In Case You Missed It: Coconut Record Release Show

As soon as I learned to talk, I’ve been trying to explain things. Therapy sessions yield the same advice, year after year: some events can’t be explained, some emotions can’t be named. In art, I often interpret the lack of an explanation or legible concept as a cop-out, a way for an artist to get away with using conceptually loaded imagery without accounting for its implications. I’ve noticed this trend among some Bay Area artists: rejecting meaning, embracing formlessness and mysticism through beatific pastoral imagery. For an explanation addict like me, such presentations can frustrate and confound.

It would be all too easy to dismiss the Coconut Record release show I attended August 20 at Grace Cathedral on these grounds if it hadn’t seduced me so thoroughly. The event, which celebrated the release of the Coconut single by artists Chris Duncan and Maria Otero’s Land and Sea project, made me wonder if I really need all those words I use.

As I entered, a man silently walked a labyrinth to my left, his intuitive navigation serving as a metaphor for the evening. Lacking explanation or guidance, faced only with a vast cathedral, I migrated to the crowd. The audience stood before a white projector screen while three men, members of the band Aero-Mic’d, played laptops as though they were musical instruments. With no verses or choruses, back-up vocals or solos, the music was more like a sonic aura than a linear series of distinct expressions. It surrounded, permeated, and resonated; it did not entertain.

The screen appeared white, until a young girl ran up to her father standing before me and said, “Can you see the ocean?” I looked again, put on my glasses, and saw the flat surface break into ripples, white and grey, shifting, gathering, dispersing. The sounds built up and then broke, like waves lapping a shore. The screen’s imagery, the work of Sean McFarland, changed; suddenly we were lost in the woods. The screen filled with patches of green and brown, yellow and black, but no discernible shapes. It felt like walking in the forest at night.

Both sounds and images persisted, eschewing words or explanation, definitions and discrete objects. As I felt the music move in and out, watched the subtle movement of the water, I thought about how long it had been since I had visited the ocean and for a moment felt like I was there. The performance ended; people clapped, moving on to other performances in other parts of the building.

Poster (detail), Coconut Record Release Show, August 20, 2010; Grace Cathedral. Courtesy of Land And Sea.

In a small room to the left, Ben Grass played simple folk songs on a guitar, standing in a keyhole-shaped doorway with candles at his feet. At one point in the performance, a young girl danced beside him. In the church's nave, a screen held a video, by Maria Otero, of the ocean as seen from the inside of a cave; the rock opening functioned as a static peephole framing the moving sea, reducing the watery infinity to a more knowable quantity. Coconut took the stage eventually, its members wearing white frocks, chanting, talking, and singing. I stayed for first half of their performance, and as I went back outside and saw the fog settling over the city, saw the yellow lights shining through, I wondered if it was possible to have dual, simultaneous, channels of perception—one that favors explanation, one that absorbs but does not name. Perhaps one does not cancel out the other.

The Coconut Record release show took place at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on August 20, 2010.

Correction: The first version of this review mistakenly omitted the event's full roster of participants. It has been updated to address that omission. The event's organizers and participants include: Land and Sea, Episcodisco, Paradise Now! Coconut, Ben Grass, Aero Mic'd, Jesse Schlesinger, Sean McFarland, and Maria Otero.