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Event
Jeffrey Silverstein w/ North Americans
This is an intimate living room performance in a private residence. Full details on the location will be provided at the end of ticket purchase.
TICKETS:
No paper tickets will be sent.
ADMISSION:
Print and bring your confirmation which will include the address and other details. Please don't share this info with anyone! In addition, your name will be on a list at the door. No additional tickets will be sold at the door. You must buy tickets here to get into this show.
DATE:
7/20/23
SHOWTIME:
8:00PM
SEATING:
This show will be general admission floor seating. Feel free to bring a pillow or cushion to sit more comfortably on the floor.
ALL SALES ARE FINAL. SORRY, NO REFUNDS:
Due to the limited number of tickets please make sure you can attend before you make your purchase. If you can no longer attend a show you can give or sell (at face value) the tickets to a friend. Contact us (livingroomshowlbc@gmail.com) before the show to transfer your tickets. We'll cancel any tickets resold for higher than original price.
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JEFFREY SILVERSTEIN
Jeffrey Silverstein returns in 2023 with his second full-length release: Western Sky Music. Based in Portland, Silverstein channels the natural beauty of his adopted Pacific Northwest into guitar-driven explorations of inner landscapes. The nine tracks that make up Western Sky Music advance the terrestrial themes of How on Earth EP (2019), You Become the Mountain (2020), and Torii Gates EP (2021) while lifting Silversteins sound to sweeping new promontories. Tracked live in a studio with minimal overdubs, Western Sky Music is a testament to what trust and synchronicity can achieve in the pursuit of radiant stillness.
Silverstein is once again joined by frequent collaborators Barry Walker Jr. (pedal steel guitar) and Alex Chapman (bass), as well as by a host of new collaborators. Filling out the quartet, Dana Buoys (Akron/Family) drums lend the bands textures a deeper, more richly spontaneous sound. You can find it reverberating in the stoned country swing of Cowboy Grass, which passes through phases of tension and lightness to dwell on the necessity of release. I was crying in my dream, putting the dog to sleep, Silverstein sings, Yeah it was about time, I stopped to let it all out. These tracks are built around a discipline of attention and a collective practice of focusingon the present moment. Silverstein describes the emphatic Chet as an example of the fortuitous accidents that can result from such a practice. Born from a skipping Chet Atkins record, the track pulses and grooves as guitarist William Tyler layers his signature desert tones onto its insistent rhythm. Everything comes together on the windswept Sunny Jean, a love song for Silversteins partner. Taking inspiration from a Patti Smith speech and a scene from Easy Rider, the track brims with gratitude for connection (And Im thankful for that window in) and the qualities that close, loving attention reveals: A quiet confidence, a sense of permanence.
The record was once again recorded by Ryan Oxford at Color Therapy. Amid spiraling textures of sound, Birdsong closes the record with guest vocals from Karima Walker. Will I live to see our new reality? she sings. And if were all just walking each other home? These are fitting questions for an album centered on collaboration and movement. Western Sky Music is a warm invitation to undertake the journey together.
NORTH AMERICANS
Long Cool World, the fifth LP from Los Angeles-based musician Patrick McDermotts North Americans project, begins with a plaintive strum, before Portland, Oregon-based Barry Walker chimes in with an expansive, melancholy arc of pedal steel. It is a moment that seems both wide open and completely intimate, gesturing at the hugeness of the natural world, while also taking comfort in the small moments.
As North Americans, McDermott has been experimenting with drone and noise and how it can take shape, and then jettison that shape, since 2013s No_No, but its when he embraced his love of fingerpicked guitar and vintage country music on 2018s Going Steady that he settled on a sound that felt like a genuine melding of his disparate musical interests. 2020s Roped In was another creative milestone: with Walker and a host of other collaborators, including harpist Mary Lattimore, and guitarist William Tyler creating a communal, layered approach to each track that felt vital as the world dipped into isolation during a global pandemic. I knew that for this one I wanted to dial up some of the textures and experimentation, McDermott says.
In order to do that, Long Cool World, strips away most of the musical collaborators, allowing Walker and McDermott to settle on an approach that is at once intricate and simple, creating hypnotic music that loops and layers, with subtle shimmers of noise or quiet psychedelic freakouts hiding beneath McDermotts unshowy but emotionally affecting guitarwork and Walkers pedal steel hum. The duo refined their collaborative relationship as well, with McDermott sending isolated guitar tracks to Walker, who then listened to them while on drives and walks around Portland, before going into the studio with only a loose sense of what he wanted to add to them. Eventually McDermott and Walker came together to record the album, giving the whole thing a sort of free-flowing, naturally collaborative feel. We were really excited to dig into our own process in a more focused way together, McDermott says. Walker echoes this sentiment, speaking of how those guitar loops built into a full-fledged collaborative relationship: There were times when we played the organ together, Walker says, speaking of the tandem organ drone of The Last Rockabilly. We sat down and it was feeding through the Leslie speakers and we were doing a drone togetherit was a lot of instinct.
At its core, Long Cool World is a confident album that finds its heart in deceptively simple moments: the pedal steel cascading over McDermotts strumming on Think of Me as a Place or the quiet burst of noise at the midpoint of first single Classic Water, or the warm, drunk wobble of album closer Bad Box, are all moments that happily exist on the periphery of the core sound of the record, but take center stage the more you listen. This music is so simple. I just didnt feel like I needed more, where my instinct previously was to add more whenever it was applicable, McDermott says.
Though you may hear plenty of clear influences hereLong Cool World does exist firmly in the American Primitive tradition, after allthere are a few that exist just under the radar, but offer up fascinating context to not just the albums roots, but how McDermott and Walker think about composition in general: guitar loops repeat until they become abstractions of themselves, drawing inspiration from McDermotts love of DC hypnotic hardcore experimentalists Lungfish and the delicate compositions of Loren Connors circa Airs. Walker, for his part, draws inspiration from older soundsMichael Hurleys deceptively simple guitarwork, Washington Phillips zither, the polyphonic harmonies of the Bosavi and Mbuti people, and much more. I draw inspiration from old forms, Walker says. Ancient melodies that have tumbled and been rounded in the waters of oral tradition, settled into folk and classical music, and then eroded again.
This erosion, followed by a sort of contextual rebuilding, is a central theme found in not just the music on Long Cool World, but the North Americans project as a whole. As if Walker and McDermott are perpetually seeking to answer the questions: what happens when we create and collaborate instinctually? And how do we channel the unpredictability of influence into a cohesive song cycle that seeks not to portray a single moment or memory, but instead a state of being that is exactly as natural as the world it was borne from? Long Cool World doesnt so much answer those questions as it does sit with them, comfortable in the wild beauty of modern life.
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LocationTo Be Announced (Long Beach, CA)
Displayed After Purchase
Long Beach, CA 90814
United States
Categories
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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Contact
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