Mohamad Hafez papers the walls of his New Haven, Connecticut, studio with printouts of news photos. The pictures show old women weeping and gesticulating; piles of rubble in narrow, ancient streets; young boys with a look of shock and sadness on their faces; rows of tanks; views from inside blown-out interiors; half-demolished apartment buildings; and throngs of huddled refugees awaiting food or rescue. The photos are from Syria, Hafez’s birthplace.

Hafez, 33, works as an architect, designing corporate high-rise skyscrapers for Pickard Chilton. That’s his day job. But in the evenings, on his off-hours and often late into the night, he comes to work on his visual art in his upstairs studio in the Westville Village Historic District section of New Haven, a few blocks from the Beth El–Keser Israel synagogue. Hafez makes detailed assemblages—scale models and sculptures—that generally hang on a wall. Many of Hafez’s pieces depict ripped-apart buildings, with dangling wires, bullet-riddled plaster, and crushed furniture. They’re like dollhouses that re-create the destruction of war rather than the comforts of domestic calm. Others are part of what Hafez calls his Baggage Series, which he makes using open suitcases of varying sizes, crammed with miniature items, sometimes including numerous tiny houses or fragments of dwellings.

Mohamad Hafez considers Unpacked Refugee Baggage: Ayman & Ghena, 2017, mixed media. Photo by Paul Specht

When he was 19 years old, enrolled as a first-year student at Iowa State University, Hafez took some of the skills he was learning in his architecture classes and eventually started applying them to intricate models of buildings from Damascus. The hobby served to ease his homesickness at the time. This was in 2004, before the civil war began in 2011, in which over four hundred thousand Syrians have died. This was before the humanitarian crisis that sent approximately one million Syrian refugees to Europe.

Having entered the United States with a one-time entry visa following an extensive background check, Hafez feared that being a Muslim from Syria named Mohamad might make reentry into the United States unlikely. So, for about seven years, Hafez channeled some of his longing for home and family into work that conjured Syria. As an architecture student, Hafez was understandably drawn to the layers of history and culture represented in the buildings of Damascus, with their meshed and stacked traditions and
aesthetics—Islamic, Byzantine, Roman, Hellenic, modern, and more. When the civil war began, Hafez, watching reports on TV and online, saw the material destruction as emblematic of the senseless human suffering that went along with it.

His artwork is a sort of visual lament. “There’s the personal component of this, in the sense that I am weeping over the death of my country and culture,” he says. “Well, how do you cope with that? How do you cope with thousands of years of culture and heritage and archaeological sites being bombed into dust in front of your eyes in a six-year vicious war, without a meaningful outcome being planned, or at least a light at the end of the tunnel? As a Syrian, as a Muslim, as an Arab, how do you cope with that while living in the diaspora?”

Hafez is quick to establish that his suffering—reading about the war in Syria and watching news reports from halfway around the world, agonizing from a distance—is nothing like that of those who are there. But, his predicament offers a peculiar kind of vantage point that increases the sting in some ways.

“To see your country deteriorate and see the whole picture from afar—that’s another torture in itself. Because when you’re in it, you’re just consumed with your day-to-day life,” he explains. “But when you’re outside of it, you get more of the whole big picture. You’re getting a taste of so many medicines. So the only way I figured I could cope with that was to get into these models, these sculptures.”

Hafez got to go back to Syria in 2011, right before the civil war erupted. But he hasn’t returned since. He says he’ll go again when things calm down.

Mohamad Hafez, Unpacked Refugee Baggage: Um Shaham, 2017, mixed media. Photo by Paul Specht

One could, theoretically, look at Hafez’s sculptures without any knowledge of his background or the specific subject of the work, and assume that the artist was somehow making Joseph Cornell-esque assemblages that aestheticize destruction or structural decay. Hafez recognizes the impulse, but it doesn’t motivate his work.

“I do surround myself with photos of the destruction just because . . . it’s not beautiful . . . it’s sophisticated,” he admits. “Destruction in itself is sophisticated, and the detail attracts you. There’s a sad and horrific component to it, but the way that buildings fall apart and the rubble, to the human eye, is mesmerizing. I don’t know why. Our dark side likes seeing things dismantled. It’s curiosity. My job is to remodel that curiosity and to tell you there are human beings living in there. So you see the laundry lines, you see birds’ nests, you see different hints of life that take place.”

Art is supposed to expand our sympathies. Hafez’s work can spur viewers to feel their way into a routine life—a mundane life, with clothes, dishes, furniture, houseplants, and neighbors—that has been upended and blasted apart by hostile, chaotic, and indifferent forces. Sometimes there are pieces of Koranic calligraphy spray-painted on crumbling facades. The phrases are inspirational, hopeful messages for believers, about justice and perseverance, but they also have the visual hint of revolutionary signals—as if simply surviving and retaining dignity were a kind of insurrection in the face of war and bomb blasts. Faith is almost seen as a form of defiance.

If he’s summoning chaos and dislocation in his work, Hafez finds a way to that place in his carefully ordered studio, playing the sad but meditative Persian violin music of Kayhan Kalhor, working into the night in a kind of trance. Neat bins and boxes of found objects are separated: driftwood here, plastic there, rusted metal in one container, shiny fuses in another. Glue guns and tools are stacked and arranged. Hafez doesn’t create in a jumble, even if what he creates resembles one.

Bricolage—art created by assembling media from multiple sources—is usually slightly crazed and off-kilter, but Hafez’s constructions have a strange obsessive realism. Hafez’s day job as an architect gives him a built-in sense of material and scale that contributes to the authentic feel of his war-torn miniatures and the substructures that get pulled into the light when a building is destroyed.

“You’re always trusting your artistic intuition and your architectural intuition,” he says, “in that if you’re modeling a building, you’re thinking ‘Does that look right? Is the thickness of the slab, the thickness of the wall, the proportion of the window to the floor, correct?’ That’s subconscious at this point. Because when you break a wall you expose rebar; when you break a floor you expose electrical and plumbing.”

When he’s designing corporate high-rises at Pickard Chilton, advance planning is central. But his visual art allows for much more spontaneity and freedom. Hafez might even be said to be improvising space.

“In my day job, we design every bit of detail in our architecture projects,” he explains. “When you start, you have a pretty darn good idea of where you’re headed. This work is so liberating in the sense that I just start building, making on the spot. If it looks right, fine; if it doesn’t, I’m ripping that off and throwing that on the floor.”

Hafez’s work has been shown around New England and the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom. A recent show at New Haven’s Artspace featured a collaborative series of pieces from Hafez and Ahmed Badr, an Iraqi-born writer who is now attending Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Together, the two interviewed refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan, collecting their stories and documenting their accounts of war, uprooting, wandering, resettling, and longing for home. The show, UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage, is a multimedia effort to humanize and individualize large-scale events that often get covered from a distance, or lost in the charged political debate in the United States today. Audio clips are woven together with Hafez’s constructions. The artists hope to redefine and expand the meaning and associations of the word refugee in twenty-first-century America.

Mohamad Hafez. Photo by Paul Specht

To create his work—to make it with the right force—Hafez feels like he needs to channel some of the suffering. “I feel a responsibility,” he says. “If I want that emotion to come through honestly in the work, then I have to be that emotion for that amount of time and put it in the work.”

The keening instrumental music on the stereo helps him focus. Hafez says he “latches” with it. “First what I’ll do is look at a lot of photos. I look at what happened—I remind myself,” he describes. “I look at the photos of kids, of refugees, of dead people on the streets, of our devastation, in order to absorb that and put it into sculpture.”

Mohamad Hafez
New Haven, Connecticut
Website

All photos by Paul Specht

The post Dislocations appeared first on Take Magazine.

The people at the Artisan Beverage Cooperative, makers of mead, ginger beer and kombucha, have tapped into the fizzy zeitgeist. Fermentation is having its moment. Or, depending on how you look at it, maybe it’s having its epoch. Foods and drinks that are the product of fermentation — wine, beer, cheese, bread, coffee, chocolate, vanilla, miso, kimchi — are held up as some of the culinary pinnacles of civilization. What would we be without this stuff?

Artisan Beverage Cooperative came together in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 2013 after a brewing collaboration between the makers of Katalyst Kombucha and Green River Ambrosia, a maker of ginger beers and meads. Different qualities draw people to these beverages. Some are fascinated by the honey in mead, some simply love all things related to tea (leading them to kombucha), and some beer hounds are always eager to expand their palate. There are those are always looking to fold more fermentation into their diet. One of things that got General Manager Garth Shaneyfelt interested in mead was the fact that he played Dungeons and Dragons when he was a kid. He knew about mead, which is honey wine, from the popular fantasy role-playing game, but when he got older, Shaneyfelt, 45, started brewing his own beer, and so it made sense to revisit mead as a beverage in the real world.

On the one hand, you might think that the cooperative chose some very obscure beverages as the centerpiece of their operation. Plenty of consumers have never heard of kombucha, a tonic-like beverage made from fermented tea, but the drink is booming now, with every city having its own competing local brewer, and with mega chains like Target, Wal-Mart and (of course) Whole Foods selling cases and cases of the tangy stuff.

Mead might be a little less trendy, but its popularity is growing. Shaneyfelt says that it’s not impossible to experience 1000 percent growth in a market sector that was virtually non-existent a few years ago. If there were only a few dozen meaderies around the country at the start of the decade, now people are making the sweet wine in virtually every state. Artisan Beverage Cooperative is a member of the American Mead Makers Association, a group that tracks the growth in what it calls the “mead movement” and helps promote the fast-growing young industry selling an old beverage. “Some people are actually looking for it,” he says of the mini-mead boom.

As Shaneyfelt points out, mead may in fact be the oldest alcoholic beverage because the ingredients — wild honey and water — would have been on hand and plentiful before humans started farming. You may remember from reading Beowulf in 12th grade that mead figures pretty centrally in some of the foundational literature of England. Mead is mentioned in the Bible, in Hindu scripture and in Virgil. So, even after people settled down and started growing grapes and oats, our taste for the stuff didn’t evaporate.

Mead may be booming, but the honey wine is still only about five percent of ABC’s overall production, with half of its output devoted to kombucha and the remaining 45 percent being the ginger beer. Keeping track of the growth in the market will be a key challenge for ABC, since the mead fermentation process takes about a year, and the demand could conceivably triple or quadruple as the beverage gains fans.

Shaneyfelt and the other owner-operators at ABC partner with local beekeepers and use a variety of barrel-aging techniques, delicate floral infusions and other elements to flavor the mead, but the beverage is built around the honey, the taste of which is shaped by the types of pollen and nectar the bees collect. Part of the interest in mead is related to a growing concern about problems like colony collapse disorder, which devastate the pollinators vital to our agriculture.

While ABC’s Ginger Libation and Katalyst Kombucha are distributed around much of New England, the co-op’s meads are sold in shops mostly in Massachusetts. But, since the mead is technically a wine, ABC is able to ship bottles to 32 different states. And, like other wines, the mead can bring out or accent the flavors of food. “Our traditional meads go well with a fruit and cheese plate,” says Shaneyfelt.

And, also like other wines, mead tends to get better as it gets older. Shaneyfelt says he has bottles from the first batches they produced in his basement, and they improve over the months and years. “Depending on the style and how sweet it is, it will age differently,” he says. “In general mead just gets smoother and smoother as it ages.”

Garth Shaneyfelt, Artisan Beverage Cooperative
Greenfield, Massachusetts
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The post Making Mead appeared first on Take Magazine.

Peter Katis got his start doing karaoke. Well, not really. Katis is a world-class record producer, engineer, mixer and part owner of Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut. One of Katis’s first gigs was working in a studio in New York City that did high-end karaoke instrumental tracks. It was a crash course in quickly replicating the sounds, textures, and effects of hit recordings. Katis already had loads of experience as a musician (he’s in a band called The Philistines Jr.) and as a recording engineer, but the karaoke job gave Katis some of the skills required to work fast, under the sometimes heavy pressure of deadlines and pay-by-the-hour logistics. He worked with some world-class musicians—like Larry Campbell, who went on to be a member of Bob Dylan’s band for years.

“It was a weird combination of really talented people making terrible music,” says Katis.

Aside from that stint churning out karaoke tracks, Katis came by his talent in the recording studio by being the person in his bands who was good at setting songs to tape, tinkering with microphones, adjusting levels, tweaking the compression and effects, getting a good take, knowing when that extra time through the chorus needed to be weeded out, etc. Not everyone—even the most talented musicians—has a set of ears that can do all that. “My favorite part of being a musician was producing a record,” says Katis.

Since then, Katis and Tarquin have helped give the world some verifiably great music by artists such as The National, Interpol, Jonsi, Kurt Vile, Trey Anastasio, Guster, Dispatch, Mates of State, and many more.

Tarquin Studios is a perfectly Connecticut answer to the challenge of recording in the digital age. Katis had started assembling a studio in his parents’ basement in the early ’90s, but he soon realized that he needed a devoted space. So he bought the 7,000-square-foot three-story Victorian in 1998, slowly transforming it into a destination for indie rock bands—and others—looking to carve out a distinctive sound. The Bridgeport location gives artists easy access to New York City (about 65 miles away), but also just enough of a buffer from the lures of the big city to allow for the intense focus required in a recording session, without the immediate distractions of Manhattan or Brooklyn outside the door.

But what makes Tarquin a destination spot for artists is that it’s a fully outfitted studio that’s also fully outfitted as a place to stay, to sleep and cook and hang out. Think of it as a little like a big B&B for rock stars. “I had that idea kind of early on,” says Katis. “Now it’s sort of much more common.”

Artists can move in for a few days, or a week, or a month, and with all of the instruments and recording gear around (there are essentially two studios on the premises, and a third one for sketching out idea), if an idea strikes at 2 in the morning, the creative flow can keep flowing. (Katis, who is married and has a child, however, tries to work regular hours, from noon to 8 p.m., so he wouldn’t be the one documenting those crack-of-dawn flashes of inspiration.)

Musicians don’t just want a room to kick around and document ideas in, they want some cool gear to mess with. At Tarquin there’s a ton of sick noise-making gadgetry on hand, including, just randomly: a Hammond B-3 organ, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Farfisas, an upright piano, a Gibson Les Paul, a Fender Telecaster, a Rickenbacker, Sunn cabinets, Marshall stacks, Ampeg bass amps, a theremin, Moog synths, and all kinds of other things, such as accordions, glockenspiels, and more. Plus mics, effects, pre-amps, compressors, analog tape decks and mixing boards, and lists of serious tech-head stuff that would make your head spin. (Don’t forget the Leslie cabinet that actually does spin.) Artistic frustrations can be worked off on vintage video games and pinball machines.

Katis and his family used to live in one half of the house, but a few years ago he and his wife and child moved to neighboring Fairfield, so now Tarquin is a full-on palace of sonic perfection. The move away, separating his home from his workplace, has added a degree of sanity to Katis’s life, instituting more non-rock-star hours and requiring some needed distance from any given recording project. “I am a workaholic,” he says.

If you’ve never been to a recording session, it’s easy to imagine it as exciting. But few things are more excruciatingly boring to the layperson. Listening to a song, or snippets of a song, or the particular isolated clang of a crash cymbal over, and over, and over, is a sure way of deromanticizing the process of recording music. This is one reason that Katis likes to split his creative time at Tarquin between recording tracks there and mixing tracks that artists have recorded elsewhere. “Although I love doing music,” he says, “making it is misery; finishing it is nice.”

Peter Katis–record producer/engineer, Tarquin Studios
Bridgeport, Connecticut
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Top image: Peter Katis. All photos courtesy of Peter Katis.

The post Recording Off the Beaten Path in Bridgeport appeared first on Take Magazine.

Beer geeks have strong opinions. Take the subject of IPAs, for instance. The name stands for India Pale Ale, and they were traditionally made with a lot of hops, and stashed away in oak barrels to allow for the long sea journey from England to India. That made for a bitter ale with high alcohol content. The demand for IPAs hasn’t diminished since the rise of refrigeration and air travel. IPAs have conquered the world yet again in the past 15 years, and it’s not hard to find beer fanatics who are seriously engaged in the pursuit of the perfect pint (or can, or bottle, or growler). New England Brewing Company, out of Woodbridge, Connecticut, embraced the IPA surge early on, and they’ve continued to ride the hoppy wave over the years.

NEBCO has made a number of popular IPAs over the years—they’re always experimenting and coming up with new flavor profiles, seasonal specials and novel concoctions—but the brewery’s Fuzzy Baby Ducks IPA has really engaged with beer fans. Sure, the name is catchy. And Men’s Journal and other beer-obsessed outlets have put FBD up there in their lists of the best IPAs in America. You can plug into Fuzzy Duck mania online by following @FBDTracker on Twitter, an account that basically tells beer fans which bars and restaurants are serving Fuzzy Baby Ducks on tap during any given week.

Head brewer Jeff Koebbe says that while the name appears random, it actually conjures up some aspects of the beer’s flavor. “It pours to a nice bright orange color,” he says. “It’s hazy. It’s an all-Citra-hop IPA. It came out of our single-hop series a while back. It has a nice bright citrus aroma. It’s light, bitter, crisp, and not overwhelming.”

Because of the market-jolting success of IPAs, some contrarian-minded beer devotees, of course, find the whole trend to be over the top. For every craze, there are naysayers. And you can find well-informed beer drinkers who complain of hops fatigue, of too much citrus, and have a general exasperation with IPA domination. Some beer drinkers want to see a pilsner boom or a saison craze. “There’s a subculture of beer nerds that are trying to steer it away from IPAs and double IPAs,” says Koebbe.

But Koebbe says there’s a fairly practical explanation behind the IPA explosion: It satisfies the demands of people’s palates while allowing brewers to do what they do with what’s available. “IPA is a year-round kind of beer,” he says. “It’s one of the only styles that can be brewed year round that people will enjoy in the summertime and the winter time.”

In addition to delivering what beer-drinkers want for their taste buds, Fuzzy Baby Ducks also supplies a visual treat for beer consumers thanks to the bright and playful design of the cans themselves. The rainbow design looks as if it could just as easily be for a kids frozen treat at a fairground as for a 6.2 ABV beverage for adults. But that is part of the fun. The cans were released 10 months ago and the visual element has added to FBD’s appeal.

“A lot of our art is bright and bubbly, almost funny; it catches somebody’s eye,” says Koebbe. That’s important in the beer world. Sure, it’s a product to be drunk, but consumers connect with it by other senses as well. “People go through a process of sight, smell, and then they taste it,” says Koebe. “If it looks good and smells good, people are gonna jump right in.”

Koebbe realizes, of course, that New England Brewing Company can‘t rest on its fuzzy duck laurels. To that end, they reopened the tasting room six months ago after an expansion. That’s the spot where the new brews get their trial run. If fans keep coming back for another pint or to refill their growlers, then Koebe and the crew know they’re onto something.

“We always have to create something new, every week or every month,” says Koebbe. “[New beers] start out as smaller batches, mainly just released in the tasting room or for growler fills. If it sticks around long enough, it becomes a can.”

Jeff Koebbe–head brewer, New England Brewing Company
Woodbridge, Connecticut
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All images courtesy of New England Brewing Company

The post Fuzzy Baby Ducky You’re the One appeared first on Take Magazine.

Anthony Pasquarosa wanted to make a spaghetti Western soundtrack. The Belchertown, Massachusetts, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist didn’t let himself get hung up on the fact that he didn’t have a film to score. He created the soundtrack all the same, a sort of psychic hypothetical score, conjuring shootouts, dusty streets, galloping horses, criminals, and a desert desolation. The record, Abbandonato Da Dio Nazione, is hypnotic and dark, part flamenco flourish, part psychedelic drone, part old-time ramble, part rebel raga. Brooding organ, lonesome slide guitar, and meandering banjo lines all intersect on the instrumental record. The title translates roughly to “Godforsaken Country,” which is, incidentally, the title of the first track on the recording that Pasquarosa, who teaches art in the public school system by day, recorded at home by himself as the spirit struck him.

Inspired by the soundtrack to the Charles Bronson spaghetti Western Chino, the main theme of which is, according to Pasquarosa, “basically a hippie folk-rock song,” the guitarist decided to think in terms of a story. “I just started messing around with some ideas,” says Pasquarosa. “The [hypothetical] movie would be sort of loosely based on the life of Cole Younger, who was a real American outlaw.”

Pasquarosa read up on Younger’s life. He felt that a story—a former Confederate soldier who turns to a life of crime, gets captured, serves time, and lives on to be a kind of wild west-show celebrity—had some kind of elemental resonance, something that pertained to a buried national truth, or maybe just a good plot. Younger is also the subject of an iconic old time song, “Bandit Cole Younger,” variations of which were recorded by Dock Boggs and others. The titles for the tracks from Abbandonato Da Dio Nazione are all lines from the “Bandit Cole Younger” ballad: “With Knives, Guns and Revolvers,” “The Robbing of the Northfield Bank” and “Godforsaken Country.”

Old time is one of Pasquarosa’s musical foundations. But he’s a thoroughly eclectic 21st Century player and listener, steeped in punk, classic rock, jam band music, and vintage recordings from the 1920s. The wide-ranging eclecticism applies to his visual arts practice as well; Pasquarosa generally hand-makes limited edition prints to accompany his musical releases, which often take the form of what he calls “strange CD-Rs and tapes.” The cover of his new record includes hand-drawn artwork by Paquarosa, a kind of outsider-art movie poster with a composite image of a guy sporting a third eye, hands loading a pistol, and the contours of a bank building. “I have these ideas and I make stuff, and then I just move on and make something else,” says Pasquarosa.

Abbandonato Da Dio Nazione CD cover by Anthony Pasquarosa

He also coaches JV baseball at the high school in nearby Palmer. (His voice was hoarse when we spoke, maybe from calling out plays.) Pasquarosa, 32, says he’s treated nicely by the art and music communities in western Massachusetts, but he doesn’t necessarily go out of his way to tour in support of his records or to display his visual art in local galleries. His professional life allows him to operate this way. “In a lot of ways, teaching, or having a job,” says Pasquarosa, “it just sort of funds the bad habit of playing music.”

Want to hear what Pasquarosa is listening to? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel to hear. While you’re there, check out the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured and the Take staff. Enjoy!

Anthony Pasquarosa–musician
Belchertown, Massachusetts
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Photos courtesy of Anthony Pasquarosa

The post Howdy Pardner appeared first on Take Magazine.

When I reach Haley Morgan by phone at home—which is fitting—she is stretching—also fitting—to prepare for a show later that night. Morgan is the singer for the Western-Mass.-based electro-art duo Home Body. Home Body play dance music, which is inherently about the body—moving the body, feeling and articulating rhythms in the limbs and hips, a physical correlation between the body and the music. The body is an important part of who and what Home Body are.

Clubby dance music can sometimes seem oriented toward physical pleasure, but the meaning of connecting with our bodies through sound and through organized movement is greater than just our ability to pursue or project physical desires. We learn to carry ourselves in space, to convey poise and grace and self-possession through movement.

“It’s so easy to become separated from our body or not think about it as something that you have agency over or to think about it as something that you can reinvent yourself through,” says Morgan. Not surprisingly, Home Body have made fruitful connections with the world of fashion and galleries, sometimes making their music specifically for settings that showcase the multi-media art potential of music.

Haley Morgan, Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Morgan and her partner Eric Hnatow met at Hampshire College in Amherst. The two were a couple for five years or so before they formed the band, with Morgan having a theater background and Hnatow having played in some industrial electronic bands in Ludlow and Palmer.

Morgan and Hnatow want their project to connect with people, and they put thought and effort into making their shows visual, interactive, kinetic, and stimulating. They’re into “the power of spectacle,” says Morgan. “We use sound, we use light, we use costuming, we use dance, just to try to figure different ways to hook people,” says Morgan.

The music strikes a nice balance between the synthetic and the organic. Hnatow gets the beats pumping along with mechanistic oscillations, handclaps, and robotic clicks and hisses. Sometimes the bottom-scraping synth bass lines sound as if giant kazoos were buzzing beneath the fabric of the mix. The glitchy and smeared sonic textures serve as a fitting background surface for Morgan to sing, intone, and blurt over. She has a rhythmic force and emphatic articulation to her singing. Her vocals—with growls, coos, yips and dips—can bring to mind a range of idiosyncratic vocal stylists like Grace Jones, Sinead O’Connor, Robyn, Bjork, Yoko Ono, and even Alanis Morissette and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries. Home Body are working on a new full-length record, one that could come out by year’s end.

Eric Hnatow of Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Listen to Morgan on “Inner Red” from the duo’s most recent release, 2014’s Guts. “Bite your tongue and swallow it whole/No need to name it, your gut will know,” Morgan sings. Another song, “Something Tempting” has lines about “turn[ing] our bodies back on.”
There are ways of knowing that don’t involve the brain, and that’s seems to be part of this band’s point.

“I think that sound vibrations, the music that we make—sound is movement, and I think that sometimes life can get too heady, literally coming from our brains,” says Morgan. “There’s so much more that we can understand about the world around us if we employ all of our senses.”

Want to hear what Home Body listens to on Spotify when they’re not making music? Check out our Take a Listen channel.

Morgan Hanley – singer, Home Body
Western Massachusetts
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Top image by Robert Tobey

The post Art-Dance Duo Home Body Keep It Corporeal appeared first on Take Magazine.

Anne Decker got involved in contemporary classical, or new, music not because of the curriculum she was studying in college. She jumped into this forum because she heard what her fellow students and composers were creating and had an AHA moment. “I said ‘Hey, I’d do that!’” says Decker of her response to the sounds she heard and the thought of helping realize performances of those scores. So she and some friends started a student-led new music ensemble, the first of its kind at the school where she was in Michigan.

That DIY attitude is part of what infuses TURNmusic, a Vermont-based new-music chamber series that Decker helped create in 2014 and for which she is the conductor and artistic director. “I had been listening to all of the latest new music coming out,” says Decker of the formation of TURNmusic, referring to the wide-ranging outpouring of work from contemporary classically-versed composers. “There was this cool genre of music that I felt like wasn’t being represented in Vermont. Quite accessible chamber music is being written. I wanted to bring that stuff to Vermont.”

With encouragement from innovative violinist Mary Rowell, co-founder of the forward-thinking ETHEL quartet, Decker assembled a group of top-notch players committed to performing new music and playing it, in many cases, outside of the traditional high-culture venues where “classical” music often gets played. “She helped give me courage,” Decker says of Rowell, who is also a core part of TURNmusic.

“I just felt like there was a place for new music here,” says Decker. “I believe in this music. I’m a music educator. And I believe in hearing these high-level musicians that I’m working with. They should be heard. And they don’t have to be heard by the elite. It’s music for all.”

Anne Decker, TURNmusic in performance

TURNmusic has, in its three years of existence, been committed to music written by living composers. That, basically, means someone born after the advent of the age of mass entertainment, pop culture, radio, records, and the embrace of youth as a marketing demographic. These are composers who—unless raised in a classical-music commune—were probably soaking up rock, hip-hop, soundtracks, jazz, electronic music, non-Western music, and all kinds of other traditions beyond Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Though Decker, 42, was keen to bring new music to Vermont, she was also interested in highlighting some of the new music that was already being made or associated with the state. Composer Nico Muhly is a prominent name in new contemporary classical music circles. In addition to composing his own operas and other pieces, Muhly has gotten a lot of attention for his orchestrations and arrangements for performers within the artsy-leaning end of the indie rock world, people like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sam Amidon (also from Vermont), Bjork, Antony and the Johnsons, and Joanna Newsom. Muhly’s work was included in the first TURN series in 2014.

Other artists with a foot in both the contemporary classical and the world of indie rock that TURN has featured include Bryce Dessner, who plays in the band the National but who also has a masters in music from Yale and a highly regarded output as a composer. TURNmusic featured a performance of Dessner’s “Murder Ballads” in the fall of last year. Recently TURNmusic has included performances of work by Richard Reed Parry, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who’s known for his work as a member of the band Arcade Fire.

But highlighting the connection between the world of indie rock and contemporary classical music is just one of the threads TURNmusic tugs on. Decker also helped to create a collegiate composition prize that allows composers still finishing their formal education to have a piece performed by a professional ensemble. She wanted to zero in on collegiate composers because that was the period in her life when she fell in love with new music. TURNmusic also helped launch the North Country Electronic Music Festival.

Decker, whose day job is as a music teacher in the public schools, is also on the lookout for Vermont musicians, particularly those who might be slightly outside the world of new music, to ask them to consider writing for the chamber ensemble. “These are players who can play anything,” she says of her musical collaborators.

Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, which Anne Decker also conducts. Photo by Monika Rivard.

If the musicians in TURNmusic are open for just about anything, Decker feels that the audience is in a similarly receptive state. And the work of TURNmusic is, in part, about connecting with listeners, making the experience of hearing new music one that isn’t complicated by much uncertainty or anxiety about being thrust into some abrasive sonic terrain “I feel like I’m just building trust,” says Decker. “The fans are just looking for good music.”

Anne Decker–founder TURNmusic
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The post DIY New Music in Vermont appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our December/January 2015 print issue.

The Green Mountain State’s most famous musical product is almost certainly the jam band Phish. If that quartet, formed in Burlington in 1983, earned a reputation for playing extended improvisations and working in the spiritual and musical wake of the Grateful Dead, MV & EE took shape largely in the twenty-first century, in the southern end of the state around Brattleboro, still playing off many elements of the Dead’s legacy but with drastically different results.

Valentine and Elder are also a couple. Unlike Phish, MV & EE are unlikely to sell out Madison Square Garden anytime soon, but the duo operates on a whole other level, making deeply psychedelic, small-batch, boutique, esoteric folk music that’s tinged with noise. Or maybe it’s indie rock tinged with folk. Either way, their recordings and performances are highly improvisational and experimental. The music of MV & EE embodies a thread of the reality of their home state: it’s both earthy and spacey, and it’s all propelled by a spirit of intrepid self-reliance.

This year was a big year for Valentine and Elder. A new MV & EE double album, Alpine Frequency, came out in the summer, at about the same time Valentine released a solo double album as well. “They were both pretty large records,” says Valentine. “We try to make a record that someone ideally is going to go back to and revisit. So we try to make the album have a certain depth or trajectory. There were several years of work on both of them. Hopefully that will tide some people over for a while.”

Photo by Paul Specht

Valentine’s new record is called Midden Mound, which, if you’ve forgotten some of the terms from your college anthropology class, is basically a prehistoric trash heap made up of shells and bones and other stuff. It’s a meaningful pile of refuse, dense and old, yielding secrets to those patient and learned enough to sift through it. The title seems to fit right in with the concept of “sonic agriculture” Valentine has spoken of, a utilitarian, plow-sow-and-reap vision of music making, with natural forces and human labor producing fertile results.

“I can’t get out of the underground,” jokes Valentine about the record’s title. But then he adds, “I thought [the title] worked for that body of work specifically; it’s definitely the remains of a certain sonic settlement of mine.”

That’s not all just talk. Sound attains something close to physicality in Valentine’s solo work and in the music of MV & EE. The music and the recordings are more about textures and resonance than melody, lyrics, and song form. The attention to the physical extends to the packaging and marketing of the music as well. Both new records were pressed on vinyl in addition to being available in other forms, such as CDs and MP3s. The duo often creates limited-edition original artwork to go along with some of their small-batch releases or to bring to shows, to make each record one of a kind.

Valentine’s connections with recorded music—with vinyl in particular—go back to his formative musical experiences.

“I’ve always been around records,” he says. “My parents collected records. They had a record library. They encouraged me to use the turntable. I heard a lot of music growing up that was interesting to me. I worked at record stores since I was a teenager. I stayed working at record stores. I was a lifer, a record-store casualty.”

Selling records has never been the most remunerative line of work, and surviving by playing DIY avant-garage folk presents challenges. But Valentine and Elder approach the work with a flinty Yankee ethos. They are impressively prolific, releasing an average of two records a year, which brings their total to something like 32 since 2001. They also run a boutique record label that releases limited pressings of live recordings, packaged with original artwork. Oh, and they have a two-year-old daughter. So they keep pretty busy.

Elder does work as a freelance graphic designer, and she says their living space reflects the creative multitasking that goes on there. “You should see our house— it’s part house, part workshop. It’s all blended together,” she says.

MV & EE possess a particular kind of twenty-first-century musical eclecticism, drawing on the Old, Weird America of Harry Smith’s epic Anthology of American Folk Music, steeped in old-time music, country blues, and field recordings (the duo was asked to contribute a song to the highly regarded 2015 tribute record to English singer and folklorist Shirley Collins), and yet their work is also in conversation with some core ideas of contemporary classical music, minimalism, and free jazz.

Photo by Paul Specht

“That’s very natural,” says Elder. “If you look at our record collection, we’ve got our Carter Family and our Sonny Sharrock records right next to each other.”

She grew up in Virginia, where singing was a regular part of her extended family gatherings. “I kind of brought the Appalachia to the table,” Elder says. “I grew up thinking that everybody just got around the piano on Sundays and played different songs.” That included folk songs and plenty of religious material, sources that MV & EE have returned to.

“I played sax in elementary school,” says Valentine. “I got kicked out of the school band for trying to play like [keening iconoclastic saxophonist Albert] Ayler. I got booted.”

Valentine got one strand of his musical education for free by auditing classes in the Conservatory of Music at the State University of New York at Purchase, where several pioneers of experimental and computer music taught and where the homemade instruments of maverick composer Harry Partch were housed at one point.

Extended drones, ominous echoes, alternate tunings, dub effects, and spooky war whoops all make appearances on Valentine’s new solo record. Two-chord vamps attain a mystic density as they’re prolonged. It fits right in with the MV & EE oeuvre. The DNA of much of MV & EE’s material seems like it can be traced to either “Dark Star,” the Dead’s epic interstellar exploratory vehicle; “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s mythic caveman-like protosludge masterpiece; and “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” David Crosby’s haunting and beautiful comedown opus. Those are good genes, at any rate.

Valentine and Elder make the most of what they call the global I-91 corridor—a joking way of referring to their spiraling network of friends, fellow musicians, and collaborators. And the town they live in, outside of Brattleboro, is something of a magnet for other creative people.

“We’ve been here for 13 years,” says Elder. “Everybody who lives in this area whom we’re friends with is here for the energy. It’s still a very important reason why we’re here.”

But the actual I-91 connection links them to likeminded artists from New Haven, Connecticut, through western Massachusetts and up through Vermont. Contributors to the new batch of records include J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and Pete Nolan of art-noise trio The Magik Markers. And the band has recorded on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! record label, based in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

For MV & EE and for Valentine’s solo album, recording isn’t just a matter of heading into the studio with some tunes, some guitars, and rolling tape. Bits are recorded in Valentine and Elder’s home studio or sometimes at a friend’s place, or while traveling; then sometimes layers are added on elsewhere. Some tracks might take shape in a living room and others in a fancy studio. The setting needs to be conducive to improvisation, which is central to much of the duo’s work.

“I have pretty elaborate recording techniques deployed that we use now,” says Valentine. “And they’re primitive, too, in some cases. There are techniques used to sometimes make one performance sound like multiple ones. The mood of the moment was more important than the technicalities.”

MV & EE balance the raw and the refined, the overstuffed and the stripped down. “It’s sometimes very minimal, sometimes very maximal,” says Valentine.

Photo by Paul Specht

For all of their folk tendencies and pedigrees, MV & EE can also sound like a stoner rock outfit, with lumbering bass lines and bruising drumbeats anchoring their unison singing and slashing guitars, like on “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample)” from 2007’s Gettin’ Gone. Though the deep psychedelic connection is clear, there’s also a classic rock aspect to some of MV & EE’s eclecticism. “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample),” for instance, is followed by a song called “The Burden,” which has gentle finger picking and high, atmospheric pedal steel guitars. It’s a pairing that might be at home on Led Zeppelin III, where the howling stomp of marauding invaders gives way to soothing and dreamy acoustic songs rooted in traditional folk music. “I’m in such a trance state usually when I’m playing,” says Elder.

That textural and tonal perspective is what helps the music withstand repeated listenings. “We try to keep it interesting for ourselves as much as for people who might be hearing it,” says Valentine.

But—as with something like a Fela Kuti record, an Indian raga, or a piece of music by La Monte Young— sometimes the music of MV & EE and Valentine’s solo work are meant to possibly scramble one’s sense of time: to transport the listener into a slow-drip mindset, where a pattern repeating for 15 minutes somehow becomes more gratifying and meaningful than one that stops after 3 minutes. Sometimes that aesthetic can be at odds with the demands of the marketplace. Valentine had originally planned on making Midden Mound a triple record, but he decided to settle on a double album.

“I kind of peeled that concept back,” he says. But he will be releasing the material that would have been that third record as another single solo album in 2016.

Valentine and Elder don’t have an elaborate promotional machine behind them. They do much of the behind-the-scenes logistics themselves, booking and publicizing shows. So if people are possibly starting to hear their music more and know their name after years and years of productivity, it’s because the world is beginning to come around to them. The combination of heavy rock, obscure folk, and experimental music is perhaps less of a head-scratcher than it was 20 years ago. “People are a little more ready for what we’re doing now,” says Valentine. “People are catching up to the sound.”

One senses that being creative and productive is just the way Valentine and Elder live their lives, and they’d be playing music every day and handcrafting one-of-a-kind art to go with it whether or not they had fans and a career. “I just like to make things,” says Valentine. “It’s probably why I like living up here.”

MV & EE–musicians from Brattleboro, Vermont
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The post Small-Batch Mystical Folk Noise appeared first on Take Magazine.

The digital realm—staring at laptop screens, scrolling through social media feeds, manipulating images with photo-editing software, banal narcissism in the form of selfies, pervasive porn, the searchable history of human culture—it’s all swirling through the paintings, silkscreens, fabric assemblages and drawings of Cambridge, Mass.-based artist Samuel Kontny. Analog media like paints, ink and brushes get expertly deployed in Kontny’s vibrant work as he renders images from Western art filtered through our online universe, complete with pixelation, dinky icons, cursor arrows, layered windows, screengrabs, crude cut-and-paste jobs, or jarring photoshop maneuvers.

Kontny, 32, works in a number of interrelated styles and techniques. He paints. He makes silk screens. He draws. He uses visual editing software and then replicates his creations in other media. Sometimes he uses Kid Pix, the vintage-ish bitmap drawing program for children to generate nostalgic Web 1.0 images. “I like using those tools and in some cases recreating those effects by the human hand, or by my own hand,” he says.

Kontny might riff on a recognizable painting by Picasso or Andy Warhol, taking a selfie in front of a famous canvas, then manipulating the image digitally and then making a painted or silk-screened version of the end result. There are layers and layers of meta. It’s a giddy self-referential hall of mirrors. Kontny, who works full-time as a bartender, also has a sideline working for restaurants and bars making elaborate murals, semi-permanent lists, menus, specials boards and other dense, text-heavy projects. As with his silk screens and paintings, Kontny’s restaurant work sometimes makes playful quotes of art history, with one mural suggesting the coiled graffiti-ish figures of Keith Haring and the playful cartoon zing of Kenny Scharf.

Samuel Kontny, Mom N Pop-Up Mural, acrylic, 2014, photo by Emily Isenberg

You can think of Kontny’s work as a visual version of mash-up culture in music. If a dance DJ might sample snippets of older hits, jamming together two bits from different eras, abruptly dropping out sections, making space with silences, muddying up the texture, Kontny does the same thing. He might appropriate an image from Lichtenstein, say, (already an appropriation of comic book art) and quote it in the context of 21st century digital technologies, referencing the tools he uses (the grids, the palette icons, tabs) within the piece itself. All the component parts are in conversation with each other.

Erasures and deletions are part of the look and feel of these pieces. Look at “Me and Laocoon and Chuck,” a 2015 CMYK silkscreen. It appears to be a picture of someone in front of a Chuck Close portrait, with those signature tangles of color that the eye and brain assemble into a facial close-up, as if broken down to its coloristic molecular structure. But in Kontny’s piece the figure and the portrait behind it are uncovered and erased to reveal an ancient Greek bust of the blind fortune teller Laocoon, sort of like a bass note underneath the whole thing.

The erasures bring the work of Alberto Giacometti to my mind. Giacometti may be more known for his carved-away spindly sculptures of figures, but in his sketch books he routinely made extreme use of his eraser, rubbing away lines and sections from his vigorous pencil markings. Kontny establishes a kind of lineage of portraiture and labor: the work required to create an ancient bust from a block of marble is contrasted with the work of painting a portrait on a canvas, which is in turn contrasted with snapping an image on a cell phone. All of it can be digitally replicated, deleted, or manipulated with a click. The entire set of images is framed within another set of images: the smartphone screenshot, with its icons for battery power, wireless bars, timestamps, signal strength, GPS and bluetooth, all serving as a hieroglyphic of digital decorative banding. “I like taking the idea of portraiture and using what’s available at the current time,” Kontny says.

Samuel Kontny, Installation sketch, CREATE Boston, 2017

As with Kontny’s non-permanent work in restaurants and bars, his digital-centric art confronts the nature of sustaining and archiving images over time, how some things are wiped away and some preserved.

Kontny likes the idea of “layering and comparing” the different modes of portraiture, “contrasting the amount of work that went into ancient marble sculptures—and now it’s so easy to create a portrait of something so meaningless and passe, of yourself just doing whatever.”

Technology and media saturation, web-enabled distraction, the virtual world subsuming the physical world, and ambient narcissism can all be easy targets, but Kontny isn’t necessarily wringing his hands about the state of the world and how we relate to pixels and our digital devices.

“I’m more embracing it than critiquing,” he says.

Sam Kontny–Artist from Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Top Image: By Chuck, CMYK silkscreen print, 22″X 31″, edition of 4, 2015

The post Scratching Beneath the Digital Surface appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michael Sargent says he tells stories in spite of who he is. Revealing stories about his history, hardships, longings, and fears isn’t his natural mode. In other words, Sargent isn’t who you’d imagine would create The Corner, a monthly community storytelling event in Lewiston/Auburn, Maine. And yet he did.

The story behind this starts with the community where Sargent, who is a psychology professor at Bates College, lives. Sargent started The Corner in 2013, in part because he was frustrated by the lack of world-class arts, culture, and entertainment in the area not specifically associated with Bates College. It wasn’t that Sargent didn’t like his students and colleagues; he just felt as if it would be healthy and good to have a place, unrelated to his work, where he could go and connect with others in the community.

Rather than just complain, Sargent did something. Since 2013, The Corner has been held at She Doesn’t Like Guthrie’s restaurant and cafe, a suitably non-corporate venue.

The Corner | Michael Sargent | Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Blogging, podcasts, stand-up comedy and the pervasiveness of Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media platforms have made the practice of self-revelation an almost compulsive habit for many. We share facets of our lives—snapshots, tidbits and details—all the time. But the kind of truth-telling and radical candor that Sargent has helped to encourage is different from all that.

Audience members are as likely to cry as they are to laugh. “You can tell that someone else has experienced something similar to what you have,” says Sargent. “It creates a great sense of connection.”

In a time of growing xenophobia, racism, and nativism in America, Sargent sees this connection-forging and community-building as a vital element of storytelling. Watching a total stranger get up to tell a story about having cancer or about coming undone by booze or overcoming crippling self-doubt makes a listener appreciate the bravery of anyone willing to participate, but it also jumpstarts a sense of empathy and compassion.

Storytelling events at The Corner do have rules. The “tellers” have to tell stories that are truthful, first-person narratives, recounted without notes and kept under five minutes. Events are organized around a theme. (April’s theme is “Fool’s Errand”—about doing something when we really shouldn’t have, for whatever reason.)

One of the innovations at The Corner is a sort of preliminary trial run where audience members are encouraged to swap ultra-brief stories with their neighbors where they’re seated. In some cases, this is enough to nudge introverts toward telling their story on the stage for the featured event, or to fine-tune and tweak for some future telling.

Sargent announced in May that he was handing over organizational and logistical duties for The Corner to Kathleen Juten, who has told her own stories there several times. Juten views the act of sharing and opening up to others as more than just a special form of art or entertainment. Before moving to Maine, she worked as a barista in California, where she found that artfully revealing parts of ourselves to each other is what fosters friendships and meaningful relationships, in addition to making mundane interactions more gratifying. “I found that the more open and honest I was with people, the more people reciprocated,” she says.

Civilization is, on some level, built on our ability to all go about our business without being overwhelmed by the depth of human feeling and history that each person carries around with them; if we were to always be fully aware of people’s stories, of what made them who they are—in good and bad ways—we might find it difficult to function smoothly. Storytelling is a small corrective to that. As Juten says, “It breaks down so many of these perceptions that we tend to have about each other.”

The Corner – hosts, Michael Sargent and Kathleen Juten
Auburn, Maine
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Top image Michael Sargent | Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The post Storytelling Full Disclosure appeared first on Take Magazine.