Saturday, June 26, 2010

Four Records From The (Almost) Canon

This piece originally appeared in Issue One of Stop Drop and Roll. It was written in 2006.

Sun City Girls: Torch of the Mystics

Majora, 1990

On an Indonesian boat trip in 1989, the Sun City Girls borrowed some equipment from the boat's lounge band, saying they wanted to play a short set. The audience clapped politely as the Girls rolled through a set of Sumatran pop, stop-start improv-skronk and a few trashed covers of American standards. The performance--which, like almost everything the SCG have done, later surfaced on a recording--features a local, at one point during the set, exclaiming to a friend, 'Ah, this is American jazz!'

Scruffy looking desert kids from Phoenix, SCG began playing open mic nights in the early eighties, bewildering audiences with their mix of unhinged improvisation, obscuro exotica and performance art, their incredible racket combining musical wizardry with self-indulgent trash, often within the space of a single song. They made a business of defying expectations; the Girls were known to execute note-perfect covers of Jodorowski's El Topo soundtrack, then, a few nights later, sit on stage with cheap mics imitating hobos for an hour while their soundman danced like a tramp behind them.

Behind the Girls' bizarre and sometimes caustic public persona, though, lies a serious love of the Orient; a love that somehow manages to marry vulgar Americana with elements of Eastern esotericism. The Girls' affection for the East has led Alan and Rick Bishop, the brothers at the heart of the group, to spend a few months each year traipsing through the third world, recording the sounds of themselves and others, often dropping the resulting tapes into local milk bars.

While their Indonesian audience recognised something of the Girls' kinship with jazz's innovation and improvisation, for a long time no one in their home country knew quite what to make of them. Indeed, until the release of the out-masterpiece Torch of the Mystics in 1990, a lot of people thought the SCG were merely an elaborate post-punk joke. They could be forgiven--the Girls' immense discography includes literally hundreds of recordings that run through free jazz, hushed folk balladry, campfire babbling, spastic gamelan, astral-pop and terrible classic rock covers; album titles include Horse Cock Phephner, Dante's Disneyland Inferno and 330,003 Cross-Dressers From Beyond the Rig Veda.

There has always been a conviction to the Girls, though--a trueness of heart, some have said--that, to many, only began to become truly obvious with Torch of the Mystics, an immensely charming, delirious distillation of their obsession with the East.

To this day, I can't understand more than a few words on the record (much of it is just cooing and screaming). But there is a wizardry at work here that affects me in the way few records do. 'Space Prophet Dogon'--presumably a paean to somebody we are not yet lucky enough to meet--is quite possibly the most ecstatic song I've ever heard: tangled vines of Richard Bishop's incredibly loose, virtuosic Eastern-tinged riffing tailed by Alan's spidery bass and utterly wild, almost wordless yelping; the whole thing underpinned by drummer Charles Gocher's magnificent, spastic pounding.

According to long-time out-rock writer Byron Coley, we have the Girls to thank for the diversity of modern underground music. 'Without these french-fried, grass-skirted motherfuckers,' he wrote, 'it would all sound like Merzbow.' 

This Heat: Deceit

Rough Trade, 1981

Many of the landmarks of modern pop are irrevocably tied to where they were recorded--the Beatles and Abbey Road, Elvis and Sun Studios, Motown and Studio A. It makes a kind of perverse sense, then, that the wildest record from the English post-punk scene was recorded in a converted meat freezer.

This Heat's choice of workplace, it turns out, was not because of any ascetic leanings or working class sympathy, but, rather, simply because the sound in there was incredible--at once crisp, cavernous and immense. Unlike the alternately muddy and tinny recordings of many of their peers, Deceit, like all the This Heat recordings, sounds great--clear and spacious and devastating.

It helped that they could play, too. In the early 80s, much of the punk and No Wave scene fashioned its credibility from a combination of anger and a lack of conventional musicianship; This Heat were certainly angry, and, while none of them could sing, they were truly great musicians. Deceit proved chops were no obstacle to immediacy.

On Deceit, This Heat's second record, whole songs emerge out of parts that, at first, don't seem to fit together at all--voices from Radio Prague, quotes from Thomas Jefferson, African percussion. Songforms coalesce out of the vapour only to disappear just as suddenly, replaced, as in the incendiary 'Makeshift Swahili', by an anguished, underwater scream where there might have been a chorus, almost as if someone shut the door of the freezer to protect you from the noise.

There is genius, born of a total fearlessness, all over this record. This Heat knew to speak their mind, even if their voices were out of tune. It's a shame, then, that they cared so little for publicity--even if, given their attitude to consumerism and the West, it was entirely understandable. (It took a period of debate for the band to agree on the merits of even releasing Deceit at all.)

Deceit is protest music of the best kind--affecting, stylistically inventive, but possessed of a lightness of touch. Though with lines like, 'Well, what do we expect?/Paper hats?/Or maybe even roses?/The sound of explosions?/Oh no,' it's not always clear what they were angry at. The fury that underpins Deceit seems, at times, to be its only constant, allowing them to fuse their experiments into discernible songs.

Deceit shoehorns elements of prog, musique concrete, free jazz and post-punk into one hydra-headed beast, at once contemplative ('Sleep'), spastic ('Paper Hats') and furious ('S.P.Q.R.'). Released shortly before the band's demise, what will forever separate Deceit from its peers is the sheer scope of its recording; using innumerable loops, flutes, kazoos and primitive gadgets, the trio came upon an alchemy that, even today, sounds like it was recorded three weeks into the future. 

Nowhere do the elements of This Heat's sound--the relentless experimentation, wayward vocals and left-field instrumentation--come together better than on the record's penultimate track, 'A New Kind of Water,' Deceit's angriest--and best--track. Woozy, skewed chanting gives way to Hayward's skeletal, powerful drumming, before the whole thing explodes into a sublime frenzy of upright bass and precise, angular guitar. It should have been a hit.

This Kind Of Punishment: A Beard Of Bees

self-released, 1983

After Gareth Williams left This Heat to join a monastery, the baton of heroic obscurity was passed to two Kiwi brothers, Peter and Graeme--themselves big fans of This Heat--who had tired of the limitations of punk, and who had holed up in an isolated farm house with a piano, a couple of guitars and a four-track. Recording under the name This Kind of Punishment, over four records and two EPs spanning almost five years, the Jefferies brothers, along with a rotating cast of friends, created some of the most affecting and beautifully recorded folk music of the later part of the century.

The New Zealand underground in the early and mid-80s was astoundingly fertile, with weird kids doing amazing things in noise (Dead C), black-folk (the Pin Group) and jangle pop (the Clean) all over the country. It could be said the Jefferies brothers--forever grim, gifted and obsessive--were the dourest of their peers. TKOP, from their inception in 1983, were obsessed with all manner of gloomy things--Russian literature, death and endings--and it showed in their song titles--'The Horrible Tango,' 'Trepidation' and 'The Diary of Hermann Doubt' among them--if not always in their music.

Many of the melodies begin brooding, but finish, if not cheerful, then at least cathartic and resolute. When, towards the end of 'The Sleepwalker', Peter sings, 'I'll wait until the cows come down the river,' you get the sense that he's going to be waiting a long, long time. By the time the icy guitar figure gives way to the spoken bridge, you kinda want to wait with him. By the time the rhythm section makes its customary late and devastating entrance, you're absolutely his. It's roughly three times better than anything R.E.M ever recorded.

The Jefferies were tired of punk, but they were not going to settle for folk's template of a few chords and a story. Experiments run rife throughout A Beard of Bees, from the percussive stabs apparently beating a rooster to death in 'East Meets West', to the ultra-minimal solos that begin 'An Open Denial', all placed in complement to the duo's by-then masterful songwriting.

With the rise of lo-fi indie heroes Sebadoh and Guided by Voices, a certain raffish charm became attached to having your instruments buried under several layers of fuzz. The Jefferies would have none of this--A Beard of Bees took eighteen months to record, and their releases remain the high-water marks of four-track production, always striking in their clarity and fidelity. Their obsession with sound was well documented: rather than put A Beard of Bees out through their label--the seminal Flying Nun--they chose to release it themselves, preferring the sound of their music on vinyl from another factory. Their care throughout is incredible--not a sound on A Beard of Bees is out of place. At various times flourishes of violin, piano, bass and drums appear, but you are always drawn to the brothers' earnest, plangent pipes, their quietly jangling guitars.

TKOP lasted another three years after A Beard of Bees before the remaining members moved on to other bands and solo careers, the brothers only working occasionally together thereafter. I heard from a friend who played with Peter that there remained between the brothers a quiet disappointment that the music of This Kind of Punishment--timeless and great as it was--didn't reach nearly as many people as it probably deserved to.

Stuart Dempster: Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel

New Albion, 1995

To describe music using words like 'transcendent', 'ethereal' and 'meditative' is a sure-fire way to align something, almost certainly against its will, with the New Age--a hopeless path of unicorns and water births and Yanni and death. But what to do with music of a type and quality that it absolutely requires those terms, if not their implied and horrible meanings?

Trombonist and experimental composer Stuart Dempster's Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel--variously for ten trombones, solo conch shell, didgeridoo, and conch trio--was recorded in a massive water cistern in Seattle, a tank 186 feet in diameter where every sound reverberates for 45 seconds. It is, for want of less degraded words, 'heavenly' and almost 'spiritual'. It is also a masterpiece, a luminously beautiful piece of music that absolutely transcends the amazing gimmick of its creation.

When you talk about its construction--a professor and former Guggenheim fellow taking his master class into an enormous water tank to record shells and didgeridoos and trombones--it can seem ridiculous, another calculated, difficult experiment dear to the hearts of avant-boffins and Wire readers; experiments that, despite the thought that goes into them, can often be as interesting to listen to as farm machinery. So it is all the more remarkable that an album of such strange academic provenance is so compelling.

The reverberation inside the two-million gallon cistern is so intense--a whisper from close to the wall can be heard anywhere in the chamber--that it required the musicians under Dempster's tutelage to communicate non-verbally, responding to their teacher as he moved his head, span around, or ignored them completely. With every sound absorbed into the immense drone above them, the teacher had his students play minimally, knowing that too much tonal activity, in this environment, would be overwhelming.

Dempster knew what he was talking about: a renowned experimental composer and trombonist, he pioneered, with bandmate Pauline Oliveros, a sound they call 'Deep Listening'--simply put, music performed in cisterns and cathedrals that makes artful use of reverb on a truly massive scale.

The sixteen-minute 'Cloud Landings', the record's highlight, is a gorgeous wall of trombones that seem to appear out of a single note before swelling into lush figures, each with no apparent beginning or end.

For the sublime, pulsing 'Didgerilayover', Dempster, who studied circular breathing techniques with the instrument's inventors, spun slowly around on the spot, allowing the noise to float up the walls and arrive at the mics as a soft, distant hum.

Listening to Underground Overlays, I find whole ten minute songs drifting by without registering in my head as taking any length of time at all. With everything caked in this astral sheen, the whole record can pass as one amorphous drone; it's a record that can take some time and close listening to reveal its treasures. Its rich tone, can, on first take, sound like so many crystal healing CDs of recent marketing, something you might play at a Tantric weekend while a suburban guy you've just met fucks your wife. But with time, its charm takes you over, often to the point where you feel like you've just clambered down into that hole in Seattle, into a tank where you can't hear yourself talk and everything's quietly bouncing off the walls and ringing above your head.

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