LIT: A Concert By Candlelight Featuring Kishi Bashi
Guthrie Green
October 2
In the throes of downtown’s First Friday Art Crawl, I elbowed past a gentleman on stilts offering free hugs and one-dollar kisses, someone’s pet bird (untethered) meeting someone else’s pet cat (in a sling), a young woman listening attentively to a tarot reading, and several dozen cowboy-hatted people on their way to whatever a “Koe Wetzel Street Party” is. This chaotic liveliness left no room for serenity, and even Guthrie Green’s LIT: A Concert by Candlelight (featuring Kishi Bashi) and its namesake candles couldn’t conjure much magic.
I’ve seen Kishi Bashi before, in 2012 in Oklahoma City opening for fellow Athens, Georgia-ites Of Montreal, a band in which he’s also toured as a member. He’s performed with Regina Spektor and Sondre Lerche and released a handful of beautiful and interesting albums, following closely on the heels of other dudes doing looping violin work—the live playing and layering of melodies and accompaniment on a single instrument, building a full song in real-time in front of the audience—in indie rock circles, like Andrew Bird and Owen Pallett. This was A Whole Thing for a while, and it works great in the small to mid-sized venues and concert halls that naturally curate musical curiosity over civic engagement, places that lend themselves to austerity and precision over showmanship.
On paper, most of the pieces were there: perfect weather, thousands of warm LED flames flickering across the Green’s stairs and stage, and a virtuoso violinist with alternative street cred out the wazoo. But “precision over showmanship” is what makes live looping work from a technical standpoint, and that piece was missing from much of Friday’s concert. Listen to one of Kishi Bashi’s records, and you’ll hear tight staccato violin as a building block for layered arrangements and sincere lyricism. He’s a strong instrumentalist and a strong singer, but neither of those things felt obvious for a lot of the set in Tulsa, with some of the songs sprinkled with tempo changes on the loop points and accelerated beyond recognition from start to finish.
The between-song banter felt nervous and repetitive, with a few requests for the crowd to sing along to melodies too complicated to remember from the one round he’d provided. Excepting some of his older, more tightly arranged songs, which he did deliver with the expected ease, the show felt scattered, with irreverent neoclassical looping careening into pop ballads like disconnected vignettes in a stage play. The many moments of impressive musicianship (bolstered by pianist Graham Richards, who joined him for a large portion of the set) were punctuated by what came across to me as an eagerness to please rather than a confidence in the catalog: please clap, please sing along, please dance.
I discussed the show with a friend and fellow writer who also likes Kishi Bashi’s recorded work, and he mentioned that “artists who exist between classical and pop space fall into the trap of really trying to sell you” on their appeal, and I believe this is what happened. Was it that many—possibly most—of the several hundred people on the Green lawn were there for any free show and not specifically his, so that he felt he needed to amp up the theatrics to get them on his side? Maybe.