Sun Circle/Wind-Up Bird/Ramona Cordova – Circle of Hope, 2/17/07

Er, so, what an interesting place to start.

Circle of Hope is a “cell” or what you and I might call a “church,” of Christians who worship in a big open room on the second floor of a building near Broad and Washington. If you get close enough to the window, you can see right smack up Broad to the skyscrapers of the business district – which throws light on the distance between there and the Circle’s relatively shabby surroundings, but also emphasizes the church’s insistence on its connection to modern urban life. Evidently pro-social-justice, and also emphatically pro-Jesus; I guess they’d tell you there’s no difference in between the two.

You come in from a door on Broad; a few girls smoking outside point out the entrance to you (guess you ignored the big “WORSHIP HERE” sandwich board outside.) You come up through an unfinished stairwell, pay your $6, and – if you’re by yourself – you grab a piece of wall and lean against it. Because the Falwellization of American Christendom has conditioned you to expect certain things, you cast an equivocal eye on the crowd, but they’re just the same morass of hoodies, asymmetrical hair, and iffy beards you’d see anywhere else like this. The room is super-clean, and big, and has a great hardwood floor; there is a lounge in the back with good art and furniture, and a nursery further back in the space. It’s a mix of cool-kid youth group and an old-fashioned social-servicing religious institution, and you admire it even though you feel your own secularism as acutely as ever.

The quasi-religious setting turns out to be more or less spot-on for the two acts I see in their entirety. The first act, whose set I mostly miss and whose name I don’t catch, is a couple of guys manipulating feedback and making exploding noises; kind of a weird thing to wander into, and it’s over pretty quickly. My excuse for missing them: I needed to grab dinner, which I got at the S. Broad Street McDonald’s. A surprisingly classy place, if I say so myself! It’s got an elaborately designed ceiling with funky IKEA-looking light fixtures, and a couple of TVs are showing CNN, meaning the random homeless people who stroll in to buy coffee are more politically enlightened than I am.

Enough about the Broad Street McDonald’s! Sorry. So – next act: Sun Circle, two gentlemen from Burlington, VT, Greg Davis and Zach Wallace. They set up speakers in the four corners of the room, and seat themselves, facing each other, in the middle of the room. Shoes are taken off; an incense stick is lit. Greg toys with an little machine, and at this point you almost half-expect Celtic trance music to emerge – but instead, it’s THE LOUDEST FUCKING THING I’VE EVER HEARD – a single note that sounds a little like a chainsaw attacking an organ. Greg modulates it a little bit, using the amplifier’s torrent of complaint as a harmonic accompaniment to the underlying drone. Eventually, the two guys start singing – vocalizing? – whatever.

The words to the song are “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Sometimes they’ll sing the same note as the drone, or an octave higher, which gives the room an even heavier, more saturated feel. Sometimes they sing about a step lower, which gives the sound tautness, and makes you wait for it to reconcile to itself. As we move along (even if it feels faintly absurd to suggest that this music “moves”) Greg ups the level of distortion, and both of the guys start to wail with more intensity. For me, this is passing out of the realm of music and into something like experience; I’m a passive recipient rather than an active listener. A crescendo happens; the guys, red-faced, take it down a notch, and abruptly shut everything off and say “thank you.” Everyone looks exhausted while they’re clapping. My musical tastes don’t really lean this way – I have Shins tickets for next month, for chrissakes – but I’m pretty impressed at this feat of stamina, which lasted almost a half-hour. It’s the kind of cleansing you can only get from rough treatment.

The next act, The Wind-Up Bird, is a guy named Joseph Grimm who would have been mightily impressive had he not been doing much the same thing as Sun Circle. In fact, he invited Zach and Greg to resume their earlier positions, and began playing the same song, except with a dial-tone sound instead of a chainsaw and lyrics that go “oooooo” instead of “aaaaaa.” At one point – this is new – Grimm picks up a violin and away on different strings; his singing sometimes moves into something like throat singing, and he continues to use his computer to add new sounds, building the sound up to a heavy electronic squall. Again, it cuts out, leaving the three guys singing in falsetto alongside the dial-tone sound.

Something a little unexpected happens. Grimm says, “Thank you – we’re going to take a quick break, and then come back for a short bit. It’s just me, Greg, and Zach on the gongs.” And just like, that, the guys walk off to a corner of the room and return with three heretofore-unnoticed giant friggin’ gongs. Shoes come off again. Grimm takes his padded mallets and holds them up for almost a minute, silent, and then starts lightly brushing them against the gong. The other two follow suit, Zach with a driving tappa-tappa and Greg going at it with just one mallet. It sounds like wind, I guess. Things build up after a while; if you’ve ever heard a gong struck in a symphony room, you can perhaps imagine what happens with three men beating them rapidly in a smallish room. I can’t imagine how long this goes on for. As the guys get a little tired, chinks start to appear; bum notes (notes?) are heard amidst the gonging. It dies down. Greg stops; Zach stops; Grimm stops. They still hold their mallets up, though. After a while, they put them down. A guy in the back claps twice, then stops. And we sit there, totally silent. Is this a moment where we’re supposed to let our scrubbed-out mind rest? Are we being fucked with? In any case, Zach gets up after about three minutes of silence, and the chatter slooowly comes back to life.

I’ve heard Ramona Cordova’s music before, and I’d love to find out what the person who put this bill together was thinking. A hour and a half of punishing zen drone, followed by a set of spry, ambisexual folk-pop. It’s no problem, anyhow. The kids whoop it up for Ramon Alarcón and his keyboardist, who provides dry banter throughout the set. Ramon has an absurdly lithe voice, which fluctuates between a high croon and a remarkably feminine, lilting falsetto. The crowd, which numbers between 75 and 85, claps and stomps on the floor during a flamencoish number. At one point, Ramon drops his guitar, takes the mic, and bursts into a set of choreographed dance moves – which cracks everyone up, which then cracks up Ramon. I don’t know a soul here, but it’s good to be somewhere where other people feel so comfortable.

I’ve gotta catch some folks for a drink, so I head out before Ramona Cordova’s set ends, which is too bad. The healthy-looking Circle of Hope box office people smile at me when I leave; even a die-hard agnostic can latch onto the feeling of gathering to celebrate a certain spirit, whether it’s expressed through hymns or god-awful noise.