Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Last year it happened midway through Kate Bush's Aerial; this time we were listening to Playing With Fire by Spacemen 3. I'm talking about Unsilent Night, this annual East Village peripatetic sound-art twist on going Christmas carolling, where sundry downtown musician types and their friends wander through the streets of lower Manhattan carrying boomboxes playing loops that together escalate into a Reich/Riley-esque sound-swarm. I wasn't taken so totally unawares as last year but Joy was, wondering to herself, "hmmm, Spacemen 3 sounds even more wondrous and ethereal than I remember", than she glanced out the window and saw the throng wending their way up Avenue A. The loop this year was based on a bell sequence so sounded, in massed form as a cloud of interlapping and saturated overtones, especially Yuley and heartwarming. Have yourself an avant, avant Christmas.

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