RECENT LISTENING #20 (SPECIAL 20th ISSUE! SEVERAL NO-PRIZES WITHIN!)
Equipment Pointed Ankh, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Bill Orcutt? (KKYLP actually), Hawkwind, Dave Burrell, Frank Lowe Quintet, Mind Maintenance, Maureen Tucker
EQUIPMENT-POINTED ANKH Without Human Permission LP (ASTRAL EDITIONS/SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) Second or third release (counting a cassette-only) I’ve heard by this Kentuckiana-based experimental/improvisational weird-jamming American Krautrock unit, and you know what, forget a k****rock label. They’re beyond it and onto something their own, with a 21st Century harsh-improv thing going as well. This aligns them sonically with other 21st C. Midwest-rooted peers like the Wolf and Dober crews (check out track five, “An Almost Completely Clear Hat”), but even that is somehow mixed seamlessly with a post-fusion/funk tone and groove throughout — maybe even an actual pop sense? (Check out numerous tracks like “Blue Folding Room” and “Rainforest Cotillion,” or the wild side two move where “Pioneer Chairs” suddenly becomes “Chrome Run.”) It’s funny, sometimes I’m convinced they’re the one true Midwestern heir to the now-dispersed Tortoise in that both could be described as actual Midwestern fusion/funk underground-music supergroups. Naturally, the contexts are different in that the bands use different concepts of “super-” and they do it in a different decade, Equipment Pointed Ankh consisting of Jim Marlowe (Tropical Trash, the mighty Sapat, the short-lived and underrated Teal Grapefruit, the short-lived and underrated Astro Black Records store), Chris Bush (Caboladies, Flanger Magazine, Flower Man), Ryan Davis (Roadhouse, State Champion, Tropical Trash, the Sophomore Lounge record label, the Technique Street online record bodega), Shutaro Noguchi (Feeding Tube solo artist, Tropical Trash), and Dan Davis (Tropical Trash). In the end, maybe the only reason I’m invoking Tortoise at all is the way these five EPA members are pictured on the cover, in a rather unnervingly distorted portrait-style, the big T having made a similar unnerving band portrait move on the cover of that one album I haven’t heard (you know the one), because Without Human Permission is definitively its own beautiful thing, a huge tiering-up and/or refocusing from/of their already-wild precedent. Been listening to it obsessively, 3-5 times a day, still marvelling each and every time they press their sprawling electronic & experimental jam-style into another fresh song-form, built from endless combinations and/or reductions of pulse, repetition, noise-as-hooks, occasional actual Canterbury-prog chamber-music moves (especially on the last track, which is also the title track, spoiler alert), even some brief low-key funky-ass one-note bass guitar (I swear). Anyway, I don’t ever pick Albums of the Year, and I’m not going to pick any for 2021 either, but…..
“BLUE” GENE TYRANNY Out of the Blue LP (UNSEEN WORLDS) Speaking of album(s) of (a) year, here’s a lovely reissue of a lovely album that was originally released in 1977 on the Lovely Music label, home of those Robert Ashley classics like Private Parts, which was released the same year, and which “Blue” Gene Tyranny also played on. Tyranny was born as Robert Sheff, a brilliant keyboardist from Texas and then Michigan and then Northern California, adept at seemingly all vernacular from garage rock to show-tunes to avant-garde, even playing in Iggy Pop’s teenage band the Prime Movers, not to mention bravely sitting in with his old friend for a couple decrepit late-period Stooges tours in 1973. Out of the Blue came along in 1977 when Sheff/Tyranny was on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, and it’s side two that truly makes it a masterpiece, the 26-minute track “Out of the Blue/A Letter From Home About Sound And Consciousness.” It’s a long track, but I think I’d still love it if it were 2 or even 3 hours long, because it’s almost literally a great arthouse film, something like Sans Soleil (1983, d. Chris Marker), or the film it kind of shares a title with, News From Home (1977, d. Chantal Akerman). In an earlier and discarded draft of this very record review, I wrote that “Out of the Blue/A Letter from Home” is no less than “one of the great artistic explorations of utopian possibility within human consciousness, and certainly one of the great musical ones.” I now realize that’s a little too over-the-top, because you might immediately run out and buy it, and get it home and start with side one like you’re supposed to, and then, even if you like it, you might happen to not think that side one is one of the great artistic explorations of utopian possibility within human consciousness, and that it’s in fact superficially classifiable as semi-maudlin 1970s soft-rock (albeit filled with strange and highly progressive tendencies), and then you’ll say, why, you’ll say “What the hell was Dolman talkin’ about? Do I have the right record?” Well, side one really is rather woolly, and I can’t be responsible for your reaction to it, although I’m listening to the album opener “Next Time Might Be Your Time” again right now, and really can’t believe my ears at what lovely melancholic nooks and crannies this arrangement is getting into, guided by the sweet vocals of one Patrice Manget, singing lyrics written by “Blue” Gene himself. Track two “David Kopay (Portrait)” is the one that might scare the most people off, with its highly funky all-instrumental fusion/prog riffage (guitarist Steve Bartek says move over 1970s Jeff Beck!), but man, these guys are playing their asses off, especially Tyranny with his flowingly complex keyboard arrangement. There’s also side one closer “Leading a Double Life,” which is really a gospel song, with deep and strange lyrics like “on the other hand, you know/it takes some language/an agreement for the moment/making dreams ring true/so with the resistance/comes an angel’s assistance/bringing it closer and closer/leading a double life.” Okay, I do love this whole LP . . . but I especially love Side B.
“BILL ORCUTT Untitled 7-inch (Self-Released, 1996)” I put quotes around the title of this review because I don’t know if this record even exists. A couple mp3s that are labelled “bill orcutt side a” and “bill orcutt side b” definitely exist on my hard drive, in a folder called “Bill Orcutt Untitled 7-inch (Self-Released, 1996),” all titled just as I downloaded them a good 10 or even 15 years ago from someone on the S-----k network (I just checked and the folder is still up there in a couple different places), so naturally for all these years I’ve assumed these are the two tracks that make up an untitled debut solo 7-inch by Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt that was released in 1996. After all, he had another solo release that same year (“Solo CD” (Untitled) on Audible Hiss), which came out as his notorious band Harry Pussy was starting to dissolve. I even seem to have a vague memory of this 7-inch being announced when it came out, as an edition of 100, and people talking about it on the internet or even in (gasp) paper fanzines… but my memory is not very good. And, who needs memory when you can just look it up on Discogs, where I can also see if my prediction that it’ll be selling in the $100-$200 (or even higher) range is accurate… but wait, it’s not on Discogs at all, and I can’t seem to find any other mention of it anywhere on the entire internet either. It even goes completely unmentioned in both this excellent 2011 interview/discography feature with Orcutt at Terminal Boredom, and this also excellent survey of “the music of Bill Orcutt and Adris Hoyos” as published in the online magazine Surround. Hey Bill, just in case you happen to be reading, let us know… is this 7-inch you?! If you want, leave a comment below and tell us! Or just let the mystery continue… maybe it’s some sort of file-sharing hoax or mislabel, which does happen… or maybe it is Orcutt and he’s disowning it! Personally I think & hope it is Orcutt, because it’s a great record, as I was reminded just tonight when all two tracks and 5:21 minutes of it came up on my iPod’s album shuffle while I was washing the dishes. Together the two sides form a single glorious rhythmically clanking but also ethereally chirping and glowing electronic whatsis, which I wouldn’t even think of as electric guitar music if Orcutt’s name wasn’t on it. It sounds more like something from Nuno Canavarro’s super-singular electronic (?) album Plux Quba; even if Orcutt is using traditional guitar, there’s a strange inversion of traditional guitar attack throughout, unlike anything else in his (or anyone’s) catalog up to 1996, and I don’t think anything in his (or anyone’s) catalog since. I mean, there was no active Bill Orcutt catalog at all for another 13 years after 1996, and this purported 7” might not be part of said catalog anyway, which would explain why it would be a somewhat musically anomalous part of it, even when compared directly to the possibly contemporaneous styles on Solo CD (Untitled). What was music, anyway? (EDIT: Figured it out! It is Orcutt, recording as KKYLP, and it was released in 2007, not 1996. It was Orcutt’s 9/7/22 appearance on the Noisextra podcast in which the breadcrumb was dropped: “Fake Estates predates Palilalia as a label. I released a single — before I started playing guitar again, I released a single on Fake Estates.” And it’s selling in the $40-$70 range, not quite at the $100-$200 level yet.)
HAWKWIND A Space Ritual 2LP (UNITED ARTISTS) Finally got an original double-LP super-gatefold edition of this 20th Century masterwork, replacing the MP3s that had been tucked away on my iPod for a decade, and goddamn this is so much better. Yes, it’s because of that good old (warm!) vinyl fidelity, and yes, it’s because of the packaging, because while you’re listening you can have a multisensory experience by folding out the super-gatefold, staring at all the pictures on both sides of it, and reading the names of the credited “musicnauts,” all of which can help you hear the music on a deeper level. For example, I’m now reminded that Dave Brock is the only guitarist in Hawkwind, which allows me to really understand what Lemmy on bass is contributing to the overall steamroller thickness that is their sound. As a rhythm guitarist, Brock has a real pile-driving style, and he locks in with drummer Simon King to create a late 20th Century symbolic monolithic wall that is easily the audio-only cultural equal to Kubrick’s monolith in 2001, fully inventing industrial punk at the same time. Of course the low end of Lemmy’s bass is a major part of this “steamroller-thick” and “industrial” wall, but Brock and King are so solid of a rhythm section that Lemmy is free to become the moving/weaving/improvisational element that all rhythmic tapestries require in order to breathe, to show variation of pattern and color. That is, Lemmy’s basslines actually aerate the monolith that is Hawkwind, just as hand-drums like djembes and congas aerate the monolithic ‘one-chord’ grooves of African music. Hawkwind has three more key aerators as well, in Nik Turner on saxophone and the classic electro-cosmo-chaos duo of Dik Mik on audio generator and Del Dettmar on synthesizer, but Lemmy is the most nimble of them all. And never mind the aerators, let’s close the review by going back to one half of the monolith, in the person of drummer Simon King: after all these years and all those listens to Here Come the Warm Jets, I still had not really put it together that he’s the drummer on 6 of the 10 tracks on that album, no less than “Needles in the Camel’s Eye,” “Baby’s on Fire,” “Driving Me Backwards,” “On Some Faraway Beach,” “Blank Frank,” and the massive album-closing and still-somehow-underrated title track. . . which actually sounds almost exactly like Eno fronts Hawkwind, if you think about it.
DAVE BURRELL High Won-High Two 2LP (ARISTA FREEDOM) Feel like I’ve only heard Dave Burrell on three or four records total, and then always blasting as part of a large avant-garde ensemble, but here, on a relatively post-bop stripped-down piano trio recording, his music blasts just as fully. The opening track goes on forever (in a good way) and I think I recognize traditional themes, though can’t quite name them, and feel like Burrell is both blasting them out as joyful music, and making fun of them at the same time, and I love jazz music’s capability for such nuance. After a while I peep the credits, and see the opening track is indeed 19 minutes and 49 seconds long, and it’s “West Side Story (Medley),” credited to Leonard Bernstein, so no wonder I recognized some themes. All other tracks are credited to Dave Burrell. The bassist is the great Norris “Sirone” Jones, and the credits also reveal that even though this is definitely a piano trio record, Pharoah Sanders makes it a quartet by playing tamborine on all tracks but one. (Wait, what?) Two records, four sides, all made up of recordings from two different days in New York City in 1968, one day with the “quartet” of Burrell, Sirone, Sanders, and Bobby Kapp on drums (sides A, B, and D), and another day with the trio of Burrell, Sirone, and Sunny Murray on drums (side C). I also learn from Discogs that slightly edited versions of three of these tracks, including the one with Murray on drums, and two of the seven with Kapp on drums, were released in 1969 as a Burrell LP called High. This expanded High Won-High Two double-LP version came out in 1976 on good ole Arista Freedom, and by the way, the strange and dreamy cover art is by one Benno Friedman, a visual artist and one-time rock photographer who took such well-known photos as this one of Anthony Braxton and this one of Jim Croce, and, significantly for all of you Blastitudians and Blastronauts out there, played singing bowls and flute on the Angus MacLise track called….. “Blastitude”!
FRANK LOWE QUINTET Exotic Heartbreak LP (SOUL NOTE) Speaking of Blastitude, and master blasters, my goodness the Freedom Frank Lowe deep dive continues. This guy never made a bad or forgettable album. I promise you, every single one of them is great. The beautifully titled Exotic Heartbreak was recorded and released in 1981, and Lowe’s terrific band includes the Morris brothers (Butch on cornet and Wilber on bass), a drummer named Tim Pleasant (who doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page but smokes on here with a driving and even punkish clatter-vibe), and perhaps most key, the great Chicagoan Amina Claudine Myers on piano. Very cool to hear her just blowing post-bop free piano on someone else’s session. She’s really good at it! And P.S., at a glance I wondered if the artwork was by Moki Cherry, but it’s not. It’s in Moki’s style, and quite possibly/likely directly inspired by her, made by Frank Lowe’s wife/life partner Carmen Lowe (who also did the great cover art for the Black Beings LP).
MIND MAINTENANCE s/t (DRAG CITY, 2021) A straight-up new spiritual jazz album, but not with your typical instrumentation. Mind Maintenance are a mimimalist duo of Josh Abrams on guimbri and Chad Taylor on mbira, which you could roughly compare to bass (sit-down style) and kalimba (thumb piano), but the guimbri is one of the deepest bass instruments ever built and played, and the mbira is also thousands of years old (in fact, today I learned that the kalimba is a simplified and Americanized version of the mbira, and it wasn’t even designed until the 1920s). I was unsure if Chad Taylor could pull off just mbira, completely dry and untreated, for an entire album, but of course he can, he’s Chad Taylor and he always kills it. It is a confrontationally minimalist record though; there’s moments throughout where I feel like the instruments are almost supporting each other in some sort of inverse gravity field, and that I, the unconnected listener, am about to fall off the face of the earth. Or they’re about to, so unwieldy is their sonic construct, but driven fearlessly forward at high speed, fast enough to create its own gravity that holds everything into place throughout. A wild ride!
MAUREEN TUCKER Playin’ Possum (TRASH RECORDS); MAUREEN TUCKER Life in Exile After Abdication (50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 WATTS) Would you believe I’d never heard a note of Moe Tucker’s solo records before? And it’s not because I’ve cancelled her over bad politics (baby), if I may deny we us-vs.-them dawgs on the internet just a little of that prime us-vs.-them red meat. No, the only reason I hadn’t listened to her albums yet is the standard one: there’s like 9 million other albums I’m supposed to listen to first (including any possible album by her original band 100 times apiece of course… just listened to WL/WH for the 300th time yesterday, for example). There’s a time for everything, though, and this week has been Moe’s time, all because of general social media convo about the (flabbergastingly good) Todd Haynes VU doc, convo that in at least one social media comment section included a link to this Doug Yule interview on Perfect Sound Forever, which in turn led me to this Moe Tucker interview also on Perfect Sound Forever, which got me thinking, if like, Jad Fair and Kim Gordon and all of Sonic Youth — not to mention Reed, Cale, and Morrison themselves! — played on some of those solo Moe albums… I bet they’re good? And by golly, they are! On her 1982 debut Playin’ Possum she plays every single instrument and it’s kind of amazing, basically all cover songs (she even does her former band’s “Heroin” as the second track!) played very primitively, legitimately Shaggsy at times, and I’ll damned if it doesn’t have that perfect charming 1980s post-punk indie-pop bedroom-skiffle vibe, you know the one. And if you don’t know the vibe, by the time you get to her sparse side-two rendition of Vivaldi’s “Concerto in D Major” followed by her sweet hand-clap-driven (and even quasi-ska!) version of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” you sure will. And right after that it all closes down with “Ellas,” which is Moe tearing it up on solo instrumental electric guitar, playing cosmic Ellas “Bo Diddley” McDaniel riffs eternity-style for six minutes. A really raw and soulful album, and one of the finest in the extended VU canon. Her next real full-length didn’t come along for awhile (she was a working mother after all), 1989’s Life in Exile Before Abdication, notably more professional-sounding, and more in tune, both harmonically and culturally, as Moe is joined by all of Sonic Youth as well as her old friend Lou Reed. That said, the band on most tracks is her solid non-celebrity hometown friends Scott Jarvis on drums and the duo of Hank Beckmeyer and Kate Messer on guitars. Kim Gordon does play bass on four tracks, making her almost a full band member, with Steve Shelley playing drums on one track, and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo playing guitars on another. Everything is definitely more 120 Minutes ready, if you will, which in 1989 was important, but it’s also an excellent album, and the first to feature Moe’s budding songwriting (which was sweetly encouraged by her old friend Lou, according to that Perfect Sound Forever interview linked above). Those are the only two Tucker albums I’ve listened to so far, but I think they’re just as important to us VU freaks as Chelsea Girl and Paris 1919 and even Metal Machine Music are.