Brian Slattery photo
When Cafe Nine patrons came to the club on Wednesday night, they found the above-pictured scene before the show started. Was it an altar? What was going to be sacrificed?
The audience was about to find out, in a night that turned the State Street club into a music venue, theater hall, and ritual space, all at once.
Visitor 10 out of Philadelphia kicked the night off right with a set that blended his philosophical hip hop with a theatrical one-man show that included juggling, a set of masks, a magnifying glass, and a suitcase filled with surprises.
When your life flashes before your eyes, he suggested at the beginning of the set, what’s really happened is that “you’re already dead — this is the life that you remember. So let’s elaborate on that, shall we?” His songs proceeded to do just that, weaving together the cosmic, the playful, the weird, and the unsettling. At one point he opened that suitcase, which contained a frying pan and a deck of playing cards. Placing the cards in the pan, while rapping, he tossed them in the skillet as if frying them, until they were scattered across the floor in front of Cafe Nine’s stage. The suitcase also contained a series of objects that, in the set’s darker moments, he arranged into a humanoid shape. Solemnly, he produced a knife and cut a lemon in half on the makeshift doll’s head. It was a ritual, a sacrifice — and a harbinger for what else was in store.
Amherst, Mass.-based Ruune — an acronym standing for “ritual utilizing universal nightmare energy” — offered a set of music that employed three microphones, a laptop, a case full of gear, and Ruune’s own distinct voice to create 8‑bit soundscapes over which Ruune laid plaintive vocals, raw with emotion.
“I had some theatrics to my act, but figured I’d leave the theatrics to the other acts,” he joked. He was selling himself short. As he painted his face on stage and drew symbols on his arms, the fully committed Ruune used theatricality to strip the heart of the music even more bare.
And at last, the assembled crowd found out what the altar was for. The San Francisco-based artist Lucien Shapiro was an a tour to collect fears and conduct rituals to overcome them. After showing a short film, he cast his circle of candles, and Ceschi, who had organized the evening and acted as emcee, invited everyone to approach the altar, write down their fears on pieces of paper, and place them in the urn on the table.
Shapiro donned an antlered mask and began an orbit as person after person took part in the ritual — first, Ceschi and the other members of Anonymous, Inc., who were about to perform, and then a steady stream of people from the audience, as Anonymous Inc. drummer David Ramos laid down a groove to anchor the proceedings.
The drums, the candlelight, the film — all of it together gave Cafe Nine a vibe this reporter hadn’t experienced in that space before. It was deep, solemn, holy even. Shapiro’s work seemed less like art produced by one person’s vision and more like a ritual drawn from a fully-fledged religion, from an entire culture, that none of us had ever encountered before. We were visitors. But we were let in, and we understood the rules well enough to be a part of it.
It deepened the meaning of Anonymous, Inc.‘s set, which closed out the evening. The lights, turned off for Shapiro’s ritual, stayed off. Ceschi told the people there to crowd the stage. They did. After starting with a couple old favorites, the band laid down a skittering, energetic song led by keyboardist Max Heath — “he wrote it, and we just added stuff,” Ceschi explained — that hooked the audience for the rest of the night. By the time Ceschi jumped off the stage into the crowd, or he and David Ramos traded verses from songs from last year’s Broken Bone Ballads, the people in the energetic crowd made it clear that they’d be with the band until the last song.
“Everything tonight has been about ritual,” Ceschi said from the stage, “and this is our ritual, bringing together community.” He made explicit what was already in the air, that this night had brought together the people assembled and made them, in a way, into a small nation, celebrating together.