Photo by Blaine Schultz
Califone at Shank Hall 2023
Califone at Shank Hall
Tilting at windmills seemingly of their own creation, Califone camped out at Shank Hall Monday evening to play a set of fractured blues and folk songs that often balanced precariously on a fulcrum of slow-motion collapse or sonic explosion.
The Chicago-based band led by Tim Rutili since 2001 (when it evolved out of group Red Red Meat) skirts the issue of rock and roll in favor of otherly music; sounds and lyrics that could be taken at face value as poetry. Then things get wonderfully weird. Those blues and folk melodies as presented by Rutili’s wobbly vocals are served up to a band who massaged the sounds in a wilderness of mirrors. Drums and percussion move a groove off-kilter and effect pedals that seem to have a mind of their own guide the songs tottering toward a precipice—certainly trippy but definitely not spacey.
Former Decemberists drummer Rachel Blumberg may have been the evening’s MVP. Her restrained, oblique playing included a sense of humor and delivered just enough sinewy resilience to songs that seemed bent on deconstruction.
Rutili’s scatological Milwaukee memory aside, the evening was a chance to witness a group who likely never plays a song the same way twice.
Christen your band The Setting and the internet is paralyzed, fittingly. Caliphone’s opening act, a trio that shared Joe Westerlund (percussion/electronics) with the headliner approached their set in the spirit of LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. The Setting gradually built dronescapes that evolved in real time.
Utilizing loops, layers and delays to treat sounds conjured by harmonium, bowed cymbal, rototoms and banjo (which was plucked and used as a drum) they played a hypnotic set of music that had it been set in a background might have simply been ambient. Taking it to a stage meant listeners were obliged to pay attention and witness how things unfolded.
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