My late friend R. and I huddled with a few dozen other weirdos in the basement of All Souls Unitarian Church for a performance by Peter Hammill in 1979. The extraordinarily unlikely event was my first meaningful experience with a literal and figurative music underground. Artlessly Falling, the frequently harsh prog-rock freakout by Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, reminds me of the transformative concert. Not only does Artlessly Falling feature Hammill’s art-rock peer Robert Wyatt on three tracks, I witnessed Halvorson’s showcase of what I suspect was some of the same material at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville last year. I realize it’s the perilous times talking, but I fear that if my presence at the 1979 concert in Kansas City was the inception of my proclivity for patronizing performances of outsider music, my trek to Tennessee to catch Halvorson might end up being its unexpectedly premature conclusion.
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I reviewed I’m Feeling Mellow, the new album by the Kansas City vocalist Molly Hammer, at Plastic Sax.