Consciousness as Nebula
Well that didn’t take long. As I may have mentioned in the past, I really love booking shows. I especially love when someone tells me about an artist that really moves them, and I’m able to get them here to perform. It isn’t so often that a person bares themself and lets a song in; I know from experience dude. When you do let a song in, it’s a little easier than letting in another human being, but it can be just as heavy, because as you know, songs are tied to people. And as I have whispered in that sweet cherished bubble of afternoon, our consciousnesses are nebulae slowly tearing through space, and we are but wireless machines. In this way songs hang above us like balloons, and some folks are almost floating away, they are tethered to so many. Those are my people; they shine and squeak like perfect lovely mice.
We’ve got a hell of a show coming up this Friday 4/28, when Montreal-born Grenadian- Canadian banjo player and songwriter Kaia Kater stops in Keene. Her songs are gorgeous: she walks this line between traditional old timey Appalachian music and something freshly her own. This ability has garnered her JUNO and Polaris awards as well as accolades from Rolling Stone, NPR, BBC, CBC, and No Depression. The banjo and arrangements are certainly striking, but they are containers for some of the most poignant lyrical creations, each couplet knocking a hole in whatever wall you’ve built between yourself and the world. She wields these verses like a sledgehammer, and by the end of an album, it’s just you standing under the moon with the crickets stretching out their bows.
Abigail Lapell was someone I stumbled upon after what felt like years chasing a lithe and elegant deer through woods and neighborhoods. Maybe that is confusing, but listening to her has had a dreamlike quality, so why not describe it properly? And if someone can provide an easy route into your dreams, I say take it. Her voice then can be a prism by which we can examine our lives, noticing the colors and where one begins and another ends; if you can look deeply enough at something, it will generally yield a pathway or trail to something beyond where you are observing from. It’s a point out in space, ahead of you, and all you have to do to get to it is step through; which can feel nearly impossible. Songs are all possible futures and they allow us to peek a little bit into each doorway they provide, and Abigail Lapell carries a multitude of these doors, holding them all like cards, fanned out and held without difficulty in one hand.
Just a little insight into my process, I don’t usually have a plan when I begin a new entry. I hear something and it lights a fuse that my heart follows with great curiosity, as it winds and climbs around the architecture of the buildings in my brain. Music can resonate at the same frequency as a feeling, and when the two ring together, it becomes a bit of a compulsive need to communicate that feeling. Then other things are struck as the machinery is bumped and harried. Beginning this sentence, I have no idea how this will all wrap up, but I’m confident that it will come to a satisfying conclusion, regardless of which point I circle back to: the prism, that accepts light and turns it into rainbows; our minds already wrapped around one another in space, leading the way; or just a primal imperative to look on while songwriters build fires so that we can hear the sound of smoke dancing through time and space. Either way, for all these reasons, join us Friday night to be near each other in collective listening.
Get tickets and listen to some of their music HERE.
Essay by Eric Gagne