Brooklyn Audience Experiences Jerry Paper

Jerry Paper live by photo by Kali Bush-Vineberg

Brooklyn – I’ve known Lucas Nathan, the human body inhabited by the spiritual entity called Jerry Paper, since he was making sci-fi-influenced instrumental ambient music under his birth name. He’s come a very long way since then, evolving into an alternate universe Tom Jones, a sweaty lounge act in the outer space equivalent of Las Vegas. His retro-futuristic cyber-pop took corporeal form in Bushwick’s Palisades on a cold night in February for an Ad Hoc-presented show.

The show began with Nathan performing a sound check in street clothes, and then announcing “I’ll be right back” and disappearing backstage. He returned a few moments later wearing a blue silk kimono, his signature plastic Casio watch, and no shoes, just tan tube socks. He then performed selections from his most recent albums, Big Pop for Chameleon World and Feels Emotions, and the upcoming Carousel.

The Jerry Paper project explores “direct experience”— the mystical phenomenon “that some of what you gain through sensory perception can’t be expressed linguistically.” This manifests in a live experience where Jerry Paper appears as a sort of low-rent New Age guru, working to convey his conception of spirituality via chintzy synth presets. The effect is uncanny in the Freudian sense, like the memory of something you’ve seen before, but sadder and weirder and more desperate. Alone onstage (he sings over prerecorded backing tracks) and bathed in a purple spotlight, he’s like something out of a David Lynch movie or an Andy Kaufman character. Jerry Paper is sad and funny and satiric and sincere all at once.

There’s an archness to the project, but Lucas Nathan-as-Jerry Paper is fully committed to the performance. He scrunches up his face and twists his mouth into uncomfortable shapes in order to achieve the glum lounge voice he sings in. He rolls his eyes at the ceiling. He waves his arms and stomps back and forth and acts out the synth parts with shoo-fly flicks of his hands. It’s as much an interpretive dance performance as it is a musical one.

All of the sounds Jerry Paper uses are cheesy synth imitations of real instruments. There are synth saxophones, synth violins, synth tablas. The songs are like karaoke versions of real songs, or if the fake trumpet solo from Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love” achieved sentience and began a solo career. Again, it’s uncanny in the Freudian sense. The instruments are strange imitations of the real thing, recognizable as supposed to be saxophones or violins, but not quite getting it right. Jerry Paper’s stage presence is like this too. He performs like the idea of a mid-1960s masculine sex symbol pop star, but wrong. “Today Was A Bad Day” has a slow tempo and downcast melody that signifies a ballad about romantic heartbreak, but the lyrics are about slapstick misfortunes, like slipping on a banana peel and falling down the stairs into a tub of piranhas. His new single “Destroy” uses a Bacharach-ian harpsichord sound, but is about dismantling systems of hate and violence and corruption. The album it’s from, Carousel, will be Jerry Paper’s third in a year. He must be a cyborg; humans aren’t that prolific.

Carousel is out March 31 on Bayonet Records; and Big Pop for Chameleon World and Feels Emotions are available on Bandcamp.

Jerry Paper has a handful of upcoming dates in a number of different places, including the Festival Nrmal in Mexico City on February 28.

Photo: Jerry Paper live by Kali Bush-Vineberg

Liam Mathews

Liam Mathews

Liam grew up in Rosendale, NY, a little town in the Hudson Valley. Now he lives in Brooklyn. He has a degree in nonfiction writing from The New School. He mostly writes about music, comedy, and style, but he can write about a lot of things. He's written for Playboy, Fast Company, Nerve, and a lot of other places. He's real good at Twitter.
Liam Mathews