PL Night
Oh what a night! Hypnotizin' mesmerizing me, sweet surrender, what a night. (pretty pictures and tmi about music)
Tomorrow is PL Night at Silent Green. I’ll be performing entirely new music accompanied by video from Kelsey Isaacs at 20h. Afterwards, Nick Klein, Diego Behncke, and Adam Campbell will play as Crack Crypt Crucifixion. You can buy tickets here or on the door, which will open at 19h.
I think this show will be special for many reasons. In the last email, I mentioned that the songs feel pretty different. If you’ve seen me perform in the last year, you know that voice and language is back for me in a big way after almost a decade of mainly instrumental performance. The music I’ll be playing tomorrow is where this chapter began, from music I started writing around my fixation on a certain classic folk song.
When I get obsessed with a piece of music, it’s hard for me to just appreciate it without analyzing it, pulling it apart, trying to recreate it or better yet, make something completely different out of its pieces. I have a lot of training as an instrumentalist, but aside from some rudimentary music theory classes as a teenager I have basically no formal education in composition, so this is how I’ve learned about writing music. I’d guess a lot of my peers without conservatory backgrounds have a similar experience. Anyways, I’d say 99% of the studies I do in this manner are exactly that and will never see the light of day, to everyone’s benefit, but sometimes a source is so loaded up on meaning that the studies and experiments can become worthwhile and meaningful works in their own right (well, to me at least). That’s what happened here, to me, with this song that’s ostensibly about war but also authorship and translation and shapes and structures and the 20th century. I hesitate to write too much about this because 1. no one asked and 2. what I DO have a formal education in is being intense and annoying about what everything MEANS (it’s called cultural studies) so maybe I’ll peel off here for now and share some previews of what you might see tomorrow when you look up:
Kelsey and I have been friends for a very long time and had a (in my opinion, INCREDIBLE) short-lived band in I think 2014. It has been so much fun to work with her on the visuals for this show as well as the artwork for the record <3333
It is extra special to me to do this at PL Night because Nick aka Mr. PL has been incredibly supportive of my work since the early Wilted Woman days, not to mention a great friend and collaborator. Also, the Kuppelhalle is one of the prettiest rooms in Berlin so I am really excited to play there for the first time :)
Thanks for reading,
Elizabeth