[thank you.]
death is the last word of the proletarian drinking song
DEAD ANGEL is:
editor/tyrant for life/prime maggot: the moon unit [moonunit@eden.com]
assistant maggots: fuzzdoll, brain, yol, etc.
special adminstrative tyrant: the headless sno-cone girl
editorial rant : blabbing with brutal truth : a forgotten album : readable stuff : listenable stuff : watchable stuff : ephemera : next issue
Send piles o' $$$, vile rants, demos, music releases, press/label jazz, wild things in black rubber dresses, li'l miss no name dolls, Bliss Blood memorabilia, additions to the Shrine of Mineko, cryptic schizophrenic mumblings (long live the one Last Living Queen of Norway!), vile art, videos, truly obscure music, MONEY, cheesy guitar crap, etc., etc., TO:
email: moonunit@kdi.com
snail: RKF, 815-A Brazos St. # 515, Austin, TX 78701 (USA)
Miscellaneous note: The editorial We at DEAD ANGEL will review anything that moves as long as it ain't rap or country (they got their own big damn magazines and don't need my "help"). WE LIKE THE LITTLE PEOPLE. We are hep to obscurity and want the undeservedly obscure to become better known. By the way, we define "pop" along the lines of Spinanes and Angie Heaton's first album; we define "the Antichrist" as Mariah "yelp!" Carey and Alanis "shampoo? what's that?" Morrissette. We define "noise" as anything my wife tells me to shut off as soon as i start playing it....
Web location: http://www.kdi.com/~moonunit/dead/dead.html
Moon Unit Central is home to web pages extolling the virtues of Angel in Heavy Syrup, Band of Susans, L7, Null, Pain Teens, Shiva Speedway, and Skullflower, among other stuff (LOTS of other stuff). Find it at:
Moon Unit Central: http://www.kdi.com/~moonunit
I am obligated BY LAW to mention something about big-boned dominatrixes in black rubber dresses somewhere in the body of this document, so here it is: Big-boned dominatrixes in black rubber dresses make me all hot and BOTHERED and there's no helping the situation, okay?
Onward....
FIRST RULE: WHEN YOU SKI, YOU SKI, NOT PLAY FOOTBALL: Is it just me, or does the whole national tooth-gnashing and wailing over the premature death of yet another Kennedy (Michael this time -- you know, the shtupper of young babysitters) seem a bit ridiculous in light of the manner in which he died? I mean really, here we've got magazines and newspapers solemnly intoning that we've lost yet another one of the "best and brightest," and we're talking about a doofus whose main claims to fame are a) being born into a rich and highly overrated family and b) fucking 14-year old babysitters, a man who died while being exquisitely stupid enough to try playing football while skiing. Now, i don't ski -- i like all my bones remaining intact -- but even * i * know that when you ski, you're supposed to fucking SKI, not play FOOTBALL. How anybody can talk about his intelligence with a straight face after that is beyond me. (And don't tell me about how wonderful the guy was for heading some charity for the poor; he paid himself approximately $300,000 a year, so it just sounds like yet another Kennedy scam to moi.) It just never ceases to amaze me what dumb-ass things rich playboys will do next, you know? (Note: While Sonny Bono croaked in similar fashion just a few days later, he at least was actually skiing instead of doing something stupid, so i'll pass on dissing him. Besides, if Angel'in Heavy Syrup thought enough of him to cover "I Got You Babe" then he's all right by me.)
AND NOW, KARLA FAYE'S HEARTWARMING RENDITION OF "NEEDLES AND PINS": And now onto something even FUNNIER -- namely, the sight of George Bush Jr. trying to decide who he'd rather piss off, the religious right fanatics suddenly clamoring to save the born-again pickaxe killer Karla Faye Tucker (betcha never thought you'd live to see the day when Pat Robertson would be pleadin' to spare some poor li'l Death Row inmate, did ya?), or the "little people" (just a few million of them) who are waiting for Karla Faye to get the needle. And in an election year no less! Yee haw!
The media circus has become pretty amusing too. Everybody wants to horn in with his or her opinion, from all over the globe. Me, i find it kind of surreal that people from all over the world are taking up the cause of an admitted killer just because she suddenly got Jesus. Apparently we're not supposed to be terribly concerned about the fact that she hacked a guy to death with a pickaxe while he begged for his life, or that by her own admission she had an orgasm while doing it; now the shining light o' Jesus has changed EVERYTHING. Hoo hah! I'm sure the dead guy will be HAPPY to hear THAT....
A few points, then. One: The claim currently being repeated in the press (mostly out of NY, for some reason) that even the detective who put her away now wants to see her spared is, um, not to put too fine a point on it, utter bullshit. He keeps issuing hot denials and the press keeps printing what they want anyway. Two: GUYS on Death Row get Jesus every day and no one cares; they get the needle without much fanfare. So why the sudden uproar about croaking Karla Faye? Because she's not only (obviously) a woman, but an ATTRACTIVE woman, and suddenly everyone's gotten all squishy over it. (There are, incidentally, five other women on Death Row in Tejas awaiting the same fate. But you haven't heard about them, have you? No? You HAVEN'T? Guess it must be because they're not quite so attractive and don't have Karla Faye's press agent.) Which leads to.... Three: Hey, let's be fair here: if we're gonna smoke the MEN, it's only fair to smoke the WOMEN too. After all, isn't that gender equality is all about? Why should Karla Faye get off the hook just because she's a cute li'l cowgirl? (A cute li'l cowpoke who, crazed on speed and booze, hacked someone up, let's remember.)
Of course, one could make the argument that if we're going to shrivel up and wussy out on the subject of executing women, then maybe we shouldn't be executing ANYBODY -- and you know, i can sort of see the logic to that argument. Of course, it leaves out the fact that there is no such thing as life imprisonment in Tejas, which means sooner or later you'd have to let these death junkies back on the street, something i find less than totally reassuring (for that matter, life sentences are kind of a joke in a state where prison escapes are routine). Myself, i favor public stoning, but i'm a barbarian at heart. If -- IF -- the State of Texas could assure me that they would change to law to hold these people (and securely) for life rather than resorting to executions, THEN i might buy the idea... but until then, i'll be watching with interest to see if Karla Faye gets to be wheeled out of prison on a meat wagon. (And while we're on the subject of possibly commuting her sentence to life, it might be instructive to consider the case of one Kenneth McDuff, currently passing his days on Death Row waiting to see which will come first, his execution date or death from liver failure. McDuff originally went to prison in the sixties for kidnapping two teenage boys and the girl they were with and taking them out to a field where he shot the two boys and then raped the girl while strangling her with a broomstick. His original death sentence was commuted when the death penalty was briefly declared unconstitutional; he was paroled in the eighties and promptly went back to raping and strangling women, often while burning them with cigarettes and the like. The man is one of the most dangerous people in the Texas prison system and there's no question that if he were released more young women would "disappear." And yet some idjits would argue to spare his life, when what would really be fitting would be to chain him down to the floor and allow the parents of all his victims to slowly beat him to death with lead pipes. But this kind of thing is what happens when you commute the sentences of killers and eventually let them loose again. Think about that when you think about Karla Faye's sunbeam-for-Jesus act.)
Boy, aren't you glad you're not George Bush Jr. right now? To piss Pat Robertson off or not to piss Pat Robertson off, that is the question....
FOURTH RULE -- IS: MONICA, EAT KOSHER SALAMI: Aw, not AGAIN. When is Bill "Velcro Fly" Clinton ever going to learn that you don't shit where you eat? Gah... i was originally going to use this as an opportunity to gloat, but already the feeding frenzy in the media has turned so repulsive that i'm almost beginning to sympathizewith the guy. (But not quite.) Besides, i still can't tell where the spin is going -- every day now they drag out some new, hideous indiscretion with little or no support for it. While i'm pretty certain that Burger Bill did SOMETHING with Lewinsky, i'm not sure about much ELSE, so unlike the goons with the press passes, i think i'll wait until the dust settles a bit before i wade into this one.
Behold that which is Brutal Truth -- whirlwind guitar played at subhuman pitch, tempo shifts so dizzying that each album should come with its own supply of Dramamine, the train-wreck at the intersection of grind, death, jazz, industrial, avant, and a dozen other subgenres all crammed into a phone booth and heaved off a cliff. Brutal Truth are to grindcore what Sun Ra was to jazz (which explains them covering the man on their latest album, SOUNDS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM). They are currently on tour (off and on), but just before that i was able to discuss all things Brutal with their drummer, the esteemed Rich Hoak, who's also appeared on SMOKING SONGS with Exit-13. Here's the man, then....
DA: What's the connection between the new album and the Desmond Morris book THE NAKED APE?
RH: Kevin's song lyrics are attuned to the emotion and mood inherent in our music, based on the world he sees around him. After SOUNDS... was recorded, we had to go back and listen to our own music and discuss the lyrics and motives behind the music in order to get the concept for the title and cover. Many of the songs on SOTAK discuss the effects of the clash between the animal in man and man's rapidly advancing technology; much of the music has a primitive basis but is recorded with technical playing and advanced recording technology. The cover illustrates how these two ideas join together as a whole. Also the cover expresses sudden and intense emotion, similar to the sudden and intense emotion of the music on the cd. I spent a couple of weeks at the library trying to brainstorm a cover and came across THE NAKED APE, which I had read years ago in school. I realized Desmond Morris had a similar message to BT's and we decided to quote his book on our lyric sheet to give people some more information about what we're trying to express. Desmond Morris is a great writer and can express in words what we can only do in music.
Check out THE NAKED APE, THE HUMAN ZOO (Morris's comparison of an overcrowded city with a overcrowded animal cage in a zoo) and any of Desmond Morris' books really. They are pretty easy to find; I think most libraries have these books or can get them easily. Also, THE NAKED APE was made into a six-part BBC tv series with Morris' narration.
DA: I see that the lyrics this time around often focus on the dangers of commerce and its contribution to the process of deevolution -- would you like to elaborate on that message?
RH: Since the beginning, BT's lyrics have always stressed responsible individualism; on our new CD we elaborate a little: we see many problems in today's society resulting from humans (both as individuals and as a society) not coming to terms with the technology that their brains have created. We have allowed our technology to run rampant over the human animal and the results are dehumanization of the individual and the corruption of the natural and social environments.
DA: Given the lyrical thrust of the album, i'm curious as to what you make of the recent epileptic seizures of the stock market on Wall Street....
RH: We don't give a fuck about the stock market or Wall Street. If it crashes we will go on making music just the same. If the electricity stops, we will go out and make our music with sticks and stones.
DA: Is the track "4:20" from the new album inspired by John Cage's "4:33"?
RH: In the USA at the moment 4:20 is slang for "let's smoke pot!" We say "looks like the time is 4:20!" No one knows how this slang got started. We left this song as an empty space on the CD so the listeners could relax and prepare for the final brutal ending of the CD. [tmu: A wise idea, for the ending is indeed most gruesome in its brutality.]
DA: The opening collage bit that introduces "blue world" is amazing. How did that come about?
RH: Whenever I have some free time I go to visit my mom at her farm in the middle of Pennsylvania. We go to junk sales, flea markets, second-hand shops, etc., and I like to look for crazy record albums from the 50's 60's and 70's. The collage is built up from samples from some of these records: the ocean sound is from a 60's environmental sounds records, there is a Molly Hatchet sample, a Telly Savalas (Kojak) sample, a sample from the musical "Oliver" and a few others. Originally this bit was put together as a opening tape for the live show, but it worked so well, we decided to recreate it in the studio.
DA: I'm really impressed by the album's sound-- what sounds like controlled psychosis, for lack of a better term. How do you manage to harness that sound without having it melt into pure unbridled chaos?
RH: Well, Billy Anderson is a studio genius and technical wizard. Since we had already worked with him on KILL TREND SUICIDE (where the recording session was very rushed), we all knew what we wanted: to capture the live intensity of BT, raw power and totally in your face, and combine it with quality production with all frequencies and sounds at their ultimate. Billy is the kind of producer whom you can say to: "we want that kick drum to sound more 'uummphh'" and he can turn the correct knobs to make that happen. With sounds we had plenty of studio time to get the best instrument sounds and pay attention to the details.
DA: Even in a genre noted for extremity, you guys are pretty far out on a limb -- do you run into listeners who just don't get what you're about?
RH: Sometimes, though people who give our CD a good listen (maybe 2 or 3 times) usually catch on to what we are trying to do and say with our music. People who don't know about grind or any kind of extreme underground music can even catch on if they open their minds and listen carefully. I say to the uninitiated that our music is like some forms of jazz or classical: you need to listen to the music in context, study it and its form and you will understand that it isn't just noise or people playing as fast as they can.
DA: I would gather that Brutal Truth has some unusual influences for a death band -- which ones do you think people would find the most surprising?
RH: I think the most surprise for people is that we don't sit around and listen to only grind and death. Each member of Brutal Truth has various influences: Danny likes classical music, black metal, thrash, gothic, Kevin likes noise and underground hardcore punk and grind, Gurn likes metal and Stevie Ray Vaughn, I listen to underground hardcore punk, free form jazz, and old records that i buy at junk sales and flea markets. And these are not the only kinds of music that we listen to either! We have a short attention spans and are always searching out newer and more intense music to listen to.
DA: Do you agree with my contention that bands with influences and interests well outside their chosen genre generally produce more interesting work?
RH: Absolutely. By definition a band cannot be extreme if they play the exact same kind of music as 100 other bands. What is extreme if played by a few bands is generic if played by everyone. Even though a band may be basically grind or death or black or what ever, if they can add to that, they become more interesting, they are a little different.
DA: How did you end up covering Sun Ra's "it's after the end of the world"?
RH: Before we go to the studio to record, each member of BT picks a cover they'd like to do. Usually the covers don't end up on the CD; last time was when the Germs song was on NEED TO CONTROL (Kevin picked that one), usually covers end up as bonus tracks or on comps somewhere. I picked the Sun Ra cover, but it wasn't until after everything was recorded, we went back and listened and decided what would go where and the Sun Ra tune made both musical and thematic sense to be on the CD. Sun Ra did for jazz music what I can only hope BT might do for grind.
DA: One for Kevin -- tell me about your noise show at Bar Noisein Osaka a while back ago; i'm sure that was an interesting experience.
RH: Sorry, Kevin's job is to answer the snail mail and I just don't know the answer to this one.
DA: And one for Danny -- seeing as how i'm a huge fan of (sadly defunct) 13, can you tell me about playing with them and what that was like?
RH: I'll give this one a shot, since I played on the Exit-13 SMOKING SONGS CD: Exit-13 consists of Bill on vocals and Steve on guitar. Over the years they have borrowed musicians from many other bands (including Danny and myself from Brutal Truth) for various projects under the Exit-13 name from grind to jazz. Exit-13 was never a band that rehearsed, toured, etc., etc., but mostly a sort of series of studio projects; though there were some live shows they were all four-five years ago. It always rules playing with Exit- 13: Bill calls up, we go to the studio, smoke pot, record tunes. [tmu: I actually meant 13, the slow-as-fuck black-metal band from NYC led by Alicia Morgan, but hey, any band swank enough to invite Bliss Blood to sing on their disc is more than okay by me.]
DA: I would assume the band is still active in pursuing the legalization of a certain recreational pastime...?
RH: Of course!!! On SOUNDS there are two songs that address the hypocrisy of the marijuana laws: "postulate then liberate" and "promise." We find it ironic that in the USA one can buy a six-pack of beer and go driving into walls with little legal repercussions while having a joint will put you in jail.
DA: For that matter, what other political activism are you involved in?
RH: Brutal Truth is the main focus of our lives and our lives are our political activism. We refused long ago to accept the status quo of work, watch tv, sleep, buy cheap consumer goods because we want to fit in and then die. We try to spread our message and hopefully shake up a few people and maybe in the end it will do the globe some good. I guess we could do more, but playing music is what we do best and it's cool that we can spread some meaningful messages thru words and music.
DA: Any parting shots on life, death, music, politics, the state of the nation, or anything like that?
RH: No, we just want to say mega-thanks to all those fans of underground music who have supported BT over the years because it's those people who helped us to be able to do our thing. We are totally psyched about our new CD and will tour for most of 1998 in support of it. If you see that bt is playing come out and party with us!!!
To contact us:
Brutal Truth
70A Greenwich Avenue # 413
New York City, NY 10011 USA
(for reply send a self addressed stamped envelope or irc's)
Or email: rich666@voicenet.com to get on our email list for tour dates etc.
I know, i know -- you WANTED to forget this album. You WANTED to strike from your terrified memory the video of a big, sweaty Meat dueting with the eternally wide-eyed Betty-Boop clone Karla Devito (and just where IS she these days anyway, hmmm?). You wanted to never be reminded again of those lyrics -- pages and pages of ridiculous lyrics, really, you could read WAR AND PEACE in less time than it took to wade through a collection of Jim Steinman's ravings. (Given his penchant for overwhelming bombast, it's hardly surprising in retrospect that once he and Meat parted ways, he would hook up with the equally bombastic Andrew Eldritch -- the Meat Loaf of the eighties, really -- for the Sisters of Mercy epic "More.")
But here i am... bringing it up again. Cruel of me, isn't it?
Before i get into why this really isn't such an awful album after all, i should confess the horrible truth: Not only did i buy this when it came out, and not only do i now own it on CD, but i also bought all of his OTHER albums (even MIDNIGHT AT THE LOST AND FOUND, the one that finally got him dropped, since i was apparently the only one who did buy it). I even bought the exquisitely awful Jim Steinman solo album BAD FOR GOOD (it sounded like Meat Loaf with shittier vox, if you're wondering, only not as good). So it's obvious that i am not exactly on an even keel here....
But BAT OUT OF HELL is actually not a bad album at all. It IS a baroque masterpiece of camp, though. Everybody forgets that Meat Loaf first burst into the public consciousness in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW; imagine this album as a teenage fantasy extension of that and Meat Loaf shines in an entirely different context. You didn't really think he was serious, did you? I don't think so -- at least not on this album, anyway. I do think he started taking himself too seriously after this one sold more copies than there are starving babies in Rawanda, which might explain why subsequent releases sort of sucked. If you approach this album from the camp angle, it becomes infinitely more interesting.
The title track and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" are still great examples of overblown seventies excess (it must have been the coke) that still hold up even now. And "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," regardless of its nearly trite eternal-flame-o-luv theme, is still a great song. Ditto for "All Revved Up with No Place to Go," and "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth," both paeans to the misplaced romanticism of teenage foolishness that are a whole more realistic (in a weird way) than any of the crap spouted by big-hair bands and the likes of Mariah Carey.
"For Crying Out Loud" is still the silliest thing i've ever heard next to Kiss' "Great Expectations," though. I still can't listen to either one without threatening to hemorrhage from laughing so hard....
If you're looking a definitive accounting of the mysterious Sun Ra, who was regrettably called back to Saturn in 1993, this is probably it. There is another book (whose title I forget, alas) that was previously cited as "the" Ra reference, but this is more current....
Sun Ra remains one of the most enigmatic figures in not just jazz but all of modern music -- this was a man, remember, who changed his name more times than a cat has lives, claimed to be from Saturn, and was incorporating noise and chaos into his music long before there even a term for such antics (the book's accounting of his "non-duet" with John Cage is amusing) -- and while this book doesn't exactly demystify him, it does go a long way toward explaining where he came from (Birmingham, Alabama or Saturn, depending on whose view you lean toward), how he was educated, how he came to be one of the most singularly innovative figures in free jazz, and his relationship to the members of the various (endlessly various) incarnations of the Arkestra. It also provides some insight into their admittedly chaotic discography (Ra had a tendency to tape everything, then send the tapes back to El Saturn headquarters in Philadelphia, where the songs would be issued in puzzling configurations across dozens of records many years later, making the issue of discography placement a real headache) and working methods (basically they rehearsed and played all the time). The book is liberally sprinkled with many colorful anecdotes of Ra wandering the streets of New York in only a toga and wild hat (wild, festive hats figure prominently in the Sun Ra saga), his battle with the authorities over being drafted, encounters with the likes of Coltrane and Sonny Sharrock, and tons of other interesting stuff. If you're only dimly aware of what all the fuss is about, this is the place to start. (As for where to start listening, good luck -- there's about two hundred albums to choose from....)
For more Sun Ra info, visit the Saturn Headquarters web site at:
http://www-hrm1.vpad.uab.edu/Saturn/index.html
NOTE: [yol] at the end indicates reviews by Dan Kletter; [jr] means Josh Ronsen; [bc] means Brain Clarkson; [jk] means Jason Kushnir; no [] means bullshit courtesy of moi.... [the moon unit].
This two-man noise team from Sayreville, NJ are classic cut-up power electronics artists in the vein of Macronympha, but this is a bit of a different take on the vein they've chosen to mine. While there are bursts of jagged electro-terrorism to be had all over the tape, most of it is more ambient in nature, ladling eccentric sounds over flanged-out loops (loops seem to be the big wave lately for some reason), giving their particular headkick a bit more of a hypnotic feel, particularly on tracks like "Peace comes from knowing pervert machines." Others like "Scape" and "Tack" employ more subterranean sounds and distorted throbbing, coming across like Throbbing Gristle played at 16 rpm. But then tracks like "Invade" are much more punishing, like scrap metal being force-fed through a meat grinder, complete with bursts of distortion like radios being blown up and all sorts of high-pitched evil tone hate. Other tracks like "Gash Chambered" and "Sluts in a Trash Heap" are even more violently obnoxious. All of which lends a bit more variety to the proceedings than with many noise bands. An interesting diversion from the usual full-tilt powertrip mania.
Monumental heaviness from England (i think) that falls somewhere between late-eighties progressive speed metal and less-obsessive death metal. The most obvious influence at work here is Metallica, although there nods to Slayer, Queensryche, and a whole slew of British metal bands. Listening to this album -- released late last year -- you'd never guess that "grunge" or "alternative" ever even happened. You'd also never guess that metal "went away" (wherever it went, someone forgot to tell these guys, Mr. Blackwell, and about a million other metal bands still workin' their mojo on the endless tour circuit).
Skytorn are a bit different, though, in having a bit more imagination than most of the bands in their genre. While the opener, "Blinding Shade of Black," is pure over-the-top eighties metal (the REAL kind, not the horrible poofy stuff made "popular" by the likes of Ratt, Poison, or Bon Jovi), the second track ("To Shine Inside") has a weird reggae influence (sort of) and some genuinely strange guitar lines going before moving to more traditional values (although i notice that the melodic breakdown in the middle has a definite flamenco influence, something i've never heard on a metal album before). Subhuman basslines, a weirdly loping beat, and chiming guitars introduce "Duality," which quickly turns into turbocharged piledriving rhythm madness fraugh with half-time tempo changes and more heaviness. (It sure is strange to hear a singer who sounds variously like Layne Staley, Eddie Vedder, and any number of death metal croakers, often in the same verse.) Others like "Twisted Fate," with its interlocked harmony guitars, are actually kind of catchy (at least until they start obliterating your senses with god-of-thunder drumming and croak-style vox); "Emphasis," by contrast, is just pure plain Sasquatch-rock, all chunk-chunk pounding fury. In fact, pretty much everything, including the last two tracks ("Last Ashes" and "Skytorn") eventually turn into blunt festivals o' heaviness.
While Broken are not exactly breaking lots of new ground here -- if you listened to a lot o' speed/death metal through the eighties and early nineties, then much of this will sound familiar -- they are pretty good at what they do, and that's probably good enough. After all, the whole point of metal is that nothing succeeds like excess, right? One can never have enough, as long as it's clearly the good stuff....
In a nutshell: Fast, tense, catchy harmonic punkpop. Think Green Day, Offspring, Ramones, Rancid, the Clash with a better singer (no offense Joe, "character" is okay with me), that sort of thing. The songs are reasonably short and high on energy, and they erect a pretty serious wall of sound for a three-piece unit. Betcha they smoke live. The only catch is that, for the most part, the songs don't really stand out from one another; it's all one big blur of motion that periodically stops for a few seconds before starting up again. Some people might find that, ah, irritating. Given the genre, i'm not sure this is actually that much of a drawback -- after all, the Ramones basically knew two songs (the fast one and the faster one) and they managed to extend that into a twenty-plus year career.
"Faces on File," the first blast of energy, pretty much lays out the blueprint -- stingray guitar, bom-bom bass, relentless drums, high velocity everything. These elements -- which sound just fine, incidentally -- don't vary much over the course of eleven songs (although there are a couple of exceptions). Regardless, i'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack since their lyrics are not only snotty, but considerably more intelligent than the average punkpop fare, and the lyrics to "Towel in a Turban" (which manage to work in a humorous cleavage reference) are pretty funny. And they DO have a serious level of energetic catchiness happening. Ah, if they'd just work on making the songs stand out from each other a bit more....
Some exceptions: "When You Find Yourself" benefits from pulling back on the speed and employing a bit of twisted funk, and "Scratch the Dance Itch" works on a similar level for the same reason. "React" takes on a different drum sound and puts a bit more space in the mix, and as a result the song stands out even though, musically, it's not remarkably different from the rest of the album. Which may be the real hidden weakness here -- if they'd changed things up in the mix a bit more often they might have achieved a bit more variety in the songs. Ah well, it's still hard to beat that energy....
The long-awaited debut from this local Oakland, California all-female group. Imagine east European folk tunes (Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ladino,Yiddish) sung lovingly in an olde world meets acapella styled vocals way with prog rock- like instrumentation, all arranged by the group, and you'd be close. What is so amazing about this album is the diversity of material that holds together in a completely seamless way. This includesthe original compositions and even the inclusion of a rendition of a traditional African-American work song from Alabama. Further, I was struck by the deeper contrast found between the upbeat singing and mood of the music against that of the rather intense lyrics, of which in many cases are quite bleak, calling direct attention to a variety of negative social issues women are still regularly confronted with. For example,the traditional Hungarian song from Transylvania titled 'Give Him A Little Time' is about a marriage marred by miscommunications, alcoholism and rape. The liner notes add "original text includes the line 'nothing could be a greater sorrow and misery than two people who live together without love.' Discovering such lyrics is like a blow to the gut with a brick. And yet, it doesn't ruin the enjoyment of the music. Instead, it challenges one to pause and think. [yol]
(TAKE 1)
Goddamnit... i... i was doing SO GOOD at not smoking... was gonna kick that fuckin' demon in the BALLS... yah... i was doin' just SWELL... even though the nicotine demons had imported the Sweat Machine and Subatomic Molecule Sandblaster and i either wanted to sleep for 27 hours at a time while dreaming immensely fucked-up dreams about watching my nephew eat oatmeal in a goldfish bowl or couldn't sleep at all... NO PROBLEM... thinking in mad obsessive fashion every fifteen seconds about that cooooooool breeze, the PAUSE THAT REFRESHES, not getting a goddamn thing done, yah, but STILL... i had a fuckin' HANDLE on it... and then... o GOD... and THEN....
Yah, i was FOOLISH enough to start diggin' in to the fat, juicy booklet for this here fat-ass four-CD box set and... and... AND...
* sob * there... THERE IT WAS....
Yah like a motherfucker.... yah... yah... YAH... GOD DAMN IT... the young Tony Fuckin' Conrad lookin' suaver than shit and... and... and SMOKING A CIGARETTE.....
[ten minute pause while Moon Unit's spine turns to tofu and he gets dressed, goes out to the Texaco, purchases overpriced generic cigs]
Okay, so i'll have to quit AFTER reviewing the Conrad box set. FINE. No PROBLEMO. Never mind that i'm so goddamn broke that i can't even AFFORD to buy generic cigarettes -- shit, you KNOW the apocalypse is upon us when you have to pay two fucking dollars for cheap-ass shitty-smelling foul-tasting GENERIC cigarettes, damn, where's my GUN? [whispers from the HS-CG] Oh yah, i forgot, i don't OWN one, guns are for RICH people, well fuck, i'm gonna have to STEAL one and DO something about these fat maggots in Congress who keep jacking up the price of cigarettes, laying on those taxes, to the point where a pack o' cigs is 80% tax (this is true, dammit).... it's an absolute heartbreak, let me tell ya....
[nicotine kicks in] Woo, i'm dizzy now....
You know, heroin is starting to look downright SENSIBLE....
(TAKE 2)
To understand the story behind (and importance of) this box set, the first in a series of "reconstructions" of Conrad's original work from the sixties, you have to understand the Dream Syndicate. Not the paisley underground guys led by Steve Wynn, but the Dream Syndicate that eventually evolved into the Theatre of Eternal Music -- Conrad, Cale, Angus MacLise, LaMonte Young, and Marian Zazeela. Cale and MacLise went on to join the Velvet Underground; Young and Zazeela went on the form the Theatre of Eternal Music, and Conrad remained outside, doing his own thing. But somewhere along the way Young, who had taped all of the Dream Syndicate rehearsals/jams in his loft, grew possessive of the tapes and refused to let any of the others hear them, much less release them, without agreeing to sign over all the rights to himself. Naturally, Cale and Conrad refused (MacLise died, which conveniently put him out of the running). In the mid-eighties, when it became obvious that Young was determined never to relinquish his hammerlock on the tapes, Conrad finally talked the bearded guru into letting him at least listen to the tapes... at which point he took notes, went over his own scores, and proceeded (with the help of such luminaries as Jim O'Rourke and Alexandria Gelencser) to recreate the originals live and tape them, thus executing a neat end-run around the power-mad Young.
Which brings us to the present, and this four-CD box set, the first in a series of volumes. The four slices o' creeping dissonance captured here are FOUR VIOLINS (an early solo bit), EARLY MINIMALISM: APRIL 1965, EARLY MINIMALISM: MAY 1965, and EARLY MINIMALISM: JUNE 1965. (The FOUR VIOLINS disc, incidentally, is enhanced and includes a nifty assortment of sound bites, interviews, and pictures, none of which i've been able to actually look at since my outdated PC doesn't have enough base RAM, boo hoo.) And naturally they are all heavenly clouds of droning tone clusters or else excruciating (and endless) wails of earhurt, depending on where you stand as far as minimalism and screechy violins are concerned. As you have probably guessed by now, i'm in Tony's corner.
FOUR VIOLINS, then, is an "unscored recording" (composerese for "he sat down with a couple of beers in him and just started playing with the tape running") of four overdubbed violins, recorded on Conrad's own four-track in December 1964. This is a key document to understanding Conrad, because it's the first available recording of his early success at codifying his unusual scale theories and actually putting them to use on tape. Conrad's unique sound, beginning with this document, comes from a scale whose sound derives primarily from "pitch relationships derived from the second, third, seventh, eleventh, and seventeenth partials in the harmonic series." It's a radical, dissonant departure from the twelve-tone scale and while it sounds haunting and beautiful (to ME, anyway), i'm sure it must have scared the pee out of people hearing it for the first time in the age of flower power. This doesn't sound psychedelic at ALL; it sounds more like the relentless march of dead mathematicians bursting from the grave to wrestle music back from the cult of hippy dippiness.
EARLY MINIMALISM: APRIL 1965 begins with one lonesome violin sawing away that is eventually joined by another, faster (but equally droning) violin. Eventually, just as the incessant sawing appears ready to launch into the stratosphere, it falls back and the open space is filled by a string quartet. The music evolves -- slowly -- through movements in which the individual elements of the quartet (violin, viola, cello, and contrabass) all take turns moving to the forefront. After several cycles of these movements, everything falls away to two violins again, before the entire quartet joins in again (in more restrained fashion) behind them. The entire performance takes over 53 minutes to complete.
EARLY MINIMALISM: MAY 1965 is even longer (an unbroken stretch of 56:57) and proceeds in a similar format, although here the instrumentation is stripped down to two violins (one manned by Jim O'Rourke) and cello. Of all the pieces in this volume, this is probably the most "listenable" to those who find Conrad's tones mystifying; it is also the most severely droning. It doesn't even start getting all that dissonant until the second violin comes in, and even then the dissonance is nowhere near as violent as in the previous two pieces. Structurally, though, this is perhaps minimalism at its most extreme -- the tempo does not vary and the slow progression is so deliberate and understated that to the casual observer, it might well seem that the music is essentially standing still for almost an hour. This is my favorite of the four discs.
EARLY MINIMALISM: JUNE 1965 is -- brace yourself -- even LONGER (60:23) and more minimalistic, a drawn-out composition using four violins and one cello. (Incidentally, since i have not noted it already, these are electric versions of said instruments at work here; FOUR VIOLINS may be an exception, though.) The feel is similar to the previous disc, although the additional violins insinuate themselves a bit more sneakily this time. In fact, there isn't an obvious difference (other than a gradual thickening of sound) until nearly thirteen minutes into the piece. The next major shift -- one of register this time -- doesn't occur until 24 minutes have passed. Shortly thereafter this is a new movement, a return to the beginning of sorts; it plays like a restatement of the original movement with shifted emphasis on instrumentation, with the background violins now visible in the foreground.
The liner notes, by the way (all 90 pages of 'em), are an excellent introduction into the theory of minimalism, the history of the Dream Syndicate (and the resulting feud), and Conrad's enigmatic mindset. It also includes many swell pix of Conrad as the young artiste and much peculiar wordplay (as an "explanation" of the pieces themselves, bizarre neo-stories that effectively mock the concept of "explaining" music in the first place). It's a stupefying work of art that nicely complements the music on the discs. Table of the Elements, in fact, has gone to ridiculous lengths to present this work in spectacular fashion, and i'm certainly looking forward to the next installment....
Looky looky looky -- they FINALLY came out with the box set to end all box sets, the one ah been whinin' about for years, and they managed to do it, what, just a month before his final plane ride into the ocean? I mean really, talk about TIMING....
As exits go, Denver could have done much worse. RCA presents a pretty thorough overview of his career on the label (from 1969-1986), seventeen years worth of highlights compressed down to four CDs (but the discs are crammed full -- there are 79 songs total here). They get immense, massive brownie points from moi by including about half of the still-out-of-print AERIE album. In fact, they appear to have included something from every album released on RCA, and the scary part is that i get the feeling they only scratched the surface -- i know of at least a dozen songs not here from three albums that COULD have been, and i'm sure there are even more from the albums i haven't heard. They also re-engineered and remastered most of the early material (some to the point of reinstating parts absent from the actual album releases); Denver has never, ever sounded this good, at least in terms of pure recording quality. Sort of makes me wish they'd go back and relentlessly remaster every single one of his albums and re-issue them.
Some interesting surprises crop up. For instance, i never knew that Denver had such a fascination for the circus, which shows up in at least two early songs ("Circus" and "Molly"), or that the ubiquitous "Sunshine on My Shoulders" was actually released three years before it was reissued as a single in conjunction with the first GREATEST HITS album and basically imbedded itself forever in the public consciousness. It's also surprising to see just how many of the good songs (and they're all good, really) -- about ninety percent of them, in fact -- were written by Denver himself. RCA also gets my thanks for including absolutely none of the horrible, career- damaging Muppet-related trash on this set.
In fact, they get just about everything right in this set. They have all the obvious ones -- "Poems, Prayers and Promises," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Sunshine on my Shoulders," "Rocky Mountain High," "City of New Orleans," "Annie's Song," etc., etc. -- plus plenty of favorite lesser-known (but just as good) ones like "Casey's Last Ride," "All of my Memories," "We Don't Live Here No More," "Ripplin' Waters," "It Amazes Me," "Thirsty Boots," "Some Days Are Diamonds," "Dreamland Express," "Fly Away," "Flying for Me"... the list just goes on and on.... There are also no obvious clunkers on the set (although the insanely, irritatingly cheerful "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" and "Grandma's Feather Bed" come awwwwwwwfully close). True, there are moments toward the end of his RCA years where everything starts to get a bit too bombastic (my God, whose idea WAS it to pair Denver with Placido Domingo on "Perhaps Love"?!? Never mind how it sounds -- pretty good, actually -- just the mere IDEA is so deranged that it fairly makes the mind reel), but you can blame that mostly on the label, who took note of Denver's declining sales and suavely booted out his longtime producer Milt Okun in favor of new and "hip" yoyos who nevertheless weren't, uh, quite as good. Fortunately Denver's talent was still too large to completely squash, but some of the material on the last disc is still a little over-the-top....
Aside from that, though, this is a reasonably swank collection. It is true that i could quibble over some of the selections -- i would have traded a few of the lesser songs for more selections from AERIE, for instance -- but that largely comes down to personal taste. I do have one mildly bigger complaint in the fact that they left out completely his protest songs (about Nixon, Vietnam, and the like), which -- had they included them -- might have gone a long ways toward combatting his goofy Mr. Sunshine image. Outside of that, however, it's almost impossible to fault this box set. I really didn't expect RCA to do a decent job of it and now i'm pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. Color me impressed....
Okay, this has been out a while already but Relapse generously sent it along to feed my Bliss fixation, so it seems only appropriate to mention it here. Besides, this is a most hep platter. The two members of Exit-13 (and also co-founders of Relapse) join forces here with the drummer and bassist of Brutal Truth and Bliss Blood (formerly of the Pain Teens) to crank out a bunch of old-time tunes devoted to the pleasures o' huffin' ganga. The coolest thing about this disc is that they do all these songs -- most from the flapper era of the late twenties and early thirties -- more or less in their original style. This is a good move, since Bliss (who contributes vox most of the time here) is essentially a flapper reborn in a dominatrix outfit to begin with. It's also amusing to find that all these death-metal guys are perfectly capable of playing swing-band era tunes on piano and standup bass. (The trombones on "Light Up!" and "If You're A Viper" are a definite plus.)
Not surprisingly, my favorites here are the ones were Bliss is out front ("If You're a Viper (Blissful Mix)," "When I Get Low, I Get High," "Lotus Blossom (Sweet Marijuana)," "Knockin' Myself Out," etc.), but all of the tunes are beyond swank. And that is one swell blues solo (courtesy of Scott O'Donnell) on "Stoney Monday." My favorite on the album is probably the dreamy "Lotus Blossom (Sweet Marijuana)," which is actually not far removed in its sound from some of the jazzier tracks on the last Pain Teens album. But "Willie the Record Releaser" (a version of "Willie the Chimney Sweeper" with retooled lyrics and vox courtesy of Bill Yurkiewicz) is pretty fun in its own right. In fact, all of them are pretty amusing, even if (like moi) you don't actually smoke dope -- the songs themselves are good enough to transcend the novelty value most would attach to a project such as this. They did such a good job picking the right songs that I'd really like to see them do this again....
O, there's also a "hidden track" called "Loading Dock," a crazed jazz- meets-noisecore thing that sounds like they put all the previous tracks in a blender and hit the puree button; drummer Richard Hoak croaks "I get no kick from cocaine... I get my kicks out of smokin' doobs...." over and over with improvised ad-libbing while the rest of the band goes completely apeshit. An experience not to be missed.
Now that Fahey is suddenly a big deal again, his old labels are just falling all over themselves to release his every recorded utterance before his star fades again. This is a good thing, for Fahey has an enormous catalog and probably half of it (including, alas, OLD FASHIONED LOVE, the source of "Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw the Light Go Shining Round and Round," most recently covered by Gastr del Sol) is horribly out of print. So now we have this back in print again, an album considered by many to be his best (from the first phase of his career, anyway, prior to his comeback with CITY OF REFUGE). I'd be hard pressed to disagree with them. Some of the numbers here, like "Orinda-Moraga" and "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean," are flat- out brilliant examples of orchestrated fingerpicking. It also makes for interesting listening on the level of determining the roots of his current sound. You can hear the beginnings of his weird WOMBLIFE-era slide moves on his interpretation of "How Green Was My Valley" and "The Death of the Clayton Peacock"; you can hear the embryo of "juana" in "Orinda-Moraga"; and the overdubbed guitar experiments are all over the place on this one. Along the way you also get country picking on "Come Back Baby," the obligatory hymn ("Saint Patrick's Hymn"), and the amusement of hearing him stop midway through "Poor Boy" to shush his barking dog.
Of course, the experimentation on this album was nothing compared to what would come later on albums like VOICE OF THE TURTLE and REQUIA -- in fact, this is one of the most traditional-sounding albums of his catalog -- but it's there, if you listen for it. Beyond that, it just plain sounds great. If "Juana" was the song that captivated you the most on WOMBLIFE, then this is something you probably should investigate.
Oh, and the cover is hilarious. Too bad they couldn't include his long, rambling liner notes, though....
Think of this as Fahey's answer to the original Folkways Anthology. The sound is certainly weird enough -- moving from traditional fingerpicking rags to fucked-up dissonance and found-sound experiments, sometimes all within the same song -- and to make the point absolutely clear, the blackly funny, paranoid, and ironic liner notes (truly an epic, we're talking pages and pages, with photos to provide "authenticity" to the outlandish notes, all provided in charming eyestrain-o-vision) hold distinct echoes of Harry Smith's cryptic notes for the original Anthology.
"Bottleneck Blues" is nominally a standard guitar blues, but midway through distorted sounds and odd riffs start creeping in, throwing you off balance. The normalcy continues through "Bill Cheatum" (which has a nifty fiddle sawing away), but things start getting a bit eccentric on "Lewisdale Blues," which opens with a weird flute aria and (way in the background) either tape noise or electronic hum; eventually a sprightly guitar joins in, but the lonesome flute always has the last word. This is followed by two wildly different versions of "Bean Vine Blues," then "A Raga Called Pat, Part III" -- where slide guitar and background noises give way to found sound, droning chant vox, and other weirdness that must have sounded extremely mutant when this album was first released in 1968. "A Raga Called Pat, Part IV" is even stranger -- it opens with a burst of echoed sound that fades away, then reverberates back to life again and again, eventually fading out into an actual song that finally ends in subterranean drones.
Tradition briefly reasserts itself on "Train," but then "Je Ne Me Suis Reveillais Matin Pas En May" is broken up with howling, half-drunken vocals and shouting, giggling, and other infantile background behavior. I can only imagine what the general reaction was to this when the hippies heard it the first time. (This song, incidentally, sounds remarkably like an outtake from the Anthology, which was no doubt intentional.) "The Story of Dorothy Gooch, Part I" is broken up by jagged bursts of dissonant piano (or heavily treated guitar, i'm not sure which), and while his reworking of "Nine Pound Hammer" is essentially traditional, it's still plenty eccentric.
This album, as it turns out, was merely a taste of the avant before proceeding in the full-blown weirdness of REQUIA....
This actually starts off in innocuous fashion as prime fingerpickin' Fahey with "Requiem for John Hurt," a raglike folk blues in open C modeled (in its own weird fashion) after Charley Patton's "Jesus is a Dying Bed-Maker." (Of course, since this helpful info comes from Fahey's liner notes, and since Fahey has always been a sardonic trickster of the highest order, this may or may not actually be true.) Then "Requiem for Russell Blaine Cooper" opens with single, drawn-out chords before turning into a more regular tune with a guitar sound reminiscent of WOMBLIFE's "juana," even though the tune is totally different. "When the Catfish is in Bloom" is a slow (but not dirge- like) fingerstyle experiment in volume and dynamics, but otherwise not too far removed from the more traditional bits of his oevure. So far, so good.
Then he moves into the four parts of "Requiem for Molly," where bits of symphonic found sound and intercut with sounds of traffic, slowed-down bits, other effluvia, and wild reverb sound effects. At some point a traditional song begins to happen, but it's almost drowned out by the sonic weirdness. This is the most concrete sign pointing to the direction he would eventually return to with his "comeback" on CITY OF REFUGE thirty years later. The second part even incorporates looped snippets of speech and farm sounds (appropriate, given that this is an homage to Knott's Berry Farm Molly), along with a completely unrelated fiddling marathon that fades in and out against the actual song (it's down there somewhere). This pattern of sonic experimentation with sound and loops continues through the third and fourth parts as well, before the album concludes with "Fight On Christians, Fight On," so slowed down that it is pretty much unrecognizable.
Interesting, this mix of the old and new... the traditional and the experimental... very interesting indeed....
I receive a great many odd things in the mail these days, and this is one of them. Twelve related tunes form a conceptual gesalt of sort on the state of the world, with songs aimed at culture, religion, politics, sex, the media, you get the idea. The opening "Overture" -- all bouncy electronic uptempo keyboard rhythms -- give way (in somewhat bombastic fashion) to a weird waltz that turns into a... a... waltzing rap (?!?) on "Shove It In, Pull It Out" (about culture, not sex; that, uh, comes later). Lots of abrupt tempo/feel changes and the overall drift of the lyrics give me the strong impression that Buddy Green has a lot of Zappa records in his collection. (The end of the lyric sheet pretty much confirms this with a quote from the Bearded Chin's ONE SIZE FITS ALL.) But "The Crux" is an interesting slice of ominous goth doodling broken up by weird electronic frippery (almost like a low-rent Cheer-Accident). The slo-mo bluejazz "My Favorite Porno Star," while not quite living up to the great title, is still a welcome respite from all the extended keyboard shuffling in between. There's a lot of interesting sound-collage stuff on "To Hell With You," apparently an assault on the media, which leads into the ballad-like "The Angels in the Den," the closest thing to a traditional song here. "Shove It In Reprise" is bizarrely reminiscent of Jackson Browne, of all things. Things wind down to a close in pure Zappa fashion with "We're Such a Happenin' Nation" and "The Cows and Their Closing Credits."
Not bad for a demo (and certainly strange enough, that's for sure); it doesn't tell me anything i didn't already know, but then, neither did Zappa. Intended to be heard as one long piece, with a bit of editing (some of the interludes go on a bit longer than they probably should), it would actually work well in that respect. An intriguing document, although probably of interest mostly to Zappaphiles who aren't averse to electronic equipment.
The opening death-dirge makes it clear: Icon of Throat, for all intents and purposes, is secretly the evil twin of Vertonen. Looped segments of electro- snippets anchor shifting keyboard lines on "rust slave," like a corrupted (and static) repositioning of dance music minus the movement; "angelic," by contrast, is a wailing, almost-ambient drone punctuated by occasional piano (?) notes and weighted down by a subhuman, crawling beat, like an ambient cross between Eno and early Swans. The Icon returns to static loops on "wounded," where the unchanging beat clatters over droning synths. Soothing yet disturbing. The wind noises that open "tunnel" are soon overlaid with droning washes of devolved synth, which are then pummelled into submission by a crackling electrobeat, rendering the track both hypnotic and highly relentless. The final offering, "electrode," begins with a set of loops (one of which sounds like a needle tracking a very slow lockgroove) that grow in volume so slowly that the change is difficult to discern unless you're paying attention. Gradually other elements are added -- the sound of running water, odd instruments -- as it builds and builds, until abruptly falling away to the sound of one faraway violin before returning even stronger than before. Powerful, unsettling stuff -- like mantras for twilight sleep. A must for ambient/loop devotees.
Power electronics from Mt. Carmel, PA -- just a stone's throw from the hideout of noise purveyors Macronympha. Marinelli has more than just mere location in common with Macronympha, judging from this tape's first track. There he favors the same dense, violent cut-up approach favored by Roemer and co. -- grinding noises, high-pitched squeaks and jerky distortion all chopped and splintered into a huddled mass of agitated confusion. The second piece is one that i find a bit more interesting: a toned-down, almost ambient approach featuring the use of metals, both in loops and in actual performance, and an underpinning of rumble like freight trains rolling off in the distance. The third track is similar but a bit more thunderous, with looped pummeling sounds and cascading distortion drones in addition to the live manipulation of sounds using threaded metals, sandpaper, and the like. The last track is also the most ambient (although harshly so), a collection of flanged-out sounds riding over a chittering loop of unidentifiable sound, like random chunks of metal being washed down the drain in an apocalyptic flood. Given the fondness for cut-up editing and scraping textures evident throughout, it's not surprising that he has appeared on releases and compilations from both Deadline Records and MSNP. For more information on this and other cassettes avaiable, check in with the man himself via the address in the EPHEMERA section. (FYI: the cassette is $5.00 postage paid.)
This kind of took me by surprise. I'd never heard of Minekawa when I picked this up used more or less on a whim (DEAD ANGEL never needs a real excuse to spend $$$), but it turns out to be a peculiar mix of techno-pop and noise. Apparently it's sort of a concept album about living in one of those tiny cube-shaped rooms that are the staple of young urban life in Japan or something like that. The songs are structured more or less like traditional pop tunes (particularly on "Fantastic Cat," "Never/More," ...), but the instruments are sequenced drums and synths spewing out hypnotic basslines and bizarre yet catchy noises. "Never/More" sounds almost like something Golden Earring might come up with now if they had actual taste; "Klaxon!" is pure bouncy pop tweaked by strangely distorted instruments. "Woooog" is, as the name insinuates, a Moog-driven ditty that should hold much appeal for Stereolab fans, while "Dessert Song" sounds weirdly sort of like the Beatles gone techno. "Destron" has a subsonic fuzz bass over an industrial clank riff and cheesy synth bleats while she sings (one of the few songs in English; about living in "the white cube"). Some of these tracks, like "Pop Up Squirrels," "T.T.T. (Turn Table Tennis)" and "More Pop Up Squirrels" are just so weird they almost defy description (weird rhythmic noises, mostly), while stuff like "Rainy Song" is dreamlike shimmer-pop. She's all over the map, but still somehow manages to make it all hang together. Interesting.
Because Minekawa happens to be Japanese, i'm sure inevitable comparisons will be made to the likes of Cibo Matto and Pizzicato Five, but ignore that; she definitely has her own thing going. Hopefully someone on this side of the ocean will have the good taste to continue releasing her forthcoming albums over here, so i don't go broke buying imports....
If heavy metal is dead and rotting in the desert sun, somebody forgot to tell Mr. Blackwell. Frankly, this self-released disc sounds better than most well-known mainstream metal released anytime lately. Check out the slash and burn riffdeath of "Burn" for proof -- they have the downstroke thing down COLD. Yi! On "Denial," they sound like a more baroque version of Alice in Chains, kinda (the baroque part must be the keyboards warbling in the background), only heavier and less doodle-intensive. But then on "Breaking Me Down," they cross over into White Zombie's industrial-funk groove, complete with percolating keyboard riffs, only WAY heavier -- we're not talking wall of guitar here, but more like an iron curtain. You can almost hear the tape melting. There's some strange riffing going on in "Torn" -- hard to describe but definitely unusual. Not to mention plenty of pure sonic tonnage. Clanking bass clatter on "Save Myself" turns into big jolts of stop and start thunder (palm muting is a metalhead's best friend, eh?), sort of like mid-period Slayer but with a better groove and without the hyperkinetic splattersolo guitar wank (thank God). The album closes with a neo-classical instrumental, "?" -- a move that's become sort of de rigeur among metal bands (i'm not sure why; maybe this is something we can blame on Metallica). It sounds fine, although a little bit out of place among the sonic fury of the rest of the album (then again, maybe that was the point)....
I'm not sure Mr. Blackwell are doing anything tremendously new (which is kind of difficult in this genre anyhow), but they're doing it real well. And real loud. Any metal band that still sounds like a metal band these days that plays this well has my vote. Scope it out, mon.
Well, this is kind of an interesting idea -- two guys, Big Taylor and Lee Roy (actually Britt Monk and Steve Rohe) playing mostly original music in the pre-war (1920s-1930s) folk blues style. The sound is pretty authentic; on tracks like "Hound Dog Blues" and "Drunken Woman Blues," if you weren't clued-in already to the nature of the proceedings, you'd never guess that these weren't actual old 78s that had been cleaned up for presentation to a new generation. They have all the original touches down cold -- fingerpicked resonator guitar, slide, harmonica, and accordion -- and are good enough to turn out credible covers of Big Bill Broonzy's "Mississipi Blues" and Tommy McClennon's "Whiskey Headed Man" among the original tunes (which are, of course, sonically indistinguishable from the covers). Their sense of humor is most evident on "Bang! Bang! Thud! Thud!" and "Creak'n Bedsprings" (just take a guess what that's about, eh); it also surfaces in more pointed fashion on "Slick Willy Blues," a aiming its arrows at our currently- embattled Prez, he of the wandering trouser minnow. The remaining tracks, "Mister, MIster" (no relation to the horrible eighties band) and "Le Machine" are more of the same modern spin on an old sound. The results are pleasing enough; as the tape says, "This music is made to entertain." It succeeds splendidly in that aim.
When I listened to this for the first time, i honestly didn't know what to think. I wasn't even sure i LIKED it, to be frank. But the more i listen to it, the more i see that this is a most fitting way for Gira and Jarboe to bring that which we called Swans to a close -- the only way, really. What they have done here is to present a handful of songs across two live discs (one culled from the final 1997 tour, another from the 1995 tour), mostly songs from SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND, in such a fashion as to touch on all phases of the band's career. To this end they've radically reworked older material such as "I Crawled" to fall more in line with the sound of later albums, while debasing (in a fashion) some later material to match the monochromatic thunder of their early albums. The entire set, across both discs, flows almost seamlessly from ominous loveliness to jagged thunder and white noise and back again, like a two-hour tidal wave washing up bits and pieces of the different sounds of the Swans' development with each wave. A brilliant way to sum up the band's lifespan in a limited amount of space without falling prey to the "greatest hits" syndrome. Brilliant.
The first disc opens with an otherwise-unreleased track, "Feel Happiness," which confronts my original estimation that the baroque splendor of "The Sound" couldn't be duplicated or matched, let alone surpassed, and proves that belief to be a lie. Where "The Sound" was the swirling auditory equivalent of a door opening one degree at a time to reveal a blinding sun rendering everything invisible in sheets of white light, "Feel Happiness" is the soundtrack to thunderheads on the horizon breaking apart to reveal a glacier implacably crunching its way through a thousand miles of arctic ice. Over its nearly seventeen-minute length, it sets the tone for all that is to follow. After a reworked version of "Low Life Form," they bring on another "new" song, "Not Alone," that comes across as a bizarre industrial folk- death blues, driven by an endlessly repeated guitar riff and a remorseless slo-mo beat imported directly from the era of COP or FILTH. After Jarboe sings "Blood On Your Hands" to an almost nonexistent accompaniment that appears to be mostly guitar hum and runs through a version of "Hypogirl" that rocks considerably harder than the version on SOUNDTRACKS, they do the impossible: they completely rework "I Crawled" so that it begins sounding like an outtake from THE GREAT ANNIHILATOR and ends up sounding like a distorted death-metal roar echoing the first EP. Then "I Am the Sun" is turned into something vaguely resembling a country song (!) -- although a very LOUD country song, true -- and "Blood Promise" is introduced with Gira singing along to an actual country gospel song before closing out the disc with nearly fifteen minutes of beautifully morose doom.
And that's just the first disc.
The second disc is not dissimilar in sound, although its intent is a bit closer to that of a traditional tour document, offering live and, on some, moderately reworked versions of songs (i don't believe that stuttering guitar on "Final Sac" was present on the studio version, although the mix may have deceived me all this time). Nearly everything on this disc is from SOUNDTRACKS ("Lavender," a Jarboe solo offering if i remember correctly, and "M/F" are the two exceptions), including a thunderous recreation of "The Sound," a version of "Yum Yab Killers" even more violent and psychotic than the original, and a long, droning version of "Helpless Child" that charts new vistas in desolation. It all sounds amazing. While there are pretty (if dark) moments, none of it is even remotely wimpy. This is powerful stuff, impressive in light of the fact that after hearing SOUNDTRACKS i didn't think much of it could be pulled off effectively live. Apparently i was wrong. (But then, many people have wrong about Swans. It has a lot to do with why they decided to retire then name and move on to other things.)
There are two things about both discs that remain consistent, both of which i like: one, that it's relentlessly repetitive -- nearly everything here features parts (mostly on guitar) that sound like endless loops, and those repeated elements are often the simplest, creating hypnotic trance mantras; two, that the drum sound is not only immense and cool across the board, but widely varied (not surprising, given that each piece was apparently picked from a different show). In a weird and compelling way, this double-set works not only as a complete work in itself, but as a bookend to SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND (although i can only barely imagine being insane enough to try listening to both double-disc sets back to back for an unbroken stretch of nearly five hours).
All of which leads to the following conclusion: As bad as i felt about having missed them on their final tour (the day they appeared in Austin was the one day i managed to be so sick i literally couldn't move out of bed), i feel even worse now. But i'm definitely looking forward to seeing where they go from here with the new projects (The Body Lovers, Angels of Light, Jarboe's solo career) on the horizon....
You knew it was only a matter of time. Masami Akita and Matthew Bower have been aggravating eardrums across the globe separately for years now in the guises of Merzbow and Total, and since Merzbow has already recorded at least one album with someone from the Broken Flag camp (HORN OF THE GOAT with Consumer Electronics), this offering from the kings of pain is hardly a surprise. Released in a limited edition of 250 on cassette only via a somewhat obscure UK label, this 1997 issue of material originally recorded by Bower and then chopped up/remixed by Merzbow in July 1996 is one of the harder items to find in the Total canon... which is kind of a shame, because this is actually one of the better ones.
Merzbow and Total have the same problem: they record (and release) way too much stuff, and since each man has a fairly regular approach to his wall of noise, after a while the results start to sound a bit... generic. But when they start filtering one man's raw work through another man's mixing and editing process, that's where things get interesting. Total benefits greatly here from Merzbow's evil redirection. Where the usual Total album consists mostly of unbroken, unwavering guitar screech, Merzbow has chopped things up, varying the pace and feel of each piece (there are only two tracks, for a total of just over fifty minutes); the sound also varies radically, with parts of pure guitar drone giving way to flanged-out hollowness, then irradiated walls of distortion that crumble and crackle and fall away in volume before building back up again. With Merzbow at the mixing desk, the material also benefits in terms of pacing. Total's sense of dramatic pacing has always been hit or miss -- Bower has a tendency to just throw stuff down on tape and let it be -- while Merzbow has a considerably better sense of how to pace the movements of different textures and shifts in volume for maximum dramatic effect. The results are sufficiently impressive enough to make me think that maybe Bower should just start letting all of his Total material be filtered through someone else's mixing process. This cassette is certainly more interesting -- and consistent -- than most of Total's regular output. Not to be missed, assuming you can find it (contacting Sterilized Decay via the address in the EPHEMERA section would be a good start).
This is interesting: two guys from Australia who nevertheless sound like they've been camping out in a desert somewhere in the Middle East, soaking up Arabic melodies and the like. It's one of the discs that crosses a lot of different lines, mixing elements of ambient, tribal, industrial, and Arabic pop all into a bizarre but intriguing stew of sound. Using traditional non- western instruments in conjunction with sneaky synth moves and droning vocals, they combine the best of several genres into a compelling package with a much wider appeal than you'd think at first glance.
The opening track, "Father of the Flower," is a good place to start: it begins with synth drones, then a layer of tabla percussion, then other odd percussion instruments join in, followed by a lazy-susan guitar riff and throat singing. It builds into an exotic trance mantra that is followed by the more "upbeat" sound of "Ubar," in which the main instrument is some kind of horn playing shifting figures over a bed of plucked acoustic guitar and percussion, among other things. Both tracks contain much incidental sound and instrument that point to one of the band's primary strengths, which is in creating thick layers of texture that still sound open and airlike.
In "The Promise," neo-classical guitar and distorted piano lines lead into shifting rhythms overlaid with layers of violin-like instruments and cello; some of the same elements surface in the moodier "Serpent," along with more wailing horns. But then "The Lyre of Awakening" comes on like a sandstorm drone of different instruments mixed in such a fashion that the entire song seems to be drifting in and out of focus; the effect renders it almost opaque, and the resulting sound would not be out of place on a Voice of Eye album. This and the minimalistic "Muezzin" are the band at their most ambient, while "The Court of the Servant" sounds oddly like Tony Conrad on an Arabic bender. There's more of a gothic tinge to "As Night Falls," which (while still firmly grounded in the natural sounds found on the rest of the disc) is heavily synth-laden, and "Alizee" is a marvelous slow-building drone mantra festooned with incidental percussion, chant vocals, and various odd noises, somewhere in the territory of a gothic Gregorian chant.
This is a good disc for when you're in the mood for exotica. Most tasteful too, although possibly a bit somber for some (although that's more than okay by me). As an added bonus, the packaging is exceptional, from the nude statue on the cover to the clever typography inside; really, the case itself is a work of art that made me feel bad about having to remove the shrink wrap to get to the disc....
Guess what! Unsane are back... and they STILL want to kill you. Slowly. Preferably by shoving large knitting needles through your ears. But since doing that one by one all across America would take too long (although it would offer them the opportunity to drink lots of free bear from countless fridges), they've settled for the next best thing: releasing this album. Talk about your massive cases of earhurt, this would be a good one....
The drill should be familiar by now. Three guys from the diseased bowels of NYC (you know, the BAD part of town, the part they leave out of the tourist brochures, the vile cesspool of body parts floating in sewer grates in crack dens... THAT part of town) playing a volatile mix of nitro-fueled hate with indecipherable lyrics that nevertheless sound real scary because Chris Spencer screams them at you like the dying words of a blood-spattered psychotic killer. Bassist Dave Curran still has the most bowel-loosening bass sound on earth -- really, it constantly sounds like his instrument is about to give up the ghost and just fall completely apart -- and the band's overall sound can still be roughly likened to having a letter bomb explode in your face.
Some things have changed this time around, though. One-time Swans drummer Vinny Signorelli sounds even more ominous than on previous discs, if such a thing is possible -- here he sounds like a human drill-press. You can just imagine the drums imploding during the sessions. And while Dave Curran's wall-o-filth bass trundling hasn't changed much (in fact, he still sounds enough like Pete Shore, who left after TOTAL DESTRUCTION, that you could be forgiven for not even noticing the personnel change), it's certainly gotten more surgically precise in its search for the perfectly lurid hate groove. The big surprises here, though, are mostly emanating (sort of like radioactive waste) from Chris Spencer's guitar. Dunno if it's all the endless touring or what, but the guy has gotten genuinely unpredictable; it's not just churning power chords anymore. "This Plan" features a swirling guitar line that owes a hell of a lot more to the likes of Null and Coltrane than it does to ordinary noise-rock (it also fades out instead of just ending like a car crash, which is a new move for these guys). More guitar spew of a similar nature on "Over Me," a churning juggernaut in its own right, confirms that this is not just a passing thing, either. "Take In The Stray," which opens with semi-jazzy drums, is almost -- God help us -- sort of catchy, at least until the Spence-man opens his mouth and starts barking. After that you just have to hide under your chair and hope some of the furniture is still standing when the song ends. More psychotronic guitar shows up on "Sick," where Spencer alternates doodly hall-of-whirling-knives stuff with brain-raping power riffing until you have no choice but to submit or be buried beneath the onslaught.
Things get really interesting with the likes of "Hazmat," though, where they pick up a machine-like industrial vibe that puts a whole new spin on their patented crash-and-burn approach. "Humidifier" is not far removed from this new spin, with clanking stop and start bass riffs overrun by a quirky beat and more shredomatic guitar doodling. Both of them sound like the band's performing in an industrial laundromat, turning over and over in the washing machine.
The rest of the album is essentially a series of pummeling shots to the head -- all spine-rupturing bass, cannon-blast drumming, wounded-rhino guitar, and the voice that sounds like Spencer just got shot at close range with a shotgun. It's all pretty blinding (not to mention exhausting -- how these guys manage to play this night after night without imploding onstage is beyond me), but "Understand" -- with its shuddering bass tonnage and beyond-hardcore drum and guitar pounding -- is one of the major standouts. Beyond brilliant. Makes all the rest of their albums look like they were just getting warmed up. If listening to this doesn't make you want to set people on fire then there's something wrong with you....
This is one of the most important music collections of the twentieth century and it's finally available on CD, thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, who acquired the Folkways label in 1987 largely just for this collection. It's hard to effectively convey just how significant this collection has been on the development of music in the second half of this century -- although you can get an inkling by noticing the impressive range of artists called upon to contribute to the liner notes: Peter Stampfel (the Fugs), Allen Ginsberg, and John Fahey (whose amusing, cryptic, and highly lucid commentary threatens to turn into a book of its own) are among the luminaries who speak here of the ANTHOLOGY's impact. Listening to the six discs in this set, you can suddenly hear where the likes of Fahey, Dylan, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, among others, first got the initial slivers of their inspiration. (A detailed annotation of the songs at the end of the ridiculously huge booklet notes, after each song, a partial list of artists who have covered the song in question; a small sample of those names includes P. J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Professor Longhair, The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pentangle, George Thorogood, Johnny Cash, Dick Dale, the Grateful Dead, Doug Sahm, Boiled in Lead, Louis Armstrong, Townes Van Zandt, Eddie Cochran, the Silencers, Flatt and Scruggs, John Fahey, the Lovin' Spoonful, Hot Tuna, the Dream Syndicate, Thelonius Monster, and Kristen Hersh. Obviously the collection has had not only a tremendous impact, but holds appeal for a wide range of listeners.
The reissue itself is a work of art that rivals the original edition. For those not familiar with the story, Harry Smith -- an eccentric loon, veteran of World War II, and obsessive record collector (big surprise) -- got the bright idea to assemble a "beginner's primer" of sort on American folk music. His method of selecting the 84 songs that appeared was arcane and cryptic, yet (when it was all assembled) somehow made perfect sense; taking advantage of the emergence of long-playing vinyl (a new phenomenon when this was first released in 1952), he essentially created the box-set by compiling six records into one volume, divided into three sections with two records apiece: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. He even threw in an eye- popping booklet decorated in a lurid fashion that anticipated the clip-art frenzy of art mutants like the Church of the SubGenius, complete with a dazzling series of annotated cross-references and lurid tabloid-style sluglines for each song ("FATHER FINDS DAUGHTER'S BODY WITH NOTE ATTACHED WHEN RAILROAD BOY MISTREATS HER! -- WIFE'S LOGIC FAILS TO EXPLAIN STRANGE BEDFELLOW TO DRUNKARD!"), all written in eyestrain-o-vision type. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen or heard and immediately became the operative musical bible for an entire generation of musicians (mostly, but not limited to, folk singers).
Then for reasons too complicated to elaborate on here, the album went out of print. (Typical record biz woes.) And now the Smithsonian Institution has reissued it on CD, in a format that closely follows the look of the original set (they have even gone to the trouble of printing up a close facsimile of the original booklet). The new set also includes a 68-page booklet full of informative essays (one by Greil Marcus that is actually a chunk of his quasi-Dylan book INVISIBLE REPUBLIC), and one disc is enhanced to include photos, interviews, and other interesting notes. In addition, they went to a great deal of trouble to clean up editing and sound problems, sometimes to the extent of hunting down original copies of the 78s in question and recutting masters; they even managed to fix a problem that inadvertently plagued the original set by compensating for and correcting tracks that had been recorded too fast or too slow. (78s, by a quirk of their manufacturing process, actually varied in speed, sometimes by as much as ten revolutions a minute; the techno-freaks at the Smithsonian compared certain instruments on each track to instruments of fixed pitch to determine the proper speed. This sort of attention to detail has a lot to do with why it took them ten years to reissue the damn thing.)
All of which brings us to... yes... the music in question. What is it? Well, it's basically old-time music from the late twenties to early thirties (blues, bluegrass, hillbilly music, spirituals, and the like), performed by a bizarre mixture of professional musicians (the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc.), genuine oddballs (Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee), and plain old ordinary people from way out in the sticks (pretty much everyone else). Most of it is played off the cuff (this is, after all, from an age where everything was cut directly to the master and subsequently had to be performed live from start to finish); some of it isn't even in English (Smith had a fondness for Cajuns); all of it sounds eerie and primal. This is music that was never meant to be discovered, really -- the music people out in the back woods play for each other on the porch at night for entertainment because no one has any money to do much else. Some of it, like "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," are just flat-out creepy; others are more in line with traditional ballads (mostly about murder and disasters, interestingly enough). All of it sounds like it is not of this earth. Personally, I think it's all brilliant (note, though, that i definitely favor "The Mountaineer's Courtship" above all the rest). Everybody should own this. Fuck the cost. There's not a bad song on here (how many other six-disc collections can make that claim?), and a great many are classics that, as already noted, have been covered by just about everyone who's anyone. Now that the set is available in such excellent form, and for a reasonable price no less, this would be the time to investigate for yourself what all the fuss is about....
Deep in the bowels of the Temple of Paz, far beneath the Staircase of Skulls, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl tiptoed through the dust-covered husks of the ancient dead, swathed in darkness, picking their way through the ruins with only the help of stylish infrared glasses. TASCAM-Girl, as was her custom regarding imminent battle, was loaded down with grenades, smoke bombs, seven automatic pistols, an M-16, two carbines, the sinister Freem Blaster and a Refract-O-Gasm Raybolt, a grenade launcher purchased with Green Stamps, and enough raw munitions to overtake France. The Captain, meanwhile, carried only a boombox on one shoulder.
"So let me get this straight," she whispered as they eased into the Hall of Creeping Death, "I'm carrying enough raw firepower to supply a third world nation and you're carrying... a boombox. Do you have some, uh, master plan you haven't told me about, or are you just out of your mind again?"
"All will be revealed," he said mysteriously.
"Oh, I like that. 'All will be revealed,' my ass. You're just a fucking fruitcake, you know that?"
Suddenly a massive stone door creaked open to reveal the terrifying countenance of their arch-nemesis Doktor Shithead, flanked by dozens of his evil minions. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he cackled wildly. "I haff you BOXED IN! This will be zee END for you meddlesome do-gooders! My evil minions will chop off yer limbs and eat zem for BREAKFAST! We shall DINE on the girl's fat rump!"
"HEY!" TASCAM-Girl fired a round into the ceiling. "Don't be dissin' my ass, you pointy-headed li'l fuck!"
"SEIZE ZEEM!" The Doktor shouted, enraged. "Break zose tiny pipecleaners she calls arms and waste zeem both!"
The army advanced, only to be repelled by TASCAM-Girl's deafening roar of artillery. As they exchanged shots, she said to the Captain, "If you've got a secret weapon this would be a good time for it, buddy. I only have so much ammunition, you know."
"Certainly." With a flourish, he dropped a CD into the boombox. After a few seconds, music began to play. Tweety bird sounds emerged over a simple strummed guitar. A reedy female voice began to sing slowly in Japanese.
"What the hell is this, folk music? Are you going to bore them to death with Japanese folk music?"
"Quit," he said irritably. "Just wait...."
Suddenly, without warning, the song exploded into a slowly-spinning wash of hip-hop beats, hypnotic basslines, and chittering guitar warbling. The girl's voice chanted in robot fashion over the top. The sound was so perfect in its hip-hop trancepop danceability that all the shooting stopped as everyone in the room found themselves suddenly, horribly compelled to... to DANCE.
"Achtung!" one of the minions screamed. "My hips, they move without volition! I... I CANNOT STOP!"
"YOU MUST!" The Doktor raged. "SHOOT THEM! MEIN GOTT IN DER HIMMEL, you must fucking SHOOT THEM!"
"We cannot!" The chorus swelled up to meet the song's "aaaah, aaaah" vocal chorus. "Help! Help! Our feet, they move on their own!"
"Hey," TASCAM-Girl said gruffly, her booty causing carnage all of its own, "nice move. So what the hell is this anyway?"
"One of the songs from this fabulous new Alchemy compilation. This is 'Nadima,' by Hiroko Tanaka, one of the guitarists for the Japanese psychedelic hip-hop gods Mady Gula Blue Heaven. Is it not brilliant?"
"My God, listen to that guitar solo -- it sounds like she's feeding her guitar into a wood chipper-shredder."
"And the next one, 'Owari,' is even better." Calliope sounds whirled like a pinwheel before turning into a breakbeat augmented by wailing siren sounds. Then the song kicked into full gear, with a seductive lock and lull bass and drum beat augmented by all sorts of electronic frippery and more angelic vox.
"Here," he said, putting earplugs in her ears. Her hypnotic movements immediately ceased, even as the Doktor's minions were forced to helplessly get down. "Now you should have no problem mowing them down."
Her M-16 chattered with a furious roar. "Hey, you're RIGHT -- this is like shooting fish in a fucking barrel. So what else is on this swell disc, anyway? More stuff like this?"
"Yes and no. This is actually the second in a series of guitar comps from Alchemy, and this one features only women -- the aforementioned Takana in addition to two of the women from Sekeri, Miyu Uemura and Aya Ohnishi, plus one track from Angel'in Heavy Syrup guitarist Mine Nakao. The first two by Tanaka are actual songs; the third one is a strange hip-hop experiment that takes some getting used to. The five tracks by Uemura and two by Ohnishi are interesting, but more in the nature of sound vignettes than actual songs. The last song, 'Gin No Fume,' shows what Mine Nakao has apparently been up to while her bandmates try to decide if they're ever going to put out another album again. Here, listen."
He fast-forwarded to the song as TASCAM-Girl punched holes in another line of helpless dancing fools. "Hey, this sounds an awful lot like, uh, Angel'in Heavy Syrup. Listen to those spiraling guitars... what's with all the reverb, man?"
He shrugged. "She's a psychedelic girl, I guess."
"Look!" She dropped her gun momentarily -- no longer necessary now that dozens of minions lay dead and stinking on the floor -- and pointed to a tiny figure running away. "The Doktor is escaping! Should I go chase him down and pound a few rounds up his ass?"
"Not at all," the Captain said suavely. "For what the Doktor does not know is that during this little escapade, I deployed one of the robot cockroaches to climb up his pants leg. Little does he know that he is leading us directly to his hidden lair. Soon enough... we will meet again."
"And then I'll get to use the grenades?"
"Then you'll get to use the grenades."
"All right!" She pumped her fist. "So how about playing that thing again? That was actually kind of catchy...."
This is subtitled "Audio Documentation of the 1997 Northern California Experimental Music Festival," which pretty much sums it up. The festival took place September 12-13, 1997 and featured approximately thirty bands or solo artists; this CD includes tracks by approximately half of them. Much of the music here is of a cut-up, found-sound nature, as evidenced by tracks by Office Products ("Launch Break"), Diaz-Infante Dvorin ("Excerpt from Tryptich, Panel One") and ECOMCON ("Records Joe Gave Me"); others, like Crib's "Dissolution," are more in the vein of droning minimalism via electronic gadget manipulation. On "...recollecting past events of seminal importance, with allusions to three situations," CMU lures in the listener with stretches of silence intercut with bursts of gadgetry, abruptly followed by something resembling a slice of a droning song -- a sound that falls away into silence, then more gadgets. Moekestra employs heavy reverb and gating to achieve a hermetic drone occasionally spiced with peculiar clattering and bursts of sound on "Falling Objects from an Atmosphere"; Radiosonde puts shuddering and distorted bass loops into effect with noisy results on "Moments Before Play"; and K. Atchley puts more loud, fuzzy drones to work opposing each other on "Cactus Flower (Classical)," which doesn't sound remotely classical at all.
The shining tower of drone seems to be one of the more prevalent sources of sound construction here -- more than half the bands employ some form of drone -- along with snippets of found sound. This is best put to effect on pieces like "Surgaspring" (Klowd) and Eugene Thacker's "Opal-Binhex Aether," which features a great loop like the sound of an engine knocking that gradually increases in volume, wavering in strength. One of the more intriguing offerings here is the collaboration between Chris Cobb and Floyd Diebel (of CMU), "Twelve Evenings/Prometheus Loop," a more structured piece than most of the material here, in which different segments of sound are faded in and out in movements over a churning loop. A vocal and piano segment is looped in the middle, and grows in volume as the loop sequence progresses, then fades out. Hypnotic stuff.
This is quirky, unusual stuff that should be of considerable interest to those enamored of found sound and highly experimental cut and paste hijinks. How you get your hands on it, though, is a damn good question. Perhaps if you were to send a nice email message to Chris Cobb at [ cobbsf@sfai.edu ] he could enlighten you in that regard....
Ah, more loops and drones with the magic four-track... an entire cassette's worth, this time. As with the singles mentioned last issue, the method here generally remains the same: Blake Edwards composes bedrock tracks that consist out of simple loops, over which he layers ambient washes of sound and unidentifiable incidental noises. The sound that results, over the course of an entire tape, is not unlike the effect of floating through water tunnels in the middle of the night... or maybe driving through the lunar landscapes of city highways and overpasses still under construction. Part of the appeal in these tracks is the hypnotic effect of the sunken loops, the process of making ambience rhythmic; the rest of what holds your interest comes from Blake's inventive use of field recordings, treated guitar, AM radio, dulcimer, flute, sheet metal, and the like to create almost invisible layers of texture over the loops. His success at transforming sounds is so complete that i have no idea what sounds were actually generated by what instruments or objects, which only helps the tracks to sound that much more mysterious. Like the singles, this is works either as background music or something to which to can pay closer attention (if you're so inclined); and like the singles, it is worth seeking out and hearing. As with the round spinning things, it also comes with a nifty printed booklet....
Director: Simon West, who probably should know better
Slumming: Nicholas Cage, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Ving Rhames
Ah, the joys of watching actors who really ought to have better things to do with their time attempting to gamely slog their way through ninety-odd minutes of complete incoherence. Woo woo! Forget the explosions and random gunfire every fifteen seconds and miles of exploding plate glass -- the REAL fun is watching the look of frozen horror on Cage's face as, about midway through the picture, it s-l-o-w-l-y dawns upon him that he has no business being in this ridiculous flick.
It really isn't that bad (well, on second thought, maybe it is); it's just puzzling to see a lot of high-caliber actors assembled in something than can only charitably be described as 1997's front-runner in the Trailer Trash Cinema Sweepstakes. The "plot," in a nutshell: Cage plays a military veteran who, upon returning home, gets in a bar fight defending his woman and kills a guy and gets sent to a federal prison for manslaughter for eight years. (Already we're in high implausibility mode; let me tell ya, if a decorated veteran wasted a thug in a bar in Alabama, they'd give him a fucking medal and a cash bonus, not a trip to prison. And since when does manslaughter get you sent to federal prison anyway? I believe someone goofed... oh, oh wait, the Headless Sno-Cone Girl has just pointed out that ignoring that reality conveniently allows him to ride a federal prison transport jet, and without that we wouldn't have a plot, would we?) So he does his time and they parole him (another goof -- i don't think federal prisons don't do parole; doesn't ANYBODY in Hollywood know how to fucking look stuff up?), whereupon he hitches a ride home with a bunch of bad guys being transferred to a maximum security prison, and then the bad guys take over the plane (and no, the takeover doesn't make much sense either). So then Cage has to save the day... like you never would have guessed....
So they have Malkovich as "Cyrus the Virus" (pause while you laugh until you stain yourself), the bad guy in charge, Ving Rhames as a crazed black nationalist, Steve Buscemi as the creepy "look! we saw SILENCE OF THE LAMBS too!" Lecter-clone, plus assorted other goofballs and the rest of the bad guys. Oooo, i'm pissin' in mah diddies now. Apparently they all realized immediately just how ridiculous this whole exercise was and started hamming it up from the word go (particularly Malkovich, who goes so overboard that he steps right into toon-land)... all except, uh, Nicholas Cage. Apparently no one bothered to tell him that he would look ridiculous actually acting in this, um, "vehicle." And why the hell is John Cusack in here (as a U. S. Marshal, of all things)? Was he supposed to bring an air of "legitimacy" to this project? (To be fair, he's actually pretty humorous.)
The end result: Um, they blow up lots of stuff. Airplanes, cops, cars, planes, military personnel, fire trucks, a casino... why, the list just goes on and on... the oil companies were overjoyed, i'm sure.... They also shoot things when they're not blowing stuff up. Really, this is an incredibly LOUD movie. Lots of slo-mo running shots too! The hallmark of quality! Yessir!
And just what, exactly, was the point of showing the escaped Buscemi gambling at the casino at the very end? [HS-CG whispers in moonunit's ear] Ohhhhhhh yeaaaahhhh... to demonstrate how crudely they can steal from other successful flicks, truly the hallmark of Hollywood stylin'....
Director: Evan Crooke
Starring: Brett Cullen, Tamilyn Tomita, Tom Bower, Brion James, Wes Studi
Well now, this is interesting... i picked this up for the exquisitely bad cover art, figuring that it would be another exercise in campy badfilm entertainment, and imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a real movie. An INTERESTING movie. With, like, an intelligent plot with mondo suspense and actors who can actually act and stuff. Huh. Makes you wonder why the video company hid it in a bad cover that screams cheesiness, eh? The dumb things movie companies do....
This is essentially the movie that WHITE OF THE EYE wanted to be (and, for about the first half, kind of was -- until it degenerated into David Keith painting himself funny colors and screaming in the desert like a dumbass). We have a guy who passed by an "auto accident" at night that turns out to have been the scene of a brutal murder. Under hypnosis, he remembers a great deal about the murder -- and eventually becomes the prime suspect. But a lot of what he's remembering that makes the poliza suspicious is a red herring -- in fact, actually what he's remembering from an auto accident he was in as a child, an accident that killed his father and one friend while leaving another maimed for life. It's all wound up together, see. I'll leave out the details (no fair spoiling it, eh?), but essentially the truth comes out... although the movie ends in massive bummer mode. Wups!
I should have the good fortune to be surprised like this more often. This actually turned out to be one of the better movies i've seen all year. And it certainly doesn't hurt that Tamilyn Tomita is awfully cute, mon.... Recommended. Highly recommended.
Castrated Tapes (now Loud Cat) -- 22 Henry Street, Sayreville, NJ 08872
Crippled Intellect -- P.O. Box 628, Village Station NY 10014-0628
March Records -- P.O. Box 578396, Chicago, IL 60657
Bob Marinelli -- 300 West Fourth Street, Mt. Carmel, PA 17851
The Rainmakers -- email: monk@lcs.net
Relapse/Release -- http://www.relapse.com
Sterilized Decay -- email: goblin@sardu.demon.co.uk
Table of the Elements -- P.O. Box 5224, Atlanta, GA 31107
Tracheotomy 13 -- email: rotten@netwiz.net
Interview with Chris Cobb (i think), reviews of nifty shit by Low, Icy Spicy Coolmint, more Icon of Throat, Rapoon, Walking Timebombs/Tribe of Neurot, more Vertonen, etc., etc. You just never know what will arrive in my mailbox....