Cabinet of Curiousities - The Review

The Full Disclosure
I have known Bob Drake since 1973. I am honored to call Bob my oldest and dearest friend. We have been friends since the beginning of sophomore year in High School, played in bands together, traveled together, dreamed together and shared countless creative and fun moments. So, I am the last person that could claim to be an impartial reviewer of a recent incarnation of his band, "Cabinet of Curiosities." Too bad.



The Temptation
Based on our common love of the avante garde, the bizarre, the unknowable and just plain fun, &c &c, the temptation was to start this review reciting the litany of seriously unexplainable and silly things that happened during the concert I attended in Chicago, at the home of Michael Eisenberg, on October 11, 2008 with Bob's "Cabinet of Curiosities," such as, for example, the entrance of the band dressed in the odd multi-colored dinner jacket and other asundry recycled garb festooned in warm dinner rolls, descending none too elegantly down a winding flight of stairs while perched on bicycles and loudly chanting the non-word "Ipangula." I could start out that way. However, not only would it be a blatant lie, it would be too easy and besides the point, somehow.

The Opinion and Why It Matters
In the big picture, it doesn't. However, since I raised the question, it should be known that I have written and performed and loved music for 42 years, in all styles, mostly on guitar, but also on bass, drums and djembe. I also have done some synthesizer programming, most happily on a modular Moog, but also on more modern instruments. While many are more accomplished and talented than I, no person has a higher appreciation for music and loves music more. Thus, I am qualified.

The Point
Cabinet of Curiosities is a group of remarkable musicians assembled to recreate the music compositions of Bob Drake. The group comprises Bob Drake, Dave Kerman, David Campbell, and Jason DuMars. With only a few exceptions, Bob composes the music, writes the lyrics, performs all of the musical parts, records and engineers the albums, and is responsible for the CD artwork. The man is a wellspring of creativity. That the members of the band can actualize the intent of the original recordings, painstakingly composed, arranged, assembled and forged by Bob, is a testament to the band's incredible level of musicianship and creativity.

The Recordings
Without disgorging a history book full of trivia, and sounding like a lecturer, Bob's music has been, perhaps unfortunately, called "Prog Rock." If you have heard any of Bob's recordings, you should find yourself thinking that the term Prog Rock is too limiting. Interestingly, Progressive Rock has been said to include a vast number of subspecies, the sum total of which, while hinting in the right direction, still incompletely captures Bob's eclectic, far ranging, anything goes sound. The use of many different instruments, from banjos, to altered drum kits, to dime store guitars, to found objects and accidental sound captures, violins, old analog synthesizers, vintage archtops, and randomly wired stomp boxes points to the fact that Bob will use any technique, means, or source of sounds available to him, whether deliberately designed or fortuitously unintentional, and spanning the slavishly engineered to unconcernedly casual to achieve the sonic pallet that accomplishes the desired result. To enter the sonic, musical world of Bob Drake requires a suspension of reliance on familiar and comfortable musical touchstones. It requires the cultivation of some openness. The ample reward in so doing is agape.

The Result
The result is a lush, complex, layered, sometimes gritty, mostly humorous, masterpiece of composition and execution, that lights up a strange, eerily glowing and funny part of the universe where few ever dare to go, and in which Bob revels and rolls. Bob has been called an eccentric sound sculptor. This holds some truth. Despite numerous time changes, difficult harmonies and unorthodox chord passages, the music is not artificial or forced. I recall an experiment in a college composition course that involved tuning an electronic instrument so that there were 15 evenly spaced steps in a scale between octaves instead of the usual 12 half steps. After being exposed for a time to the unusual intervals between notes, one's mind became adapted to the atypical arrangements of the sounds. Bob's music is like that. It is so different from what you might be used to hearing that your mind changes some to accommodate and understand it. That is a good thing.



The Reason for Live Music
One of the important discoveries for any music lover, hopefully revealed early in one's musical education, is that live music is better than recordings. The reason is simple. More information is conveyed during a live performance, i.e., sonic information and visual information. Somehow, seeing the music performed, being able to watch the notes and sounds being coaxed from the instruments elicits a deeper understanding of the intent of the composition and the relationship of the various elements being generated by the musicians. This phenomenon is striking in observing the creation of Bob's music. Also, there is the benefit of hearing the instruments live without the interference of sound reproducing equipment, however good it might be. Certainly, one should buy the recordings. The complexity of the compositions, the creation of the sonic chalkboard on which the songs are painstakingly sketched requires careful listening to realize the full extent of the brilliance of the performances and composition. Above all, however, it is clear that this music must be experienced live. During live performance, the dry humor, the obvious love of strange places in which the songs are set, the clear elucidation of the strange, the mysterious, the altered mindscapes - it all comes through like the surprise shock of static electricity, thrilling and intense.

The Performance
Much impressed me during the night of October 11, 2008. The band cohesively performed a diverse arrangement of old and new songs, most of which were familiar to me, and all of which gave me a jolt of recognition in their immediacy. In fact, immediate is the best word I can think of to elicit the feeling of joy and spontaneity, and the clarity of the music performed. Each song contained humor and foreboding. My history with Bob helped me understand the references to the mysterious, and the dark corners of place and of mind, hauntingly full of gibbering and boneless ideas, and I wondered how others would view Bob's sometimes casual juxtaposition of humor and unspeakable horrors.

The Coda
Rising above all was the tremendous musicianship, the unorthodox tunings of the instruments to create the heretical chords, the fantastical and constant changes in tempo and time signatures, the dissident passages, sometimes clashing, sometimes heartrendingly beautiful. Each composition was a tiny gem. A musical web so complex, that unraveling the structure of it would take forever, yet each minute so elegantly crafted that one is struck instantly with its meaning and simultaneously suffused with wonder that it came from an organic being. I enjoyed the evening thoroughly and shuffled out of the building rejuvenated. Highly recommended.