BODY/HEAD with MARK MORGAN and PLEASE at the Great Hall, Saturday, March 9. Rating: NNNN
Body/Head, the experimental guitar duo of underground icons Kim Gordon and Bill Nace, brought searing intensity to their short but vividly powerful 30-minute set.
There was palpable excitement and expectation among the devoted fans gathered at the Great Hall for their masterclass of six-string manipulation, and for good reason. While Nace has appeared in Toronto several times in recent years with various collaborators, this was only Body/Head’s second ever Canadian performance (following Calgary’s Sled Island) since their formation in 2012.
Gordon herself has not hit the stage in Toronto since her former band Sonic Youth’s Massey Hall concert in 2009, their last here before they broke up.
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Kim Gordon
Toronto also plays a curious role in Gordon’s history. As she briefly describes in her 2015 memoir Girl In A Band, Gordon spent a year studying art at York University in the late 70s. “I didn’t like it here, so I left,” she told me backstage after the show. Even if it wasn’t a favourite time, it sounds like it was a formative one – alongside her studies with Fluxus filmmaker George Manupelli, it’s also where Gordon joined her first band Below the Belt, a motley crew of artists with varying levels of musical experience including one-time Oingo Boingo drummer Willie Winant and members of cult Chilean prog group Los Blops.
So in a way, it was a homecoming.
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Becky Katz a.k.a. Please
First, Please, the solo project of Becky Katz, co-founder of Hamilton’s Strangewaves festival, broke the ice with a phantasmagoric audio collage of abruptly chopped vocal loops, spectral saxophone and chorus-drenched crooning. With a gleeful grin on her face, Katz conjured a unique combination of avant-garde comedy (including references to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “things nihilists hate”) and head-bobbing hypnagogic pop, like the musical equivalent of surrealist prank caller Longmont Potion Castle.
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Mark Morgan
Sightings frontman Mark Morgan, who performed with Wolf Eyes at the Garrison just a couple of weeks ago, followed with a 20-minute solo onslaught. While armed with a guitar, his extraterrestrial mangling sounded more like a malfunctioning amp jack, dental drill or revved up chainsaw, clearing heads and sinuses in equal measure.
Body/Head capped off the night as only they can, flowing through a mesmerizing and dreamlike set of uninterrupted chasms of sound. With just two guitars, Gordon’s unmistakable voice and no song breaks, the duo came apart and together in undulating waves of chiming harmonics, squealing feedback and sawtoothed riffs. They set the mood perfectly, performing against slow-motion projections of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye while young Elliott Gould’s slack-jawed expressions loomed over the candlelit stage.
As Nace rocked back and forth like Terrie Ex, Gordon cut a captivating figure in a pair of silver shorts. She shook out her hair and attacked her whammy bar while gazing into the crowd with a steely thousand-yard stare.
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Kim Gordon of Body/Head
The set reached its apex when she climbed on top of her amp and aimed the headstock of her guitar into the ground like a divining rod to unearth surging swells of sound that threatened to envelop the audience completely.
While Gordon’s singular voice can often channel sadness, desperation or fear, her performance on stage was absolutely free.
