Idea Fire Company - 'Anti-Natural' (Swill Radio)

This is a two-part manifesto, being both language and sound. All sound is a form of language of course and Anti-Natural is a clear example that even the most conservatory-trained traditionalist could understand. Karla Borecky and Scott Foust's synth interplay, accented with reedy guitar and tape loops, stakes out a universe that redefines musical concepts such as metre, pitch, and duration. With all of the tracks on Anti-Natural, it's really one complete work, the concept of the 'album' being probably the most traditional music-industry one being adhered to. Shorter tracks tease out pinching tones, a murky ambience that breathes and pulses, and these support the longer explorations, for example the 13-minute 'Magnetic Fields', which glows with an organic repetition that feels so attuned to the human body that while listening to it carefully, closely, I feel a change in my own breathing. This LP feels like a complete statement of intent even without the printed manifesto included, but that is an intense and I'd say recommended read, especially for me over today's morning coffee. No one in academic art history circles is even aware of the 'Anti-Natural' manifesto, a fact that serves to prove the manifesto's own points about the conspiratorial blanketing of capitalist commodification, Judeo-Christian morals and positivist scientific thought. It's a convincing work, one that should be taken seriously and applied to this and all future Idea Fire Company recordings, for it stakes out their aesthetic position and radicalises a music that should be already radical, were it not for the context of the music industry which de-radicalises by definition, and of course the LP (pressed and sold by IFCO themselves on the Swill Radio imprint) is a commercial product. Anti-Natural, not music you'd listen to with Grandma, is a vital document of sound exploration that forms around a much larger context than simple electroacoustic experimentalism. And thinking about this as an aesthetic, one that a younger version of me would have happily summarised as an 'alien' one, really raises the question about how to live our lives through art, uncompromising and true. Some of the shorter tracks have great titles like 'We Are Nothing and We Want to Be Everything' or 'On Your Toes, Intellectuals!', which could be seen as jokes or as serious provocations, and somehow I vote for the latter, though the Anti-Natural ideology doesn't feel heavy or dogmatic. The music is ultimately what matters and over the last 25 years or so, IFCO has tended towards lightness, with sounds that are lifting, expanding, and evolving, generating a sensation of a world to explore. It starts here for me (though there are a few earlier records that I haven't heard) and as a statement of purpose, it's marvellous.

D.R. Hooker - 'The Truth' (Subliminal Sounds)

How do you argue with an artist who looks like this? D.R. Hooker's record is famous more for its obscurity than its music, which is unfair. It's Christian psych at its best, not built around heavy guitar crunching like the Fraction Moon Blood record, but mostly flowing pop-rock songs that show Hooker's talent for songwriting -- if only he had gotten a larger audience at the time! And his voice isn't bad either - not enough to stand out against the million other rock voices of the greatest decade (the 70s, of course, with this coming out in '72) but with an expressiveness that's enhanced by the occasional echo/delay flutters applied at the ends of key verses and lyrics. But it's the backing band that excels here. 'Forge Your Own Chains' has a great swing to it, showing a precision of rhythm but a languid pulse, almost funky. Opener 'The Sea' is beautiful, elegant in its vocal melody and accented with sharp guitars. I don't know who these guys were, really - the rhythm section are the Sheck brothers, one of whom is credited on an Edgar Winter recording, but not much else that's recognisable to a layman. 'The Thing' is maybe my pick of the album, with sharp riffs courtesy of Hooker's own guitar, crescendoing into a cacophony with some gurgling analogue electronics and a psychedelic sheen. Or maybe it's 'I'm Leaving You', where Hooker's Jesus-lite persona gets its biggest test, as he becomes a funky soul vampire crooning about the end of a relationship over a wall of screaming flanged guitars. It's pretty fucking secular, but then the whammy of the title track, followed by 'The Bible', is where he really lays down the Word. 'The Bible' builds into an almost orgasmic peak, with Hooker's intoning of 'The bible, the bible' being so hypnotic that when it all gets quiet for a second and revs back up it's a stunning effect. When listening to this I like to stare into the off-centred spiral on the label, and take in the smell of acrid Christ-smoke, wet ferns and sand that this album seems to give off. The whole thing ends with some deliberate, obvious backwards speech, which I'm not going to risk destroying my belt-drive to hear but I assume it's imploring us to praise the Lord, or maybe praise Hooker himself (you gotta wonder about anyone who dresses up like Jesus and self-releases rock music, right?). The big complaint here is the fidelity - I assume this is a bootleg like most of these private-press reissues (supposedly there were only 99 copies of the original) so it was probably mastered from a non-mint original. Or maybe it's supposed to sound like this - this wasn't exactly Abbey Road studios to begin with, and this is lo-fi or rather 'mid-fi' before any such term existed. There's a constant sense of having dust on my stylus, distortion around the edges and a pretty murky mix when things get thick (which they often do!). So I kinda wish there was a properly remastered version out there, but maybe there is, as this has been reissued a zillion times and I just got this '99 repress secondhand. Apparently he made a second album (which I haven't heard) with the promising title of Armageddon - maybe would be a nice pairing with the decidedly anti-Christian Comus?

Guided By Vocies - 'Bee Thousand (The Director's Cut)' (Scat)

As mentioned a few posts ago, I no longer have my original copy of Bee Thousand, as it was loaned to someone years ago and never returned. It's OK, I suppose; I've committed every second of it to memory over the past 20 years anyway, and while I'll happily replace it when I come across it cheap-ish, for now I survive. Bee Thousand (The Director's Cut) actually contains every song anyway - the first two LPs recreate an earlier, longer version as assembled in 1993, and the final platter contains the seven songs from the official Bee Thousand that weren't on the 1993 version (which includes some of the most definitive tracks of the album: 'Buzzards and Dreadful Crows', 'Hardcore UFOs', 'I Am A Scientist', and 'Gold Star for Robot Boy') as well as The Grand Hour and and I Am A Scientist 7"s. But sequencing is everything, as one listen to any side of The Director's Cut will indicate. So much of the genius of Bee Thousand is how it fits together as a complete whole, without any filler and with the transitions carefully chosen. 'Echoes Myron' without 'Yours to Keep' preceeding it (and that awkward tape splice) just isn't right! And opening the whole thing with 'Demons Are Real' is a bold choice, but the first chords of 'Hardcore UFOs' are the most iconic opening in indie rock history (except, perhaps, for 'A Salty Salute' on Alien Lanes) so it's hard for me to really think of this as Bee Thousand without it. And yeah, not every song here is great - the would-have-been third side gets pretty spotty, so it makes sense that 'I'll Buy You a Bird' and  'Zoning the Planet' were dropped later, when the album we know and love took its final form. And I don't know that the world needs the falsetto-filler of 'Rainbow Billy' for any reason except the historic record. But still, at this point, Pollard and Sprout were just hit machines, churning out such an incredible body of work that fan-assembled outtakes collections are still being assembled to this day. The liner notes, written here by Robert Griffin of Scat, are really nicely done, telling the story of his relationship to the band, and how this album took form over so many iterations. The other running orders are reproduced with Pollard's lyric sheet for the third one, and his cassette track listings for the others; it turns out it's Griffin himself who put together the iconic sequencing, and that the album was actually assembled on an early version of ProTools (not bad for 1994!). So all of this is rather disjointed - Christ, it's a cluttered mess - but it's a glorious one. Some of the songs turned up much later - 'Why Did You Land?' was sped-up and re-recorded as a b-side to 'The Official Ironmen Rally Song'; 'Stabbing a Star' came out on a 7", and bits of 'Bite' and '2nd Moves to Twin' turned up elsewhere on Bee Thousand itself. And even shaken up and put in a blender, there's so much here to love and enjoy, and so much meaning and associations to draw, maybe even amplified by its new juxtapositions. 'Smothered in Hugs' retains it's magic nostalgia; 'Hot Freaks' and 'Her Psychology Today' their rampant sexuality. 'Myron' feels like it ties together many threads, and 'Deathtrot and Warlock Riding a Rooster' has some beauteous self-harmonising. And this is before even getting to this final LP, which contains a few of the greatest GbV tracks (two versions of 'Shocker in Gloomtown', a song so great the Breeders covered it; and an Andy Shernoff-produced version of 'My Valuable Hunting Knife' which never ended up anywhere else, somehow). So even though I still wonder why Pollard originally wanted to end the album with 'Crocker's Favourite Song' instead of 'You're Not An Airplane'. Yes, listen to the original first, but thank God for Griffin's efforts in releasing this, both musically and writerly - this is an important bit of history, at least to people like me.

Kevin Coyne/Dagmar Krause - 'Babble' (Virgin)

I file this under C-for-Coyne because he wrote all of the songs, and Dagmar is "just" the female perspective vocally, but she sure adds a lot to this, a forgotten masterpiece in my opinion. Babble is a concept album about a relationship falling apart, set in the late 60s. The main theme is communication, but there's a lot of brutal honesty in these songs. It's not something for everyone, nor would I classify this among the greatest downer breakup albums like Mountain Goats' Sweden or Smog's Doctor Came at Dawn. Instead it's a restrained, folk-rock song cycle that tries repeatedly to find hope and strength in failure, but offers no answers. Instead of being duets, the songs are often led by one or the other, though they do come together at points. The opening two cuts are pretty incredible - the male 'Are You Deceiving Me?' and then Dagmar's 'Come Down Here'. These two songs, with lyrics that are actually pretty sparse, are drenched in fear and insecurity and explore a middle-aged emotional territory that few artists ever touch. The vocal performances are stellar, of course, and you would think these two actually had a relationship (though I doubt that). The music is generally folky-blues in that Kevin Coyne style, most rambunctious in 'Stand Up' (which is also probably the weakest, most out-of-place tune lyrically) though 'Sweetheart' could totally be an Art Bears track with it's doom organ and vocal hysterics. 'Shaking Hands with the Sun' is almost a misstep, equating the relationship with Hitler and Mussolini, but that type of extreme simile can work if one is grounded in a similar emotional quagmire. The closing lyric of "it doesn't burn" is repeated in a way that conflicts with the upbeat tune; and then 'My Minds Joined Forces' comes out of it which is the most sarcastic, almost twee mirage of the album. But I gravitate towards brutal, raw honesty which you get in 'I Really Love You' and the Kevin Ayers-like 'Sun Shines Down on Me'. 'I Confess' is the guilt song, and it has the same gentle cadence of Marjory Razor Blade's most successful strummers. This avoids becoming a musical light-opera deal by being fairly untied to the "concept album" format, and having loose, open lyrics that can resonate to anyone, outside of a narrative. The last two tracks are repetitive duets, the first "It really doesn't matter' and the "We know who we are" - both the song titles and only lyrics. It's a trance of resolution, but I can't say that the album ends hopefully; just in an air of resignation.

Chrome - '3rd from the Sun' (Don't Fall Off the Mountain)

Chrome in 1982 has taken on a somewhat more formulaic approach, though it's still a formula that is very distinctly and uniquely their own. There's some longer tunes here, such as 'Armageddon', that establish unrelenting horizontality. There's still the usual thick guitars, atmospheric effects, and slow-moving oscillators, but by this point they've been doing it for awhile and there's not such a strangeness to it. The vocals are frequently doubletracked, maybe both Edge and Creed in unison (?), but they tend to create a more robotlike effect, which is almost jarring on the opening cut ('Firebomb'). '3rd From the Sun' begins with an epic chordal progression, illustrating how much closer to traditional rock music we've gotten since Alien Soundtracks. When taken out of the bedroom experimentalist environment, the harsh vocal delivery and minor-key guitar leads draw this closer to horror-rock territory than I'd like. I'm not saying this sounds like White Zombie, but there are some affinities. Using chords isn't a sin; on 'Off the Line' a fairly standard progression becomes a workout in maximalism within a minimal structure, and it's one of the more rewarding (and lyrically slim) tunes here. There were guitar solos on Alien Soundtracks too, probably moreso than here; what's changed is that Chrome has figured out how to be 'heavy'. It's not thick or loud necessarily, but heavy in terms of speed and space. Parts of this record remind me of Voivod, who were surely influenced by Chrome. And there's a big scary head on the cover of this record (like there is on most Voivod albums).

Don Cherry (Horizon)

This is the tenth Don Cherry record discussed here, and sadly the last to feature in these pages. I list it as self-titled but it's been reissued as Brown Rice, so I tend to think of it as such myself. 'Brown Rice' is the opening track, a composition for three electric pianos, acoustic bass, drums, electric bongos, vocals and tenor sax. It's also one of the most singularly unique compositions heard thus far in this project. The graphic score is printed in the sleeve, which a fairly symmetrical structured pattern - pianos start, other instruments come in and disappear, and even Frank Lowe's washed out sax blasts are indicated. The melodies are very similar to the structures we've heard on the last five or so records, particularly where Cherry is on the piano. But here, it's made ecstatic with electricity, and a nice 70's cop-show waka-chika underneath it all. The whispered/chanted vocals are just over your shoulder, peering into your soul, and it's unsettling yet inviting. It's a piece that explodes with colour; an all-time classic for sure, it embraces of psychedelic electric fusion while distinguishing itself. 'Malkauns' is actually my favourite track on the record, a slow dirgy tune that begins with Charlie Haden playing bass over a tambura drone. Shades of 'Song for Che' of course, as there's the same thoughtful pauses, but it builds into a pitter-patter jam with Cherry-streaked trumpet lines over everything. This record feels like a very conscious return to the sound of the pocket trumpet from those original Ornette Coleman releases, but transmogrified through Cherry's own musical journey from the preceding decade (this is the mid 70s, after all). On the flipside, 'Chenrezig' evokes dark African clouds (Hakim Jamil's bass style is striking different than Haden's, which is a contributing factor; Cherry's vocals are growly and gruff). But there's also moments that glide along like a taxi in the streets of New York in the late 70's, calmly rooted in a sort of magical squalor. Ricky Cherry's acoustic piano is recorded in a way that makes it sound like an electric piano; by the end he's just pulsing on chords while Lowe and Don Cherry are ripping things up. 'Degi-Degi' takes things to a close, getting back to the electric boogie-whisper of 'Brown Rice'. Haden's bass sounds like it's been put through a loop pedal (except I don't think such things existed back then); the non-stop circular base has more electric pianos shattering glass around it. Cherry's voice and Lowe's sax mostly trade off roles, emulating a sort of verse-chorus-verse structure, but like a great Can track, the magic is all between the pulses. And with this, it fades away, though it connects to 'Brown Rice' and forms a Moebius strip of a record. We can read a bit into the cover photo - Cherry is in front of the Watts towers, yet adorned in some sort of traditional dress and slightly blurry, as if in motion. There is a definitively more 'urban' feel to this record than the last few, though it's still seeped in a mysterious atmosphere, a bit magical.

Bugskull - 'Snakland' (Scratch)

For this vinyl long-player, Bugskull (now sans-umlauts, perhaps due to Canadian importation laws, as this is on Vancouver label Scratch) step it up a notch. Things sound cleaner, though not necessarily studio-quality - just with better drum mics. There are crazier layers of psychedelic excess, like frantic synths and more clarity in these excursions, relying on timbre over fuzz. The songwriting feels a bit regressed, or maybe I should say that instead of concentrating on the lyrical side hinted at on Phantasies and Senseitions, there is more development of the musical sketches there. Lyrics are present, though often repetitive chants like 'We are coming' ('From the Skies') instead of personal lyrical material. But this suits the album's overall artwork and presentation - adorned with toys and stuffed animals, Snakland feels like a record that Jeff Koons would have made. There is still a band here, though a 3-piece, and the rhythm section falls into 90s indie swing occasionally. Sean Byrne keeps it interesting with all of the layers, and the buzzing and spurting electronics often give the record the vibe of a haunted Toys R' Us. 'Mind Phaser' is perhaps Snakland's most epic track, sounding like early Mercury Rev if the wordy guy was kept in-check. I'd say this is a 'transitional' album, but that's usually a term for lazy writing. 'Bouncer' certainly points towards the electronica direction they will take, but with a significantly more clubby feel than the mild textures to follow a few albums later (I guess that's why it's called 'Bouncer'). Underneath these beats are some thick My Bloody Valentine guitar smears, like traffic in a city tunnel. Don't blink or you'll miss it. 'Exit Wound', the closing track, is long and meandering, with the wound not far from "Nurse With", if you get my drift. And drift it does, through heavily modulated darkwoods with screaming (yet largely organic) murk behind it.

Masaki Batoh - 'A Ghost From the Darkened Sea' (The Now Sound)

This lovely mini-LP blows away most Ghost recordings, in my opinion, but major gas face to the label for not marking the 45rpm speed anywhere. Because, this opens with a thumping, acoustic cover of Can's 'Yoo Doo Right' with deep, breathy Japanese singing -- and it sounds great at either speed, just more guttural at 33. So it's not until track 2, a cover of Cream's 'World of Pain', that it becomes clear that it's a 45rpm record. Both songs are great reworkings that show the gentler side of Batoh, though there are still very dark winds blowing. 'Sham No Umi' closes the first half with some shimmery beach acousticness, still out there enough to qualify for the psych prize. What I love about these acoustic treatments is how he will subtly accent some chord changes with a spare organ or harmonium note, or perfectly underplayed percussion. The massive wall of sound psychedelic guitar monster stayed home for this one. 'Spooky' opens side 2 and it's not a cover of the Classic IV standard but a steel drum repetition that can't help but make me think of Steve Reich or 60s minimalism. It's cut with some dissonant howling and fades into 'Tuchigumo', the most experimental piece on the record. Here, rubbing and bowing sounds build up into a soundscape, not unlike Nurse With Wound at times but holding back from the balls-out juxtapositions. There are some great reversed sounds in the background but it's not overwhelming. The last track is where you hear the 'hardy gardy' credited on the sleeve, and it's a dense wall of thick drone that lets light in, but only in glimpses. The track, like the whole album, is a gem.

Albert Ayler - 'My Name is Albert Ayler' (Fantasy)

Hey, is a promo copy of the first Albert Ayler record worth anything? Especially one with mislabeled sides -- in fact, I'm not even sure if I got the right record. I thought I was listening to side one but there were only two long tracks so I assumed it was actually side 2, meaning 'On Green Dolphin Street', a midtempo bump through a Caper & Washington number. The Danish backing band is more than competent; I want to hear some cold-weather inflections on the material but to be honest I'm probably just projecting that. Niels-Henning Orsted Petersen plays bass and he drops a bowed solo here but Albert lays low, showing his melodic sense. It's only on 'C.T.', the sole Ayler composition on the record (allegedly), that we get a taste of what is to come. I guess it's named after Cecil Taylor? Ayler's tone is a fairly radical departure from what we heard on the last track; the cutting vibrato is beginning to show and we get strange start-stop bursts and long periods of dropping out. When it accelerates into a bop pattern it sounds like Ayler is wandering out of the room, lost in his own thoughts - thoughts with occasional punchy interjections. But it never maintains enough momentum to really explode. A few spritual-cum-freejazz-cum-primitive shards get tossed out at the end - you know, the kinda lines that make it really sound like Albert fucking Ayler - but it plods to a rather anticlimatic end. This is the end of the record but the beginning of a new frontier in music, though since the wrong labels caused my to listen to this fucking thing inside-out, I have to perversely flip over to the real beginning. Except, I don't think the other side is right either. The liner notes say that this should all begin with a spoken introduction by Ayler, 'Introduction by Albert Ayler', but this side starts with a voiceless Johnny Carson-style warmup piece. There are four tracks listed but only two bands on each side. This side is supposedly lyrical stuff you'd expect from a debut record in 1965; 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and 'Summertime'. And while it begins that way, it quickly breaks down into the same exploratory, uneven momentum as I described 'C.T' (or what I thought was 'C.T.') above. There are some moments that are great - Ayler's reed occasionally closes up into a shrill drinking straw and Niels Bronsted provides enough piano haybales to keep it afloat. But is this a different record entirely? 'Summertime' is a fave standard of mine but I don't hear the familiar chord changes anywhere - could I have some weird, mutant Albert Ayler record instead? Unless he's deconstructing it beyond recognition, something that would surprise me since the liner notes describe his tone as 'gentle and caressing'. Whatever I have here, it's clearly true, as the liner notes say, that 'this present record shows Albert Ayler as one of the most original tenor saxophonists of the young generation'. But if this is truly a great important record - because I know it is - it certainly doesn't sound particularly urgent. But guess what comes next?

Art Ensemble of Chicago - 'Chi-Congo' (Paula)

This is sadly the final Art Ensemble of Chicago record we'll be exploring, and I placed it here because some online discography placed it after Fanfare for the Warriors, though I now see this has a copyright date of 1973 and Fanfare is '74, so I most likely screwed up! Dusty Groove calls this 'a lost chapter' and maybe that's a good one; they're right in that it's closer to the open-form style of the Paris years, though Don Moye (misspelled here as Moxe, kinda like that weird medicinal soda they love in Maine) rocks the fuck out, and the opening track resembles the drum circle mode of Bap-Tizum (though significantly more tentative and, I daresay, amateurish). Roscoe Mitchell's pieces comprise 75% of this and 'Enlorfe' is a real winner, split over both LP sides and featuring some nervous-ass Jarman soprano while Favors and Moye accelerate to an outer dimension. Mitchell moves to the steel drums over some repetetive hole digging by the rhythm section and makes things into a buzzing perpipatetic run-on sentence. At the end it slows down to a thick drone, almost remniscent of 'Tnoona' but then flurrying back to life at the end. I'm a bit sad to leave the Art Ensemble of Chicago (though excited for a change in the Underbite). The crazy thing is that after 24 LP sides and 4 more on CD, we haven't even covered their whole career - just a middle part of it. Their pre-Paris, earliest recordings, which were released on a super hard to find box set, are a thing of wonder though I have only experienced them in the non-physical form. (The blog where I review my mp3 collection in alphabetical order will not be started until, I dunno, 2013 or so). And for some reason I don't have any of their later records for ECM, even though they're pretty easy to find and a few of them (Full Force in particular) rank among their best-ever work. But there's a real difference between 28 sides of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and 28 sides of, say, The Fall, or Kiss or something. Not that I don't like The Fall or Kiss - I do, in the case of the Fall quite a lot - but the inherent diversity of avant-garde jazz means there's going to be a lot more surprises among 28 sides of the Art Ensemble. Now this might be a bit of a fetishisation of the genre, like an attempt to fight my 'rockist' urges and associate a sophistication to this 'other' music - and I'm aware of it! I mean, I've read Carducci and I certainly agree with him on a lot of points (though not all the stuff about gay people, I mean that's just out-of-line) and I really do often wonder if I fall into that particularly as I (like most of ya kids, unless your Dad is John Corbett or something) grew up with rock first and came to 'other' musics in my late adolescence. Because the development of The Fall across 54 LP sides might be an even greater thing to experience, as the variations will be more subtle. Cause it's hard for me to even really say what I've learned from the AEoC Gauntlet I just finished. Despite the compositional basis to these records, it's hard for me to say what distinguishes a Joseph Jarman jam from, say, a Roscoe Mitchell one. Whereas any fool can listen to a Sebadoh record once and know the difference between Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's songs, right? Of course there's a lot more freedom/improvisation present in the works of Jarman, Mitchell etc and that makes things a bit more difficult. But maybe that's also what makes it feel so much more dynamic overall. Am I just stating the obvious and sounding idiotic again? It's hard to say because my head actually kinda hurts from all of this AACM theorizin'. When I got into this band it was like being touched by the Hand of God, but then again I used to feel that Touch quite often in those days, when everything was being blown wide open again and again, like an artificial ski slope eternally rolling downhill. But I would have died to see them live, particularly as their theatrical costumes, paint, and antics were allegedly an antidote for the dullness of much other contemporary jazz, visually. At the time the band was pretty much defunct - Bowie died just about that time and Joseph Jarman had retired, running a karate dojo just down the street from my friend's place in Brooklyn. Now I believe they're active again, with some new members, and I'd certainly go if it was local or cheap but it's pretty clear I missed my chance. But how many groups today are there, blending theatre, tradition, and radically groundbreaking assaults on theatre and tradition, that I am also missing the chance to experiencein their prime? I think not that many, but then again, what do I know?