Sundown Salon #01: SALON INAUGURAL
April 1st, 2001, 6:00 - 10:00pm
music:
Book of Giant Pets including
Adam Goldman
Melissa Thorne
Julian Gross
light installation:
Mark Allen
INTERVIEW: TRYING TO REMEMBER THE BEGINNING
A conversation between Adam Goldman and Melissa Thorne of Book of Giant Pets {later to become Bedroom Walls} and artist Mark Allen {who went on to found Machine Project in 2004}
Melissa Thorne: Fritz bought the house, and immediately conceived of having social events there. He was into Schindler and these LA modernists, and I think he liked the idea of following in the steps of their social / art / experimental scene, like the house could be some sort of cultural gathering spot. Also, the architecture really lent itself to being thought of as a performance space: the “cave” downstairs has a natural stage formed by a split level and spiral staircase. Giant Pets was pretty new as a band: we had played a few shows, including another “salon” at our friend Esther Mira’s house. We started practicing together sometime around the fall of 2000.
Mark Allen: Fritz talked a lot about opening up the space and letting whatever happen. I'd been making robotic mirror sculptures that year, and being friends with the band and Fritz, they asked me to light the show.
MT: Early on, there was some effort to make the piece site-specific. Fritz lives on Sundown Drive, and the idea was for salon events to take place at sunset. Initially, there were conversations between Mark and the band about wearing costumes that would actually illuminate, changing color to resemble some idea of a sunset.
MA: That didn’t happen. I made 20 mirrored hemispheres, each the size of a baseball. Each sphere was connected to a motor, which was connected to a computer. The mirrored spheres were randomly wall-mounted in the space. The lower level of the dome is like a cave, in fact I think it's called "the cave". I was thinking of the spheres as a kind of underground growth, like those blind fish they find deep in caves, or the ones in the ocean with little light stalks growing off their heads. The mirror balls would be like an organism that evolved to catch and reflect as much light as possible. Giant Pets had a really beautiful song called “Dots on the Wall,” that Melissa sang, and I think the idea of the mirror lights might have started there.
Adam Goldman: We played a set of about 10 songs. Our music was pretty quiet, so the cave seemed like a good venue — no bar noise and chatter to interfere with the sound. I decided to make a program for the show because most of our songs at that time were instrumentals. It seemed to me that people might like some idea of what the songs were "about," which is funny to me now.
MT: But people really liked that program: a few told me later that they had saved it.
AG: My father happened to be in town on business when we did the show. He came wearing one of his classic outfits: a charcoal grey sport coat over a black turtleneck. We played a song that I had written for him as a 60th birthday present. For some reason, I let Julian come up with a title for that one. Naturally, it’s a completely ridiculous and inappropriate title — “Smoothly Woven Arms”. We also covered The Smiths’ “Death of a Disco Dancer”, which was a kind of dream come true for me. I think there was a moment during the climactic guitar cacophony when I actually felt that I could really enjoy playing long, messy guitar solos for thousands of people as a career.
MT: I remember that we were still sort of inept at the transitions between songs; Julian had to tell jokes to fill the gaps.
JG: My favorite part was Mark’s lighting. When playing, when drinking, when people were talking to me...all I was really paying attention to the whole time, were the lights.
MA: The mirrored spheres were individually lit, and moved at semi-random: I programmed about 8 different patterns so that each song could have a different look. Humans love to find patterns in everything, and although there was no direct connection between the lights and the music, most people thought the music was driving the lights.
MT: I think we started playing before sunset, and as the light level diminished in the house, the swirling mirror patterns became more pronounced. It felt like being slowly immersed in a dark, starry sky. It was a dreamy, sleepy, romantic atmosphere. People were sitting and lying on the floor, or draped on the spiral staircase.
MA: We thought a smoke machine would be a nice touch, but people didn’t like it in their faces. I remember running around spraying fog everywhere to try and get the perfect look for the lights, and then looking at the audience and realizing they were gasping for air.
AG: It was also the birth of Bud Light: Fritz wouldn’t let us have red wine in the space (light carpet) — so we bought all of this cheap beer. At the end of the night, there were about five cases of unwanted Bud Light, which became the band drink of choice.
MT: I remember feeling really happy about the experience, which was essentially friends entertaining other friends. After we finished, someone told me that we sounded like Yo la Tengo, which I took to be the ultimate compliment. Also, after we finished and everyone left, Fritz told me that his grandmother had just passed away that night, just before we started playing. He thought that the beginning of the salons that evening had been a beautiful sort of elegy.
**Mark Allen is the founder and director of Machine Project, a non-profit performance/installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science and poetry. His research interests include social and relational art practices and the creative applications of electronics and technology.
**Bedroom Walls has been hailed as "the next breakout group from Los Angeles" by the SF Bay Guardian. They enchant fans with a voluptuous sound they call Romanticore. Armed with a narcotic grace and a bone-dry sense of humor, the band's songs aim to instruct listeners in the proper use of melancholy. Or, as Bedroom Walls told the Los Angeles Times, "We just want to make people sad."
I'VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT DOTS ON THE WALL
traffic cones
overtones
senior citizens homes
parking lots
black socks
tied in a slipknot
i've been thinking a lot
about dots on the wall
and it won't be too long
until they're all gone away
magazines
lima beans
wear the same pair
of dirty jeans
i've been thinking a lot
about dots on the wall
and it won't be too long
until they're all gone away
{lyrics by Bedroom Walls}