Photos from the Communion Tour concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on October 17, 2013, featuring The4onthefloor, Willy Mason, Dustin Smith & the Sunday Silos, and Hugh Bob & the Hustle. For more work by Matt Erickson, visit MRE-Photography.com.

The 4onthefloor:

Photo by Matt Erickson, MRE-Photography.com

Har-di-Har. Photo by Taylor Creery Photograpy.

There are many unusual things about the married-couple musical duo Har-di-Har, including the way songs swerve, shift, collapse, explode, die, and rise again with little warning. But it's unlikely that you'll get to hear their strangest songs when they perform at Rozz-Tox on Saturday.

Some odd bits first:

• The name Har-di-Har is drawn obliquely from the theme music of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that information is as helpful as any of the other explanations given by the band.

• The pair shares a drum kit, with Julie Thoreen playing the "hands" and Andrew Thoreen the "feet."

• People who purchase a USB drive with the band's two EPs will get all future Har-di-Har releases uploaded to it for free at a live show.

• The Thoreens decided to pursue music before they'd played a single show as a band.

• Har-di-Har's Facebook page calls its music "psychedelic dream pop intricately composed and played the way three-legged contests are won."

"We cannot do anything the way other people do it," Julie Thoreen said in a phone interview last week.

The first Masterworks concert of the Quad City Symphony's 99th season was a checkerboard of strengths and weaknesses. Huge, transcendent moments filled the Adler Theatre in the October 5 concert, but when things got quiet, discrepancies in tone color, balance, and rhythm appeared.

Under the direction of Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith, the orchestra explored four diverse approaches to composition in reverse chronological order. Commissioned by the Quad City Symphony, the world premiere of American composer Michael Torke's Oracle opened the program, followed by fellow countryman Aaron Jay Kernis' Musica Celestis, featuring only the strings. The mid-20th Century's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, by British composer Benjamin Britten - with humorous narration by local media personality Don Wooten - completed the first half. After intermission, pianist Jonathan Biss joined the orchestra for Johannes Brahms' Concerto for Piano No. 1.

The concert was an elegantly designed program that included a variety of contemporary works balanced by a classic masterpiece, but - except for Torke - it was not a good selection of music for this orchestra. In the tutti sections, when all the instruments were played, the mixture of timbre was profuse. Yet as the scoring broke down into smaller instrumental combinations, the differences in individual colors became more problematic. The result was tonal incompatibility both among the same instruments and between instrumental families.

Willy Mason

An online comment on the American Songwriter review of Willy Mason's Carry on disputed the gushing praise heaped on the album, complaining that "the percussion sounds to me like it's straight from a drum-machine loop."

There's a simple reason for that: It was.

The singer/songwriter will be performing October 17 at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn as part of the Communion Tour with Rubblebucket, Roadkill Ghost Choir, and others. In a phone interview last week, Mason explained that the drum-machine idea came from producer Dan Carey. "He had that, and I had the songs, and we went in and we started working with that rhythm, and things just unfolded from there pretty quickly," he said. "I was actually skeptical at first, but I thought it would be worth a try. ...

Photos from the Truth & Salvage Co. concert at Rozz-Tox on September 27, 2013, with opener Ernie Hendrickson. For more work by Matt Erickson, visit MRE-Photography.com.

Truth & Salvage Co.:

Photo by Matt Erickson, MRE-Photography.com

Laura Stevenson. Photo by Dave Garwacke.

Laura Stevenson's song "Sink, Swim" could be called an apocalyptic ditty, a cheery, up-tempo rock song with soaring vocals that sketches out the destruction of the West Coast: "Oh California, I tried to warn ya. / The earth is gonna quake before ya. / You'll be real sorry but it won't be sorry. / The dirt is gonna crack and split you in two." The casual address certainly suggests the musical approach, but it's easy to miss the lyrics in such a joyous ruckus.

The song appears on her 2013 album Wheel, and she explained in a phone interview last week that "I like that juxtaposition of mood and ... undercurrent - the actual meaning of the song. ... Two different ways of feeling the same word[s]. You can read them on the page and take them at face value, or you could hear them put to music with a completely different mood. It's just a different way of digesting it. Kind of what life is like."

She and her band will be playing the Moline Bier Stube on October 4, and in that setting it will be easy to gloss over grim words. But Stevenson's songs are rewarding both musically and lyrically, whether you consider their sometimes disparate components together or separately.

Photos from the Chuck Ragan concert September 18 at the Redstone Room, with openers Comfort and Jamestown Revival.

For more from Roberta Osmers on the Quad Cities music scene, visit OfTechAndMusic.Blogspot.com.

Chuck Ragan:

Photo by Roberta Osmers, OfTechAndMusic.Blogspot.com

Michael Torke. Photo by Brian Hainer.

In February, the Quad City Symphony contacted a representative of Michael Torke with the hope of commissioning a short season-opening piece from the well-known American composer. It was a long shot - a request with a turnaround time of a few months instead of the typical year or two between commissioning and the orchestra's first rehearsal with the completed music.

But Torke was looking for a summer project, a short work to add to his library of titles. "I love those drop-everything-now projects," Torke said in a phone interview in July. "The Quad City thing seemed perfect." With the logistics in place, what remained was finding an appropriate artistic concept and completing the piece before rehearsals in September.

Oracle was composed in a burst of creative energy from mid-June to mid-July. "I think this is going to be one of the best pieces I've ever written," Torke predicted the day after the five-minute composition was completed. "I am so jazzed up about it. It starts off with this kind of 'Pines of Rome' thing, with one variation of the melody warm and juicy, and another noble."

Matuto, photographed by Vincent SoyezDepending on the source, the English-language equivalent of the Brazilian slang term "matuto" appears to be "country boy" or "bumpkin" or "hillbilly." What it absolutely isn't is "critically lauded ensemble selected as American Musical Ambassadors for the U.S. State Department."

Yet that is indeed a fitting description for the capitalized Matuto, the sextet of touring musicians appearing locally as Quad City Arts' latest Visiting Artists. After a week spent conducting workshops and performing for area students, these dynamic, adventurous artists and educators will present a September 21 concert at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, where they hope to excite many more listeners with the infectious thrill of Brazilian bluegrass.

That's right: Brazilian bluegrass. Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of it.

Creed BrattonThere are people who work in an office and dream of stardom. And then there's Creed Bratton, who actually achieved stardom, and then went on to work in an office.

Of course, given that he wound up in the office of the Scranton, Pennsylvania-based paper-supply company Dunder Mifflin, this could hardly be considered a career demotion.

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