Photo by Doug Seymour
The title of Nineteen Thirteen’s new album, Music for Time Travel, is all about how sound recording can become a bridge between eras. For starters, the duo’s Janet Schiff explains that she “feels like time traveling when I hook my cello [crafted in 1913] to the new technology of looping, delays and distortion.”
Clinching the concept, however, is the album’s lone cover. Nineteen Thirteen’s rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” is based on a 1961 home recording of the cellist’s grandmother, Marguerite Schiff a well-known Milwaukee organist in those days. Nineteen Thirteen’s other half, percussionist Victor DeLorenzo, explains: “I thought, ‘What if we took Margy’s recording and built a song around it?’ I transferred the tape into Pro Tools and we began building an arrangement.” The final version includes contributions by a pair of guest musicians, Rob Wasserman’s deeply reverberant bass and a jaw-dropping vocal by Monia that turns the muggy melody into material for a Southern gothic.
Most of Time Travel’s tracks are instrumentals, and most of those were originally composed and recorded for a dance concert by Cooperative Performance Milwaukee, A Woman’s Place, which depicts an insane asylum for women in 19th-century Wisconsin. Perhaps the production’s theme endowed those pieces with a pensiveness and tension sustained by long-drawn notes on cello and percussion rattling like tin cups on barred windows. Nineteen Thirteen might have a future in soundtracks for scary movies.
However, Time Travel includes many moods. “Bye Bye” is a happily whimsical tip of the hat to David Bowie while “A Joyous Return” suggests a lost ’70s track by Bowie’s collaborator, Brian Eno.
Originally a trio, Nineteen Thirteen has performed for more than a year as a duo featuring DeLorenzo, a founding member of The Violent Femmes, and the Wisconsin Conservatory-trained Schiff. Guest stars are added as the occasion demands. “We get along so well and it’s easy to travel,” Schiff says of the logistics. “We can fit my cello and Victor’s drums in my VW.”
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Nineteen Thirteen opens for the Avett Brothers, Friday, June 10 at 8 p.m. at the BMO Harris Pavilion.
