The Art of the Take Away Concert
— By Adri Wong | August 3, 2010
Music is not divorced from place. We know that songs and albums are psychically and sensorily linked to specific memories, specific ages: the temperature of a summer in a foreign city, the smell of an old friend or lover. The take away concert carves out a role for this method of experiencing music in a media ecology otherwise premised on mass distribution and precise sound engineering. It does this by placing renewed emphasis on spontaneity, intimacy, and space-particular acoustics. At the same time, it opens the door (literally, and metaphorically) to new innovations in expression — combining techniques of found sound with the dérive.
La Blogotheque deserves recognition as a pioneer of the medium. Through its series les concerts à emporter it has produced countless take away concerts: live performances by musicians perched in quotidian locales or rambling the cityscape, probably shot with a handheld digital camera and one boom mic.
Here, for example, Arcade Fire performs “Neon Bible” for Blogotheque in a crowded Paris elevator. Percussion is supplied by thumping on the roof and doors of the elevator and ripping pages out of magazines. Take away concerts like these allow listener-viewers to witness musicians improvising with their surroundings. The stray echoes and vibrations in these recordings are not acoustic flaws; they are integrated components of the performance. In this sense, the take away concert is the 2000s audio-visual analogue to lo-fi music of the 1980s and 90s. The difference is we may now also visually experience the interruptions and ambient noises that become woven into the musical performances — like the force of the wind in Blogotheque’s Sufjan Stevens show, or the rumble of a nearby train in this Tenniscoats clip:
Tenniscoats – “Baibaba Bimba”
Individual artists themselves have started to experiment with combining musical performance and external audio-visual interruption. Pittsburgh singer-songwriter and farmer Nicole Reynolds is one artist that has been remarkably successful at doing just that. Reynolds’ is well versed in the creative potential of interruption – she has described her process as one in which musical invention is punctuated by tasks like goat-milking and baling hay. In similar fashion, she punctuates her take away concerts with rural interruptions like the bleating of sheep, or the slow, erratic drift of falling snow.
Nicole Reynolds – “Call the Guard“
Beirut is a band that has seized upon the potential of the take away concert. For its second studio record, Flying Club Cup, the band filmed acoustic performances of every track of the album in different parts of an old industrial building and compiled them into a curated online space. In the videos, frontman Zach Condon wanders from room to room, up and down winding staircases, occasionally encountering a cello player or a trombonist as he sings:
Beirut – “Guyamas Sonora“
This is a different sort of portable music than, say, the iPod. In contrast to little white earbuds secreted away in the concha, piping narrowcasted tunes, the wandering performance represents an investment in our shared sonic environment — something that is increasingly underappreciated as the role of the “boombox” fades towards oblivion. The take away concert reminds us once more that anywhere can be a public venue; anything (a handheld cassette player, a megaphone) can be an instrument:
Lykke Li ft. Shout Out Louds – “I’m Good, I’m Gone”
Take away concerts manage to restore the intimacy of “the venue” even as they expand the definition of venue itself. Through its Tiny Desk Concerts series, NPR has produced a steady stream of performances recorded at All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen‘s desk. The intimacy of these recordings stands in stark contrast to Clearchannel’s megavenue lawns and enormous festivals littered with portapotties and college kids on mushrooms. What’s beautifully ironic about the Tiny Desk Concert series is that it uses new electronic technologies to ensure continued access to small acoustic shows:
Raphael Saadiq – “Love that Girl”
The most emotionally resonant shows of my life have been in stranger’s living rooms, the rented lot behind an animal feed warehouse, the stage assembled in the record store or local cafe. The Tiny Desk Concert series taps into the same informal, neighborly feeling of these ad hoc gatherings. At each Tiny Desk Concert, the musical guests transform the space of NPR’s mundane office — with its desktop computers, cubicles, and office chairs — into something between Gilman and a musical town hall:
Gogol Bordello – “Start Wearing Purple”
(watch more footage of Gogol Bordello invading the NPR offices here)
The power of musical performance to transform the character of a space is evident in the story behind take away concert site Laundromatinee.com. According to its founders, the project began when a local blogger and a high school radio station manager / teacher began inviting independent musicians to record at Pendleton Heights High School in the “small, quiet town of Pendleton, Indiana.” The result was this: video performances by indie music stars that mix the miserable associations attached to florescent lighting, plastic chairs, and blackboards with feelings of nostalgia and peace:
Bon Iver – “For Emma”
Predictably, corporate media wants a bite of the apple too. Myspace Transmissions has (quite successfully, I think) recorded a series of radio sessions featuring “up and coming” artists. The best of these videos utilize elements of the take away concert (spatial proximity, landscape) as in this video of Miike Snow:
Miike Snow “Animal” live from MySpace Transmissions
MySpace Transmissions | MySpace Video
Youtube monster VEVO, in cahoots with American Express, has also jumped into the fray, announcing its intention to launch an online concert series. The plan is to combine “live streaming, digital quality video and accompanying social media interaction.” The title of the series — “Unstaged” — might otherwise suggest a move towards streaming concerts of a more acoustic or personal nature. But based on how VEVO has ruined the informality, embeddedness, and portability that made the Youtube experience so great, I would not be surprised if the company shot itself in the foot and produced only glossy megaproductions that underutilize every creative outlet at its disposal. At the very least, I doubt we shall see VEVO integrating into its shows anything like the sound of chickens or the cheerful face of a labrador watching them any time soon.
Nicole Reynolds – “The River”
Now that you brought them to attention Adri, there must be hundreds of take-away concerts in development every month. Some of these can become conceptualized, for instance The Black Cab Sessions: “One song. One take. One cab.” And Pitchfork features its own thematized stripped-down live concerts, such as Juan’s Basement or Surveillance (filmed through surveillance cameras for aesthetic savour I suppose, but the latter’s music video editing probably discounts it from your definition of true “take-away” steez, which implies a kind of mobility and free verse approach).
I especially enjoy how videographers toy with the accidents and conditions that an open space or a contained space will enforce on the same song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlfdVLLMl8w
http://www.vimeo.com/2592281
Norway‘s in the mix.
thanks jose! these are great – I’ll definitely have to keep them on my radar. & big ups to norway.
Great article, with fantastic musical choices.
I think there’s another element that makes these concerts à emporter somewhat uncanny in their appeal. The spontaneity of “bursting into song” evokes, whether we realize it or not, the fantastic reality-bending of musicals, where the same world can host the normally opposed binaries of speech and song, discourse and performance, language and music, and thus functionality & expressiveness. Of course, it is the polished and overly glossy take on the world that makes us weary of musicals and cynical of the environment they offer. Think of the twee sounds of ‘Rent’ versus the timbre of real-life impoverished bohemians with AIDS.
Music has permeated into all parts of the world, and being wedded to technology has earned a functionality all its own. What good musicals do, not unlike opera, is to create a magical world where music might a real-world venue, or serenading an urban landscape (I think best seen in the Tenniscoats video, when the singer faces the train tracks and seems to sing to the city). So at the risk of over-simplifying, I say that the appeal of these Take Away Concerts is psycho-social and post-media, yes, but mostly it’s because they are just magical.
loved this article!! finally someone talking about that!
for myself, being a long time fan of La Blogotheque, what i like the most of the take away show is the reaction of the people in the streets, in the parks or in the anonymous pubs: the wonder of meeting amazing music in a place where usually there isn’t. the idea to bring the music into the everyday life of a city, into the corners usually neglected is a revolution – making the music literally walk around, wander and meet people that otherwise wouldn’t know about it, that’s the innovation. that’s my thought about it
they surely launched a trend, and hopefully small intimate and walking concert will be spreading everywhere, changing the ways to experience music.