Issue 05
Burn to Shine
By Neil MahoneyPhotos By Jim Saah
Illustration By Garrett Morin
There’s something eerily attractive about abandoned houses. They’re kind of ghostly, like fossils and museums. People desperate to escape authority have sought them out for criminal privacy and stolen-liquor make-out parties since the beginning of time. In the DVD series Burn to Shine, released by the Trixie music DVD label, Brendan Canty and Christoph Green capture the morbid excitement of exploring the skeletons of suburbia. In houses scheduled for demolition, musicians like Wilco, Shellac, the Evens, Ted Leo, and Sleater-Kinney each perform within the doomed walls, setting out to create lasting documents of ephemeral moments in each musical community where the sessions take place.
The Burn to Shine concept wasn’t born out of a grand creative vision, but rather the artistic thriftiness that the DIY music scene has always worn with pride. A friend of Canty’s came across a house owned by an elderly woman he’d befriended and tended to in her final year s. After she eventually pass ed (found standing up), Canty’s friend contacted him to see if he had any use for the house before it was torn down. Partly because of the uniqueness of a disposable house, and partly as an effort to pay tribute to the lives lived there, Canty decided to capitalize on the opportunity in one artistic fashion or another. Best known as the drummer for the Washington, D.C.-based band Fugazi, Canty admits that, initially, grandiose party concepts and mural projects were considered. But when Canty took the idea to film the local music scene performing in the empty house to Green, their partnership was galvanized. Despite Canty’s later aspirations to beef up the content of the recordings with band interviews or extraneous content, Christoph held fast to the original idea of portraiture. It would all be shot in one room, each band to play one song; that’s it.
The performers are encouraged to present material they are currently working on, or simply the material each feel best represents their musical goals of the moment. The result, Canty admit s, is“much more design-conscious.” With a strict and uniform framework for the bands to play within, their unrestrained performances take beautiful prominence. “Combining that small confined space with incredibly loud, rich music – I feel it more.” Each disc begins with an overview of the project and a brief profile of the house and how it became slated for destruction. Some are simple homes that became casualties of their owners’ overhaul s, while some are more storied. The Chicago setting was the last of three identical houses built by a man for each of his three daughters nearly a hundred years ago.
The soul of each house explored, the performances begin. The acts are all shot in the same room, equally for convenience and artistic standard. In Washington, D.C., the setting is in front of an unlit fireplace on the coldest day of the year. Ironically, after the local fire department training exercise had destroyed everything else, the chimney was all that was left standing. The Chicago house’s backdrop is a bay window overlooking the street and sidewalk traffic. As the machinery tears it down, the house’s proximity to neighboring houses paints a stunning contrast.
Each musical act takes its turn, each in different contrast to the environment. Some performances are solemn, like a preemptive wake for the doomed dwelling. Others are so intense you’d think the rest of the house was filled with kids holding keg-cups on the lookout for cop s. But there’s no one there but the cameras, the eyes of your television. The performances are captured on high-definition digital video by a handful of camera s, while a still photographer takes snapshots. The seams showing, there are often camera operators in frame, flares of discontinuity but no overt nods to camera. This is not a peek inside a private rehearsal, nor is it a recording of a performance for an audience. It’s essentially a document of the musicians committing to their music. There are moments that seem out of place without an audience, like high kicks and shredding guitar solos, but, as Canty points out, “The guy from Tight Phantomz was doing that in rehearsal. He was covered in sweat before we started.”
After playing in Fugazi, Deadline, Rites of Spring, and other D.C. Bands over the last 25 years, Canty has become a barometer for the scene. At the time of the initial recording for Burn to Shine, his heart told him that the moment wouldn’t last. Sensing that not only his but the whole community’s“band life” was in yet another era of flux, the thought was adopted as manifesto. They set out to capture these bands before they broke up, re-organized, or changed direction – Canty’s portrait of a musical community in its season of unrest, captured if only for that afternoon. Since recording their performance for the D V D, Q and Not U have broken up.
For the Chicago edition, Shellac’s Bob Weston tried to select bands that would show a diverse view of the working musical community. In the same way that Canty’s selections in D.C. Were resigned to being captured as “this band on that day,” the lives of the bands from Chicago have evolved since as well. The Red Eyed Legends track “Je M’Appelle Macho” and Shellac’s “Steady As She Goes” have since been reworked and recorded for their respective albums. The Ponys’ lineup has changed drastically.
The third installment of Burn To Shine is set in Portland, Oregon, and features Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists, The Gossip, Quasi, The Shins, a hip-hop group called Life sava , and a band of 11 -year olds from the nearby girls’ rock camp. While the performances feature some firsts for the series, the location strays from the other two editions here as well. The relatively new farmhouse was to be destroyed and join the surrounding landscape, as it evolves from farmland to expanses of “McMansions” and an 18-hole golf course. Throughout the day of shooting, foursomes offered curious gawks from the fairway beyond the window set behind the performers. The aesthetic of the area is in a season of change just as much as the musical community.
The value for the viewer, beyond symbolism and artistic critique, is that these are intensely personal performances from authentic artists who don’t benefit from the exposure offered by M T V and Billboard chart s. “If I could have put it in bold type, it would have (said) that I was trying to capture the bands doing what they do best, which is play live,”says Canty. “There’s a cross -section of music out there that’s just not going to get documented unless I do it.” And that’s precisely what he, Greene, and Trixie DVD have done in a product that is at once archival, precious, and slightly spooky.