Lately I’ve been reading the second-latest book from philosopher and Hinternet founder Justin Smith-Ruiu, 2022’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (A History, A Philosophy, A Warning). One passage early on in this lovely book struck me as particularly relevant to the work we do here at Oregon ArtsWatch.

Here, chew on this:

”The earth has moved under our feet in just the past few decades. The largest industry in the world now is quite literally the attention-seeking industry. Just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the global economy was dominated by natural-resource extraction, today the world’s largest companies have grown as large as they have entirely on the promise of providing to their clients the attention, however fleeting, of their billions of users.

”And these users are, at the same time, being used. One vivid and disconcerting term that has begun circulating in social media to describe anyone who spends time online is ‘data-cow.’ The role that users of ‘free’ online platforms occupy might sometimes feel creative, or as if it has something in common with traditional work or leisure. But this role sometimes appears closer to that of a domesticated animal that is valuable only to the extent that it has its very self to give. We do not usually provide our bodily fluids, and are not usually asked to do so, though sites such as Ancestry.com do ask for saliva as part of their data-collecting efforts, and health bracelets and other such devices owned by Apple and Amazon are increasingly discovering ways to monitor a number of our vital fluid levels. But even if we are not giving our fluids, we are giving something that has proven more valuable to the new economy than milk ever was in the system of industrial agriculture: information about who we are, what we do, what we think, what we fear. Some of us continue to have old-fashioned careers in the twenty-first century – we are doctors, professors, lawyers, and truck drivers. Yet the main economy is now driven not by what we do, but by the information extracted from us, not by our labor in any established sense, but by our data. This is a revolution at least as massive as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it. Whatever else happens, it is safe to say that for the rest of all of our lifetimes, we will only be living out the initial turbulence of this entry into a new historical epoch.

”This then is the first thing that is truly new about the present era: a new sort of exploitation, in which human beings are not only exploited in the use of their labor for extraction of natural resources; rather, their lives are themselves the resource, and they are exploited in the extraction.

”The great engine that is fed upon countless little nibbles of individual human attention, and that must constantly solicit such attention if it is to get fed, runs much more effectively, and is much better able to indulge its voracious appetite, when it appeals to human passion than to human reason, when it entices our first-order desire for dopamine-fueled gratification, than when it invites us to cultivate moral character or pursue long-term goals of betterment of self or world. This gives rise to what we may describe as a general ‘crisis of attention.’ Parents complain of the difficulty of limiting their children’s screen time; the pharmaceutical industry develops new drugs and new avenues of profit in the fight against attention deficit disorders like ADHD; start-ups sell special brain-scanning goggles that shock students back into focus when their attention beings to flag; people of all ages complain that they are no longer able to read a book from cover to cover or even to watch a movie without slipping away to Google some half-remembered trivia about one of its players. The crisis is real, and many-tenatacled.

”Just as the overproduction of material goods is best understood in terms of its ecological consequences, the new crisis of attention is best understood in similarly ecological terms: as a crisis affecting a particular kind of natural being in a particular sort informational landscape, one replete with human-made powers and dangers. As Yves Citton has sharply discerned, with the rise of the internet, global human society has passed into a stage of overproduction of cultural goods (we had already long been living with the overproduction of material goods, however unequally distributed). In these new circumstances, by what means our eyes become locked on this fragment of human intention rather than that one is now among the most pressing matters in both politics and economics, yet understanding it requires us to pay close attention to how the human mind cognizes its surroundings and navigates its way through the world. Both cognitive science and phenomenology thus appear germane in news to basic questions of politics and economics.

”This then is the second new problem of the internet era: the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving.”

Phew! That’s, um, a lot. The book delves into all of this in depth, drawing upon Leibniz and a variety of other philosophers both recent and classical to attempt an understanding of what, exactly, is going on here. Read the book, if you like (and if you can); what concerns us here today is the moral and musical dimensions of that “overproduction of cultural goods,” which comes from Citton’s 2017 book The Ecology of Attention.

Because, well, listen: we spend a lot of time here at ArtsWatch working in the fields of attention, specifically your attention. What we present to your eyes – and, in the case of this here music section, ears – is all, hopefully, useful to you in your efforts at “betterment of self or world.” In last week’s discussion of the ongoing “Sounds Like Portland” festival, we talked about the time-honored conflict between Map and Territory, how the map is of necessity a limited perspective, must be limited in order to be useful.

“Anyways we could go on, list every significant composer in Portland, the long-timers and the newcomers. Which brings us to an important point, which is that the map is not the territory. We usually say that as a way of expressing the limits of our understanding, but another aspect is that the map is useful as a map precisely because it is not the territory. It is a reduction, a curated representation. Curation represents, always, the biases of the curator. But a map is also a guide, and a way of limiting focus for the purpose of comprehensibility. Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.”

We are map-makers, dear reader, and our goal is guide your listening mind through the dark forest of “too much music” into temporary autonomous zones where you might discover something new, or rediscover something old, or just get to know the musical ecosystem you’re a part of instead of letting the infinite content of the algorithmic overlords wash over you and lull you into infinite contentment (special thanks to Arcade Fire for this pun). Truly, if I had my way you’d all turn off your phones, walk out the door, wander into the closest music venue, and check out whatever’s going on there right now. Not that it’s any of my business what you do with your attention.

But I also have a second, semi-ulterior motive: it is to curate and archive this particular musical ecosystem. While the rest of the world chases the latest craze (is Taylor Swift still a big deal or have we moved on to Bad Bunny?) – while the herd grazes the matrix, sleepily getting milked – we want to fill our time capsule up with artifacts from the dark weird forest that is Oregon, circa 2025, anno domini. So even if you’re reading this from outside Portland, outside Oregon, outside the soon-to-be-former USA, a year in the future or ten years, we hope you’ll find some joy in this curated archive. And, yes, that’s part of why I’m always buying vinyl and encouraging you to do the same. When all this crap [gestures vaguely at entire internet] either crashes completely or squeezes authentic human cultural goods out altogether, you’ll be glad you have some physical media made by human hands, hearable by human ears, so you can crank it up and shout into the void, “we were here!”

Anyways, exaggerated doomsaying aside, why not turn off the computer (after you finish reading this column and clicking on the ads embedded herein) and go touch grass? If you live in Portland, for instance, you might walk or ride down to Revolution Hall in Southeast Portland for the return of Oregon Music Hall of Famers Portugal. The Man, who will be celebrating the release of their upcoming tenth album Shish and kicking off a month-long national tour with two sold-out shows on Thursday, November 6 (tonight, if you’re turning this off on Thursday, November 6) and again on Friday, November 7.

Now, here’s the thing: even if you don’t actually go outside tonight or tomorrow night and brave the wild dark forest of Southeast Portland to go hear PTM at Rev Hall (did you notice they’re sold out?) this is as good an excuse as any to give them a listen. Because, well, frankly I take it for granted that you don’t really know these guys. Sure, sure, they’ve got a couple of giant hits, just like Dandy Warhols, and a memorable name, and a fanbase that can sell out two nights at a medium sized venue, but my guess is that the Oregon ArtsWatch readership is more likely to know about Kenji Bunch than some pop-rock band. That’s not a bad thing, of course – it’s my privilege to introduce you to them.

And let me break kayfabe for a moment: this hard-working and generally well-informed Oregon music journalist didn’t know much about this band either, before spending the last week listening obsessively to their output. It’s good stuff! The first album Waiter: “You Vultures!” is quirky and mildly aggressive in a way that perfectly demonstrates why they wanted to move from Alaska to Stumptown. (Comparisons to Mars Volta are probably overstated, but you can hear the comparison; you can always tell what the band is listening to.) Ditto their psychedelic 2009 album The Satanic Satanist, the Danger Mouse-produced 2013 album Evil Friends, and so on. You can get a fair overall introduction to the band’s basic vibe with Oregon City Sessions, recorded “live” in the studio at the tail end of a tour in 2008 and shelved until 2021 (read about that here). Or spend 23 minutes with the oddball early EP It’s Complicated Being A Wizard.

Portugal. The Man performs on November 6 & 7 at Revolution Hall, but you missed out, so you’ll just have to wander around the dog park with your headphones instead.

What a pain

Not sold out yet: Ural Thomas and The Pain’s 12th anniversary show on November 15 at Mississippi Studios in North Portland. The Ural Thomas story is a beautiful one, and perfectly Portlandy. Short version: professional soul singer from Portland toured throughout the fifties and sixties before retiring from the music business and returning home in 1968; four decades later a Portland DJ and drummer sought Thomas out; they put together a band which plays around town regularly and has now released three albums; in 2019 Thomas was inducted as Oregon Hall of Fame’s Artist of the Year. You can read the long version of all that right here, and you can pick up the most recent album, 2022’s Dancing Dimensions, on vinyl via Bandcamp:

Special thanks to Wikipedia user Mattsjc for this pic of Ural and the boys at Mississippi three years ago:

Ural Thomas and The Pain celebrate their 12th anniversary November 15 at Mississippi Studios in North Portland. More information and tickets are available here.

When you are the moon, the best form you can be is a full moon

The same weekend, November 14 & 15 at Twilight Cafe & Bar on the corner of Southeast Grand and Belmont, a spate of mostly PNW bands will attempt to gather up not only all thirteen hearts but the ever-elusive Queen of Spades. If they can accomplish this heroic feat, they will be rewarded with the coveted score of zero for the hand, while the rest of us will have to take twenty-six points each. It’s a risky move – if anybody bails for the Ural Thomas show, the punks will be left holding the bag.

We’re referring, of course, to “Shoot the Moon Fest.” The lineup for night one:

• Holy Locust, on tour from New Orleans; they’re hitting Ghost Town Outfitters in Eugene the night before and will be swinging back through Corvallis on the 22nd (after a trip round Northwest Washington and a night in clean-as-can-be Vancouver B.C.);
• Olympian crust-popsters Pigeon Pit;
• Portland’s utterly unironic outlaw country act Jesco Payne and the Painkillers;
• The even more unironically country Portlander Lightnin’ Luke.

And the lineup for night two is pretty much pure Nadine Records:

• Nasalrod, the label’s cornerstone supergroup and unquestionably the most important band in Portland that hasn’t blown up with a fucking TV ad or something yet;
• Inny, upon whose couch the present author used to crash pretty regularly, back in the pre-sobriety days, about which the less said the better;
• Gone to Crotan, who seem to have appeared from nowhere as mysteriously as the vanished New Englanders they’re named after;
• Mikey Classic, he of the “hobocore” act The Goddamn Gallows.

Now, if you’re looking for Portland Weird, this is it. Remember that scene in Slumdog Millionaire where Dev Patel is all like, “You wanted to see a bit of the real India? Here it is!” You probably won’t get your tires stolen or your ass kicked (touch wood), but you will get a nice taste of what the dirty, gonzo, close-to-the-river, Portland bar world is actually like.

Or sit back, stay home, and enjoy the rewards without the risks, via the Miracle of Internet:

Shoot the Moon fest happens November 14 & 15 at Twilight Cafe & Bar in Southeast Portland. Tickets and more information available here (night one) and here (night two).

Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?

About this time last year, we published a roundup of orchestras around the state of Oregon – meaning the ones outside of the Portland Blast Radius. One such is the Oregon East Symphony, now in its 40th season in Pendleton, just past where Interstate 84 parts ways with the Mighty Columbia River as they continue their separate journeys toward (respectively) Canada and Idaho.

All those orchestras are pretty regularly playing Beethoven and whatnot, which is great, but this one stood out for a pair of very good reasons: the centerpiece is by an Oregon composer, on an Oregon theme. We’re talking about Malheur Symphony by Chris Thomas, commissioned in 2019 by the Central Oregon Symphony in Bend, where Thomas lives (when he’s not in Los Angeles doing film and video game scoring work). OES performs it on November 9 in Pendleton.

The composer and his symphony are both terrific stories. One at a time.

Thomas was born and raised in Pendleton, graduated from Pendleton High School, made his way to University of Southern California, interned with famed film composers Christopher Young and Michael Giacchino, and eventually made his way back to Oregon. He now lives in Bend when he’s not needed in Mordor, and says it’s helped his composition life (read all about that in this recent profile for Bend paper the Source).

COS commissioned the symphony following the 2016 occupation that made Malheur a household name throughout the first couple months of that strange year. The feeling was that Malheur was a lot more than a wildlife refuge and associated culture war struggle; it’s been home to humans for at least 15,000 years (you read that comma right) and was designated a protected habitat by the notorious conservationist Teddy Roosevelt. Thomas’ five-movement symphony focuses on the region’s natural splendor and even quotes specific bird song. You can read all about that in OPB’s story about the premiere right here, and listen to the composer himself discuss it right here:

And, shall wonders never cease, you can listen to the premiere of Malheur Symphony from the comfort of your own home, because the Central Oregon Symphony had the foresight to record the premiere and the courage to release it. Listen to that recording on Thomas’ Soundcloud page right here:

And Central Oregon Symphony isn’t done with Thomas yet; they’ll premiere a newly-commissioned work on their spring concerts in Bend next April. Stay tuned!

Oregon East Symphony performs Chris Thomas’ “Malheur Symphony” at 2:30 pm on November 9 at Vert Auditorium in Pendleton. More information and tickets are available right here.

It’s a mystery

Last week we offhandedly referred to soprano and Renegade Opera co-founder Madeline Ross as “steadily emerging as Portland’s greatest singer of contemporary music (she does a mean Queen of the Night too).” And seriously, Ross just keeps showing up all over the place: singing Mozart dressed as a bird; picking up memorable roles in operas like Dark Sisters and The Rose Elf (both with OrpheusPDX); taking the co-lead in Renegade’s recent production of Waking the Witch; modestly but impactfully joining the corps with famed local vocal ensembles like Resonance and In Mulieribus. In 2022 she was included in Part 4 of OAW photojournalist K.B. Dixon’s ongoing “The Cultural Landscape” series. One of these days someone’s going to write an opera for her and they’ll win a Pulitzer and I’ll never get tired of saying “I told you so.”

This weekend she’s singing Caroline Shaw at stop one of the Concert Crawl. Shaw’s vocal music has the striking quality of being mostly singable by pretty much anybody but also of being singable perfectly by only a select few. Ross is one of those select few.

A few years ago, Oregon’s finest composer collective – Cascadia Composers – produced a György Ligeti-themed concert called “A Ligeti Odyssey: The First 100 Years.” (We’re still a little bummed they didn’t go with “Ligeti Split.”) In what has become a regular concert motif for Cascadia, this one paired music by the Hungarian groundbreaker alongside Ligeti-inspired music composed by members of their own ranks (Michael Johanson, Daria Baiocchi, Gary Noland, Antonio Celaya, John Bilotta, Paul Safar, and Alex Shapira).

You can watch the whole thing right here on Cascadia’s florid YouTube channel, but the video from that concert that really stood out – and which we continue to share around, and think about whenever Ross comes up – is this rendering of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre:

This particular piece is an arrangement of an arrangement by conductor Elgar Howarth of three arias from Ligeti’s deeply bizarre 1977 opera Le Grand Macabre; specifically, it consists of arias sung by the Chief of the Secret Police, which is sort of perfect for a singer famous for embodying Mozart’s Tito as a paranoid modern day president.

Anyways, that’s happening again this month when ChatterPDX brings Ross and Reed College professor Rebecca Stager (same pianist as at the Cascadia concert) to the Pacific Center in Downtown Portland. Also, Steger and another Reedie, Rachel Modlin, will play a handful of four-hand pieces: Sonatina BWV 106 “Actus tragicus” (Gyorgy Kurtag’s arrangement of music from a J.S. Bach cantata); Igor Stravinsky’s Five Easy Pieces (probably composed for the composer’s kids); and Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite.

ChatterPDX presents Madeline Ross, Rebecca Stanger, and Rachel Modlin at 10:30 am on Sunday, November 23, at Pacific Center in Downtown Portland. Tickets and more information are available right here.

No sleep till

The same weekend as the Malheur Symphony, which is to say this weekend (November 9 specifically), Metropolitan Youth Symphony and flutist Adam Eccleston will be premiering Venezuelan-Oregonian composer Giancarlo Castro D’Addona’s flute concerto Spirits of Wildness at The Schnitz in Downtown Portland. You can read all about the concerto in our upcoming interview with the composer; we mention it here only to note that you could just barely squeeze in the Caroline Shaw Concert Crawl – part three of which is starts at 5 pm on Sunday at Revolution Hall – and still make it across the river by 7:30 for the flute concerto. Busy day! Ditch the car and use Tri-Met: it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about parking.

Anywho, the MYS concert we want to talk about today is on November 24 at their new home in Brooklyn – the neighborhood in Southeast Portland, that is, not the Borough in New York. The 45th Parallel Universe strings – the same folks you can hear playing all of Caroline Shaw’s fabulous string quartet music this Sunday – will be there, and so will “the pan-dimensional Portland harmony and orchestral duo” Wonderly.

Now, the 45|| folks you know – it’s probably gonna be Marilyn de Oliveira, Greg Ewer, Emily Cole, that lot. As for Wonderly, well, unless you listen to the New York Times Daily podcast you might not have heard them.

Which is a shame, because their music is rad. Here’s what their recent covers album, Appropriate ‘til Death, sounds like:

Who doesn’t love a good Bowie cover? And here’s what their 2022 album Story We Tell, which “explores topics of mythical air pirates, balloon bombs, disappearing towns, manipulative demigods, mansplaining, self-care, and going to Canada,” sounds like:

Well shucks, that’s Ural Thomas himself on “Please Please You” – how it all ties together! And here’s the fellas that make up this little pan-dimensional duo:

Lord have mercy, that’s Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk. Real life Portland celebrities! Jim is the founder and owner of not one but two of the finest music venues in Portland, both of which have already made an appearance in this here column: Mississippi Studios and Revolution Hall. Jim is also yet another Oregon Music Hall of Fame inductee, having been admitted to those hallowed halls just this year.

Ben, meanwhile, is the mad genius behind Low Bar Chorale. You don’t know about Low Bar Chorale? It’s basically group karaoke with a live band, which is even cooler than it sounds. Here’s how they describe it:

“You show up at a bar or music venue. You grab a drink and within minutes you’re singing the hell out of your favorite rock song with a hundred new friends and a killer band. In three-part harmony, no less!

”Welcome to the Low Bar Chorale and what we all not-so-secretly wish singing could be.

”Our shows combine music, comedy, and some good ol’ rock and roll magic to transform the audience from a group of strangers into an epic chorus – the room comes alive with harmony. We’re drop-in only: no auditions, rehearsals or commitments ever. We’ve got an incredible band, and we’ve performed with some amazing artists, including Built To Spill, Guster, Portugal. The Man, Storm Large, and others.

“Over the past few years, we’ve toured throughout Australia, Alaska, California, and throughout the Pacific Northwest.

”The best thing is that ANYONE CAN DO THIS. No prior musical experience required. Just show up with your love of music and an open mind, and we guarantee you’ll sound great.

”So if this sounds like something you’d love, what are you waiting for?”

Oh, and here they are at pre-pandemic Mississippi singing a Storm Large classic:

And you can experience this for yourself – while you’re out touching grass and listening to Portugal. The Man on your headphones and trying not to get your new Nasalrod vinyl poached on the streetcar – on November 25, with “Chorale for a Cause” at Mississippi Studios. Just in time for Thanksgiving!

MYS moves into their new home at 3880 Southeast Brooklyn Street in Portland on November 24; tickets and more information are available here.

Low Bar Chorale presents “Chorale for a Cause,” a benefit for Oregon Justice Resource Center and Project POOCH, in partnership with Willamette Week’s Give!Guide, on November 25 at Mississippi Studios. Tickets and more information are available right here.

GTFO

And with that we leave you, dear readers. Log off! Go outside! Touch the damn grass!