Vincent Gallo is known for the trying, difficult, obtuse films he directs and stars in, such as “Buffalo 66” and “The Brown Bunny.”
The latter debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to boos and catcalls, inspired a war of words between Gallo and critic Roger Ebert and featured an explicit oral-sex scene.
So if Gallo were to try his hand at music, you might think that it too would be trying, difficult and obtuse — with the potential to offend.
And you might be right. Or wrong. It’s hard to know for sure. Checking out Gallo’s new live-music project RRIICCEE is not as easy as buying an album or visiting a MySpace page.
The band doesn’t have anything recorded for distribution. Instead, the band is touring the country — including a stop at the Walnut Room on Monday — spreading its experimental-rock gospel without the buzz of a hot blog single or a popular viral video.
“When I say experimental, I don’t mean the cliche of experimental music, where everything is perfectly abstract,” Gallo said in a recent interview with The Denver Post. “What I mean by experimental is that I’m looking to connect with a musical vocabulary to get us beyond my own vocabulary.
“I’m trying to avoid cliches and protocol and being stuck in the old story of my past, which prevents me from being on the cusp of my future.”
Gallo is obviously a peculiar dude. And while he’s notorious for speaking vaguely about art — film, music and visual art — he’s actually a very focused individual. And that is causing him to pick his words carefully when talking about RRIICCEE, a project that also features Rebecca Casabian, Nikolas Hass and Eric Erlandson, the founding guitarist of Hole.
“Improvisation is a peculiar word, too, because it conjures a mood that can be impulsive,” said Gallo. “Improv jazz is all about randomness, and it’s the same with rock and blues. When I say improvisational, I’m talking about the creation of composition. If we don’t build on clear compositions, then we’re playing random sounds that don’t really connect.”
Although randomness may apply to some forms of improvisational music, there are scores of improv musicians, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Pat Metheny and even Jerry Garcia, who would say Gallo could not be more wrong, that, far from being random, their music was carefully built on composition. But we’ll let him have his say.
“It’s the gesture of composing and performing at the same time — utilizing whatever vocabularies that come together, and arranging them in a way that is pleasing and connective and unconscious. Usually when people improvise, it’s unconscious. The purpose of our music is to be as conscious and reflective as possible. The results have been, sometimes, really inspiring.”
While Gallo said he is limited by his own taste, vision and habits, he and his bandmates are making this band an exercise in nothingness — or, as he puts it, openness.
“Cerebral moods are not where creativity comes from,” Gallo said. “It comes from chaos. I try to practice as much as possible becoming the person I really am. I’m willing to go up on stage without anything in my mind. If the voice in my mind comes up to tell me to do something from the past, I try and change those voices and tell myself that it would be beautiful to try something new.”
So, once again, what does RRIICCEE’s music sound like? Well, that’s a tough one, but Gallo will be playing melodica, mellotron, guitars and bass straight through amps with no effects. Other instruments include drums, drum machines, electric string instruments with the possible addition of live vocals.
“I’m only interested in making what I think of as beautiful music, whatever that is — and maybe it’s at odds with what other people think — but I’m really coming from that place,” Gallo said. “In our best moments, our stuff is really sensitive and beautiful and not much like other things you’ve heard, even if it is reflective of the emotions of other things you’ve heard.”
Even though the band had played seven shows of its current tour by press time, there is seemingly not a single clip of them on YouTube or Google.
And that’s how Gallo prefers it. As he attempts to approach each show with a completely open and balanced mind, he hopes that listeners will do the same. Sure, most people at the Walnut Room on Monday will be familiar with Gallo, the standoffish auteur. But they’ll know little of his music until the first notes are played.
“This band is a reflection of four people much more than it could ever be a reflection of a community,” Gallo said. “I’ve never collaborated with friends. I’ve never been a part of a collective or a community, and this project is great — I learn so much from Eric and Nik and Rebecca every day, and the goal is not to control, but learn from them.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
RRIICCEE
Experimental rock. 8 p.m. Monday at the Walnut Room. $16. thewalnutroom.com
