Music

Listen to 8 airy, cumulous songs (keeping in mind that not all ambient music sounds like this).Never miss a chance to experience Laraaji’s sonic opalescence.Balarama Heller for The New York TimesDear listeners,In times when I need to tune out the busy exterior world and tune into my own subconscious, I turn to ambient music.I have read entire novels — on rush-hour subway commutes, no less! — thanks to the dulcet tones of Laraaji. I retained (most of) my sanity when a new apartment building was going up across the street because of the textured, hypnotic drones of Bitchin Bajas. I have written more articles to the placid soundtrack of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” than I can possibly count.Ambient music — a vast and nebulous genre that I’d very loosely define as wordless music that focuses more on atmosphere and tone than on rhythm and melody — has had a surprising and somewhat controversial uptick in popularity in the past decade. It became a common method for quelling anxiety during lockdown, but even before the pandemic it had become something of an ever-present millennial commodity, in the form of endless streaming playlists advertised to help one study, work or just chill.The Canadian experimental musician Tim Hecker called ambient music “the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” in a recent Times profile by Grayson Haver Currin. His reason? “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world,” he said. “They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”Hecker is definitely on to something. In the streaming era, ambient music has too often been branded as yet another tool for hyper-capitalist optimization — either a way of focusing more deeply at work or relaxing more deeply in order to return to work recharged and ready to be more productive. The actual artistry involved in composing such music, at least according to this viewpoint, is woefully beside the point.In fall 2020, when I had the delight of interviewing the ambient pioneer and perpetual crossword answer Eno, he recalled composing his earliest works of what he called “Discreet Music” in the late 1970s, and voiced reservations similar to Hecker’s. “When I started making ambient music,” he said, “I was very conscious that I wanted to make functional music. At that time, functional music was almost exclusively identified with Muzak — it had a very bad rap. Artists weren’t supposed to make functional music. So, I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t they?’”I appreciate Eno’s challenge that artistry and functionality don’t have to be mutually exclusive. When he considered how he used music in his own life, he realized, “Well, I use it to make a space that I want to live in.” Sometimes that desired atmosphere was kinetic and upbeat, so he’d listen to Fela Kuti all day. Other times, he preferred slow orchestral music. “I started to think, I imagine a lot of other people are doing this as well,” he said. “Ambient was really a way of saying, ‘I’m now designing musical experiences.’ The emphasis was on saying, ‘Here is a space, an atmosphere, that you can enter and leave as you wish.’”In that spirit, today’s playlist is a space that you can enter and leave as you wish. I designed it to be airy, tranquil and cumulous, like a house of drifting clouds illuminated by slashes of sunbeams. Of course, not all ambient music sounds like this. (I love Hecker’s music, for example, but much of it features evocatively woolly textures and a general sense of foreboding that would have felt out of place here.) I tried to find a unifying harmony in the feelings and tones that all of these songs conjure, and, though they’re all very different artists, I found that Julianna Barwick’s heavenly vocal tapestries, Laraaji’s sonic opalescence and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s burbling electronics worked exceptionally well together.Many of these songs have existed in my own life as “functional music,” as Eno calls it, but not just in the soulless “Music for Productivity” sense that Hecker rightly bemoans. I have used some of these songs, time and again, to slow down and daydream. I used a few of them on a playlist at a friend’s wedding that I D.J.ed, for those liminal but still sacred moments when the guests were arriving. I tested this exact playlist earlier this week on a noisy New Jersey Transit train, and it gave me enough mental elbow room to get lost in Annie Ernaux’s gorgeous and immersive novel “The Years.” May this music find its own unique and gloriously unproductive function in your life.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Laraaji: “Trance Celestial — Movement 3”A gently luminous slice of bliss from the prolific New Age legend and laughter enthusiast’s 1983 composition “Trance Celestial.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Julianna Barwick: “Envelop”To create the songs on her magnificent 2011 album, “The Magic Place,” Barwick wove layer upon layer of ethereal vocal loops into intricate symphonies of breath. (Listen on YouTube)3. Harold Budd and Brian Eno: “An Arc of Doves”In 1980, for the second album in his Ambient series, Eno teamed up with the Minimalist composer Harold Budd for the evocative “The Plateaux of Mirror.” On “An Arc of Doves,” Budd’s improvised clusters of piano notes glide along the marbled surfaces of Eno’s electronics. (Listen on YouTube)4. Hiroshi Yoshimura: “Feel”A pioneer of Japanese ambient music, Yoshimura’s “Feel,” from his landmark 1986 album “Green,” uses synthetic sounds to construct an otherworldly landscape. (Listen on YouTube)5. Laraaji: “Trance Celestial — Movement 4”Back to the celestial trance already in progress. I love the rippling effect Laraaji achieves here. (Listen on YouTube)6. Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena: “Hundred Dollar Hoagie”Though its title is charmingly down-to-earth, the harpist (and, here, synth wizard) Mary Lattimore’s 2022 collaboration with the guitarist Paul Sukeena sounds like a warped transmission from a distant galaxy. (Listen on YouTube)7. Bitchin Bajas: “Pieces of Tape”The adventurous Chicago group Bitchin Bajas create soundscapes of all sorts of tones and textures, but here, on a nearly 10-minute composition from their 2014 self-titled album, they sound like warm-blooded aliens. (Listen on YouTube)8. Brian Eno: “2/2”I just had to include something from “Music for Airports.” Ken Emerson’s 1979 New York Times review of the album is an illuminating time capsule, too. As he concludes, “if it were ever actually piped over the p.a. system at LaGuardia, travelers would either ignore it — or miss their flights.” (Listen on YouTube)Wordlessly,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Ambient Playlist to Create a Bubble of Tranquillity” track listTrack 1: Laraaji, “Trance Celestial — Movement 3”Track 2: Julianna Barwick, “Envelop”Track 3: Harold Budd and Brian Eno, “An Arc of Doves”Track 4: Hiroshi Yoshimura, “Feel”Track 5: Laraaji, “Trance Celestial — Movement 4”Track 6: Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, “Hundred Dollar Hoagie”Track 7: Bitchin Bajas, “Pieces of Tape”Track 8: Brian Eno, “2/2”Bonus tracksJon Pareles’s radiant profile of the 79-year-old Laraaji, from earlier this year, is a must-read.So is Isabelia Herrera’s poignant and beautifully descriptive essay from last year, about how ambient music helped her relinquish control after her mother had a stroke. “In its call to suspend time,” she writes, “the music carries the potential to press pause on the punishing velocity that attends disaster, that robs our attention and predetermines a fixed future.”And I cannot mention Annie Ernaux without also pointing you toward the great Rachel Cusk’s definitive piece on the recent Nobel Laureate.Plus, as always, check out the Playlist for the latest song recommendations. This week, we have new tracks from Blur, Bad Bunny, Anohni and the Johnsons, and more. More

The 76-year-old performer canceled a Saturday performance in Charleston, S.C., for unspecified health reasons. He had resumed touring this year after canceling a series of shows in October.Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter who has built a lucrative lifestyle empire on the basis of beach-bum anthems like “Margaritaville” and “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” canceled a show scheduled for Saturday in Charleston, S.C., after he was hospitalized for an unspecified illness.Mr. Buffett, 76, said in a statement on Thursday that he had a “sudden change of plans this week” after returning from a trip to the Bahamas.“I had to stop in Boston for a checkup but wound up back in the hospital to address some issues that needed immediate attention,” he said. “Growing old is not for sissies, I promise you.”Mr. Buffett said that he would perform again when he is “well enough.”A representative for Mr. Buffett responded to a request for information about his condition by referring to his statement and declined to comment further.It was unclear on Friday how long Mr. Buffett would refrain from performing. There were no events listed on his tour page, which told Parrotheads, as Mr. Buffett’s fans call themselves, to “stay tuned” for upcoming show announcements.Nick Pezzorello, the president of a Charleston-based Jimmy Buffett fan club, said that the Lowcountry Parrothead Club wished Mr. Buffett a “speedy recovery” so that his fans “may enjoy and celebrate his music and lifestyle for many more years to come.”“We will anxiously await his return to the Holy City,” Mr. Pezzorello said, referring to Charleston.It was the second time in seven months that Mr. Buffett has had to reschedule shows because of his health. Citing “health issues and brief hospitalization” in September, Mr. Buffett canceled five shows that had been planned in Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City and Nampa, Idaho, in October.“On doctor’s orders, he must take this time to recuperate and heal,” an announcement on Mr. Buffett’s website said in September.Mr. Buffett was soon back on the road, performing monthly since February. He rescheduled and performed two shows in Las Vegas in March and one in San Diego in early May. He also played in Key West, Fla., and Phoenix.Last month, his hit “Margaritaville” from the 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” was among 25 recordings that were added to the National Recording Registry.The registry, which is part of the Library of Congress, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and “worthy of preservation for all time.”When “Margaritaville” was released, the song stayed on the sales charts for months, “scoring with pop and country audiences alike, as well as teenagers and adults,” the Library of Congress said in a statement in April.The song celebrates a life of sunny leisure and frozen drinks, from the opening lines, “nibblin’ on sponge cake, watchin’ the sun bake,” to its earworm refrain, “wastin’ away in Margaritaville, searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt.”“Today, its lyrics are as memorized as any song in history,” the Library of Congress said, adding that the song is “as well known and omnipresent as ever — a regular component of bars, beach parties, karaoke and any place cool vibes are required.” More

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More

12:30 p.m.
Follow the grill smoke to the river
Puerto Madero, a redeveloped dockside neighborhood about a 10-minute walk from San Telmo, has become one of the busiest tourist destinations in the city, thanks to landmarks like Puente de la Mujer, a sleek pedestrian bridge designed by the renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, and the ARA Presidente Sarmiento, a museum ship that bobs on the Rio Darsena Sur river next to a long line of loud, packed restaurants. Less than half a mile farther along the river, away from the crowd, is Estilo Campo, a fantastic parrilla (an Argentine steakhouse, which literally means open grill) with river views and waiters wearing kerchiefs and belts in the style of gauchos, to the delight of tourists. But the expertly prepared chorizo, crispy sweetbreads and juicy skirt steak leave no doubt that you are in an authentic Argentine parrilla, and the wine list is expansive. Lunch for two, about 18,000 pesos. More

Forests, a band from Singapore, ended its tour in New York in high spirits, two weeks after being robbed in California.The band, Forests, did not miss a show.ForestsAn international rock band’s first U.S. tour is a moment to be celebrated, a sign that years of hard work have paid off. But just a few days into their American debut, the members of Forests, an emo rock band from Singapore, endured another rite of passage for some musicians traveling the United States when they stopped for the night at a California hotel.When they returned to their rental van a few hours later, they realized they’d been robbed.“In Singapore I kind of made a joke about it, like, oh, you know, your band is only legit if your stuff got stolen,” said Darell Laser, 36, the bassist. “Then it really happened.”Forests and the Oklahoma band they were touring with, Ben Quad, are hardly the first musicians to be robbed while on tour in America. (In 1999, Sonic Youth famously lost an entire truck’s worth of gear to a thief, also in California.) But the experience was still a shock for a band from a country as safe as Singapore.“It was the worst luck ever,” said Chris Martinez, 29, a Forests fan from San Diego who discovered the band years ago on a business trip to Singapore.The robbery prompted an outpouring of concern from both bands’ fans, and more than $9,000 in donations allowed them to buy replacement instruments. They did not miss a show, and they ended their tour in high spirits with a sold-out concert at a bar in Queens on Tuesday.“They seem to have moved past it,” said Mr. Martinez, who donated $200 to the bands’ crowdfunding campaign after learning of the robbery. “Keeping a positive attitude and trying not to let it bring them down.”Forests and Ben Quad had some instruments, along with other goods, stolen from their parked rental van while they were sleeping in a hotel after a show. ForestsThe May 1 robbery made for a surreal early leg of a cross-country tour — entitled “Get in losers, we’re going to Walmart” — that Forests had spent months planning and years looking forward to. It happened a few days after their tour began in Seattle and a few hours after their gig in Oakland.When the tired musicians from the two bands straggled into a Hampton Inn in Hayward, Calif., at about 1:30 a.m., they left their gear in the 15-passenger rental van they were sharing for the tour. They parked next to a security camera as a precaution, but it didn’t help: When they returned to the parking lot after 11 a.m., they noticed that some of their guitars, a bass, pedals, clothing and a box with cash from merchandise sales had been stolen.The theft was the latest in an area of California where property crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins are on the rise. The hotel management told the bands that its security footage did not show a theft. A location tag on one instrument appeared to show that the stolen gear had been taken to an Oakland apartment building, but the police said there was no easy way to get it back.“The cops told us, ‘Hey, there’s nothing we can do unless it ends up in a pawnshop,’” said Edgar Viveros, 27, Ben Quad’s lead guitarist. The pawnshops they called said that it had not.Instead of canceling the tour, the bands decided to play on with borrowed gear. They also set up a crowdfunding page and were surprised to see how quickly donations rolled in — $6,000 in about four hours.The robbery was “kinda heartbreaking,” Imre Griga, 23, a fan in Columbia, Mo., who attended three of the bands’ tour dates this month, said in an email. “I think the entire community felt Forests deserved much better for their first tour in America.”Within a few days, members of both bands were playing with new instruments. They went a little longer without the pedal board that Ben Quad typically uses to play samples, like the theme from an “Austin Powers” movie, between sets. But a replacement for that, too, was eventually found.Forests first played with borrowed instruments after the theft, then bought replacements after fans donated more than $9,000.ForestsBack home in Singapore, the story of the robbery, and the fan support, made headlines. Some readers commented about their own experiences of getting robbed in the United States. Others wondered how the three members of Forests, who all have day jobs and tour on their vacations, could have been so naïve.For Forests, it was not their first international tour: They have performed across the Asia-Pacific region over the years. But on their first tour of America, they loved watching the landscape — deserts, trees, snowy mountains — whip past the van’s windows.They also kept a list of “crazy things” they had seen, like people fighting in convenience stores, or the woman in Seattle who threw her luggage down three flights of stairs in a subway station. The band’s drummer, Niki Koh, 31, said he particularly enjoyed visiting a store that sold guns, knives and hunting gear — “ everything that we won’t find in Singapore.”“It’s culture shock,” he said, speaking in a video interview from Kansas City. “But at the same time, it’s very interesting.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe fifth Jessie Ware album, “That! Feels Good!,” is a robust, richly sung neo-disco manifesto, among the most vibrant music the singer has released. It marks a solidification of Ware’s second phase, following her early years making restrained club-soul and adult-contemporary R&B.This second phase was made possible at least in part by the success of “Table Manners,” the podcast she hosts with her mother, which has become central to Ware’s public flowering as a relatable celebrity. Now, she is making music that’s playful and untethered, but just as crisply delivered as ever.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about midcareer sonic switches, the importance of fantasy in music making, and how freedom outside of one’s music career can lead to liberation within it.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times and writer of The Amplifier newsletterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

In some ways, turning the movie “Titanic” into a farce about climate change makes a lot of narrative sense. Instead of an iceberg — which has melted, of course — the ship goes down because it hits a mountain of underwater garbage.In other ways, “Titanic Depression,” a new multimedia performance, could only have come from the madcap brain of Dynasty Handbag, the queer vaudevillian with punk origins and questionable taste in unitards.The 1997 movie was a blockbuster, sure, but Dynasty Handbag’s vision may be even more epic than James Cameron’s. Clad mostly in frilly underwear, with a recalcitrant therapist on speed-text, she’s a bawdy version of Rose (Kate Winslet’s character in the movie). Jack, the Leonardo DiCaprio love interest, is played by an octopus, who sneaks aboard the vessel disguised as a fanciful hat. Billy Zane’s villainous snob is replaced by a dildo in a black loafer. A camel and a microscopic tardigrade make cameos. Mark Zuckerberg is there. The whole thing is a metaphor about the seeming futility of fighting industrial capitalism and impending environmental doom, but it is also: a hilarious romp! A sexcapade, with consent forms! A self-own, with a pause for meditation — about death! And Dynasty Handbag, the alter ego of the artist Jibz Cameron, inhabits all the parts.Cameron, 48, has been working various stages in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles as Dynasty Handbag for over 20 years, building a fan base both at august cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at underground freak spectaculars.Jibz Cameron as Dynasty Handbag, in rehearsals. The project “just kept getting more money and more attention,” she said. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times“Jibz is able to address all kinds of issues — whether it’s body dysmorphia or childhood trauma or climate change — with the most hysterical absurdity and in ways that you would never expect,” said Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at the Broad in Los Angeles, which programmed and commissioned her work. “She’s a great performer, in that you never see her rehearsals — it looks completely spontaneous.”“Weirdo Night,” her popular, long-running monthly variety show in Los Angeles, which she summed up as a “live ‘Muppet Show’ meets demented queer ‘Star Search,’” has become a Mecca for the surreal. “The ‘Weirdo Night’ community is freak church and Dynasty Handbag is the weirdo priest,” said Sarah Sherman, the breakout “Saturday Night Live” star, who has performed there. (The series was the subject of a well-received 2021 Sundance documentary.)“Titanic Depression,” which was commissioned by the Brooklyn cultural venue Pioneer Works in 2017 and will premiere there on Saturday and Sunday, is Cameron’s most ambitious and multidisciplinary project yet; it involves animation, video, soundscapes, singing, history and dance. It arrives on the heels of her Guggenheim Fellowship, a lot for an artist who refers to her crew as “dirtbag queers.”As her vision for “Titanic” grew, “it just kept getting more money and more attention,” Cameron said, with an avant-gardist’s note of surprise. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”“What keeps it fresh for me is knowing that I can just make myself something to do, if I want to do it,” she added, on a break from rehearsals near her home in Los Angeles last week, in a studio where she also takes punk aerobics. “I definitely trust that it is what it wants to be.”Her instincts are being recognized all over: She will have visual art in “Made in L.A.,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial this fall; a comedy album, on the artist Seth Bogart’s Wacky Wacko label, is also forthcoming.But even among performance artists — not exactly a conformist bunch — Cameron’s alchemy of comedy, art, music, theater and fashion stands out for actually delivering on its lunacy.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that he and his wife, Tanya Haden, “were completely blown away” when they first saw Dynasty Handbag. “We were laughing uncontrollably,” he wrote in an email. “It felt like a hallucinogenic experience.” Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWith a sharp jawline, an askew wig and features that contort into a bouquet of disdain, Cameron plays Dynasty as an alternate-universe star, whose aesthetic is “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” crossed with a minor ’80s Aaron Spelling crime drama (lately she’s been partial to “Hart to Hart”), “but covered in goo, and a lesbian,” she said.One of those inspirations, Paul Reubens — Pee-wee Herman himself — was impressed by her character work. “To a certain degree, she seems kind of undefinable,” he said. “You have to see it; you can’t explain it very well. And that in itself seems like an incredible thing to have going for yourself.”The show, originally developed with the artist and technologist Sue-C, and presented as part of the New York Live Arts festival Planet Justice, is performed with a video backdrop; our heroine is live onstage, and everyone else is animated, mostly from Cameron’s own drawings, and sometimes with her face.At a recent rehearsal in Brooklyn, Cameron and a team of her collaborators — including her co-writer Amanda Verwey, and the visual director, Mariah Garnett, who is Cameron’s romantic partner — were working through a scene. À la Rose and Jack, Dynasty trails the octopus through gilded-age state rooms — generated partly by Dall-E, the image A.I., because, Cameron explained, that makes them visibly off-kilter, like Dynasty herself. In the bowels of the ship, they find a throbbing dance party. (Cue techno beats, not fiddle.) Cameron choreographed a wiggly duet with her cephalopod lover.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that when he and his wife first saw Dynasty Handbag, it “felt like a hallucinogenic experience.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesA lot of the hourlong show is this loopy, until it gets to what David Everitt Howe, the Pioneer Works curator who commissioned the project, called “the bonkers death sequence.” A literal meditation, it underscores how consumerist greed led to the tragedy then, and to the vast trouble we’re in now.“It was such a tonal shift,” he said. “It’s dark. I remember I laughed uncomfortably, but I think it’s powerful, too. It makes the silliness stronger.”Jibra’ila Cameron, known as Jibz since childhood, grew up scrappy and poor in Northern California, with glimpses of creative freedom. A performing arts summer camp run by Wavy Gravy, the hippie clown and a friend of her parents, “totally saved my life as a kid,” she said.Her family life was volatile, though, and she left home at 15 or so, bumming around the Bay Area. Though she hadn’t graduated from high school, she was accepted at the San Francisco Art Institute on the strength of some Edward Gorey-style comics she drew. There, she was introduced to performance art and began making videos and joined bands. “I would just kind of freak out onstage, play the keyboard,” she said. (One of the groups was an all-female post-punk act called Dynasty; when it split up, she kept the name, tacking on Handbag — “I always thought the word handbag was really funny.”)“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” Cameron said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLater, hoping to become an actor, she studied at a theater conservatory. She had already embodied Dynasty Handbag, who debuted at Ladyfest in San Francisco in 2002, and her look remains remarkably the same: a misguided take on femininity, a studied failure of aesthetics. “She’s wearing tights, but they’re underneath a bathing suit,” Everitt Howe noted. “It’s all layered wrong.”Her quixotic clarity has influenced a younger generation of artists, like Sherman. “Jibz gave me the best piece of advice ever — after seeing me perform with all my props and costumes and gadgets and gizmos, she said, ‘You don’t need to WORK so hard, you’re funny! You’re ENOUGH!’” Sherman wrote. “I really took that to heart.”Cameron is not related to the “Titanic” director James Cameron, but he’s in the show, alongside industrialists like Benjamin Guggenheim, who “made his money in the mining and smelting businesses,” Dynasty Handbag says, punctuating her monologue about him with fart and bomb sounds. The disembodied voice of Guggenheim, who actually died aboard the Titanic, responds: “How dare you, I gave you a Guggenheim in 2022 and you wouldn’t be making this ridiculous show without me!”Cameron was still working out the ending for “Titanic Depression” last week, conjuring a moment out of a discarded plastic straw, a Lou Reed song and a gown made of garbage.“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” she told her crew. “People make music no matter where they are, what socioeconomic class. I get to come out in my showstopper outfit — that’s the showbiz part I really like. And then it gets weird.” More