music
West Coasting
It’s one thing to be an innovative musician working
the confines of your chosen genre; it’s quite another
to reinvent the instrument you’ve mastered and
revolutionize t the way it is played. Grammy-
nominated ha
harpist Deborah Henson-Conant has
accomplished this and more.
inveter
An inveterate
lover of music and former resident
of Eugene, Henson-Conant
He
has given the concert
harp a compl
complete and total makeover.
“I fell in love with the harp because of how it
was built,”
built she says. “I started playing in
restau
restaurants, then I started touring, and I
realiz
realized I had to change it. The thing was
six-f
six-feet tall and 75 pounds.”
S
So Henson-Conant set about designing
her own
o harp. She wanted something that
travele
traveled easily, but also an instrument that
would completely
c
revamp traditional
perceptions of the harp. “I wanted something I could strap on and
move with, and I wanted it t to have a pick-up on every string,” she
says.
After landing on the original
origin design and then struggling to find
someone to bring her blueprint
blueprin to life, Henson-Conant finally struck
gold. “I took it to France, to a French
Fr
Harp Company called Camac,”
she says.
At Camac, the visionary harp builder Joel Garnier constructed
Henson-Conant her first harness-h
harness-harp. But it was his protégé Jakez
Françios who continued to work on the designs, going on to create the
DHC Light, a sleek chrome harness h
harp made from the same material as
French racing bikes. It is an instrument that did not exist before Françios built
it. A lightweight electric harp — the sort of thing you’d imagine Jimi Hendrix
playing in heaven.
“Take a guitar and put it on steroids. It weighs 11 pounds, I’ve got 32 strings to
play with and the thing looks like a Stratocaster,”
Stratocas
Henson-Conant says.
And because it is built like a guitar, Henson-Conant
Hens
can play it like a guitar.
Incorporating looping systems and distortion
distortio pedals, the harp presents a
physicality that is more or less antithetical t to the traditional role of the harp. And
Henson-Conant is very aware of the paradi
paradigm shift her innovation catalyzed.
“The harp has traditionally been seen as
a a woman’s instrument, relegated to
the back of the orchestra,” she says. “And I a
always felt that that relegated women. I
wanted to take the instrument and make it str
strong, powerful and loud.”
Strong, powerful and loud is exactly what Henson-Conant
H
continues to do.
Deborah Henson-Conant plays 7:30 pm Wednesd
Wednesday, March 7, at The Shedd; prices vary.
— Dante Zuñiga-West
String Theory
PHOTO BY GREG VAN ANTWERP
The thing about Coasting is that momentum equates
productivity, not stasis — especially when the goal is organically
rolling, low-pressure indie rock with teeth. For Madison Farmer
and Fiona Campbell, guitarist and drummer respectively, the
two-piece Coasting is the rugged touring sister act amongst
myriad other DIY siblings around the country. Formed in
Brooklyn in 2009, Coasting currently drifts between Memphis
and Portland, spitting gritty melodic shoegazing music back
and forth.
You’re Never Going Back, the debut long-play released last
November on floating record label M’Lady, sounds like heavy
rain falling simultaneously on Glasgow, Olympia and Dunedin,
New Zealand, back when indie was a necessity not a style,
when punk was about to break big.
Influenced by perpetual motion and bands like The Clean
and The Chills, Coasting bridges fast three-minute punk and
soft slow-drone coos with cantilevered ease (see: “Kids” and
“Snoozefest”). This is the intentional chilling-out of musicians
escaping the New York pace but retaining all the intensity.
Reunited to tour, Coasting heads to SXSW via the great
Northwest. “We’re all over the place,” says Campbell. “That’s
the way we like it.” Right now, Coasting is in its element: doing
what it wants, where it wants, how it wants to: cruise-control to
the next sonic location. As they say in New Zealand, sweet as.
Coasting plays 9 pm Monday, March 5, at Wandering Goat;
donations gladly accepted. — Patrick Newson
Sound Storm
Anyone who’s ever been in a band and grown
frustrated by managing three or four different
schedules while juggling three or four eccentric
personalities would blanche at the prospect of being in
Typhoon. With a rotating lineup of up to 12 members
(who needs one drummer when you can have two?),
Portland’s Typhoon is the kind of indie group critics fall
all over themselves to heap praise upon. This band is
emotive — think Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. The
group is lyrically epic and sweepingly romantic à la
The Decemberists or Arcade Fire.
Typhoon began life in Salem. Its early recordings
show the band dabbling in everything from sea
shanties, to Eastern European sounds and country
western. In 2010 Typhoon placed second in Willamette
24 MARCH 1, 2012 EUGENE WEEKLY
Week’s “Top-Ten Best New Bands in Portland” list and
has been carrying the mantle of “next big thing” for
some time now.
Last year’s release A New Kind Of House clocks in
like an incomplete sentence at only 22 minutes. But it
does a lot in a short amount of time: shouty anthem-
like choruses blend with primal rhythms (did I mention
two drummers?), mariachi-flavored horn arrangements
meet a lush bed of strings, and simple guitar arpeggios
back-up vocalist Kyle Morton’s warbling tales of
sadness and loss — often inspired by his own struggle
with Lyme disease as a kid.
Typhoon plays 9 pm Friday, March 2, with Motopony
and Ravenna Woods at WOW Hall; $10 adv., $12 door.
— William Kennedy
Milk Worth Crying Over
Let’s face it, jazz is perplexing:
Beyond being compositionally complex
and stereotypically highbrow, it’s also
enigmatic in its far-reaching eclecticism.
Most wouldn’t look at OG jazz guitarists
like Django Reinhardt and find justifiable
comparisons with gypsy-punk groups of
today — think Gogol Bordello or
DeVotchka — but such comparisons are
there for the finding. That’s probably the
coolest thing about local group Hot
Milk, a band that slots perfectly into a
puzzling no-man’s-land between jazz and
folk — a land that, at least locally, is
likely to evoke a soundtrack of groups
like Voodoun Moi or Manouche Noir.
Picture edgy, contemporary Klezmer
music without the woodwinds and you’re
on the right track.
The instrumentation is as thorny as it
is smooth. From Dusty Carlson’s bass
playing, through Susan Richardson’s
enchanting drumming, to Andy Page’s
dope brass-work, Hot Milk’s musical
chops are as solid as they come, and
Rebecca Conner’s lyricism provides the
final touch. Her vocals are like strands of
silk woven through a loom of sharp
seventh chords and syncopated jazz
rhythms. The finished product is a soft,
groovy musical blanket that’s all too fun
to wrap yourself in.
Though still young, Hot Milk has been
beating out a stormy musical path in
recent months; taking no prisoners and,
more often than not, leaving behind the
ruins of a crowd that just got its mind
blown in half. And there’s no better way
to sum up Hot Milk than with their own
words: “We met in a dream and then
woke up dancin’.”
Go now, and dance with them.
Hot Milk, Eager Beaver and Lower 48
play 9 pm Friday, March 2, at Sam
Bond’s; $5. — Andy Valentine
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