Luxbndr's Blog

Once upon a time, many years ago, I visited relatives in Finland. During my stay, they gave me the run of a small camp by a river for a few days. In the wee space was an old foot-pump style organ…maybe two/three chords wide…very basic. No electricity at that cabin, so whatever music I would play those days would be from personal effort. As we know, I’m not a musician, so the notes drawn from those evenings alone in the Finnish forest are blessedly in the ether of a past time. But are they?
What drew me to the compositions of Low Anthem over the past few months, and what made their concert in Portland like a hand on my heart, was a reminiscence. The simplicity of the frames of their songs, the raw chords, music lifted only by voice and word, simple to the point of complexity. I’m not saying the concert was a weird solo acoustic foray by a deranged half-Finn, not at all. But one could tell from the listening that the song was built of very simple stones. Then colored with clarinet, oboe, keyboard, saw, fiddle.
I have no setlist to work from, so sequence is gone as a referential tool. I have all their lp’s, but I have spare knowledge of specific songs and wordplay. Yet some works still stood out within the time……an a cappella “Charlie Darwin”…..a plunky “To Ohio”, the eerie “Ghost Woman Blues”…. The odd love song of “Matter of Time”, mellowed with the heartbeat of that weird farfisa pump-organ….so like summer as a child, a dreamy harmonica undertow. And older reflections like “Burn”…when they played that crazy-amped saw, and spoke of memory and regret. And songs like “Golden Cattle”, so close to an early American hymnal, with full-throated harmonies. As we spoke earlier. the concert created its own “space”…whoever was ready to “be there” that night were present….it’s hard to explain a moment unless you’re there (or perhaps you’ve been to one of those times when time sweeps/shifts into a different plane…..)
An example that I cannot explain…..Tom could give a better clue/explanation…. At the end of the concert, the band asked the audience to dial their cell-phones to a specific number and to then hold their phones up…..the result was a buzzle of sounds, like crickets and peepers and odd night voices from the dark of night…..but the nice sounds. It was a grinning dissonance…this weird “old school” plunkety banjo band, suddenly arcing into “social networking as music source”……
Other songs played…..apothecary, love and altar, smart flesh, home I’ll never be, god damn this house, cage the songbird, ghosts who write history books, etc etc etc …..