David Bowie’s (via Brian Eno)EMS Synthi used on LowandHeroes. Photo’s snapped by Chicago synthesist Brett Naucke while visiting the David Bowie retrospective at the MCA last year.
JG Thirlwell + Ensemble will be performing as part of the Bang On A Can Long Play Festival on May 1 2022 at Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn. The Festival runs from April 29-May 1 2022 and will feature 60 concerts over three days in eight different venues in Downtown Brooklyn.
There will be performances by Attaca Quartet,Ashley Bathgate,Balún,Joan La Barbara,Kelly Moran,Matmos,Sun Ra Arkestra,Tristan Perich,Dither & Lee Ranaldo and many more, and works by Anthony Braxton,Arvo Pärt,John Luther Adams,Terry Riley,David Lang,Eliane Radigue,Galina Ustvolskaya,Robert Ashley,Ornette Coleman,Brian Eno,Julia Wolfe and more.
JG Thirlwell + Ensemble play chamber versions of some Foetus repertoire and will be premiering two new arrangements for the show. With Evan Allen on piano and accordion, Leah Asher on violin and viola, Rebecca El-Saleh on harp, Simon Hanes on acoustic guitar and bass guitar, Pete Moffett on percussion and JG Thirlwell on vocals.Tickets are available at https://bangonacan.org/longplay/ and you can receive a 50% discount on tickets by using the code JGTENSEMBLE
So, just as we might come to accept that “coriander” is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands.
And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience - the possibility of better guesses - without certainty.
Perhaps our sense of this, the sense of belonging to a world held together by networks of ephemeral confidences (such as philosophies and stock markets) rather than permanent certainties, predisposes us to embrace the pleasures of our most primitive and unlangued sense. Being mystified doesn’t frighten us as much as it used to. And the point for me is not to expect perfumery to take its place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything else to become like perfume.
