570 Lexington Avenue
Musical Representation of Architectural Imagination
For around 6-7 months I was a bike messenger in New York City. Few people get to experience intimacy with the city through that lens. Bike messengers are on the street, underground in delivery entrances, and high above the city, elevated to law offices to hand over day-of documents.
As an amateur architecture fan, my time as a bike messenger was also a lucky opportunity to greet buildings in that city with awe, and consistently, going to the same buildings on Broadway, 5th and 6th Avenue, Wall Street, over and over.
Taking a break in between deliveries, I would read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities across 54th Street from the granite and glass chapel of St. Peter's Church on 619 Lexington Avenue waiting for my smart phone to beep with another pickup.
Lexington Avenue captured a lot of my attention when I was in the city. Of the named avenues, the others beings Madison and Park, Lexington has a staggering narrowness in comparison, and the X gives it a vaguely menacing curiosity relative to the other two.
One building that arrested me immediately and became an obsession of mine was 570 Lexington: the General Electric Building.
Originally commissioned by RCA, 570 Lexington was designed by Cross and Cross, and built between 1929 and 1931. The East Side of Manhattan is laden with Art Deco masterpieces, the Chrysler building especially. But 570 Lexington is an intense example of Art Deco's eery majesty.
The top of the building is jagged and still fluid with monuments to gods of electricity, representing the anchor tenant of the building at the time of construction. Stonework representing arcing bolts of energy. Centered the top of each facade an austere, placid-faced god with a crown of electromagnetic waves.
Later I would listen to the band Imperial Triumphant, an avant-garde, jazz-inspired black metal band from NYC that borrows generous inspiration from Art Deco Manhattan. Their music represents the constant chaos and fluidity of Jazz Age New York.
Their album artwork is transparent in its homage to this era.
The band's music is similarly jagged and fluid all at the same time. Periods of peace disrupted by atonal fretboard slides in "Metrovertigo," seeming to represent the inconsistency of respite in the city.
The members of Imperial Triumphant, astonishingly only a three-piece, all wear masks when they perform. But less like Slipknot in their morbidity, Imperial Triumphant's masks make them look like the Gods of Electricity atop 570 Lexington, stone-faced, aging gold, intimidating in their silence and smoothness.
The lyrics of "Gotham Luxe" are almost an ekphrastic exercise in creating a song inspired by architectural achievement.
Golden peaks of timeless vision
From the pedigree of lies
Builds the murky sea of giants
Top floor, the Kings crown
Grand illusional desperation
Accommodates the masses
While keeping forward motion
Lift up, the queens crown
I'm not familiar with many bands that choose the built environment as an inspiration. Often lyrical content has interior momentum to it. Rarely does it seem to generate thrust from the environment around us. But so much of Imperial Triumphant's work seems directly inspired by the boundaries of broad and narrow avenues, buildings both threatening and breathtaking, street scenes with flows of people colliding with each other, all maneuvered by a disembodied hand of God.
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