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Brian Slattery |
Nov 22, 2024 7:58 am
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Allie Sandt and Teddy Holly.
From the stage at Never Ending Books on Thursday night, Trae Sheehan asked if there were “any introverts in the crowd.” He was met with complete silence. He beamed.
“See, I try that at every show, and audiences fail,” by cheering, he explained. The cheer, he said, was a sign that they couldn’t be introverts; the silence felt all too right. “This one goes out to you,” he said.
Sheehan was part of a three-act bill at Never Ending Books on State Street — including Sam Moth and Allie Sandt — that warmed a rainy night by fostering honesty, openness, and kindheartedness in song after song.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2024 9:12 am
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Magdalena Abrego crouched over her pedalboard Sunday evening at Never Ending Books on State Street, and unleashed a lush, complex soundscape, a series of guitar-made tones layered over one another, now vibrating together.
As the sounds continued pulsing around her, she began to play simple chords, laying down a rhythm, a chord progression. On the downbeat, Mali Obomsawin and Willis Edmundson joined Abrego. The soundscape switched off in a second, and the band — Deerlady — sounded, suddenly, like a rock band. But the impression was left, and a point made, that the trio was drawing from a broad musical vocabulary. Which made sense; the last time Abrego, Obomsawin, and opener Allison Burik were in town, in May 2023, they were playing music that brought together elements of traditional Abenaki song and free jazz at Firehouse 12. Deerlady deployed a different sound, but still had the same searching sensibility.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 6, 2024 9:29 am
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A deer head with flowers for eyes. Streams of color stretching down from the ceiling. And, on a couple dozen cardboard panels, all manner of people, in all manner of poses. It’s all part of “This Art is Trash,” an exhibition at Never Ending Books on State Street by artist Alice Prael that puts humanity into the things we usually throw away.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 5, 2024 8:20 am
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Sarah Gross.
“I’ve been crying, I’ve been trying / Reinvent myself each day to keep from dying,” sang Sarah Gross, the first of two musical acts to perform at Never Ending Books on Friday. The lyrics came from her original song “Liar,” the first of many originals she played that night. Gross’s full, sweet voice and introspective lyrics recalled a young Taylor Swift, right on the cusp of transitioning out of country music.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 19, 2024 9:12 am
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Shula Weinstein
The Architect.
Even without knowing the name of the piece, the figure represented there looks like a mythological personage, a character freighted with symbols. It’s there in the decorations on her boots, and the way she walks through and astride the town at the same time. It’s there in the way she holds a building in her hand. In the artist’s style, she could be a giant, holding an actual building; she could also be showing us the vision she has in her head. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 9, 2024 9:09 am
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Patti Smith's Horses.
The powerful voice of Patti Smith emanated from the speakers in the side room of Never Ending Books Monday night, as the latest installment of Album Club met to pore over her debut 1975 punk-rock album, Horses.
In her music, Smith is a wild horse herself, powerful and untamed. Horses is the kind of album that needs to be analyzed as seriously as any novel, and the group were prepared to do just that.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 14, 2024 9:23 am
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Brightening the dark at Never Ending Books.
Stan Nishimura announced his entrance with a fanfare from his trombone. Paul McGuire, on saxophone, answered with a wail. For a moment they made a game of matching notes and unmatching them. Then they moved into playing off one another, supporting one another, but breathing together, starting and ending their phrases together, turning the movement of air in and out of their lungs into their own rhythm section.
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Brian Slattery |
May 29, 2024 9:24 am
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Beloved New Haven.
It’s a simple idea with big consequences. The picture of East Rock is the sort you might see on a postcard. The message is easy to digest, a salute to a city the artist loves, a message of solidarity. But it’s also an acknowledgment of struggle, and that’s where the fact that the art is made on a record comes into play. Give the record a spin, and everything gets blurred, both the place and the message. In the midst of the struggle, the hardship can be dizzying. It’s hard to know sometimes which end is up. But that’s also when the music plays.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 26, 2024 9:15 am
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James Paul Nadien sat behind the drums with an impish grin as violinist Sabrina Salamone tightened the hair on her bow. “F.I.M. 50!” he yelled. The crowd, a packed room at Never Ending Books on a Saturday, cheered. It was an appropriately direct introduction for the 50th installment of the F.I.M. concert series, which was started in April 2022 by guitarist Luke Rovinsky and bassist Caleb Duval and has quickly become a linchpin of the Elm City improvised music scene, joining the New Haven Improvisers Collective and the Instantiation series to solidify the next generation of players.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 30, 2024 9:09 am
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New Haven Improvisers Collective.
It was 7:30 p.m. on Monday at Never Ending Books, and Bob Gorry of the New Haven Improvisers Collective had a few instructions for the musicians gathered in the room.
The collective always started with the same exercise, of playing long tones together, “whatever that means on your instrument,” Gorry said. “It’s very important for listening and for figuring out the room. It’s really important that you hear everybody.”
The idea was to play a tone as long as possible, then pause and play another, while listening to everyone else. “If you can’t hear someone,” Gorry said, “play quieter.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 22, 2024 12:55 pm
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Angel Piss.
Sounds like nature. Sounds like video games. Choirs of unearthly voices and raspy tones from a saxophone. And people listening hard to build sounds together. All of this awaited the healthy crowd that showed up at Never Ending Books on Friday evening for a triple bill of The Sawtelles, Human Flourishing, and Angel Piss.
At the MLK Love March Monday in the Goatville neighborhood.
As a practicing agnostic, I’ve often wondered why the Civil Rights Movement began in the church. Christianity has always seemed antithetical to Black liberation to me. After all, this is the white man’s religion, with a white Jesus foisted upon our people during the degradation of slavery. I’ve resented my people’s devotion to a God we wouldn’t even know if not for our conquest.
This question was cycling through my mind when I stepped off with the members and supporters of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church for their 54th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Love March through the streets of East Rock, the state’s longest-running celebration of Dr. King’s life and achievements.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 8, 2024 9:12 am
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Zero Dollar.
Nicholas Serrambana on bass came on with a prowling, acrobatic line. Jeff Dragan on electronics countered with purrs and hisses, as though from a virtual snake. Nick Di Maria played his trumpet into a microphone to apply effects to the horn’s sound, from echoing reverb to electronically generated harmonies.
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Adam Matlock |
Dec 14, 2023 8:56 am
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Setting up for a meeting of the Album Club at Never Ending Books on State Street, organizer and host Dean Andrade said that “I think this album will be kind of a revelation for our regulars.” On Monday night, the club assembled for the 16th time since starting in 2022 to discuss Alice Coltrane’s 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda — the first time, according to Andrade, the group had discussed a jazz album, or anything without lyrics.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 31, 2023 11:06 am
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Klein watches her video premiere.
Volume Two and a crew of three local acts amped up their audience for Halloween on Sunday night with a spooky video release celebration and a selection of songs that got everyone in the holiday spirit.
Musician Laura Klein started working on the video for “Faux Départ” while recovering from surgery. She happened upon unreleased tracks from her band Western Estates, deciding “this song deserves more than just an internet blast.” After working on the video for over two years, she gave it its premiere in front of an enthusiastic crowd, some dressed in apropos Halloween attire, and all surrounded in the appropriate art of the most recent Volume Two art exhibition, titled “Volume Boo!”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 10, 2023 8:32 am
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At Friday's "Vol. Boo" art opening.
The Volume Two collective at Never Ending Books threw open its doors Friday night for a seasonal art opening running at the space at 810 State St. through the end of the month — not of fall foliage and decorative gourds, but of ghosts, ghouls, and other visions of the macabre, as New Haven prepares for what is, in some ways, its most celebrated community holiday. The exhibition, called “Vol. Boo,” is a collaborative art show featuring the work of 15 artists who all took the chance, some playfully, some seriously, to explore and illuminate the darker side of life.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2023 9:07 am
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The cover of Never Ending Poetry.
On the last page of the new poetry anthology Never Ending Poetry — a celebration of the first year of Open Mic Surgery, the poetry reading series that happens almost every Tuesday at Never Ending Books on State Street — there’s an incisive poem by Alice Prael about a barrel in a field on fire, melting plastic. “Polymers propagating / intimate inanity / inane intimacy,” she writes. “It’s poison but it’s warm.” On the same page is a poem called “Ode to Baby Jesus” by Julie Meehan. “You’ll get nailed down,” she writes, “but you’ll get up again / They’re never gunna nail you down.”
The juxtaposition is just fine by Brian Robinson, who runs Open Mic Surgery and put together the anthology. “I love that one poem is a beautiful, really elegant” piece, “and then the last poem is an adaptation of a Chumbawumba song about Jesus,” Robinson said. To him, “that’s the dichotomy” of Open Mic Surgery itself. “Nothing is off the table.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 25, 2023 9:03 am
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Maya Elise and the Good Dream.
On Monday night three acts — Low Ceilings, Kendra McKinley, and Maya Elise and the Good Dream — brought the warmth of connection and culture to an appreciative crowd at Never Ending Books, turning the communal spot at 810 State St. into a sanctuary.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 17, 2023 3:07 pm
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Sallow Friend.
Four bands made an emotional evening of music at Never Ending Books Sunday night, as Nose Bleed, Sallow Friend, Mildly Allergic, and Kitchen gave a rapt audience songs that were by turns energetic and meditative, angular and wistful.
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Eleanor Polak |
May 31, 2023 8:35 am
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Robinson and unicorn.
Brian Robinson, organizer of Open Mic Surgery, the poetry open mic running for almost a year at Never Ending Books, walked into the State Street spot carrying a giant unicorn-shaped piñata. “You don’t leave a dog in the car.… I’m not going to leave a unicorn in the car,” he explained. “It could get hot.”
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Karen Ponzio |
May 2, 2023 8:38 am
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Painting by Ben Cannan.
Sunday morning may have been gray and rainy outside, but inside Never Ending Books a group of artists was bringing color and shape to the State Street space with pencils, pens, clay, watercolors, and acrylics. Arts Meet Up, a twice monthly event, provides an open area for creatives of all kinds and all levels. According to Ryan Licwinko, a member of the Volume Two collective that runs the space, the event has been going strong since June of last year with a simple and straightforward goal: to give artists a space to create.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 2, 2023 9:25 am
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Haley Grunloh’s rendition of dragonflies shows off, first, her technical skill as an artist, as the insects are depicted with all the attention to their form a viewer could want. But she has also chosen to depict them mating, one of the most fascinating and also slightly awkward moments in a dragonfly’s life cycle, as it’s one of the few moments when they’re not capable of the aeronautics we usually associate with them. It’s a hint at Grunloh’s attraction to the unusual, and a doorway into her artwork — assembled as a show running at Never Ending Books on State Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 19, 2023 8:40 am
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185668232.
At the beginning of his set, 185668232 asked everyone in the audience to say their names while he held out a microphone. “One, two, three,” he said, and everyone in the audience said their names. The syllables blended in the air. 185668232 looped the sound. “Do you like your name? Can you say it with some energy?” he asked. We did, and he mixed the two samples together. Now it was a surging mass of noise, swelling and subsiding, creating a rhythm. Now 185668232 was ready to begin.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2023 8:52 am
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Brian Robinson, poet and host of Open Mic Surgery — a weekly open mic poetry night held at Never Ending Books — joked on Tuesday evening that poets are always late. Yet when he arrived at the appointed time of 6:30 p.m., he found a room of people waiting for him.
“Everyone’s here on time, and it’s kind of weird,” he said.
“I think it’s a sign that more people are coming,” someone in the audience said.
