L’Rain, a.k.a. Taja Cheek, opened the Knockdown Center’s mainstage at 8 p.m. Like Gordon, she’s someone whose practice is equally rooted in music and visual art: In addition to the intriguing sounds she makes as L’Rain, she is a highly respected curator who helped put together the film and performance program for the just-opened 2024 Whitney Biennial.
L’Rain’s most recent album, I Killed Your Dog, arrived last year to rave reviews that often noted the sense of humor underlying her musique concrète collages. “The result is one of the year’s slipperiest delights, constantly evading grasp, like a joke from a dream you can’t remember,” critic Clayton Purdom wrote when Rolling Stone named it one of 2023’s best albums.
The crowd filled the cavernous main room at Knockdown Center, which once served as a glass factory that manufactured marbles before relaunching a decade ago as an arts space and concert venue.
Reflecting on the start of her career in late-2000s Brooklyn, Cheek recently told Rolling Stone’s Jon Blistein, “Those early years really made me think about what I was feeling when I would go to see performances. I would think a lot about openers as they relate to the headliner, why someone would choose that, or how the audience behaves differently.”
“I believe if we really let artists lead, they’ll lead us somewhere good,” Cheek added in the same interview. “The biggest central tension I feel as an art worker is being in the middle of extremely radical ideas, thoughts, and critiques, and people that uphold all the things those ideas, thoughts, and critiques want to dismantle.”
In between mainstage performances, attendees could wander to a side room where even stranger sounds were emerging. At one point, guitarist Bill Nace (who collaborates with Gordon in the band Body/Head) and singer-songwriter Circuit des Yeux joined for a duo performance where otherworldly moans summoned the atmosphere of an abandoned spaceship.
Kim Gordon recently told Rolling Stone that singer and cellist Kelsey Lu, whom she handpicked as her opening act for this show, is one of her favorite young musicians.
Lu began their performance completely solo, draped in a black hood that hid them from view. Standing solemnly at the cello, they layered high, keening cello notes over low, guttural ones.
After that introduction, Lu pulled off the hood and smiled. “My name is Kelsey Lu, and tonight is a very special night because we’re all here,” they told the crowd. “We’re alive and we can share in this together. So it’s special, because not everyone can.”
Lu proceeded to play a set of skillfully sculpted avant-garde pop, joined by “a really cute band that I put together especially for tonight” including musicians on harp, cello, bass, and a laptop.
“I first met Kim a long time ago in L.A.,” Lu recalled. “I was performing at a Dublab event. She came up to me afterwards and gave me some compliments. My friend was like, ‘You know that was Kim Gordon?’ I was like, ‘I didn’t! And that’s so cool!’ And now fast forward, and here we are. “
Lu’s set included some of the songs that have helped attract a cult audience, like 2018’s “Shades of Blue,” about a bad romance that left them feeling like “a chess piece.” “I’m not over you, not over you,” they sang in rich, textured tones. “But I’m over feeling shades of blue.”
Their set also included two new songs, with one featuring accusatory lyrics (“I disagree with the way that you loved me”) and jumpy, skittering beats — raising hopes for their first studio album since 2019’s Blood.
Between songs, Lu talked about facing down moments of creative doubt, and said how good it felt to connect with the crowd in the room: “This is why we do this.”
Gordon has lived in her hometown of Los Angeles for most of the past decade, but she began her career in New York, and there was a special resonance to this tour stop. “Thanks for coming out on this great New York night,” she told the thousands of fans who’d braved a rainy Saturday to see her.
Many of the songs on The Collective have an eerie industrial-club sound, thanks to Gordon’s close collaboration with producer Justin Raisen. Onstage, she gave those songs a thrilling rock twist, performing with a tight band of young musicians: Madi Vogt on drums, Sarah Register on guitar and keys, and Camilla Charlesworth on bass and keys.
Guitarist Sarah Register flashed a grin as Gordon threw herself around the stage to the noise they were making together.
Gordon opened her set with “BYE BYE,” the first song on The Collective, in which she proves something fans have known for years: She could read the phone book or a grocery list (or, in this case, a tally of items to pack for a trip) and make it sound cool.
She went on to perform all of The Collective in order. The album’s track list doubled as a compelling live set, shimmying through the dislocated groove of “I Don’t Miss My Mind” and building to a huge, crashing peak on “I’m a Man.”
Gordon was a restless, kinetic star, moving to the hard-edged rhythms played by drummer Madi Vogt as Exploding Plastic Inevitable-style video images were projected on a screen behind them.
Bomblike bursts of noise punctuated “It’s Dark Inside,” where Gordon sang about violence and politics in her mysterious monotone. After the song, she made it clear where she stood with an unambiguous statement against the war: “Ceasefire. Right fucking now.”
Bass player Camilla Charlesworth’s locked-in performance was a highlight in Gordon’s backing band, as the set continued through the clattering beats of “Tree House” and the haunted, sensual mood of “Shelf Warmer.”
After playing all of The Collective, Gordon returned to the stage for an encore of songs from her 2019 solo album No Home Record, kneeling to the ground to call up a wave of feedback in “Cookie Butter.”
Gordon ended the night with a second performance of “BYE BYE” that was even louder and more transgressive than the one that opened the show. Performing your single twice in one set is the kind of flex only an artist who’s very sure of themselves can pull off — of course she could. It was the perfect sendoff for a show that reminded the crowd they were in the presence of an icon.