{"id":4096,"global_id":"edgefieldconcerts.com?id=4096","global_id_lineage":["edgefieldconcerts.com?id=4096"],"author":"13","status":"publish","date":"2024-01-29 09:00:25","date_utc":"2024-01-29 17:00:25","modified":"2024-05-10 12:06:04","modified_utc":"2024-05-10 19:06:04","url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/event\/khruangbin-night-one\/","rest_url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-json\/tribe\/events\/v1\/events\/4096","title":"Khruangbin","description":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eRvBeMJ9ilk?si=BAovQM6BLfeGHweg\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201c\u2018A La Sala,\u2019 I used to scream it around my house when I was a little girl, to get everybody in the living room; to get my family together. That\u2019s kind of what recording the new album felt like. Emotionally there was a desire to get back to square-one between the three of us, to where we came from\u2013in sonics and in feeling. Let\u2019s get back there.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0&#8211; Laura Lee Ochoa<\/p>\n<p>The title makes it clear. <em>A La Sala<\/em> (\u201cTo the Room\u201d in Spanish), the fourth studio album by Khruangbin, is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and do so on your own terms. It extends the air of mystery and sanctity that\u2019s key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald \u201cDJ\u201d Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark \u201cMarko\u201d Speer approach music. Yet if 2020\u2019s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record whose ensuing post-lockdown tour enhanced the band\u2019s musical reputation far and wide, <em>A La Sala<\/em> is the measured morning after. It\u2019s a gorgeously airy album made only in the company of the group\u2019s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It is a porthole onto the bounties powering Khruangbin\u2019s vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. <em>A La Sala<\/em> scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.<\/p>\n<p>It is also a response to the unique moment Khruangbin finds itself in now: following a decade spent cultivating extraordinary music paths, beginning a year when they&#8217;ll perform for more people, in more iconic spaces, staging a live show that pushes a creative envelope peculiar to them alone. (Look for the band at major festivals and venues near you.) 2024 feels like both marker and pivot, cementing Khruangbin\u2019s stature as a commercially and critically successful group that continues to be guided by creative possibilities.<\/p>\n<p>Such crossroads are familiar for iconic artists throughout the rock era \u2014 your Dylans, Stevies and Bowies, up thru turn-of-the-century Radiohead, all have navigated these straits. On <em>A La Sala<\/em>, Khruangbin also pulls exploration inward, spurning the din of the crowd\u2019s expectations, mapping a personal direction home. The trio\u2019s collective musical DNA and the years spent constructing it in Houston\u2019s local-meets-global cultural stew ensure the band carries on sounding like no one but itself. A La Sala may in fact be Khruangbin\u2019s purest distillation. A cascade of crisp melodies still emanates from Marko\u2019s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee\u2019s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ\u2019s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place.<\/p>\n<p>Where prior album-by-album growth seemed to point the narratives towards music\u2019s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like known intimacies. What once seemed like sonic invocations \u2014 spaghetti-western film scores, found-sounds, dancing moments more living room than rooftop disco \u2014 are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! And there\u2019s a freshness to the instrumental interactivity on <em>A La Sala<\/em> that\u2019s less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in. That depth is not about therapeutic self-reflection, but a profound desire to celebrate the world\u2019s external wonders.<\/p>\n<p><em>A La Sala<\/em> invites intimate intercontinental partying. The first single is, after all, called \u201cA Love International.\u201d \u201cPon P\u00f3n\u201d holds the band\u2019s table at the West African discotheque; yet the joy now moves to the corner left of the dancefloor, where the back-and-forth between Laura Lee\u2019s bass, DJ\u2019s hi-hat, and Marko\u2019s tuneful rhythm scratches, is a marvel of knowing head-nods. There\u2019s \u201cHold Me Up (Thank You),\u201d a familial sweetness in its spare lyrics, feeding off the rhythm section\u2019s sturdy funk shuffle, and a chorus on which Marko\u2019s guitar evokes both sides of the Atlantic in confident unshowy rhythms. They\u2019re on \u201cTodav\u00eda Viva\u201d too, next to DJ\u2019s noir-soul rim-shots, synth strings and a pregnant pause that is Laura Lee\u2019s favorite moment on the album, the mood kin to the band\u2019s glorious live interpretations of G-funk fantasias. And the rocked-up miniature, \u201cJuegos y Nubes,\u201d demonstrates Khruangbin\u2019s Houston-born superpower to culture-mix, a dancing mood less concerned with worldly glamor than communal grooving.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cI read something long ago, attributed to Miles Davis. He said, \u2018When they play fast, you play slow. When they play slow, you play fast.\u2019 And it&#8217;s definitely how I&#8217;ve approached looking at music: Don&#8217;t follow the trends. And if the trend is this, then do something else.\u201d<\/em> &#8211; Marko<\/p>\n<p>From the get-go, Khruangbin\u2019s journey has been emphatically its own: a sound and visual representation with few precedents, ignoring pop expectations, relying only on internal inspirations, and a multitude of visions. It\u2019s a mindset of penetrating the self, connecting to the surrounding world, modeling your own life experiences. This ethos is threaded throughout <em>A La Sala<\/em>, audible in the album\u2019s form and function. (It\u2019s even visible in the vinyl version\u2019s physical package, which will be released as a set of seven distinctive covers and color-sets \u2014 more on which in a sec.)<\/p>\n<p>The building blocks for the album\u2019s 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbin\u2019s creative past. Having stockpiled ideas originally set down as off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absentminded epiphanies), they began fitting those pieces together in the studio. Which parts were apt? Which could be massaged and stretched out? Which inspired new sections or rhythms or musical interactions? Once more, Khruangbin\u2019s familial DNA kicked in. Layer-by-layer, the intimate work, rework and re-rework bore new fruit. They also brought back a strategy once foundational to their records: seeding an album with field recordings.<\/p>\n<p>Some results fold directly into <em>A La Sala<\/em>\u2019s down-home feel. \u201cThree From Two\u201d and \u201cMay Ninth\u201d are wistful mid-tempo numbers, with guitar melodies that reside somewhere between Bakersfield and by-the-riverside, cues that, for all its borderless inclusivity, another core Khruangbin value is being steeped in American roots. And in the landscape that music comes from. Like all albums prior to Mordechai, Marko made sure environmental sounds \u2014 natural and man-made \u2014 appeared as textures. (At times philosophically: the group recorded while cricket chirps played in their headphones, presumably for terroir.) It\u2019s how <em>A La Sala<\/em> achieves such interconnected set-and-setting-ness.<\/p>\n<p>Other results are more metaphorical, especially in Khruangbin\u2019s flirtation with ambient spaces. The dramatically beatless \u201cFarolim de Felgueiras\u201d and \u201cCaja de la Sala\u201d both feature only Marko\u2019s unmistakable guitar dueting with Laura Lee\u2019s Moog, lightly layered with sounds of shoes on stone steps, and cicadas in an open field. The closing \u201cLes Petits Gris\u201d more fully reduces and fleshes out the ambiance, with a piano and a simple single-note bass pattern, Marko\u2019s plaintive spare guitar echoing the melody of a ballerina-turning music box. It feels an apt way of ending \u2014 as a passing of this particular moment, preparation for the next one, soon-come.<\/p>\n<p>Even the seven different covers that adorn <em>A La Sala<\/em>\u2019s various vinyl editions offer a throughline from the music into Khruangbin\u2019s current frame. Designed by the band using Marko\u2019s multitude of travelog photos, they are windows from the band\u2019s living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances illuminating what is going on inside. These are also directly related to David Black\u2019s images of DJ, Laura Lee and Marko which accompany <em>A La Sala<\/em>, and to Khruangbin\u2019s live staging reinvention. It\u2019s all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cAll the little moments you capture. You don&#8217;t see how impactful they are until you hear what eventually comes of them. A lot of those scraps end up being the thing \u2014 and you don&#8217;t realize it until it&#8217;s \u2018The Thing.\u2019\u201d<\/em> &#8211; DJ<\/p>","excerpt":"","slug":"khruangbin-night-one","image":{"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square.jpg","id":4095,"extension":"jpg","width":2160,"height":2160,"filesize":682029,"sizes":{"medium":{"width":350,"height":350,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":28733,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-350x350.jpg"},"large":{"width":1024,"height":1024,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":139961,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-1024x1024.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"width":300,"height":300,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":23236,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-300x300.jpg"},"medium_large":{"width":768,"height":768,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":90205,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-768x768.jpg"},"1536x1536":{"width":1536,"height":1536,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":261079,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-1536x1536.jpg"},"2048x2048":{"width":2048,"height":2048,"mime-type":"image\/jpeg","filesize":401824,"url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Khruangbin-pdx-24-square-2048x2048.jpg"}}},"all_day":false,"start_date":"2024-08-18 18:30:00","start_date_details":{"year":"2024","month":"08","day":"18","hour":"18","minutes":"30","seconds":"00"},"end_date":"2024-08-18 22:00:00","end_date_details":{"year":"2024","month":"08","day":"18","hour":"22","minutes":"00","seconds":"00"},"utc_start_date":"2024-08-19 01:30:00","utc_start_date_details":{"year":"2024","month":"08","day":"19","hour":"01","minutes":"30","seconds":"00"},"utc_end_date":"2024-08-19 05:00:00","utc_end_date_details":{"year":"2024","month":"08","day":"19","hour":"05","minutes":"00","seconds":"00"},"timezone":"America\/Los_Angeles","timezone_abbr":"PDT","cost":"","cost_details":{"currency_symbol":"","currency_code":"","currency_position":"prefix","values":[]},"website":"","show_map":false,"show_map_link":false,"hide_from_listings":false,"sticky":false,"featured":false,"categories":[],"tags":[],"venue":{"id":10,"author":"2","status":"publish","date":"2017-11-16 10:51:05","date_utc":"2017-11-16 18:51:05","modified":"2024-05-07 15:50:41","modified_utc":"2024-05-07 22:50:41","url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/venue\/edgefield\/","venue":"Edgefield","slug":"edgefield","address":"2126 SW Halsey St.","city":"Troutdale","country":"United States","state":"OR","zip":"97060","stateprovince":"OR","json_ld":{"@type":"Place","name":"Edgefield","description":"","url":"https:\/\/edgefieldconcerts.com\/venue\/edgefield\/","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","streetAddress":"2126 SW Halsey St.","addressLocality":"Troutdale","addressRegion":"OR","postalCode":"97060","addressCountry":"United States"},"telephone":"","sameAs":""},"show_map":false,"show_map_link":false,"global_id":"edgefieldconcerts.com?id=10","global_id_lineage":["edgefieldconcerts.com?id=10"]},"organizer":[],"json_ld":{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Event","name":"Khruangbin","description":"&lt;p&gt;\u201c\u2018A La Sala,\u2019 I used to scream it around my house when I was a little girl, to get everybody in the living room; to get my family together. 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