March 27, 2012 9:00 PM
Skully’s Music Diner
1151 N. High Street
(614) 291-8856
$10 advance / $12 day of show
18+ / $3 surcharge for patrons under 21
Fanfarlo
http://www.fanfarlo.com/
“Rooms Filled With Light was a phrase I found in an old notebook,” says Fanfarlo’s singer and songwriter Simon Balthazar of the title to the band’s second album. “To me it summed something up, creation, not creation of the world, but what we do as people. It seems like creating rooms and filling them with light is a very modern, fundamental human activity, creating little worlds. It resonates with the whole experience of making art or music.”
The follow-up to Fanfarlo’s 2009 debut album Reservoir was recorded by Ben H Allen (Deerhunter, Animal Collective) during a six week session at Bryn Derwen, a studio located in a remote former slate quarry in Wales. Simon paints a picture of an idyllic time of days spent recording and experimenting, followed by communal meals slow cooked on an Aga, and evenings watching early cinema. A day off hiking in the mountains of Snowdonia “felt like Highlander”, there were birthday chants and weird rituals, such as attacking cake with meat cleavers on the mixing desk. It’s the sort of picture, one too rare these days, that you’ll find in any number of rock biographies: artists free to live their music for days and weeks at a time.
There, the strikingly different characters that make up Fanfarlo coalesced around the songs Simon had sketched out on acoustic guitar or drum machine at home. He enthuses about the chemistry of these five individuals: “I’m a Swedish country boy with all these hippy ideas about the world and the Universal One. Cathy [Lucas] grew up in Brussels, Justin [Finch] comes from Kent and went clubbing lots in London when he was younger, and Leon [Beckenham] is more of a classical player, Amos [Memon] is half Pakistani and grew up in Abu Dhabi. He had to clandestinely learn to play the drums when he was house-sitting for neighbours.
Their shared musical inspirations that shaped Rooms Filled With Light seem to stem as much from the spirit of an era as specifics in sound. “For me, an amazing moment in pop history was the late 70s spilling over into the early 80s, artists who were taking the idea of making pop music and songs and saying ‘let’s see where we can take this’, people like David Bowie, Talking Heads, Kate Bush, or Scott Walker,” says Simon. Minimalist composers Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, described as “real heroes” of Fanfarlo, also left their mark. “We were looking for a new way of using acoustic and orchestral instruments, and started talking about it, saying ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we had a contrapunto hammering, how can we use violins and drums in a new way?”
These new textures allowed Fanfarlo to create a melodic reflection of the lyrical subject of their songs. So on recent single and album opener ‘Replicate’, the dance of the pipes reflects the subject matter, the mutation of a virus under a microscope. “I was using imagery from viruses replicating,” says Simon of his lyrics to the track, “My sister is a microbiologist and works with vaccines, and I talk to her about her work a lot. Viruses are really fascinating, because they’re sort of alive but they’re not.”
In a voice that sounds increasingly confident, with hints of David Sylvian or Bowie, Simon’s lyrics explore themes inspired by his extensive reading, from Czech poet and scientist Miroslav Holub to Camus and American poet Kenneth Patchen. “Most of what I write tends to be these slightly odd meditations on a subject,” says Simon. “The overarching subject on this record comes from a place of ‘where the fuck are we and how did we get here?’ looking at what a weird place the world is. I want music to be about big ideas; I want people to write songs about quantum mechanics, far away galaxies and the inside of the earth. I don’t get why people want to write songs about relationships, and I very rarely find love songs interesting.” So Rooms Filled With Light has ‘Tunguska’, a saxophone-led track with a fine rhythmic swing that is actually about the 1908 incident when a comet exploded just above the ground in Siberia, flattening the forest for miles around. It is written, says Simon, from “the perspective of someone who’s a wholehearted supported of this comet, a doomsday aficionado.” ‘Bones’ is a nod to the art of the murder ballad, and sung about “someone who finds meaning in modern life by the fame of having your name in the headlines, and the only way he can find that fame is by killing people.”
Rooms Filled With Light is an album of brilliant contrast, chamber pop with melodies as infectious as the viruses that are the subject of ‘Replicate’ holding up bold and bright lyrics and ideas. What’s the secret to making it hold together? “Something that often happens when we arrange the songs,” Simon explains; “they start stark and bedroomy with dark sentiments, but with quite pleasant melodies. When we get together and play them as a band they bloom, and become more uplifting on the surface.” The best pop music ought to draw you in, charm with sweet and beguiling melody and then, when you’re least expect it, turn on you. As Balthazar says, with a laugh, “it should pull the rug out from under your feet.”
Gardens & Villa
http://www.gardensandvilla.com
Gardens & Villa is the project of five college friends from Santa Barbara, formed following the collapse of a noisier post-punk band and a hitch-hiking journey up the west coast. Members Chris Lynch, Adam Rasmussen, Levi Hayden, Shane McKillop began playing in earnest as Gardens & Villa in 2008. The name is pulled from the location of their house on Villa Street, and the property’s lovely garden to which they tend. The music they make is very much connected to coastal city they call home — the stoney bike rides, dance parties, a scene free of judgment. The band refers to this Santa Barbara feeling as “coco vibes.” For two weeks in the summer of 2010, the band camped behind visionary and now-labelmate Richard Swift’s Oregon studio. No shower, no kitchen, but all the magic you could ask for. After taking a band oath to always play all parts live — a la Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense — the band added member Dusty Ineman to supremely execute the live incarnation of the band.