RECENT LISTENING #29

Tristan Dahn, Pole, Equipment Pointed Ankh, Gum Country, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Prince, Wolf Eyes v/a

TRISTAN DAHN Housekeeping LP (WASTE MGMT MUSIC) Had no idea what to expect from this 2022 LP, seeming as it does like a one-off or first release for both the artist Tristan Dahn and the label Waste MGMT Music. I guess it’s what we can still call a “private press” LP, this one with a backstory that after Dahn’s mother passed away in May 2020 he spent the following summer living and working in her upstate New York house, the same house he’d grown up in, cleaning and organizing and using the various musical instruments left there over the years to home-tape this album. I’m mostly hearing acoustic (at least clean-toned) guitars and drums/percussion, as well as some cheap keyboards, and a few effective field recordings from the house and grounds (there’s a particularly crucial lawnmower and/or leafblower appearance at one point). Dare I write Slint-meets-Woo? (I do . . . but do you dare unread it?) No vocals and therefore no verbally articulated or overt autobiographical component to the music, instead a wide imaginal evocation of a loving familiar space and ramshackle DIY creativity within it.

POLE “Raum Eins” b/w “Raum Zwei” 12-inch (DIN) Which translates to “Space One” b/w “Space Two” in English, and I’m always down for that, especially thinking of this 1998 12” single as exactly what krautrock would have sounded like 25-30 years down the line, coming from a new generation of German musicians that are going to keep changing the style, until it’s even more electronic (in fact completely so), even more minimal, with rhythms that are (subtly) more post-house than pre-house. Imagine if krautrock had happened after house/techno, instead of before. Brings me back to the 1990s, alright. (Not to mention having just finished You’re With Stupid and therefore jamming Labradford and Pan American non-stop.)

EQUIPMENT POINTED ANKH Changing Legs (NEWTON’S KIDNEY); EQUIPMENT POINTED ANKH From Inside the House (BRUIT DIRECT DISQUES) Walk-in music: Can’t stop the Ankh… Can’t stop the Ankh… (Sung to the tune of “Stop the Rock” by Apollo 440.) Thanks, everyone! Larry Dolman here, back with another EPA update for all you EPA heads out there… lord knows I write about ‘em every other issue, can’t help it if headz gotta know… their 2021 full-length Without Human Permission was some kind of monster, a definitive bizarro-world pop-rock statement by a fully experimental and instrumental band, and whatever it was, it worked. A quick CD/digital followup snuck out in November 2022 called Changing Legs, and it’s a somewhat more obtuse listen, as if Permission is the pop-rock planet and Legs is a smaller satellite, or more accurately a collection of space dust and moonlets in Permission’s planetary ring system. Not so much heavy big-hook songs, more like studio miniatures, more Faust Tapes than Faust IV, if you catch my drift. Come to find out from Bandcamp that Changing Legs is 14 tracks of “improvised duets,” various permutations of the band’s five-person core Permission lineup (Chris Bush, Dan Davis, Ryan Davis, Jim Marlowe, and Shutaro Noguchi) joined by a guest (?) member Seth Manchester. Now, in January 2023, the core lineup has put out another album that is not duets, and feels more like a direct followup to Permission called From Inside the House, less improvised and more composed (at least that’s my interpretation of their process). It also features a sixth member Jenny Rose, who was not on Permission or Changing Legs, and I assume that’s her doing the recitation on the Side B opening track, also called “From Inside the House,” and that she wrote the words for it too. Not sure if she adds other instrumentation throughout the rest of the album as well, but this title track is a tranquil mid-album sea of possibility, ringed by a bustling coastline of Permission-style big-beat high-rises; I’m not the first to compare it to “Out of the Blue” by “Blue” Gene Tyranny (that would be our Philly phriend Max Milgram, writing about records over on the @philarecx IG account).

GUM COUNTRY Somewhere (KINGFISHER BLUEZ) It’s comforting and rare when I allow myself to casually jam and enjoy some good ole brand new unassuming poppy punky music, this time a band featuring Courtney Garvin, the guitarist from The Courtneys, the Canadian band that, with their 2017 release Courtneys II, became the first non-New Zealand band signed to Flying Nun Records in 35 years or something like that. This is Garvin recording her songs in a duo with multi-instrumentalist Connor Mayer, bedroom/home taper-style. She’s doing all the singing and I presume most or all of the writing, and the songs sound big and full and rich and they’re nice melodic low-key power-pop, or as the band calls it “harsh twee.” It is indeed “Chickfactor music,” but with more fuzz pedals. (Sorry, over on the Rock Writ podcast Chickfactor founder/editor Gail O’Hara was talking about how people actually use the phrase “Chickfactor music,” mostly in a disparaging way. Makes great sense to me as a compliment, my notable personal dislike of Magnetic Fields notwithstanding.)

THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282 Bob Dinner and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner’s Celebrity Avalanche (THE COMMUNION LABEL) Did someone mention the 1990s? Well, 1990s legends Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 have been in the news lately with a couple reissues, but back in 2001 when this album was released, it had been 5 years since their previous full-length. This already seemed like a major slowdown for the band, and indeed, while still not officially “broken up,” they have not released another record in the 22 years since. I was still a big fan in 2001, and that still-underrated penultimate 1996 release I Hope It Lands was absolutely one of their very best, but I did not at the time buy or otherwise seek out this followup. I was a little out of the TFUL282 habit, sure, but the main reason is that I simply could not in good conscience listen to an album with that title. Tubby Turdner? Those letters, in that order, in your actual LP title? Nope. Ain’t gonna listen. Well, after 22 years of resistance I finally pressed play on the damn thing tonight, and I’m still pretty mad about the title, but… goddamn, it’s really good. Could it be their “most fully realized” album (I didn’t say “best”), just as I Hope It Lands was before it?

PRINCE “Deep Prince 1978-1991” (SP****Y PLAYLIST) Always doing amateur therapy on myself that sometimes strikes a nerve, I write a phrase on a piece of paper, a simple phrase describing just one aspect of the deep and challenging relationship between my teenage daughter and I, and then immediately burst into tears. Heavily enough, the song playing on my stereo right at that moment is the frankly beautiful solo piano demo version of “Father’s Song” by Prince, which he recorded in 1983 and posthumously released in 2017 as an outtake on an expanded reissue edition of the official Purple Rain soundtrack, the melody having been incorporated prominently into the original 1984 album and film, as part of the quite progressive electric guitar-led instrumental middle section of “Computer Blue.” Anyway, don’t mind me, I’m just going nuts on this nearly four-hour-long Prince “Deep Cuts 1978-1991” mix I just made, featuring as it does a 12-minute version (now that’s progressive) of “Computer Blue” from the same 2017 expanded edition, and lots of other highlights too, such as the instrumental version of “God (Love Theme From Purple Rain),” which plays on the soundtrack during the film’s big seduction scene between Prince and Apollonia, but was only actually released as a B-side on the UK pressing of the “Purple Rain” 12”. The US pressing of the “Purple Rain” 12”, which I bought back in 1984 in an Omaha shopping mall, also had a version of “God” on the B-side, but it was the shorter and much different solo vocal/piano version, also essential as one of his very best and most otherworldly vocal performances. Still, the extended demo drum machine version is also an essential showcase for Prince’s instrumentalism, this time not his voice and piano, but his extended melodic post-Santana (and so much better than Santana) guitaristics. Or how about “4 the Tears in Your Eyes”? At the time I thought it was too artsy, frankly too unfunky, no stank, only the stink of the Live Aid controversy, which was kind of a bummer. But hearing it in 2022, wow, it’s a really beautiful song, and a genre/region-confounding piece of music. One of the great Wendy-and-Lisa vocal arrangements too. I’ve also got “Hello” in this mix, which was an actual written and sung response to the Live Aid mess, and kinda one of the weakest tracks on The Hits/The B-Sides, imho (it’s still plenty genius, dgmw). Oh man, and from that to one of his very best faux-Britpop B-Sides, “Girl” — what a nice ethereal song! Even when he drops into his trademark juxtapositionally cringey frank-talk sex lyrics (see also “When 2 R In Love,” which is on here too of course). Another thought as I listen through this whole mix: this time, the most consistently I’m impressed by Prince as an instrumentalist is with his bass playing. I mean, his guitar and vocals are amazing, of course, and piano too, but that’s already very familiar, and the bass playing is what’s jumping out this time, right from the beginning of his career on the underrated funky/progressive 1978 rock epic “I’m Yours,” especially with those scorching bass and guitar trade-offs towards the end. “Partyup” has such a highly grooving Minneapolis-style bass line too… though I do like the spicy possibility that the entire instrumental track was laid down by Morris Day solo, which I think is what Morris is actually claiming in his recent memoir On Time: A Princely Life in Funk (quite recommended, and co-written by David Ritz himself): that he had recorded the entire instrumental track all alone one night, then Prince showed up after it was done and dug it, adding only his vocals and lyrics, which so transformed and elevated the song that he was able to convince Morris to give him full writing credit in exchange for an actual major label record deal. A deal that Morris accepted, forever shrouding the genesis of the song and rhythm track. Listening now, I think Morris might’ve played the drums and, yeah, maybe he played the piano and bass too. Both are incredibly great parts, but also very skeletal and without any personal flourish that would make them clearly by Prince. And for another bass example, how about those final moments of “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”? So funky, though treated in a way that it’s hard to tell if it’s a bass guitar or synth bass. The more I listen, it’s gotta be real strings, but a weird treatment for sure. Another PSIRRL (Prince Song I Really Really Love ) is “I Wish U Heaven” from Lovesexy, what a perfect dreampop number for a 1980s teen fantasy movie montage that never was. And talk about another PSIRRL, how about “Money Don’t Matter Tonight,” the only song I chose from Diamonds and Pearls, a cool and entertaining 1991 album that was also a clear step down in artistic quality from his 1980s heyday, a collection of catchy enough songs, but for the first time in Prince’s career almost devoid of a single purple note. But on “Money,” it really doesn’t matter (tonight), because he’s a master, the way he takes a very simple chord progression and soul-rock melody and repeats it over and over, keeping it simple, while saving the complexifying for ludicrously creative multi-track vocal improvisations that supply non-duplicative passionate gospel turn-arounds each and every time through the changes. Dude, it’s so good.

WOLF EYES V/A Difficult Messages LP (DISCIPLES/LOWER FLOOR) Wolf Eyes have now been around for 25 years, so at what point do we just call Nate Young and John Olson legitimate contemporary classical composers? Like what Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley were doing in Michigan in the 1960s, but in the 2000s, 2010s, 2020s… the contemporary contemporary composers, the 21st Century composers. I know I can hear Wolf Eyes music, even (especially?) at its noisiest, in the compositional tradition of Mumma, Ashley, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and another Young (La Monte), to name just a few. If you have your doubts, I will grant you this: neither Young or Olson are classically trained, and did not come up through the music academia tradition that some may insist on as a contemporary composer prerequisite. And yes, certain Wolf Eyes eras/tracks could be described as too “rockist,” okay, sure. We’re probably not going to put “My Recipe is Lust” and “Wolf Eyes Rules (What Kinda Band?)” up there with Xenakis. But especially in the last 10-15 years, as the Wolf sound always evolves, including when there is still a “rockist” beat to it, I can still hear it as contemporary composition, in the drone/intonation context of L. Young, the electronic/noise/abstract context of Stockhausen/Xenakis, and those occasional N. Young vocals in the context of Ashley’s own development from a ‘noise’ composer in the 1960s to a composer of actual avant-garde opera in the 1980s, why not. And I do largely think of N. Young as the composer, because Wolf Eyes began as his solo concept, and even when crucial others joined like Aaron Dilloway and Olson, it has always sounded to me like Young is the one initiating the basic sound and vibe, laying down the lower floor, if you will, providing lots of space for all the other musicians to spread way out into. Hence the vast contributions of so many over the years, culminating in this incredible collaborational Difficult Messages series of releases by Wolf Eyes and Wolf Eyes-related projects, a truly inzane and very necessarily limited 2021-2022 series of four hand-painted hand-made lathe-cut 7-inch box sets, a whopping sixteen 7-inch records released in all, containing 34 tracks by a whopping ten different credited artists, Wolf Eyes and collaborators mixed into different subsets and suprasets (Stare Case, Universal Eyes, Short Hands, Time Designers, Gretchen Gonzalez solo, Animal Sounds, Invisible Thread, Wolf Eyes, Raven Chacon & Wolf Eyes). Saw the brief preorder window and didn’t bite, wish I would’ve on at least one of the sets, especially after hearing this superb LP compilation of 11 of the 34 tracks, representing almost all of the artists (9 out of 10), Raven Chacon & Wolf Eyes renamed Wolf Raven, Gretchen Gonzalez now just Gretchen, and one of the Universal Eyes tracks now billed as U Eye Trio. A somewhat more digestible and easier to obtain version of these Difficult Messages, at least so far. Also comes with heavy extensive back-cover liner notes and an actual (quite literary) zine. I haven’t said much specifically about the music itself, but do check the leadoff hit single “Dank Boone” by Short Hands, “Passive Tempos” by Time Designers, and Side B sleeper cut “Michigan Red Squirrel” by Animal Sounds, which is Young/Olson/Moskos and, if it doesn’t include actual treated field recordings of Michigan nature preserves, sure is created in their spirit. P.S. Did you know Raven Chacon has won a Pulitzer Prize? Now that’s a legitimate 21st Century composer! P.P.S. This lathe-cut box-set series is so inzane that Volume 2 has a time theme, with actual thrift-scored clock hands glued on the outside of each set, and leading off with a 7” by a Wolf Eyes subset/supraset called Time Designers (I believe it’s a duo of Nate Young and Alex Moskos) and also including a mindblowing CDR of another 19 tracks by them, called The Design Demos, which absolutely rules with some new kind of scrambled techno mania kick. That’s all I’m going to say to try and describe this particular project, but you can get the whole set digitally for the price of a (gentrified) cheeseburger on the “Clock Box” Bandcamp page, as far as I can tell the only volume of the Difficult Messages lathe series available on there. (Oh wait, volume four is up there too.)