Freak Scene #120: Fugue State Blur the Lines on 'After Nothing Comes'
Plus, the Figments are back after a long break, and Sebadoh co-founder Eric Gaffney has been diagnosed with cancer
This week in Freak Scene, we’ve got the first album from experimental electro-acoustic project Fugue State, plus long-dormant Northampton band the Figments return with their first album since 2013. Also, some bad news for Eric Gaffney: the Sebadoh co-founder has been diagnosed with cancer.
When the comics artist Aiden Koch released her 2016 collection After Nothing Comes, a review in ArtForum described her aesthetic: “Koch’s visual and textual vocabulary is full of palimpsests, fragments, snippets of conversation, and partial landscapes.” The same is true of Dan Langa’s version of After Nothing Comes.
After Nothing Comes | Fugue State
10 track album
Langa is working in a different medium, to be sure: he’s a composer, producer and sound engineer who was transfixed by “the smudged lines and dream-like haziness of everything” when he came across Koch’s six-zine compilation at a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich., his hometown. Now living in Northampton, Langa used Koch’s After Nothing Comes as the inspiration for his own musical representation, an experimental collection of electro-acoustic songs that he released earlier in May as Fugue State.
With a blend of synthesizers, strings, woodwinds and vocals, along with bass, drums and guitar, Langa led a group of collaborators through songs that reflect a sort of fractured grandeur. He builds atmospheric constructs, and then smudges them. Crackling noise lurks at the edges of lush soundscapes, swirls of indistinct vocals hover somewhere between alluring and unsettling, digital manipulation disrupts the meditative flow with slashes of glitchy dissonance. It’s commanding, and powerful.
Langa first began working on the concept in 2019, which resulted in music for a chamber ensemble comprising a saxophone quartet, a string trio and a vocal trio. With suggestions and guidance from co-producer William Brittelle, the project began evolving in 2023 into its present form.
“He helped me see beyond the notes on the page and really encouraged me to treat the recordings as raw materials that could be warped and rearranged, much as figures are blurred and obscured in the book’s images,” Langa says.
Alongside Brittelle’s advice, Koch’s methodology proved foundational to Langa, who had a chance to talk to the artist early in his process (they have since had a conversation for Talkhouse). Koch told him that she often draws the figures in her work in a way that allows readers to project themselves onto them. Langa wanted his music to have a similar effect, creating “completely new figures, shapes and forms that could be heard in a new light depending on who was listening.”
He’s succeeded with After Nothing Comes, a collection that feels a little like a portal into a world where sound and emotion blend into a cohesive, inseparable whole.
The Figments Are Back with ‘The Wrong Way’
There are plenty of reasons why the Figments haven’t played a full gig since 2012, or released any music since 2013, but they’re all the usual ones: somebody moved away, everybody had kids and life simply did what it does. At last, the (mostly) Northampton band is back with The Wrong Way, the foursome’s sixth album and first in 13 years.
The passage of time hasn’t altered the band’s approach on 13 indie-rock songs with a shambolic bent that’s not so different from what the Figments were doing on their 2013 LP Where You Go. Unfussy, overdriven guitars from lead singer Thane Thompson and Matthew Zapruder power these songs, while drummer Brian Marchese and bassist Trace Meek add ballast that holds the songs together. Zapruder, who moved to the Bay Area in 2012, recorded his parts remotely, leaning into keening lead lines on the title-track opener, and adding warm chords that resonate through “Not an Easy Jerk.”
Marchese and Meek carry “Losing the Light” with a thudding beat and brooding bassline, respectively, before an avalanche of guitar tumbles down around Thompson’s conversational vocals. The guitars lean slightly off kilter on “A Rut or Roots,” an existential quandary for self-aware people who live a long time in the same place. That describes the Figments (three-quarters of them, anyway), who started playing in the mid-’90s. With the benefit of the long view, and a body of work that charts an ever-evolving trajectory through pauses of varying length, it seems clear enough that the Figments put down roots, and have yet to find themselves in a rut.
Eric Gaffney Diagnosed with Colon Cancer
Sebadoh co-founder Eric Gaffney, a longtime fixture in Western Mass., has been diagnosed with colon cancer, according to a GoFundMe page he set up this week to try to offset the cost of treatment.
Gaffney was diagnosed after a colonoscopy at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, followed by an MRI at Mass General on Memorial Day. Now the singer, guitarist and drummer is waiting to hear what comes next.
“If I don't have a cancerous liver and if I qualify for surgery I might have a chance of hanging in there,” he wrote. “That's my goal.”
Gaffney formed Sebadoh with Lou Barlow in 1986, between albums by Barlow’s other project, Dinosaur Jr. The duo added Jason Lowenstein in 1989, and Sebadoh became slacker-rock pioneers on a string of albums before Gaffney left the group in 1994 to release his own music. He later re-teamed with Barlow and Lowenstein between 2007-11 for a “Sebadoh Classic” reunion.
Upcoming Concerts
These are new shows announced this week. The full concert calendar is available here for paid subscribers.
Veteran ska-punks Big D and the Kids Table play with Matamoska! Sept. 5 at the Drake (tickets). Celtic duo Nuala Kennedy & Alan Murray are there Sept. 15 (tickets).
The Iron Horse hosts a Secret Planet show featuring Indonesian psych-funk act Ali Sept. 29 (tickets), Martin Sexton Nov. 13-14 (night one and night two) and Roomful of Blues Nov. 29 (tickets).
Coming to the Space Ballroom in Hamden: Kentucky hardcore band Greyhaven Aug. 22 (tickets), Australian folk-pop from Way Dynamic Sept. 19 (tickets) and the outsider singer-songwriter Robert Lester Folsom Oct. 14 (tickets).
That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading! Previous issues are available in the online archive. Freak Scene is free, but donations help make this happen and are gratefully accepted. If you’re able, please consider a paid subscription!
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