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Voodoo – The Musee Mecanique
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Like every other person in the audience at Laura Gibson’s show last week, I was enraptured by her stunning performance. This is art, this is magic, I knew. Laura herself is a work of art, but, the rest of the band (drummer Micah Rabwin and electric organist Sean Ogilvie) were equally – uniquely – mesmerizing. Rabwin and Ogilvie share their own band, Musee Mecanique, pictured left. Musee is a collective dedicated to producing pure voodoo. Prepare to fall under their spell.
Sean Ogilvie’s voice is as soft and sleepy as his eyes, which close while his hands canter gracefully across instruments, three at a time, or look somewhere else, far off. His music sounds as though it comes from a distant place – from a time already passed, but from a land that hasn’t yet made the map. “We like putting things together,” Ogilvie said, and it clicks like the ticking of clock.
His music is an almost-finished puzzle, waiting for you to lay down the last piece if only you can find it. Musee Mecanique gives us the adventures of someone who used to be young and daring, but now lives only in black and white photographs, cracked with yellowed corners. As one of the illusionists, he plays the keyboard, accordion, glockenspiel, and meanwhile smokes the melodica through a hose that looks like a hookah. Micah Rabwin is the other, drummer and player of musical saws.
Ogilvie and Rabwin appreciate the sounds of nostalgia and the magic of the perfect fit, and turn to over-looked instruments to cast their spell. “We like different timbres, different colors, different pieces coming together,” says Ogilvie. A while back they saw a street musician with a musical saw and were fired with inspiration: a week later, they had ordered one, and a week after that, Rabwin had it mastered. “He has a good ear,” Ogilvie said of his friend modestly.
He and Rabwin grew up together in the San Fransisco Bay Area, exploring the titanic modern ruins of the Sutro Baths and frequenting the mechanical wonderland of the Musee Mecanique, a private collection of turn-of-the-century toys and mechanical entertainment. Ogilvie told me about the penny arcade gallery, pinball machines, and a Wurlitzer Organ. “They come from an old time when people, before television, would put a penny in the slot and it would display some kind of show or the orchestrian band in a box would play,” explained Ogilvie, “It’s just very fascinating.” Although they did not take any musical influence directly from the Musee, the voice of the past is there like the hum of a lawn-mower in the field behind, entrancing and hypnotic. “When Micah and I started making music a couple of years ago, the music just had a feel of music box, kind of folk, kind of all the pieces of these different songs,” mused Ogilvie. Appropriately, their CD is titled Hold This Ghost.
Inside of the Wurlitzer at the Musee Mecanique
“I like the idea of antique music,” says Ogilvie, “things simple, but not so common.” Musee Mecanique is the Prestige of music, materializing magic through heirloom discoveries and bygone advances in science.
Musee Mecanique – Like Home mp3
Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish. She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps the blog A New Amsterdam
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6 Responses to “Voodoo – The Musee Mecanique”
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It’d be great to see them perform sans Laura Gibson to see what it would be like.
They have a pretty cool daytrotter session. I like their stuff a lot, but I do feel like their sound is almost better as a compliment to Laura Gibson’s.
Oh, I’m not dissing their perf with Laura Gibson. Sean and Micah are just such talents extraordinaire that I thought they deserved some highlighting to draw them out from among the interest in Laura Gibson.
Mm-hm, I liked the daytrotter session – but most of all I like the museum website and the sutro baths wikipedia. Check out the pictures and look at the weird stuff in the museum! In this case, the pix explain 1,000s of words.
Good song. Yay.
It would be great to see them (particularly Rabwin) play at the annual NYC Musical Saw Festival (http://www.musicalsawfestival.org )
Molly, you make music with your words.