“Nothing,” jokes Matty Sonar,
describing what attracted him to playing in local noise outfit Gaybot.
“I didn’t like it at all,” he says,
“and I don’t know if I do now.”
For Sonar, who provides beats and
plays guitar, saxophonist Chris Wicks, and mastermind Brian Blatt (who most
often embodies the Gaybot persona, though he insists that “Gaybot” means all
three people in the group), the music they make together isn’t necessarily
intended to be liked. Though that
hasn’t stopped their steadily growing audiences from having a great time.
“Lately, we’ve been getting people to
stay through our entire sets, which I think is quite a feat,” says Wicks. “I
don’t know exactly what has changed — maybe people’s perceptions? — but I
think it can be a pretty confusing spectacle because we get up there and there
are really no boundaries.”
Maybe the answer lies in the fact
that as aggressively theatrical, musically messy, and abrasive on your senses
Gaybot shows may be, they’re never unpleasant. In fact, jovial mischief is about
the only thing that connects one performance to the next, as no two of them are
remotely alike.
Where a lot of experimental music can
come off as detached and self-absorbed with alienating, highbrow pretenses,
you’ll get none of that from the Gaybot experience. Sure, you’ll be confused
and, more likely than not, wondering “is this art?” or “is it weird just for
its own sake?” But Gaybot manages to strike a fine — and rare — balance.
Despite a heavily contrived
presentation, with new costumes, concepts, entrance routines, contraptions, and
homemade instruments planned in advance, you won’t have to worry about the band
taking itself too seriously. Not even close.
In a recent performance, for example,
the usual directionless improvised wailing created by the trio — a maelstrom
of piercing saxophone, drumbeats played completely out of reference with
anything else, and a series of squeaks, squeals, squonks, and distorted vocals
echoing and repeating and building on themselves through an effects processor
— suddenly halted for an earnest, pre-planned rendition by Blatt and two
guest accordionists of Oscar the Grouch’s theme song, “I Love Trash.”
After that, Blatt and Sonar, clad in
wrestling singlets purchased secondhand, broke into a spontaneous bout of
wrestling on the floor. Wicks, spared from being pulled into the fray by his
refusal to don a used singlet, just kept playing his horn.
For
the most part, such playfulness is fostered by Blatt, an amiable fellow who
founded Gaybot two years ago as a solo act. He played fractured, barely
coherent rhythm patterns (you really couldn’t have called them “beats”) on a
laptop.
Blatt, who also paints with
watercolor in an abstract though strikingly more accessible, sedate style,
doesn’t consider himself a musician. In conversations with him about his work,
this point comes up again and again. He is not, however, cavalier about it. He
says he would like to acquire some formal training so that he can start
developing a vocabulary for his ideas. He is even starting to compose actual
songs, though it’s anyone’s guess as to how they’ll emerge in the context of
Gaybot, if at all.
In the meantime, Blatt isn’t
interested in waiting around for his chops to develop; he’d rather just take
the leap and see what happens. His upcoming musical, which he talks about at
length on the condition that it’s kept off the record, will be his most
ambitious outing to date. (Let’s just say it will take Gaybot’s theatrics to a
whole new level.) But with no regard for whether the parachute opens or not,
the risk of failure becomes non-existent.
And, so far, creative tools —
musical gear, paints, etc. — just keep finding their way into his hands,
either via other people’s garbage or donations. Walking down South Clinton
Avenue, for example, he stops to pick up a long, thin pipe lying near the curb.
“I need this,” he says excitedly. “No
— I really do.”
He carries the pipe vertically, so it
extends way over his head, which gives him a Moses-like air as he adjusts his
stride to accommodate the new weight at his side. Passersby give him strange
looks. Blatt seems either indifferent or entirely oblivious. He taps the pipe
on various other objects to gauge the sounds it can produce.
“I figure I could make some kind of
instrument out of it,” he explains. “Either one you blow through or strung up
with wire.”
It’s not like Blatt is on some
crusade to make fun of or desecrate music or even inspire people to question
what music means. He’s just making fun — literally creating a fun atmosphere.
“I’ve always had the urge to make
music,” he says. “Listening was a really, really big part of my life.” Blatt
says he spent 10 years watching bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. “I
thought ‘why am I not doing this myself? I love it so much.’ While the actual
style of that music is totally different, the [jamband] spirit is very similar
to what I’m doing.”
He reminisces about going to shows
and seeing people dance and lose themselves without self-consciousness — a
trait he feels is all-too prevalent in this town. One of Gaybot’s main
intentions is for audiences to feel freer.
Still, Wicks andSonar — both confident, seasoned, technically proficient
musicians — lavish Blatt with praise for what they see as his musical skill.
Indeed, in an impromptu private
performance in his bedroom, Blatt thumbs the bare end of a guitar cable plugged
into an effects unit. At first, he just taps. He then adds vocals, the sound of
coins jingling in a metal bowl, and feedback, tapping at varying rhythms
against different parts of his hand. He piles different effects, like
distortion and repeating echo, on top of one another.
Soon lush, dreamy soundscapes filled
with texture and color begin to form. One sounds like ghosts chanting Buddhist
prayer at daybreak, another like an electrical storm coursing through another
planet’s atmosphere. Even the harsh, initially invasive feedback is corralled
into beauty.
“I think one of my favorite
instruments,” he says, “is just this — buzz.”
One of Blatt’s random recordings,
done on a tape recorder, is of two voices each repeating a two-syllable phrase
and overlapping in a pattern that makes them sound like an entire chorus.
Of course you won’t hear anything
quite so discernable when Gaybot is egged on by the glare of a crowd, but these
pockets of creativity reveal Blatt’s sense of craft — which is also starting
to show in the Gaybot jams that the band records a few days before each show.
The spirit on the recordings is still free, but there is more repetition,
subtlety, and restraint.
Nonetheless, the end result remains
secondary to the act of expression.
“It’s kind of refreshing for me,”
says Wicks, “coming from the other groups that I play with — jazz and other
types of improvised music — where there’s really a lot of pressure to create
something beautiful. With this, it doesn’t have to be beautiful.”
Sonar concurs: “even people that have
performed their whole lifetime and are famous and have gotten every other
aspect of their career satisfied… seek the things that Gaybot gives me. It’s
natural and pure.”
Gaybot’s
upcoming shows: Monday, May 9:Brian
Blatt solo set with usaisamonster and clouds crossing, A\V Space, 8 Public
Market, 9 p.m. Donations. www.avspace.org, 423-0320 | Tuesday, May 10: with
Houston Bernard and Roger Houston, Bug Jar, 219 Monroe Avenue, 9 p.m. $6-$8.
www.bugjar.com, 454-2966 | Saturday, May 14: the Gaybot Musical debuts, Door 7,
439 Central Avenue, 10 p.m. Free. www.door7.org, 512-470-0078 | Saturday, May
21: at the A/V Space, 8 Public Market, 10 p.m. Donations. www.avspace.org,
423-0320
This article appears in May 4-10, 2005.
