Twofer Tuesday #5

Two recent albums of collaborations with Tim Barnes that recall a lost NYC topography and the potential and power behind every musical gesture.

I’m less than a year into living in New York City and somehow I’ve managed to squeeze my way into the Bowery Ballroom for a ludicrously sardined Wilco show imaginable, one going down in April of 2002, the day that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally saw actual release. Thanks to my day job at an internet café with unlimited high speed internet, I’m able to Audiogalaxy just about any music I can imagine and one of my first downloads is a Wilco album that has been shelved for reasons unknown, its title a code from The Conet Project of mysterious numbers stations.

Despite my fervor for this unreleased album (which really did soundtrack those desperate, disintegrating fraught months that followed after I watched the Twin Towers collapse from a Brooklyn rooftop), I’m only here thanks to the largesse of drummer Tim Barnes, who somehow gets me on the guest list for the hottest show of the year. He’s in the opening band. I’m years away from getting a paper check to write about music (there used to be such things); I’m just a broke fan and Tim gladly helps assists.

Tim Barnes is one of the first musicians I meet upon arriving in the city. And by that token, he’s also inescapable. He’s at Tonic. He’s in the Tonic sub-basement. He’s at CB’s Gallery. He’s onstage at the Bowery Ballroom. He’s also at the Mercury Lounge. He’s in a loft space in lower Manhattan. Maybe also out at a Brooklyn loft space, too. He’s drumming in noise duos, playing in Neil Michael Hagerty’s new post-Royal Trux band, he’s still doing Tower Recordings-adjacent freak-folk, he’s grappling with the likes of Jim O’Rourke and Ikue Mori’s laptop abstractions, he’s steadying the droning sinewaves of Michael J Schumacher. He’s a dervish of motion and a steady hub for the creative music community here.

One night in his post-production office, he handed me a copy of this Angus Maclise archival project he had diligently worked on. But also enthused about the Everly Brothers’s late ‘60s psychedelic gem Roots, and early Van Dyke Parks’s 45s. He’s an exquisite example of the studied and spontaneous. I like to think that omnivorous enthusiasm remains with me thanks to his example. It’s not dissimilar to Marc Masters’s experience with Tim back in those days, profiling him for The Wire where he said, “I crave a community of people to play with, to be continually building outward.”

On any given night, I can watch Tim playfully explore every nuance of a drum head or small cymbal, always seeking new timbres, a new rhythmic pattern to glean on a surface, whether metallic or hidebound. He’s tireless, he’s joyful. His sweet generosity stays with me still. I can still see his deep gaze looking down at a drum, how his shoulders rise and shrug. As Will Oldham put it, Tim’s every gesture behind a kit is “to illuminate and strengthen the power of communication and transformation inherent in every musical act.”

The mental map I have for that era of New York is long since been razed (miraculously not Bowery Ballroom), from Tonic to CB’s Gallery, from all of those loft spaces to the internet café I first worked at. It’s all erased now. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with Tim and his wife Erica, who long ago decamped for Louisville. The news about his early onset Alzheimer’s Disease during the pandemic was gutting news and I feared more grim news.

So it’s a joy to have two new albums of music recently appear on Tim’s revived Quakebasket label, Lost Words and Noumena. It collects some twenty thrilling, spiky, woozy, adventurous pieces that spark memories of that lost time on the downtown scene. Whirling around the nucleus of Barnes is an array of my favorite players of the late 20th and 21st century: Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, Glenn Kotche, Roberto Carlos Lange, Rob Mazurek, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jim O’Rourke, Chad Taylor, Britt Walford, and Mike Watt, to list just a few. Old bandmates, new friends, collaborative dialogues that stretch a quarter-century, drop-ins, and more all get conveyed here. Some pieces transpired in the same room, while others were a swapping of files across the ocean.

I’m struck by Brown’s quote there about taking the test pressings to Barnes’s full-time memory care facility. “We listened to them together,” says Brown. “I could see an immediate emotional connection to the music…he just got up and started dancing. I want to believe that the heart and soul of Tim is still in there… He was just very excited about it.”

Just who does what I’m left to guess (there’s no info on the mp3s I loaded on my phone), but in Masters’s recent Bandcamp story about these albums, Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown helped pull everything together. Barnes’s disease has left him with inability to communicate verbally, so that Brown likened the process to 20 Questions, with Barnes answering yes or no to the pieces he wanted to work on.

For me, I think of it as a photo collage. (Think Sly’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On or the Beastie Boys’s Check Your Head, that mash-up of people, places, and spaces long since lost to time.) I like to just put both albums on shuffle and have everything weave in and out of itself. There’s rough edges, sudden songs, droney smears, sonic clashes that work in juxtapose, strangers abutting one another in a shared space. Sounds like a night out in the city some twenty-five years ago, where I never knew who or what I was going to hear next.