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The Wire
Scala, London UK
by Nick Southgate, January 2008
20 years since they first took to a London stage as two-thirds of Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi have constantly honed and refined their melancholy pop aesthetic. They are joined tonight by Bhob Rainey on soprano sax and Michio Kurihara on electric guitar, and open with "Lilac Land" from last year's sublime Within These Walls. The statuesque and preternaturally youthful Naomi coos out the vocal from behind her keyboards. Despite the absence of percussion, there is a hypnotic ebb and flow to the songs as Damon's acoustic strumming, Rainey's soaring sax and Kurihara's liquid velvet guitar intermingle and swell together. Naomi picks up the bass to add her distinctively sculpted lines to "Robot Speaks" and the closing "Stars Never Fade", which finds Kurihara in exhilaratingly flamboyant mood painting squalls of vivid sound around the room.
All Music.com
Live Feed: Roaring Silence Revue
by Sean Westergaard
On September 30th [2007], the Empty Bottle in Chicago hosted Wire magazine's Adventures in Modern Music festival, culminating with the very first show of an odd touring package: Boris with Damon & Naomi, both featuring Michio Kurihara. Since both bands released an album in collaboration with Kurihara this year, on the one hand touring together seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, the musical worlds of Damon & Naomi and Boris could hardly be further apart when one thinks about Damon & Naomi's hushed melancholy compared to Boris' full-blast rock assault. Before the show I asked Naomi how the tour came about. She told me simply, "It was Atsuo's idea." Kurihara was working with Damon & Naomi at their base in Massachusetts, and they all went to see Boris play in Boston. After the show, Atsuo suggested that they all tour together. "We thought it was a joke," Naomi said, "but Kurihara, who was translating for us, said, 'No, he's serious.'" She tried to explain that she wasn't sure Boris' fans would enjoy their music, but Atsuo insisted. Then, Kurihara wasn't sure he wanted play both entire sets, so Damon & Naomi suggested he play half a set with them and half a set with Boris. Again, Atsuo insisted that Kurihara play both entire sets, "so it's Atsuo's idea...his mischief" that led to the tour dubbed "the Roaring Silence Revue." As Damon explained, "Boris brings the roar and we bring the silence."
The sold-out crowd seemed to still be arriving when Damon & Naomi began. In order to do justice to their new album, Within These Walls, which is richly augmented by horns and strings in addition to Kurihara's guitar, Damon & Naomi brought along Bhob Rainey (nmperign) on soprano sax and Helena Espvall (Espers) on cello to fill out their live sound. Beginning with "The Well" and "Lilac Land," the band played much of the new album but also performed "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" from Kurihara's album, Sunset Notes. Naomi did a fine job singing the Japanese lyrics originally done on the album by Ai Aso. Damon also sang a beautiful song called "Ueno Station," dedicated to Japanese singer/songwriter Mikami Kan (who is one of four artists featured on International Sad Hits, the third release from Damon & Naomi's 20/20/20 label). Throughout the set, the cello, soprano sax, and Kurihara's guitar weaved a beautiful tapestry of sound around Damon & Naomi's songs. The soundman did an excellent job: all the instruments were clear in the mix despite all being in about the same register. Too bad he couldn't turn down all the people toward the back of the room who were talking too much and too loudly. Up by the stage, though, the crowd was pretty enraptured. "Stars Never Fade" was another highlight, with a wonderful solo from Kurihara. They closed the set as they close the album, with "Cruel Queen," which Damon described as "the quietest song of the night." Based on an old traditional folk song, it was a daring way to set the stage for Boris.
Harp
Visiting Damon & Naomi
by Byron Coley, December 2007
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang have always seemed like a pretty classy couple, so it was no surprise to find that their Cambridge apartment is gracious as hell. Naomi gives us a tour of the place — living quarters upstairs, offices for Exact Change Press (their small publishing house) downstairs — and we're all struck by how organized and tidy everything is. Naomi claims they always keep it this neat. Jimmy Johnson offers to give Naomi lessons on how to make things messier, more organic. Lili Dwight suggests we could all learn some valuable organizational theories from these neatniks. I keep my mouth shut and head back upstairs to the champagne table.
The reason we're visiting this tidy place is that we've been invited to attend a preview show for the tour Damon & Naomi are about to begin with Japanese heavy-rock monsters, Boris. This pairing may seem impossibly anomolous, but there is a conceptual methodology to its origins. The common factor is guitarist Michio Kurihara. Kurihara (best known in the U.S. as the lead guitarist for Ghost) has just guested on Damon & Naomi's Within These Walls (20/20/20) and Boris' Rainbow (Drag City), and he will play with both in concert. Kurihara is present for this evening's performance. Other auxiliary members are Bhob Rainey on soprano saxophone and Helen Espvall on cello.
We head to the living room (or as close as we can get) and the music starts. Damon jokes about the idea of facing Boris's black-robed audience, but he seems up to the challenge. Their brief set is lovely, mostly drawn from their new album. Listening, on a balmy autumn evening, to Kurihara's haunting electric guitar, it seems possible they might even draw a few new converts from the Boris crowd. And why not? Even stoners like to be neat.
The Washington Post
Damon & Naomi, Driving On
by Patrick Foster, Thursday, April 21, 2005
When Dean Wareham gave up on the band Galaxie 500 in 1991, it seemed unlikely that the trio's remaining pair -- drummer Damon (Krukowski) and bass player Naomi (Yang) -- would even continue in the music business, much less forge a significant body of work.
But 14 years on, the duo has not only logged another stint with a rock band (Magic Hour) but also released six albums of their own, built up their publishing company and made their marks in poetry (Damon) and photography (Naomi).
Despite their relatively high profiles, the tour that brought Damon and Naomi to Iota on Tuesday night with Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara is still the kind of thing they don't do very often.
But they played like road veterans, spinning a web of low-key, psychedelic folk that Kurihara adroitly adorned with scorched electric-guitar lines.
Though chiefly concerned with their new album, "The Earth Is Blue," the musicians (with Damon now playing guitar, not percussion) also served up a clutch of covers that nicely framed their originals: the English country folk of Vashti Bunyan's "Winter Is Blue," Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," "Love" by 1960s Japanese legends the Jacks and a spectral pass at Galaxie's "Blue Thunder."
Tunes such as "The Robot Speaks," which Krukowski called "a new song about the past," also evoked the Wareham era, but the real revelation was a merging of Caetano Veloso's "Araca Azul" and their new record's title track. With Kurihara's Gibson flickering, Damon and Naomi drifted into a gently floating, trippy dream, a milieu in which the pair crafted a comfortable artistic home.
The Boston Herald
Damon and Naomi show: Work of art
by Linda Laban, Monday, April 18, 2005
Utterly beautiful. That was the sound of the music that Cambridge couple Damon and Naomi parlayed, sequestered in the cozy ICA's theater Saturday night, two floors below Andy Warhol's peculiarly watchful image, exhibited in the gallery above.
Most songs came from their stunning February release, ``The Earth Is Blue,'' which is Damon and Naomi's first album of new material in five years. The pair, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, founders of defunct '80s indie rock-pop band Galaxie 500, performed with their regular collaborator, guitarist Michio Kurihara (of Ghost), and improvisational trumpeter Greg Kelley.
One passage saw these players rise up in a jarring clash of sounds. But with Krukowski strumming an acoustic guitar and Yang switching between swooning melodic bass and keyboards, a delicious harmony ruled.
The performance swapped Yang's baroque-pop singing with Krukowski's folk huskiness, and flawlessly twinned those tones on Galaxie 500's ``Blue Thunder'' and Tim Buckley's ``Song to the Siren.''
The sublime finale segued Caetano Veloso's ``Araca Azul'' with ``The Earth Is Blue,'' which peaked with Kurihara's plangent notes and Kelley's piquant tejano touch. Not exactly Warhol's confrontational cup of tea, maybe. But these artists, clearly, never subscribed to Warholian pop culture's stifling 15 minutes of fame.
Now Playing
by Steven Hanna
Spaceland, Silverlake, LA, Friday, 13 May 2005
If you breathed wrong, exhaled at the wrong time or failed to suppress a cough, the delicate magic of Damon and Naomi’s music might have shattered, falling to the Spaceland floor in jagged chunks. But such was the skill of these veteran slowcore performers that most of the audience were breathlessly still for the entire hour-plus set, which spanned Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang’s career from their early days in Galaxie 500 to their gorgeous recent record The Earth is Blue.
Galaxie 500 is one of those bands customarily tagged with the adjective “seminal” by rock journalists, but in their case the term is richly merited. The Boston threesome may have broken up in 1991, leaving Damon and Naomi to go it alone ever since, but classic songs like “Blue Thunder” – played at Spaceland in a rapturous, noiselessly climactic rendition – are among the cornerstones of modern independent rock music. You could be forgiven for showing up at a Damon and Naomi show just to pay homage to their legacy.
But these two are far from a nostalgia act, and in fact the quiet strumminess of the new material so perfectly mirrors the current folk-revival scene that you almost feel surprised to hear an older Galaxie song slotting neatly into what feels satisfyingly like 2005 at its best. Particularly when Yang takes over lead vocals, as on a lovely “House of Glass” or “A Second Life,” or when additional guitarist Michio Kurihara lends his spindly fretwork heroics to the songs’ playouts, cutting through the shimmery near-silence and then subsiding back into it, the band feels like they’ve found the slow-beating heart of all the music Devendra Banhart and Animal Collective listen to while they drift off to sleep.
It seems an uncharitable quibble to point out that Krukowski is a tad supercilious, or that the night felt oddly same-y, especially during a rather limp mid-set stab at “New York City,” because overall this is what a lot of us are hoping music sounds like once we get past this silly post-punk revival thing. Assuming that happens, won’t it be odd that among the finest practitioners of the neo-folk sound will be two of the least neo-kids on the block?
New Beats
by David Chiu, Northsix, Brooklyn, New York, October 9, 2002
An aura of tragic magic was in the house when the duo of Damon and Naomi played in Brooklyn's Northsix the other night. Their fragile, melancholic sounds with only a guitar, bass, and harmonium brought new meaning to the term unplugged. It was music to its barest essentials.
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang might be known to some serious music fans as the former rhythm section of the now-defunct and now-legendary Galaxie 500. Their music as Damon and Naomi is a further extension of Galaxie's trippy, Velvet inspired approach, but it now sounds more psychedelic folk pop; and in doing so, channels the Rimbaud-influenced, sad troubadours of '60s artists like Tim Buckley. If one expects to hear the upbeat pop of their former Galaxie selves like on Fourth of July or conventional crass music is gonna be very disappointed. If you were to witness Damon and Naomi's sound today, be prepared for something of a somber, but not in the least entirely depressing, affair.
The duo's most recent album is the live Song to the Siren, a collaboration with guitarist Kurihara from the Japanese rock band Ghost. Ironically, the duo that night opened for the headlining Ghost at Northsix. Although the space of the venue seemed vast and large, the small crowd and the music took one back to the coffeehouse folk circuit of '60s Greenwich Village. The musical set-up was as intimate as the mood of the songs in the short set such as "The Navigator," "The New World," a translation of the Japanese song "Watashi no hana," a cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," "Love," and an untitled new song (some dude in the audience "cleverly " cried out, "How about 'No Title'?")
It would have been nice for Kurihara from Ghost to step in and play guitar on several of the songs -his piercing electric guitar on the Song to the Siren CD was a key highlight. But either way, the music itself was stirring and eloquent as the players. Krukowski's velvet heart on his sleeve voice and emphatic guitar strumming and Yang's singing like a soprano while alternating between the bass and harmonium (defined as an an organlike keyboard instrument that produces tones with free metal reeds actuated by air forced from a bellows.). And the duo's vocal harmonies meshed so perfectly together.
In some respect, if you factor in their work in Galaxie over a decade ago, Krukowski and Yang helped forged the quiet new loud approach in today's inward looking bands because the music is so exquisite and eloquent, if not dreamy and spiritual. Any other artist trying to do this might be perceived as boring as hell. But in Damon and Naomi's capable hands, the music's ethereal sadness can also uplifting too, as was this case of this NYC gig.
San Francisco Chronicle
Postdoc Rock: Damon & Naomi
by Kimberly Chun, Bottom of the Hill, SF, August 30, 2001
At first listen, Damon & Naomi come off as hothouse folk. From the gentle, acoustic and achingly soft and slow sound of their latest album, Damon & Naomi With Ghost, one would expect them as fragile as fading flowers, sipping absinthe, padding about in velvet slippers and paisley prints, plumbing the more narcotic, dreamy aspects of their old band Galaxie 500.
So it came as a slight surprise when the pair showed up at Bottom of the Hill last Thursday, August 30, silently set up their equipment along with wraith-thin Ghost guitarist and collaborator Michio Kurihara, and then began plucking through their tunes in a quiet, yet workman manner.
Sounding more immediate and riveting than their recordings, the trio played songs culled mainly from their latest album, numbers such as "Judah and the Maccabees" and "Tanka," with earnest dignity, shaking their heads with the tenderness of proud, though not necessarily loud, folkies. They averted their eyes out of shyness rather than practiced aloofness or some erstwhile Blues Brothers-style illusion of cool. All the better to dream, even when you're referencing Ringo's famous lines from the Beatles' "White Album."
"I haven't done shows in a while and now I actually have blisters on my fingers," guitarist/vocalist Damon Krukowski said wonderingly, holding up his fingers for all to behold midway through the set.
"It's your punk rock cred," teased bassist/vocalist Naomi Yang, looking up from her squeezebox.
"It's helping me reach down deep for the pain," Krukowski deadpanned.
The fact is the pair have it pretty good, maintaining Exact Change, a publishing house, which reprints lost avant-garde novels, playing the Bumpershoot festival on this short round of shows, and bouncing back from the dissolution of Galaxie 500 in 1990 after bandmate Dean Wareham, now of Luna, called it quits. G-5 were wildly popular back in the late-'80s day, the shoegazing, rising stars of a hipster firmament, the exotic Americans on the US arm of the Rough Trade label. At times, it seems altogether possible they could have been a kinder, gentler Smashing Pumpkins or a more literary Cowboy Junkies.
But instead of going the way of bigger venues and major-label record deals, as Wareham has, Damon & Naomi have kept it simple and uncommercial, mining the ethereal, Sandy Denny-oriented folk-rock moments of Fairport Convention and building an oeuvre that seems to use the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" as a starting point from which to drift, nod and wander.
They wore those influences well Thursday night, after the Chapman Stick-and-cello prog rock of Laughing Stock and the studied, American Indian-chant indie-experimentation of Six Organs of Admittance. The clutch of older college rockers and studious-looking younger men and women in black gathered around attentively, while near the bar, others chattered loudly, threatening to overwhelm the generally hushed performance.
Kunihara lit a fire under Krukowski and Yang's falsetto vocals and their sleepy tempos. On "Great Wall," the Tokyo guitarist's solo plunged into chorus-effects-laden crunch, taking the lyrical and eloquent central melody while Yang provided the rhythmic counterpoint, singing airly again and again: "It's been so long."
It was the sound of acid-washed surrealists who'd rather make love than war, create symbolist lyrics about mirrors, sand and waves, a recurring image in Damon & Naomi With Ghost, rather than insipid love songs. By the time they surged into their first encore of "cosmic American music," Gram Parsons' "A Song For You," resistance was futile.
NME
The Garage, London, May 2001
by John Mulvey
It's the exact moment in the late-'60s when the hippies realised that, instead of just dreaming about the countryside, they could run away to it. Reconstructed with the aid of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang's psychedelic folk, that moment of idyllic possibilities haunts the Garage tonight. Yang's harmonium drones hazily and the unfamiliar smell of clove cigarettes hangs in the air.
Nice vibe, then. This is where the decade-long journey of Damon & Naomi has brought them; away from the pioneering slow-mo sadness of their first band, Galaxie 500, to an even quieter place. The clearest map reference is given by a cover of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren'.
So far, so NAM. The trump card, however, is guitarist Michio Kurihara, a visitor from the Japanese band, Ghost. Initially, Kurihara's ebbing electric atmospherics are even softer, more evanescent thant Krukowski's acoustic guitar. Gradually, through the astoundingly subtle freak-out of 'I Dreamed of the Caucasus', he adds more volume and an extra dimension to this already lovely music.
"This is our pseudo-anthem to go with our pseudo-legendary status," says Krukowski, introducing 'This Car Climbed Mt. Washington', and by now Kurihara has emerged from the mist and is bending air like a brittle Neil Young. Get the camper van engine running, it's time to head for the hills.
L.A. Weekly
The Knitting Factory, Los Angeles, October 31, 2000
by Jay Babcock
Before starting his band’s gorgeous headlining set at the Knitting Factory on Halloween night, singer-guitarist Damon Krukowski looked out at the audience of seated dozens and commented wryly, ?You think your tour’s going great, everything’s taken care of, then you find out the police have blocked off all the streets around the club you’re playing . . .? We all laughed, but it was a chuckle as much at our own recent transport misery as it was at Damon’s dry delivery. Still, the cruel act of godlessness that had made for an aggravating start to the evening had already been redeemed by an unannounced opening act’s (Ana D.) performance. . . .
Damon & Naomi and Ghost’s performance was a second act of kindness. Concentrating on melancholy songs from their new Sub Pop collaboration, the Boston–based Damon and Naomi (on bass and some sort of tabletop pump organ, respectively) traded vocals in complement to three members of Tokyo’s finest psychedelic-folk band, Ghost. This transcontinental match is a wonderful one: The songs, firmly in the balladic/anthemic tradition of every troubled troubadour you’ve ever heard (Chris Bell, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Velvets, etc.), gained much from Ghost’s tastefully detailed instrumental embroidery — and especially from Michio Kurihara’s staggering electric guitar, which, given more free rein live than on record, was by turns elegant, meditative, lyrical and blazing.
Seriously, this show was so good, it was easily worth the hour in unmoving traffic it took to get from Los Feliz to Hollywood and Sycamore . . .
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