floor rather than the stage, as they
are fond of swiftly setting up right in the center in a room. This
taste for “guerrilla gigs” has informed Lightning Bolt outside of
conventional music spaces, too, with the band playing on terrain such as
sidewalks and parking lots.
At the
outset, the party-friendly band’s preference for playing within crowds
was rooted in pragmatic purpose—they felt physically removed from their
peers when onstage and moved closer to close the gap—but over time,
Chippendale has realized other pleasures, too.
“There’s
a certain casualness that the audience feels toward the band. I don’t
know if it helps them loosen up, but it just seems to sort of have a
positive energy about it,” he says, noting his fascination for the
increased potential for things going wrong. “Aspects of my drumming have
been informed by being knocked off a beat by something and having to
learn how to play beats that are allowed to fall apart and then come
back together, just [so I can] step over a kid or something. It’s almost
forced me to become a jazzier player just to dodge the missiles that
are flying my way.”
That
same juxtaposition between fun and danger runs deep within the group’s
sound on record. A Lightning Bolt record is a barrage of
elements—jangly, distortion-soaked bass lines, cymbals making clatter
that’s the best kind of amateurish, unintelligible lyrics propelled from
the bottom of Chippendale’s chest—that ultimately sound coherent
through sheer force of will. There’s something profoundly, wonderfully
naive about how committed the band members are to banging out their
songs and engaging audiences, but also something sinister about the
unruly nature of their sound and how sincerely they are compelled to
maintain such aggression show after show.
While
yes, relatively chilled-out songs exist in their discography—two
examples are “Colossus” and “Rain on the Lake I’m Swimming In” off
2009’s Earthly Delights, their fifth and most recent
record—but Chippendale has little faith that he could calm down for
good. “Everything I do, I get really wound up, and I take it a little
too far. That’s just the nature of what I do,” he says, considering an
option offered in this interview about a particularly strange place for
him to end up. “I don’t know how I’ll feel in 20 years. I’ll definitely
be more mellow I think. Things will have to have changed to some extent.
Maybe I will get a job as a backing band in a Mexican restaurant or
something. But as far as I can project forward, that’s not going to
happen anytime soon.”
Ishmael Butler: All questions, no answers
Posted // September 6,2012 - “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass,” wrote Anton Chekhov.
Although
removed by more than 100 years, Ishmael Butler (aka Palaceer Lazaro)
epitomizes the Russian
existential writer’s show-don’t-tell style—the essence of this quote—and
his disregard for traditional story structure. Chekhov also believed
that what is obligatory of an artist is not to provide answers, but to
properly pose questions.
In
this vein, Butler, the rhyming half of Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, pushes
the boundaries of storytelling in hip-hop. First, there was the band
members’ anonymity—virtually unheard of within a genre of celebrity
names—during the first two EP releases, allowing merit alone to gain
notoriety without relying on the successes of Butler’s previous group,
Digable Planets.
Butler
also offers mysterious, semi-cryptic titles, like “An Echo From the
Hosts That Profess Infinitum” and “Endeavors for Never (The Last Time We
Spoke You Said You Were not Here. I Saw You Though.)” from the
critically acclaimed 2011 release Black Up.
Each
song shows its own “glint of light on broken glass” in a smattering of
vignettes written seemingly as stream of consciousness. Butler would
argue that these several-lines-long scenes sewn together are the most
realistic approach to penning a narrative.
“A
film or book is a nonrealistic view of life,” says Butler, who then
describes a fictional scenario of a couple cyclically falling in and out
of love. “It seems abstract [as it’s happening]. You can pick out those
parts and then, later, put it in line [for a story]. But that’s not the
way life goes; it’s not the way you hear, think, feel.
“I’m
trying to reflect what’s happening to me and the world more
realistically than sitting down and filtering out a linear story,” says
Butler, whose songs, rich in imagery, allow open interpretation, much
like a work of non-narrative contemporary film art. It poses questions
and gives nary an answer. For example, “Are you ... Can you ... Were
you? (Felt)” muses on the illusion of time, the problem with
materialism, the adoption of television over literature, the struggles
of African-Americans and so on.
Also
within that song are clues to Butler’s writing processes: “Aw, dude/ The
spicier the food/ When you chew, fuck their rules/ It’s a feeling.”
Furthermore, as he speaks via phone from his home, the way he describes
his creative process isn’t dissimilar to how a medium would describe how
they channel a deity from another realm.
“When
I’m making music, I don’t feel like I’m doing something, as much as I
feel like something is happening to me,” Butler says.
The
environment has to be perfect—the lights dimmed, the proper tools put in
place and Butler relaxed and calm. And then “it” just comes. He has
difficulty (or maybe it’s reluctance) describing the process further,
but gives the allusion of it being meditative—hypnotic even.
Butler
doesn’t think too much—about the lyrics or the industrial, minimalistic
beats that he produces with Tendai “Baba” Maraire. “I don’t necessarily
like all the sounds or the rhymes [that come out], but I believe
in them,” he says. “[It’s like] you’re spiraling up or down or to the
side. But when your instincts come, that’s where it’s at.”
Yet
it’s not all from a higher power; there is responsibility on his end, be
it culling sources of inspiration or habitually jotting down lyrical
sketches. He cites Harlem Renaissance poets—like Nikki Giovanni, Alain
LeRoy Locke, James Baldwin and, especially, The Last Poets—as shaping
his worldview and opening his eyes to wordplay and the power of
language. These were tradition-challenging writers whose fresh and
clever approach was derived from their urban environment. Butler is
doing just that now. His work is not derivative of these cats, just
informed.
“Everything
is born of something else,” Butler says. On his phone, there are
roughly 2,500 recorded notes—phrases, sketches, rhymes—but he rarely
goes back to them as a direct source material. “Everything that I record
or think about or write down or whatever, even if you never see it
again, it all leads to a song in one way or another.”
The
whole process is magical, he says. “What’s happening is some divine
stuff. You’re channeling and you feel like you’re plugged up into
something. It’s hard to describe or chronicle. I’m not able to do it.
I’m always amazed when cats can do that ... maybe when I’m older [I will
be able to].”
It’s admirable to deal in the currency of mystery, though. After all, “It’s a feeling.”
Even
if Butler could describe his creative process, he probably
wouldn’t—that’s not his ethos. He shows glints of light on the broken
glass of his fractured storytelling, and the listerner can extrapolate
meaning. Butler’s job isn’t to provide answers, it’s to ask questions.
