I found myself on a recent evening amongst a ragged assembly of bespectacled geeks in a place called The Sultan Room. The centerpiece was a sunken ovular dancefloor with a backdrop of angular light panels evoking the futuristic situation room of a 70s sci-fi. The Sultan Room is entered through a sidedoor of the Turk’s Inn, an orientalist’s wet dream surrounded by graffitied warehouses in Brooklyn’s hipster Bushwick neighborhood.
The venue’s eclectic design suited the music. Experimental bands 75 Dollar Bill and BASIC each defied convention, juxtaposing unlikely musical genres and pairing electric guitars with homemade percussion rather than conventional drum sets.
75 Dollar Bill
The intellectual small talk hushed as Che Chen and Rick Brown sat down, Chen with guitar in lap and Brown seated atop a large plywood box of varying resonances that was his primary instrument.
Chen’s introspective guitar hook slowly gathered strength as Brown reached his arms down at both sides to slap out a 6/8 blues rhythm against the box. His right hand beat the bass pulse, his left hand held a stick with bells that produced the snare pop, and his foot controlled a pedal that rattled a collection of metal plates, the “cymbals”.
Brown told us afterwards that the metal plates were slipping out of place. All he could do was keep them moving so that they were always making some uncontrollable sound, an ethos that applied to 75 Dollar Bill’s adventurous music more generally.
Imagine you can turn a knob that mutates Tool riffs into Indian psychedelia, replace the drum set with the junkyard percussion of a post-80s Tom Waits album, and you’re getting close to 75 Dollar Bill’s ecstatically modal sound.
Chen’s guitar meandered in perpetual motion, alternating between arpeggios and chords in some happy-sounding Indian scale. It reminded me both of John Coltrane’s searching sax and experimental guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama’s album Don’t Forget to Boogie. He played in spirals: making slight variations to a lick on each pass until he’d wandered all the way up the fretboard and back. At one point he spiraled into a minute of ringing feedback before descending into regular notes from the burning above. At other times he just picked across his open strings for a few bars before starting another run.
There was a sitar-esque quality to Chen’s sound. The tone was neither clean nor fuzzy, but fiery and dignified. Raga rock!
The drums stayed constant throughout. “He likes to keep playing the same thing, but I’m always trying to change it,” I heard Chen explaining to fans outside after the set.
The second piece began more abruptly, with Robert slapping a fast beat in 5. In a reversal of roles, Chen’s 12-string guitar settled into a repeating 10-beat riff while Brown toggled between a stomping 4/4 and the fast 5 beat. The lurching rhythms created a start-stop feeling that was over as abruptly as it started within a few minutes.
While the audience recovered from whiplash, an organ drone glowed out of the guitar pedals. Brown blew a gentle harmony into a snake charmer’s horn, sounding like an Indian funeral dirge. Chen grabbed various chimes, bells, and shakers before joining the harmonies on a small flute. It felt like calm before a gathering storm.
The bells and shakers slowly coalesced into a 15-beat rhythm as Chen tentatively plucked a path to nirvana. The guitar sounded cleaner than in the previous songs, and tambourine outlined a sinewy rhythm growing in tension. The duo drifted across peaks of ecstatic feedback and contemplative valleys, propelled by a constant pulse until slowly gliding to a soft landing.
BASIC
If 75 Dollar Bill seasoned their organic guitar rock with Indian psychedelia, BASIC’s preferred ingredient was electronic disco. Like the former, they eschewed the traditional drum set for a homemade setup.
Percussionist Mikel Patrick Avery triggered and modulated electronic dance beats on his laptop and pounded a lateral bass drum between his feet with his right hand, marching band style. His left hand knocked on a giant round cowbell electronically wired to produce the Disco Toms sound. Varying shades of a cartoonish descending-tone biuuu, like the sound of a hollow rubber ball bouncing around in a video game, played a combo role somewhere between snare and cymbals.
The beats were danceable, but only a handful of the “guess it’s all downhill from here” crowd unfolded their arms.
Often buried in the mix, Douglas McCombs played a guitar that seemed to combine lower bass strings and higher guitar strings. When audible, his bass tone rumbled like Chris Squire, and occasionally he led the way with wiry guitar lines.
This instrumental band’s lead singer was guitarist Chris Forsyth, who sizzled through an endless array of euphoric riffs harkening back to yacht rock, new wave, or even Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold”.
All but one song began with another drum machine beat, which the band would jam on for up to 10 minutes. The hard-hitting electronic approach felt energizing for the first few numbers, but I found myself zoning out by the end. Maybe that was the goal?
The two bands were united in novel approaches to percussion and determination to blur genres, though they pushed the boundaries in opposing directions. 75 Dollar Bill levitated into the ethereal and ecstatic through unusual time signatures, while BASIC stayed grounded in hard-hitting 4/4 dance beats. I ultimately found 75 Dollar Bill’s music more captivating than the thudding, repetitive beats and maximalist guitar work of BASIC.
With ears ringing and glasses dampened from sweat, flannel-clad guests of The Sultan Room dispersed into the graffitied industrial surroundings stimulated by a kaleidoscope of musical possibilities.
Leave a Reply