Chris Gray

Latest Articles

Americana: land of progress

Califone’s peerless take on the future of roots-rock
You can listen to 30 seconds of any Califone song and get a fair idea of what the band is all about.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | October 14, 2009

From the Dumpster to the Gallery
To get an idea of the remarkable sprawl of supplies, clutter, and chaos involved in SPACE Gallery's forthcoming exhibit by Swoon and guest collaborators, "Distance Don't Matter," there are two good places to look: the gallery itself, and SPACE Executive Director Nat May's Facebook page.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | October 14, 2009

Behind the (local) music

A new show shines a light in the recording studio
“Working in a studio for so many years, we get to work closely with musicians when they are at their most creative — and most vulnerable,” says Marc Bartholomew, audio engineer and co-runner of Hanover Street’s Acadia Recording Company.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | October 07, 2009

Take the fifth

The Camden International Film Festival hits a half-decade, with momentum building
Among the issues you'll see tackled at the Camden International Film Festival this year are poverty, overfishing, peak oil, and the plight (and/or) ambition of children who grow up too quickly.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | September 23, 2009

Politics on the ground

AJ Schnack opens the Camden International Film Festival with Convention
Convention , the opening-night feature at the fifth annual Camden International Film Festival, is a logistical triumph that chronicles a logistical triumph. AJ Schnack, the director of the Kurt Cobain documentary About a Son, organized a group of nine filmmakers to capture the breadth of the August 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | September 23, 2009

Stars aligned

Cult heroes and superstars dot the region's fall concert calendar
The days are growing shorter, the magazines are (well, barely) getting larger and meatier, and the first batch of cider doughnuts is on the way real soon: all sure signs of autumn, as is the bountiful crop of prestigious concerts coming our way this season.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | September 16, 2009

Glorious bastards

Deerhunter's path from divisive buzz band to indie royalty
Few bands could serve as a better case study on the influence of Internet hype on mainstream media and popular acceptance than Deerhunter. Before the band "broke" in early 2007, to a glowing Pitchfork review of their album Cryptograms , the Atlanta four-piece were virtual unknowns nationally.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | September 02, 2009

Rock of wages

Huak intertwine politics, sentiment, and decades of influences
Huak are the rare local band who, in the two-plus years they've been playing regular gigs, sound bolder and more self-possessed every time you see them.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | August 26, 2009

Music Seen: Neko Case + Haru Bangs

Neko Case and Haru Bangs last weekend
First things first: Neko Case is the complete package, an unmitigated bombshell (gorgeous, wry, self-effacing) with a singular artistic vision (country/folk songs so heavy on metaphor and animistic and obscure mythological references that you could — and should — unpack them for months) and a voice like an air-raid siren.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | August 12, 2009

Music Seen: Neko Case + Haru Bangs

Branding Bangor

It's Maine's first large-scale indie music festival
If a big-league indie pop festival falls in Bangor, will anyone hear it?
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | August 12, 2009

Music Seen: Neko Case + Haru Bangs

Shoot the piano player

Robert Stillman returns with Master Box
Robert Stillman's music is like an anachronistic, sepia-toned spin on the fanciful film scores of Jon Brion (Punch-Drunk Love, I Heart Huckabees). Both make fleet-footed, extremely visual piano songs with trotting melodies, a natural fit for an old silent short.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 22, 2009

Born to rock

Deer Tick take it to the roadhouse
The last time Deer Tick were in Portland, at SPACE Gallery in November 2007, then-21-year-old frontman John McCauley decided to sing the national anthem. He sprung offstage and hit the floor belting the Tony Bennett standard "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" in a nasal voice soaked in equal parts whiskey, battery acid, and gravel.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 15, 2009

(10) days of celluloid

From the gridiron to gritty realism at the Maine International Film Festival
Among the many treats at last year's Maine International Film Festival were a future Oscar winner (James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire ) and one of the biggest art-house hits of 2008 (Scandinavian teen-vampire flick Let the Right One In ).
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 08, 2009

Deep impact

Ron Currie Jr. has a blast with the apocalypse once more
In the most memorable piece in Waterville author Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 debut short story collection, God is Dead (Viking), God is reincarnated as a Dinka woman in a refugee camp in Sudan, who enlists a jive-talking Colin Powell in an effort to find a young boy.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 01, 2009

Power through peace

In exile, Burmese monks still carry the torch
Now is a critical time for democracy's worldwide battle against totalitarianism. Rioters in Iran are disputing the outcome of a possibly stolen presidential election. North Korea has sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor for allegedly crossing the border into the closed country from China.
By JEFF INGLIS | June 18, 2009

Music Seen: Karaoke with DJ Annie; Bentley's Saloon, Arundel

No irony here
There is no irony at Bentley's Saloon. This is kind of hard to process, because the crowd at the bar is totally incoherent: there are, primarily, biker dudes and chicks, along with cowboy types, hard-drinking college kids, senior citizens, and the odd hippie with dreadlocks.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | June 17, 2009

Pixel revolt

Burma VJ's heroic dissident journalists
Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country is paced and edited with the keen, polished urgency of a thriller — there are frantic, confused phone conversations, along with gloomy music and a healthy amount of ominous foreshadowing — but most of its footage is shaky, off-center, and drastically pixelated, even when viewed on a television.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | June 18, 2009

Letters to the Portland editor: June 12, 2009

Thanks for honesty
I'm writing to thank you for your brief, honest assessment of our band's performance and constitution (see " Bands Come, Go, and Get Bashed ," by Christopher Gray, June 5).
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | June 10, 2009

Greetings and salutations

Aging and patriotism in The Way We Get By
The film, a decidedly unlikely crowd-pleaser, has had a charmed year so far. It won a Special Jury Award upon its world premiere at Austin, Texas's SXSW Film Festival, and an Audience Award at the prestigious Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina, becoming something of a "little documentary that could" on the festival circuit.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | June 10, 2009

Last call

Bands come, go, and get bashed
One of the big topics of social conversation in Portland last week was the anonymous Portland Point blog's ruthless, somewhat self-negating takedown of the Honey Clouds' May 23 CD-release show.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | June 03, 2009

Creative manifesto

Capturing Portland's collaborative spirit, with $90 and a borrowed car
"Is it fair to say we're a Marxist city in spirit if not law?"
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | May 27, 2009

Manufactured landscapes

Highlights from a banner year in wordless music
Depending on our mood, most of us seek out albums that coddle our hopes, fears, and concerns; failing that, we want escapism, foreign environments that either take us where we want to be or startle us with the thrill of the new.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY + ANDREW FREDERICK | May 13, 2009

Music Seen: Ocean and Pontiak

Ocean and Pontiak at SPACE Gallery, May 5
The day after Ocean's predictably under-attended (30-40 people) Cinco de Mayo performance at SPACE, a friend who also attended asked what I thought. "So loud," I said. "So slow," he responded. It wasn't hard to catch the reverence in both reactions.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | May 13, 2009

Food unfarmed

Pollan and Schlosser, on message, in Food, Inc.
Following in the Peabody Award-winning footsteps of Aaron Wolf's congenial, informative documentary King Corn, Robert Kenner's omnibus agri-doc Food, Inc . offers a bleaker portrait of America's food economy at this year's Food+Farm event series, centered at SPACE Gallery from May 7 to 10.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | May 13, 2009

A new hope

The Thermals' tentatively ambivalent Now We Can See
Amid a barrage of assessments of our new president's first 100 days in office, it's a ripe time for the Thermals to come back to Portland and offer their two cents'.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | April 29, 2009

Why we live here

Tell us your story at thePhoenix.com/Portland
By now, we've all heard what the people at Forbes magazine have to say about why Portland is at the top of its annual "America's Most Livable Cities" list. We apparently scored a lot of points on a "leisure index."
By PORTLAND PHOENIX STAFF | April 22, 2009

Dancing with himself

Arthur Russell's posthumous renaissance
Arthur Russell's music does little to illuminate the mysteries and vagaries of his life. It simply tosses them aside, in pursuit of moods and rhythms few have successfully replicated, two decades later.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | April 22, 2009

Brain strain

Jonah Lehrer on neurological warfare and picking a cereal
Those of us aching for a 300-page treatise about the crippling implications of the "build your own scramble" at Local 188 won't, at first glance, find a great deal of solace in Jonah Lehrer's second book, How We Decide.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | April 08, 2009

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