Arto Lindsay New Museum November 30, 2012 Right from the outset, singer/guitarist
m: Arto Lindsay appeared uncomfortable about the framing for this gig in the New Museum on the Bowery. He'd been involved in one of the current exhibitions upstairs, documenting the art scene in that area (Come Closer: Art Around The Bowery, 1969-1989). Much of the music erupting from that vivid scene would have typically inhabited some grimy, graffiti-covered, beer-swillin,' vomit-coated, dimly-lit joint, rather than this gleamingly white, blank-spaced, glare-lit gallery. Well, at least Lindsay's one-man show was down in the museum's basement. He might have felt quite exposed, like a squirming creature pinned to a sterilized mount. A butterfly and a beetle are apt creatures to personify the constant contrasts in Lindsay's songs. His gentle, softly whispered Portuguese lines were infused with the emotionally exposed troubadour sound native to his spiritual home of Brazil. It became a mixture, with Lindsay's fragmented, staccato guitar outbursts jolting straight out of the Downtown NYC environs, and harking back to his No Wave beginnings with the DNA trio in the late 1970s. He often separates these aspects of his work, but lately Lindsay has been developing a solo performance stance where the introverted aggression fuses into an entity that's shifting at a rapid rate between the two vocabularies, creating a third vocabulary. The violence is somehow calm. The floating fragility now carries an underlying threat...
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December 25th, 2012, 11:30 PM
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