1994: Total - Here, Time is Space
I find myself having great difficulty describing what I find so pleasantly alluring about Total’s Here, Time is Space. For me the album can only be summed up in brief phrases that allude to pain and misery. Since this approach has become an exercise in near futility for me, I decided to give some insight into my process of trying to convince you (being the collective you who have decided to read this) to listen to the album.
First I will attempt to put the music in the context of which it was created; i.e. describe the musical and historical significance of the project in a way the reader can relate to:
• Total is a solo project of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Pure/Hototogisu/etc.) Originally started as a noise/industrial outlet following the breakup of Bower’s band Pure, Total later became a side group of the Skullflower project.
Okay. So Skullflower isn’t exactly Pink Floyd but I think I covered what I needed to. Now comes the part where I talk about what Here, Time Is Space sounds like:
• By 1994 Skullflower had been primarily delving into distorted sludge jams focusing on the low end of the register that nonetheless contained some semblance of a structure to work within. Total, on the other hand, was the polar opposite – all high end guitar fuzz and no discernible structure. Sometimes beautiful tones can be heard through a wall of piercing static distortion. Other times, its just an ugly mess of well… piercing static distortion.
Okay, it’s getting kind of dicey right? I should try a different approach. Maybe if I talk about a real life feeling the music reminds me of some readers can relate and they will like it! (PLEASE LIKE IT!)
• Listening to Here, Time is Space is like spending too much time in the sun with a really bad hangover. You aren’t sure if you have a fever or maybe the sun has warmed your skin too much. It feels like a can of motor oil has been poured in your head, and it’s getting difficult to form complete thoughts or ideas. Your only choice is to close your eyes, shut out the pounding headache and nausea, and just allow the warmth and delirium to overtake you momentarily.
Great, there I go again. Perhaps this is just how it’s supposed to be. I should probably just sum it up and post some youtube videos.
• Total’s Here, Time is Spaceis an epic solar drone. Miserable? Only if you let it be. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and search for that one great feeling among the sickness that surrounds you.
1956; 1970: Nervous Norvus’ "Transfusion" and the Dr. Demento Show
The story of Nervous Norvus’ “Transfusion” was also the story of how novelty radio DJ Dr. Demento got his name. Apparently, after the Dr. played “Transfusion” on his then un-branded-by-dementia radio slot, he began getting phone calls from baffled, enthused listeners. Dr. Demento’s name and unique radio slot took off thereafter, and with it a host of weirdo novelty personas who flocked to the outlet he provided. The crash of “Transfusion” and Dr. Demento was so momentous that Demento was quoted upon his retirement this year as saying “I think without The Dr. Demento Show, the probability is high that Alfred Yankovic would be a professional architect today.” If, indeed, “Transfusion” and other popular oddities were responsible for the rise of Demento, then they were indirectly responsible for Demento’s giving exposure to generations of novelty artists once his persona was established: Frank Zappa, Monty Python, Al Yankovic et al.
“Transfusion” had already been a big hit for Nervous Norvus by the time it was rediscovered by Dr. Demento in 1970. By 1957 the novelty song was always a strong contender for a hit, and it appears that Norvus had deliberately intended to become a novelty artist like his idol, Teen comedy presenter Red Blanchard. He bought a baritone ukulele, got piano lessons, and submitted the results of his song-writing efforts to Red’s comedy show. It was Blanchard who added the ‘crash’ sound effects between the verses of Transfusion. It was also Blanchard’s lingo that Norvus copied when he came up with his own handle; ‘Nervous’ was one of the show’s words for ‘cool,’ and the shy Jimmy Drake chose to identify himself as ‘Nervous Norvus.’
Norvus hired himself out as a producer, but his own sound never expanded into a fuller rock ‘n’ roll band. He stuck with a straightforward kick drum to accompany his own ukulele playing. The sound effects between verses became standard after Blanchard added howls to Norvus’ second hit “Ape Call,” an even more hilariously tentative song about quotidian encounters with danger. Norvus’ other great asset, his jittery voice, struck a primitive note as he cheerfully and tremulously suggested that a cat’s wisest approach in the jungle of romance was to single out an equally nervous chick and howl with bravado. The final and most important feature of Norvus’ sound was his jive jingle lyrics; “The pterodactyl was a flying fool” (“Ape Call”) is typical of his alliterative silliness. “Transfusion,” though, is the song that sums up Norvus’ feel-the-fear, faint-at-heart delivery best of all. Every time a verse ends, Norvus vows that he’ll never ever speed again, but by the next verse he’s apologetically looking for a fix, saying things like “Slip the blood to me Bud” or “Make that Type O, Daddy-O.”
The lack of conviction in Norvus’ voice was ironically his best asset. As a middle aged rocker, he managed to cut a dangerous figure at a time when so many kids idolized the sacred ton of metal that was the car in 1950s America. As Norvus was making light of dangerous driving, other musicians like Bill Hayes and Ferlin Husky were cranking out so-called ‘death discs’ as cautionary tales of teenage recklessness. Naturally, this genre of public safety warning crossed with rock ‘n’ roll was also mined for glamour (see Bill Hayes’ “Message from James Dean”), but Norvus was singular in exploring the phenomenon for its comedy potential. Knowing that “Transfusion“‘s comedy was accidentally-on-purpose at the cutting edge in the 1950s sheds light on its shrewd rediscovery by Dr. Demento. It perfectly fit the spirit of nonsense and apolitical anti-heroism of the comedy music that was popularized by the Doctor in the following decades.
1998: Duster - Stratosphere
Stratosphere is an apt title for Duster’s first LP. Given that the stratosphere is the second major layer of Earth’s atmosphere (i.e., not in space, but above the clouds), a fitting halfway point between Duster’s introverted slowcore and gauzy, bordering on space rock instrumentation can be drawn. Forget Music for Airports or In Search of Space, this is music for gazing at the clouds from an airplane window seat.
San Jose’s Duster was formed in 1996 by the multi-instrumentalists Clay Parton and Dove Amber. Prior to forming Duster, Parton and Amber were both in the frantically chaotic screamo group Mohinder, yet I never placed this connection until recently – frankly, it’s hard to imagine either band making anything that remotely resembles the other’s music. Regardless, I mention this because there’s one aspect between the two worth mentioning: feeling. It’s simple enough for one to hide behind metaphor or to mask earthly personality with guitar delay and songs that figuratively (or for some, literally) invoke space, yet the part of me that grew up listening to post-hardcore is often suspicious of this idea. While comparing the sounds of Duster and Mohinder is quite pointless, I’d like to think that Duster’s roots have something to do with maintaining an evocative sound that’s full of instrumental feeling.
Stratosphere is a record that actually sounds better for having been largely recorded to 4-track – the clean guitar interplay takes on an additional feeling of audible warmth because it was captured on tape, while the distorted guitars tend to maintain an enveloping fuzz, as on the seven-minute drone of Stratosphere’s title track. I’d suggest that both of Duster’s albums are essential for laid-back indie rock guitar fans, as not only does the band demonstrate an impeccable ear for tones, but also the ability to build relaxing songs out of cyclical, paradoxically meandering-yet-engaging guitar lines. The loud songs (e.g., “Echo, Bravo,” “Earth Moon Transit”) utilize feedback echoes and textured distortion, while more restrained tracks like “Topical Solution” and “The Landing” are relatively free of distortion yet retain a spaciousness befitting of the term “space rock.”
Compared with the myriad of other psych/space-leaning indie rock bands of the 90s, Duster’s records exist in a distinctly middle-ground niche. Aside from a few of their drone tracks, they rarely dealt in the sort of feedback/static washes utilized by Flying Saucer Attack; furthermore, they weren’t nearly as drugged-out as Spritualized, and they never fell in the turgid soloing that marred a sizeable chunk of Bardo Pond’s work. Normally this “middle ground” wouldn’t exactly be a ringing endorsement, but in Duster’s case it’s a comforting sitting (and, as an aside, Duster released an album of much sparser and atmospheric space echoes called Hier Kommt Der Schwartze Mond under the name Valium Aggelein the same year as Stratosphere, demonstrating their more abstract side). If anything, I’d compare Duster to a more atmospheric take on the clean, gorgeously layered guitar melodies of the Kadane brothers (Bedhead, The New Year) – Parton and Amber likely have more pedals than the Kadanes, but the feelings behind their approaches are similar. Both pairs make deceptively simple guitar lines sound effortless and beautiful, but the Kadane’s style generally feels more firmly rooted and ground-borne, while Duster’s guitars often sound like they’re floating – not out in space, but in the sky; jet stream echo as we fly from one place to another.
1987: Sonic Youth - "Schizophrenia"
This is where Sonic Youth finally delivered on all the promise their early work hinted at. Don’t get me wrong, almost everything they did before their 1987 masterpiece Sister was pretty damn good, but the noise-pop gem “Schizophrenia” that kicks off the album is the band’s single greatest accomplishment. Sonic Youth had been experimenting with alternately tuned guitar workouts for years and they were no strangers to mutilating a pop song or two live, but “Schizophrenia” was the first instance where they injected an original “pop” – in the loosest sense of the word – composition with their own unique noisy jangle. The song begins with a simple drum figure and stays relatively tame and straightforward for the remainder of the verse. It’s only after Thurston’s singing stops that the band enters transcendental-jam mode and whisks listeners away. Lee and Thurston trade harmonic pings back and forth as Kim’s haunting chants lead the band into a dramatic swell. Then Lee and Thurston steal the show again with another guitar blitz before the song slows down and crawls to a creepy finish. I’ll go ahead and say it, this is probably my favorite song of all time. Late 80s Sonic Youth was forcing everyone to rethink the guitar’s role in pop songs – check out the excellent “Expressway to Yr. Skull” for further proof – and “Schizophrenia” is their most perfect statement from that era.
2001-2009: Daughters
It has been nearly two years since the collapse of the Providence, RI band Daughters. Their eponymous 2010 album (which had deservedly earned them exposure) felt so much like a fresh start, yet it came stillborn, released well after their apparent ugly breakup. Frustratingly, there has never been a definitive disbanding, though half the members have left. Singer Alexis Marshall and drummer Jon Syverson could potentially come back with more material, but with every passing month it seems less likely. What we have in their absence are the few recorded documents of a band that, while perhaps not recognized during their existence, should only grow in recognition and admiration.
For a band that played together for eight years Daughters, originally formed by members of also-defunct As The Sun Sets, have a shockingly small discography. From 2001-2009 their recorded material amounts to little over an hour. Fortunately numbers becomes irrelevant when you consider their immediacy; the band’s output is one of the greatest examples of quality of quantity in recent memory. The debut album Canada Songs boasts ten songs in 11 minutes, which might seem insignificant if those 11 minutes weren’t honed to a razor edge. There are so many memorable moments crammed in. “Jones From Indiana” is all noise rock until an unexpected shift where drums, piercing guitar, and screaming vocals all meld into a violent groove with a few seconds to spare at the end for a droning coda. “Nurse, would you Please” has Nick Sadler abruptly shifting between his usual splintering guitar screech and moments of prickly precise lucidity. “The Ghost With the Most” builds to the breaking point it feels the album has been rushing towards from the start, until suddenly all the tension falls away and the band locks into a slower pace, losing none of its muscle. Marshall’s screams disappear and are replaced by a surprisingly great singing voice indebted to David Yow. Clearly Canada Songs works best when listened to as one piece, something that benefited the early work of The Boredoms, an important influence here; the album could be Soul Discharge’s kid brother.
Hell Songs (read original TMT review here), released in 2006, is expansive in comparison to the first album. At ten songs in 23 minutes, everything that was introduced on Canada Songs and the debut EP is developed, a shift displayed perfectly on “Recorded Inside a Pyramid.” The production sounds far clearer, the instruments give each other a little more space, the seasick string coda at the end comes out of nowhere but feels appropriate. Marshall’s vocals have turned from high pitched screech to a deeper, half-spoken howl. The vocal refinements allow some fabulous lyrical moments to occur, something absent from Canada’s purely musical pleasures. Lines such as “I wear my sickness like a wedding band,” the chanted “love is a disgusting thing,” and the ominous opening shout of “I’ve been called a sinner,” leave a powerful impression on the listener.
This brings us back to that final album, Daughters, released close to the successful debut of guitarist Sadler’s new band Fang Island, which only seemed to cement the break-up. The album was criticized by its own singer, Marshall, as having a very intentional commercial sound, and none of its songs have ever been toured. While a song like “The Hit” does immediately give its listener a groove that might have been built up to or ignored on previous albums, there is still a tremendous value to it. Experimenting with pop music or accessibility should not intrinsically be perceived as “less than shit,” as Marshall puts it in an interview. Liars followed their most brutal and uncompromising album, Drums Not Dead, with a self-titled release of brilliant pop song interpretations, perhaps the most controversial thing they could have done at the time. Daughters is a streamlined, less alienating version of what the band had been progressing towards – if they are truly dead it’ll make a damn good swan song.
If this is what Daughter’s entire discography will amount to, it stands as a wonderful display of a bands refinement over time. From opener “Hello Assholes” on their first EP to the organ-filled closer “The Unattractive Portable Head,” a highlight of the self-titled, they had an incredibly consistent sound that was nonetheless being honed into something sharper at every opportunity. Regardless of their current status or their shitty demise Daughters will be remembered as the brilliantly uncompromising band that exists on these recordings.
2000: Anthony Braxton - Composition 169
I walked into the basement of a Wesleyan University studio and sat down at the piano for day one of Anthony Braxton’s small ensemble rehearsal. We were handed Composition 169. I opened the part to reveal 1,100 measures of relentlessly unison rhythmic clusters. Reading it for the first time, my fingers were annihilated by rapidly fluctuating successions of time signatures – 9 over 2s, 13 over 4s, 5 over 2s.
After a few weeks of rehearsal and division practice, the ensemble sounded “together.” But there was still a strange disconnect. I was concentrating so hard to play each cluster correctly, and when my brain lapsed it all fell apart musically. “Professor Braxton,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m still having a tough time getting these rhythms to feel right.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I’ve been looking at these rhythms for 300 years, and it’ll probably take another 300 years before I can play them correctly.”
We all smiled at Braxton’s sincerely unconventional sense of time, but his comment was enlightening. It wasn’t worth focusing on each individual rhythmic phrase, even though the piece demanded it. Instead, we were forced to internalize, putting the unnaturally complex rhythm in our bodies instead of our minds. The less we counted, the more it locked in.
Returning a few years later to 169, my feelings about it are intensified. Like playing it, 169 demands extremely precise listening and extremely detached listening. It invites analysis while laughing at you for even trying. It creates a world of visceral feelings through an unromantic process and concept. I believe it will retrospectively be regarded as one of Braxton’s most important works.
