Redhooker - The Future According to Yesterday
Rating
RIYL
Slow SixSteve Reich
Phillip Glass
Max Richter
Tracklist
1. Sometimes She Speaks Gently2. Animus
3. Sunday Silence
4. Twelve Times Goodbye
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To answer your first, second, and third questions: yup, you read it right, the band’s name is indeed Redhooker; no, it is not a southern thrash band; and yes, I would like an apple pie with that, thank you.
All joking aside, Redhooker is the solo project of Stephen Griesgraber, who normally spends his time playing guitar in Slow Six, an up-and-coming avant-garde ensemble from Brooklyn, New York. You may be wondering why he chose the name Redhooker as his moniker. Well, I’ll tell you. After finishing graduate school, Griesgraber moved out to Red Hook, a fringe neighborhood in Brooklyn. Red Hook’s melancholic and isolated environment inspired Griesgraber to write the music that would eventually encompass his new album The Future According to Yesterday, which interestingly enough, was written in a vacated accident injury law office rented out to Mike Gordon, the bass player of Phish, 700 feet above ground in the 46th floor of a Woolworths building in downtown Manhattan. It all comes together now, doesn’t it?
Though all the compositions on The Future According to Yesterday are written entirely by Griesgraber, the album features Peter Hess on clarinet, Slow Six bandmates Maxim Moston on violin and Rob Collins on keyboard, and Griesgraber himself on guitar. As you can see, there are no drums, bass, or beats on The Future According to Yesterday - just a simple, yet unorthodox (you would not usually see a band solely comprising of this combination of instruments) quartet. Nevertheless, Redhooker pulls it off nicely by fusing all of the elements together.
Though The Future According to Yesterday is a four track affair, it is actually two pieces split into four movements; the first two tracks or movements encompassing the first piece and the last two encompassing the second. The first piece starts off with the strongest and most emotionally demanding track on the album, “Sometimes She Speaks Gently.” The track begins with a lonely Rhodes piano and is soon accompanied with a violin and clarinet who repeatedly swell and fade, sometimes in synch and sometimes not. The minimal and repeated nature of the song radiates an incredibly melancholic atmosphere which hits the listener especially hard when the repetition is broken and the interaction between the violin and clarinet intensifies while the Rhodes still plays its lonely tune and ends the song the way it started. The second movement “Animus” continues with the Rhodes, but this time in a much faster pace than its counterpart, only to soon be accompanied by all the instruments in a fine frenzy, each feeding off the other throughout the track in an instrumental polyphony.
The second piece like the first begins in a minimalist somber mood only to later evolve into a polyphony of sorts. Over the course of these two pieces that clock in at a combined 25 minutes, Redhooker does a great job at fusing together melancholic minimalist classical music with frenzied contemporary pop aesthetics, creating a shining example of contemporary classical music.
--Armand Babian
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Fort Bragg, CA