A MAN AND HIS CHAPMAN: Throughout town this week, good shows ring with the sound of many talented players working in concert — indie rockers, singer/songwriters, and more. We begin this column, however, focusing on one individual who has championed a unique instrument few people play. Bright Brown, aka Alex Nahas — who performs at the Mercury Lounge (5871 Hollister Ave., Goleta) on Wednesday, September 26, at 8 p.m. — concocts cinematic maneuvers and moody art rock on the polyphonic electric neck that looks like a guitar with no body known as the Chapman Stick.
The Brooklyn-based singer, composer, musician, producer, and engineer stands out with his self-invention. Nahas makes a sound that’s truly individual and varies album to album: sometimes sprawling, but more recently austere. Growing up on the prog of Pink Floyd and King Crimson, he was drawn to the instrument through bassist/Chapmanist Tony Levin (of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson fame). The stick proved initially elusive. “It felt like a huge hump to crawl over to even make a sound out of it,” he said. Abandoning jazz-fusion technicality, he took to it like a folksinger, striking it simply, coaxing the tone. “It’s a very intuitive instrument — the stick texturally has this sound that can be so manipulated by the intensity of how you tap it.”
Nahas gets poetic with his singular stick, with a creative palette that widens from the familiar to the outré. The songs on 2017’s What If It Exists are quite sparse and raw, evoking perhaps the Velvet Underground’s minimalist artistry with something like Rainer Ptacek’s spiritual reckoning. Indeed, the devil and the divine are in the details for Nahas, who’s focusing on the more discreet, personal sides of life, lyrically and sonically. “I’m into small lately,” said Nahas of his leaner sound. “I can sort of put the songs in my pocket and take them with me, and take them out wherever I am.”