Globe Unity - 'Improvisations' (Japo)

I made a typo on the first draft of this and actually called the band "Glove Unity", which is a nice concept, indeed. This is a good test of the new turntable - so far I've noticed that jazz sounds far better than rock, as thicker mixes struggle a bit for clarity, but the turntable (which I got secondhand) has a pretty old cartridge/stylus on it, which I really should replace. I remembered this being nothing more than a giant ball of noise, but I'm confusing it with another Globe Unity album I have on CD. This has its moments of ball-like fury, as anything with 15 musicians playing at once will, but it's actually a lot more delicate and spacious than I remembered. Side one starts off very slowly, with everyone feeling each other out. The instrumentation is cryptically referred to with two-letter abbreviations and I think it's clear to me (ss = soprano sax, fl = flugelhorn --  or is it flute?, etc.) but it's not always clear who is what. For example, both Peter Brötzmann and Michael Pilz are credited to bass clarinet, though it's the third of three instruments for Brötzmann, so you're left to guess who is what. At the beginning there's a nice soft little lick played on that instrument, left to echo into the beautiful air-space that this vinyl pressing really clearly captures, and I'm guessing it's Pilz because it doesn't sound like a rocket launcher firing. But who knows? There's two of just about everything - well, not exactly - but only one drummer here, Paul Lovens, and he's content to sit back for long passages, just adding some cymbals or other percussion. And Alex von Schlippenbach, the leader of the whole thing is absent for long stretches. It's not until the end of side 1, when this group finally explodes in the manner I spent the whole side waiting for, that his piano really starts chopping through everything. The group interplay is fantastic, and even at its thickest, there is a remarkable balance between the different forces. It's at times tentative, and at times confrontational, but you don't feel like these musicians are battling in a way to establish dominance. I love European free jazz, because it seems to avoid any ego driven basis of much American soloing and focus on a group mentality; plus, later Dutch efforts start to reincorporate traditional swing elements and melody in a way that's really remarkable. There's no Dixieland flavours here, but as any record with both Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, a hell of a lot of boundary pushing. The end of the record is all strings, where the cello by Tristan Honsinger interplays with the bassists (Buschi Niebergall and the great unsung Peter Kowald, who I think is the Robert Horry of Euro free jazz); something is done to the bass, maybe the way its recorded, that makes it sound like some space age synth affect. I'm not sure if they actually used any effects or if it's just an accident of studio sonorities (or dust on my stylus??) but it feels like a spiritual connection to out-there European NWW list music like Heldon or Mahogany Brain, if only for a minute. Though I've pointed out the few musicians I can clearly identify (due to their instrumentation being unique), this isn't really a showcase for any one player, but rather one of the few examples of 15 people coming together to make something great together. I don't know if freely improvised music has moved very far beyond this record (recorded in September, 1977) but that's also not the point - the point is the lineup, for these musicians sound distinctly like these musicians when in this combination. And a joyous sound it is.

Cassis Cornuta - '25 jaar de gebraden zwaan zingt' (Ultra Eczema)

The low countries are full of weird obscure electronic musicians whose early experiments have been seeing the light of day in recent times - for more, see the Edmund de Deyster record, when we get there, also on Ultra Eczema. Cassis Cornuta is a synth/electronics goofball who is still active in the Antwerp underground, though these recordings were made in 1985 for a radio show which is still running. Cornuta, whose real name is Daniel de Wereldvermaarde, mines some Anton Bruhin territory though with a significantly less refined approach. There's rhythms made from the difference between turntable needle and dictaphone static, with bursts of space between them to provide a curious momentum. The tracks are all untitled and flow together well - the middle of side one is probably the most feisty bit, where there's various objects bashing together to be heard, and they all are given their own voice. It's a no-style style, a celebration of cheap mass-produced consumer electronics and the pure, childlike experimental approach of shoving fingers and toys between the gears. There's nothing digital about this type of electronic music - it's a pure product of the early 80s, the Pride of the 80s Radio Hut magic. Some of the murky bumps on side two start to resemble a steel drum, though the resemblance to anything human is superficial. It's a good listen - difficult and harsh but not annoyingly so, and Cornuta resists the temptation to mix everything into a thick soup. If anything, this music is very democratising, in that it welcomes the listener to experiment, maybe even generating sounds from the very equipment on which the record is being listened to. This isn't to say Cornuta is an idiot savant or naive; there's a real beauty in what's here - a strong sense of curation, of not just selecting sounds but expressing himself through the tension. I've seen Cornuta live and he was more invested in analogue synths and complicated electronics, but this pause-button madness is much more charming of a clamor.

Can - 'Tago Mago' (United Artists)

When I found this copy of Tago Mago I was torn between this British import, with alternate cover photo and neat (but delicate) matchbox folding -- and the original gatefold cover we know and love. I went with this one to save a few bucks, in the process depriving myself of one of the most iconic images in the whole Kraut world, but probably snagging the more rare of the two options. This isn't an amazing pressing, or maybe it's just old, or maybe my stylus is just showing some wear (we are 191 records through this project, after all). Side one opens with 'Paperhouse', which segues into 'Mushroom', a track that really opens up and (on a good pressing) allows you to really hear the room when Jaki is cracking against the rim of his snare drum. Here, things are a bit distorted and the sense of space is compromised a bit by the inevitable noticing of vinyl artifice. Oh well. I used to somewhat discount 'Mushroom' for the obvious drug reference but tonight it just sounds magical - particularly the converging downward tones of the guitar leads and the organ leads. 'Oh Yeah' is the champion tune of the first side though, beginning with noisy, electronic filterbanks and unfolding into a bouncy, jazzy groove. I particularly like the sense of backwardsness that is throughout - maybe Damo's unique vocal style or maybe a bit of studio trickery. It feels like art that is erasing itself as it happens, trying to keep up with its own beautiful internal momentum. Overall there's so much more swing here than in any of the Mooney stuff, 'Soul Desert' excepted. I dunno if it's Damo's influence or Jaki coming out of his shell more, but 'Paperhouse' introduces a new lightness of touch that serves Can well, particularly on 'Oh Yeah' when the band will sort rise, like the crest of a wave, then it will break and shimmy out into every direction at once. It's a sense of motion that is far more open and free than Monster Movie's grooves. In the middle of Tago Mago, quite literally, are two side-long pieces. Both are behemoths, amazingly dense constructions that are (to me) what cements Can's legend. 'Hallelujah' you've all heard - a repetitive hook, bass-driven, that again proceeds quite dub-like through 1,000 transformations in eighteen minutes. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration but whereas 'Yoo Doo Right' is plodding and (sorry) stupid, 'Hallelujah' answers to a higher calling It rolls more than it rocks, without being any less heavy. In the middle it suddenly turns all Tony Curtis-like, but it's still the same song. When turned up really, really loud, it rips the roof off. But then, side 3 has 'Aumgn', 17:22 of Can's most experimental side. If you dig the Holger Czukay solo album Canaxis (and I sure do) then you might love this, though Canaxis's platitudes of calm are replaced by intense, screaming horror. There's dense walls of sound, upfront organ textures, blatant music concrete, and overdriven drum pounding that duets with a sinewave generator, barking dogs, and Damo shoving the microphone down his throat and moaning through reverb and delay units (just like kids do today, in basements worldwide). Those who want to dismiss this as mere fucking around should direct their attention to the last five or six minutes, where everything builds to a ludicrous crescendo before sputtering out into an assonant dawn. Gratuitous, no! It's actually one of the most accomplished examples of long-form rock experimentation on record. And after that, side 4's 'Peking O' feels relatively short (at twelve minutes). I don't know how connected Damo was to the nihilistic Japanese psychedelic underground happening at this time, but 'Peking O' begins like a companion piece to Tereyama's Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. It's harsh, dissonant layers of organ, delay-affected vocal screeching that melts into a bizarro Casio lounge trip, a bizarre atmosphere that is somewhat plush animals and somewhat proto-Residents tone-squawk. There's swirling keyboard lines, bent jazz breakdowns, and a manic, Brainticket-esque pulse. It's the fragmented attention-span, non-linear adjunct to 'Aumgn's dense wall of cosmic energy. It's easy to get lost in the magic, but then when you think about the step made between Monster Movie and this, well, it's a holyshitohmigod-nobrainer. I can hear Renaldo and the Loaf birthing into existence, and the sequenced blast beats + electric piano noodling are a recipe for dementia. Vocally, Damo is showing how he influenced both C. Spencer Yeh and the Micro Machines guy. At the end it finds it's pulse, just in time to burn out and introduce 'Bring Me Coffee or Tea', which despite it's darkly impulsive suspension, can only feel like a comedown when juxtaposed with the last four tracks. There's a reason Tago Mago is considered an all-time classic and I didn't really just need to write all of this to further inflate it's legend. But sometimes a close listen, even to something familiar, is rewarding in a way you'd never expect. And that's been a nice benefit to this project - rediscovering what was never lost.

Carla Bley / Paul Haines - 'Escalator Over the Hill' (JCOA)

Actually, you know, Escalator Over the Hill is my favorite chronotransduction ever. Why can't avant-garde jazz have their own Jesus Christ Superstar? As notorious as this is for being an overblown pretentious pile of art-wank, if you actually listen to it you'll find a pretty good time. There's only a few triple LPs that I think are deserving of the length, and this is one of them. A Lot of People Would Like to See Armand Schaubroeck ... Dead is another, but it'll be years til we get to it. Sandanista is not, and something about that forthcoming Joanna Newsom triple gives me a bad, bad feeling. But let's get to Escalator - the lineup is amazingly great, and I could fill this post naming the luminaries who blow 'n pluck on these six sides: Bley and Mantler, of course, and then Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Jack Bruce, Don Preston, John McLaughlin, Linda Ronstandt (!), Roswell Rudd, Michael Snow (!), Jimmy Lyons, Enrico Rava, Leroy Jenkins, Dewey Redman .... and that's not counting the unsung heroes like Paul Motian (who drives the drumkit throughout). I am a sucker for Bley's style of brainy big-band deconstructions; I love Tropical Appetites and a lot of the songs here follow a similar pattern, though with Paul Haines' perplexing lyrics. There's a lot of great, soulful movements here; the whole set opens with Roswell Rudd's trombone aching in pain. This Hotel Lobby Band comes back and forth like a Greek chorus, with other smaller breakout groups driving forward the story and the band returning - used to great effect at the end of 'Holiday in Risk'. I'm not going to be a literary critic here, so you won't get any comments on the themes present in the lyrics (mutation, India, conflict, the body, etc.). But as one who enjoys delicate, female-driven songwriting, big-band swing, and weird electro-acoustic sound fuckery -- this has everything for me. It's amazing how incredibly consistent it is over two+ hours. I guess this took a few years to assemble so Bley really could take her time to keep the wheat from the chaff, you know? But while "it's all good", there's still highlights. Linda Ronstadt really has a shit-hot voice, and whenever she takes a tune, it slays ... check 'Why?' on side 2 if you don't believe me. I wonder what this stage production looked like? I can only imagine actors dealing with sounds like the ring-modulated piano or the calliope bits. Jack's Traveling Band (which is McLaughlin, Bley, Bruce and Motian) rip it up in rock-fusion fury on side 3-- to the point where you can only dream of an offshoot LP. It resembles Tony Williams' Lifetime on more than a surface level, though contained into a five minute "rock song" and somehow fitting in place with the rest of this. They come back in 'Rawalpindi Blues' and get a bit more room to explore, when McLaughling busts this nutty guitar line that is super staccato repeated notes. The piece goes into this weird chanted "What will we ever do with you?" vocal part over what sounds like AMM or something, and then the theme is taken up by the other recurring band in Escalator Over the Hill -- the Desert band. They actually appear earlier on side 5 to introduce the Eastern section of the story. This is where Jenkins shines, though it's also copiloted by Don Cherry's ethnoclouds of trumpet (and later his vocal glossolalia). The cello (played by Calo Scott) has a tambura/Bharat vibe, and these sections feel like a slice of curry-flavoured gristle in the middle of wedding cake. Overall, cause it's been a few years since I last listened to this, I'm kinda blown away by how good it is. I could probably go to this at any point during the last ten years and found something in there to reflect on my current interests. When I was into jammy, spacey rock explorations I would have enjoyed the Jack's Traveling Band sections; when I was interested in oblique songwriting, well, pretty much all of the parts with singing would apply. Free jazz? Of course, and more restrained improvisations are all over this, too. Outsider, NWW-listy sounds? Sure, they're the glue that holds this together really. There's also a few tunes where the voice drifts over the instrumentation in the same way that outsider/free folk does, which I can't explain any better. 'Oh Say Can You Do?' on side four (which is voice and calliope) is what I'm talking about. Ethnic free explorations: see the Desert band, above. Complicated art-rock ideas: the whole thing. Right now what I take from this the most is the idea of composition as a means of liberation, not control. This is a pretty tightly knit triple LP, probably the most tightly knit 3xLP I can think of except for maybe that one Vitamin B12 release. But at the same time, it invites exploration across a shitload of different genres, and can probably be studied to the point of microscopic detail.

Area - 'Event '76' (Cramps)

Here's where they really lose the plot, at least for the rockist Area fans. Boasting a somewhat compromised lineup featuring Steve Lacy and Paul Lytton (who sneaked onto Maledetti, if you remember from yesterday's post, and 75% of this album is titled 'Caos part II' so I guess it's the logical followup), this is a full album of free improvisation, containing no trace of the bombastic rock riffs found on Crac! or Arbeit Macht Frei. Despite the jazzy pedigree this is much more akin to NWW-list free playing (ah, that has become a genre of its own now!) such as Jacques Berrocal, Futura label stuff, maybe MEV. But for me this is a great step forward in showing what rock music can be. This whole record is recorded very weirdly - in the red at times, with a strange chorus effect on everything and unusual reverse fade edits popping up, even when the crowd cheers at the end. Lytton's cymbal crashes sound like trashcans and occasionally dominate the proceedings, but it gives the whole record a raw feel that makes the fucked up synths, babbling, and tape manipulations have a rhytmic centre. I love this record and I think it's a must-hear for anyone interested in any of the tangents that cross it: Euro freedom, prog rock, free jazz, musique concrète. But it's really in the context of Area's other work that makes this record slay so much - it's like all of the outtakes and indulgences that they restrained themselves from including on the studio albums - all at once, and all on top of each other. On the cover we get a still from Frankenstein, a scene also featured prominently in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive which I just watched. It's pretty appropriate for the Frankenstein monster on this record: curious, and certainly monstrous, but gentle and approachable. I wonder what the difference is between this recording and what the audience actually heard that night in the Università Statale di Milano -- I'm guessing it was a bit clearer than the saturated sounds on this vinyl, but maybe it was incomprehensible live too. I imagine Stratos running back and forth like a madman or maybe he was just bent over a table of electronics processing his voice. This is a fitting way to end the Area section of the Impenetrable Prog Gauntlet, and I'm sad I don't have Stratos's solo album to be the icing on the cake.

Anti-Pop Consortium - 'Tragic Epilogue' (75 Ark)

These guys should have been so awesome. The music media proclaimed that "hip-hop" and "experimental" had finally found their place together, 'cept whenever I listen to this (or, come to think of it, anything else ever described as such) there's too much of the former and not enough of the latter. What makes this so "experimental"? That these guys are kinda nerdy, like weird words, and employ more stoner/lo-fi production methods than radio-friendly rap? I guess I must accept the reality: I just don't like hip-hop; if I want experimental + language I'll go to Robert Ashley or Henri Chopin. The instrumentals are probably my favorite part, which, I know, says more about me than about the music itself. Maybe I'm being too hard on them, but I don't think time has been too kind to this; there's a few 'interesting' elements, but interesting in a Logan's Run kind of way. Maybe they're talking about slingshotting into the sun and walls turning inside out, but it still has that rap diction. That masculine affect is a turn-off; it makes me think that the real radicals are the white kids doing sound poetry in the basements of Columbus, OH and other such dens of weirdness. Saying 'Control-alt-delete' in a rap song was probably a little more edgy in 2000 but now you might as well rap "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC." The Wire used to jizz over these guys if I remember correctly - well, mission accomplished cause they opened up for Radiohead on tour and thus ensured their audience would be eternally white kids who went to college round the turn of the millenium (well .... I must admit, my hand is raised there). Not that there's anything wrong with that - far be it from DUSAET to suggest that hip-hop must have some radical communicative purpose; we're even less keen to engage in stupid debates about 'authenticity' or 'keeping it real' or whatever. And I hope I don't sound too hung up on the white audience thing - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. My point is that out of the 1,100 or so records that will ultimately get their time here, I feel like I can connect to just about every one of them. This is one where I cannot; and like all 'reviews', this says more about me than the music.