Review: BASIC at AyurPrana Listening Room
BASIC's March 14 performance at AyurPrana Listening Room showcased the band at a fascinating and captivating moment in its short but impressive history.
This Is BASIC, the group’s debut album released only this past September, was titled in such a way as to serve as both an announcement of a new musical project as well as a description of the music contained within, as it has an elemental feel for those of us who grew up in a certain time period. This Is BASIC sounds like the soundtrack of a lost William Friedkin heist movie, one that would have been played over and over again on basic (there’s that word again!) cable in the late ’80s and well into the ’90s.
The project grew out of guitar player Chris Forsyth’s obsession with the 1984 album Basic by Robert Quine & Fred Maher. To channel the sound of Quine/Maher, Forsyth enlisted fellow guitar player Nick Millevoi and percussionist Mikel Patrick Avery to create an all-instrumental, groove-centric album that blended sleek, futuristic guitar sounds with electronic beats and live percussion.
The show at the AyurPrana Listening Room occurred in the wake of BASIC releasing a new EP called Dream City the previous week. Both the performance and the EP featured Douglas Andrew McCombs and his reliable Fender Bass VI, who replaced Millevoi after the release of This Is BASIC. Dream City also marked the arrival of a new sound for the band, which was reflected in their Asheville show.
The first three songs of the night were drawn from BASIC’s debut album: “New Auspicious,” “Nerve Time,” and “Positive Halfway.” The tunes possessed the slick, insistent rhythms of the studio versions but seemed punkier and spikier in the live setting. Some of this shift could be attributed to the interplay between Forsyth and McCombs, who stretched the length of the songs and expanded the edges of the arrangements while Avery provided a solid foundation for these explorations. Forsyth is an adept and imaginative player (read his earlier interview with Asheville Stages here), but his solos on this night felt less like him stepping into a spotlight and instead conveyed deliberate extensions of the musical motifs of each song.
Speaking of expanding BASIC’s sound, at one point during “Nerve Time,” Avery began playing the fife, adding another unlikely yet welcomed texture to their musical fabric. And a few times during the three-song opening stretch, the trio would pause to let the looped beats play by themselves. These stoppages served as a reminder that the electronic beats are an intrinsic component of BASIC's music, yet also demonstrated the trio’s confidence in taking a moment before launching into another display of complex and visionary playing.
The second half of the night consisted of performances of each of the three new songs that make up Dream City. The sound presented for this part of the show had less of an emphasis on slick robotics and was instead more jazzy, jammy, and earthy. For instance, “Changes, Changing” possessed a King Sunny Adé vibe that also hinted at the “Nu Yorica” flavors of 1970s salsa and Latin jazz.
The centerpiece of the second half of the show was the title track of Dream City, which started with an extended improvisation by McCombs that summoned the wide open vista sounds of his band Brokeback. This beautiful section showed that when Doug McCombs is in the band, it is wise to leave space for him to do Doug McCombs things.
After the McCombs intro, the trio launched into its prototypical interplay. There were moments during “Dream City” that evoked the late ’70s Bowie/Eno/Visconti sound, and then at other times BASIC could have been mistaken for live LCD Soundsystem without James Murphy’s vocals. The trio continued to grow and build “Dream City” not exactly to a peak, but rather to a kind of sustained moment of realization. This was certainly the highlight of the entire night.
The diversity of sounds presented by BASIC at AyurPrana Listening Room displayed the trio’s musical dexterity and expertise as well as its unending creativity. It showed that BASIC can and will evolve beyond the Quine/Maher template and continue to seek out new areas of exploration for the band’s direction.
(Photo courtesy of BASIC)
BASIC’s opener was Bark Culture, a trio consisting of vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco, drummer Joey Sullivan, and bassist John Moran, who presented a mesmerizing set of outer space jazz. In particular, Vieira-Branco’s masterful playing was especially captivating — it was hard to look away as he traded off hitting the vibraphone with mallets and playing the sides of its bars with a bow, generating sustained notes that seemed to float in the air. At one point during the performance, Moran took a solo and conjured an intergalactic sound that could have been a Star Destroyer flying over the venue. Bark Culture certainly warrants further investigation.
