2009: Yoshi Wada - Earth Horns and Electronic Drone
The 21st century has seen an influx of reissue/archive labels responsible for shedding light on obscure recordings nearly left behind by history. Some aim for nothing more than bootleg-esque production (which often caters to the mysticism of a “lost recording”), whereas others -- Numero Group, Finders Keepers, and Shadoks -- thrive on their role as musicologists, going to endless lengths to provide the thorough documentation of their subjects. In the last year, Em and Omega Point, falling into the latter category of archivists, have been busy reintroducing the world to the works of Japanese artist (by way of New York) Yoshi Wada. While they may be brushing the dust off of someone who was seemingly lost in the shuffle of the 20th century, pictures of Wada playing with Rhys Chatham, The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and other big names indicate that he was indeed a key figure in New York’s avant-garde. Coming out of Fluxism and a contemporary of La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, Wada’s work boasts pure, first-generation minimalism influence at its finest. Wada is an inventor as well, having constructed massive sound installations, homemade bagpipes, and, in the case of Earth Horns and Electronic Drone, four massive 10 to 20-foot-long horns built from common plumbing materials. These instruments, coupled with his methods of composition, keep Wada’s music as alien from Western culture as possible.
Culled from a nearly three-hour live performance from 1974 (and issued in entirety on an über-limited three-LP set), this piece combines Wada’s homemade horns with an electronic feedback-resonating system designed by himself and Liz Phillips. The horns are tuned to the naturally occurring frequencies of the room, and the electronic drone — sensitive to these instruments' subtle, wavering tones — responds accordingly to the room in real time, creating an endless interplay of sound that reflects on itself. Although methodically planned out, the result is something quite visceral and less scientific than its process would indicate.
I won’t say it’s easy to set aside upwards of three hours to sit in front of your turntable and digest a drone, and it’s certainly easier to champion this sort of aural experience in theory than in practice. But although seemingly little happens, length is quintessential to Earth Horns’ success; it’s impossible to judge its merits within the first five minutes of listening. There’s a reason drones tend to…drone on, and over time the ears become finely tuned to the acute changes within this piece. Although at first glance a monolithic work, the nature of the instruments interacting with each other and with the space in real time lends itself to a much more linear action — and this is exactly why the music takes such a great amount of time to absorb. As Wada’s continually changing sound environment trails on and on, acoustic nuances occur, feeling more like a subtle hallucination than the aural investigation actually at hand. That’s all to say that there’s a lot to be gained by listening to this recording with a degree of patience and attentive ears.
In addition to the near psycho-acoustic interplay flourishing between Wada’s instruments, this piece also emphasizes the importance of ritual in music. Often sounding like slowed, melting monk chants, the perseverance of each player involved in this performance is indispensable. Required to repeatedly perform a small task at such great lengths is a tall order, with all the performers working towards something homogenous rather than striving for individuality. Its streamlined design and notions toward infinite real time and space give Earth Horns mantra and ceremonial qualities. Not that anyone should be expected to meditate while listening to this, but it wouldn’t be totally inappropriate. Our culture generally doesn’t set aside time specifically to listen to prerecorded music, but Earth Horns is the antithesis to our bustling, ear-bud-sporting times. The notion of music requiring such attentive listening is more valuable to our society now than ever before.
As attractive as all this is, Earth Horns' falls slightly short of Wada's other recently unveiled archives, primarily Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile -- though it's not the performance but the recording itself that dissapoints. Initially, it sounds as if Earth Horns is mastered at a volume far too low, but the reason for this quickly becomes apparent when loud, intrusive audience coughs and footsteps enter into the mix. These effects are easy enough to tune out, but this remains a mid-fi room recording at best, and not without its imperfections. We should be thankful that such documentation exists at all, though, and like Charlemagne Palestine’s landmark recording Strumming Music, Earth Horns' highlights the fact that it is a facsimile of a live event. The uninitiated would do best by starting out with the aforementioned Elephantine Crocodile or Off the Wall, but for those generally swayed by drone and early minimalism, Earth Horns and Electric Drone is an essential piece of music history.
1. Earth Horns and Electronic Drone
1970: Demon Fuzz - Afreaka!
I've always felt that the best bands tend to have the best names. The choice of moniker says a lot about who a band is; not, as one might think, because of what it describes in the literal sense, but because of what it suggests about the group’s collective psyche, their sense (or lack) of self-realization, and, above all, their creativity. Some of the best names are those that manage to perfectly straddle the line between atrocity and genius, between cringeworthiness and precision. It is, as you may have guessed, right smack in the middle of this spectrum where we find Demon Fuzz.
Even now, at the height of the Google age, there is a dearth of obtainable information on the particulars of this mysterious group. What we do know is that they formed in England in the late 1960s, consisting of seven men with musical tastes informed by -- but certainly not limited to -- West African, Calypso, soul, jazz, and ska. Most sources credit the group as the brainchild of saxophonist Paddy Corea, a mainstay in the thriving London ska scene. It is clear upon listening to Demon Fuzz, however, that no one man could plausibly be responsible for such a holy mess of ideas. In these tunes, all the aforementioned genres come into play seemingly at once, mixed with a vigorous dose of that ubiquitous bastard genre itself, rock ’n’ roll, to create a heavy, vibrant, psychedelic sound that both encompasses and rejects all notions of what music can and should be. To put it bluntly, it grooves.
That groove comes on strong, starting Afreaka! in free-form fashion with “Past, Present and Future.” The track boasts a fuzzed-out bass line and some sparse, noodly guitar before settling into a repetitious space-island jam, complete with menacing horn harmonies and a long, psyched-out organ solo. Carrying on in this manner for nearly 10 minutes might seem like a drag, but halfway through the song, it becomes a different beast entirely. The rhythm changes abruptly, the horns return, and you’re in the middle of the best dub-soul tune you’ve never heard. "Past, Present and Future" is instrumental, but the interplay between guitar and horns, between organ and rhythm section, expresses more than words ever could.
“Disillusioned Man” begins with a single acoustic guitar and a hand drum, suggesting something tame and hippieish until the beat drops and, voila, it’s a mind-expanding soul journey from way beyond -- it’s also the first track on the record with vocals, which tell the tale of a man who “almost lost his mind,” who “thought he was a king,” but was in reality a “[puppet] on a string.” Demon Fuzz’s lyrics, like the band name, walk a fine line between clever and kitsch, and while one gets the impression these songs would be just as strong without words at all, the occasional lyrical gem does well to legitimize their inclusion. This occurs most notably on the standout “Another Country,” the song on Afreaka! most fit for the dance floor. “If I could lose/ All my troubles/ By running away/ I wouldn’t stay,” declares singer Selwyn “Smokey” Adams, later opining that “it just ain’t fair.” It is simplistic, almost childlike in its brevity, yet somehow profound.
Originally released as an EP alongside the album itself, the three bonus tracks included on this CD reissue, while not as indispensable as the rest of the album, nonetheless shed some light on the band and their musical machinations. A cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” does the illustrious tune proud -- all of John Fogerty’s weirdo wails notwithstanding, there’s a truer sense of soul here than in other recorded versions. “Message to Mankind” is the requisite 1970s posi-funk seminar, with its warnings of death and destruction unless we all get together and love, man -- but it works, firstly because it’s a good goddamn tune, but mainly because it feels like the legitimate product of deep concern, not writer’s block.
The best of these songs, however, is “Fuzz Oriental Blues,” a seven-minute instrumental jam that lets the horns and Hammonds run amok, vamping slowly and expressively all over the place before skronking out into a free, churning ending. Although ostensibly an afterthought, it’s a wonderful and fitting way to end this lost gem of an album, one that runs the proverbial gamut of genres and styles but manages to fit them squarely and potently into a strange amalgam of funky, funky truth. That Demon Fuzz never achieved fame or stardom in their time makes some kind of paradoxical sense; as tight and pop-driven as they were at times, their jams ran a little too free and lasted a little too long for radio play. It is, above all, a true shame that we don’t have a whole lot more output from this exciting band to explore. Thank goodness we at least have Afreaka!
1. Past, Present and Future
2. Disillusioned Man
3. Another Country
4. Hymn to Mother Earth
5. Mercy (Variation No. 1)
6. I Put a Spell on You*
7. Message to Mankind*
8. Fuzz Oriental Blues*
* Reissue bonus tracks
1996: Doo Rag - What We Do
I wish that instead of reviewing Doo Rag’s 1996 album, What We Do, I could just play it for a group of people and count the number of hips that start shaking as a result. In an ideal world, I’d just publish what would undoubtedly be a pretty high margin, type out “I told you so,” and be along my merry way.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing is frowned upon in the overly-verbose world of music criticism. So instead, I’ll outline my argument for why an album by a glorified junkyard band from 1996 -- mostly relegated to novelty status in a select few’s record collections -- is worth re-examining in 2009, when artists everywhere are sacrificing fancy digital recording techniques to recreate the tape-hiss drenched, feedback-filled sound du jour.
Whereas most of today’s lo-fi bands simply eschew production value, Doo Rag’s duo of frontman Bob Log III and percussionist Thermos Malling threw out conventional instruments entirely to make one hell of a sludge-covered, Delta-blues-punk, little-to-no-fi album that few people have actually ever heard. Handmade dobros, $2 thrift store guitars, microphones encased in hairdryers and amplified through vacuums, and a drum kit made of trash cans, metal film reels, grocery carts and Miller High Life boxes filled out their equipment. A splash of Hasil Adkins gets thrown into the mix and you’ve got the musical stylings of Doo Rag, in a nutshell.
That said, it’s easy to see how What We Do has been written off as gimmicky by histories tastemakers. Sure, songs with titles like “Naughty Little Wiggle” don’t offer up much in the way of poetry, and the musical content isn’t exactly exploring much new territory, either. But to entirely discount the album -- or the band -- is missing the point of making stripped-down music in the first place: giving a middle finger to innovation and getting back to basics.
The question then becomes not how innovative a band like Doo Rag were, but how well they did what they did. And the 20 songs on What We Do serve up an honest-to-goodness dance party on heavyweight vinyl that almost anyone can appreciate, even 13 years after the fact. Whether it’s the John Lee Hooker-esque blues shuffle of “Tire Knocker” or the Cramps-inspired mania of “Trudge,” it’s clear that Doo Rag’s main focus is getting folks to get dirty. Even in the rare moments when the album does slow its pace (“Freeloader” and album closer “Hans Kramer’s Super Disco”), it’s not for the sake of squeezing in a ballad, but for providing the inevitable hazy, slurring, still-drunk-the-morning-after comedowns to the rest of the album’s booze- and meth-fueled rager. The tracks might not always leave the listener feeling good, but neither do a lot of the best parties.
In that spirit, What We Do may not be a hidden classic or anywhere near approaching essential. But it was never aiming to be, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, no matter how much you love a good mathy jam or 200-piece experimental guitar orchestra, listening to rock music was never intended to be an overly-cerebral exercise -- and therein lies the beauty of What We Do. It’s broken-down blues run through a blender. No complex time signatures, no fancy harmonic acrobatics. Just loud shouts, percussive stomps, and blues riffs played quick and dirty. It all comes together to make one hell of a find for any music nerd willing to turn off his hyper-critical brain long enough to give it a go.
1. Nickel
2. Nickel (Club Version)
3. Bam
4. Freeloader
5. Trudge
6. Doin' It To It
7. Mop Down
8 Rickety
9. Kick Walken
10. Jalopy
11. Tire Knocker
12. Naughty Little Wiggle
13. Crooked
14. Don't Need But A Little
15. Kick Down
16. 2 1/2 Ft. Soul
17. Rectifier
18. Race Truck
19. Some
20. Hans Kramer's Super Disco
2009: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - From Her to Eternity
Of the four albums reissued and remastered by Mute records, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ seminal debut, From Her to Eternity, is probably the most abrasive and difficult to digest. Coming off his stint as front-man for Australian noise-punk outfit The Birthday Party, Cave seemed intent to carry on in his former band’s atavistic tradition. Joined by, among others, fellow BP alum and lifelong collaborator Mick Harvey, Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargled, and Magazine’s Barry Adamson, Cave crafted the ultimate fulfillment of The Birthday Party’s promise: a raw, wet lump of writhing passion; a barb-wire tangle of love, hate, desire, and repulsion. The Bad Seeds stripped the song down to its ramshackle elements, then pulled it inside-out to expose all the quivering viscera.
The album begins with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche.” One of the darkest of the great songwriter’s early career, Cave peels back the tinkling guitar in favor of a slow, sleazy bassline and rolling, muffled drum fills courtesy of Harvey. The song crawls along on its belly under the weight of Cave’s rabid-animal snarl. The remastering has been particularly revealing for this track, which had been penalized for its menacing stillness in previous editions. “Avalanche” feeds directly into “Cabin Fever!” which, like the title track and “Saint Huck,” typifies the best of Cave’s earliest compositions. The song's central underpinning is a lurching bass figure, jarring and hypnotically repetitive; it cycles endlessly amid a cacophony of clattering drumsticks, free-form guitar shredding, and crashing cymbals. It’s one of Cave’s most harrowing vocal performances, too. He flits back and forth between ragged shrieks, squeals, and growls, conflating the experience of a seafarer going slowly mad with the singer’s own romantic turmoil (fueled, most likely, by his volatile relationship with fellow singer and occasional collaborator, Anita Lane). What makes the song so brilliant is that it presents a series of rising motions with no actual climax. In doing so, Cave creates an atmosphere of pure anxiety, of frustrated desire, a world of violent emotion from which release is unattainable. The music actually functions as a gateway into the artist’s psychological state.
"From Her to Eternity" is perhaps the most celebrated track on the album, a staple in The Bad Seed’s live set up through the ‘90s. Co-written with Lane, Cave narrates the speaker’s obsession with a woman who lives above him. The song presents some of his most vivid and unsettling imagery: “I hear her walking/ walking barefoot cross the boards/ all through this lonesome night/ I hear her crying too/ The tears come splashing down/ leaking through the cracks/ and down upon my face/ I catch ‘em in my mouth.” For four and a half minutes, the song teeters on the edge of destruction, often with only a simple, pounding piano theme holding the thing together. Bargled’s guitar lashes out periodically throughout, squalling, gnashing, and occasionally obscuring the vocals like a tangible outburst of the speaker’s id. It is followed, fittingly, by “Saint Huck.” Like the title track from Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, “Huck” revolves around the displacement of its protagonist -- in this case Twain’s Huck Finn -- into a depraved, morally bankrupt contemporary setting. “Saint Huck,” however, is pervaded by a wholly different sense of humor from “Lazarus.” Absent is the wry wit or the irony, and in its place is the humor of the Underground Man: confessional, self-debasing, squirm-inducing.
While “Cabin Fever!” and “From Her to Eternity” were the full fruition of Cave’s early work, other tracks offered glimpses of where the band was yet to go. “Well of Misery” is a masterpiece of minimalist blues that Cave would explore more fully in The Firstborn Is Dead. “A Box for Black Paul” continues in the same vein, with Cave crooning over the death and burial of a small-town, Southern intellectual to the sparse sounds of his own barely-melodic piano accompaniment. At over nine minutes, it’s one of his most challenging compositions, but also one of his most haunting for its bleak depiction of the human condition. “Just who will dig the hole/ when you’re done ransacking his room/ grabbing any damn thing that shines?/ And throw the scraps down on the street/ like all his books and his notes/ all his books and his notes/ and all the junk that he wrote/ Whole fuckin lot right up in smoke.” Mortality, the tenuousness of community, the insufficiency of art to provide paths to transcendence -- these are the themes swirling around in that piano vortex.
More than a collection of songs, From Her to Eternity is an incarnation of late 20th century anxiety and confusion in the tradition of Eliot and Ginsberg, and it is finally being presented with the fidelity it deserves. The improved quality should make this a worthwhile purchase down the road for audiophiles who already own the 1994 CD transfer. Newcomers to Cave would be advised to look elsewhere for a first look, but for anyone who appreciates music capable of drawing the listener into its own subjective state, From Her to Eternity will be an ecstatic and revelatory experience.
Disc 1:
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
Disc 2 (DVD):
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
8. In the Ghetto
9. Moon Is in the Gutter
10. From Her to Eternity (1987 Version)
11. Do You Love Me Like I Love You, Pt. 1
12. In the Ghetto
1990: The Simpsons - The Simpsons Sing The Blues
Within its first season in 1989, The Simpsons was a massive hit; America ate it up. So did you, as your parents surely remember -- they’re the ones who threw away your “Don’t have a cow, man” t-shirt in 1996. They also probably tossed The Simpsons Sing The Blues while they were at it, unless you set it aside as a cultural artifact you thought you’d find funny in, say, 2009.
If it was spared from garage sales, the time for re-examination has come. The Simpsons Sing The Blues, as you can probably imagine, has dated about as well as any episode from the show’s crudely drawn, Bart-centric first season. It starts with “Do The Bartman,” the producers' attempt to add “dance hit” to their endless list of merchandising wins. It was a modest success, as was the similar second single, “Deep Deep Trouble.” Both are pure early 90s: awkward rapping, cold stilted beats, and production by DJ Jazzy Jeff. They’re also the weakest links on the album, excluding a few funny spots (not much can top Dan Castellaneta’s delivery of Homer’s line “D’oh! Now you can’t go/ to the boat show.”)
The best (and, not coincidentally, least embarrassing) track on The Simpsons Sing The Blues is “Look At All Those Idiots,” on which Paula Abdul dance beats are contrasted with Mr. Burns’ decidedly unfunky demeanor. It works because the joke is about the characters, from Burns misunderstanding the concept of a “breakdown” (“What if there was an inspector around?!”) to Smithers unexpectedly ripping through a Prince-like guitar solo. It’s exactly what the rest of the record should have been: comedy, plain and simple.
Other ideas fall totally flat, such as Homer’s rendition of “Born Under A Bad Sign” (with the always-game B.B. King on lead guitar) and “Moanin’ Lisa Blues” (which was also featured on the Simpsons episode in which Lisa meets Bleeding Gums Murphy). These songs take the album’s title literally, and it’s here you realize: this is nothing but a cash-in, a waste of talent and time. The cringe-worthy “School Day,” featuring Bart butchering the Chuck Berry classic, is downright awful. “Springfield Soul Stew,” a homage to King Curtis’ “Memphis Soul Stew,” is innocuous enough -- and Marge saying “This is gonna taste alright” in a soulful growl is downright charming -- but you can’t help thinking that the players, and all the rest of us, had somewhere better to be.
The Simpsons Sing The Blues is a perfect musical snapshot of 1990. It’s also an effective encapsulation of The Simpsons in its first couple of years: a project full of potential, experimentation, periodic failure, and attempts to make a buck.
1. Do The Bartman
2. School Day
3. Born Under A Bad Sign
4. Moanin’ Lisa Blues
5. Deep Deep Trouble
6. God Bless The Child
7. I Love To See You Smile
8. Springfield Soul Stew
9. Look At All Those Idiots
10. Sibling Rivalry
2008: A Handful of Dust - Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards/The Philosophik Mercury
Named after a line in the T.S. Eliot poem “The Wasteland,” free noise duo A Handful of Dust has been one of the most influential and enigmatic projects to spring from the surprisingly fertile New Zealand experimental culture, along with other luminaries such as Birchville Cat Motel and Antony Milton. The duo consists of two heavyweights of that country's scene and of international experimental music in general: Bruce Russell, known for his work with crucial noise rock trio The Dead C, and Alastair Galbraith, an accomplished solo experimental and folk artist. Here we have a welcomed double-disc reissue of two long, long out-of-print albums released originally in the mid ’90s on Russell's own Corpus Hermeticum label. The discs come packaged in a nice fold-out case, sheltered in individual plastic sleeves to prevent scratching, and are accompanied by an illuminating essay by Marc Masters.
A Handful of Dust is a paradoxical group in many ways. For example, they are devoutly improvisational, yet they almost never perform live sets. Perhaps most interestingly, however, are the ways in which they straddle the divide between noisy, abrasive fracas and mainstream artistic credibility that sometimes today seems unbridgeable. Galbraith is the recipient of a major award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand for his contributions to the music of that country. Imagine for a moment Aaron Dilloway or Richard Ramirez receiving a National Medal of Arts from the NEA, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about. These two discs are perfect evidence of this point.
Everything on here is immediately and unapologetically harsh, yet at the same time, there isn't the type of wild excess and spastic aggression offered up by many of their peers. You get the sense that, though improvised, these pieces are progressing — or at least processing. There is work being done somewhere within each track, work with some type of goal in mind, even if that goal is only to meet itself at its own tail. It's often difficult or impossible to follow the directions of the pieces while in their midst. The sounds are constantly mutating, splintering off the main body, disappearing into expanding puddles of drone that underly the tracks, and ultimately reappearing to zip past our heads. Massive prominences of butchered violin and guitar feedback burst inward with varying degrees of recognizability, sometimes allowing us moments of orchestral reverie, and other times eliciting shouted maledictions on the names of Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari.
However, at the end of it all, if we take a look back over our shoulders, we can see that the mire has coalesced into a discernible and often gripping pattern. It's a phenomenon analogous to the idea that from inside our galaxy (or any, for that matter) we see essentially chaos -- meaningless bodies positioned meaninglessly in space. Once we turn our eyes back on the same cluster of bodies from the outside, we are confronted with some of the most unquestionably beautiful schemes in the entirety of nature. I don't mean to call these pieces unquestionably beautiful, but there is an awareness of self in them that illuminates this phenomenon of perspective. It's this type of maturity that serves as the link between AHoD's abrasive tendencies and their artistic legitimacy. It's a feature that, for better or worse, you simply are not likely to find in the latest Lambsbread cassette. What A Handful of Dust does is to take the term "accessibility" (often a pejorative one in the experimental world) and, rather than shun the idea, absorb the possibility of thoughtful, open dialogue between the music and even the paradigmatic "average listener." It's a process that has been a constant in their art and is illustrated strongly on these well chosen re-releases.
Disc 1:
1. The Book Nature: Chapter The First
2. Oration On The Dignity Of Man
3. The Expulsion Of The Triumphant Beast
4. The Lullian Art
5. The Book Nature: Chapter The Second
6. The Dark Lantern Of Reason
Disc 2:
1. Fama Fraternitatis
2. God's Love To His People Israel
