Festival of Faith & Music 2007:Evening Prayer with Liz Janes, Son Lux, and Sarah Masen

Following Friday’s late evening show at the Festival of Faith & Music in Calvin College’s Chapel, I remarked to Liz Janes that it felt as if the concert could instead have been designed as Evening Prayer. She kind of said, “I think it was Evening Prayer.” I had meant that with a little introduction as such and some formal liturgical aspects that the time could have been like a postmodern/traditional Evening Prayer. Janes was gently correcting me. Even without any formal accoutrements, it was Evening Prayer in a much more postmodern way than my idea of a concert-liturgy combo deal. And she was right with her inference, because as I look back on my notes, I realize I experienced everything I needed to make it a time of meditation, contemplation, tentatio, prayer, Word, and praise.

Janes opened the service with a solo set playing guitar and ukulele. Her voice filled the space—recalling 50’s rockabilly, 60’s Sandie Shaw, Julee Cruise (without being so airy)/David Lynch/Twin Peaks, and Chris Isaak. With that combination of sounds, Janes’ music is caught up in a certain romantic air which doubles back around for songs like “Martyr’s Grind Up,” expressing God’s love for us, His people. The chilling, Eden-after-the-Fall “Poison & Snakes” stares in disbelief at God: “How’d you get so true?” “Through Jerusalem” is anything but an archaeological song; it’s a love poem to Christ, “Since I found you, my heart has a place to suffer and be comforted.”

Perhaps a confession/absolution-like turning point in Janes’ set was a Pixies song played with a lullabye’s soft distance. “Wave of Mutilation” in the reverent space of the Chapel was a perfect marriage of disarming an angry song and letting hope rise from that angry song in our hearts.

Janes ended with an a cappella song for the space, calling out with a strong voice, “I’m already home”—a song which at once was asking an blessing on the Chapel and the incense of our prayers rising before the Lord as the evening sacrifice.

After Janes, the newly formed “Son Lux as band” took over as liturgist. Winner of the FFM Bandspotting contest which judged entries by unsigned artists, Son Lux has primarily been the bedroom computer hacking, piano, electronic compositions of Ryan Lott. Finding two musicians who could help bring those recordings to life on stage, Michael Weeks (percussion, vocals) and Matt DeRubertis (bass) embody a portion of the parts once resigned to separate tracks on Lott’s iBook. Still working with the iBook on stage, Lott sang, played piano and keyboard, offering up his ethereal, slowed down dance floor beats as resonating prayers spinning around like the video images that formed a backdrop.

Certainly the opening “At War with Walls and Mazes,” the soon-to-be released album’s title tacks with accompanying fully-fledged video, is an exceptional synthesis of jazz piano structures, sampled syncopated rhythms, and pop song. “Wait. . .” is a halting song, the slow motion of emotion.

On “Cinematic Waves,” the piano break saw sounds just spiraling up into the center circular steeple of this chapel in the round. While the music may have been composed by Lott alone in his room, here we were experiencing live electronica brought back to its acoustic, analog roots, even as the iBook continued to churn out sampled noise.

At times, you can hear hints of Radio 4, Rob Smith, Spacer, or Carpark Records artists. Put another way, it is like a full blast of what Charlotte Martin does with piano and sampled beats. Elsewhere, some jazzy runs on a piano made me think of three referent layers: 1) Bruce Hornsby, 2) industrial-like sampled loops, and 3) KOOP.

Lyrics float out of Lott’s mumbling confessions which are redeeming. “You’ll have to do it,” he sings, pointing to our need for grace. If taken to be spoken by God, “You will be betray me/I will be true” is like George Winston’s New Age piano grounded with reality’s truth.

The evening continued in a return to the singer/songwriter sound with Sarah Masen. While staying in the non-formal Evening Prayer format, Masen still led us to see how the music may be working in our worshipful devotion. On that Friday before Palm Sunday, she opened with the Lenten song, “Let’s Kill Him,” singing with Emmylou Harris’ Gospel-like country although breaking down into a growl on the chorus’ Jerusalem crowd/my sinful self’s cry to kill Jesus. From the A History of Light and Shadows EP, this song comes with an Americana dance lilt and her head voice disarming the song before that hammer swing: “Let’s kill Him.”

Masen followed it up with the Christmas song, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” from the Women’s Work is Alchemy EP, a bittersweet “unto us a child is born” song knowing that as she just sang—we’ll kill that Lamb. From the same EP, much of which is inspired by reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the Sufjan Stevens-like plaintive “A Dream in My Dream” comes from her young son’s question one morning, “Mama, did you have a dream in your dream?” It is one of many songs and moments during the FFM that raised up the mystery in lieu of our box-like structures. Masen also explained that the song was in part a reaction to someone’s attempt to find a mathematical formula for figuring out human emotions. She said, “That’ll put me out of a job. Who would need poetry?” And really, who would need mystery anymore?”

Masen closed the evening with the benediction of “The River”—a reminder of baptismal waters, of the New Jerusalem and the River of Life, of the Resurrection a week away on Easter, of the Resurrection on the Last Day.

Thanks to Liz Janes, Son Lux, and Sarah Masen.