The Bare Necessities

AS THE MEMBERS of Starring sit on the floor of Death By Audio’s tucked-away recording studio, I can’t help but notice that all five of them are doing different things. Keyboardist Mike Gallope is discussing Krautrock and Grateful Dead-era psych; viola player Amy Cimini, post-conservatory free jazz; bassist Sam Kulik is reclining comfortably on a musty carpet; guitarist Clara Latham is eyeing a stack of amplifiers sitting against a far wall; and drummer Matt Marlin is outside moving the van. Despite this seemingly haphazard organization, the band members always seem to bring the conversation around to a point that they all ardently agree upon, albeit from five different directions. I can think of no better analogy to describe Starring’s music.

Loud, technical, rhythmic, pulsating and intense, Starring’s sound is a genrebusting crossroads—different places and directions all coming together at one point, making for a singularity that is dynamic yet unified; a sort of musical cocktail that creates something new while retaining the most basic elements that went into it.

Though the end product is far from ordinary, Starring’s beginnings were somewhat plain. It began with Mike Gallope, keyboardist for experimental rockers The Skeleton$, and Matt Marlin, Pterodactyl’s ferocious drummer. The two began to record some rather nebulous, amorphous demos, which they themselves do not hesitate to admit were rough. “It didn’t sound very good, but you [Gallope and Marlin] were very enthusiastic about it,” says Kulik of the band’s fledgling work. Jagged edges aside, there was something to Starring’s early music that was undeniably intriguing. As Latham remembers, “You could hear what was going on rhythmically; it was exciting.” At its inception, Starring was, as Marlin describes it, “coming at it fresh-faced, thinking of nothing as being taboo, trying things as they feel fun and intuitive… I had no idea what the band was going to be like.”

With the addition of Kulik on bass, Latham on guitar and vocals and Cimini on viola, Marlin and Gallope brought to Starring a wealth of musical diversity. “When we’re writing a song, we have a lot of different options as to where it can go,” says Latham of the effects on the band’s creative process. Indeed, the backgrounds of the members opened up new opportunities for the band. Within Starring, each member was given the chance to explore his or her own talents in a new context. Cimini, who came from classical and highly formalized training that disavowed rhythmic intensity and rock straightforwardness, now had the chance to re-contextualize this background, saying, “I missed playing with a lot of rhythmic impetus; I missed playing with a pulse.” Kulik, originally trained in the trombone, also used Starring as an opportunity to test himself. “All of the cultivation and training that I’ve had, its application has always been on a different instrument. You can do things on a trombone that you can’t do on a bass,” says Kulik of his transition.

After adding the new members, old friends from the duo’s days at Oberlin College, Starring managed to put out a debut album, Wife of God, after only three weeks of practice.

Both the urgency with which the group recorded and the members’ varied musical backgrounds shine through on the record. The opening title track begins with heavy bass, crashing symbols and a spacey, epic-sounding organ trill evocative of the prog-jams of the late ’70s, breaking into a pulsating drum beat, fuzzy keyboards, scratchy guitar, ambient vocals and a viola that acts like a lead guitar. This sets the tone for the remainder of the album, which winds its way through all of the different facets of the individual members’ musical training, from classic rock to experimental sounds, jazz and improvisational.

Despite the influx of different styles and talents, Starring’s music somehow manages to remain cohesive. What links all of the members’ styles together is their commitment to intensity and energy, and their focus on the bare elements of rock. “For me it’s about trying to grasp how minimal rock really is,” Gallope says of the band’s elemental nature. “This is not an emotional project; this isn’t about anyone’s message to the world. It’s about energy, rhythm, channeling affect in a certain way.”

Although the five piece admits that playing genre-less music in a place like New York—Brooklyn in particular— is a strenuous and sometimes frustrating endeavor, Gallope says (and the rest of the band agrees) that Starring is happy with the decision to make music here. After all, those of us who remember high school physics know that singularities eventually explode into something infinitely greater.

>> STARRING July 5, Bruar Falls, 245 Grand St. (betw. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.), Brooklyn, 347-529-6610; 8, Free.