#[baz arrington] | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

letonmite · 6 years

Text

A COMEDY OF ERRORS: 2

First off, it should be said that moving from Little Rock to Olympia is about the same distance as moving from Istanbul to Glasgow. The first night there, I met Arrington De Dionyso, who among other things, happened to be a fellow clarinet player (bass): He happened to live for a year or so in Little Rock as a kid & who happened to have a friend in common,(dancer Melinda Allen. In any case 27 December 1999, I arrived in Olympia for good and a few days later the world celebrated the year 2000.

Shortly after, I learned that some kids I knew from Bebee, Arkansas, were in a gritty garage band that was starting to be popular in town: the Gossip. Nowadays, I hear their songs in second hand shops here in Brussels. If that's not success, I don't know what is.

Ok, time to get back on track :

I found pretty quickly a group of folks that were equally interested in pushing the boundaries of performance (centered around K Records) & others in pushing the boundaries of sound (friends more in the Kill Rock Stars scene or in no scene). We organized & played so many concerts. There was a sort of permeable musical community, where everyone played on everyone's project and more likely than not, you would find yourself in the studio, singing & clapping or playing something on someone's record. Some contemporaries were, Unwound, Calvin Jonson, The Blow, Microphones, Mirah of course Old Time Relijun... Not sure if you recognize the names, but, we were just constantly creating things, making theatre performances, building sets for parties and doing more than I think it was even possible for us to do. All this in a town about the size of Verviers but with as many, if not more, musical scenes as there are here, (except each scene had like 6 people). You get the idea. Olympia is by the sea and surrounded by forest & mountains with a good dose of earthquakes. Geographically very different from Belgium.

I started to play more & more alto clarinet, flute & trombone in free music settings, leaving the micro-cassettes & keyboards aside. Something clicked & I started performing concept shows. The concept of the concept show is that all of the performance (from one to how many ever songs) was based on one subject: to be performed once or twice, to throw everything away and move on to the next topic/performance.

As there are no recordings in my archives, here are some fliers of the various concept concerts:

Dante's Inferno.

a fashion show

Rising sea levels.

Eating Snacks at an art opening:

and the following something that i don't even understand today.

flatland and multiple dimensions. (missing image)

The Orange album

A history of popular music in 30 minutes:

A dance piece & operetta: “the subtle tyranny of silent orchestras”:

Here I’m with Dana who worked on the project with me.

Most fliers were printed at the Sherwood Press, where I was an apprentice for five years, learning the art of letterpress.

(Please wait until 2030 when I make my third lecture "Pressing Matters: 30 years of Letterpress")

But let us go back to 2003...

Based on the fact it was the closest it will ever be to Earth in our lifetimes, I prepared a concert on the subject of Mars, with the help of cello player Derek Johnson. Arrington invited Le Ton Mité to perform with Chris Cohen's project The Curtains & a group from Japan, whose work I knew from their split CD "Make us two crayons on the floor": Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

I mention this for two reasons, 1. I invited Tori & his group for a series of concerts in March of 2018 to celebrate the 20 years, so normally I would have mentioned this at the first lecture I did at Ateliers Claus, I forgot, & 2: as Maher will come up again as part of the Le Ton Mité story, might as well start here:

At the time, I was living so far away from the letterpress studio that I started spending evenings on the bed in my friend's office, in the same building & next door to the print shop & also the "Big Room": a wood floored industrial space that served as the recording studio (and party room) of K Records. As Maher was there for a few days, Arrington set up his multi-track recorder & they were working on recordings. Being frequently in the studio and talking more in depth with Maher members, I invited them to come a solo bassoon concert I performed in a bakery, after which, Tori asked me to play on a cover song "Black eyed Susan". Thanks to that experience I became a member of the Maher family and I am still thankful for the friendships and musical communion that has resulted from this meeting.

Khaela from The Blow asked Anna Oxygen & me to go on a tour of The Big Apple and Upstate New York, that would be the first for the project. During university, I thought of a project called "Brand Strategies" where I made a series of products "Le Ton Mité" & I built a portable store to go on tour: Here are some of these objects, flags.

Summer 2004, Le Ton Mité became a three piece with Ann Adachi & Sam Lohman, who had played a couple of the Le Ton Mité concept shows. We started with a little Northwest tour with Cheval de Frise (a group of Thomas Bonvalet) & Gorge Trio (here John Dieterich and I are enjoying a little whiskey in the kitchen).

This trio played festivals, opened up for book readings, it was great, The recording were released as a CD with Yik Yak label, then everyone went off to university and I found myself again left with lots of energy, but alone...

Late summer 2004, I went on a road trip down the Pacific Coast from Olympia to San Francisco, every moment was spectacular, so I wrote songs like a diary, a soundtrack for the voyage. Thinking of this trip as a sort of hyper-reality, I decided to call the collection "Tickets to real imaginary places". Then I made an full on cardboard installation of images based on the trip for an art show.

In November of 2004, Le Ton Mité made a first full west coast tour with Rob, who was rather enthousiastic and a talented guitarist. Oolympia, chehalis, Portland, Eugene, Ashland, Arcata, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, etc. We crossed Chris Cohen in Santa Cruz & did a newspaper only for us in the car: The Jetta Dispatch.

I got back to Olympia and finally found a decent job, as the production manager at Kill Rock Stars. We did lots of projects for friends, namely working on “The Runners Four” record of Deerhoof. Here is a pay stub just in case...

Getting back to the amazing journey the summer before, I recorded songs in March 2005 mainly working with cellist Derek Johnson with many special guests. Le Ton Mité got invited to do a first concert in Bordeaux, France and speaking with my friend Nedelle, who had connections in Italy, we decided to team up and do a tour France & Italy together. That was pretty invigorating, It made it seem like everything was possible artistically and musically. That tour put me in contact with many people who are still today good friends. I couldn’t find any photos unfortunately. Getting back, I learned that I got fired from the Rock Stars, so I decided to focus on music & make ends meet with letterpress printing and other odd jobs. I printed a flyer for the group The Evens and afterwards, as I had printed the flyer, discussed letterpress with band member Ian Makaye (of Dischord records). I sent the new recordings and shortly after, got this postcard:

Being invited to tour the East coast with Deerhoof in January 2006, and organizing the first US tour of L'ocelle Mare, for some reason, I thought I would be better off putting out the CD myself so that it would be ready in time. Thankfully, I had help from Andy Bernick from Richmond County Archives label, and we co-released the CD. This is the second run cover for the LP:

The tour with Deerhoof and L'ocelle mare was great, but obviously i sold maybe 10 of the 400 CD’s I pressed. A few months later, Thomas invited me to France for my second tour there, with the release of the "tickets" album on vinyl by the labels "Les Potagers Natures" & “Galerie Pache”. It was my first vinyl LP and things were looking great.

After the tour, in Bordeaux, I missed the train that took me back to Paris to the plane that took me back to the US and to the apartment waiting for me in New York City.

#Olympia #floraison #blooming into being

4 notes · View notes