"Thanks to Joel," Implodes guitarist Matt Jencik offered at the end of their Thursday night set at the Empty Bottle. "I bought my copy of Prazision the week it came out. I guess that shows my age. But I've still got it, and lots of others, too." Prazision is the debut of droning Virginian post-rockers Labradford, the first record issued by Chicago-based experimental imprint Kranky, which Joel Leoschke co-founded with the since-departed Bruce Adams in 1993. Over a long, frozen weekend, Kranky celebrated 20 years of record-making with four shows around the city. As a rule, Kranky bands don't do a whole lot of talking. But when they did, they spent most of it like Jencik, thanking Leoschke for his decades-long commitment to the patient, peculiar music that Kranky's made its name on.
Never ones for brevity, Kranky stretched out their 20th anniversary weekend into four nights. "It's a dream lineup," Leoschke told me Thursday morning. In large part, Implodes' Ken Camden and Kranky publicist/Nudge guitarist Brian Foote were jointly responsible for booking the weekend's festivities. "I told [Ken and Brian] I'd go along with it if I didn't have to do too much," Loescke joked, but the weekend's itinerary neatly hit on every aspect of Kranky's current roster. Thursday was, by most measures, the rock show, sandwiching the psychedelic drones of ex-Chicagoan Rob Lowe's Lichens with the somber, pulsing Implodes and the gristly post-punk of Disappears. Friday and Saturday moved the party to the fairly new Constellation (co-owned by Pitchfork Music Festival producer Mike Reed), with performances from Tim Hecker, Grouper, Benoit Pioulard and others. On Sunday came the main event, a 90-minute set from Texan drone heroes Stars of the Lid at Lincoln Hall that found them joined by the 10-piece Wordless Music Orchestra. Leoschke's long waved off any intimations that there's anything like a "Kranky sound," pointing out the very obvious distance between a noisy rock band like Disappears and the blooming drones of Stars of the Lid. Spend a weekend with this music, though, and certain themes begin to emerge. Vocals are rare, and when present, rarely comprehensible. Song lengths frequently surpass the ten-minute mark. Traditional song structures take a backseat to textural explorations. Much of the music Kranky releases requires a kind of concentration that's fairly uncommon in a live setting, particularly in a rock club like the Empty Bottle; start fiddling with your phone halfway through a hushed 20-minute drone piece, and chances are, you'll break the spell.
There was a kind of tacit social contract at work throughout the weekend, a silent agreement to keep quiet so as not to overpower the often skeletal, low-toned music on offer. Friday at Constellation, Christopher Bisonette set his rippling ambience to a few frames of distressed nature scenes; it's not as though anybody'd thrown a "shut the hell up" sign on the door, but you'd no sooner talk through something like that than you would a movie. At times, the tranquility of the crowd at Sunday's Stars of the Lid show at Lincoln Hall was downright eerie. At set break, the couple behind me ordered food, which arrived two songs into Stars of the Lid. You could tell they were hesitant to even grab a fry for fear of wrinkling the butcher paper. You could, in fact, hear a pin drop; when they started washing out glasses behind the bar, several heads turned, a few scowls were exchanged. With anything less than total absorption from the listener, the most delicate of this music quickly turns into background noise. Like a book that teaches you how to read it as you go along, this music teaches you how to listen to it, how to free yourself from distraction and appreciate its slow motion beauty, to consider every constituent element. When you give yourself over to it entirely, it's a time-distorting, sense-enhancing thing. In this era of endless distraction, that kind of sustained patience takes some adjustment. But the reward for your stillness is considerable: 45 uninterrupted minutes just to think. I know how this sounds, but even today, after several nights immersed in sound, my mind feels clearer, less restless.
Kranky's never chased trends, never signed anybody to keep up their bottom line; for two decades, Leoschke's stuck with a genuine, personal vision that, at a time when all factions of the music industry are scrambling to stay afloat, feels uncommon. Leoschke puts out records he likes; it certainly helps that he has a world-class ear for immersive, forward-thinking music, but the consistency of Kranky's carefully curated output has engendered the kind of trust that allows him to sell out four nights of beautiful, challenging music. Kranky records require patience, but they inspire devotion; how else to explain the hundreds of not-exactly-outdoorsy types who left the comfort of their turntables on the coldest weekend Chicago's seen in some time to chase this music all over the city. Before a brief encore, Stars of the Lid broke out "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface", from 2007's And Their Refinement of the Decline. As the song swelled, the koi pond visuals they'd been playing to went warp-speed; the whole thing quickly became impossibly immense—a good quarter-hour of sheer supernova. Walking out of Lincoln Hall some minutes later to the sound of passing taxis and DePaul kids on their way to the bars was something of a shock to the system. It's easy to forget just how much unwanted noise is out there.