Five years in the life of Excepter
(((unartig))) has a great video series on Excepter over on his site, here’s a taste:
The first time I saw Excepter was five years ago at Tonic, a small experimental music venue in the Lower East Side that slowly went under as the condos went up. I don’t think I had moved to the city yet but Excepter would be one of the reasons I’d be doing so eventually. The group performed something like musical theater that night: Caitlin Cook, who I remember being tall and blond and beautiful (I only saw her this once, so don’t hold me to it), wore a short fur coat and walked on and off stage into the audience, seeming aloof and murmuring into a microphone whose signal was treated with considerable delay and reverb. When she took off the coat, revealing a backless dress, you could count every one of her vertebrae, from the top of her neck and all the way down. I had never seen anything like that before. John Fell Ryan, who I am nearly certain was wearing his linen suit and a bucket hat, also looked the part of prophet, while the rest of the band played bass guitar, a drum set with torn cymbals, and a small drum machine. Sometimes the sounds made sense together, other times they did not. Each player held the other in quiet disregard. The crowd, which had been wall-to-wall, thinned out considerably. But for whatever reason, I had the distinct feeling that night of wanting to understand‚Äìwho were these quiet, disregarding people, what did they read, what did they listen to, what food did they eat, where did they get their clothing, what did they worship, what did they think of the walls closing in around them.
Check it all out here.
Excepter | NYC @ WKCR Studios Columbia University | 25 Oct 2009
