Rating: NN
This isn’t music so much as performance art, mostly bits of voyeuristic taped conversation, smattered clips of poetry and buzzing electronic frequencies that sound like someone constructing a ham radio and playing with the plus and minus cables. Can’t is New York avant-garde conceptualist Jessica Rylan, who keeps company with the borderline-pretentious likes of Thurston Moore (he writes her adoring liner notes). But unlike the Youth, Rylan doesn’t bother with “songs” in the conventional sense. The closest she ever gets is Nothing As Real As It Felt, an intimate coupling of grade-school piano chords and key-oblivious vocals that sound recorded on a boom box at best. I suppose I’m missing some kind of point here, but it all sounds like art installation material to me.
Jessica Rylan brings the noise to the Drake Underground Tuesday (August 29).
