Take Ecstasy with Me

Look I know I haven't mentioned this before and I REALLY SHOULD HAVE but you guys kind of have to go to the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein is curating at Merkin. It starts tomorrow, Monday afternoon, Jan. 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so you're off work!), and runs for freakin' MONTHS. Here's the program for tomorrow's FREE marathon, which starts at 2 and for seven hours, with lots of breaks and refreshments and whatnot so you're not being held prisoner or something:

Ne(x)tworks plays a piece by Julius Eastman (no not THAT piece, it is MLK Day, do you want to get us all in trouble)
Timo Andres plays Ives and Andres
Face the Music plays Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth
So Percussion plays So Percussion
Chiara String Quartet plays Jefferson Friedman
NOW Ensemble plays Greenstein
John Matthias, Adrian Corker & Andew Prior play Matthias
Julianna Barwick sings Barwick
Vicky Chow plays Daniel Wohl
Corey Dargel (w/ NOW Ensemble and Nathan Koci) sings Dargel (Other People's Love Songs, complete!)
Ashley Bathgate & Lisa Moore play Kate Moore
Ashley Bathgate plays Michael Gordon's Industry
Gabriel Kahane sings and plays Gabriel Kahane
Nadia Sirota & Nico Muhly play Muhly
and Buke & Gass collaborate with Mazzoli's Victoire on some awesome new thing.

That's just the first day! I kind of CAN'T NOT go to this.

Here's the whole page for the extended festival. I hope you'll reconize some incredibly serious names here: Dan Deacon, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Doveman, Owen Pallett, Clogs, Sarah Kirkland Snider, John Medeski, AND MANY MORE.

I Dig Her Deeply, and No Wonder

Hey! It's been awhile. But let's catch up, shall we, with that gang of superpowered misfits busily engineering the New York new music scene down in the secret underground bunker of New Amsterdam Records. I talked about the new Victoire release in my print column not too long ago, but there've been a coupla discs released since then that we really need to talk about.

For one thing, even longer than we've been waiting for that Victoire disc, we've all been waiting for David T. Little's noisy Newspeak to drop their first record, so the release of their new sweet light crude means we can finally EXHALE, and so now how is it?

Well, I'm not crazy about it, but that doesn't answer the question, since after all do I not like it because it really isn't good or do I not like it because it's just not my thing? Now THAT'S a puzzler, because there's a lot here that is Not My Thing—the sound here leans often towards the heavier genres of popular music, which are most effective when they've got that Wall Of Sound density, aren't they? Those turgid fuzzed-out textures you have to dig into to make everything out? When everything is articulated clearly, demanding instead of just allowing you to hear everything that's going on, we're falling into the genres I'm not crazy about, where the word "rock" is preceded by "prog" or followed by "opera."

But—no, it's not just that. Harmonically, melodically, these pieces leave me, for the most part, unmoved. And these genres don't always gel—there's always the hazard, when crashing all these musics into each other, of coming up with something that combines not the Best of Both Worlds but instead strays into "Most Unwanted Song" territory—nor do these pieces really hang together; I didn't feel, at the end, as if they'd added up to anything bigger.

Which is too bad, because these players are so great! In the aforelinked Victoire review, remember how I complained about their fiddler? Listen to Caleb Burhans play Missy Mazzoli's In Spite of All This and hear the difference a first-rate violinist can make. In Pat Muchmore's Brennschluß, Mellissa Hughes (of The Little Death) delivers her text like a total pro. How many singers can also Talk that convincingly?

Actually, of all the pieces on this program, it's Burhans's Requiem for a General Motors in Janesville, WI that I find myself returning to the most—it's the least fussy thing on the program, and for that reason the most successful as a rock composition. (Although this is clearly reflective of my listening again, I have to say that Oscar Bettison's B&E (with aggravated assault) also holds up pretty well, as the most progg'd-out piece on the program, so, who knows.) Here, anyway, is David T. Little's title track, in a video directed by NewAm regulars Satan's Pearl Horses, which is so 90s that I think I might love it:

As always with NewAm, you can listen to all of every track before you buy the album, here.

In that same envelope, I also got a copy of the new New Amsterdam disc from janus, a trio—featuring Amanda Baker, Nuiko Wadden, and Beth Meyers on flute, harp, and viola, respectively (although they also pick up a few other instruments and speak and sing along the way)—that I really hadn't heard as much about, which is crazy, because this disc is an Incredibly good listen.

(Can I point out here that the fact that the trio is named after a two-faced god reminds me CONSTANTLY of that SNL sketch about the R&B trio called Gemini's Twin? Okay sorry, continue.)

i am not, it's called, and it was recorded by Lawson White, because Lawson White records everything, apparently. Not only did he produce sweet light crude, he recorded the Isabelle O'Connell [SP?] album (Reservoir) whose sound I was raving about that one time, and he did Katrina Ballads for Ted Hearne, which sounded so clear without seeming naked, and he did Cathedral City for Victoire, which like sweet light crude was a little too clean for my money, i am not is not just clean, it is BONE WHITE, and it's terrific. Maybe it's because the album is strung together with interstitial movements composed by White's co–So Percussionist, Jason Treuting—crunchy, savory bites of music, kind of like those little rice crackers my dad's always eating?—that the album hangs together so well despite the range of different composers' voices; at first, I wanted to credit the harp-trio format, with its limited resources, for unifying the palette, but of course with the extra instruments and electronic accompaniments they employ on this record the actual possibilities are limitless. Those resources just happen to be very, very cannily exploited.

Here's janus playing the track Keymaster by (OF COURSE) Caleb Burhans:



I know what you're thinking and yes, it's super Philip Glassy, but it has its own smarts and its own charm—I love the sound of the viola harmonics–versus–flute unison at the beginning of the piece, and the simple fact is that this kind of writing is totally native to these instruments. Cameron Britt, Anna Clyne, and Ryan Brown each turn in a lovely movement as well, and Angelica Negron of Arturo en el Barco fame contributes the especially fascinating Drawings for Meyoko. Huh? What's that you say? Arturo en el Barco does not enjoy what you'd call "fame" yet? Oh, sorry, I temporarily mistook this for a just universe ruled over by a benevolent deity! Now click here and download some free Arturo en el Barco—okay thanks—and then click here to hear & buy i am not.

And then this OTHER recent New Amsterdam release, Penelope by NewAm co-founder Sarah Kirkland Snider. I'd not only heard a lot about it, but I knew Snider was a solid composer, having heard a particularly well-crafted piece of hers during her Yale days (conducted by her future husband, Real Steven Mackey!) on one of the New Music New Haven concerts; Signal is a great band, of course; and I'd loved Shara Worden's singing with My Brightest Diamond and Clogs. Still, there's no guarantee that all these parts will add up to something awesome. Is there anything more cringe-inducing than hearing an overqualified singer struggle to wring something worthwhile out of a song earnestly overcomposed by another talented musician? All the talent in the world don't count for nothin' if you can't write a ditty.

Well GREAT NEWS, y'all: Snider can, it turns out, apply her classical chops towards the creation of an amazingly solid pop record. It's seamless! Snider's hand is incredibly well-hidden here—this could be a singer-songwriter disc that just happens to have especially savvy harmonies and arrangements. Of course, it also helps that librettist Ellen McLaughlin also knows how to write a subtle refrain. And that the album was warmly, clearly produced by, OH LOOK, Lawson White again.

So I have greatly enjoyed listening to Penelope, but more than that, I have actually turned to it for when I am feeling down. It is a balm! It is tha bomb. Now, as I said, the whole album is surprisingly solid, so I really can't single out one song as being the one that you absolutely have to listen to, but also yes I can, it's this song, "Lotus Eaters," which I've been humming to myself for the past several weeks, in a weak and quavering voice, as the autumn sun descends closer and closer to the southern horizon and the days grow dark and cold:

This video I'm actually not that crazy about, despite the often exceedingly lovely photography—it just seems a bit "on the nose." BUT THAT SONG, right?? Buy it, and/or the rest of the rest of the album, here, and be glad you did.

(And remember! Now that NewAm has Naxos distribution, all of these albums are available not just at their website and iTunes but wherever fine compact discs are sold. Jinkies!)

Music Video for "Cathedral City" by Victoire

Mellissa Hughes and Victoire come up with a new answer to the old question, "How many sopranos does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"*

*The previous answer: "Three! One to climb the ladder, one to pull it out from under, and one to say, 'That was really too high for her.'"

(Via PopMatters. I review the disc here.)

Have You Heard These Things?

New Corey Dargel, everybody. He and violinist Cornelius Dufallo are premiering a new song-cycle at the Stone Nov. 29, and here's a taste—fiddle loops, brutal lyrics, 7/8 time. Highly recommended. It's like Owen Pallett meets Stephin Merritt meets rhythmic complexity? Yikes, okay, the previous sentence just embarrassed us all. Let's move on.

I haven't written much about our New Amsterdam friends lately, which is totally a mistake. They've been continuing this monthly ARCHIPELAGO concert series at the Galapagos Art Space, and I kicked myself when I realized I'd forgotten to tell y'all to check out the show by Roomful of Teeth, a new-music chamber choir, which based totally on YouTube clips, I'm pretty sure is going to become the new thing. Like Toby Twining and the Toby Twining Singers! Or Meredith Monk and the Funky Bunch! Look here they are singing Judd Greenstein: And here they are singing Caroline Shaw: Seriously, isn't this going to be a big deal?

Anyway. The next Archipelago concert, on Nov. 20 (there will also be a Dargel one in the spring), is all about Victoire, whom—as we have established—you totally love, and special guests Arturo en el Barco. Arturo en el Barco is one Angélica Negrón and her band, and you'd really better check it out, here. Eerie, sample-driven ambient, very good. It makes me want to wear gloves. And eyeliner. Actually, after listening to a little Arturo and a little Victoire just now, I think I am going to try to bring hats back, so this is a dangerous combination. You're warned. You're welcome.

Kill Them with Sweetness

Quick rundown of congrats for the New Amsterdam Records-and-affiliated crowd of young composers:

The WNYC podcast doesn't seem to have put out a lot of episodes lately, so it was a pleasant surprise to find in my pod-hole an episode dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's Victoire! Listen to it (mp3 here, podcast RSS feed here) and tell me what y'all think. For me, one of the most satisfying features of the music is the canny use of electronics—and one of the most troubling is the integration of the clarinet. Sometimes I think it wants to be a trumpet? At any rate I feel that the place of the woodwind section within the bandsemble lineup, as I noted so long ago in my Free Speech Zone review, is its weak spot, its Achilles heel if you will. Listen yourself, enjoy, & tell me what you think.

ALSO, let's toss a bouquet of congratulations at Ted Hearne, who won the Gaudeamus Prize for his Katrina Ballads! (Via, probably, @dja?) Here's the thing: I am not that crazy about the Katrina Ballads. Why am I so resistant to a work that is so obviously well-crafted? I enjoyed the New Haven premiere of Hearne's Eyelid Margin immensely, but his political music makes me feel more harangued than provoked. A clearer example than this might be his piece You Have AIDS. No, no, you don't actually have AIDS! (I mean, unless you do. Get tested, everybody!) No, that's just the title of the piece. It asks the listener to assume the position of a South African man being apprised of the fact that he has AIDS by what must be one of the worst HIV Counselors in the world ("So, like I said, you have AIDS. / Am I going too fast? HIV. CD4. AIDS. Any questions?"). I guess the idea is to shock the audience into an awareness of the reality of the AIDS crisis in Africa, but when I listened to this sound clips, I felt more like I had found myself at the audience at LEASE: The Musical. As if there's something smug, or presumptuous, or, it seems unfair to say, condescending going on here.

"Unfair," because, what—are Ivy League composers not allowed to comment on events affecting Black America or the developing world? That's absurd. I'm not fully able to articulate where I'm coming from with this, which may be why I've allowed my attempt to qualify my congratulations run on about ten times longer than the actual congrats. What is wrong with me?? Do I just dislike this off-Broadway sort of idiom? Maybe that's it, is that it feels in some superficial way like a Urinetown without the intentional self-parody, or an I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky without, well, okay I'm not actually going to defend I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky:

John Adams – "Leila's Song About the Wise Young Women"
from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky

I'm sorry. I'm obsessed.

And our final CONGRATULATIONS WITH EXCESSIVE QUALIFICATIONS (should I start drafting this blog before I post, so I know where I'm going before I get there?) goes to Corey Dargel, whose "Condi songs," Con Dolcezza, earned a tweet from that very special lady who makes me fantasize about going to one of those weird ex-gay camps where they teach you how to un-limp your wrist and then make you marry a lesbian, just so that the two of us could be forced into a sexless opposite-marriage, Rachel Maddow.

I actually love these songs. Almost a year after the election of Barack Obama, now that the people in charge of representing America to the rest of the world are less prone to making them totally hate us, and we can look back on Condoleezza Rice's tenure the way we look at pictures of a kegger gone horribly wrong ("I can't believe we actually DID that, dude we were so WASTED"), I'm hearing these pieces for the first time, and they've lost little of their impact—because Condoleezza Rice has lost little of her mystery. How did an intelligent, cultured woman end up rubber-stamping such a disastrous foreign policy? How did someone whose family struggled up from slavery join an administrative team that turned its collective back on the cause of equal rights for Americans? Dargel doesn't pretend to answer these questions, but he asks them more eloquently than I've ever heard them asked before, by generously and sensitively setting to music remarks that make Rice sound more like a civil rights leader than, say, a coldblooded conniving bureaucrat with the blood of innocents pooling about her Manolos.

But since I'm being a total bitch to everyone today, I'll also point out that this performance is a bit unsatisfying—I feel as if really pulling off a number like "Gospel Song" requires a vocal instrument with more gravity than this lady is able to muster. ATTENTION ALL SINGERS, please check out this piece! I want to hear a second recording.

Jesus, WHY am I so negative. Anyway, congrats again to everybody, and if you didn't already know that Naxos is picking up the New Amsterdam catalogue, the first releases are trickling out next month—including the debut from NOW Ensemble, and Dargel's Other People's Love Songs—so if you actually still buy records in a record store nowadays, you will suddenly be able to find them there! Hooray. Okay g'bye.

The Artists Formerly Known as "Victrola"

Huh, I got word that Missy Mazzoli's bandsemble, Victrola, was asked to change their name by Sony-BMG, the company that formed when Sony Music merged with BMG, the company that bought RCA, the company that bought the Victor Talking Machine Company, which produced the Victrola record-playing machine, in 1906. It's easy to see why they would feel threatened, not because the RCA Victrola label is still active (it went kaput earlier this century), but because, dude, vinyl is making a comeback, and all those hipsters who bought the new Animal Collective LP are going to need decorative wooden cabinets to play it in. In related news, this is all starting to make me nervous about the legal status of my drag persona, Elektra Nonesuch. But ANYWAYS! The newly rechristened VICTOIRE (new myspace here) will be playing with So Percussion at Galapagos next Wed., Jan 28 at 8 pm ($10). You have to go, because So is playing Cage! And you love Cage almost as much as you love VICTOIRE.

Redhooker, Twi the Humble Feather, Victrola Tomorrow

So it was no surprise to hear that Missy Mazzoli's delightful Victrola project just signed with New Amsterdam Records, as she is a fixture of the New Amsterdam "community," or should I say "commune," since those hippies all squat together in a giant condemned industrial space on the waterfront, dumpster-diving and making free love, but in other news, Missy emailed to tell me about this gig Victrola's doing tomorrow, at the new and I'm told gorgeous home of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO (which is a place in New York), and she said and have you heard of this band we're playing with, Twi the Humble Feather? But no I hadn't, because I live in a cave, in Connecticut. So I went to their MySpace, and would you listen to that, it's super fun! You indie kids will love it, with your Grizzly Bear and your Panda Bear and your El Güincho Bear! Srsly it's hard to listen to their music without suspecting that they're sitting poised on the verge of a big fat blog-fueled breakout. But you know who else is super fun? The other band on the bill, Redhooker, which takes its name from the Brooklyn neighborhood its members call home, namely DUMBO. Cool, bittersweet, with a tangy twist of old-school minimalism. SO: Redhooker, Twi the Humble Feather, Victrola, Galapagos Artspace, 16 Main St, Brooklyn, $10, 11 pm tomorrow night, dress sexy. Go go go!

Catching Up

Skip the next two paragraphs. They are boring. In fact, feel free to skip this whole post. The next one will be better. Today I'll just talk really fast and get a lot of stuff over with at once. So I haven't written anything for this blog in ages and that's for a lot of reasons but mostly I just haven't gotten very excited about anything. Things I did get worked up about but neeeever quite got around to blogging included Nico Muhly's Merkin Hall concert a month ago, the one I was talking about here, and the super-fun afterparty, which was actually just the gang from Nico's show crashing the New Amsterdam Records afterparty, because Corey Dargel and William Brittelle's record-release show (for Brittelle's high-concept new-music rock-opera Mohair Time Warp project) was exactly the same night and Bedroom Community & New Amsterdam Recordses are BFF, so it was a veritable who's who of whatnot, starring such boldface names as Valgeir Sigurðsson! Nadia Sirota! Judd Greenstein! Missy Mazzoli! Caleb Burhans! Corey Dargel (obviously)! and though I didn't get to talk to Corey Dargel I did get a chance to talk to Darcy James Argue, whose blog I have always admired but usually can't really say anything intelligent about because I know next to nothing about jazz music, but I'm trying, I promise I am, and finally I broke down and as you can see added him to my super-exclusive blogroll because he is one of so few people actually talking sense about new music nowadays, and also he was totally adorable in person. There was also someone there who looked exactly like Scott Johnson but I didn't want to ask him if he was Scott Johnson because if he wasn't I would have felt extremely stupid. That said, all of you need to buy the Tzadik reissue of John Somebody if you haven't already. The whole crowd was very cool, and in fact I will one-up Anne-Carolyn Bird's announcement that New Amsterdam Records dot com is her new Facebook for professional networking and say that I intend to do all of my networking, professional, social, and sexual, at New Amsterdam Records dot com, and I suggest they retool the site accordingly. Not only would a new-music dating website fill a major niche, it would prevent confused listeners from wasting google queries like this one. (A: No.) My biggest celebrity sighting of the evening though was at the intermission of the concert, where I saw (was it him? it WAS!) my boyhood hero, the rock star whose music has meant more to me than he could possibly ever know, Mister DAVID BYRNE. Like I get starstruck pretty easily, I'll admit but when I lived in New York I could handle running into Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch &c. pretty well, but there was DAVID BYRNE, who not only did I buy his Talking Heads records and solo records but I like watched and rewatched True Stories to the point where I am still regurgitating snippets of disjointed dialogue at my friends. Like the song says, it's a scientific lifestyle! He was hanging out in the lobby, apparently by himself, like he was just a dude. I wanted to run up to him and thank him for all the joy he'd given me; however, not only was I not sure it was him at first, but I quickly realized that if I were David Byrne I would carry around a thing of pepper spray at all times for the sole purpose of incapacitating people who felt the irrational need to run up and express how important I had been to them when they were in college. So I walked past him without looking at him directly and instead pretended to be reading a poster on the far wall, hoping to make celebrity ID based on peripheral vision alone, but when I looked at the poster closely I realized that there were about ten words printed it and I couldn't pretend to be reading it for very long, so I looked around like I was searching for something while I figured out my next plan, and then a nice usher lady came up and asked if she could help me. Oh, ah, no, thank you. (But it was totally him.) The other thing I kind of wanted to blog recently was the death of another one of my heroes, Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg is famous for taking garbage and accidents and turning them into art; what's far more important, though, is that he made it into art that was a pleasure to see, while still retaining that strange energy of accidental, garbage beauty. Like that famous erased DeKooning—even when he destroyed a work of art, it came out looking great. His work was mysterious and passionate and inimitable and oh-so-often imitated. But like jazz or dance, visual art is something I know almost nothing about—fortunately the Times got somebody to write an appreciation who does know what he's talking about when it comes to visual art, namely... David Byrne. Please read that link. I don't have much to add, except to wince whenever people use the word "deconstruct" this way, and then to quote Donald Barthelme, who describes what is, honestly, not my favorite Rauschenberg, in a way that I think is a useful description of what a Rauschenberg achieves. Here's the piece in question, and here's what Barthelme says (Not-Knowing, p. 19):

We can ... wonder for a moment why the goat girdled with its tire is somehow a magical object, rather than, say, only a dumb idea. Harold Rosenberg speaks of the contemporary artwork as "anxious," as wondering: Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? ... What precisely is it in the coming together of goat and tire that is magical? It's not the surprise of seeing the goat attired, although that's part of it. One might say, for example, that the tirecontests the goat, contradicts the goat, as a mode of being, even that the tire reproaches the goat, in some sense. One the simplest punning leve, the goat is tired. Or that the unfortunate tire has been caught by the goat, which has been fishing in the Hudson—goats eat anything, as everyone knows—or that the goat is being consumed by the tire; it's outside, after all, mechanization takes command. Or that the goateed goat is protesting the fatigue of its friend, the tire, by wearing it as a sort of STRIKE button. Or that two contrasting models of infinity are being presented, tires and goats both being infinitely reproducible, the first depending on the good fortunes of the B. F. Goodrich company and the second upon the copulatory enthusiasm of goats—parallel production lines suddenly met. And so on. What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital—no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it.

In other words, it's like that Speaking in Tongues collage Byrne talks about in his appreciation, with the images dividing and multiplying and obscuring each other and complementing each other, but it happens with meanings as well as pictures. (This vast network of subtexts of course undergirds all of Byrne's work, too.) You can waste a long, long spray of words describing what their relationships are and still never describe the thing itself, and forget about articulating the sheer visual beauty I was going on about before. Something huge and great and wonderful left the world forever two weeks ago today.

Victrola, Hola, Hola, Eh, Eh, Eh

Hey, what are you doing after work tonight? Really? Jesus, that sounds boring! Instead of that, why don't you go hear Victrola at the Stone, John Zorn's groovy New York experimental venue? Victrola is a new "bandsemble" starring composer Missy Mazzoli (I've mentioned her here before), and the pieces on their myspace are kind of gorgeous. 8 p.m., $10 at the door, corner of 2nd & C! Go there.

The End of New Music Part II: Son of New Music

Okay, as promised, here's my thing on the Free Speech Zone tour. First, let me admit my biases: I really like the dudes from the NOW Ensemble. Composer Judd Greenstein went to college with one of my Gregs (also with, by a happy coincidence, one of the Books!), then went to grad school here in town, and I still see him around and everybody loves him. Same story with NOW bassist/sex symbol Peter Rosenfeld! But while I've always been embarrassed that this review never (apparently) made it into print, I hesitated to send it directly to Greenstein and fellow FSZ composer Missy Mazzoli just on account of it's sorta ambivalent. This has caused me to act really awkward whenever I see them, as in the following exchange from a merch table at this year's 26-hour Bang on a Can Marathon:

MM: "Hey!" DSJ: "Uh, hey!" [Thinking, Is that Missy Mazzoli?] MM: "Remember me?" DSJ [unconvincingly]: "Of course!" [That is Missy, right? But the lighting's kind of off in here, and I haven't seen her in a while, and isn't her hair different, and what if it's not Missy and I say "Missy!"?] MM: "It's me, Missy!" DSJ: "Of course!" [Oh dammit, I have that breakfast date scheduled for the exact same time as her piece is getting played.] MM: "How are you?" DSJ: "I'm going to miss your piece!" MM [slightly baffled]: "Oh!" DSJ: "People do have to sleep and eat, you know! Ha ha!"

So yeah, I thought I came off well. Anyway, here is that Free Speech Zone review, which I still pretty much stand behind, newspaper-y prose notwithstanding, although... one more disclosure: Firehouse 12 is an intimate, acoustically flawless venue (the Mates of State record there!) with a bar that, if you ask for a martini, hands you something that looks like a fishbowl with a stem on it. Long story short, by the time this concert was over I was feelin' some martini, so hopefully my aesthetic judgment was not as clouded as the judgment that would have stopped me from saying omg I'm so TIPSY with NOW Ensemble's Mark Dancigers sitting right next to me. Anyhow--

COMMON GROUND You say "preaching to the choir" like it's a bad thing. I'm suspicious of political art, as a rule. What's the point of a piece of classical music on political themes? Did a string quartet ever inspire someone to vote Democratic? Or is the act of composing political music merely therapeutic? I asked these questions Saturday night--before the Free Speech Zone Tour played to a packed house at Firehouse 12--and I left with a few more answers than I'd expected to. Named after tour co-organizer Judd Greenstein's piece on the program (named, in turn, after the corrals to which our President exiles all dissent at public appearances), Free Speech Zone paired young, left-wing new music groups NOW Ensemble (formerly of New Haven) and Newspeak in an evening of amplified protest. The concert opened with the setting of an unfortunate text: excerpts from Sam Smith's "Apology to Younger Americans," an essay listing Smith's regrets "on behalf of all my fellow members of America's crummiest generation." I wasn't impressed when I encountered the "Apology" as an email forward, and I was all the more dismayed to hear it sung aloud. Former Green alderman and Yale assistant professor of music John Halle's introductory remarks, dedicating his piece to the young NOW Ensemble, were genuinely touching, and his seamless writing made the most of the material. But when the words "Bill O'Reilly" are sung by an operatic soprano (the excellent Bo Chang--expressive and articulate, though seemingly unused to a microphone), something has gone wrong. Patrick Burke's contribution, External Forces, started promisingly--with the weird, unpolished sound of vocal humming from the instrumentalists. The piece attempted to describe the corruption of stable conditions by outside agents, but the chipper melody that emerged, as well as its interruption by crashing dissonances, were disappointingly obvious. The "breakdown" rang false, and when we finally retreated back to that eerie humming, it too had become a gimmick. Part of the difficulty of writing for the NOW Ensemble must have to do with its eccentric, Bang on a Can-inspired lineup: guitar, standup bass, piano, flute, clarinet. When the sonorities of the piece were pure and light, these instruments sang together like a choir, but when the rhythm section decided to rock out, the flute and clarinet were unable to join them. Greenstein's Free Speech Zone was the most affecting piece on the program, though accompanied by an undistinguished video presentation. The composer introduced his work wearing a t-shirt reading COMMON (as in the rapper); according to his bio, "Judd's music blends Romanticism and post-minimalist harmonic and textural elements with a strong grounding in hip hop, rock, and electronic dance music"--but that's got it backwards. While the textures of the piece occasionally turned jazzy, a pulsing/strumming figure embedded between polyrhythmic strata, the foundation was unmistakably classical. The instrumentation of the piece was convincing not because Greenstein had found some place for the woodwinds within a popular idiom, but because the winds' Stravinskian outbursts and sinuous lyricism were already at home in a music saturated with early 20th-cenury influences. *** After an intermission, Newspeak launched directly into director David T. Little's ferocious Electric Proletariat, a showcase for their unique virtuosity. This band's lineup was more inherently versatile than NOW Ensemble's, replacing the flute and bass with brutal violin and cello fiddling (amplified for most of their set) and adding a drummer and a percussionist for even more edge. Daisy Press, the group's vocalist, came on for Keeril Makan's song cycle Target, based on overwrought verses by Jena Osman ("It seems to be moving," went one line, "like a body made of parts." What?). The setting did not impress, but the performers made the most of the score's best trick: pairing sounds from the vocal line with close imitations from the ensemble. Press's near-oracular performance was half rock star (she definitely knew how to use a microphone), half new-music diva, and the instrumentalists' ability to take their cues from the back of her wild hairdo was miraculous. The last two pieces on the program cemented the overall tone. The closer, a cover of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, was tight, loud, and exhilarating (though Press's intonation wavered); the penultimate piece, Missy Mazzoli's lovely and hopeful In Spite of All This--the strings "unplugged" for a little while--underlined the evening's essential purpose. Yes, it was a "merely" therapeutic performance. But it was consoling for the audience as well--a sorely needed moment of community in dark political times.