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Coming from North Adams, western Mass.'s wilderness outpost of contemporary art, the Books delivered their thoughtful concepts to the ICA on Friday night* via a Postal Service of gentle electronica and indie (soft) rock boy vocals. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong also brought several closets' worth of tightly-edited found footage to match their pop musique concrète. A mood of inexplicable optimism pervaded, in the split-screen video of animals stampeding forth into an avant-garde National Geographic documentary, in the birdsong stitched together into makeshift jazz, and the virtuosic solos built from archived laughter.
"A Cold Freezin Night" was an affectionate meditation on the Hobbesian savagery of children, featuring vintage Talkboy recordings. Elementary school children expressed their aspirations to humiliate other children, to murder other children, to change genders ("I wish I was a boy," pouts one tiny Lesley Gore), to humiliate and then murder other children, over a danceable beat and footage of bare feet treading on green lawn and of doll assembly.
"You stay alive as long as I want you to," squeaks one boy.
"So I can kill you."
Neither music video nor screen saver, the show's incessant visual content helped glue the set together with flashes of words and recurring images of hypnotherapy and shuddering Pentecostals, moments of wild abandon looped to make giddy cuckoo clocks of everything and everyone they touched. It was often difficult to determine which was the chicken or the egg: Zammuto sang that "I was born with a teacup on my head," and that "there was nothing we could do / cracked bell fell off a train," all of which could stand, mournfully, on its own—yet every image was echoed on screen in grainy historical film that predated the lyrics. A woman turned her head in slow motion, stepping from frame to blurred frame with tears in her eyes alongside de Jong's lurching cello, and an unhappy trip to the mailbox was transformed into a sweeping epic of context-free sadness.
Deliberately misleading sing-along lyrics were projected to confuse and underscore the rapid-fire artist's statement of "Smells Like Content." The beat sampled rushing sounds that evoked a refreshing can of soda being opened and opened and opened forever.
*Bostonist attended the delightful 9:30 show, the second of two sold-out shows. Did they also play their Nick Drake cover during the encore of the earlier show? Did the 7 o'clock audience also audibly say "Oh, wow"?
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"A Cold Freezin Night" was an affectionate meditation on the Hobbesian savagery of children, featuring vintage Talkboy recordings
Where the recordings vintage, like found recordings left like messages in variable speed bottle in the early nineties, or were they recordings made on a vintage Talkboy?
I think they said they were made by children, on Talkboys, in the nineties, possibly in the wake of Home Alone 2.
wow.
"I'm gonna pull out all your hair until you're bald and everyone will say Meredith looks like an idiot hah ha"