Through the curtain-lined doorway of Never Ending Books on Saturday night, an older woman in a blue shirt left the performance room, plugging her ears with her fingers. This reporter passed by her, going in the opposite direction. The room inside was in darkness, the sounds of metal grinding and shaping layers of noise music, echoing from a monitor on a fold-out table. Behind the table, OPCOH moved his hand along what looked to be a black electric violin, while the monitor, with wiring colored red, yellow, and blue, jutted out from the near corner of the table. His performance felt like a conjuring, what with the backdrop of wind from Hurricane Ian’s remnants picking up speed behind him. As he neared the end of his set, it sounded as if raindrops were falling from different corners of the dark room, the sound of them moving off into the distance and then disappearing.
OPCOH was the first of four performers at the State Street space, starting off a night of friendly, fascinating music experimentation that continued to solidify Never Ending Books’s place as a welcoming hub for the eclectic and unusual in the Elm City. After OPCOH’s set, once the room had fallen into something close to silence, audience members talked of purchased taxidermy, foliage, and oddities markets, while FIFAC arranged a small wooden bench on the floor amongst chairs. While he set up, I moved to a white floral bench along the wall and sank into it. When the lights went off again, signaling the set’s beginning, someone said, “Scary in here now.”
Before he began, Lys Guillorn, who would perform later that evening asked, “Jeff should we reorient?”
“Where should we go?” OPCOH echoed.
They rearranged the chairs in the room into a half moon shape, and I realized why. When FIFAC begins to play, found sound bounced from multiple speakers across the room. After his set, he told me that his first song featured the sounds of him flipping through pages, that he is “just trying to record the most mundane stuff.” He records various sounds you can make from straws, other inanimate objects, and found sounds on his phone. In performance, he layered them spontaneously, discovering as he went how they could blend or complement one another. As the found sounds bounced through the room, his process of blending them mimicked the bouncing colors of an arcade game. It makes me think of playing pinball, a slot machine, the sound of pennies hitting pennies, and even, for some reason, buying candy. His layerings and playfulness in working with found sound feels like an ode to The Books — even though he says he’s never listened to them.
The lights turned back up and two guys, each with a guitar in hand, set up a small amp and some mics. During the mic check one of them sang, “I’m a trained singer, I’ve been singin’ all my life, my mom said I should sing because I’m really good at it.” The audience laughed.
The entire performance of Jeff Unfortunately, hailing from Massachusetts, was filled with jokes between songs, though they didn’t feel like jokes as much as Jeff, the lead singer’s, honest and unabashed personhood. In leaving the lights on, he commented, “I want a surgical room. I want everyone baking in this hot, white light.”
As soon as Jeff Unfortunately began to play, the combination of amp buzz and fuzzy lead guitar and monotone but not quite monotone singing lent a feeling as if you were attending an early Velvet Underground concert. It was scrappy, somewhat messy, loose yet intricate rock that added up to refreshingly charming. Even if Jeff Unfortunately cared deeply and greatly how other people received them, their carefree presentation of music created a room open to anything.
“We’re gonna switch guitars a few times,” Jeff said. Someone in the audience yelled, “Let’s go!” There was a pause. “Not yet though,” Jeff responded. With sheets of writing covering the floor around them, they switched guitars by crisscrossing and trading cables, and ended with a song about Jeff’s dog and a cover of Michael Hurley’s song, “Don’t Treat Me Bad.”
The night ended with Lys Guillorn, a collection of guitar pedals hosting various effects at her feet. She opened with her song “Dial Tone,” at one point stepping away from the microphone to belt a part from the song, which was powerful to be witness to. She was an extremely expressive singer and storyteller, blending influences of punk, rock, and folk into a style that fused singer-songwriter with grunge and punk rock. During her second song of the night, I was reminded of the song “Shivers” by The Cairo Gang, with its driving bass line, repeating nature, and infectious rhythmic pacing.
During her set, Guillorn told the story of how her song “Wisdom Teeth” was written. On a particularly tough day she dressed herself in glitter, went upstairs, and listened to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John, which led to the birth of her own song.
“Sometimes you just need to get inside someone else’s songs, and it breaks you and you can come out … from the little cave inside yourself,” Then, toward the end of the night, she broke a guitar string. “Let’s see what happens,” she declared. “That’s the theme of the evening.”
