Chapter Forty: "Blues Control. Sapat. Parlour."

This dream last night made my mouth taste shut when I woke late for work this morning. It started with my discovering a video channel on archive.org called Shocker Drive-In: a digital recreation of going to a drive-in movie sometime in the 1950s through the 1970s. I stayed up past the safety bedtime watching cartoon popcorn boxes dance, the faux-invention of corn dogs, and public service denouncements of vandalism to the venue, followed by a screening of screams centered around both Roger and Gene Corman's films. When I finally forced myself to the hay nigh 2am, my brain was fuzzy.

I dreamed. Somewhere in my dreams, I attended a baumy, summer-nights-on-my-radio drive-in. After getting home late from the movies, I was deciding whether to go to bed or go get some late night pizza. I apparently was living in a college house, and my concern for making it to work on time somehow became twisted into my concern for making it to classes on time. I needed sleep to understand those upper level Geology classes, I kept thinking. Several mushy incomprehensible dream minutes/hours/chairs later, there was an explosion near the house; or a shootout! Or giant haunted cave-beast attack! Who can tell!? All my friends were scattering from the pizza-gas station. They yelled my name, telling me "Run, Sex Dragon! Run!" We were all running to our cars in fear from a monster/madman/giant mushroom/gorilla that was firing lasers/bullets/frowns from his fingertips or gun or red Satan-eyes.

I saw my friend Neal's white van skid off. I hopped into a car with Matt from local punk band The Teeth, and then realized we all ended at the same place: our dorm house, which was, in fact, The Cathouse in Germantown/Old Louisville. And then I realized all my roommates were the people who attended the Blues Control show at The Cathouse on Thursday, July 23.

"Listen to me, Sex Dragon," Dream Matt addressed me, calmly. "Classes don't start until late afternoon. So go back to bed, turn off that alarm; sleep in; all is fine."

I adhered to Dream Matt's advice and was actually very late for work today. But I don't blame him, or the real Blues Control.

But what is the real Blues Control, anyways?

Before that drippy Thursday night show, I knew they were a duo from Queens that had played Louisville in the past, being brought in by Sapat, the River City anchors of experimental carousing. A few days before the show, Old Baby and Sapat member Neal (see white van driver from above dream) informed me that Blues Control had cracked the Billboard New Age charts and had peaked at number 5. This fact intrigued me to just what sound was going to come from the two on a summer night that was so humid I felt like we were being cremated in our shoes on Preston Avenue. It also intrigued me that Sapat was bringing in leaders of the Top 40 New Age movement.

I showed slightly late, unfortunately missing tunes by young Louisville band Wet. I walked in disorientated and swayed to Parlour, after which we all commenced to wringing our shirts of sweat into the backyard during a passing storm of lightning almost directly above us. Before Blues Control began I found myself engaged in talks with a fan who had witnessed them in their prior visit here. He attempted to describe the experience and sound, and found it difficult. He talked of BC being one of those bands that denies as much as defies genres; that just takes the music where they take the music. Plus, he added that he had taken acid right before that particular show. I believe his exact words to characterize the experience were "it was like hearing (or seeing) a freight train run through Bobby McFerrin's voice."

photo by Michael Powell

With that, the lights went down in the Cathouse, and we entered. I hovered and skulked behind amps, glancing the duo from afar at first. Guitarist Russ Waterhouse was nearest me and as the resonance ran through time and vision I was already captivated by the sparkly Mustang he played, standing behind a wall of wires and unpredictable sound concoctions. Directly across from him, keyboardist Lea Cho underwrote the swell of music through the keys, parceling between melodies and rhythms. As the music began to climb, I was pretty sure my head became part of the amp near me.

photo by Michael Powell

Blues Control. are touring in support of their latest LP "Valley Tangents" (Drag City), which is the recording that has earned them the aforementioned recognition in the popular New Age community. I don't listen to much music in that record store category (I didn't even know it still existed as a category), but I'd be willing to bet that Blues Control presents more challenging music than what is often accepted in that realm. The guitar changes direction often, technologically hopping on board with itself occasionally into a piggyback of seemingly undesigned soundscapes and melted percussion. Only after setting a pace or melody line that swims somewhere in the waters of jazz fused with an almost children's singsong that dips and sashes into a noisier subzone before passing into an angelic spin.

The mugginess of the summer night parked itself inside the thule of all of us there, and at times I felt like a chant from the audience could have coincided with the hypnosis Blues Control creates in the live situation. The Korg created a groove out of no percussion, but the simple chugging of notes and aligning of Cho's fingertips, which would dip in and out of melodic refrains and themes, sometimes delicately, and sometimes forcefully; sometimes both. The set was a juxtaposition of temperate notes delving and diving because of their synchronicities within one another; the guitar would almost build a slide for the keyboards to tip-toe down, and then both would swerve into a jump through the puddle at the bottom, and ditch roll to the end of the song.

photo by Michael Powell

And then Waterhouse would hit the cassette player to his left and something altogether new would happen. There were references to 70s soft rock that had boils of melted heavy metal and warped old blues hidden in there, but that would all be a blind trap that would patiently pursue an end that was never expected.

Sapat followed, with Kris Alplanalp beginning the set seated with an old electrified acoustic guitar. The more I experience Sapat, the more I am endeared with the directions the band takes. Their songbook seems to expand into more pages than there are members of the band. Nothing is ever pre-dialed with Sapat, as Alplanalp's voice shifts the band through variants of rock filtered through key changes and keys from other planets. With the horn section bombastically wrestling amongst the guitars and Jeff Komara's drums, it was loud and perfect for such a sticky evening. At one instant I felt like I was watching a German big band populated by gypsy musicians playing a hypnotic Malaysian theatrical piece. And Dane Waters rose above everything with That Voice.

It all made being late for work worth it. Although I still don't know much about Geology.  

Chapter Twenty Two: "Dane Waters - Dark Waters."

Dane Waters has released an album I've gotten hooked on.

I first saw Dane perform a couple of years ago with the Louisville experimental/bang/boom/everything band Sapat. I've been racking my brain trying to recall which venue it was I saw her first perform with them. I believe the first show I saw Sapat perform at was the now defunct Swan Dive circa 2008ish? Or it might have been at Club 21? My memory can fail me often, no matter how much I scold it. I do remember, whatever venue it was, at whatever date it was, being already blown to pieces by the massive sound Sapat creates. Sapat can get loud once the band heads toward a coup of its own songs and all members begin to chime in for a working finale. The performance, I recall, suddenly swerved left as the band abruptly backed off and there was a voice that hit high notes that somehow towered above the rumble the band had created, making the piece they were performing become a plume of operatic vocals before the group resumed. It basically knocked me over to hear the contrasts together.

It was at Lisa's that I once, in a hurry, walked into a softcheque show, Dane's own band. I only caught minutes of the show and couldn't decide what was really happening, lost in the midst of the thick crowd at the back of the room. I had no idea it was the same person until I saw her perform with softcheque a second time at the Rudyard Kipling with Montag. And it was there that I finally understood the magic of softcheque (as well as the magic of Montag) and their performance and sound and creativity with structures and notes. It was impressive.

I didn't officially meet Dane until the summer of 2011 when we performed together in The Childish, a Billy Childish cover band. It was at this point that I slowly assembled two and two and realized that she was also an opera singer with Kentucky Opera, as well as a prolific singer-songwriter-keyboardist. There was a party one night when we sat in the backyard and compared notes on our love of opera, which in turn led us into a conversation about why opera is so good. We talked the big themes: Love, Lust, Corruption, Evil, Violence, Betrayal, Jealousy and Death. While I can obsess over a song that itself obsesses over a miniscule picture of a moment in time, the Big Themes are my own favorite points of interest in art.


Dane's first solo recording, "Dark Waters," is just that. A complete atmospheric immersion into the Big Themes. Atmosphere is a key word. She creates heavy swirling escapes into moods and the illusions that make up reality. Each song explores different streams of imagination and thought, gathering up and setting down ideas and feelings through lyrics that touch on those Big Themes and their simple truths: Death; Love; Longing; Lies; Absence; Dreaming; Loss; Devotion; Fate; The Chasm of Disagreement. It's all there, like some antique handbook missing on a shelf in a made-up library closed in winter.

Dane relies mostly on her skill at the keys, approaching every song with its own unique sideways soundscape. Lowe Sutherland's guitar appears sparsely but wonderfully in the mix, such as on the opening of "Push," which begins sadly and beautifully. Speaking of the mix, Warren Gray's approach purses Dane's voice with the various sounds into a deep and warm listen, giving the CD a powerful place. Both he and Dane have created a blend of complex moments for each minute of the recording. "Key" begins as a quiet sense of voices singing sadly until the boom of percussion brings the pound of an organ through Dane's voice, which ends it all with the proclamation "And trust banished terror." "Blue" provides a cold piano as what sounds like scraping metal and chains peruse the background, making loneliness sound scary. Which it is.

Dane uses her voice as much as an instrument as the lead melody, overlapping her skills, which are much. If you've never heard Dane sing you need to probably immediately go to her shows. She was definitely born with and has developed something that seems to be able to do anything. Too many adjectives would be needed to describe all the places it goes. She can sing dark; she can sing beautiful. She underlies the ethereal electronics on "Winter" with her voice providing an underlying vocal metronome while she sings of the season and the ocean.

One of my favorite tracks is "Inoperable." Led by a hermited pulse, a stark piano pounds a shooting melody. And of course Dane tears it away with her vocals. "Rappelle" remains ethereal as she mixes French and English, bringing to her style extracts from Jacques Prevert's poem "Barbara."  "Teeth of a Bear" shows the intensity the album goes into, as the synth rises into the listener's ears loudly while she experiments with the dynamics of her own voice and the melodies that can fit within the song. Without a doubt, my favorite point of the album comes with the final acts as "Dream Again" lands as one of the most beautiful places, only to culminate with "Agelessness," a disconcerting psychedelic space cabaret. Based on these two pieces, I can see Peter Berkowitz's mermaid reference to her sound in his interview with Dane.

Perhaps the thing that really grabs me about "Dark Waters" is that is sounds like an album to be listened to in its entirety, which I can really respect at this point in history when many musicians/bands have subscribed to the Digital Age idea of capping together a group of songs that stand alone for download only. Hearing "Blue" follow into "Inoperable" follow into "Rappelle" sounds like a story that should be written down somewhere. And I guess it has been.

Dane with Warren Gray on drums.

Dane's live show is just as intense as the recording, remaining stark, with her center stage, managing electronic sounds and keys with a variety of multi-tasked gadgets. Her voice is so strong, I wonder if she even needs the microphone. I mean, I saw her perform in a production of Bizet's "Carmen" at the Brown Theatre without augmentation; I imagine she could handle a club. Although, live in the club, she mixes the intricacies of her voice with looping and other effects to bring "Dark Waters" to life. When I saw her at Zanzabar on Friday, December 16, I joked with her that she makes it hard to photograph her performances when armed with such a shitty camera as I have, performing completely in the dark. She joked that she should probably have used some lights. I personally thought the darkness added to and fit the music pretty perfectly. 

"Dark Waters" can be purchased at Better Days, Underground Sounds and through Dane's bandcamp site.