photo from rriiccee.com
Vincent Gallo, who put Buffalo on the hipster map with his movie Buffalo '66, bought his musical project in RRIICCEE back to Soundlab last Thursday. While Gallo's past musical collaborators in other projects include Sean Lennon, Jim O'Rourke, Eric Erlandson and legendary New York artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the current RRIICCEE line-up includes less recognizable names in brothers Nikolas and Simon Haas. Gallo describes RRIICCEE as, "a gesture of composing and performing at the same time, always hoping to avoid musical cliché or jamming... when we play live, the music is often created during the performance."
Upon descending the Soundlab steps Thursday night, it looked like Gallo had planned everything except the music. Seven rows of black folding chairs had been arranged in rows facing the stage, with a narrow, de facto walkway cutting the rows through to the back of the room. A drum set, synthesizers, amplifiers and guitars were set up in front of a white screen. The stage was completely lit by fluorescent light-- an island in the dark, subterranean Soundlab performance space.
RRIICCEE took the stage without opening act, the first song built up from guitar noise loop into abstract trip-hop. Throughout the set, the band also touched on elements of jazz, tropicalia, electronica and rock. Some of the songs had vocal melodies, a hint that some of the music is written beforehand. The music felt, at times, like the score to a film playing just behind the stage. Returning to trip-hop before the end of the set, Canadian emcee Buck 65 dropped a few freestyle verses over RRIICCEE's bed of minimal-ambient sounds.
photo from buck65.com
After playing about only 40 minutes, with no opening act, some people were grumbling about the ticket price after the show. Some were probably hipster-suckers, looking for a celebrity experience or Gallo photo-op. At $20 a pop, without hearing a single song they recognized, no doubt a lot of people were asking themselves-- who the fuck is Vincent Gallo anyway?
