Racer Session #488 | KSMNT | September 15, 2019
Hello, fans of the Avant!
This week we’re stoked to host our new friends KSMNT!
Kosmonaut (KSMNT) is the gesamtkunstwerk of Brooklyn/San Francisco based musicians Anni (vocals, french horn, drum machine) and Aaron (vocals, keyboards, trumpet, visualizers). As a musical expression, the group fuses their fascination in indy/psychedelic rock with deeply rooted training in the classical and jazz traditions. They currently perform around the country as a duo, though they sometimes exist in larger ensembles.
Their recording project, VSTK1, encapsulates the entirety of the group’s artistic voices: a 9 song album that weaves in and out of genres as a relentless stream of melodies and harmonic idioms paint starkly different moods.
This will be a great and fun Racer Session! Brass! Electronics! Vocals! Visuals! You don’t want to miss this one! So make sure you’re at Cafe Racer at 8pm to check this one out, and stick around for the jam session after as well! Keep reading for some words from 1/2 of KSMNT, Aaron Messing.
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“Greetings Racers!
I’ve always been interested in the creation/consumption of art as a function of time. When I reminisce about a book, I don’t just remember the words on the page, the plot, or the themes: I remember where I was reading, what I did when I put the book down and before I picked it up, the people I knew, the phase of my life, etc. The same goes for albums of music. When I listen to an album I’ve already fully digested, I remember what it felt like to be me when that music was my life.
The music we will be performing at the session represents a different time in my life. Most of what you will hear has origins from years ago, when my relationship with my trumpet and classical music in general was becoming estranged, when I thought being in a traditional rock band was the height of musical expression, before I met Anni and we learned to fuse our musical identities.
What is most interesting to me about this music now is the retrofitting I’ve had to do to map my old self onto my new self. I often find myself having accepted musical insecurities I didn’t know I had, seeing ideas I had once tossed aside from an angle previously unknown to me, and newly embracing the creative process in light of the chaos of the performer-audience relationship. Thus, the art you will be consuming is ‘me’ (or ‘us’) now, as informed by the ‘me’ of the past.
After our set, I invite others to bring ideas from their past, ones that may have been given up on, and collaborate with your past to shepherd into the present a changed musical and personal identity.”
