Beach House  |  Holy Shit

Lauded dream-pop band Beach House returned to West Texas for a live concert, with opener Holy Shit. In addition to near-universal critical acclaim, the unique sound Beach House has refined also translates across a wide swathe of contemporary culture outside of the indie rock world that birthed them: Kendrick Lamar and The Weekend have both sampled a number of Beach House tracks, and their songs have shown up in film and TV episodes.

Beach House recorded Bloom with Chris Coady at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, TX, just up the road from Marfa. 

Ballroom Marfa presented a lecture by Anthony Elms at the Marfa Book Company in which Elms discussed his work as a curator, editor and artist. More specifically he addressed his work in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, at the ICA in Philadelphia. The exhibition, which featured Genesis P Orrige, Bernadette Corporation, Dexter Sinister, Zoe Leonard, Erin Leland and Frances Stark, among others, presented the work of artists engaged with clothing, adornment, and self-presentation within the context of identity.

Ballroom Marfa’s Lecture Series is an ongoing program for artists, authors and curators to present perspectives on contemporary culture, visual arts, film, music, and performance.

Ballroom Marfa and Tiger Mountain presented Jeff Mangum. After a period of nearly complete public silence, Jeff returned to perform a few shows across the country and we were honored to present him in Marfa for two sold-out shows.

Jeff Mangum is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his work as the lyricist, vocalist and guitarist of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, as well as being one of the cofounders of The Elephant 6 Recording Company. He is best known for his complex, lyrically dense songwriting, apparent on the critically lauded album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Ballroom Marfa invited Eleanore Friedberger out to Marfa for a weeklong recording residency in 2012. While she was driving from Austin to Marfa, she mentioned that she was feeling “a little bit miserable.” Her low spirits convinced her that if she was going to record a 7-inch here, it would include “I’ll Never Be Happy Again,” a heartbreaking song about the moment when sadness invades relationships, and how “after perfection, it’s all downhill.”

Upon arrival, Friedberger’s Chinati Foundation tour guide volunteered to take her on a motorcycle ride down Pinto Canyon, a deserted ranch to market road that dead-ends at the Mexican border. Then, while shopping for dinner, the grocery store checker introduced himself as Gory Smelley, who would soon be recording and mixing her session at the Marfa Recording Company. Smelley’s young daughter joined her on stage for a brief standup comedy routine a few nights later during her intimate solo show at the Crowley Theater.

The 7-inch single she recorded at the Marfa Recording Company features a crew of Marfa players — the Cashiola brothers, Chris Hillen and Brian LeBarton — known from local bands like Candles and Hotel Brotherhood. Colt Miller of the Cobra Rock Boot Company accompanies Eleanor with banjo and pedal steel, adding the finishing touches to the session’s classic West Texas sound.

The A-side “I’ll Never Be Happy Again” is a new song that fans might recognize from Eleanor’s live sets during tours supporting 2011’s Last Summer album. It appears here as a sonorous country ballad, well suited to the lonely environs of the high desert grasslands.

For the B-side, Eleanor chose to cover Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” a tribute to her father’s record collection. “My dad only listened to classical music,” she remembers, but after taking a Texas Tech job in Lubbock when she was 14, the Flatlanders showed up on his stereo. “For the longest time ‘Dallas’ was the only song I knew that wasn’t one of mine. To get to record it in West Texas was special; I couldn’t think of a better place to do it.”

Eleanor Friedberger’s new 7-inch, “I’ll Never Be Happy Again” b/w “Dallas,” was published as a limited edition of 500 and is currently available in the online store.

New Growth was a solo exhibition of new work by Rashid Johnson. For this exhibition, Johnson combined both personally and historically loaded material–such as shea butter and black soap–with LP covers and books in complex paintings, sculptures and installations that confound the uniformity of collective identity and multicultural representation. Beginning with the question:  “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?,” Johnson attempts to answer this hypothetical by drawing on personal and historical references. New Growth‘s playful scrutiny intertwined cosmology, escapism and irrigation in a re-contextualization of the lines between past, present and future in a desert setting.

The concept of physical manipulation of biomaterial into an abstract form ran through the work on display, with references to the transformation and rehabilitation of bodies, landscapes and the identities embedded within them. This played out most dramatically in the outdoor installation in which the sun-baked gravel of the gallery courtyard was irrigated with shea butter, terraforming the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas.

In keeping with Ballroom Marfa’s mission, New Growth featured newly commissioned work including the video Samuel in Space and the Shea Butter Irrigation System–both of which were produced during the artist’s stay in Marfa. Works in wax, burned wood, tile and mirror, as well as brass and wood chairs and rugs rounded out the exhibition. A film program curated by Rashid Johnson in collaboration with MoMA film curator Josh Siegel also ran throughout the exhibition. 

To inaugurate New Growth, Ballroom Marfa hosted a weekend of festivities, including an opening reception which featured a performance by multi-instrumentalist legend Kahil El’Zabar and saxophone master Hamiet Bluiett, whose musical styles range from avant-garde to bebop. 

All events were free and open to the public.

Percussionist Kahil El’Zabar and baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett performed at the opening reception of Rashid Johnson’s New Growth, at Ballroom Marfa.

These two highly sensitive modern music masters came together for a jazz performance of historical significance. The stories they weave with rhythmic complexity and melodic sonority brings listeners on a spiritual journey of musical ecstasy!

The most prominent baritone saxophonist of his generation, Hamiet Bluiett combines a blunt, modestly inflected attack with a fleet, aggressive technique, and a uniform hugeness of sound that extends from his horn’s lowest reaches to far beyond what is usually its highest register. In St. Louis in the 1960s, Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), an artist collective not unlike Chicago’s AACM. And, in 1969, he moved to New York City to join the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers Large Ensemble. In 1976 he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet (along with two other Black Artists’ Group members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake), which soon became jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. Over the years, Bluiett has also worked with Babatunde Olatunji, Abdullah Ibrahim, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.

Kahil El’Zabar is one of Chicago’s jazz treasures. He joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the early 1970s and became its chairman in 1975. He regularly records for Chicago’s Delmark Records and, during the 1970s, he formed the acclaimed ensembles Ritual Trio and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, both of which remain active today. El’Zabar has performed alongside a myriad of jazz greats such as Cannonball Adderley, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Dizzy Gillespie, but also in the bands of Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.

Ballroom welcomed Gary P. Nunn to Marfa for a special Valentine’s Day performance in 2013. Local legends, Primo Carrasco & Friends (featuring David Beebe and Gary Oliver) opened.

By all appearances, the longest-running love affair in Gary P. Nunn’s life is with the state of Texas. Though he was born in Oklahoma, Nunn’s songs are inspired by his deep affection for the Lone Star State.

Nunn is best known for his song “London Homesick Blues,” a ballad sung from the perspective of a country musician stranded in England, pining for the armadillos, country music, and attractive women. His anthem was first made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker and David Allan Coe, and then immortalized as the theme song for PBS’s long-running live music showcase, Austin City Limits.

After moving to Austin to pursue a degree in pharmacy at the University of Texas, he became involved in the nascent outlaw country movement, playing bass for Michael Martin Murphy and Willie Nelson.

Soon he found a home with the infamous Lost Gonzo Band, backing Jerry Jeff Walker on 1973’s Viva Terlingua!, an album that ranks with Honky Tonk Heroes and Shotgun Willie as one of the stone-cold classics of progressive country music.

Nunn went on to make three more albums with the Lost Gonzo Band, and then began performing under his own name in the ’80s. In keeping with the ethos that defined him early on, he took a hands-on approach to his solo career, avoiding major labels, releasing his own music, and gravitating toward Campfire Records, an indie label based in San Antonio, with whom he’s released nine albums.

Nunn has never hidden his love for Texas, and in turn former Texas Governor Mark White named him our Official Ambassador to the World in 1985. In 1995 he was included in the West Texas Walk of Fame, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Texas Hall of Fame.

The Sebastian Ensemble played an intimate concert in Ballroom Marfa’s north gallery. The Sebastian Ensemble — with Stephen Redfield on violin; Susan Patrick, harpsichord; and Katie Rietman, cello — is a group dedicated to the performance of Baroque chamber music on original instruments at low pitch. 

Their evening-length program served as an aural reflection of the art works from The El Paso Museum of Art’s concurrent ’s Golden Age exhibition. The composers of these lived and worked in the countries and within the cultures, even among the very artists, featured in the exhibition. Sebastian Ensemble imagined that the musical and visual artists of this period provided inspiration to each other, and that those relationships could be brought to light through this concert. The program featured the music of: Willem de Fesch (Dutch); Jean-Baptiste Loeillet (Flemish); William Byrd (English); Johann Sebastian Bach (Germanic); Jean-Marie LeClaire (French); and Dario Castello (Italian).

As part of Ballroom Marfa’s fourth annual New Year’s film program, Sarah Lipstate (AKA Noveller) played an original score for Victor Sjöström’s 1921 Swedish film, The Phantom Carriage, a masterpiece of silent cinema often cited as an aesthetic touchstone for Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The film opens on New Year’s Eve as three drunks recount the legend of how the last person to die before the end of each year must serve as Death’s soul collector in the year to come, driving the titular phantom carriage. One of these men dies just before midnight, shortly after spurning the wishes of a dying woman. His sins are then recounted in ethereal flashbacks by Georges, the driver of the carriage from the preceding year.

Lipsates’s melodic guitar soundtracked this iconic silent film masterpiece with new compositions.

As part of Ballroom Marfa’s Education and Outreach program, we launched a Children’s Film Series in collaboration with Marfa Public Library. Our inaugural screening was princess Mononoke, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The now-iconic 1997 film about a questing Japanese prince and the battles between human and nature he encounters. The movie was preceded by an introduction and followed by a brief discussion with the children. Our discussion investigated pressing environmental concerns as well as morality in relation to Miyazaki’s animation.