ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work
About ISSUE Project Room
mwalker on 11/27/2009 at 10:45AM
more about mary
Guess it’s just a Mary Halvorson kinda week and believe me, there could not be a better way to bulldoze away those post-Thanksgiving blues, disintegrate that red wine hangover, and jolt yourself out of the turkeyfied stupor then to curl up in the middle of your kitchen floor and blast this absolutely nasty set from guitarist Halvorson and co-conspirators of dopeness Ingrid Laubrock (saxophone) and Tom Rainey (drums).
Mary and Ingrid allow you about a minute of time to brace yourself, casually preluding the affair with some start-and-stop fragments of sharp angularity that quickly coalesce into flowing cascades of terse rumination. And then Mr. Rainey completely explodes the proceedings into a total maelstrom of relentless muscularity – an entrance raucously sick enough to merit 2 or 3 or 12 rewinds. Somehow managing to freely barrel through time, evocatively groove, and pack in enough polyrhythms to leave you in a face-punched daze, Tom shoves the easily-convinced melody-makers into full-speed freneticism. The guitar erupts into scorched chords that pulse and quiver as the sax spews out heavy slabs of coarse trilling. And from here, there’s really no looking back for the next 20 or so minutes – the few pockets of dynamic and rhythmic reprieve last just long enough up to ramp up the tension and let you steal a few sloppy gasps of breath.
So just ride it out, bring it back to the beginning, and crank it a second time. You’ll feel better, I promise.
