Redhooker - "The Future According to Yesterday"

Redhooker - Twelve Times Goodbye (Soft Landing 2007)

Redhooker - The Future According to Yesterday / Soft Landing

A few weeks ago we featured a record here on Audiversity by Brooklyn group Slow Six. Its gentle mixing of post-rock and classical was well executed and our enjoyment of the record did not go unnoticed: Just one week after that, the group's guitarist Stephen Griesgraber got in touch with me about an album of his own that he was in the process of putting out. As my ongoing personal sagas with trying to move to Chicago continue to get in the way of the important things (like, y'know, blogging), Redhooker's The Future According to Yesterday is very much a record I'll be needing for today as much as for the past or the future.

Some facts: The Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn is the home of "Crazy Joe" Gallo, Kentler International Drawing Space, and Charley Goldman. It's also the setting for H.P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" and Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge." A public high school principal was once killed in the crossfire of a drug-related shooting while looking for a kid who'd taken off from the school. It's the only part of New York City that has a full view of The Statue of Liberty from land.

I spend a paragraph telling you this because I feel that as the inspiration for the quartet's name, a great deal of the neighborhood informs this album (despite the fact that it was recorded in a vacated law office in downtown Manhattan). Griesgraber says as much, too. "The stark contrast of these two environments yields a four-piece program that is spacious but dark, dense yet fluid, cautious while extreme." I don't know about that last bit when it comes to the music, but there's no doubt in the space, darkness and fluidity of this album.

Its density is as good a place as any to start, though. An argument could be made that these songs aren't dense; there is no percussion and the instruments (limited mostly to the violin, clarinet, Rhodes piano, and guitar) are all about as far from the climax to "My Father, My King" as you can get. Its density instead comes from the amount of notes packed into each line of music, the interplay between Griesgraber and his colleagues as evidenced by the opener, "Sometimes She Speaks Gently."

If you think it sounds a lot like Nor'easter, you're not far off. Violinist Maxim Moston and clarinetist Peter Hess are both members of Slow Six. But Redhooker is like a pop version of Slow Six. The songs are a little more succinct, they're not quite as minimalist, and hooks (for whatever pun that's worth) are occasionally identifiable.

And this is one of the more interesting things for me, to listen to this and describe it as a more "pop" Slow Six. I don't know if that's the right word, but it is more immediately accessible. Someone can turn on Redhooker and understand right away what is happening with "Animus." Slow Six requires a little more time, a little more patience, and an altogether different approach. They are not the same beasts. Think of Redhooker as a less band-ish Tortoise or Hylozoists. Chamber music released into a cold, rainy sunset at Prospect Park.

Griesgraber and his cohorts do a lot with a little on the opening three tracks. But he saves the best for the longest and last with "Twelve Times Goodbye." "Animus" is pretty great, but it's like the abridged version of "Twelve Times Goodbye." This is a slow-burning near-nine-minute epic, brilliantly building tension and setting a somber mood straight from the moment the Rhodes kicks in over the strings that have bled in from "Sunday Silence." Like Slow Six, Griesgraber is using technology to his benefit too: In this case, it's Max/MSP, another real-time audio editing program most famously used by Autechre and not unlike the Audiomulch Erdem Helvacioğlu used to great effect on Altered Realities. The great relief is that, also like Slow Six, it does not distract from the superlative arrangements and interaction of the players. You hardly notice it happening at all, in fact.

There are still some people who think that, going into a review of something even vaguely classical, a guitar is some kind of shock or an instrument that should sound out of place. Griesgraber is exactly the guy you want to talk to about what should and should not belong in music, because he's demonstrating with Redhooker that anything can belong when played effectively. It's not a revolution, it's not an albatross, it's not to be ignored. Hear what the annoying intellectual at work who's been listening to way too much NPR is fawning about; hopefully this review will go some way toward helping you understand why it's so good on your own terms.