The Puppeteer Effect

Originally written Monday, November 23, 2005

I checked the paper yesterday morning to make sure there hadn’t been any unexplained deaths in the area of the dance. Fortunately, there hadn’t been, or at least none reported. So Moshe’s off the hook for now.

Patrick and I went to see this amazing show last night after another full day of training. Andrew Bird is a singer/songwriter/violinist (and a few other things) with the most subtle yet powerful stage presence, kind of like a geyser, bubbling under the surface of the earth, that never quite erupts, but you feel like it does. He looks like he’s singing to himself, but you feel like he’s singing straight into you. When he moves along with his own music, it’s like the music is a physical element moving through him. His lyrics are a stirrage of sense and nonsense that emerges as cohesive but only beneath the skin, where you can’t see the connections but just know they’re there. His appeal is not what he gives you but what you see him give himself, kind of like an art film that makes you say, “Yes! That’s exactly how I feel!” even when you have no idea what you’re looking at.

Anyway, both of us—Patrick and I—had been into his stuff before we met, just as we’d both been into Melissa Ferrick, so music seems to be a nice common ground (that is, he doesn’t call it “old people stuff”). The last time I’d seen him, he was playing with a band, and I had no idea what he would be like in a solo performance because, well, it’s hard to sing, play the violin, and sustain a strong performance with no other instruments for too long. It turns out he uses a loop machine now. This also allows him to play the guitar and xylophone on the same song, provided the song is repetition-compatible. In addition, he has one other musician accompanying him on drums, percussion, and keyboards, Martin Dosh, who does his own looping thing.

To be honest, I’m a bit ambivalent about looping. I think Andrew Bird actually does it very effectively, and Martin Dosh’s accompaniment was good on the songs they did together. But Dosh also had his own brief solo set, in which he essentially did looping for the sake of looping—just piling track onto track for no apparent reason except that he can—and it didn’t appeal to me at all. Patrick loved it and bought the guy’s CD, but he may be too young to recognize a fad when he sees it. It’s performances like Dosh’s that make me expect looping to go the way of the Moog synthesizer or that electric thing the name of which escapes me but you create different noises by passing your hands around it… anyway, that thing. But then Bird did such a good job with the technology—and so did Dosh, in back-up mode—that I’ve come to a new conclusion about it. I think it works best as a tool, not an instrument. My irk is when there’s a hey-look-at-my-new-toy feeling to the performance. It’s like plucked eyebrows: most effective when you can’t see the means of production. That’s kind of why I didn’t like that Jim Carrey movie, The Majestic. It’s the puppeteer effect.