It seems like there are two ways to orient oneself to the prospect of post-industrial urban living in America.
One way is to gripe and grumble about the orange sludge clogging up Jones Falls, or all the vacants lining North Ave.
Another is to find all there is to recommend a city full of empty warehouses and unused mills, and to creatively reclaim those spaces.
While most Baltimoreans seem to be engaged in a healthy mix of the two, it’s clear where the folks running G Spot locate themselves.
They have taken the old Mt. Vernon Mill on Falls Rd., a place that still exudes blue collar grit, and transformed it into an art and performance space.
The rest of Friday’s transformation was completed by the folks at Friends Records, the nascent Baltimore label.
The room was lined with white ghostly streamers and about eight projectors sending images of damaged photographs across the room.
All this (plus the merch guy dressed as Gimli and the man in the spot-on Teen Wolf costume, Beavers jersey and all) made for a very Baltimorean Halloween.
Which set the stage nicely for the four Baltimore acts (all with upcoming or relatively new releases on Friends Records) that followed.
Opening was Dustin Wong, one of Baltimore’s preeminent guitar deities. With the humblest of banter (“My name is Dustin, I’m gonna play a few songs,”) Wong tore, or maybe slipped, sort of both, into a half hour of unceasing riffage.
But for the most part, Wong was far more Don Caballero than J Mascis, rarely even bending a string.
Seeing Wong develop through the ambiguously-defunct Ponytail’s primal prog-pop and as one of the rotating cast-members of the sorcerous guitar-slinging outfit Ecstatic Sunshine has been enthralling.
His Friday night set felt like watching the steam rise off of someone’s head after a hard workout. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t a certain energy to the whole affair.
The textures Wong weaves aren’t really spacy or ethereal, but almost pointillist, with percussive melodic loops layering to create incredible dynamic space, especially for a single guitar and the occasional simplistic drum-machine beat.
And his onstage presence is incredibly endearing, as he seems to be just as amazed as the audience at the sounds he is producing.
After 30 jaw-dropping minutes, Wong’s set was over, and to heavy applause, he bowed graciously and packed up his pedals and guitar.
But the palpably calm Wong had bestowed upon the crowd was soon broken by the “No Jazz” of Microkingdom.
Microkingdom is, as their obscure (if not totally self-invented) genre implies, somewhere between the avant jazz their upcoming album (Three Compositions of No Jazz) references (Anthony Braxton’s 1968 debut, Three Compositions of New Jazz) and Lydia Lunch and Brian Eno’s No Wave of late-70s New York.
If those seem overly heady points of reference, consider Microkingdom’s own pedigree: Marc Miller has toured with Wire and is a member of the pre-Wham City mischief makers OXES. Will Redman has a PhD and teaches music theory at Towson. John Dierker’s coming up on three decades of free improvisation in Baltimore.
Which, if all that experience makes Microkingdom sound stuffy or institutional, it’s not.
Debuting as a quintet, Microkingdom took the stage to Redman’s snarky, toying banter — “Did Dustin Wong not put the love in your ear and the joy in your heart?” — and proceeded to play freak jazz for the next forty five minutes, culminating in Miller’s literally ripping the strings off of his guitar.
In between there were alternating squawks and skronks, riffs hinted at and fully realized, Miller’s foot repeatedly muting Redman’s hi-hat (visualize that), and the deconstructed low-end of the bass and keys.
But the quintet was not all blurring-speed and brutal power. For most of the set, there was plenty, even for the uninitiated jazz enjoyer, to latch on to.
Perhaps the No-Wave-est part of it all was Redman’s intermittently driving beats, heavy on the snare and hi-hat.
His Orthodox grip is deceptive, as Redman is clearly capable of and often indulges in jazz drumming tropes, but knows when to up the intensity and create powerful if simple skeletons upon which his four bandmates can build.
Wong and Microkingdom alone would have made for an impressive juxtaposition of opposing moods and styles, but Friends Records seemed out to make a point about their roster’s scope, radically shifting gears once again with Sri Aurobindo.
The quartet set up slowly, taking the time to fully crank up their amps and sound check their booming toms, and for good reason.
Sri Aurobindo is a band that sprawls and looms, drawing heavily on the psych haze of yesteryear (or forty).
Rarely clocking in under six minutes, the reverb-washed 12 string guitar, pounding nine piece proto-Neal Pert drum set, the un-self-conscious wah-wah pentatonic runs, and wailing vintage Yamaha organ were all put to an endurance test.
The Sris are at their best, however, when they show their true colors as a 21st century band that might be entirely enamored with 70’s psych and some of the groovier Nuggets tracks, but can never un-hear the punk that followed it.
When the band reined it in, and forsook the half-lidded psych mumble for a strained wail, like on the celebrated “My Luv is Stoned,” they had the crowd fully engaged.
At its best, Sri Aurobindo reshaped an old genre for a post-millenial crowd, and at its worst seemed an interesting if somewhat confused exercise in psych revivalism.
And after coming out of Sri Aurobindo’s pleasant, narcotizing haze, the crowd whirred in anticipation for Celebration, the headliners of the night.
The wait was long, but Celebration delivered, lead singer Katrina Ford’s face painted white as she swayed to the slow build of the first few tracks.
It was at this point that the crowdedness of G Spot was most apparent, as the couple hundred people moved along with Ford while still more would-be concertgoers were turned away at the door.
The people at G Spot responded in kind, upping the spookiness with occult projections and dry ice drifting from the ceiling. Celebration capped off Friends Records’ eclectic showcase with adequate gusto, playing nicely off of the enthusiasm of the packed mill on the banks of Jones Falls, yet another demonstration of the charms of post-industrial living.
