RIFF MARKET

Excepter
382 Jeff Street
29 April 2006

The backs of Excepter records typically say something like "recorded at 382 Jeff Street" or "live to stereo 382 Jeff Street" or "you'll see us at 382 Jeff Street, probably recording stuff." Since I spent most my Williamsburg days literally just a block from the Bedford stop, and since "Jeff Street" doesn't exist on Google Maps, I just assumed "382 Jeff Street" was a play on John Fell Ryan's work-averse nickname "Jeff"--like, fucking lord, this guy recorded the album in his mind, it's all a dream in the end ain't it, and so on. I mean these guys are geniuses, so anything's possible.

Jeff is Jefferson though, Street is Street, and about two blocks from the Jefferson Street stop on the L there's a heavy treaded silver door with 382 sprayed onto it. To get there you have to walk down the most desolate stretch of road I've seen since living in the city--very 28 Days Later, a block of warehouses, broken glass and wall weeds and above-Ecko graffiti, maybe a car's coming but maybe it's just me dropping plastic snakes down your skirt. "So this is where the magic happens," I said in my mind at the door. Then I corrected myself (aloud). "This is where the magic will happen." On the way from East Village I had bought that kind of gum that snaps your finger when you try to take it out the pack, and I thought maybe I could bust that out for everybody after the band finished their set.

Fuck I know this seems like carryover from the 28 Days Later deet, but up the steps and into the place--Jeff's loft apartment, the site of tonight's record release party for their upcoming Alternation 2xLP--I felt like we were entering a fallout shelter. I don't like saying that because technically that makes Jeff the "fall out boy", which makes me the guy singing, not really, "all I got was this stupid song written about me," hee haw, save it for Harvilla.

So maybe Zion from The Matrix is better, which I guess makes my face the Nebuchadnazzer but I can deal with that. Huge windows face the sun, and one of the walls Jeff's plated with some kind of tin or aluminum siding--it prolongs the sunset I assume, delays the sunrise. Band inclusive there were about fifteen people there already, most of them surrounding a tray of smoked gouda (fuck E-40) and empty margarita glasses, and most of them talking about how they're not typically margarita people, but there was something in the mix that really made the drink work tonight. "Worms," said Jeff's girlfriend, carrying another pitcher of margarita. "I threw a bunch of worms in this one."

Along one long wall lay the keyboards and soundboards and synthesizers and computer proudly running OS 9; the rest of the equipment occurred as wire piles around the room, floor stations farflung with a PA bookending a large kitchen table. Music started soon enough, not at once though, not announced. It was as if Jeff tired of his company and retreated to the keyboards for a minute, which turned into two, which turned into your Porkchops and Hoaglands and Corbins moving to their machines and dillydallying along too. They weren't really playing with each other. House beats and overprocessed synths rang out indifferently, a bunch of autistics with Casios and Basic Channel mp3s and not nearly enough of those portable iPod speakers (the ones that look like bats). If you went to college and remember freshman week, it sounded like that--lots of where you from and what you like and who you know--but the answers were less bushytailed.

In fact the band was being super fucking evasive I thought, as if they worried they'd misunderstand each other if they opened up to each other too much, or just lose interest. They hid their time signatures, their keys, their words until something greater brought their sounds into one contradicting trance. It didn't demand your attention, and you could cut yourself some cheese and return without missing much, but if it stopped you'd miss it.

I get a lot of shit for liking, loving, swearing by Excepter. For a while it was just a sound thing--I liked listening to them, and at most I liked the idea of crossing minimal house with freeform krautrock without just playing Enforcement on an iRiver while my hi-fi blasts Ash Ra. Somewhere in between gulping tequila and thinking Jeff's cat Margaret was telling me riddles though I realized Excepter is probably protest music. They're trying to slow down the city--the gentrification and affordable housing lack, the trendfucking, the death touch of success, the categorization and professionalization and therefore nullification of what was once the world's most fertile ground for art.

In Excepter I hear people who love dance music and love to dance and saw Moodymann play live but after ten years can't afford the Sparks at clubs and can't stand the people there anyway. I hear people who have probably listened to every record in their collection at least ten or fifteen times and still probably think of albums as more than a bunch of songs and shows as more than things to do. I hear people who thought they could work small jobs and make music the rest of the day, who found out they had to work 60 hours and the art they made in the off nobody liked anyway because the hi-hat didn't swish right.

Weirdly, I don't hear the escapism. Other people see that as the common thread of Excepter, Double Leopards, Skaters, No Neck, Wooden Wand (?!), Black Dice (?!?!?!), whatever random Brooklyn dude with an echo box, etc. With Excepter there's more at stake though, at least musically. I remember something Jeff told me on the phone after Excepter got banned from the Knitting Factory, it went something like "that stage is ours by divine right...they hate us because they know we're going to destroy their world" (!).

Excepter got to play the Knit again a few months later; so much for bans and melodrama. But Facetious or not, Jeff knows he's something of a traffic director in concert, violently seizing upon the images and mood around him, and verbalizing it in a way his bandmates can react to and disrupting them all the same. It's not hokey break the fourth wall stuff, except when it's really hokey, like when he dressed as a tiger at the Animal Collective pre-Thanksgiving show, got himself into some sort of tiger dance, then jumped off the stage and tackled some kid who had his arms crossed. He's not complaining about marginalization of art / creativity stampout / lack of creative venue a la backpackers and non-O.C.-ed indie rockers and the shit-ton of writers in this city who actually think they should get paid for saying one band sounds like another. He's just doing something about it.

This is one band, granted, and I don't think after Excepter does its 1000th gig all the magical sudden every newspaper in the world will start running 2000word thinkpieces on Questlove's dick implants every day. But my guess is Excepter's not doing Excepter because they're on a mission. They're doing Excepter because they don't know what else they can do.

That night they were pulling out of a long jam, each member clicking and clacking less, de facto outro. Then somebody's cell phone went off. There was no ring, but you could hear the morsecode-like interference in the PA system. It was Jeff's phone, and everybody laughed when he said "Hello?" It was he woman next door--she said stop. John Fell Ryan agreed.

In a way, it was a perfect ending--the band had just gotten away with 45 minutes of impossibly loud music at night in a New York apartment. The band moved away from their instruments towards the cheese, the two videographers turned off their cameras, "nice set dudes," "really good stuff guys," "you excited for tour?" etc.

Then I don't know what happened. There was a collective "wait, what the fuck are we doing, we're not done yet" sorta moment among the band members. So they started playing again. It wasn't a fuck you. It was a fuck the phone call, fuck the healthy efficient-for-what living, fuck the endless alarm clocks and bloodless logic--there were more worms to eat, so we ate them.