Local Live & Album Reviews

[May 3rd, 2006]

^Justin Maurer Friday, May 5

Clorox Girls leadman stands and delivers ... a memoir?

[NONFICTION] It's Saturday, April 22, and I'm hanging out with Justin Maurer. As we walk into Powell's on Hawthorne, the Clorox Girls leadman is considering the differences between the songs he writes and the stories he will be reading the next day at the Paragon. "What can you really say in a one-minute song?" he asks, and then quickly rattles off all four lines of "The One," a 42-second number by the Clorox Girls. We check out a small rack of independently published books, where the 23-year-old's Future Tense chapbook, Don't Take Your Life, is on sale. He explains that the 46-page collection of stories was a chance to tap in greater depth the same creative well he drew from for the two Clorox Girls LPs. The book's two parts—of which one focuses on childhood memories and the other on travel stories—feel like the A and B sides of an album. Maurer's style, what he calls "short sentences that kick you in the face," is at its best in the autobiographical bits found in the first part, where Maurer creates moments just as jolting and charming as a tune by his band.

Later, over burritos and salted beers at Pepino's, I ask Maurer why none of the stories discusses his life as a musician. He says he preferred to separate his musical and personal lives on this project. I hint that he must have left out some good shit, and he launches into a hilarious rendition of how, when on tour with Maurice's Little Bastard at age 17, he stripped naked onstage to taunt a pack of homophobic skinheads.

The next day I buzz into the Paragon to see Maurer read to a dozen or so regulars and 30 or 40 supporters from the local punk community. He reads "Coyote, Jesus, Sex" and "Turkish Viagra." One from each of the book's two parts, they both contain some of its finest moments: A dialogue in which a 4-year-old Maurer tells his father he wants to die so he can be with God, and another in which a Turkish child insists that Maurer is a Satan worshiper because of a skull-and-crossbones button he wears. I'm a little disappointed that Maurer—who regularly slam dances with his guitar and had me in stitches at Pepino's—didn't approach his reading with all the spontaneity of a show. One would think that performance would come naturally to Maurer. Being a seasoned punk, though, counts very little in the writerly world, and Maurer has got to earn his chops, as he will when he reads at Ozone this week.

Maurer is hoping eventually to support himself with his music so that he can spend more time writing. In the meantime, he's looking forward to the next Clorox Girls record (planned for next year), which he says will be a breeze compared to the painstaking work and extensive revision he put in on his book.

JASON SIMMS.

Justin Maurer reads from Don't Take Your Life May 5 at Ozone Records. 7 pm. Free. All ages.

^Fogatron Saturday, May 6

Local beatboxer cranks up a crowd in Barcelona.

[HIP-HOP] Wearing a long, tan coat and a camouflage bandanna that rests just over his orangish eyebrows, Fogatron looks like a singular character as he walks in the door of the Bagdad Theater. But for any success he has attained, the tall 24-year-old credits his ability to imitate. That and his tenacity. His parents, who called him Adam Kristopher Test, were an audience for the beatboxer's early mimicry, which found the Portland native constantly repeating sounds and song lyrics. It wasn't until 2002, after a stint in the Marines, that he blew up a Portland open-mic night and thought he might be able to beatbox for a living. Since then he has performed (both solo and with his band, Luminous Fog) all over the United States and in Europe. Last year he was in Barcelona, Spain, when he saw a show flyer for Guru, the hugely influential Brooklyn emcee behind Gang Starr and the groundbreaking Jazzmatazz jazz/hip-hop fusion albums.

"I was just like, 'I'm going to see Guru,'" Fog says. "It was 1,400 people in this huge-ass club, and I wanted to perform so badly. So then in my head I was starting to manifest it, you know? I like to imagine myself doing something before I do it. I imagined that I was going to bring Guru out on stage."

Fog worked his way through the crowd, asking questions in Spanish until he found the show's promoter. "I told him, 'I'm a beatboxer, I perform all over. I guarantee you I can make this crowd go crazy. Just give me the chance.'

"Sure enough, after the opening groups there was some dead music playing. He ran out and grabbed me and said [Fog imitates the promoter's broken English] 'We have to move very fast. What do you need?' I said 'Just turn my mic up.'

"The crowd was quiet when I went on stage, so I said 'Hola, soy un beatboxer de la Estados Unidos. Me llamo es Fogatron. No sar effecto,' which is 'I don't use effects.' I say that at every show. I went on for about two minutes, and it was like [Fog makes a wildly enthusiastic crowd hiss]. After I busted a couple more beats I went backstage and met Guru, then the promoter was like, 'Go back out there, bring him out on stage.' So I went out and yelled 'Make some mothafuckin' noooooiisse.' They screamed, and I was like," [he laughs], "No, you need to make some muthafuckin' noise for Guuuruuu!'

"That would never happen at the Crystal Ballroom," Fog says. "They would tell me to fuck off."

CASEY JARMAN.

Luminous Fog feat. Fogatron plays at the Fez Ballroom. 9 pm. Cover. 21+.

^Redbird April 27 at Hotel

Norther Emily Carson practices violence without bruises in her not-so-scary nightmare.

[PERFORMANCE VIOLENCE] Any nightmare that can be described in perfectly concrete terms is, automatically, a half-assed nightmare. And Portland's Redbird, a.k.a. Norther Emily Carson, is just that: a well-conceived piece of performance art that fails only in its obviousness. Throughout the 15-minute set Thursday night at Hotel, every sound and movement carried with it a certain "do ya get it?" aspect that killed any hope of the shock that the self-tagged "performance violence" act promised. Without that hope—I'm sorry to say—most of the crowd (noiseheads: It doesn't get more open-minded) was left chuckling to themselves at the perimeter of Hotel's cold, bare space.

The act began with Carson—wearing a sheer white cocktail dress—covering the room's floor with shredded cherry blossoms and a tangled white bridal veil, while collaborator Josh Hydeman filled the air with jagged bass cycles cut with an occasional noise squall. Then they left the room, letting the bass continue to throb. For five minutes the crowd was left to consider the scene, get comfortable, get acquainted with it. Yes, it was weird: something like witnessing the remnants of a wedding held in a jet engine. But the entire five minutes was little more than a suspense ploy, leaving the crowd with an act that was conceptually empty. The pair returned wearing nylons over their heads and enacting what appeared to be a watered-down rape scene. It was creepy for a moment, and then it was like watching a 1987 advertisement for mace. That bit ended, and Carson wailed into a microphone for a couple of minutes while Hydeman fucked with her voice on the sound board before running around and "attacking" the crowd. That's cool, I guess; I've never been attacked at a show before. But if you're going to do it, go all the way: I've gotten harder slaps from my cat. "Performance violence" doesn't mean you can't leave some bruises.

MICHAEL BYRNE.

^Gideon Freudmann Saturday, May 6

Not-your-ordinary-cellist Gideon Freudmann sets up shop in Portland.

[CELLO-BOP] Hearing Gideon Freudmann's genre-warping music reminds me of something paleo-rock-critic Lillian Roxon said of Tim Buckley: "There is no name yet for the places he and his voice can go." Except in Freudmann's case there is a name, of the cellist/composer's own invention: "Cello-Bop." He coined the tag, he says, after too many too-brief conversations with bookers. "They'd ask, 'What do you play?' and I'd say, 'I'm a cellist,' and it was like, 'This conversation is over,'" Freudmann recalls. "I might as well have been saying, 'Hi, I have herpes—wanna go on a date?'" So adding the "-Bop" signified "something different, something fun," reflecting his unconventional approach to his instrument.

Freudmann, his wife and their two daughters migrated to Portland at the end of last summer, after 18 years in Western Massachusetts. He says he "didn't come too well-connected" to the local music scene, but considered Portland a place "big enough that there's lots going on, but small enough not to eat you alive in a sea of humanity, or inhumanity." Portland's open-minded music lovers, however, are probably going to eat him up, because Freudmann does unimaginable things with his cello. He not only coaxes sound from it by any means imaginable, striking or stroking it with hands or bow in unpredictable ways, he feeds that sound through an array of electronics that can make it seem like a hundred cellos playing at once, or not like a cello at all.

Then there are Freudmann's compositions, ranging from evocative instrumentals to Zappa-like joke-rock complete with droll vocals. While he began writing his own songs as part of a guitar-cello duo, and continued after it disbanded, he now prefers writing wordless music. Much of it retains narrative structure, though, due to Freudmann's newfound interest in performing accompaniment to silent films. His latest album of the dozen he's self-released, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was recorded mostly live during a screening of the famous silent horror film. Freudmann hopes eventually to arrange a DVD release of the film with his soundtrack; meanwhile, local audiences can look forward to a planned performance/screening at the Hollywood Theatre in June.

JEFF ROSENBERG.

Gideon Freudmann opens for 3 Leg Torso at Mississippi Studios. 8 pm. $15. 21+.