Is Something Wrong?
22 April 2026
In House on Fire trio’s biggest commission yet in Greg Saunier, a packed house and eager audience hip to the music of Deerhoof had high expectations and little insight to what would happen next. It’s easy to say that they got exactly what they wanted and much more – an otherworldly trip to another dimension not even Sun Ra could dream up.
Greg Saunier and Curt Sydnor set the mood early on with a psychedelic poem to introduce their duo of “Bach Artillerie”, a type of music so inventive I can only imagine future historians to coin as hyper-bach or post-bach, a galactic exploration of twisted baroque counterpoint through the vehicle of free improv drum set and organ and bass synthesizers. To make matters even more entertaining, Curt accidentally switched one of his synths to monophonic mode in the middle of the set, to which Greg adapted in real time to lean into the glitchy and granular nature of it all.
After a brief intermission, Richard An of House on Fire introduced the second half with Samuel Adam’s “Impromptus: II”, a Schubert-esque (but again, not quite) solo piano piece, filled with lush rolling sounds with delayed cadences and strange interruptions, truly the calm before the storm.
“one day i can accept love in my heart and not vomit”
”one day i can accept your death in my heart and i won’t vomit”
”my baby is sick but we keep on dancing”
So how can things get even weirder?
Well here comes the 35-min dystopian masterpiece “Is Something Wrong?” co-written by Greg Saunier and Sophie Daws – things were so wrong but they felt so eerily familiar. Sophie’s stage presence and confidence to deliver her strange text was a real highlight. Every word, movement, twerk, every twitch of a facial muscle was dialed in to reflect the disconnect and depression we face daily in the digital age, with the threat of poverty, global warming, and artificial intelligence looming over us all. A new era of oppression, a clinical outpour of algorithms where our brains our trained to switch between brain rot, influencer marketing, and videos of genocide at neck breaking speeds. At one point she started doing jump jacks. And behind the madness of text and movement was a fierce performance of piano four-hands with Andrew Anderson and Wells Leng, with Richard situated on a boisterous set up of triangle, hi-hat, and bass drum – things one would find in a high school band room. With choppy stubborn mixed-meter chords akin to Stravinsky packaged into a theater piece like Cage, this premier was nothing short of mind blowing, a mirage of what life under late-stage capitalism feels like in the imperial core. “Is Something Wrong?” truly makes us wonder where we place value in our lives and lead us to examine the important contradictions we will soon face together.
Simply put, this night took me out of the context of time itself, as if I were an alien historian deciphering the codes of humanity, sifting through the artifacts of Bach, Schubert, Cage, or Sun Ra. I guess life in the year 2026 is truly an experience only a human could understand.
