This weekend our region boasts new music, old music, noise music, country rock music, and a fusion of salsa and indie-rock.
The fourth annual Basilica SoundScape, a so-called “anti-festival”, takes place at Basilica Hudson today through Sunday, and features a number of the UK's leading experimental electronic musicians, including Blanck Mass; ACTRESS; and Haxan Cloak. Also performing is Seattle-based artist Perfume Genius and the Los Angeles noise-rock band HEALTH. They'll be joined by Michigan noise legends Wolf Eyes; Calgary post-punks Viet Cong; Norwegian singer and composer Jenny Hval; experimental folk project Circuit Des Yeux; psychedelic folk project Weyes Blood and traditional Indian tabla and sitar music. The event also includes film screenings, readings, dance parties and art exhibits.
Perhaps best known as one-half of the husband-and-wife folk duo, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion, Johnny Irion taps into his own roots as an alt-country rocker with his new band, U.S. Elevator, which makes its live debut at Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday night. The group’s new album is due out in a month or two, and I’ve heard it. It boasts a melodic blend of sounds that marry "Tonight's the Night"-era Neil Young to the more psychedelic side of the Beatles. Some of U.S. Elevator's group harmonies will remind listeners of Crosby, Stills and Nash, or the Hollies. A few tunes on the album have the spiritual vibe of "All Thing Must Pass"-era George Harrison, while others rock hard like Neil Young with his band Crazy Horse.
Performer and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez presents the world premiere of his dance-theater-performance trilogy, “Age & Beauty,” at the Fisher Center at Bard College tonight through Sunday. The Brooklyn-based performance artist’s new program exploring middle age and celebrating queerness, art making, and mortality, is the result of a three-week Live Arts Bard residency.
Contemporaneous, a 21-member, new-music ensemble that performs the works of living composers through innovative concerts, commissions, recordings, and educational programs, performs a free concert at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown on Saturday at 3 pm. The concert will be held outdoors on the Spencer Terrace at the Clark’s Stone Hill Center. The program includes music by Dylan Mattingly, Conor Brown and Frederic Rzewski.
The Williamsburg Salsa Orchestra, known for playing salsa-fied versions of indie rock songs by the likes of Arcade Fire, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Santigold, and Animal Collective, kick off the new MCLA Presents! season on the MCLA Quad, outside in front of newly renovated Bowman Hall in North Adams, on Saturday at 3pm. Calling Brooklyn, N.Y., home, Williamsburg Salsa Orchestra is an 11-member band that combines the attitude of a rock band and the grooves of classic New York salsa.
And finally, the Williams Chamber Players will perform an eclectic program of ballads, chamber works by Ravel and Brahms, and a setting of Robert Lowell’s poetry by Frederic Sharaf in their first concert of the season in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on the Williams College campus on tonight at 8pm. The event is free and open to the public.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkshire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com