Gerrard reopens to stellar show: Artists push folk music boundaries

Concert review
Old Noise, New Blues
Gerrard Hall
Saturday
4.5 stars out of 5

Saturday night, the newly reopened Gerrard Hall sheltered what might well have been the most ambitious and well-executed on-campus concert in recent memory.
The concert, organized by Carolina Union Activities Board, WXYC and UNC's Curriculum in Folklore, was organized to showcase artists whose music pushes - and often breaks - the boundaries of Southern folk music traditions.
But the venue was as important to the event's success as the musicians' performances.
Gerrard offers rich acoustics with a reverb that augments instead of distorts the sounds coming from stacks of speakers and microphones. Its balcony provides a bird's-eye view of the concert, while the stageless main room provides the audience with an intimacy that makes the performances more affecting.
The show's four acts all lean toward the avant-garde, but Gerrard made the music approachable.
Though the venue was never filled to its more than 400-seat capacity, it felt full, as listeners enjoyed the experience of hearing adventurous music in a comfortable setting.
The opening band, Horse Operas, used amplified acoustic guitars and blues progressions to create a rock sound rooted in back-porch folk.
But as soon as the band finished, the music took a decidedly more experimental path.
Pennsylvania's Mike Tamburo performed a strikingly beautiful solo set using only a hammer dulcimer, a traditional Appalachian instrument. He performed wordlessly while creating the necessary feelings of tension and release to keep the music engaging.
Following an intermission, R. Keenan Lawler took to the now-darkened room. Using a 1930s resonator guitar, he evoked images of a conflicted Southern history by finding the dissonances in traditional blues forms and exploiting them until they became harsh, moaning drones. Despite a need for self-editing evidenced by extraneous concluding passages, Lawler coaxed ghosts of the past out through this music, which became a sort of seance for the blues.
But the highlight was Chapel Hill's drone collective, The Hem of His Garment, which performed with 16 members Saturday.
The piling layers of tone the group laid upon the audience became thick and heavy enough that they became a physical entity.
Having arranged themselves in a horseshoe shape, the musicians created a disorienting sense of space and time as their hour-long song took flight.
The concert proved to be academic enough to suit its college setting, but intangibly powerful enough to fit perfectly the former chapel that housed it.

The Daily Tar Heel, page 3, 11/19/07