Joseph Jarman - 'Song For' (Delmark)

There really must have been something in the water in Chicago then, because the music that came out of the late 1960s AACM scene is so unlike anything of its own time or any other. This first Jarman solo record is another piece in the puzzle that became the Art Ensemble, and thus fits in alongside the early Roscoe Mitchell recordings and the other pre-Art Ensemble experiments, which converge on that amazing 5 CD 1967/68 box set (if only it could get a vinyl release!). Jar's band at this time contained Christopher Gaddy and Charles Clark, both of whom were dead within a year (according to the liner notes of this 1970s reissue); dual tragedies, of course, all the more because this core trio had a contemplative understanding of space and time that was a really different flavour to the playfulness of the Art Ensemble. As a quartet with Thurman Barker, they're stripped down on 'Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City', a jaw-dropping excursion into outer-limits impressionism, with Jarman's poetic recitation at the centre. This celebration of urban mysticism explicitly references Dada a few times and casts Chicago's skyline as a shifting tapestry of possible worlds, a chaos that pulsates and gives. Gaddy's piano lines are especially elegant, with a mood closer to Paul Bley than fellow AACMer Muhal Richard Abrams. The larger band, found on the other three tracks, contains Fred Anderson on tenor, Steve McCall on drums and William Brimfield on Trumpet, and both sides start with cohesive, melodic compositions. 'Little Fox Run' is waxy, even a bit brittle, and a strange juxtaposition against 'Non-Cognitive'. It punches through the air and announces their arrival, but is too one-dimensional to showcase Jarman's talents. Side B starts with 'Adam's Rib', a modal, evolving progression that creaks towards silence, opening up for the longer form improvisation of the title track, which is segues into. 'Song For' starts by building percussive elements in space before erupting into a push/pull that is free, but never chaotic. Brimfield's trumpet rips over everything and the presence of two drummers makes it kinda choppy, but the band knows when to hold 'em and knows when to fold 'em, and the comedowns and murmurs are some of the piece's most invigorating moments. At times Jarman's alto and Anderson's tenor don't even seem to be in the same room, but then they come together to make great waves of sound. All around, in the corners, you can hear slide whistles, shouting, and marimba; also Charles Clark moseying around and tiny finger cymbals and bells. This flavours the music with sounds not often heard on ESP releases of the time (Don Garrett's work excepted); it's an approach radical and visionary, but quietly so, which can be the most rewarding.

Gastr del Sol - 'Camofleur' (Drag City)

More personal nostalgia (as if you haven't already endured heaps, if you've been reading this over the year): the release of Gastr del Sol's Camofleur in late 1997 was as impactful to me as Sgt. Pepper's or In Utero was to some people. Of course, there were very few people who I could share this with during my freshman year of college except a handful of friends. By the time this was released, the nascent Internet gossip (particularly the exalted droneon list, the archives of which from 1996-1999 I would kill to find) already indicated that the working relationship between Grubbs and O'Rourke had broken down, and Camofleur would be their last album. What I didn't realise then until it was released (and actually I forget about even now) is that Markus Popp joined as a full third member (or at least is credited as such) and whatever his impact was on the collaboration remains unknown - but the result is masterful. This is around (or just before) the time Jim O started producing Superchunk records and was talking in interviews about how much he loved Burt Bacharach, and this was not needless iconoclasm - it was an embracing of a plurality of sonic palette that served him really well on his first few Drag City solo albums, and surely influenced Camofleur immensely. What is more noticeable when listening to this, just five seconds into 'The Seasons Reverse', was how exuberant the sound was. Popp's digital glitching or whatever the hell he does (and that's not meant to be derogatory - I love me some early Oval) seems to propel these songs with a brightness that you could argue Upgrade & Afterlife lacked. It's not just that there was now a beat behind things, but that even Grubb's singing found a more conventional melodicism and while the lyrics are not necessarily any less cryptic, they feel truly like they support the musical idea rather than digging in their heels against comprehension. This opening track ends with an explosive cornet solo (one that I remember caused some controversy on droneon, cause after all, there are rules for experimental music, right?) and then it leads into a great bit of field recordings with O'Rourke attempting to communicate to a confused, non-English speaking child. 'Black Horse' is a thick, lush instrumental that sounds remarkably straight-forward compared to, say, 'Hello Spiral', but to me follows logically from that aesthetic. My local radio station used it as their station ID music bed for years so it conjures a special feeling; YouTube shows a live version from 1995 as just a guitar/bass/drums trio that feels like exactly the same song, yet completely different at the same time - so it's composition predates Upgrade but was wisely left off because (probably) it didn't fit the mood of that album. A song such as 'Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder' would have sounded like 'Rebecca Sylvester' on an earlier work, but the Camofleur transformation adds some fruit to this dinner plate; Popp's waterfall of digital effects feels as warm and organic as Systemisch and the cryptic, circular nature of Grubbs's worldview is something I love to lose myself in. 'Mouth Canyon' is the debut (as far as I know) of Jim O as a vocalist, and it also has this really wonderful opening passage that is like a series of breezes blowing against you - bleeping electronic tones and wind instruments come together in a magical harmony. 'A Puff of Dew' is the darkness before the dawn - a molasses-drenched swamp of stasis, with Grubbs intoning about staircases and mountains. I think Camofleur is by far the most American Gastr record, sounding influenced by landscape and other scenery throughout; 'A Puff of Dew' brings a dark undercurrent to the surface, and is one of the only mentions of an air mattress in a song that I can think of. And then it all comes to a summation with the instrumental beauty 'Bauchredner', the final march towards a higher consciousness. As it's the last track ever released by Gastr del Sol, it feels like a fitting conclusion.

Don Ellis - 'Haiku' (MPS/BASF)

A record released on the BASF label?!? Was this primarily intended to demonstrate stereo equipment over its artistic goals? Ellis is a good choice for such an approach, because he has a really lush, psychedelic arrangement style and his compositions lie somewhere between Sketches of Spain-era Miles Davis and the more circular meanderings of Moondog, or even Lou Harrison. The Harrison connection is heard most obviously on the opening cut, 'Children', which is an exercise in pure, liquid beauty. There's no easy place to file this - it's trumpet-driven but it's hardly jazz - it's soundtracky, but not a soundtrack - and it's got classical overtones galore, but it's hardly classical music. The more orchestrated moments weave the ear candy into cotton forms, occasionally overdoing it with it's pouncing rhythms ('Summer Rain') but being delightful and elegant when stripped down - side one closes with 'Forest', built primarily around Ellis's trumpet and a bit of harp. But even the parts that sounds clichéd, I can't help but wondering if you threw Van Dyke Parks singing overtop and told me it was a Song Cycle outtake, if I'd be ecstatic. Ellis is probably most famous for the French Connection soundtrack, which has a dirtier edge than anything here. The liner notes talk about how influenced he is by Japanese culture, though there's hardly any Eastern flavour to the sounds. But the photo of a nude Ellis sitting on a rock, contemplating the mysteries of the universe (with those contemplations likely forming into a 5-7-5 pattern), tells me all I need to know. This has always stayed in my vinyl accumulation because even though it's pretty 'soft', it's sometimes just the right atmosphere for a lazy summer afternoon. There's too much work to be done, so instead of romping through the leaves and trees I can stare at the screen and let this carry me off to distant imagined corners of mainstream psychedelic circa 1971. I thought I had a copy of Electric Bath, which has a somewhat more Latin edge, but I must have imagined that.

Ducktails - 'Landscapes' (Olde English Spelling Bee)

This Ducktails record is such a pleasing style of provocative music. It's built around pure dreams, the sounds being made up of airy, warm comfort that is still psychedelic in it's overall assemblage. The guitars are strummed and picked as melodic chords, recorded in a hazy, phased-out lo-fi style which reminds me of Bügsküll or other remnants of DIY dream-pop. When Mr. Ducktails (Matt Mondanilee) sings it's like a sweet, hesitant demo tape. He's not afraid to go falsetto, but it's clear that the vocals aren't meant to be any more than another layer. The cheap rhythm loops, from probably built in keyboard beats, are a testament to this generation of thrift-store sound voyagers. But while many of his generation fixate on harshness and tension, Mondanilee glides along a soft, supportive wave. Even the technicolour artwork suggests a family holiday, the sweet sense of teenage nostalgia, and a place where no dogs bite. I don't mean to say this is pure ear candy - it eschews polish, consisting of dirty-yet-soft edges.  Where a lot of melodic loop-pedal kids end up stuck in go-nowhere harmonic noodling, Mondanilee has a sense of balance - these are pop songs, even if mostly instrumental, and they burn with a relaxed glow that channels energy inward instead of being lazy. Maybe that's what 'hypnagogic' means but I think people already stopped saying that a few years ago.

Areski & Brigitte Fontaine - 'L'Incendie' (Get Back)

Areski and Brigitte Fontaine make such a cute couple; he's the bearded musical voyager and she's the arty answer to ye-ye pop. Together they were the Gallic version Richard & Mimi Fariña, or maybe Mickey and Mallory. Now, my French is barely beyond high school level so I don't know what the hell they're singing about and I'm afraid to stop and figure it out, but there's a pleasure to be found in ignorance. Side A has Areski's darkly shadowed face on the label. The nursery rhyme glow is there on some songs ('Le 6 Septembre'), sung like a round or other sort of children's workshop. We also get whacked out porn guitar behind Brigitte's fantastic voice ('L'Engourdie') and then dark medieval churchy dirges like 'Nous Avons Tant Parlé'. It's a grab bag of sounds from the 60's/early 70's, with the Eastern vibe laid on thick. When you flip to side B (so you can look at Brigitte's face spinning), you get Areski's solo vocals over bongos and snakecharmer flutes. It's one of only 2 songs over 3 minutes, yet it feels particularly long because it's Brigitte who I came to party with and I can't hear her. But the other "long" track is the whispered 'Après la guerre'. Intimate and kinda sexy, with the odd plink and pluck in the background, it's like that scene in the Blair Witch Project where the one girl just puts the camera on her face in the dark and cries about how scared she is. I thought L'Incendie was their first album but it's hard to tell since when Get Back reissued it, they didn't bother to include any additional contextual notes, such as a date. Some Google 'research' places it at '74, and therefore after Comme la Radio, but I always thought it was '71 and had filed it before. So now when writing this, I have to save this draft til I've reviewed Comme la Radio which means I'm listening to them out of order, an error I will correct when I refile (so Encourager Templates take 2, coming in April 2012, doesn't make the same mistake). Which means this bit I wrote below is now totally wrong and irrelevant, but instead of recycling it for a future qualifying post I'll just dump it here:

I'm always really interested in the records made just before the unfuckwithable ones. I'm drawn to records like The Colour of Spring, Vampire on Titus, The Dreaming - slightly flawed, perhaps, but made during a creative stride with the masterpiece just visible in the distance. Sometimes I like these predecessors even more than the "big" albums, plus sometimes you've listened to the more acclaimed album too much. I recognize Comme la Radio as the masterpiece but have more often pulled out L'Incendie because of this factor. I've always imagine Fontaine as the one calling the shots (despite Areski's top billing - I mean, that's just alphabetical, right?) and feeling frustrated at all of the fruity arrangements - that despite this record's eclecticism, it still just wasn't quite right, ie: she's almost there, but not yet. And only when paired with the Art Ensemble of Chicago do her songs really explode into something magical, but she had to wait til the next album for that. So knowing this, it's improved L'Incendie a bit in my eyes -- you can hear the hesitation, the uncertainty, the hope. And ending with 'Le Chant des Chants', so strident yet abrupt, waiting for a coda that is yet to come.

Yeah, well, screwed that up for sure....

Areski & Brigitte Fontaine - 'Comme la Radio' (Editions Saravah)

Sometimes a few minds come together and make a record that exists in its own magical vacuum. I'll probably say that about a lot of albums throughout the duration of this lengthy project but you'll just have to get used to my repetition, repetition, repetition. Due to my idiosyncratic filing system, I keep this under 'A' for Areski even though it's really Brigitte Fontaine's show. This is because I owned L'Incendie first, where Areski gets top billing; when I finally scored a vinyl copy of Comme la Radio (a dream fulfilled, really), I didn't bother to refile. Plus I quite like it in the A's because it's rather close to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the 'backing' band on (some of) this record, who we will be visiting again very soon. So yeah, this record is awesome, by which I mean it's totally mindblowingly great if you like folk or jazz or foreign people or psychedelic music cause it's all of those things plus more. It's like an ice cream sundae with a rainbow streaming out of it. Fontaine's songs are kinda long and jammy, almost in an Astral Weeks way, though the instrumentation is really sparse and the production -- my god, the production! This record sounds a bit like it was recorded in a mailbox, though that suggests that it's thin which isn't really right. Maybe it's better to say it's "distant". And kudos for that - it's probably hard to make a record with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and keep the reeds mixed low. But Areski and Fontaine realised that the beat is the real current they want to ride, so the percussion is up front, the vocals are flush up against it, and the other instruments are there, but not in the forefront. This was made after the Art Ensemble had been in Paris for a few years, and they were about to go home and hook up with Don Moye and enter a whole new period. By it's very nature the songs are gonna hold to a more rhythmic structure than what these dudes were laying down on Tutunkhamen, Reese and the Smooth Ones, etc. - but it feels like the dark side to the Les Stances a Sophie material. Areski's presence is really prevalent too, at least one assumes the dark guitar stuff is him, and he sings lead on 'Le Brouillard' but it's cool. And the credits indicate that most of the percussion is him, though it's clearly funked up by Malachi Favors. But it's clear Fontaine is the driving force behind this. I've always had a real starry-eyed view of the French idea of "pop", probably influenced by a teenage appreciation of Stereolab and Godard films. Side one feels almost like a new form of pop being invented. Side two is the more exploratory side and it burns with a pulse that synthesizes a bunch of disparate strains of humanity. Lyrics, well, I don't know really even though they are printed in a nice purple ink;; I'm happy to just smile and let it all wash over me.