Keith Lynch

When I last wrote about Unknown Component, the one-man DIY project of the prolific Keith Lynch, I focused on one song and compared his voice favorably to Kurt Cobain's.

Five years - and at least five recordings - later, I'm faced with his 2012 album Blood V. Electricity, and his growth is impressive and, frankly, startling. The Iowa-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer will be performing at Circle Tap on May 11, and the talent I saw before is now mature, the potential is realized, and the flashes of brilliance have been transformed into a consistently alluring and engaging whole. (And while his singing still has a whine, the edge has been sanded off, banishing all thoughts of Cobain.)

The album is on the one hand atmospheric and spacious and on the other concrete and tangible, finding a happy balance between misty textures and solid frames, and forging a successful, alchemical marriage of synthetic and organic instrumental sounds.

(Editor's note: This essay is a response to this commentary.)


The scene in Boston on April 18 and 19 was awesome.

By that, I don't mean it was cool. Rather, the mass law-enforcement action to shut down the city and search for the brothers Tsarnaev was "awesome" in the dictionary sense of "awe": "dread ... and wonder that is inspired by authority."

In his commentary in the May 2 issue of the River Cities' Reader, John W. Whitehead announces that the situation showed that "the police state has arrived." Certainly, anybody who's doubted warnings about the police state should have been struck by the swiftness, scope, coordination, and force of law-enforcement actions those two days following the bombs that exploded at the April 15 Boston Marathon. Even though television viewers didn't see much beyond reporters breathlessly saying that something was happening, it was readily apparent that the combined resources of federal, state, and local law enforcement are a fearsome instrument that can be unleashed quickly and without regard for rights.

So if you have the misfortune of seeing your picture above "Suspect Number 1" or "Suspect Number 2" on TV, I hope you did something truly evil, as this is the man- and firepower you'll face. And if you decline to let police search your home in a scenario similar to what happened in Boston, good luck.

But this was not a "police state" as most people think of it - a brutal, proactively oppressive regime. It would be more accurate to say that the Boston metro area on April 18 and 19 was a vivid demonstration of our potential for a police state through a single, short-lived, but widespread instance of de facto martial law.

Yet it was also a visible reminder of a more persistent underlying condition: the security state that has been built steadily in the United States since September 11, 2001. It's ostensibly designed to prevent terrorist attacks, but it proved last month that it's much more adept at responding to them.

Boston showed what our police state could look like. Now we need to decide whether it's what we want.

The Lonely Wild

On the Web site of the California band The Lonely Wild is a country-rock-stomp version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," notable for its clarity, the way it bends the song to the band's style while remaining true to the original, and some Michael Stipe-like vocals. But what will strike most people forcefully and immediately is the jarring segue into the guitar solo from Pink Floyd's "Money," with motifs from both songs intertwined for the remainder.

It's a small, natural leap between the central riffs, but it's an inspired pairing. And on its debut album, The Sun as It Comes (released April 2), the quintet shows a similar skill at combining disparate elements into a natural but distinctive whole - explosive desert gothic, with Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks blended with modern indie rock.

The band will be performing at Rozz-Tox on May 4, and singer/songwriter Andrew Carroll said the band grew out of a solo project. His previous band had been a collaborative songwriting outfit, he said, and writing alone was "kind of liberating, not having to ask for other people's opinions, or having to work with four different people ... . It gets difficult to produce material that way."

The first track of any various-artists compilation bears a heavy burden, required to set the tone for what follows even though the performer had no role in crafting the remainder of the songs. Chris Coleslaw's "Sterling ILL" does this on Hello Quad Cities - Volume 2 with a verse that succinctly repeats a common complaint about the Midwest, and the Quad Cities: "So New York grows / Hollywood glows / Well here in the middle / Well they say it just snows."

Coleslaw's delivery over acoustic guitar is poignant without being doleful - matter of fact yet clearly felt.

The sequencing here is smart - implicitly framing the second limited-edition local compilation as a rebuttal to the argument that our community is a dull dead end and then backing it up with "Sterling ILL" and 11 other exclusive tracks. (Hello Quad Cities is available on colored vinyl only, but each copy comes with a digital-download code.) Last fall's Volume 1 was notable for its consistency, and the follow-up comes close to rivaling it.

Bernie Worrell. Photo by Brian Diescher.Plenty of musicians talk a good game about loving many types of music. Bernie Worrell lives it.

"I play it all," he said in a recent phone interview. "I'll play a Jewish chant. A Gregorian chant. A chant in the middle of a rock piece. I'll go to India. I'll go to Africa. All in one piece."

A brief sketch of his career should suffice as an illustration. He was a piano prodigy who wrote a concerto at eight and two years later performed with the Washington Symphony Orchestra. He studied at Julliard and the New England Conservatory of Music. He was music director and bandleader for soul singer Maxine Brown before becoming a central figure in Parliament-Funkadelic, with whom he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He recorded and toured with the Talking Heads and has worked with experimental artists including Bill Laswell and the super-group Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains. In 2011, he released an album of jazz standards.

As the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot wrote in a review of his 1993 album Blacktronic Science: "Bernie Worrell explores the possibilities of 21st Century funk with blithe disregard for boundaries. Bach, hip-hop, organ-trio jazz - it's one big canvas for this virtuoso ... ."

"I get bored quick," Worrell said. "I've got to be free, man. ... I will be free."

Roger EbertIn 2010, at the age of 67, Roger Ebert reviewed The Human Centipede (First Sequence) ? a horror flick that seems to exist primarily to make viewers vomit. As a professional movie critic for more than four decades, Ebert could have been forgiven for skipping it altogether. Curt dismissal was another perfectly reasonable option.

A charitable senior-citizen writer might have picked the movie apart on moral, narrative, or aesthetic grounds, or used it as a launching point for a screed against the depravity of contemporary culture or the torture-porn genre.

But Ebert turned in a no-star-rating review that begins with an earnest rumination on the path to mortality: "It's not death itself that's so bad. It's what you might have to go through to get there." And he says that within the writer/director, Tom Six, "there stirs the soul of a dark artist."

Victor Wooten. Photo by Steven Parke.

The best teachers inspire as much as they instruct, and Victor Wooten both understands and practices that.

His chops as a performing artist are unquestionable. He won five Grammys with Béla Fleck & the Flecktones - of which he's a founding member - and three times was named "best bassist" by the readers of Bass Player magazine. Rolling Stone readers in 2011 voted him the 10th best bass player of all time - alongside icons from the Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush, and the Who.

Beyond being an accomplished musician, for the past 14 years he's run music camps for kids, now held at the 147-acre Wooten Woods Retreat in Tennessee. And on April 21, as part of Polyrhythms' Third Sunday jazz series, Wooten will give both a workshop and a concert at the Redstone Room.

He will not teach how to play bass like he does. As he said of The Music Lesson, his fictional work-around to a much-requested instruction manual: "I didn't really want to put out a Victor Wooten method. I don't want to tell people how they have to play."

What Wooten excels at, as a phone interview last week illustrates, is gently knocking down the walls that keep creativity and music bottled up. He said he chose to tell a story in his book instead of writing an instruction manual because it freed him to explore his ideas and philosophy without being tied to facts or technique: "It lets me off the hook right away. ... 'This isn't true.' ... That format allowed me to put more into the book - even things that I can't prove."

Ethel. Photo by James Ewing.

The string quartet Ethel refers to itself as a "band" and uses amplified classical instruments and improvisation. It's called a "post-classical" ensemble, and the group has toured with Todd Rundgren and appeared on guitarist/songwriter/singer Kaki King's 2012 album Glow.

Ethel is the very definition of "crossover," and if all that doesn't scare you, try this sample from Pitchfork.com's (strongly positive) review of Heavy, its 2012 record: "The violins peel off into glass shards, and the cello starts moaning. It's a relief from the opening melee, but only insofar as scalp-prickling fear that there is a serial killer lurking in your home is technically preferable to the certainty of being stabbed to death."

At Ethel's April 12 performance at St. Ambrose University, don't expect quite that level of eclecticism. Or violence.

But the Present Beauty program Ethel will play still covers plenty of territory on the theme of "what it is to experience beauty from different angles," said violinist Tema Watstein in a phone interview last month.

This past weekend, we brought our daughter to Davenport's Putnam Museum and did the full tour. We saw Flight of the Butterflies 3D on the Giant Screen, walked through the new Bodies Revealed show, and saw all the cultural-, regional-, and natural-history displays that visitors have known for decades, from the mummies to the Asian artifacts to Bix's cornet.

But what kept Emily's attention was the Spark Learning Lab, a modest career-themed room with the goal of preventing high-school drop-outs.

Our daughter is five and in no danger yet of dropping out of any school - or pursuing any career beyond princess-ing. And the Spark Learning Lab is geared toward fifth- and sixth-graders. But she loved the lab's drawing program with the dual touch screens (one on the computer and one where the picture was being projected), the construction-plank set (which she's playing with on this issue's cover), and the feature that allows visitors to build tube structures and - with the help of a blower - either launch table-tennis balls or keep them aloft.

One station in the room lets visitors connect batteries to simple electrical devices, and another shows how structures they build with Lincoln Logs or those aforementioned planks might fare in an earthquake. The "concentration station" fosters communications skills, as one person describes a block structure and a partner tries to build its twin using verbal instructions alone.

If you want to see where the Putnam is headed, you can look at the conceptual drawings - posted in several locations - of its planned STEM learning center. The $1.5-million project is currently in the fundraising phase, and the museum expects to open it in June 2014. Putnam President and CEO Kim Findlay said adding the STEM center to the Putnam now is "the right time and the right thing for the community and the museum."

But you'll get a hands-on sense of the Putnam's direction in the Spark Learning Lab. Larger-scale hints are available in the interactive components of the current Destination: Space exhibit, with its compressed-air tennis-ball launcher, and a bicycle wheel and rotating platform demonstrating angular momentum.

Implicitly and explicitly, all of these draw a line from playful exploration to science to careers, and that's what the STEM center will do on a much grander level. It's an attempt to transform the nearly-century-and-a-half-old Putnam from "nice to necessary," to use a phrase that's common in the museum field these days.

At a recent visit to the Family Museum's new Fox Hollow, there was a robber at the grocery store, grabbing (fake) money and announcing his deed. This probably wasn't what leaders of the Bettendorf museum wanted to happen with their renovated facility, but dictating any aspect of open-ended play is antithetical to the enterprise.

So Museum Director Margaret Kuhl laughed when told about the Fox Hollow crime wave.

"We don't have any police officers on duty," she conceded. "Maybe somebody from the fire department could have helped. ... We have that neighborhood concept of everybody looking out for each other."

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