The Art of Rock 'n' Roll

Renaissance BAND: The members of Phillyâs Bardo Pond sculpt, sketch, paint and make bold, smart psych-rock.

Did Bardo Pond just make a pop record? No they did not.

by A.D. Amorosi

In the 12 years Bardo Pond has been Bardo Pond, they’ve been -- to locals who drink with them, to an international audience that adores them -- enigmatic. Beyond the norm of everyday rock, they are an outfit earmarked as intense, bold, spiritual, intellectual. Fans look to the cryptic Leary-like nature of the band’s titles, lyrics and the ritualistic implications of the moniker (it’s right outta The Tibetan Book of the Dead) and point to a psychedelicized soul spot within that can take you to a higher plane or land you in a different skin.

"Personally, the notion of Œbardo' still holds for me," says bassist/sculptor/sketch artist Clint Takeda, who, like his bandmates, answers via cell phone while en route to Boston. "It's not a knowledge that people have to have to dig us. Rather, more abstractly, it's a place, musically, where we Œhover.'"

The band's feedback-fueled frenzy is not so much influenced by but is at one with its contemporaries: Branca, Coltrane, Ornette, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül, Sonic Youth, Faust. Worshippers are glued to their speakers to interpret the meaning of each moan and mumble that comes from mantra-scribing singer Isobel Sollenberger (to say nothing of the notes from her flute and violin).

The band went to art school, worked at museums. Its members sculpt, sketch and paint. For fuck's sake, Bardo Pond is an art-rock nightmare. Yet, throughout their tenure, they've been seen neither as pretentious nor as just another local band. Their name never gets abbreviated. You'll never hear someone say, "Let's see the Bard" or, "Dig the Pond." Since the band's start on Pearl Harbor Day in 1991 -- from local-label albums Bufo Alvarius, Amen 29:15 (Drunken Fish) and Big Laughing Jym (Compulsiv) to the masterful morass of Matador releases -- every CD has, incrementally, grown creepier, tenser and more textural than the last. They are lovely, layered works unparalleled in their doomy, booming beauty.

Even when they're called droney stoners, they seem high above the rest of the local music milieu. "I don't know if we're at the forefront of the local scene, but I think we enjoy a certain level of respect among our peers," says drummer/scene vet Ed Farnsworth. Each member -- Farnsworth, Sollenberger, Takeda, sonic-booming guitarists/brothers John and Michael Gibbons -- seems humble about what it is Bardo Pond have brought to Philadelphia and vice versa. They still play within the circle of the like-minded they started out with: Strapping Fieldhands, guys in 1929 and UN. They still work, record, hang and cohabit at Lemur Studio in Fishtown, the place where their newest CD, On the Ellipse (All Tomorrow's Parties), was recorded.

"We love Philly and what comes out of it," says Michael Gibbons. "From the bands you mention that are friends of ours to David Lynch to Sun Ra to Siltbreeze to Brother JT to Record Exchange, our people and places are here. We are lucky." Though often discussed throughout their career, the success and fame music can bring has been replaced with content and respect for stature. While pointing out "his" Philadelphia, filled with icons like Duchamp, R. Crumb and tacos from El Mercado's at Front and Montgomery, he sees success as out of their control. "We can adjust our scale to whatever the attention level we get is. But we can't control bigness."

"We just want to buy more pedals and such," chimes John Gibbons. As with their first records, Takeda and Michael Gibbons created the band's cover art, which Takeda sums up as "shaky sketchy line drawings that make us smile."

And do they still get stoned on that which makes their music stoner's drone? "What do you think?" asks Michael.

Despite maintaining divine stature and a holy sound of cascading chaos, there have been changes for Bardo Pond. After ending its relationship with Matador, the band was picked up by ATP (which led to an appearance at that label's famed artist-curated festival, at the behest of both Mogwai and Sonic Youth).

Like its self-released improvisational outtakes, the Volume series, On the Ellipse was recorded at Lemur House, a move that let the stay-at-home band work in pressure-free luxury. "We can record a jam in the fall, forget about it, rediscover it in spring and continue to work on it till Michael remixes, or Lemurizes, it for a next album or self-released CD-R or submerge it back into our pond to gather girth and wait for rediscovery," says Takeda.

The improvs that make up Ellipse have been road-tested on tour and added to in the studio, evolving to the point of ripeness. Since the tunes are usually born in live settings, their translation, no matter how languorous or layered, from record to stage is an organic one. Though neither Gibbons brings the somnolent acoustic guitars of Ellipse to the stage, each plucks his electric guitar as if it were a prickly thorned rose on "J.D.," "Every Man" and the Indio-Asian "Night of Frogs."

Everything on Ellipse seems to fade in, as if from another room, walking slowly to its own tender, bludgeoned heartbeat. Each tune builds from smallest fear to longing and loathing on a grand scale. From the laughing collage of "Walking Clouds" to the wounds of "Dom's Lament," there are moments that climb a creeping vine from forlorn silence to deep, sad, guttural scream. "The first time we played ŒLament' was out in New York City a month after 9/11," says Farnsworth of the tune's emotional power. "I almost lost it in the middle of the song."

The Gibbons' wall of fuzz and churning, rhythmic combine is formidable. "I think about speakers a lot," says Takeda, who has implemented cones and woofers in his sound-sculptural work. "I love the way they look and sound, super low frequencies that make things rumble." But what makes Ellipse and Dilate exquisite is that while each record is more diabolical than the last, each is also twice as beautiful in its melody and spartan in its arrangement.

Michael Gibbons points to the fact that studio explorations have taken Bardo Pond deeper into acoustic-textured territory and tabla-gong-bell softness, but Sollenberger notes that the sparseness on their recent records was created by removing, not adding. "I've always had the tendency to edit," she says, noting it in the removal of instruments during the mixing process as well as in her lyrical cutting and pasting. "While we recorded Ellipse I read a lot about the Emerald Tablet and the Hermetic tradition. That certainly is coming through. In these dark times it is for the light that I reach and perhaps the mantras are a way of keeping to that path. More and more, I feel that the songs are just coming through me, that the songs write themselves, that they dictate their own needs and pare themselves to their basic essence."

The essence of On the Ellipse has a stake in the band's past -- the feedback and distorted noise from whence they came. "I think we've got more control over the things we do," says Clint Takeda. "Control of when to get heavy, control over how to stay quiet when we want little details to define a song, control of when and how freaky the freaky parts happen."

Says John Gibbons: "Hopefully, we'll find the right combination of distortion and frequency to create a sonic boom to arc from Fishtown to the White House and implode the Bush administration."

Bardo Pond plays Thu., July 3, 9 p.m., $7, with 1929, Comets on Fire and Steve Krakow, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888.

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