Guru Guru (Brain)

For years I thought this was the first Guru Guru record, but the Internet tells me it's actually the fifth! For guys often lumped in with Kraut heavyweights, you wouldn't think it listening to side one, which is mostly balls-out biker rock. Any intellectual (or at least, progressive) tendencies present in Guru Guru are buried behind the riffs, operating here in power trio mode, and even doing an Eddie Cochran cover as well. I'm not so equipped to rate such things - at parts I feel like I could be listening to Steppenwolf - but when flipped over, this record becomes a winner. That's due to 'Der Elektrolurch', a snaking, funky exploration which starts around some jammy percussion before experimenting with heavily processed guitars and a scary sci-fi voice (though I think most voices sound scary in German). It's almost unrecognisable against the riffage on side one, and it's kosmiche musik at its best - progressive, dark, and invigorating. You could probably argue that it's a bit underwritten, sounding more like a few sketches put in linear fashion than an actual 'song', but that's OK. Closer 'The Story of Life' continues the atmosphere for 12 and a half minutes, and it takes it's time. It's a slow, meandering tune with a plodding bassline, built around the repeated tenor vocals about matters such as 'The story of life' / 'is hello and good-bye'. About 2/3 of the way through we get to some sort of bridge, suggesting we sleep 'until we meet again', and it drifts off to nothing among some gongs - before a distorted guitar comes back in and takes us home via a flying carpet of burning riffage. Guru Guru are second-tier Krautrock for me but this second side can stand up against the best moments by Dzyan or Cosmic Jokers, for sure.

Jon Appleton and Don Cherry - 'Human Music' (Flying Dutchman)

Thank heavens for this vinyl reissue! Because this is an amazingly out-there classic of electroacoustic whackjobbery, and it just sounds so so great on this nice thick slice o' black polymer (and you know I'd never uncover an original). I try to approach recordings like this somewhat critically these days, as opposed to just enjoying the twisted sonic excursions, etc. So what's so great about this? Well, in some ways, it's exactly like Mu, except replacing Ed Blackwell with Jon Appleton. But the same interest in texture and space is here, as this is a very spacious exploration. The vocals are the most intriguing part - and they are sometimes hard to distinguish from the synthesizers. There's murmurs, gasps, and yelps, and the opening cut 'BOA' slips in some layered glossolalia among the synth's many exaltations. Cherry's small wooden sounds are a natural fit for the clean, line-in ambience of Appleton's tools. It's the definitive statement of the record, even though the two musicians feel like they are not even in the same room, due to the cold headspace. But then 'OBA' brings in some traditional trumpet playing, a brassy, back and forth circus that could have come straight from Mu but with whoknowswhat programming around it. Cherry's improvisational style is punchier here, and the dancing synths really work with it, especially when breaking in analogue glissandos, an ebullient outburst worthy of the finest free jazz heads. The two players integrate much more closely on side 2. 'ABO' is a full interaction that uses Cherry's kalimba for a particularly memorable (and somewhat fierce) middle section. 'BAO' closes it out by retreating underwater. There's a flange effect on Cherry's slow, concentrated breaths and everything feels like it's melting. Dartmouth College Electronic Music Studio (in Hanover, NH) is a hell of a place to produce something like this, and I have to appreciate whoever was forward thinking enough to pluck these two out of their respective orbits and get them working together. History has littered our consciousness with many crazy synth freakout records but I do feel this one has some staying power, though I guess this attempt to address it in a critical manner has failed. Because ultimately I like these types of "outer sounds" when they manage to appeal to something beyond my brainspace, which Cherry's worldthrob outpourings certainly do.

Burning Star Core - 'Papercuts Theater' (No Quarter)

We've at long last reached the end of our Burning Star Core gauntlet, though if we were reviewing unspined CDrs we'd be here far longer. Look for Withholding Antiseptic Utilitarian Dental Inducers, our CDr blog, starting in 2013 after we get through everything else. But in the meantime we have this beautiful gatefold double LP of live material, where Yeh has taken the approach of collaging 11 years of various recordings together into four even sides. It's a 66-minute long behemoth that reminds me a bit of the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Live in Mandel Hall record from '71, at least in size, construction and density. Or maybe Metal Machine Music because that's also four evenly-split 16.5 minute sides that resist description. The bulk of the credits are the core Burning Star Core players since 1997 - Yeh, Trevor Tremaine, Mike Shiflet, Robert Beatty, Jeremy Lesniak and John Rich. There's some other notable guests whose contributions are indicated, but for the main players, they're anywhere and everywhere. Because everything blends together it's hard to tell what comes from when, but Yeh's assembled this with a sure hand, without any obvious drops in sound quality or levels. You can jump in at any place and swim as long as you want, and the mastering and vinyl really bring to life the dense arrays of movement carried in these grooves. Which if you think about it, is a real feat since I'm sure a lot of this stuff was sourced from minidisc and/or cassette. There are certainly bits I witnessed live or have heard before on other CDr releases, but it's impossible to say as everything has been transformed into a monolithic juggernaut. That's not to say this is an impenetrable, solid edifice -- there are moments of extreme delicacy, with swirling violins, spacious echoes and cavernous soundpits anchored by thundering rhythms. I'm not sure if this is a case of the sum being more than its parts or vice-versa, since I didn't hear all of the little bits that made this patchwork. If you think of Burning Star Core live as a certain thing, which this record clearly presents it as, then it makes sense to do it this way - it's an everexpanding sea of sound organisation, with various collaborators all anchoring around Yeh's own vision. There's glimpses of the rhythms we've heard on Operator Dead or the textural scrapings of Very Heart of the World, and though the vocal component is downplayed (or just buried), it's hard to mistake this music for anything else.

Anthony Braxton/Joseph Jarman - 'Together Alone' (Delmark)

These two giants supposedly only ever recorded this one album together, but it's immense. The Jarman side is first, with three compositions that begin slowly. It's multi-instrumental as you'd expect, but the first half is a very slow awakening. Jarman and Braxton tease each other slowly, trying to pull out a strong direction but then darting away when the other commits. This is the title track, 'Together Alone', and I guess that's an apt description. By the end of the side things are jittery and ecstatic, with tons of chimes and percussion clanging about, like a small furry animal trashing about in a skip full of disaprate metal shards. The voices start to come in while you can still hear saxophones, which means - gasp! - overdubs! 'Morning (Including Circles' is the name of this piece and the awakening metaphor continues, though the psychobabble of speech layers up into an indecipherable tangle of fishing lines. When flipped over, there's Braxton's two compositions to ponder. 'CK7 (GN)-436", dedicated to David Berman, begins with some electroacoustic noises quite alien to the AACM aesthetic. There's a buzzing motor sound and some flanged-out space fuzz over the Jarman/Braxton interplay. Occasionally it explodes into a fingernail-on-chalkboard soup, though processed by the big computer in Giles Goat-Boy. I'm not sure if it's distracting to the saxophone duet at the core of these pieces or if it makes things more interesting. I think a whole record of this would be a bit hard to focus on, but when juxtaposed against the more "traditional" (ha!) duets on side A, it works well. So do we have a meeting of the earth-spirit-soul (Jarman) and the turtleneck-wearing technical innovator (Braxton)? Or are things a bit less definable than this? If we listen carefully to Braxton's sax when Jarman is flauting about (or at least I assume that's the breakdown since individual credits aren't listed), Anthony is totally kicking it warm, open and human. The electronic interjections do make it occasionally sound like a giant speck of dirt has just hit the stylus, but maybe that's what he intended. 'SBN-A-1 66K' is the closer, which is the least improvised and most dirge-like moment here. It's a slow, winding melody that stops to rest every few notes. Braxton and Jarman are in-sync, playing contrapuntal harmonies off each other while a triangle randomly clinks about. There's a dynamic of push and pull at work; the lock-step song over a haphazard triangle, sure - but also you can hear little bursts of air and taps behind it all. It's a strangely unsettling thing to listen to (like all of side B, really) but when the low reed tones kick in, it shakes my esophagus.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - 'Strictly Personal' (Blue Thumb)

Strictly Personal is always a bit savaged in the record guides, claiming that Bob Krasnow ruined it with his overtly 'crazy' production. I used to think this was nonsense and that Strictly Personal was underrated, great even -- but listening now I agree that Krasnow is to blame for whatever is lacking here. This isn't so much because it's whacked out with reverb and flange (cause those parts are cool, like some dub-blues-psych hybrid) but because the production is just bad. If you listen to the first part of 'Trust Us', the drums sound like they're being played underwater (though not in a good way), and the whole performance feels like the highs and lows have been sucked out, leaving only a gross-timbred middle section. I understand that the technique of rock music production wasn't as developed in 1968 but given how many other amazing records came out at this time , I don't why they couldn't get this one right. Again, it's a shame because Don's songwriting has developed another stage in its complexity, with some proto-Trout Mask brilliance. 'Son of Mirror Man - Mere Man' is one work of genius, even despite the mismatched levels and farty bass sound. I've always wondered about that title - is 'Mere Man' the name of Mirror Man's son, or is this song about the son of someone named 'Mirror Man-Mere Man'? This song though enters a new realm of melting ice cream on the hoods of racecars - a realm opened just earlier with the bendy overlapping end of 'Trust Us'. Side two opens with 'On Tomorrow', a dark screaming song that melts into the sublime 'Beetle Bones n' Smokin' Stones', a taste of the animal-deranged vocal stylings that the good Captain later became famous for. The Mirror Man Sessions CD has the better, longer, unaffected versions of a lot of these tracks (like 'Kandy Korn') and overall is a better listen -- probably one that renders Strictly Personal obsolete -- but we'll get there on the Cinderblock tip soon enough. The good moments here are great though and it's certainly a transitional work. Though the Beefheartian vibe is true California all the way, I manage to incorrectly assign a imagistic geography that places it in some weird South that may actually be under the surface of the Earth's crust. Certainly the bluesy deconstructions are responsible for this, but they weren't consciously thinking about deconstruction when creating these records (at least I hope not!) so maybe that's why it actually rocks pretty hard.