Burning Star Core - 'Brighter Summer Day' (Thin Wrist)

Has this been ten years already? Thin Wrist catalog #B, a label that does them alphabetically, which will have to fold after release #Z? This is C. Spencer Yeh's first vinyl long-player, with two side-long beasts showcasing the sound construction of his project back in 2000. As elegantly-packaged as LPs come, this is a super thick vinyl pressing that really makes the deep tones ring, particularly on side A's 'A Brighter Summer Day'. This track is immensely powerful, with thick layers of violin constantly combining and recombining microtonally into a bulldozer of sound, simultaneously occupying every available frequency. There are electronics as well, and additional electronics by another player, though it's hard to distinguish what is what. There's a percussive element to these "electronics", sounding like a rollercoaster ripping through the sun. The electronic sense is far more prevalent on the B-side, 'Baybe It Wasn't Meant to Me', a 16 minute set of 'sleep deprivation experiments' performed on a 'computer', of course a catch-all for who knows what source material. We get synthesisers, field recordings, and natural acoustics but heavily processed and constructed in a piecemeal manner. Unlike side A's horizontal vision, this does a few abrupt about-faces, challenging in its internal logic. Circular, maybe, or a spiral that changes direction a few times? An underrated track for sure, and one that certainly feels influenced by Oval as much as Ash Ra Tempel. There's a sealed envelope in here that I never broke the seal on, not that I am typically collector scum but I saw what was inside someone else's (back when this came out) so I never opened mine. Of course, I've forgotten what was in there, and now I don't want to open it cause this is a nine-year old antique LP! As a first LP, I think it's an impressive debut. It certainly suggests both sides of what is to come - side A presages the violin-driven improvised elements (often now performed under his own name) and side B hints at the incredibly constructed, composed soundworlds that populate later LPs like Challenger. If anything, these two sides have become intertwined and indistinguishable.

Jacques Berrocal - 'Paralleles' (d'Advantage)

If the Encourager Templates ever catches fire and I can only save one LP, this might be it. Not just because I love it so much but because it's among the scarcest (and therefore most precious) items on the shelf. It's a circus of evaporating jazz and inexplicable surrealism, one that should be in every home and in every microwave oven. One reason it's so is 'Rock and Roll Station', amazing not just because of Stapleton's remake but because the simple introduction of a spoken text suddenly creates a manifesto. This is the 'History Lesson, part 2' for the whole genre of experimental/progressive/Futura/NWW-listy music; whatever you want to call it, it creeps around like a playful penguin clutching a trumpet under his wing. It tells you what music can be, at least to these ears, and to mine (which is all that matters to me). I heard a DJ play it recently and immediately had to go and make friends; it's a call to a secret society, almost. It's funny how this most 'outsider' of music is actually very focused and knowledgeable; the dedication of 'bric-à-brac' to Luigi Russolo shows that Jacques knows his anti-classics (which is probably a good idea when making one yourself). Likewise, the artwork on the back recalls Max Ernst, Dada, all that jazz - and this was a few years before Stapleton himself started explicitly describing his approach to music as a descendent of such. But enough, what about the music? 'bric-à-brac' is so fucking incredible - similar to Jacques' other masterpiece Musiq Musik but with a somewhat more windy, sinewy feel. Pierre Bastien (who we saw earlier, though 20 years later, with some robots of his own) plays contrabassoon and Bernard Vitet's strings are utterly magical, but it's pointless to single out something that is really a group thing. Until now we've not really heard any groupthink quite like this except possibly some of those Art Ensemble sides, but that was definitely rooted in something much more American. These guys, it's like it's from outer space but relatively absent of electronic effects. Hell, one track is Berrocal's solo cornet and it sounds totally amazing. So many sounds here, and yet there's something magical that makes this transcend all the legions of followers since. Maybe I'm a sucker for myths, though it's cool that there's nothing reclusive or obscure about Berrocal - he's around these days, still active, quite approachable and all of this stuff is in print on CD now. Which means, readers, if you don't have this you can probably pull out a credit card and Google your way to surrealist nirvana.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - 'Lick My Decals Off, Baby' (Straight)

It's been a bit of a holiday for the Underbite corp., for which I can only offer my heartfelt apologies. Life, reality, circumstance, etc. often combine to prevent the listening required to properly assess these records and without being physically near the accumulation (or a turntable), this service had to just lie dormant. But Lick My Decals Off, Baby is a hell of a way to return. A lot of people hold this up as the pinnacle of Van Vliet's musical work and I wouldn't argue against it; certainly it's an essential piece of the puzzle, at least along with Trout Mask. It's single-album length and general diversity (and marimba!) make it a somewhat more palatable record to throw on when craving a blast o' Beefheart. I think there's a greater merging of the dismantled visionary (heard on Trout Mask) with the raw rock of the earlier stuff; somehow the overall product isn't compromised. 'Doctor Dark' is a great indication of this sound - it drives forward like the most raw, guttural riff-based rock but also mangles the fence. Even though this is one of the most listened to Beefheart records, there are some songs I always tend to forget about, like the brilliant 'The Clouds Are Full Of Wine (Not Whiskey or Rye)' or 'Petrified Forest'. The lyrics sheet prints some additional poems mixed in, which deny the normality of the font with the freelancing apostrophes and choppy fragments. It's a pleasure to read these, something I can't do for Trout Mask because (my copy, at least) doesn't boast a lyric sheet. Listening to 'Bellerin' Plain' is like proto-Pollard - the casual falling off in pitch at the end of each line as he sings "Foothills, locomotives walked n' sugar beets rolled down the tracks/Sunbum bounce soot off the black smokestacks" is practically 'Dusted' to me. And how about the sense of assonance in 'Doctor Dark's "Tear apart 'n black 'n white 'n like / The moon on a pail of milk spilled down black in the night / little girl lost a tear 'n her kite/ T' the night 'n like 'n light" -- I know it's boring to quote lyrics here but that's some fucking Bruce Andrews shit there. 'Woe-Is-A-Me-Bop', 'Space-Age Couple' and 'I Love You, Big Dummy' are the rawest songs, I think, perhaps of Beefheart's entire catalogue. It's not that they are simplistic or particularly carnal; rather I think they just communicate most directly. There's some brilliant shifts in 'Woe-Is-A-Me-Bop' - listen to the way the intro bars set a tone and then as soon as Don's voice comes in, it totally contorts itself in a different direction. There's a lot of cadence shifts in this song as it goes along; perhaps the limited set of lyrics on this one makes it easier to concentrate on the tonal lurches. But somehow, by the time of 'Flash Gordon's Ape', the lurching feels more like a snowmobile running through the desert, hitting irregularly spaced rocks. It's enough to see your own shadow and know when to confront it.