OM TRIO: BANGIN' AT THE BOOM BOOM

OM Trio | 11.20.03 | Boom Boom Room | San Francisco, CA

Moving slowly from the back of the club, I could hear them begin like some slow electrical tube coming to life inside a supercomputer, one of those vast machines that once filled rooms before silicon made the universe fit on the end of a pin. Something complex is afoot, punch card equations that won't be understood until this behemoth spits out a ticker tape in a few hours.

I thought back to a poster for this show I'd seen on a boarded up storefront on Haight Street earlier that day. Yellow and green shapes floated in a dark blue sky over industrial buildings. Abstract but no more abstract than the descriptor: Instru-Metal Jazz-Rock. This is a sound that could only emerge from the City. There's no country in it, no pastoral sigh, no woods, no long single lane roads. This is edges and speed, color laid on color and bright lights twinkling against steel, high-rises and sirens screaming. Keyboards, bass, and drums. As pure as it gets in jazz or rock yet this is little more than a cousin to what happened when Miles plugged in his voodoo. Not to disparage the whole sub-genre but fifteen minutes, a paltry quarter-hour, in their company tells me this is OM Music, a creature distinct, undulating, bold as brass. In placing it near other music I'm simply identifying suburbs in their geography, neighbors in good standing but all living outside their borders.

Like a cat staring at the flap of wings, I locked onto Ilya Stemkovsky's hummingbird hands, a movement graceful in form and function. Without hyperbole, I can tell you he's one of the best drummers I've ever heard. Period. His playing makes one reach back into the pantheon for comparisons: a bit of Clyde Stubblefield's funk friction, the god-almighty crash of Elvin Jones, the jagged truth of Ronald Shannon Jackson, Joey Baron's tireless funked-up swing. He exhibits a nigh endless ability to grab ya, hold ya, give ya a nanny-shake to scare the baby inside you. I grinned hugely when I caught that he was wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt. Ted and Darren Peligro would dig this guy for sure (and the rest of them, too, for they are punk in the purest sense of the word). Zooming in on a single aspect, I don't know that I've ever enjoyed another stick man's cymbal work more. Consider the thousands of hours of monk-like listening I've done at home and in concert halls and feel the true weight of that compliment.

Dolly back and the seams between the trio fade. The sheer physicality of their playing is striking. Notes are reflected in their bodies--in the damp-haired flail of Ilya, in the locked knee sway of bassist Pete Novembre, or the porn star grimace from Brian Felix as he hammered the Hammond organ. There's delicacy and atmosphere, sure, but they seem most alive, most themselves, when they chomp into a tactile bump that'd do Fatboy Slim proud. It would be too simplistic to call it "funk." There's much too much chaos floating in this particulate matter to pin-the-genre on this donkey. If Sun Ra had it right and space is the place then OM Trio builds rocket ships for exploration, dig?

Novembre's bass proves a kind of massage, a pummeling that leaves you sore like you've been worked over by one of those shiny, blond, muscled Swedes that littered every spa in '60s cinema. He pours the "metal" in their sound, summoning up Geezer Butler's paranoid fairies in boots with a hand of doom. Standing between the neat mountain of effect pedals on Brian's keys and the percussion cage around Stemkovsky, he's a bridge builder, the never missing link in this threesome. Not too easy given the sick, flashing palette they're working with. Brian shows a knack for peels of moon dust, low flying clouds, bent girders, and all manner of beautiful noise. The only sonic mensch I can compare him to is Dale Sophiea, unsung sampler slinger in kindred Bay Area iconoclasts MX-80/O-Type. Both take the stuff of everyday life and twist its knobs until it cries out in a new voice. Glorious, that.

Felix unleashes a low whir, part accordion, part melodica, breathy. This fills their lungs and I suddenly remembered a meditation chant I learned long ago. Close your eyes and as you inhale "say" in your mind the word "I" and then as you exhale finish this silent sentence with "Am." It's in the same school as watching a candle flame or envisioning a barrel floating on a stream. Timing my breaths to Ilya's beat, I begin... "I... am... I... am..." and soon I could feel the pulse in the music, feel it flowing beneath their skin, a joy in repetition, rising and falling with their efforts. You could smell the sweat in the air as dancers packed the floor, white afros and tiny-tops melting, bumping, howling. A few stand stock still, moving only from the waist up, grooving glassy eyed like the gopher from Caddyshack. A part of me wanted to join them, throw in with the low-flame hedonism they'd inspired, but the density of the band's prose kept me plastered to the wall.

They roll with pheromonic sensuality. That's real sex, not the stuffed codpiece of Joe Satriani, Al DiMeola, or most other hack-diddly-hacks that purport to play jazz-rock. There's a framed quote from author John Barth in my house which nicely sums up what I'm trying to get at (far better than my own scattershot observation can muster):

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

OM Trio gets it done like it needs to get done. They show us their collective "O" face and don't blush when we smile back. It might burble up in the dub textures that opened the second set or in a slipstream, jet fueled forward assault like their version of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Suck My Kiss." At the heart of this music is a mixture of the male and female orgasms. Not to make too sticky a point but this is thoroughly masculine in execution yet feminine in form, a powerful wave crashing on the shore, each impact clear but still rising and falling without end in a cry of the divine which manifests all that is.

Knowing that work awaited early the next morning, a practical alarm sounded inside that I should leave, reserve some part of my energies rather than tying them up with the mantra being delivered on stage. Like a lightning hand on a pre-dawn snooze bar, I slapped these concerns down as quickly as I could. I muttered a few feeble, "I really should go now's" but there was no heart in them. To stay was to witness one of my favorite things, the world turned upside by music, the familiar equipment turned to new purpose. How does one walk away from that?

Ilya hits a triangle late in the show and somebody cried out, "Oh shit!!!!" That's a mighty good touch, children. It fueled the band into deep territory, burrowing out a feeling akin to snorting a good line of pharmaceutical-grade MDMA cut with a dental anesthetic to numb your sinuses, shaking off all constraint. Not that I would know anything about such shenanigans... Still, that's how it seemed and so I'm telling you that three guys took instruments and came up with something like euphoria.

As the vibrations of the encore (a clamorous, wholly surprising take on the Smashing Pumpkins' "Cherub Rock") subsided and the lights rose like eyelids awakening from a dream, I looked to see what was written on the readout, what answer had emerged from the electric spin of electricity of their great machine. It was blank, a question with no answer, a computation without conclusion. I couldn't have been happier. There's so little mystery anymore that when it tiptoes--or in this case stomps--in, we're best to embrace it, let go of expectation and maybe fly a few inches above our normal lives.

Words by: Dennis Cook
Images by: Susan J Weiand
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