Seeking Paradise Through Song

Janet Reynolds — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 06:37:22 +0000

Western Massachusetts musician Jake Klar channels his wanderings into a new album of troubadour homecoming.

Jake Klar’s newest album, Until the Wildfire Becomes Paradise, will drop you into a desert and envelop you in the troubadour’s crooning narrative, and then carry you back to your living room, your ear pressed against a radio like a hit-hungry kid of the 1960s. This album longs to wander, just as it longs to come home.

That stands to reason. Klar found his voice in the desert of Texas at age 17 on a pilgrimage of sorts, where he returns every year to partake in The Crooked Crow Songwriter’s Retreat. He’s got wandering feet and a hot air balloon heart, steeped in the desert songwriting tradition, but those feet always carry him back home to his DIY community of hardworking artists in Western Massachusetts. Klar’s gathered moments congeal here as soul-feeding collaborations of all sorts. This album is its rock-n-roll manifestation. It’s for the heartbreaker and its subject, the wanderer and the homeward bound, and its release will be at The Parlor Room on November 4th, alongside collaborator Max Wareham.

This latest outpouring of Klar’s is two years in the making, its characters filled in and placed with care into each song. “Because I’m coming from a writing standpoint,” Klar says, “the songs are driven by words—those are the stronghold—words and emotion.” The poetry comes first. In “Counting Stars,” he sings, “leaving’s just the feeling of forgetting when you’ll be coming home.” And then there’s the album’s instrumentation, which wraps itself around Klar’s voice, echoing and feeding its fully bared and seriously beautiful howl.

Performed solo—just the crooner and his guitar—these songs hold a refreshing clarity. Klar’s voice, on and off the record, bellows from a seemingly deeper source than the belly, and while the worthiness of this record could rest on his voice alone, it doesn’t. Each song’s needs have been lovingly attended to—filled in with harmonies and quirky embellishments in spots, and pared down at crucial moments. “I’ve been thinking about space and silence as such a crucial part of music,” Klar says.

While his voice carries through the album, at its middle is a heartbeat, an instrumental interlude, called “Hot Air Balloon.” In this breathing pocket, the listener is granted a moment to reflect on Klar’s narratives and a moment to appreciate the album’s instrumentals. Max Wareham holds that heartbeat on the bass, while Joel Helander twinkles on the keys, a supernatural adornment throughout. Holding it down at the drums is Karl Helander, who also served as the album’s primary producer at Sleeper Cave Studio in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

These songs—a self-proclaimed bricolage of collected stories and emotions—find Klar nested in his artistic responsibility to make you feel something. “I want to work until I’m dead,” he says. “I want people to cry the way I have to songs, or, I don’t know, go fall in love with someone.” Klar is the storyteller and the trickster, sneaking around the country, plucking stories to gather and disperse beauty.

Want to hear what Klar listens to for inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. While there you can listen to what other musicians we’ve profiled are listening to as well.

Jake Klar–musician
Pelham, Massachusetts
Website
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Top image: Jake Karl. Photo by Alex Pines

The post Seeking Paradise Through Song appeared first on Take Magazine.

Seeing the Light

Janet Reynolds — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 05:03:19 +0000

Massachusetts artist Clint Baclawski inverts the idea of a billboard, using light boxes and photography.

Clint Baclawski makes billboards, but he is not trying to sell you anything. With a background in advertising photography, he has a keen eye for its aesthetic, but his images are sculptural photographs rather than pushes for product. “There’s no better billboard than art, and these images are displayed as such without something to advertise,” Clint says.

After six years of practicing traditional photographic methods, Clint had the notion in 2006 to get the photograph off the wall, and so he did, transferring the images into light boxes, double-sided and free standing, lit from within with fluorescent bulbs. He was taking photographs and inverting them, flipping text, asking the viewer to question how the photograph was taken. His images dealt with commercialism, but some muddled aspect of it. A Walk in the Park, for one, represents The Macy’s Day Parade, but a small crowd from the night before.

Baclawski’s concept started evolving while he was constructing a light box during graduate school at MassArt. A print fell onto a fluorescent bulb and draped itself over the long tube of light and voila! He created Chromogenic, a composite of LED tubes separated and laid out on a wall, each wrapped with a section of a photograph—an abstracted landscape fading from bright greens to blues. The effect is disorienting in a way; the image is obscured and then clarified as you move around its parts, an effect that goes for his body of disembodied billboards.

As he moved from light boxes to more complex photographic sculpture, Baclawksi changed his subject matter changed dramatically. “No longer did I need the imagery to be dense and complex, full of crowds and tension,” he says. “I went very simplistic.” Using the structure of his work itself to stir the viewer, he layers lights on mirrors, representing simple images with complex modalities and concepts.

“There’s beginning to be two distinct bodies within the light bulbs,” Baclawski says. His nature images exist on pure color Plexiglas, but he is creating a distinct body of work on mirrored surfaces. “They’re all about places one would inhabit but devoid of people. My latest, Oasis, is a houseboat.”

Thoreau, image courtesy of Clint Baclawski

Another piece, Thoreau, sits ironically in a corporate lobby on a gold background, a minimal and humble abode glowing on a gold background in a place surging with money. His works on mirrored surfaces, such as Thoreau, seem to expand in two directions. The mirror pushes into infinity, while the glowing bulbs emerge toward the viewer. As you witness the empty replica of Thoreau’s home, you witness yourself reflected back as well, occupying the home in a way. While Baclawski’s work plays with commercialism in the digital age, he still works with film and refuses to outsource work, making sure to be a part of his work in every aspect. He’s begun creating miniature versions of his work as well.

These days, Baclawski is working on his largest commission to date, utilizing eight-foot-long bulbs, and is preparing for HUBweek, Boston’s “festival for the future,” a weeklong event in October bringing innovators, scientists, artists, and thinkers together. He’ll be occupying a shipping container in Boston’s City Hall Plaza, where his viewer will be pulled into an indoor billboard of sorts, a consumer inside an ad without a product to consume, save the thought-provoking work itself.

Clint Baclawski–artist
Malden, Massachusetts
Website
Instagram
Twitter

Top image, Oasis, photo courtesy of Clint Baclawski

The post Seeing the Light appeared first on Take Magazine.

Nellie Prior – Take Magazine