Venue: Channel Zero / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 09.10.2012
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: 15 euros (reserved) / 18 euros
When I heard Jarboe was coming through Slovenia, I was over the moon. I’d missed Swans at Kuna Šiška on May 24, much to my sorrow, and I absolutely love Jarboe’s solo albums, so there was more than enough reason for some serious fanboy hype.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the heavy-handed promotion of Jarboe as an ex-Swans member – in the style of »EX-SWANS, Jarboe«, where the font on the bit about her playing with Swans until the end of the 90s was practically bigger than the musician’s own name. Even back then it struck me as a bit unnecessary, given how excellent her solo albums are. That »ex-Swans« came across as a marketing move, though I didn’t really believe it, since her whole stylistic message has always been rooted in the alternative and, by extension, at least indirectly in resistance to the capitalist marketing of music. Jarboe also sang on the latest phenomenal Swans record, The Seer, so maybe that’s why the »(ex-)Swans« tag is pushed even harder. So who is Jarboe, then?
The wait inside Channel Zero was kind of unusual – the crowd was quiet, and nobody smoked, at the musician’s express request. At the merch table there was hardly a Jarboe item to be found, just Swans shirts and albums. Right there I got a weird feeling, which matched the strange atmosphere in the room. A look at the stage offered no answer – all you could see was the keyboard of Jarboe’s touring companion Renee Valentine, a classical pianist and vocalist. Right on the dot, Renee walked on stage and opened the show all by herself – with her playing and her voice. The uncomfortable moments only built with every note. The audience clearly shared my feelings, because there was no visible connection to the music being played. What’s more – after the opening song there wasn’t a sound. No applause, no hushed whispers, no awkward coughing. Nothing. It was as if there was nobody on stage, as if time had somehow stopped, while we were all acutely aware that something was going on up there, some kind of dance of ghosts that, hand on heart, we didn’t much like. At least I didn’t. And that ghost dance carried on when the undeniably charismatic Jarboe took the stage, a presence you simply can’t not feel when she’s near.
Jarboe’s arrival at least partly woke up the audience, which had been lingering in the far, unwanted corners of a trance, and not the good kind. Her otherwise phenomenal voice, in what was clearly a personal reinterpretation of her work through the minimalist form of keyboards and vocals, still didn’t deliver what I expected. Lots of songs were rearranged in a naive, uninteresting way, a few bordered stylistically on pop-soul stuff, and the handful of good dark counterpoints quickly faded next to the lukewarm performance. Technically it may have sounded flawless – the occasional vocal duet, the odd heartfelt interpretation of different songs, and quasi-mysticism with rudimentary »costume design«. But I honestly felt nothing watching and listening to Jarboe. The whole show was watered down, uninteresting, almost unprepared, and the minimalism sadly didn’t spark at all this time, despite the solo potential Jarboe’s voice carries. And that’s where something started to stink. And not just the cigarette smoke curling off my neighbor, who clearly hadn’t heard the security guys or read the signs. What was unfolding in front of me was a concert that has practically nothing to do with either Swans or Jarboe’s solo albums as such. Sure, it was supposed to be a reinterpretation, but still… the whole »ex-Swans« campaign and merch gets under my skin. The nonchalant Jarboe gets under my skin, casually taking over the whole evening in the name of some quasi-intimacy. Given all that, the cigarette smoke didn’t bother me anymore.
The show lasted just 40 minutes. It could have lasted 10, or even 100, and it probably would have turned out the same. Uninspired, uninteresting, boring and generally pretty bad. Yep, put simply – it was bad. The pretense of intimacy came off as a farce, since Jarboe’s impersonal attitude toward the audience and the lack of contact were the polar opposite of what was »intended«. It wasn’t unique, it wasn’t lived-in, and above all it wasn’t »Ex-Swans, Jarboe«. This time Jarboe had nothing in common with Swans. The mind that worked with them before 1998 and created 17 excellent solo releases was present neither in the planning of this evening nor on the night itself, even though you could feel a special tension in her presence.
Who is Jarboe? An ex-Swans musician? A respected singer with a career of her own? Or just an underground marketing trend that found a commercial niche in the alternative? Right now I’d struggle to pick the right option. I get that musicians have to earn enough money for a decent standard of living, so I’d happily accept the whole campaign around the former Swans musician if Jarboe had also given the impression that she was once somehow involved in that cult band. Even the feelings and unique dark energy of her solo albums would have been enough. This extremely short performance, which in no way justified the ticket price (not exactly steep, but definitely too high for what we heard), personally left me with a bitter aftertaste about her musical reputation. I hope someone experienced the show differently than I did, I truly hope they got the whole game of intimacy and mysticism and the ever-popular modern minimalist approach to reinterpreting back catalogs that EX-SWANS Jarboe had prepared, because I didn’t feel any of it. Nothing.
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