There are two ways that punk and “alternative” musicians end up going as they advance in their careers: towards relatively uninspired and diluted mediocrity (I will not name names, but you undoubtedly have someone in mind); or in the direction of the frontier, the music that has not yet been made, striving in a mad dash to escape the mediatory bindings of convention and structure: towards the avant-garde. With around 40 others in the cramped basement of the Funhouse on a Wednesday night, Jim White, Guy Picciotto, and Colleen Burke delicately unveiled the experience of Jim’s solo studio work in a live setting, to great success. However, the music was not only defined by the exploratory percussion work that has defined Jim’s recent career, but also simple but effective pop structures guided by Jim’s vocals. The tight balance between these two mesmerized the thick atmosphere of that basement into silence only punctuated by bouts of applause.
Guy kicked off the show on bass, an unfamiliar choice (Guy’s work in previous bands have always centered around the guitar), thumbing a catchily simple but hypnotizingly interweaving figure before Jim and Colleen leapt in on drums and keyboards respectively. A repetitive 4/4 rhythm undergirded the occasional but thoughtful chant of “the mic is on” from Jim. As Jim’s piercing eyes scanned the audience, he raised his voice, and then suddenly cued Guy and Colleen to stop on a dime.
To be honest, the rest of the set was a bit of a red-lit blur. In a truly freeform fashion, the Trio effortlessly switched from sparse, minimalist song forms into dense improvisation. At times, Guy switched from bass to a tom drum, where he would skitter across its surface with brushes, click on its plastic sides, or pound relentlessly on the skin. On one song, Jim joined him in the latter exercise while Colleen blasted noise from her keyboard station. On another, Jim and Guy filled the air with dense percussion, Colleen barely skimming their work with heavy rainfall. At one point, Guy wished a friend of the band happy birthday. The atmosphere was simultaneously surreal and vividly personal. The band, mere feet from me, dipped and curved and shifted in and out and through structures and forms, snapping into grids and looping bass grooves before fluttering touches and journeys across the drum kit’s assets, liberated from time and space. Sometimes consonantly poppy, sometimes dissonantly confrontational, the Trio flexed their depth and breadth alongside their sheer technical ability (for Guy, his creativity instead).
Some songs saw Jim reading off lyric sheets skewered on the music stand next to him, pulling them off and littering the floor as they were used, accumulating like autumn leaves as Jim sang, chanted, and spoke. In one moment, Jim described the view of death from being carried out on the stretcher. For a man who rarely wrote lyrics in his previous work, his descriptions were sparse but poignant. The Trio converted Jim’s work to the live setting almost effortlessly, interplaying with ease, opting for minimalist effectiveness. The audience, breathless, enraptured.
A highly abbreviated overview of their careers: Jim White has done too much to fit in here. Joining various noise and avant rock bands in his youth, he ended up founding the Dirty Three, an instrumental violin post-rock trio, and remaining with them to this day. A brief hiatus in the 2010s gave him some time to work on Xylouris White, a duo with Greek singer and laoutist George Xylouris, with producer and unofficial third member Guy Picciotto. Since then, the pair have collaborated on numerous projects, often with Guy producing. It’s a little bit hard to talk objectively about Guy—he’s one of my favorite people on Earth—but his career got started in the ‘80s DC hardcore scene. Guy played a seminal role in founding the genre today known as “emo” with his short-lived band Rites of Spring, and alongside Ian MacKaye fronted the greatest punk band of all time, Fugazi, until around 2002. Since then, he’s been intermittently making appearances, but rarely in live settings. The youngest member of the trio, Colleen Burke, is a little more elusive. Homegrown in Detroit, Colleen began her career in the early ‘90s with the jangly psych-rock band Outrageous Cherry and played with the shorter-lived garage-rock We Ragazzi.
I spoke with the Trio over Zoom a week later, and they expanded on the background and lead-up to the show. As Jim puts it, his newfound lyrical talent “mystified” him: “I just started writing them, I don’t know why…I couldn’t think of two worse things, really, writing lyrics and singing. Two of my worst nightmares.” Guy also commented on the “explosion” of creative lyric-writing: “It’s like you’re the Tiger Woods of golf and you never played golf before.” On improvisation, Guy noted that “even in true improvisation, there’s a lot of conventions that are not being foregrounded in order to maintain some idea that there’s something purely improvisational happening.” The instinctual aspect of improvisation was something the group felt deeply, the emotionality eliminating the idea of conscious choice. In Jim’s words, “you can choose not to have it feel dull,” but outside of that, the beauty of their work, ironically, was the thoughtless immediacy alongside and within prepared song forms, eschewing predictability for something truer to what they feel in the moment. For younger musicians, Colleen and Guy had two pieces of advice: for Colleen, “i do notice a lack of chaos sometimes in younger music. I feel like often I see stuff that is like very well-practiced and presented…I would just like to see more like guts on the stage”; for Guy, “do not break up your band…the more time you get [together], the deeper you can go.”
Indeed, passion and experience form the bedrock of not just excellent musicianship, but for life in general. In a way, the unfettered music of Jim White that night was a call to arms: live to the fullest, experience the most, do what is immediately available, make mistakes, and come out better for it. For this Trio, more lies ahead: more shows, more places, more songs. The long road stretches in front of us, but like Sisyphus, we must rejoice in its seeming endlessness. Appreciate every pebble. Take a chance. Improvise. Live life not in the ways you know, but in the ways you believe. The only barrier between us and and a more authentic life is ourselves. “The mic is on.”