Year: 2024

A journey in music

Stephane Wrembel brings Triptych to UNH

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Triptych is the latest album from French guitarist Stephane Wrembel. The expansive 20-song collection is a meditation on life, represented in three musical movements. It’s a collaboration with pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, which came together after Wrembel’s manager suggested that the two connect. Initially, Wrembel was reluctant.

“Piano and guitar are very difficult to marry,” he said by phone recently. “It’s a difficult match because we kind of occupy the same space, and it’s very easy for tones to clash.” He decided to give it a try anyway, and quickly became enamored of the pianist. Pilc is renowned for his improvisational skills and has an impressive resume. His credits include time as music director and pianist for Harry Belafonte.

At the time, Wrembel had a concert series at Joe’s Pub in New York City coming up to celebrate the release of Django l’impressionniste, a collection of 17 preludes for solo guitar.

“Django is also influenced by Claude Debussy, so I wanted to do something around him,” he recalled. That’s when Pilc’s name came up; the two had not yet met.

He was recruited for the shows, and “the chemistry was immediate and so powerful that we decided to record together,” Wrembel said. “I had the instinct that we needed to go to the studio and record a triptych. I had the vision of a triptych. I didn’t know why, but I could see that it was the right thing to do.”

It’s a true collaboration, with both Wrembel and Pilc contributing new songs. Overall, the album is anchored by selections from Django Reinhardt like “Douce Ambiance,” which is transformed by Pilc’s piano flourishes in the intro before settling into a joyous jazzy rhythm familiar to fans of Reinhardt.

Wrembel is a devotee of the legendary guitarist. As David Fricke wrote in 2009, he “studied Reinhardt’s fleet precision and soulful swing the hard way — playing in actual Gypsy camps.” He lived in the Paris neighborhood where Reinhardt spent his final years and considers him an essential musician.

“Django is to the guitar what Bach is to the keyboard,” he said. “When you practice Django, you become a better guitarist; it’s automatic. You will understand the guitar better, you will see things better, you have a better technique, so everything about your playing is going to be better. Django is an archetypal source like that.”

Triptych’s first movement begins with “Ecco Homo” — an introduction, Wrembel explained. “It means ‘here is the man,’” he said. “It’s the birth of the triptych.” The next section starts with “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” a Wrembel composition that provides insight into what informs him beyond gypsy jazz.

The first song Wrembel recalls hearing as a very young child is Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” He’s progressed past rock, but “those sounds are still there, I make no difference between Debussy, Pink Floyd, Chopin,” he said. “All that’s the same for me.”

There’s a link to the ’70s literary touchstone in Floyd’s song “Echoes,” Wrembel continued. “It’s about an albatross hanging motionless upon the air,” he said. This led him to Richard Bach’s novel, and “the idea of a floating seagull that tries to find what’s noble in its own nature rather than just finding food. It’s a beautiful tale.”

The third section of Triptych is its most ambitious, beginning with “Life In Three Stages Part I: The Child and the Desert,” continuing with “Part II: Building a World” and concluding with “Part III: Old Age, Grace and Wisdom.” The last offers an elegiac cadence that’s gorgeous and haunting, with Wrembel and Pilc the only musicians.

The final movement’s tone reflects Wrembel’s own sentiments.

“I’m 50, I’m entering old age,” he said. “That’s the third stage, where I believe that as an artist, if you keep working and concentrating and studying philosophy, it’s possible to reach very high levels of consciousness. You don’t think the same when you are 50 than when you are 20, and probably you don’t think the same when you are 80 than when you are 50. Every time there is more and more wisdom coming.”

Triptych – Stephane Wrembel Band with Jean-Michel Pilc
When: Friday, Sept. 13, 8 p.m.
Where: Johnson Theatre, 50 Academic Way, Durham
Tickets: $10 and $12 at stephanewrembel.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/09/12

Local music news & events

• Storyteller: A singer-songwriter who rose to prominence during the ’90s folk boom, David Wilcox is a consummate performer, spinning tales and playing heartfelt songs. His latest album, last year’s My Good Friends, is full of mini movies like “Dead Man’s Phone,” “This Is How It Ends” and “Lost Man.” It showcases the tenor of his live shows, as it’s mostly stripped down. Thursday, Sept. 12, 7 p.m., Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road Exeter, $12.50 and up at thewordbarn.com.

• Debauched: Raucous and irreverent, The Gobshites are frequently called “the only Folk ’n’ Irish band that matters” and on their current U.S. tour, the merch table includes Make America Drunk Again stickers. The Boston-based acoustic punk rockers are the perfect fit for a show at a venerable downtown pub as the halfway to St. Patrick’s day mark approaches — which is Sept. 17, by the way. Friday, Sept. 13, 9 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $10 at the door, 21+.

• Believable: Well-regarded Fleetwood Mac tribute band Silver Springs performs in Manchester. Named after the song that Stevie Nicks memorably sang while staring holes into Lindsay Buckingham on VH1 — which they replicate in their shows — the group sticks to the late ’70s and later version of Mac, though they do unearth a scorching “Oh Well” from the Peter Green era. Saturday, Sept. 14, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $39 at palacetheare.org.

• Familial: After years of sticking to his own solo music, A.J. Croce began doing Croce by Croce concerts, paying tribute to his songwriter father. Fittingly, the first song of his dad’s he recorded was “I Got A Name.” Jim Croce died in a plane crash when his son was 2 years old. Later, he found a musical connection by studying reels of tape for clues about his artistic process. Sunday, Sept. 15, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $67 and up at tupelomusichall.com.

• Legitimate: When the Byrds recorded Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1965, Roger McGuinn was the only band member in the studio; the rest of the musicians were the famous Wrecking Crew. McGuinn’s scripted one-man show is both acoustic and electric, a look back from his folkie days to his time in the Brill Building, and his role helping shape folk rock. Wednesday, Sept. 18, 7:30 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $45.75 at ccanh.com.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (PG-13)

Winona Ryder brings Lydia Deetz back to the infamous ghost house in Connecticut in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a Tim Burton-directed sequel to his 1988 movie.

Lydia (Ryder) is now grown up and trading on her teenhood in the ghost house by working as a talk show host/psychic medium who visits other haunted houses to commune with their ghosts. Across town (New York City I think), her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has transitioned from sculpture to video and performance art. At a fancy girls’ school, Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is enduring taunts due to her mother’s ghosty fame. The three Deetzes come together when Delia learns that her husband, Charles, has died (from a decapitation, which is helpful for reasons you’re free to Google). They return to the family’s legendarily haunted country house to bury Charles and clear out and sell the house.

Delia’s artsy-chic funeral is interrupted by Lydia’s sorta-boyfriend/sleazy manager Rory (Justin Theroux, doing an excellent job at being very slappable) proposing to marry Lydia two days hence, on Halloween. Astrid and Delia do not like Rory, Lydia even seems to not like Rory. But he bullies her into saying yes. And perhaps she’s vulnerable from the loss of her father, from the death of Astrid’s father and the subsequent difficult relationship between mother and daughter, and from the disturbing Beetlejuice sightings she’s been having lately. Meanwhile, Astrid storms off and meet-cutes Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy reading Dostoevsky.

And then meanwhile meanwhile: Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) is working a desk job in the afterlife. His ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), who had been boxed away in multiple pieces, reconstitutes herself with help from a staple gun and goes around sucking the souls out of the dead, making them, uh, deader. Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), an action star in life, has become some kind of detective in the afterlife and is trying to find Delores. And a headless Charles Deetz wanders around, trying to get to the great beyond.

“More things!” feels like the approach in this movie. Astrid’s dad was a constantly-on-the-go activist! Astrid is also socially conscious maybe! Lydia’s crappy boyfriend won’t let her take medicine! Deliah has to postpone her art show! Astrid wants to travel! Lydia has no confidence for no particular reason! I feel like we could have gotten to the Beetlejuice factory faster and with more impact if we had sliced some of these characters (Delores, Wolf Jackson) away and given the remaining characters, Astrid in particular, more depth and personality. Astrid pretty much begins and ends at “surly teen.”

The movie’s climax features a musical scene that feels like it was created by somebody who was told about the “Day-O” scene in the 1988 movie and then made their own aggressively “look at how wacky this is” version with a different song. I found it flat and sparkless in a way that very much mirrored the movie overall. We’re getting a kind of second-hand, recreation-of-the-original version of the Beetlejuice story, not one that feels like a new adventure with familiar characters. Actually, Lydia in particular doesn’t even feel like the same character. In 1988, Lydia was a proto-Daria gothy teen with opinions and spunkiness; here, she’s kind of a mushy drip.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has moments of visual cleverness but the weirdness, silliness and fun of the Beetlejuice universe feels muted. C+

Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Tim Burton with a screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/09/12

Slowdive, “kisses (Daniel Avery Remix)” b/w “kisses – sky ii” [Grouper remix] (Dead Oceans Records)

I haven’t given much love to this English shoegaze band over the years, mostly owing to there always being enough shoegaze bands around to fill a football stadium, and besides, for a time there I thought the genre had peaked with Raveonettes. But sure, they’re fine, despite the fact that they were broken up for 20 years (1995 to 2014), and nowadays they have a sort of hallowed status among Gen Xers and pan-goths in general. The band’s 2003 album Everything Is Alive resulted in crazy levels of love, with the Pitchfork writer padding his review of that album’s single “kisses” with something about how it’s easy to write a good shoegaze song but difficult to write a great one. What a world-smashingly generic utterance; all he really needed to say was that he liked it, with its Cure guitar line and haunting-in-a-good-way, New Order-nicking vocal line (on Neil Halstead’s part anyway). Techno producer Avery’s remix turns it into a spazzing drum ’n’ bass rinseout that’s completely unnecessary, and meanwhile Grouper’s version is drowned in processing. Just stick with the original, folks. Ahem, the thing that’s missing from all this is the fact that the tune borrows a lot of its melodic steez from U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Ahem. C— Eric W. Saeger

Capilla Ardiente, Where Gods Live and Men Die (High Roller Records)

Ah, a doom metal album from a Santiago, Chile-based band. In case you weren’t aware of it, Black Sabbath’s 13 was a terrible album, but unfortunately a lot of young whippersnappers have mistaken it for a worthy template, which seems to be the case here: a lot of slow, meandering grinding signifying not much. To the band’s credit, the singer does as good a Chris Cornell imitation as the guy from Wolves In The Throne Room used to, and boy, the album cover would be as awesome as the one for Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog if it weren’t for the stupid golden castle in the background. For what it is, it stands as further proof that Chile really rocks, or however the kids say it nowadays — ah, it’s “based,” that’s it — so there’s that anyway. Closeout track “As I Lie on the Summit” is their push single, and it’s OK, but if it isn’t epic metal as opposed to doom, I’m Granny Clampett. B — Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey, guys, do you know all the things that have happened on Sept. 13, I mean on that particular calendar date, through the corridors of history? Well, for starters, on Sept. 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss became the first recorded person to be unalived in a motor vehicle accident in the United States, specifically in New York City, where else! That’s a very portentous thing, because as for the 2024 version of Sept. 13, we have new albums coming our way to mark the occasion, and the list is pretty freakin’ big, because it’s already holiday gift-buying season, according to, you know, the people in the C suites who want you to buy stuff! If you’re a millennial hipster who hasn’t sold out to The Man and gotten a job (or five) yet because you’re quite comfortable sponging off your parents and eating their chicken tendies, you’re officially still cool and relevant, so I assume you want to know about the upcoming new album from (formerly?) tuneless indie band Snow Patrol, The Forest Is The Path! This band is from Dundee, Scotland, which is basically the most horrible city in the country, and that makes them relevant, so let’s see what they’ve been up to since their Aughts heyday, back when I didn’t quite hate their music but had no idea how anyone could possibly like it, because it was like a Loot Crate version of Lifehouse or whatnot. Of course, they started doing a lot better in the mid-Aughts, with albums like A Hundred Million Suns, but in those days I was really only paying attention to trance DJs and goth bands, so I don’t know. And so, fam, that’s where we stand with Snow Patrol, with me having no idea what I’m even talking about, because for all I know they were as faux-important as the Killers until their 2018 album Wildness, which Pitchfork sort of laughed at, but not cruelly. I have no desire to play catch-up with these fellers; instead I’ll just listen to the new single from this one, the title track. Wait, why does this tune sound like a cross between Sigur Rós and M83, what are they even doing? It’s got a mopey-epic-mopey structure; are the Aughts coming back already, like, am I going to have to start preparing to hear nine million bands that sound like Spacemen 3 and Franz Ferdinand? Why is this being done to me?

• Indie-electronic producer Trentemøller is back again, keeping up the pace, even though he’s 51 now, don’t you feel oooold? Dreamweaver is his first LP since 2022’s Memoria, which barely rated in the U.S. at all, but he’s still big in Denmark and such, mostly because he’s influenced by actually relevant ’80s bands like Joy Division and Siouxsie. The sort-of title track, “Dreamweavers,” is slow, deep shoegaze stuff, with plenty of My Bloody Valentine going on, except quirkier and more electronic. All set here.

• Huh, will you look at that, it’s a new album from well-adjusted 1980s alt-rock figure Nick Lowe, titled Indoor Safari! Ha ha, any of you fellow old people remember when he was relevant, in the ’80s, with the soapy alt-rock hit “Cruel To Be Kind?” Right, I’m trying to forget it too, but the new singles “Trombone” and “Went To A Party” are like Roy Orbison redux, picture Eddie Cochran on sleeping pills. Right, OK, so he had his dumb hit 40 years ago, I really don’t have time for this.

• Lastly it’s Miranda Lambert, the second Mrs. Blake Shelton, i.e. the one before Gwen Whatsername, with her newest LP, Postcards From Texas! The single “Wranglers” is a slow-burn thing combining Dolly Parton and ’80s hair-metal, it’s actually not all that bad, and she’s a real-life nice person, so let’s leave it at that.

— Eric W. Saeger

Gate City flavor

Enjoy a world of eats at Nashua’s Multicultural Festival

Nashua is one of the most diverse cities in New Hampshire. According to Data USA (datausa.io), 13 percent of Nashua’s population is Hispanic, and 15 percent were born outside the United States. Seven percent of Nashuans are Asian, two percent identify as Black, and another four percent are multiracial.

This year’s annual Nashua Multicultural Festival, on Saturday, Sept. 14, will be a celebration of food, art, dance and more, from some of Nashua’s many cultures. Jasmine Allen is part of the Festival’s planning committee and is in charge of outreach and social media for it.

“Nashua is considered a Welcoming City,” Allen said, “and we are planning the Multicultural Festival around the National Welcoming Week as a city that is welcoming to all diversity and cultures. And so we’ll be having a flag parade, we’ll be having some wonderful cultural dances and poetry — things like that. So just a fun mix of great stuff.”

One of the best gateways to learning about other cultures is through their foods. One of the focuses of this weekend’s Festival is food that many people in New Hampshire are likely unfamiliar with. Soel Sistas Soul Food (30 Temple St, Suite 202, Nashua, 943-1469, soelsistas.com) will be providing some of the food. “They do mostly soul food, things like chicken and collard greens, things like that,” Allen said.

Iraida Muñoz is the lead for the Multicultural Festival, the chair committee, and Equity Officer for the Division of Public Health and Community Services in Nashua. She is very excited about this weekend’s food, particularly from Soel Sistas.

“Of course, we’re going to have Soel Sistas,” Muñoz said excitedly. “She is planning to bring some Hispanic food that is going to be a surprise for us. But she’s very well-known in the city by her mac & cheeses, which are quite good. People love it. [Another restaurant] is going to be Sabor Brasil. Their specialty is obviously some red meat, some chicken as well, and they are planning to bring some pasta, some salad and some appetizers. And they are going to do like sample sizes, so people can enjoy all of them in a very affordable way. So that’s one of the things that we are focusing on — affordability, so people will have options from very affordable food to a little more on the expensive side.”

Another vendor that Muñoz is excited about is Empanellie’s. “This is a couple,” she said. “They do cook Hispanic food, obviously, especially empanadas. Their empanadas are very well-known in this area and they have more than 15 kinds. They are also bringing the typical Hispanic food like rice and beans. So it’s going to be Puerto Rican style and Colombia style that they are bringing to the table.”

A wide variety of drinks will be available, from horchata (a Latin American rice drink) to Asian fruit teas and juices. Muñoz emphasized that there will not be any alcohol served at the Festival. “This is a family-friendly event,” she said. But there will be beverages from Gong Cha, a Taiwanese-style beverage shop. “They have green tea, black tea, watermelon, winter melon, Muñoz said. “They have some based in cream, so the creme brulee, and brown sugar milk tea is very popular. And those kinds of drinks, people love it. They sold out last time and they are looking forward to coming back.”

Jasmine Allen said the breadth of types of food at the Festival is symbolic of a major cultural change that New Hampshire, and Nashua in particular, is going through. “I literally feel like New Hampshire is going through a renaissance period,” she said. “It’s very exciting.”

Nashua Multicultural Festival
When: Saturday, Sept. 14, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Nashua Public Library (2 Court St., Nashua) and Library parking lot. Festival parking is available at any City lot.
Footage from last year’s Festival can be viewed on YouTube, under the heading “Nashua Multicultural Festival 2023”

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