He points to Tom Waits’s use of the violinophone, a violin-trumpet hybrid with a nasal timbre, as an inspiration. but you don’t know what it is,” says Lorenz. “That’s one of the states that I like as a listener, is when you can recognize that something is an acoustic sound. Pizzoferrato wisely recognizes that Lorenz’s eccentric collection of found percussion pieces-which rattle and whir and generally confound one’s sense of what drums should sound like-work best in the background, where they can lend support and just a touch of oddness. The songs on “Make Time” are basically live renditions with few overdubs and a lot of mixing tricks. “Make Time” was recorded with the aid of engineer Justin Pizzoferrato, whose previous collaborators include Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies and Thurston Moore. He uses the effect more sparingly on his new album, “Make Time,” placing the emphasis instead on the rugged locution of both his voice and guitar. The overtone singing comes in especially handy in a live setting, because it allows Lorenz to fill in the space where another instrument would take a solo. And those first shows where I did it for people were some of the more terrifying moments of my life.” “It sounded weird and not OK and not good so I was really secretive about getting it together. “I was pretty shy about it, because I thought it sounded pretty bad for the most part,” he remembers. He had been taking a South Indian cooking class and was playing around with some of the sounds required to pronounce the dishes (retroflex consonants, for the linguistics nerds out there) when he discovered that he could produce an ear-splitting whistling sound at the same time. It is found in a number of folk traditions, most famously those from Tuva and Mongolia, but Lorenz stumbled upon it quite by accident. The technique, also known as throat singing, employs the harmonic overtones of the sound waves produced by vocal chords, essentially allowing a performer to sing two notes at once: a drone and a series of high-pitched tones. The overtone singing is perhaps the most distinctive element of The Suitcase Junket, though by no means its hallmark. “And I put it in an open tuning, which I hadn’t really played with before, and then this overtone singing thing that I’d been messing around with, pretty much exclusively in the car, all of a sudden had a place to go.” “ got this really buzzy, dark sound,” he says. 17, remembers The Suitcase Junket beginning with a moldy, beat-up guitar that he fished out of a dumpster at Hampshire College in Amherst, the town where he lives. Lorenz, who performs at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge on Jan. Every once in a while he lets loose a series of piercing notes that sound like the ventings of a souped-up harmonica and hover in the air momentarily before they dissipate. His voice is sinewy and rough and expressive-shades of Dylan, but with a sense of melody. Lorenz writes athletic songs with indelible hooks, and he can bring it down, too, picking out warbling melodies with his fingers. Close your eyes, and you’ll hear a garage rock band, complete with a drum set and growling, overdriven guitars. What’s impressive is not merely the complexity of the endeavor-Lorenz sings, strums and plays up to four instruments with his feet at once-but how utterly he is able to transcend the mechanical minutiae. They are empty gas cans and dented cook pots, castaways pilfered from dumpsters and back alleys, any memory of their original purpose erased in the exuberant and frenzied compulsion to make noise. Perched atop an empty accordion case, which also doubles as a bass drum, he manipulates a host of percussive instruments clustered at his feet. For just one guy, he stirs up a considerable racket, his raspy voice and jangly guitar enlarged and distorted through two ancient Gibson amplifiers. It’s an astonishing thing to watch Matt Lorenz, the architect and sole member of The Suitcase Junket, perform. (Bill Foster) This article is more than 8 years old.
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