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Ooh! Pretty lights accompany Heather McIntosh's opening set (though you can barely see Heather herself).
"Damn," thinks Jeff Mangum. "They're actually growing pot right on the stage here! I love this place!"
Just your basic rocking.
"I like the cooking pot percussion gimmick...but I wish we'd washed this one out first."
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New York City is a city of five boroughs, but for the young and hip, it really consists of two: Manhattan and Brooklyn. Denizens of Manhattan gaze out at us from their overpriced, teeny apartments, drinking $12 cocktails, and think that they live in the real New York. We, and our fellow Brooklynites, gaze out on our
panoramic view of Manhattan from our comparatively spacious digs, drinking $3.50 pints, and know who's in the real New York. The neighborhood that has
done the most in the last few years to prove that it is possible to make Manhattanites come to Brooklyn is Williamsburg, a neighborhood so hip that a recent article
nominated the "L" train the hippest subway in NYC simply because it wends through the area. North 6 is a nice, spacious music venue situated behind a comfortable bar area only a few hundred yards from the East River. It is a perfect slice of Williamsburg -- cool, but inviting. The crowd that showed up on Friday night to see Circulatory System was about as indie-inside as you could get; after all, these were people who were showing up to see a band composed of members of other bands
(Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel) that were famous only to a very small subset of the music-listening public to start with. Not only that, but the show
was hardly advertised, and the band has not exactly gone out of its way to play up the Elephant 6 connection. Despite all of this obfuscation and obscurity, the crowd
numbered well over a hundred, and they waited patiently for an hour and a half beyond the advertised start time before the opening band emerged.
On a stage that looked more like it was set up for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Arcadian green Christmas lights and plastic plant life,
Heather McIntosh (who is also a part of Circulatory System) took the stage, backed by several other Circulatory System members. That's right, these guys are so cool
that they open for themselves (Kind of an Elephant 6 tradition, really -- Ed.). McIntosh, who plays both guitar and cello, led the quartet through about ten of her songs, which ranged from worldly casbah swing with entrancing cello and clarinet interplay to listlessly strummed guitar ramblings. Despite the audience's carefree and warm feeling, McIntosh's songs taxed the audience's attention span to a point that not even the clarinet could mitigate. Often, McIntosh's lyrics sounded like poorly-studied Dickinson images about fading stars, birds and narwhals. The atmosphere of the set was
decidedly experimental, like a poetry reading, so maybe it isn't fair to critique too harshly here.
At long last and amid the fluttering sounds of birds chirping, the other members of Circulatory System took the stage. William Hart strapped on a beat-up Telecaster.
Jeff Mangum, aka Neutral Milk Hotel, was one of three to take a seat behind a drum kit, forming a "tridrumverate" (sorry) with the cute Hannah James and a third
gentleman who wore a Naval pea coat and looked either like Zak Yablonsky of the Lovin' Spoonful or an escaped Kink. The clarinet player also proved capable with
the electric bass as the band took off into one many of William Hart's prodigious compositions.
The beginning of the set relied on songs that aren't on the band's eponymous debut, and given the songwriter's prodigious back-catalogue, they may have been old Olivia nuggets, or new musical concepts. In any case, the less-recognizable tracks were pretty good, and were clearly written with the rather odd three-drum, keys, bass, guitar and cello lineup of the touring band in mind. As for the tracks from the album, the results of reconfiguring them for this band set-up were mixed. Songs
like "Yesterday's World" received a heavier rock treatment, while others, like "The Lovely Universe" and "Now", didn't make out so well without Hart's double-tracked
voice and subtle, incidental flourishes to underscore his delicate songwriting. With the outfit's Planet Drum format, the experimentally transcendental sound of the
band's eponymously-titled debut album was eschewed for a more primal, beaten-log feel.
Once the audience adjusted to the change, the show became all the more interesting for being a hybrid, jug-band attraction replete with a bowed saw, violin and the
third drummer playing with a cooking pot. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of this percussive wall of sound is that elements like the saw, cello or keyboards were
mostly drowned in the wash. Still, a good time was had by all. The musicians good-humoredly admitted that it was their fifth show together and played through each of
the songs with a smile amid balloons that were being knocked around the stage and the audience. The crowd was obviously pleased to see a band that was having so
much fun. Sadly, Mangum, being only the drummer, didn't have occasion to air out his well-known pipes by singing lead on any of the songs. We say "sadly",
mainly because Mangum rarely tours and is usually found in Tibet hunting zit-lizards for his 114 adopted Siamese twins. Or something like that.
The show was good, the crowd was entranced, and most of us left pretty satisfied. The musicians assembled that night have survived the excessive hype that came with
the Elephant 6 phenomenon, and the fact that they can get together in new permutations and produce music that is as rich, complex and sonically intriguing as Circulatory System makes one glad to be young and alive and listening on a late-fall Brooklyn night.
Article and photos by Daniel Arizona and Brett McCallon.
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