Providence musician and graphic artist Brian Chippendale first fell in love with the drums when he was a toddler. No, seriously.

The Philadelphia-raised vocalist for noise rock outfit Lightning Bolt says he vividly remembers using large spoons as a kid to pummel pots and pans in his parents’ kitchen. Later, he’d evolve to markers, which he’d tap against glass bottles of varying size, and play along with the radio.

Today, he is considered one of the world’s most innovative drummers, and was even enlisted by Björk to handle the drums on her 2007 album Volta. He’s also recognized for his cartoons and graphic novels, like Puke Force and Maggots. Doing both requires a subtle balance.

“We’re a loud band,” Chippendale says of Lightning Bolt, which first took shape in 1994. They’ve released six full-lengths, including 2015’s Fantasy Empire. “I am a fairly aggressive physical drummer and I drum for about an hour each day. Then, I have the rest of my time to work on art and chase my 1-year-old around.”

According to Chippendale, he’s been sketching for as long as he can remember, and, if he gets lost in his work, ends up drawing for hours on end. He says he’s been in New England since 1991, when he came to Providence for printmaking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design.

While at school, Chippendale met his wife, Korean-American artist Jungil Hong, who was studying ceramics. “We produced a pretty cute little kid,” Chippendale says. “So far, he’s gotten the best of us.”

The self-proclaimed workaholic admits that living in Providence has helped inspire much of his work, both audio and visual. “For years, I really was shaped by this kind of mill living scene in Providence,” he explains. “I barely left the studio. Providence, specifically, was really abandoned for years, so you get these huge spaces for really cheap. The forgotten industry of Providence provided Lightning Bolt with places where we could create and be loud, and an opportunity to form what we are today.”

Chippendale says that many of his artist friends have, in recent decades, left Providence for the likes of New York and Los Angeles. But that’s not his plan. “Those cities are so difficult to thrive in,” he explains. “Ten years ago, you saw people fleeing but now, they’re returning because they’ve got kids and they just want to mellow out.”

Chippendale says that he has become enchanted by Rhode Island’s beauty, including its glorious beaches, and loves the vibe of the capital city and its dwellers. “The slowness of Providence has really allowed me the chance to do stuff that doesn’t make money,” he jokes. “I get to decorate things and I get lost in that, and forget about not making money — until I look in my wallet.”

Want to know what Chippendale is listening to when he’s not playing? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel to hear. While you’re there, check out what’s on the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Brian Chippendale, graphic artist and drummer for Lightning Bolt
Providence, Rhode Island
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The post Lightning Bolt and Puke Force 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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All photos courtesy of Anne Decker

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