As much as I like to deride my alma mater, there are a few resources on the campus that I <\/p>\n
really do enjoy. The Wexner Center<\/a>, despite <\/p>\n the fact that it’s named after the man who unleashed such abominations as Abercrombie & Fitch, <\/p>\n The Limited, and it’s frightening little sister The Limited Too on the world, provides a huge <\/p>\n volume of cultural programming which, though not oft publicized is fairly accessible to the <\/p>\n student community at OSU. One of the best events that the Wexner Center puts on is a series of <\/p>\n concerts where they bring in artists who are doing things that are significantly more <\/p>\n interesting than most. Last night I had the pleasure of seeing two bands, Fly Pan Am<\/b> and <\/p>\n Do Make Say Think<\/b>, who I was previously unfamiliar with, but will certainly investigate <\/p>\n more ardently after witnessing their performances.<\/p>\n What drew me to the show in the first place was that I learned that Fly Pan Am was a project <\/p>\n of some of the members of the “post-apocalyptic orchestral”* group Godspeed You Black <\/p>\n Emporer!<\/b>. While Fly Pan Am does create intricate, and textured audio experiments, they <\/p>\n differ from Godspeed in the scale of their music. They lack Godspeed’s orchestration, diverse <\/p>\n instrumentation and broodingness of sound and instead produce a stripped-down but still <\/p>\n interesting and satisfying take on the post-rock genre.<\/p>\n I’ve never quite understood what “post-rock” means, other than the fact that I must like it <\/p>\n since bands that I’m quite fond of such as Godspeed, Mogwai, and Rachel’s all seem to earn the <\/p>\n moniker. Seeing Fly Pan Am work through their set gave me a better idea about how to define the <\/p>\n genre. The configuration of Fly Pan Am could be that of many rock bands. The band, as I saw <\/p>\n them, consisted of 3 guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer. When they started playing, however, <\/p>\n it became clear that the rock instrumentation would lead to a far different result than <\/p>\n conventional rock music. The drums provided a minimalist base for the music, while the guitars <\/p>\n were by far the most notable percussive element. They were played both conventionally as well <\/p>\n as with drumsticks and with objects like keys connected to the strings to create a number of <\/p>\n interesting sounds. While they maintained the rythm of the songs and set the droning mood of <\/p>\n the pieces, an occasional melodic loop would make it’s way out of the soup of sound, perfectly <\/p>\n complementing that from which it arose. In another departure from traditional rock, most of the <\/p>\n melody in the song was driven not by guitars or vocals (which were nonexistant) but by a <\/p>\n 5-string bass (it’s refreshing to see that this instrument is used outside of nu-metal). This <\/p>\n gave the music a refreshing twist and kept the music from being the uninteresting noise of some <\/p>\n of the post-rock I’ve heard.<\/p>\n Do Make Say Think may hail from a totally different part of Canada, but in my oppinion they <\/p>\n shared, at least musically, far closer ties to Godspeed than Fly Pan Am. Most notable was the <\/p>\n use of saxaphone and trumpet to add a moody, sultry quality to their songs. The mood of the <\/p>\n songs was accentuated by strong melodic hooks from the guitars but driven home by the horns. In <\/p>\n many cases it seemed like parts of the songs focussed on a pair of sounds – two drummers, two <\/p>\n saxaphones, two guitar melodies, which sounded really amazing. It’s really nice, once in <\/p>\n awhile, to just be able to get lost in a band’s music without the encumbrance of lyrics and <\/p>\n that’s how I fealt during Do Make’s set. I just stood there with a little smile on my face, <\/p>\n rocking out and thinking how good it was to hear some good music and see all my friends at the <\/p>\n show.<\/p>\n I’ve always really hated jam bands. Some of it is joking anti-hippy rhethoric, but there’s <\/p>\n also a more deep-rooted disdain for the genre. Seeing both of the bands that I saw last night, <\/p>\n I have a more concrete understanding of why I hate the genre. It’s not that I dislike <\/p>\n instrumental music it’s that jam band music seems bloated and masturbratory, frivilous and <\/p>\n boring. The music that I heard last night was none of those things. The sounds were complex <\/p>\n and the musicianship excellent, but it all had a directness and sense of purpose that kept the <\/p>\n songs flowing and managed to consistantly surprise me. It’s the purposefullness of everything <\/p>\n combined to create something that is diverse enough to defy the cookie cutter formula of pop <\/p>\n music that I like. It’s the same reason I like improvisational jazz, and I guess post-rock, <\/p>\n where the solos or individual parts all seem to feed each other and contribute to a tight <\/p>\n package rather than existing for their own sake. So, listening to the bands last night, I just <\/p>\n thought, “you hippy fools, you’ll never be this good”.<\/p>\n * Thanks to Kevey for that description.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" running my mouth off about bands i’m not very familiar with: fly pan am and do make say think As much as I like to deride my alma mater, there are a few resources on the campus that I really do enjoy. The Wexner Center, despite the fact that it’s named after the man who… Continue reading 82830259<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4wnIz-82830259","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}