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Lee Renaldo and the Dust at Union Pool with Steve Gunn on Valentine’s eve; treat yourself to a bouquet of pastoral psychedelic cool.
Lee Ranaldo and The Dust will be touring in 2014 in support of the Last Night On Earth album, released October 2013, the followup to 2012’s Between The Times and The Tides. Opener, Brooklyn’s Steve Gunn, is a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile’s Violators, and one-half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo. Get thee to Union Pool this Thursday night.
The band Morricone Youth specialize in life film scoring. Photo courtesy Nighthawk
In live performances, a musician, a dancer, a singer, an actor will spend weeks in rehearsals, hitting every mark, rehearsing to perfection; but each performance is necessarily filled with unexpected moments, sometimes errors, never to be replicated in just the same way twice.
In spite of what they are called, silent films of yore were rarely silent. It was standard for live musicians to play in a theater providing a musical arrangement for a film, emotional cues for an audience to react to, and even entertainment in its own right for those who wanted to see pianists, violinists, or sometimes a small orchestra perform. A screeching violin can warn us that our favorite actress is in danger; a tapping drum can mimic the hoof beats of a trotting horse, and a sliding horn can tell us when to laugh when Buster Keaton braves death again.