KEXP and Chop Suey Present
Bear in Heaven
Young Magic // Miles Cooper Seaton
Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 8pm
KEXP and Chop Suey Present
Bear In Heaven
Bear In Heaven's new album is aptly titled Time is Over One Day Old. It's a record with a visceral relationship to time and its processes. Where invulnerability and ambition can support you as you grow, at some point they become dead weight, and being true to yourself means casting them off, starting anew. This plays out as a powerful analogy for the band across the arc of its career.
They've always made intriguing records, here especially. It's easy to see why musicians fall hard for this band. They entice and envelop you. Any Bear In Heaven song will most likely greet you with a provocative beat, textural synthesizers and unassuming but adeptly supportive bass and guitar, all exquisitely arranged and glistening. Jon Philpot's high, smooth, strong voice is so tightly wound into the music that it can be easy to overlook the lyrics, Bear In Heaven's capacious third dimension. Philpot is a center-seeking, contemplative writer who captures the fleeting thoughts that underscore our emotional lives, the interactions with the world that are both difficult to express and anathema in daily conversation.
While all of this can be said of any Bear In Heaven album, each varies wildly in tone and approach. 2007's Red Bloom of the Boom is ambitious and experimental. Beast Rest Forth Mouth (2009) was a pivotal record that still feels important, seductive and intense. On their 2012 LP I Love You, It's Cool the structural and musical ideas are challenging, and masterfully developed. For Time is Over One Day Old, we witness the band once again turning their gaze inward and prioritizing their evocative abilities in line with or even slightly ahead of technical skills. It feels very much in the tradition of BRFM in that way. It's beautiful; it's moving.
Here Philpot and Adam Wills are more deeply collaborative than ever. This album is darker at times, louder than their others; it feels personal and direct. "If I Were To Lie" places Wills' bass groove front and center, "Demon" is riveting and propulsive in spite of its dark pointed lyric, and "They Dream" dissolves into three and a half minutes of deeply satisfying ambient synth work in its second half. Wills has always been the band's anchor, providing rock solid, rhythmic bass lines and guitars that blur the boundaries of Philpot's synth. Though in moments such as the final track, "You Don't Need The World," Wills cuts through with an audacious, biting guitar hook. It's a great culmination of the album's sense of release. This album isn't about being dark, it's about releasing darkness and frustration.
When bands age well, their vitality takes shape. They wear, but with intention. They trim excesses. Throughout this album you'll hear a band at peace with themselves. They've learned to cut back on that which is merely impressive and to concentrate on simply what is crucial. For Philpot this is about making something lasting. "A lot of shedding, getting rid of layers and preconceptions... breaking up with old ways of thinking, old ways of being, starting to look at this thing in a new way and finding something positive." The result is a record that will stay with you.
Young Magic
Young Magic is the sonic pairing between Indonesian vocalist, Melati Malay and Australian producer, Isaac Emmanuel. Though based in New York, the eclectic outfit has recorded music whilst traversing the four corners of the earth.
After debuting a series of 7” releases on Carpakr Records in 2011, the band took the stage at Iceland Airwaves and began touring globally including main support for Youth Lagoon and Purity Ring. February 2012 saw the release of their full length, Melt with NPR, BBC, XLR8R, New York Times and a plethora of other publications and blogs singing the album’s praises. The group’s expansive live show continued to grow throughout 2012 and 2013 with performances at Berghain, Austin Psych Fest and The Brooklyn Museum. Remixes quickly surfaced online including cuts by Matthew David, S.Maharba & Purity Ring.
In 2014, the duo present a new gift from their explorations in their second full length album, Breathing Statues. The new LP navigates through a labyrinth of phantom harmonies and crystalline beats, with breathtaking cover artwork by longtime collaborator Leif Podhajsky.Recorded in fragments through Morocco, France, Czech Republic, Australia, Iceland and finished in their home studio in New York, Breathing Statues is a lush and distinctive collection that colors the world a new soundscape.
Miles Cooper Seaton
Miles Cooper Seaton is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles.
His musical experience started at five when he joined his church's choir. In 1989, his family relocated to Seattle, and he eventually dropped out of high school to sing and play in various punk, noise and hardcore bands. After moving to New York in 2002, he was exposed to a more refined and expanded perspective on contemporary art and music. There, he co-founded the avant / experimental / rock collective Akron/Family, which has performed around the world and collaborated with Michael Gira, Keiji Haino, William Parker, Hamid Drake, the Sun Ra Arkestra and many other cultural and musical luminaries.
Mixing the transcendental and intuitive qualities of spiritual music traditions with the visceral, confrontational and humanist values of punk and counterculture art movements, Seaton's solo performances are a candid expression of his musical and cultural roots. Typically a combination of composition and principal-based improvisation, in fine wabi-sabi style, there is often an air of impending derailment and a leave-it-on-the-field mentality that encourages audiences to acknowledge their collaborative role.
—
$12 adv/ $14 dos // 8pm doors // 21+
