The National's Dessner Twins Play Ball With 'The Long Count'

Posted on Oct 12th 2009 11:00AM by Benjy Eisen
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On Halloween weekend, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host a spirited multimedia collaboration between twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (the National), twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal (the Breeders) and visual artist Matthew Ritchie. The National's lead singer, Matt Berninger, and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden are also involved. The performance piece, entitled 'The Long Count,' is the result of more than a year of work by the Dessners' and Ritchie, and somehow ties the Mayan creation myth in with a story of twin brothers who play baseball.

For the Dessner twins, the plot elements hit close to home. "The Cincinnati Reds are an important part of our own mythology," Bryce tells Spinner. "We were born on April 23, 1976 in Cincinnati at the height of the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds dynasty that won back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976. The Reds beat the Yankees in 1976 when we were 6 months old. We were obsessive baseball card collectors and players growing up and we grew up in the shadow of those great teams."

The twins ended up pawning most of their cards when they were 18 in order to fund another obsession -- music. But, of course, their love of baseball was no worse for the wear. When they first began to compose music for 'The Long Count,' Aaron sketched a piece entitled 'Big Red Machine' that features an irregular, mixed-meter piano rhythm and unusual chord changes. "He sent it to Justin Vernon [Bon Iver] on a whim and Justin fell in love with it and managed to write this beautiful haunting song to it," says Bryce. That track actually ended up being used by the Dessners on another project of theirs, the 'Dark Was the Night' compilation, and hence didn't make it into 'The Long Count.' Nonetheless, says Bryce, "audio from the final game of the 1976 World Series between the Reds and the Yankees is featured in an abstract way, and somehow baseball is there as a thread connecting all of this music to us."

The performances will take place Oct. 28, 30 and 31 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. We're still not sure how the Mayan myth plays into all of this, but we do know that after watching a beta test of the show, National drummer Bryan Devendorf told his bandmates that they had "reinvented goth." Sounds spooky. Like, you know, just the sort of thing Brooklynites would want to see on Halloween. As far as we know, candy corn isn't included.