By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The suitcases for musical act The Suitcase Junket are mostly empty.
Matt Lorenz, the sole human member of the ensemble, doesn’t need that much luggage to haul his personal belongings. He does share the stage with two old suitcases. A large one that he beats with a pedal operated by his right heel serves as his bass. Another smaller valise props up an old gas can which he strikes with another pedal with a baby shoe attached.
Lorenz told the audience at Grounds for Thought Friday night that he’d worn that baby shoe, and his sister had as well. Sharing this familial detail is intended to make the device less creepy. Doesn’t really though. The creepy and the wistful, the otherworldly and mundane, meet in the music of The Suitcase Junket. Among the other members of the band (as Lorenz thinks of them) are a circular saw blade, a bones and bottle caps shaker, a hi-hat cymbal. He plays a guitar that he found on the river bank. It was moldy, he said. No good reason to throw out a guitar. He’s fitted out his musical set up with rescues from the junk shop and dump. And they repay his devotion though during one number Lorenz said his guitar acts up sometimes just to remind him it was “garbage.” Still that acting up, the odd, incidental vibrations and buzzes, all contribute to the “Swamp Yankee” textures of The Suitcase Junket.
Lorenz is just as resourceful with his voice, he growls, even croons, on occasion. He does a version of Tibetan throat singing, where he manipulates his voice so tones split to create an eerie, whistling sound. Lorenz also plays a mean mouth trumpet.
All this goes into the performance of songs that often have longing at their heart. Old blues about modern relationships. He can rock out like a blues rock band, or be tender. “Wherever I wake up I’ll call my home,” he sings with gentle ambiguity. Will that strange place be his home, or will he call home from that place? The uncertainty adds to the sadness. Then there’s his “Frankenstein lullaby” to a bone which he wants to give wings. Snatching a title from a Buddy Bolden setlist, he makes the existential blues question his own: “If You Don’t Like My Potatoes Why Do You Dig So Deep?”
Lorenz fills in the spaces of his songs with anecdotes and observations as amusing as the songs. He talked about how he imagined as a toddler that he was not his parents’ child but rather came from the planet Wobbly. Years later he saw a book about the Wobblies, and was stunned. Could it be? No, the Wobblies were a labor organization. Once he met a woman who had been a Wobbly, and being small and gray, it was easy to imagine her as an alien.
The sounds Lorenz produces for The Suitcase Junket make it easy to imagine that his toddler self was onto something. This is the folk music of that distant planet, and this music is the closest we’ll ever get to it.
