#32 Stars like fleas

This is slow music. These are ethereal, dreamy songs, shot with films all around, in a desert street. This is magic, they’re called Stars Like Fleas.

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A Monday evening in August, in Thomas ‘Doveman’s’ car, squashed in the back of the beat-up trunk. We had just come from filming a video in the Steinway Piano factory in the heart of Queens; a video that put on us on cloud 9. We were heading towards Jennifer Charles’ apartment in Greenpoint for a wonderful evening filming Elysian Fields. Sam Amidon (who will soon be releasing an amazingly unique album under the Plug Research label) sat in the passenger seat, speaking to me about his other project, Stars Like Fleas. The name rang a bell. David Fenech had mentioned it to me just before taking off for New York. I explained to Sam that the following day would be my last evening in New York, and that I was more than ready to leave the city on a high note. A splendid finale as such took place the following evening, late into the Brooklyn night.

The videos made that evening with Stars Like Fleas remain my favorite out of all the Take Away Shows to date. They’re the most radical as well, very long and demanding. It was inevitably a sublime memory, giving the feeling of being part of a unique moment, reaching the essence of what these Take Away Shows are: creating and sharing a unique space for just a few fleeting moments. Before your eyes the music moves, slowly evolving and finding an instance of clarity, emanating out just as the participants find each other-the camera included.

Stars Like Fleas is originally Shannon Fields and Montgomery Knott’s project, a rare and mythic group in New York that has performed in various forms since 1999. Montgomery is also the proprietor of the magnificent restaurant and venue Monkey Town in Williamsburg. And it was there, after midnight, where I met up with the nine members of the band. There were a lot them with a lot of amazing instruments. I was alone with my poor little camera. Two hours later however, with a glass of Lagavulin in hand, we were all on the same level. It was brilliant.

It all started in Monkey Town’s kitchen, everything was heaping over with superimposed sounds, all very pretty and messy. They started to catch the drift, beginning to understand our project, which nobody knew of except for Sam. I asked them to play in the streets, but they refused. I asked them a second time but they said it would be too complicated and too noisy for one in the morning. I continued to insist and they finally gave in. The nine inspiring minutes that followed began as improv, with Montgomery handling the vocals just until the group began to come together and follow Shannon’s leading melody. A friend of the band who we met at the bar was helping with sound, totally staggering and wasted. The song really takes off with Ryan Sawyer’s sorcery on percussion-watch him closely in the two videos, he’s really an amazing musician with an inexhaustible number of ideas and innovations.

The instruments were difficult to move around as we lugged them back into Monkey Town, this time in the back room, which is a large cube that functions as both venue and movie theater with four projection screens. With everyone more or else languid on the couches, the light from the film projector (a film loop that Montgomery projected. Ten minutes ago, there were some Mekas movies playing) seemed to drive the music with a particular tension as we turned around and around until we began to stagger and quiver. The light would go out much later in the evening before parting back into the New York nights. Exquisite terminus.

The new Stars Like Fleas album entitled ‘The Ken Burns Effect’ will be out this spring under the Talitres label. The album was recorded in part at Nicolas Vernhes’ Rare Book Room studio in Brooklyn (Nicolas is a great French producer who has been abroad for quite a while and who I’m sure we’ll get back to in time) and mixed at the Greenhouse studio in Iceland.