SUN., NOV. 7

HOW MANY TIMES have you heard this story? Small band in the punk-70s presses 1000 copies of its tangled, guitar-armied single. It goes nowhere. Band disappears, only to be mentioned years later in an import-only mag by an alt-rock icon who swears that band was a prime influence on his own act. Band gets back together, releases all sessions recorded during its prime. Ta dah.

Oh, if I only had a nickel.

But that's what happened when Thurston Moore told Mojo about the Notekillers, a Philadelphia Branca-esque instrumental band whose bee-swarming single "The Zipper" is said to have inspired the mangled mien of Sonic Youth. Led by minimalist-driven guitarist David First (who had, by the time the band was conceived, already played with pianist Cecil Taylor's band), the Notekillers were meant as an escape from free jazz into a more primal punk take on atonal scales. It worked. Drummer Barry Halkin and bassist Stephen Bilenky, also faced with a collective love of all things Branca-like, gave First's Middle Eastern-inspired six strings the weight of water on which to ski. With little money, the Notekillers released "The Zipper," a single unlike anything at the time—with swerving guitar buzz and deep rhythms.

Even by art-punk's standards, the Notekillers didn't fit. So they went away, leaving First to become a darling of Manhattan's new music/nu-opera/Kitchen set with AIDS crisis theatricals like The Manhattan Book of the Dead and songs dedicated to 9/11 victims like "Jump Back." First would've been happy staying minimal—that is until Moore's Mojo mention. Struck by the need to get intensely maximal once more, not only did First send Thurston some Notekillers' tapes to hear (and subsequently release, for their first ever CD, Notekillers (1977-1981) he reunited with Bilenky and Halkin. The results are even more forcefully brazen than in their youth. You may cheer the noise of the reunited Pixies. But you'll cry once you hear the Notekillers.

With Thurston Moore and Mouthus.

Tonic, 107 Norfolk St. (betw. Delancey & Rivington Sts.), 212-358-7501; 8, $10.

A.D. AMOROSI

SIDETRACK STARS

RELEASE PARTY

SAT., NOV. 6

TWO INDIE BANDS—one based in Philadelphia and another that divides its time between that town and New York City—decide to get together and produce a split single. The concept ultimately becomes a full album, and then the bands retreat into separate studios (Swivel Chairs recorded in Brooklyn; Audible did their studio work in PA) and later emerge with a collection of six songs each, which becomes Sidetrack Stars. The release party is this week.

Swivel Chairs is essentially a duo made up of Jeremy Grites and Jason Brown; they've been working together since the early 90s. Audible is a project of drummer Mike Kennedy, and the band is completed by keyboardist Mary Garito, bassist Kristine Muller and guitarist Jim Kehoe. They have been around since early 2000. Both bands seem to savor the same inspirations, mixing a lot of 90s influences with their own styles. The final result is that sometimes you think you're hearing the same band with different singers.

"This deception was intentional," said Grites. While he insists that many of the songs had been recorded even before the idea was consolidated, both bands worked together on the track list to make the song order on the album as cohesive as possible.

Not that the two bands really sound that alike. Think of Swivel Chairs as a contemporary blend of Duran Duran and Tears for Fears. Though Audible seems to go down the same road at times, they also pick up on the sounds of the early 70s and other newer ideas.

At the record release party, expect none of that. Each band will play a separate set, and Grites was adamant to say that there will be no "George Harrison jam-band at the end of the show."

Apart from this double-bill show and another date in Philly, the bands have no plans to appear together again in the near future, making this a rare opportunity to hear both play in the manner of the CD.

Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer St. (betw. Frost & Richardson Sts.), Williamsburg,
718-302-3770; 9:30, free.

ERNEST BARTELDES

EL VEZ

WEDS., NOV. 3

ELVIS IMPERSONATION IS a loathsome little art form, just short of live lip-syncing. So why love El Vez, the once self-imposed king of Mexicali-Presleyites? Because in a world of Elpersonators, he (Robert Lopez) interprets that which Elvis could have been—a seriously socio-political, wryly humorous man with a moustache—if he'd put his mind to it. The kitsch kink to Lopez's border-Vegas take on Presley is that beyond the initial joke, there's so much more. An El Vez show is always more about Latin American history and deculturalization than anything else—merely using an Elvis as metaphor, a stylized way in which to say "don't fence me in…unless you've got gold lame to keep me company."

Though El Vez has taken the wind out of Bowie and Paul Simon, to see the white high collars and bellbottoms is to understand the visual camp of Tijuana-deconstruction. His records are solid, boss and garage-rocking groovy; romps through Prado/Puentes-inspired rock 'n' roll territory that allow Vez, the lyricist, to take on the myths of Mexican-American culture, religion and politics with righteous fervor.

It is for that reason that, though goofy, his current "El Vez for Prez '04" has resonance. This former Los Angelino punk (Catholic Discipline, Zeros) and current Seattle-based theater actor surely found, early on, that making the rhetoric of the left go down easy took more than a spoonful of sugar. For El Vez, it meant peanut butter and banana sandwiches and a show whose songs feature as much discussion regarding policy changes and immigration as they do the stupid sentiments behind "Rock a Hula Baby" and "Clambake."

Southpaw, 125 5th Ave. (betw. St. John's & Sterling Pls.), Park Slope, 718-230-0236; 8, $12.

A.D. AMOROSI

LAIBACH

SAT., NOV. 6

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE fascist
pisstake of D.A.F.'s "Do the Mussolini" and Rammstein's anti-Nazi rhetoric, came Laibach. Like those other Germans, Laibach created thunderous electro-muzik with varying degrees of Wagnerian tumult whose message was meant as a balm against all oppression. Unlike those Germans, however, their dress and manner are as ardently militaristic as their rhythms. For Laibach, though, the militarism is purely for laughs, an irony-laden poke at a mother country always ready for ire. That doggone Laibach, right? Nothing but giggles. Mocking the state with danceable dissent.

Still, theirs is a rich, rare humor. In league with Laibach's brand of genuine mysteriousness, that humor makes them different from the industrial parking complex of bands left in the genre. Whether viewed through the psycho-pomp prism of mini-operas like Opus Dei (the first, fully formed classic from 1993, that along with Let It Be and WAT, changed the course of industrial music to whomever paid them heed) or their brand-new hits-and-mixes compilation, Anthems, Laibach is—without sounding too goofy—an industrial revolution worth fighting for, one whose politicized performance art, anti-Nazi speeches and democratic dirges are perfect for the week that was. Who doesn't love a band whose singer/screamer Ivan Novak said of its upcoming show, "Laibach have decided to tour straight after the election to comfort the defeated part of the American nation and to unite the divided sides into an expression of a static totalitarian cry." Oh, Laibach—such a stitch.

Downtime, 251 W. 30th St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-695-2747; 9, $20.

A.D. AMOROSI

DEVENDRA BANHART

SUN., NOV. 7

DON'T LET STORYTELLING, noir-folkie Devendra Banhart fool you with his naive act. Along with readying shows for his latest collection of songs, Nino Rojo, the spindly Vincent Gallo-like singer/guitarist is amped for his first solo gallery showing. Art student, eh? Apparently yes, as Banhart was all over the San Fran Art Institute long before the Texas-born folkie created the Bolanesque vocals, finger-picked guitars, and dadaist lyrics of his debut, Oh Me Oh My...The Way the Day Goes by the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit.

Rather than wide-eyed, primitive and innocent in Daniel Johnson fashion, think of Banhart's music as crude, brusque and rude. Once upon a time, when interviewed about his often-abstracted work, Banhart talked of its planned accidentalness in terms more entomological. "My writing is…thought out to the millionth little hair on a one million billion trillion quadro-gazillion…haired insect," he said. "If surrealism is an attempt to write or express the subconscious, my writing is anything but that. In the end, I know a baby's about to be born."

His recent work proves as much. Nino is more heroic than other releases—a rounder, psych-finger-picked guitar-god record with Banhart's once-mumbled vocals warbling, weebling and cutting more clearly through dearly demented countryfolk and gauzy-rock backdrops. Still impressionistically prose-filled, Banhart has a new focus to his storytelling: a rambling narrative that lands on quirky characters and icky circumstances sharply and picturesquely.

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $15.

A.D. AMOROSI

JUDITH OWEN & HARRY SHEARER

FRI., NOV. 5

THOUGH KNOWN AS a wry presence and constant company to Richard Thompson and Julia Fordham throughout several of their recordings, Welsh pianist/singer Judith Owen has her own thing going on, one that throughout the 2000s has proven to be dashing yet ignored. This must change. Think of Owen as a brutally sardonic, keenly observational jazzier, chanteused-out version of Tori Amos without the suicidal tendencies (Tori's and yours!) or a genuinely randy Randy Newman before he turned into a fat Samuel Barber. On CDs like Twelve Arrows, Owen cuts like a knife in every way, using her sharp-edged humor, animated intellectualized lyricism, darkly expressive unethereal voice and engaging TinPan pianissimos for music most seductive.

Must be nice then, for her and him, that she's married to Harry Shearer. Such a pairing of sarcasm could rip the culture, play with palindromes and have all sorts of fun together. This week, the fun is in supporting Owen's new disc, Christmas in July. The duo promises not only to take on the odd-ball arrangements of "Silent Night" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" that Owen's given a hearty So-Cal lilt, but Shearer's own "Christmas with the Devil"—a snorting metal track he co-penned as part of his Spinal Tap duties.

Fez/Time Cafe, 380 Lafayette St. (Great Jones St.), 212-533-7000; 9:30, $15.

A.D. AMOROSI

DIANE CLUCK

TUES., NOV. 9

DIANE CLUCK IS a storyteller and a snakecharmer. Armed only with a guitar and her voice, the Brooklynite has released 11 new songs that bristle, stark and startling, with careful force. Cluck has the power of Shannon Wright without the maelstrom, the lyric character of Regina Spektor without the outright weirdness, the hypnotic, narrative style of Kristin Hersh—but conveyed with piercing, cold clarity. Throughout these songs, there's an airiness that borders on otherworldly.

Oh Vanille, Cluck's fourth self-release, has a certain severity. Think Medea, only not so tragic. But in the absence of warmth, there's fire. Pensive guitar work builds insistent, complex rhythms and melodies that one moment wrap tight around one's ribcage, the next, sift and swirl like sand devils. "Easy to Be Around" is the obvious hit. The multitracking of the vocals adds a fetching dimension to the gentle, rolling refrain of "you belong to no one; you're so easy to be around," at moments turning the song into a round. But the subtler pieces are equally captivating and potent. The lilting, airy "Bones and Born Again" may not have the same quick catch, but it's the most exquisite composition I've heard in years. When an artist's voice is this fine, it's an added boon to also find lyrical skill and deft instrumentation.

There's a quality of sacred music to Cluck's sound. If Anonymous Four put down Hildegard von Bingen and took to acoustic guitars, it might come off something like this. It's the beauty of bare winter branches, or a simple glass of the iciest water.

Tonic, 107 Norfolk St. (betw. Delancey & Rivington Sts.), 212-358-7501; 8, $8.

KATE CRANE

IMPROV ASYLUM

THURS.-SAT., NOV. 4-6

LOST IN THE maze of the Laugh Factory's sparsely lit corridors is the unlikely new home of Improv Asylum, a Boston-based improv/sketch theater that quietly moved to town in September. Its Times Square digs have a dicey, if slightly confusing feel to them, as one might expect from a former strip bar turned comedy club in the middle of Midtown.

The theater is an auxiliary to the Laugh Factory's main stage, whose size rivals that of Caroline's. Its stage, framed by red velvet curtains with mirrors lining a side wall and courteous, attractive cocktail waitresses maneuvering the room's two dozen or so tables, is a nice departure from New York's downtown improv scene. It's more a venue to take a date to than a second home for castaway comics who like to loiter; it's a throwback to the smoke-filled, Borscht-Belt lounges that still retains a strip-bar charm. Not an improviser's idyllic setting, but so what.

A new Improv Asylum show, Homeland Insecurity, presents a medley of improvisational staples and innovative short-form sketches. After opening with an hilarious song about Red Bull and Paris Hilton, the cast then elicits suggestions from the audience to propel a series of wobbly improvised skits. (In fairness to IA's talented cast, last week's perfumed and pretty audience looked like the role call for a bad reality-tv show.) An audience member is dragged onstage to offer an anecdote from his life (in this case, a recent wedding in Rochester), which is then reenacted.

The humor is a mix of the typical and topical. Not everything is gangbusters funny, but that's to be expected from any 90 minutes of comedy (the show comprises two 45-minute acts). For only having worked together slightly more than a month, the cast is excellent, transitioning between skits smoothly, effecting emotions onstage as well as any comedy troupe I've seen. At times, blackouts were executed sloppily (or prematurely), leaving the audience unsure whether to clap or pay their tab. Another dud was a sketch loosely based on famous movie quotes audience members write down and drop in a hat (again, see audience description above). And closing the second set with "Hey Ya" evoked a bad Jason Biggs movie.

Without a doubt, the best laughs of the evening came from the cast's songs, which spoof everything from ADD-addled test-takers to the post-9/11 hysterics of unattended bags. Improv Asylum, with its background music, heavy use of props and rapid-fire scene work, borrows heavily from Chicago City Limits, but with a "darker side of funny," as Chet Harding, the Asylum's cofounder, characterizes it. IA, notwithstanding its Boston roots, is a welcome addition to New York's comedy scene outside of Chelsea.

The Laugh Factory, 303 42nd St. (8th Ave.), 212-586-7829; Thurs. at 8, Fri. at 9, Sat. at 8 & 10, $20 plus 2 drink min.

LIONEL BEEHNER

YAYOI KUSAMA

THROUGH SAT., NOV. 13

I FIRST LEARNED of the artist Yayoi Kusama through my slightly perverse habit of peeking into private rooms. One day, many years ago, a narrow whitewashed door stood in a tiny side room of the Robert Miller Gallery. Expecting a janitor's closet, I opened it, stepping to my surprise into a dazzling, infinite sea of colored lights.

Kusama's installations still have a disorienting power over me. Her current exhibition, "Steel Balls and Soft White Objects," is characteristically psychedelic, reflecting the artist's lifelong obsessions with identity and the shape-shifting patterns of the colorful void.

Cosmic Door, a triptych painted in black and white, is filled from edge to edge with tiny biomorphic forms. Looked at from afar, each shape dissolves in endless repetition. A larger organism engulfs the canvas, swallowing each of these living cells whole. Kusama's primitive creature seems dimly cognizant, keen on absorbing everything in its path. Standing in a room with a painting like this, it's easy to feel claustrophobic.

In Infinity Mirrored Room Love Forever, Kusama inverts the spatial relationship. This stainless-steel structure is approximately four-by-four-feet wide, and just seven feet tall, but peering inside it through a narrow window reveals a cavernous hall of pulsating lights and mirrors. At the end of this corridor are your own beady eyes, hovering suspiciously in a disembodied squint.

Much of Kusama's work turns our attention inward, often in subtle and humorous ways. One piece that's impossible to miss here is Narcissus Garden, a roomful of 500 mirrored balls made of steel, cut by a narrow, spiraling path. Kusama constructed an installation by the same name for the 1966 Venice Biennale, and sold each ball for $2 dollars apiece, much to the annoyance of the festival's curators.

Also on view here are Victor Vasarely's black and white paintings from the 1950s and Ai Weiwei's giant light-filled chandelier.

Robert Miller Gallery, 524 W. 26th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-366-4774;
Tues.-Sat., 10-6, free.

LAUREL ANGRIST

FRANCESCA WOODMAN, PHOTOGRAPHS 1975-1980

THROUGH SAT., NOV. 13

FRANCESCA WOODMAN committed suicide in January 1981; she was 22. "Imagine the work she could have produced if she was still alive," a friend said. He echoed my own thoughts, and surely those of the other patrons who had come to see her show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, which currently displays 30 photographs (most of them self-portraits), a couple diazotypes (images made on blueprint paper) and some of the video work of the late artist.

Truth is, I only thought one of the images in the collection, from her New York 1979-1980 series, was exceptional: It shows Woodman behind what seems like a clothesline with a couple of dark-colored towels or scarves, in the corner of a white room, next to a white door. In doing this, she creates an unusual effect as her pale body seems to disappear into her surroundings. Like this photograph, much of the artist's work shows objects fading into the background, either through a deliberate blurring of the subject or through a confounding of textures that creates a sort of camouflage effect. By definition, self-portraits are self-conscious, yet hers seem staged to a fault. Despite this, the images are successful at conveying reality, as opposed to, say, the dreamscapes of Cindy Sherman's film stills or Lucas Samaras' nightmarish Polaroids.

Overall, the photos are very good but I couldn't get over the knowledge that I was looking at the work of an art student. It shows outstanding talent—and perhaps maturity beyond her years—but it misses the sophistication of an artist who has developed her craft to a greater degree. In a sales-driven society, this technical inexperience is forgiven in the cult that can arise at a young artist's demise. The tragic loss of talent and hypothetical future production has always been held as currency in the art, literary and entertainment worlds. For better or worse, we are only too eager to capitalize on our morbid interests.

Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W. 57th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.), 212-977-7160;
Mon.-Sat. 10-6, free.

HECTOR MEZA

THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS

THROUGH SUN., NOV. 7

EVER SEEN CLARENCE Fountain take no particular musical moment, rise grinning from his chair as his band simmers, then quiver, shuffle and flame again into Lion-of-God song? If so, you'll have no problem imagining Oedipus, self-blinded with his roller-coaster life and long decades of wandering behind him, part with his devoted daughter Antigone, move offstage into Colonus' sacred grove and achieve the marvel of spiritual ascension. Sublime, overpowering music can do that to a body—just check out Clarence.

The fabulous frontman (and septuagenarian ladies' man), his stellar group the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Legendary Soul Stirrers and a rotation of gospel choirs join Charles S. Dutton (the film star/director who got to Yale from prison and who's done everything from August Wilson on Broadway to Fox's Roc) at the Apollo Theater for The Gospel at Colonus, in the 20th-anniversary staging of composer Bob Telson and maverick director Lee Breuer's (Mabou Mines' Dollhouse) musical classic. Reset as a Pentecostal revival, Colonus got an Obie in '84, made Broadway in '88 and is on steady rotation on PBS' Great Performances (with Morgan Freeman in the lead).

Breuer's love of r&b got him early to its gospel pillars, where the gush and rhythm of sermons led him to rethink Sophocles' swan song, which that playwright wrote decades after the cultural anvils Oedipus Rex and Antigone (getting its own fresh take this week at the Women's Project on West End Ave.) to wrap Western drama's foundational trilogy.

"It's a sermon on death," Breuer told interviewer Gerald Rabkin of Sophocles' Colonus. "If you go one step further with cathartic theater you might find pity and terror turn into joy and ecstasy."

Apollo Theater, 253 W. 125th St. (betw. A.C. Powell Blvd. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.),
212-531-5305; call for times, $30-$70.

ALAN LOCKWOOD

WHOLE-BODY-SEER

FRI. & SAT., NOV. 5 & 6

PROPRIOCEPTORS ARE THESE little nerve "terminals" found throughout the body (in muscles, tendons and joints) that tell the brain where the body is in space, independent of vision. So that even though your eyes are closed, you know you're holding your arm perpendicular from the ground.

These terminals are at the heart of Dana Salisbury's new multidisciplinary collaboration, Whole-Body-Seer. Alternating sequences of dance, video and audio, Salisbury has created this work as an exploration of the tactile experience of blindness. Created on the bodies of HawleyMartin Dance, a company from Salisbury's part-time home of Northampton, MA, the danced sequences of the performance are built from unadorned movement and unfold quietly into rich experiential solitude. There is humility in Salisbury's approach to the material, a storytelling quality that foregrounds the talents of her oddball collaborators.

Jeanine Durning, one of downtown's most incandescent performers, pops up (literally) in a wonderfully weird video short. Wearing a party dress made of inflated balloons, Durning is fettered and squeaky, looming over the space like a Macy's Thanksgiving doll with behavioral issues. Salisbury's editing techniques create awkward hilarity, and all that squeaking will surely arouse anyone with a latex fetish. Laura Frigato also appears in projection, in a claustrophobic, Maya Deren-evocative sequence.

University Settlement, with its clean white walls and reflective wood floor, is a perfect space for this sort of work. Michael Wall's haunting soundscore reverberates and complements the dances.

University Settlement, 184 Eldridge St. (Rivington St.), 212-929-8145; 8, $15.

CHRIS DOHSE

HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES

THROUGH THURS.,

NOV. 11

HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES was Salman Rushdie's first book after The Satanic Verses, written for his son in 1990 while on the lam from Ayatollah Khomeini's decree of death. The post-fatwa children's book is as colorful of an adventure—describing Princess Batcheat, the busdriver Butt and its boy hero's flight on the Hoopoe bird to restore his "Shah of Blah" dad's lost tale-spinning powers and regain happiness for his family and city—as it is an incisive parable on free speech.

Trimmed to libretto-size by poet James Fenton, set to self-described Maximalist composer Charles Wuorinen's music, Haroun gets its operatic premiere this week under City Opera music director George Manahan's baton, with sets by Riccardo Hernandez (Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, and Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change) and choreography by Sean Curran.

Wuorinen's high modernist music (updating Schoenberg's structure with Stravinsky's punch into the 21st century) got him a MacArthur Grant; he remains the youngest-ever Pulitzer recipient since he won the prize in 1970. And he's having a whale of a year: The Haroun Songbook is out on Albany Records, part of that label's extensive Wuorinen Series that includes Fast Fantasy with the great cellist Fred Sherry and the composer on piano. John Zorn's a fan: His Tzadik label just released their second all-Wuorinen CD with music for organ, the chamber piece On Alligators and the Third Piano Concerto. Wuorinen's setting of Paul Auster poems, Visible, premiered in September at the Guggenheim, with Ashberyana, his John Ashbery song cycle, debuting there last spring with the Brentano String Quartet.

New York City Opera, W. 63rd St. (B'way); 212-870-5630; Nov. 3, 9 & 11 at 7:30; Nov. 6 at 1:30, $27 and up.

ALAN LOCKWOOD