Laetitia Sadier
Empty Bottle
3/12/24
Musician Laetitia Sadier’s performance at Chicago’s legendary Empty Bottle was soft-focused and multifaceted, rendering her sonic landscapes in warm, consonant keyboards, bit-crushed samples, softly strummed guitar, radar blips and, perhaps most surprisingly, a few unexpected toots on the trombone.
To Sadier loyalists, the night’s performance was full of small delightful surprises in the intricacies of the loops that constituted her songbuilding process. She slowly stacked sound elements from synthesizers, samplers and modulated guitar like cairns guiding the audience through the fog-drenched sonic landscape.
Starting the evening was Radio Outernational — drummer Areif Sless-Kitain and bassist Wayne Montana, along with guitarist Aaron Shapiro, flutist-saxophonist Hunter Diamond, and flutist Kenthaney Redmond, who’s replaced founding member Nate Lepine. The band was “Chicago energy at its finest,” as Sadier mentioned later in the evening. Starting their evening with an Ethiopian groove that felt like a track from the 31st volume of Ethiopiques, the five-piece traversed the global south for the rest of the set, bringing funk and Afrobeat to the fore with flute, saxophone, and rhythmic guitar offset by an absolutely dominant bass.
The sonic textures the quintet brought forth felt like more than even five instruments, and their upbeat songs felt like even matches to Stereolab as much as Sadier; one got the sense that this band will keep getting tighter and unifying their influences into a true well-oiled sonic machine in a few years. They perfectly set the stage for a vivid tone shift.
Sadier took the stage to whoops and rampant applause, smiling warmly if self-consciously. There was a vulnerability to her performance as she artfully but fastidiously constructed soundscapes, using backing tracks to build elaborate compositions. Some tracks veered toward the groovy bubble pop reminiscent of the finest moments with her currently-on-hiatus home project, Stereolab. Other songs floated, weightless as a hymn you’ll never forget, no matter how devout an atheist you’ve become. The crowd near the stage adored her, and the feeling was mutual: “Chicago. Mon amour!” Sadier noted that the crowd tonight was the first to sell out on her tour, eliciting more whoops of Chicago pride.
The audience trended toward the Advil before-and-after-the-show age bracket, with many clearly fans of Sadier-fronted global pop Marxists, Stereolab. Also in attendance, as Sadier noted, were the founders of Drag City Records, one of the seminal Chicago-based record labels in alternative music. Whoops of recognition rose from the audience at the mention of Drag City, and many attendees had that distinct aura of maybe being a musician from the ’90s alternative scene — or maybe they just maintained a strong sense of style into their 40s and 50s.
In any case, the crowd was semi-devout — in that one half shouted the other half into being a bit more quiet — which Sadier appreciated, musing, “We can hear you, you know. Is there a bar downstairs? Go downstairs.” This elicited applause and looks of mutual recognition that we all became our dads for a brief, fleeting moment.
While individual lyrics were often difficult to decipher over the aforementioned crowd noise, some still steamrolled the crowd, who, like all of us, have been through a lot lately (happy four-year COVID-versary, everyone). One such line came near set’s end: “I am fucking serious.” It got a loud roar as people made their own associations to any number of grave topics that dominate our unrelenting news cycle, none alien to Sadier’s oeuvre. Sadier’s parting remarks ended with “If we put our energies together we can do something better than this.”
The revolution might not be televised, but it certainly involves a loop pedal.
