Feast of the Epiphany's 'Practicing Loss': An invitation

The below are some thoughts I put down last year regarding Practicing Loss, a then in-progress album by Feast of the Epiphany, one of the many musical outlets of my good friend and sometime collaborator Nick Podgurski. The album is out now, and I encourage you to explore and enjoy. (A vinyl edition is also available via Kincsem Records, a label founded by members of the excellent Couch Slut; for ordering info, write to KincsemRecs [at] gmail [dot] com.) See also this older piece, written after experiencing Practicing Loss live in 2015. -HS



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Blissful incomprehension: Listening to Feast of the Epiphany's 'Practicing Loss'

I don't pretend to know the meaning behind Practicing Loss, or to be able to comprehend its methods and materials. On the contrary, spending time with this music — as with much of the music my friend Nick Podgurski makes and has made under the names Feast of the Epiphany and New Firmament — is for me a process of coming to terms with its otherness. We have all these tactics of reckoning with art, and a lot of times, we grasp for the "next closest thing," drawing what it is we're hearing nearer to what we already know.

In the case of Practicing Loss, the more time I spend with it, the more I feel I would be doing it a disservice by likening it to anything else. I don't hear it as a difficult work. In fact, the less I try to bring it into some kind of familiar orbit, the more it draws me in. What at first seemed alien and impenetrable now feels serene, sturdy, utterly at ease with its own structure and presentation.

What I can say, in a very general way is that I hear roughly three extended "movements" in the work. The first is a kind of ambient ballad, in which an insistent, incandescent synth drone sort of beams itself through the center of the music, as gently unfurling "riffs," played by keyboard or guitar, move in their slow orbits. Soulful, patient vocals center the piece, orient you in its fundamental song-ness. I picture an intricate mobile, suspended from the ceiling, with four or five components each spinning on their own axes, at their own speed, the whole creation moving in exacting multifarious harmony.

The piece begins to build into a kind of refrain around the 15-minute mark ("Light and darkness both shall be burned"), leading to a brief pause and what is to me the climax and highlight of Practicing Loss. The patiently unfolding quality of the first section gives way to a brisk, dancing feel, what sounds to me like a song opening up and tumbling ahead with its own momentum. There is this gorgeous repeated refrain ("We are burned! We evaporate!) that drew me in like an efficient pop hook the first time I heard it, and still gets my fist pumping every time I put the record on. The combination of catchiness and vast, elusive complexity in this second section to me gets at the heart of the Feast of the Epiphany listening experience. I don't pretend to "understand" its order, and in fact, during any given listen, I often feel like more of its details are eluding me than not, but I feel absolutely sure of its own sturdiness within itself. I hear an inspired onrushing of ideas, a steady stream of marvelously choreographed events (for one, a totally unexpected and brilliantly situated guitar solo) that may take years to fully grasp.

The third section is to me the most "difficult," the most other — the least, for me, relatable to anything else I've heard. Again, the twisting, interlocking rhythmic feel of the first two sections, but sort of slowed and blurred, with an almost perverse play between disparate harmonic feels. Sometimes, the synth chords that underlie the piece feel curdled, almost queasy, then twisting into sudden beauty.

Practicing Loss ends with a sort of high-density coda, an echo of the more "uptempo" feel of the second part. The music glinting and rising into this sort of marchlike riff. The whole thing sounds like some sort of extended fanfare or annunciation, phrases dancing and intertwining in sublime tribute.  And then a final refrain — "Lust for loss / Die trying, there is nothing else" — building in its final minute to a brief and thrilling vocal eruption, with Podgurski digging deep into his guts and testing the harsh limits of his remarkable range.

I write the above not as a roadmap but as an invitation. It's possible that the less you take in with you — preconception, will to classify or "understand" — the richer your experience with this work will be. I still couldn't tell you what Practicing Loss is on any fundamental level, but I feel confident in deeming it a marvelously rich soundwork that only seems to bloom further with each listen. You, the listener, are in good hands.

Hank Shteamer, May 2018

Join us

Wednesday, February 15, 2017
@ Saint Vitus

/Blind Idiot God
//STATS
///Husbandry

8pm, $12

Hell of a bill here. I've sung the praises of BIG and Husbandry (they show up near the end of this long-ish best-of-2016 list) before. Second STATS show with Nick Podgurski on full-time lead vox  — couldn't be happier with that arrangement. Join us?

FYI, the show will run early and on time: Husbandry will start by 8:30 sharp, and we'll be on shortly after 9.

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Sublime architecture: Feast of the Epiphany and the New Firmament universe

Processing the master's passing in a private way at the moment, sharing memories with friends. There may be more to say, but right now, we just need to listen.

Saw a concert last night at IBeam that seems somehow more urgent, in the sense that a) you'll be reading less about it elsewhere and b) its sensations are newer to me, less implanted, processed, decided-upon. I know what I think of Ornette Coleman; what remains is simply the continuation of my lifelong joy and savoring of his work. I know what I think I think of Feast of the Epiphany—the ever-evolving ensemble led by singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer (and my longtime friend) Nick Podgurski—but it could take years, decades even, for this music to come into focus, for me and for the listening public. I feel comfortable saying, though, that it is something major, and that if you are interested in music of actual newness and progress, as those concepts are playing out in New York at this very moment, you need to reckon with it.

I, and I suspect most who know and love his work, first heard Nick as a drummer. A phenomenal one. For years, he played in a Baltimore band called Yukon, which has since broken up but has spawned three totally different and equally brilliant bodies of work: Nick's New Firmament universe, of which FOTE is only a small part; Sam Garrett's magical Voice Coils; and Denny Bowen's Roomrunner, the most outwardly conventional of the three but every bit as thrilling and reflective of its architect's unique sensibility. My band STATS serendipitously shared a bill with Yukon roughly a decade ago and thus began an ongoing friendship and mutual aesthetic appreciation with these great young artists. Here is Mortar, an outstanding Yukon recording from the pre-Garrett era; Nick, Sam and bassist Brad Smith made one final recording as a trio that, in my opinion, is one of the most astonishingly weird, smart and enjoyable rock-related albums of the past decade (the true continuation of the idea of "prog," without all the tired nostalgic ballast), but it seems to have disappeared from Bandcamp. Will have to talk to Nick about that…

This later era of Yukon gave rise to what could be labeled Nick's still-flowering auteur period. As a drummer who contributes to the composition, content and overall feel of his band, i.e., STATS, I'm nevertheless comfortable with the fact that at the end of the day, I am, as the saying goes, "The Drummer." Nick is not "The" anything. That is to say, he's everything. That's not to say he's a lone wolf who doesn't value collaboration; quite the contrary. What I mean to say is that he is building a complete musical system, without boundary. "ABOVE ALL ELSE I feel that the best form of information for ALL of these projects is one another," he wrote recently on New Firmament, a blog which bears the overarching name of his creative endeavors (a name that he also uses when performing instrumental ambient keyboard music). I know what he means, at least in one sense: As Nick's music evolves, it grows steadily less relatable to any other given style of music. Much as Anthony Braxton makes Anthony Braxton music, full stop, as John Fahey made John Fahey music, Nick Podgurski is making Nick Podgurski music. To deal with it, you have to deal with it, period.

Last night's performance, the first Feast of the Epiphany show in more than two years, and the debut of a new lineup of the band, was a good example of this. I'm sitting here feeling genuinely apprehensive, because I have no idea where to begin in describing this performance, or the project in general. I want to emphasize the impact the show had on me, which was considerable, but I feel ill-equipped to state with conviction even the basic facts of what this ensemble does. This isn't false modesty; as I wrote above, FOTE is a really difficult thing to relate to anything that is not itself, and I sense this is by design. Nevertheless, since I hope that you will go see a Nick Podgurski show yourself, I will try.

FOTE is at heart a song-based music. The songs are long-form, and cyclical but not overtly repetitive, if that makes sense. Nick plays keyboard—often heavily distorted, so that it renders as a sort of buzzing drone—and sings, in a voice that ranges from a low croon to a piercing, dramatic belt. There is a suppleness, eccentricity, conviction to the delivery that reminds me at various times of Eddie Vedder and Sam Herring from Future Islands, both singers I admire greatly, singers of power and control and a certain almost actorly stylization that's perfectly suited to the aesthetics of their given bands. Same goes for Nick. His vocals are key to the success of this project.

The current FOTE ensemble also includes guitarists Andrew Smiley (of Little Women; incidentally Travis Laplante, another member of that band, opened the evening with a stunning solo saxophone set) and Caley Monahon-Ward (ex–Extra Life, a band that Nick also played in), and bassist Keith Abrams (former drummer of Time of Orchids). These players weave their lines around the foundational pillars of Nick's keyboard parts, in a way that feels sometimes ornamental, sometimes elemental. The overall feeling I get from listening to FOTE is of a sort of pulsating, undulating mass—like a pop song exposed to great pressure and heat, so that it warps and elongates and melts down into pure, radiant musical matter. There's a great tension between the abstract nature of the surface sound and the clear organization that's going on beneath. You'll feel unmoored, and then all of the sudden the band snaps into a tight, balletic postprog riff and the music takes on a great forward drive.

The same applies the vocals. Sometimes they play a background role, almost inaudible. At other times they rise up to a terrifying peak. You don't tend to hear vocals this clear, commanding, pungent in so-called experimental music. Nick does not play the conventional role of frontman, but during these vocal peaks, he is a riveting presence, wielding an instrument of deep power. Nick made his first major statement as a singer in Yukon (this is a subpar recording, but it will have to do), and he's continuing to push with FOTE. Listen to his brilliant cover of the Chocolate Watchband's garage-pop classic "(I Ain't No) Miracle Worker" here for a sense of what his voice is capable of. During last night's show, there were peaks like those you hear in that performance, peaks that made you wince with awe. FOTE plays a deeply controlled music, making the moments when the band really unleashes (such as in the second and final of four long, apparently untitled songs they performed last night) leap out and grab your attention.

I sat and read the voluminous lyrics Nick passed out on a typically well-designed, beautifully illustrated poster/program (visuals are key to the New Firmament aesthetic), puzzling over potent lines such as:

We are burned

We evaporate

We are spun

From the slime that we are

And I felt like I was flying rapidly over a thriving alien civilization, catching glimpses of sublime architecture, weird landforms, houses, temples, skyscrapers, but not having adequate time to process what I was seeing. The FOTE experience is one of information overload. You can't keep up, at least I can't. But the care and the depth are easy to see. Nick Podgurski is up to something major, something that relates only to itself. Explore New Firmament, see a Feast show, see an ambient New Firmament gig, see one of Nick's improv performances on drums, spend time with one of his illuminating, genre-transcendent Playlists. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, there's something happening here—right now, in New York—and I don't know what it is. You can't label it or contain it, but you can witness it, apprehend its formidable, enlightened construction in fleeting moments. I strongly encourage you to do so.

Somewhere we've never been: Farmers by Nature at ShapeShifter Lab

The debate over the now-infamous "Sonny Rollins" New Yorker piece continues. I'm not going to get into what I think of the original article, or the points made by its various supporters and detractors, or even Sonny's own response, mainly because I think both the incident and its aftershocks are beside the point. That point being: music ("jazz," or what have you) as an actual human practice, happening now, in real time—rather than an idea to be lobbed about abstractly.

I bring up the Sonny business mainly because I read Justin Moyer's jazz-bashing response in The Washington Post yesterday, and then went out to see a very satisfying night of what you might call jazz—the Aum Fidelity–backed double-record-release bill of Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp and the Farmers by Nature trio (Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, pictured above, left to right) at ShapeShifter Lab; and a trio set by Travis Laplante, Mick Barr and Nick Podgurski in a Clinton Hill living room, part of the Home Audio series. One of Moyer's points ("There’s not much difference between a screechy performance by avant-garde saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from 1974 and one from 2014") stuck with me—the idea being that "free jazz" always sounds the same. I've seen enough supposedly free performances to know that, when it comes to the post-Coltrane/Ayler tradition, at least, "free" can indeed refer to a well-rehearsed script. I happen to love Peter Brötzmann—’74, ’14, whenever—and I think he's a much better listener/collaborator and more diverse performer than he's given credit for. But yes, you go to see him, and you know that a certain flavor of ornery, macho catharsis is going to be part of the deal.

But I take issue with the idea that actual freedom, actual improvisation, is a myth, and that, to cite another one of Moyer's points, improvisation is overrated as a rule. Again, I agree with him in the macro sense. Moyer writes, "…the fact that music is improvised doesn’t make it great." Amen to that—I think the idea of improvisation (or any other philosophical construct that informs music's creation or performance, be that serialism, or graphic scores or Conduction, or what have you) being presented as an inherent virtue of that given piece of music is b.s. I'm really only interested in the result, and very often songs, or more generally, compositions, are what I'm after. As a metalhead, I love riffs; as a jazz guy, I love melodies—Ellington, Mingus, Andrew Hill, etc.; as a lifelong pop fan, I love hooks.

But, in some cases, improvised music appears before you as a kind of miracle. Watching Farmers by Nature last night, I felt like I was witnessing the honest-to-God creation of something out of nothing. It wasn't free jazz, or any other kind of calcified thing. It wasn't self-important about its method. It was just an honest shot at doing what improvisers ought, ideally, to do every time, which is not simply to empty your closet of every idea you might have stuffed in there, but to deal with the moment, with its possibility, and to listen, really listen, to what your collaborators have to say, and concern yourself with supporting those ideas, as well as the overall continuity, as fragile as a bubble, of the collective statement.


The set had a real elegance of design to it. Parker started out solo, and the other two slowly built up a kind of murky groove, rising out of nothingness. From there, over roughly an hour, the music visited roughly six or seven different zones, like track demarcations on an album. Each proceeded logically from the one before, and never arrived till the group had fully explored the prior area of inquiry. I remember an episode of fractured funk, with Taborn and Cleaver clanking out jagged accents, completing each other's sentences; an exquisitely chill section that felt almost like placid bossa nova; a couple of frenzied Taborn flights, where he came off like a short-circuiting cyborg, juxtaposing single, percussive notes from different registers of the keyboard; a long unaccompanied Cleaver solo that took full advantage of some expert tom-tom tuning—the drum kit was really singing, in the melodic sense—and ramped up to torrential density; and maybe most profound of all, a section featuring Parker on arco. I don't think I've ever heard a double bass cry out with such grain and elegy and deep feeling as it did last night in Parker's hands. Taborn accompanied with superhuman restraint, serving up quiet yet extremely resonant chords.

So, yes, sensitivity and restraint are a big part of why this music succeeded. But as I attempted to describe above, the group raged plenty as well. I think what impressed me so much was, again, this sense of continuity, of each player's—and the trio's, as a collective unit—awareness of the overall arc. Too often, long sets of improvised music follow a predictable quiet-loud-quiet shape. This felt more like a suite, with each movement taking on its own special mini contour. The band went for the climax when it was there, but they never milked it. Intensity was only one color on the palette. And the same goes for the hierarchy of the music, as it were. For long stretches, the band played in a way that seemed totally collective, i.e., sans soloist, almost in the way that groups like the Necks improvise. But, as with the varied dynamics, collectivity was just one strategy. During plenty of other moments, the more traditional soloist-plus-accompanists concept was very much at play. Each of the three players starred in turn.

Most amazing to me, though, was how the moment, the actual spontaneous unfolding circumstance, seemed to drive the set, as much as the will of any one player, or even of the trio as a whole. I'm thinking, for example, about how Gerald Cleaver's smallest cymbal—the size of a splash, but with a more ping-y, less tinny sound than I've often heard out of splashes—turned out to be something like a central character during the last 10 or 15 minutes of the set. Throughout the performance, Cleaver moved this cymbal around the kit—sometimes it was perched on its own stand to his right, sometimes it was resting on the hi-hat stand above those cymbals or on the floor tom or snare. So, in the middle of one such transfer, Cleaver happened to drop this little cymbal. He reached down beside the bass drum and picked it up, and then he went to put it back on its original stand to his right. But this act became, in and of itself, a sort of tic or weird fixation. He didn't just replace the cymbal and go on playing the full kit. He began obsessively, continuously spinning the cymbal around on the stand, eliciting a faint little creak. The other players didn't seem to directly respond, but as Cleaver turned the cymbal around and around, it was almost like he was drawing the accumulated momentum of the set down into a final moment—draining the water from the tub, funneling the creative material out of the air. Taborn and Parker gradually quieted, and Cleaver was striking the still-spinning cymbal with a wire brush, almost inaudibly. He stopped spinning it and continued whacking the brush into the air, engaging in movement but producing essentially no sound. And that was the end of the set.

I trust that none of the above episodes, the high-intensity Taborn solos, the Parker arco feature, the concluding Cleaver small-cymbal mini drama, were planned. Befitting their group name, the three musicians actually were harvesting moments, turning them over, wringing out all their potential. The overall result didn't sound anything like any stereotypical idea of "free jazz," or any other style of improvised music I can think of. But at the same time, it wasn't alien; it felt fully logical, narrative, directed, harmonious, complete. The set lasted for exactly the right amount of time, and for the band to have played a single note after the ending would've felt (to me, at least) superfluous. This Farmers by Nature set wasn't great because it was improvised; it was great because of, as I've attempted to describe, the brilliance of the various individual moments and the coherence of the overall form. At the same time, I think the set's uniqueness, the fact that what happened last night hasn't happened before and won't happen again, was part of its immense appeal. We shouldn't fetishize the means of production—how something was made, or according to what principle—but when something truly special arises from a certain method, or lack of method, it's good to remember that, yes, that method has potential. It is absolutely no guarantee—not whatsoever—but improvisation can, under certain circumstances, take both players and audience somewhere they've never been. Last night's Farmers by Nature set reaffirmed that fact for me. As always, I'll be staying tuned.

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P.S. My focus on the Taborn/Parker/Cleaver performance isn't intended to slight the other sets I saw last night. Both were fierce and beautiful. Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp burrowed ever further into the special kind of poignant, stormy melancholy—doled out in three- or four-minute chunks, the so-called Cosmic Lieder of their album titles—they've been creating as a duo for the past few years. And Travis Laplante and Mick Barr, both scarily extreme, virtuosic and idiosyncratic musicians, unleashed their respective aesthetic selves, but with no sense of autopilot whatsoever, building something collective and response-based, with help from Nick Podgurski's expertly tension-ratcheting percussion, moving imperceptibly from sparseness to brutal density. A hell of a night all around.

Recent raves: Jason Becker + Space Opera

There are tales of dashed hopes and then there is the story of Jason Becker, a classical/metal shred-guitar virtuoso who landed his dream gig (the lead-ax spot in David Lee Roth's band) in 1989 only to be diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease before he could go on tour. I highly recommend Not Dead Yet, the new documentary about Becker.



The subject himself—now paralyzed, he communicates and composes music via a series of eye and facial movements—comes off as a hugely inspiring figure, but what grabbed me most about the film was the portrayal of Jason's parents. They'd always encouraged his art, and in the interviews featured in the doc, they seem as heartbroken as their son (and maybe even more so) over the fact that he wasn't able to seize the opportunity he'd created for himself. There's one moment that really stuck with me: Becker's parents recall how Jason once said to them (I'm paraphrasing here), "You know, Mom and Dad, my friends are always complaining about their parents, and I don't have anything to say." That clichéd heavy-metal narrative of a repressive upbringing just didn't apply to Becker, in other words. It's doubly sad, then, that he eventually encountered a much more severe obstacle to success.

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A few weeks back, my friend Nick Podgurski—an extraordinary drummer, singer and composer who heads up the New Firmament initiative—introduced me to the self-titled 1973 album by a Texas band called Space Opera. Since then, I've been having a serious, extended Moment with this record. Nick relishes musical excavation, digging up weird, forgotten gems, whether they be ambient, psych, black metal, punk or what-have-you. I always approach his playlists/recommendations with curiosity, a feeling that sometimes morphs into delight or pure bafflement, depending on what I encounter. But when I heard "Holy River," I knew this was something different:



Some obscure records are good for a quick mindblow and then you set them aside; you're just as intrigued by the simple fact of the unknownness of a certain piece of compelling music as you are by the sounds themselves. This Space Opera album is different; it's an eccentric release, yes, but it's also incredibly soothing, nourishing and fulfilling—accessible is what I mean to say. It fits into life, rather than simply being an irreconcilably weird object that you hold at arm's length. It is an incredibly well-conceived record but also an improbable one. Space Opera bridges two worlds of early-’70s musicmaking that I love equally dearly yet that have always appeared entirely separate to me, namely U.K. prog/art-rock (King Crimson, Yes) and U.S. folk-rock (America, CSNY)—with a little twangy, Allman-style flash seasoning the mix. You can hear the resulting tension in the track above, in which placidness and harshness collide to brilliant effect. I'm trying not to spoil the surprise, but I'll say only that the entry of the distorted guitar is one of the more heavenly musical curveballs I've ever been thrown.

The whole album isn't this dissonant (and I mean that both conceptually and sonically); several of the songs choose one or the other of the two aforementioned camps (i.e., the prog or the folk) and hang out comfortably there—see "Country Max" and "Guitar Suite," respectively. But I'm completely cool with that, because the material is uniformly outstanding; Space Opera doesn't need to clash and disorient in order to impress. The peak for me might be "Prelude No. 4," where all sorts of other right-up-my-alley influences from the general period start seeping in—this track honestly sounds to me like Rick Danko of the Band sitting in with Steely Dan circa Can't Buy a Thrill, which, as anyone who knows me will tell you, adds up to a seemingly tailor-made musical nirvana for me—but I love the entire record. Dig in:


P.S. Go here for more info on Space Opera. They issued a comeback album in ’01; haven't yet spent good time with that one, but I look forward to it. There's also an odds-and-ends comp out, Safe at Home, which I think contains material from the period that produced Space Opera. I highly recommend this interview with SO member David Bullock, unfortunately available only as a RealAudio stream.