FLOWER CORONET DOMUM INSPIRATIONIS

I open my eyes and am imbued with a name which seems to have existed before I did and it did, presumably. Andrew Kingsmore Grannis. The name. I am 24 years of age, now, and a musician of at least a few years but of little renown, at least to my invariably dynamic senses. Dirty blonde haired and tall and long-limbed and lean, caucasian and germanic, I bring a confused hand to my head in a something-like-a-fan style to block the sun's punishing light, and with the sun screened from view, I see I'm standing before a wide, one-story tall, white museumish building, replete with roman column furnishings and an engraving which reads before me now:

FLOWER CORONET DOMUM INSPIRATIONIS

            There are many steps, and I do not know how I got here, but I do feel compelled to climb up the steps and progress inwards now through the ingress which was styled with a round top and straight edges. I feel that a muse is calling me. This building might house the groundwork, the foundation, the preparation for something great. The greatness is possibly a sound to which there was no equivalent, but then can any sound have such echoic reciprocality to another noise, anyways?

            I walk in, knowing I am a musician and little else. There is much buzzing in my synaptical space and there is a mad hum. The museum, as I enter it, has a great room upon entrance, and above each of the rooms is a number. There are ten rooms. Hemi-annular in design, the great parlor is. The rooms are ordered. Everything is white marble, free from impression of any kind, clean.

            I am in awe and I sway into the nearest portal wildly, attracted by some clashing of electricity in strings. There is a great Ten decorating the room's entryway, sitting comfortably atop the rounded top engraved into this white marble. There are others like me in the room, musicians, but they do not share my roots. They come from north of Detroit, across a boundary line set by men in suits who talk big to each other and through each other and purportedly on behalf of their constituents. Windsor, Ontario, this northerly land, that's where these dudes in this Ten-labelled room come from, one of them says. They call themselves THE BULLETPROOF TIGER. They are a band, not of thieves, but of noisemakers.

            So that's what this is, not a museum but a venue. A venue for artistry, I come to realize. It looks like a museum, though, what with the halls all greco-roman whited out and such. A museum with a rotating collection, it would seem. These men I came upon in room Ten have only been making noise for about six years, since 2009 as far as I know, and what they're clashing about sounds more recent. Like maybe a 2011 vintage.

            THE BULLETPROOF TIGER as they stand before me consists of four Canadian fellows, two on contrapuntal guitars and one on electric bass and one smashing percussively in rhythm with his friends on skinned cylinders. They are performing without speech, and I stand in awe of the musicianship occuring before me, definitive drums underneath two clashing bleats and beeps of mathematical melodies.

            Without knowing why or what my purpose is, I sit and listen to THE BULLETPROOF TIGER's great constructed cacophony. I ponder what placed me here, where did I get my ticket to this show? It seems I am the concert's only attendant. The music might as well have been dialed right into my ears, encoded into my brain. The halls were so bare, the music jolted straight into my aural canals and is translated cleanly. After some time, THE BULLETPROOF TIGER's noise ended.

            "So what," I said, "do you call that racket you just made?"

            "Math Rock." says Greg. Greg is one of the two Canadian guitarists, and having just completed his presentation of a full set of well composed material, he's sweating and has a slight sheen. Drew, the other of the two, makes a smoochy face. "YOU WANNA KISS ABOUT IT?" Drew inquires dumbly.

            "What?" - Me, in dumbfounded reply.

            These dudes, while talented, seemed crazy to me, shouting after their performance of awkward moments with grilled cheese sandwiches and half-paralyzed actors. I ambled out of room Ten with haste, ears ringing with amazing music but my brain perplexed by such strange chatter.

            I could hear a dancing piano start up in some hall far away, and some woman rambling in absolutely unintelligible syllables. What is this place? What is the point of my disposition in this grand hall of music?

            The dancing piano is coming from the room labeled with Seven and I now somehow identified the feminine language as somehow middle-eastern sounding, without understanding what was middle and where was east. All I knew right now is that I felt more comfortable where the music was, so I walked into Seven and sat down.

            The man playing the piano seems furious, he has such energy and passion he was pushing into the ivory/ebony keys, and there is a progressive element to the madness emitting from this man's fingers. He has a darker skin than mine; Armenian, as is his female vocalist counterpart. There are men with guitars here, too, and more drums.

            The man spat something like "Im anuny TIGRAN HAMASYAN, yev arets' ayn, inch' RED HAIL."

            At least with THE BULLETPROOF TIGER, I exchanged information, but what is this? I'm not offended by it, but certainly I don't understand it. It sounds strident, the speech, in an attractive way. Clearly this is some kind of performance artistry meant for me, to drive me to perhaps madness or possibly greatness, it isn't yet clear.

            Ten and Seven's clatter are both complex but in different ways, room Seven's performance being more like a plodding calm storm and Ten's like repeated stabbing at the eardrums in ways more pleasurable than the word "stabbing" might imply.

            There were eight more rooms to explore, and so I wandered out to find room Four starting up with startling electricity. What was more startling was that it seemed like the sounds from Four were ripped from my head, from some time prior.

            Vague whirling flashes of alpine scenery and plodding boots and the sense of a long journey, all this glistens upon my imagined sightscape. Four it is, for now, then.

            Eight Norweigans are in a brilliantly lit room - there is plexiglass separating me from them. I watch through the plasticene portal as purples and greens and blues and red hues softly flicker upwards and these Norweigans blaze through repetitions, variations on a theme. It is beautiful.

            Applied with silicone to the plexiglass is a holder, containing many little square cardboard items, each identical and glossy and containing annular plastic within them as well. They say "JAGA JAZZIST" and "STARFIRE" and have eight stylized faces arranged in circle. I guessed them to be each of the Norweigians playing before me now.

            Many of the Norweigans have keyboards, some have strange metallic objects they're blowing through or wooden objects they're fellating. These are horns, I remember, and woodwinds, and I could blow them too, if I could reach through the plexiglass window and appropriate them from the Norweigans who are jamming out with some serious psychedelic hum.

            What is this place that steals so much of my memory? I become aware that I was not aware of so many things. I know that I am a musician and what countries are and who tribes are composed of, but I could not remember how I came to be in the presence of so many other musicians. It should be noted, truly, that these fellow artisans are performing so beautifully that I am in continued awe. This contributes greatly to a sense of increasing amnesia about this exhibition.

            Suddenly drunk with purpose, I realize at least that I must visit each of all ten rooms. I head back out to the hall to continue along in a more orderly fashion. I get numbers, now, I feel I'm not so lost that I don't understand there's one through ten here and that perhaps the order is important in some way. So, alright, then, let's check out Nine.

            A father and son sit in Nine. They are African, dark in complexion and both gentlemen lean and attractive. They hold instruments which seem insanely foreign, but they are nearly identical. The father and son hold twin gigantic wooden structures with what seems like thousands of strings running from the thin necked top to the half-dome base. These items are clearly handcrafted with immense care and delicate precision, some luthier spent years of his life on these twin things. 

            The base of these objects are decorated with leather and rivets and there's an acoustic hole in the dome. They look amazing, and I hear one of the African gentleman introduce himself to an inextant crowd as Toumani Diabate and this to his left here is his son, Sidike Diabate.

            The father and son begin plucking delicately and quickly, the sounds like raindrops, and the constancy of sound so arousing to me I could hardly breathe. I relaxed and let the Kora sound echo over me and reverberate through my every inch. TOUMANI & SIDIKE. Amazing. I desire to pull at the Kora strings and test them, I want so badly to touch them, but in some kind of fever I felt I had to leave room Nine to hit Eight as instantly as I could manage. The Kora's raindrops pursued forever, eternally, it seemed, even as I walked away. Understanding I must at least follow this twisted museum's order and feeling it important to glean specific inspiration from each room, I now hit room Eight.       

            Spikes of experimental electricity screeched out from Eight, and while abrasive, I pushed in to internalize aggressive melodies and I felt a stomp in my chest, from the floor perhaps. The men performing in room Eight are closer to me than any of the other prior artists, geographically, it seemed, like… maybe a six hour drive up the I-5 to Sacramento. What is the I-5, though, exactly?

            TERA MELOS is the band making such a racket in room eight. It is clear to me now that each of these compilations of musicians make a band, and I am having an easier time identifying these bands as familiar things from my past, things I have encountered prior to my amnesiac drop into whatever this is. Things are beginning to clear up now. Crystallized. TERA MELOS jams so crushingly hard in room eight that thousands of PATAGONIAN RATS are scurrying out of the entryway. 

            I bob my head violently to signatures of time immeasurable and bleats of electricity coming from some inexplicable source. I recognize one Nick Reinhart as the bandleader of TERA MELOS and Nick stomps emphatically on boxes and strums and thrums and spikes and stabs at sounds with his electric guitar.

            With such cool sounds blasting and bleating, I knew at least I loved all of the music I had heard increasingly dearly, from THE BULLETPROOF TIGER to TOUMANI & SIDIKI to TERA MELOS and then TIGRAN HAMASYAN who I remembered from room Seven.

            What was in Six, then? Surely something I must love, and I knew I had to check it out, to keep digging myself out of this amnesic museum and to get back home. Where was home? Do I have a home? I do, I know, and it is some where in a place called California. Los Angeles. Of course! Was this where this museum was housed, in the city blessed by angels, north of territory where only Espanol is spoken? There is no-one to ask, no attendant, no ticket-taker, no other soul in this place to inquire after.

            I saunter back to the great hall to go find Six. In Six was DON CABALLERO. That sounds like just one man's name, but it is actually three men at this performance. Damon Che, Ian Williams, and Eric Emm, and somehow I know their names despite never having met them before. Damon drummed, Ian strummed, and Eric bassed. They twist repetitive melodies into new and delightful dreams, sometimes torturous, sometimes delightful, but always in perfect flux.

            DON CABALLERO played heavy. They played AMERICAN DON from front to end, start to finish, their ultimate collaborative work let loose to wreak havoc in the year 2000. This is an album of theirs. An album, I know now, is a collection of songs from a musician or a band. A release. AMERICAN DON came from Pittsburgh, and I feel somehow that my first sense of math-rock artistry came from this place, Pittsburgh, and that Pittsburgh and Chicago and Toronto and Windsor and San Diego and Japan and Norway and Africa are all places I favor for their musical spasms, for different reasons. I couldn't yet place what it was I was doing, why I was thinking these things, but it seemed now on the tip of my tongue.

            I decide it best to continue my journey to room Five. Maintain the order as best as I can, now, keep it steady and straight. In room Five, I found more pianos, but this time they prefer to skip and plod and prod instead of dance. Skip, skip, plod, plod, drop, pop, pow, went the sounds in Five, steady motion forward with casual and professional ease.

            It isn't bad at all, it is THE BAD PLUS performing. THE BAD PLUS JOSHUA REDMAN, in fact. The classic jazz trio with a plus-one saxophonist. Where Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson, and David King made sounds that appealed to both like the math-head and the jazz aficionado, the addition of Joshua Redman on tenor sax melted the two worlds together in this perfection of harmony. Sweetness, I can sleep away to a solemn ballad qua jazz or I can find firings and excitement of all kinds in a rolliping piano-led instigation, Joshua Redman melting right into place in his anti-rhythmic but absolutely perfect melodic tick with squeaks and bleats and sultry sizzle through symphony in sax. Yum.

            So many stylistic choices blend together in room Five, the shifting unsettlement to please the technicians while alluding to woven lore lacking language, using only the slurs and pizzicato pops of the sax over key/plucked string/thrummed drum in perfect time. King lives up to his name, that man, and he layers sonorous glee through pops and crashes and thumps which are impossible to match in any state, superhuman or otherwise.

            Ethan and Joshua come to an amicable close on Dirty Blonde, an old favorite brushed up for four, and I long for more. This is what is meant to be, this joinder of men to make this divinely styled four piece. Where has this been all along? THE BAD PLUS knew their plus one caused a thrum, a perfect pairing for a pal who plays like I do.

            I listened to the three plus one until silence has been asked for, and the inquiry builds and blossoms and Ethan slams deliciously down and Joshua pouts through his metal spout, eking out the final whispers now of the quad-stacked clan. I sit in silence, reveling in it's question proffered up after this long stretch of complex clamor, caromed sounds counting down into the infinite and drowned out. Inhalation, and a sharp rise takes me to my feet to feed my fire into room Three, bypassing the Norweigians already met in Four who are somehow still slamming and jamming and thrashing and packing wollops en perpetuo. My heart beat resets to the tempo of the steady tunes from Four as I walk by, having my CD sampler previously ripped from the plaxiglass holder prior held close to my chest. 

            Neareast to Three now I am grabbed at the neck by an invisible tie and made to march, melodies making Three sound massive but intimate and internal and unstoppable. A maturation, surely, from anything before, a construction but a looseness and a simplicity, and a plotline described in melody so clear and interpretable it's as if it were word on page. Room Three houses four. Four men making melodies, that is, led by one man named CHRIS MORRISSEY.

            Saxophones plod their script out into the world on dripping and perfect double bass, piano calmly twinkling where it feels it's necessary. It was such a perfect mixture that it inspires my amnesiac self to come to, just a bit more. These powerful complex chordal hums with basic backbeats and delicious sax lines, as if you could lick them off the rim of a margarita glass, brings me to a partial realization of what it is my purpose is in this greco-roman hemi-annular hall of walls and performers.

            CHRIS MORRISSEY plays his antepenultimate track from NORTH HERO, alluding to some shiny solidified author of fairy tales, the Emperor with his new clothes and the ugliest duckling and a Disney adaptation of Ariel undersea, this track is called HANS CRYSTALS ANDERSON and it brought me further through the hallucinatory haze to realize that these are my favorite bands. Playing my favorite records. Of all time. Who arranged such a miraculous event for me? Who could possibly provide so much love to put me in a place, having read my mind front to back and knowing intimately, intuiting my picks, and putting those picks on performance for the pleasure of perhaps just one person?

            Knowing the magic that was coming but still missing some vital pieces to the puzzle, viz. Rooms Two and One, I felt a rush of endorphins and dopamine and seratonin and oxytocin and it is the greatest rush any man can ever have the pleasure to experience. I know now I am placed here to hear the greatest music of all time and to report it back to the masses. Are there masses to hear me? Who knows. It hardly matters at this point. I know the best lies in room One, and as NORTH HERO fades out, I gallop out to the great hall to fire myself like a cannon into room Two to see what awaits me.

            An incredible wave of nostalgia hits me as I power through room Two's portal, this record is relatively run-down in years to a man of only 24 years of age, it coming from 2009. The performers before him are DIRTY PROJECTORS, led by one David Longstreth, music-maniacal-genius, orchestrator of many musicians to many records since circa 2002. This record is BITTE ORCA and Dave leads his band in complications between two guitars and many layers of vocals of all sexes. The voices are layered thick but feel wispy and slice high in their sound, female-wise, with oohs and ahhs and eehs and guttural percussive splice soundtrack suggestions behind Dave's yearning lyricism, sitting atop guitars yawning and then cutting and popping and splashing and clashing as the music hocks back and forth from ear to ear and excites with such intensity that it feels like it would set my brain forth for years. And it would.

            There is so much texture and so much emotion and so much passion in these prior pounding sounds that I could let the record loop, but I suddenly remember it's not a record and Dave is standing henceforth, spitting his soul into the microphone with a bevy-like two-girl chorus behind him and sparse and necessary percussion and Nat Baldwin is tapping and strumming bass, providing the grounded sound that whorls in ears and minds to provide inspiration for all time. This is a live show. I am offered the opportunity to speak to these most masterful of musicians, not just to listen but to interface and to interact.

            Before I can say hello to Dave and begin my wild dream journey, it seems I have no time as room One literally becomes a vacuum, sucking everything else from rooms Ten through Two, myself included, into itself, and now all prior performers are audience members, plopped into seats in room One. Before us now, about to start, is surely what I must consider the greatest music of all time, and the feeling in the room hums loudly, grows now to a thrill as all musicians, myself included, understand what's coming. The greatest album of all time.^a

            There are curtains in room One, unusual and unlike all the other rooms, so none of the previous performers now in theater seats know what's coming. They are red, just exactly as you would imagine in the most pristine of theaters, satin and smooth and with the perfect purl in its fabric.

            WHOOSH.

            One's curtains peel back insanely fast, zipping into the recesses of stage left and stage right to reveal… a bedroom scene. It seems there is one man running around wildly in a New Jersey bedroom with microphones bought online and compositions developed in MIDI software, something called TabIt, from many moons ago (to use a cliché.) It seems the scene that's unfolding is that a man named Pete Davis is developing, blossoming, splattering this fantastically technical music from MIDI mapping into guitars and then into microphones all in his own room.

            A projector shows Nick Shaw in his own little porthole, in the top right corner over the stage (visually) who is slamming away at bass at the same thing, and Pete Davis seems to double up and there are two of him now on guitar, and the whole thing feels feverish and filmic and I am in absolute awe. Drums come from nowhere. Pete Davis sings, too, with such sweet lyricism:

                        ...LEARNED TO STOP COMMISERATING,

                        LEARNED TO STOP EQUIVOCATING ,

                        LEARNED TO RELY ON OUR RELYING ON ANAPHORA

                        WITH “HAIKU-LIKE IMAGINATION”

                        ALMOST MISSED THE VIEW FROM THE WINDOW…

           

            I am astounded. The music is like raindrops, like beautiful contrapuntal splashes of technicolor beauty, and the emotion contained in these crazy compositions is immense, building from a slow simmer to an unhinged explosion of happiness, or even an implosion of torrent, something sweet and tortured all at the same time. It is a miracle. The music that blows past the entire audience presently leaves everyone in absolute silence and it is known. This is the best album of all time.

            It is INVALIDS' STRENGTHS, and as the final closing notes fade out, the ghost-doubles of Pete Davis hum in choral awe. I'm awash with immense frisson. This whole experience, all ten performances, were mindblowing. The frisson explodes inside me for an entire era, sitting in my velvet seat with all my favorite musicians surrounding me as fellow audience members. What more perfect moment could there be for a musician? What am I to do with this feeling?

            The ghost doubles of Pete collected into a solid body, and Pete walks down from the stage with a guitar in hand. He hands the guitar to me.

            “What's this for?”is all I could think to eke out.

            “You know what it's for.” spoke Pete, replete with glee.

            Pete split into ghost doubles again – all of them moving around with ghastly swiftness and into the backstage, bringing out pieces of a drumkit, a bass clarinet, another guitar, a microphone, a mic stand, a desktop computer, a keyboard, an acoustic guitar, a ukulele, a clari

net, a tenor saxophone, a trumpet, a mouse, a monitor, a mandolin, and finally… the Petes complete their delivery and recombine.

            Pete proffers an empty palm to me.

            “You know how to play, right?”from Pete.

            And thus, 

FLOWER CORONET – HYPERCONFORMIST is born.

           

a. According to Andrew Kingsmore Grannis, let's make that part clear.