RECENT LISTENING #39

Connective Tissue, Justin Sweatt, Mary Staubitz + Henry Birdsey, Crazy Dreams Band, Dr. Slimer, Marzette Watts Ensemble, Duet Emmo, Arooj Aftab/Vijay Iver/Shahzad Ismaily

CONNECTIVE TISSUE Vol. 1 CS (YARD SALE FOR WORLD PEACE) Not sure why I always feel like I have to apologize for recommending contemporary synth music. I guess it’s sort of like recommending podcasts. “I know the last thing you need right now is another podcast and/or contemporary synth cassette, but trust me, this one is really good!” Well, here is a contemporary synth-featuring digital/cassette release that is indeed really good, from an Olympia, WA synth-and-drums duo called Connective Tissue. I will admit that when I do like and recommend a contemporary synth record, it tends to not be solo synth, but to include other acoustic instrumentation, like drums (see Jeff Ziegler & Dash Lewis review here) or the human voice (see TALSounds review here). I think this is because when actual air is moved acoustically, it aerates and terraforms that cold synth vacuum and gives it more life and movement. Although there is something warm and live-in-a-room about Connective Tissue’s synthscaping that would sound pretty great on its own, and indeed does during a couple extended solo synth passages, it’s even better with the steady coming and going and framing of these chill-but-driving ur-Dinger trapkit beats. (Interesting label alert too; I also grabbed 2,000,000,000 Years of Animal Sounds by Peter Warshall, from their YSFWP Lecture Series, and will be wrapping my head around that one for quite some time . . .)

JUSTIN SWEATT North Texas Electric (AURAL CANYON) And right at this moment, as the Connective Tissue review comes to a close, along comes another synth-based cassette/digital release that I want to recommend, and again I’m recommending it because it transcends the instrumentation and just sounds like good music to me. It does help that the composer and solo performer Justin Sweatt does add subtle guitar overdubs and drum machines to the synthscapes, both of which aerate, terraform, and in general widen the vista. (And please bear with me as I continue to use words like aerating and terraforming to describe actions within imaginative space, aka inner space, and not physical space, aka outer space.) North Texas Electric was written for Texas landscapes in and around the city of Denton, and it works very well for (my memories of) the Iowa and Nebraska landscapes I grew up with too. I may never find myself driving on I-80 West somewhere between Grand Island and North Platte again, but if I ever do, I’d like it to be into a beautiful big sky sunset with this blasting on the stereo.

MARY STAUBITZ + HENRY BIRDSEY CS (SOUNDHOLES) In which Mary Staubitz (Donna Parker, Staubitz & Waterhouse) and Henry Birdsey (Old Saw) perform as a live duo (Staubitz on metal objects, Birdsey on metal objects & lap steel) for a new-to-me cassette label called Soundholes that specializes in live performances of stripped-down experimental music. Solos and duos seem to be the order of the day at Soundholes but I don’t think the label necessarily restricts itself to that either. Regardless, this cassette is a great listen, in which the duo use the credited “metal objects” to set up otherworldly live looping, and then bring in Birdsey’s spectral pedal steel to superheat the metal grindcloud and make it glow.

CRAZY DREAMS BAND s/t LP (HOLY MOUNTAIN) Blastitude from the pastitude here, one of my favorite underground rock LPs of the 21st Century, though it seems it’s only been described in my back pages once, and then in somewhat buried fashion, not with its own review, but at the very end of a transcribed D&D record-hang dialogue between (the invocation of) my (demon) brother and I that was published 15 got-damn years ago. (Click here for the page it’s on, and control-F “Crazy Dreams Band” if you want to find it quickly.) Point being, you gotta check out Crazy Dreams Band’s self-titled debut LP, as released in 2008 on the Holy Mountain label. It’s completely nuts and totally rips, and even if it’s a very noisy and weird rock album, it is definitely a rock album. Their sole followup War Dream is great too, but essentially a different band, certainly not as gonzoid and melted as the original lineup. I suggest that you check ‘em out in the order they were released, and hey, it should be easy to check ‘em both out, either hither on Bandcamp, or yon on Discogs, where somehow the record-buying public has collectively set the market value of both of these modern vinyl classics at a mere five dollars apiece.

DR SLIMER Slimerhuasca (DR SLIMER) Anyway, that band of crazy dreams known as the Crazy Dreams Band came back on my radar when, lo these many years later, their eclectic synthesist Nick Becker slid into the BlastiDM’s to mention some music he’s currently making under the alias of DR SLIMER. Anyone who trod the boards for the Crazy Dreams Band, particularly that madcap original line-up, is going to get my attention, so I’m listening now, and I don’t know how else to say it: this is straight-up day-glo Lovecraftian autotune noise-rap. Yes, somehow this is both Lovecraftian and day-glo. Must be the ayahuasca, I mean, the slimerhuasca, taking effect. Do I love it? It might in fact occupy a particular section of the space/time fabric that only its mother could love, but I can definitely say that I’m at least impressed.

MARZETTE WATTS ENSEMBLE s/t (SAVOY) Marzette Watts’s 1968 ESP-Disk release Marzette and Company was the easier one to hear in the 1990s because it was reissued on CD, but this 1969 Savoy LP by a different Watts ensemble has never been reissued, even if it’s the one included on Thurston Moore’s “Top Ten From the Free Jazz Underground” article that appeared in the second issue of Grand Royal magazine back in 1995 when print magazines were still as important as they’d ever been. It was included for good reason, because this is an album of great beauty and one of the very best free jazz albums, period. Masterfully produced by Bill Dixon (whose 1967 Intents and Purposes LP as a bandleader is in fact just as great), this is an album just as capable of a deeply philosophical dynamic restraint as it is the soul-burning attack that the free jazz underground is mostly known for. And it features thee Patty Waters herself (1946-2024, RIP to a great Iowan) singing her own uncredited lyrics to the melody of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” what more could you want? (Thanks to the interview in Tone Glow 111 for the intel on Patty’s roots and lyric-writing.) (I’m from Iowa too.)

DUET EMMO Or So It Seems (MUTE) Dark electronic record from 1983 on Mute and it shreds, a prime example of Shitify just serving me good and easy stuff on an algorithmic platter. And I wrote that sentence before just now reading Marc Masters’s FB post of this quote from an interview with animator Don Hertzfeldt: “What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.” Well yum yum, Duet Emmo sure tastes good, and now I’m learning that I know who they are, being a 1983 offshoot of the 1980 Wire offshoot Dome, in which the Dome duo of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis are joined by Daniel Miller of Mute Records, leading to their band name being a Dome/Mute anagram, these three krautrock heads following in the footsteps of Rother joining the duo of Moebius and Roedelius a decade earlier to make a new band.

AROOJ AFTAB, VIJAY IVER, SHAHZAD ISMAILY Love in Exile 2LP (VERVE) I put this epic double LP on my Best of 2023 list just from streaming-without-buying it on Bandcamp and racking up the theft-plays on Shitify, but now that I’ve picked it up on vinyl and have been spending some quality time with it that way, I’m starting to ask . . . is it too ambient? Too chilled out? Too spiritual? Too ‘ECM’? (It’s on Verve but Iver has in fact released seven albums on the ECM label, including one just now in 2024 called Compassion by his trio with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh.) All of which is to say . . . sure this music could be described as “new agey,” but is it . . . . . . too new agey? Well after two or three full vinyl listens I think the answers to all of those questions are a simple “no,” and I think it’s because this really just happened during the third: as the music played, I found myself staring out my window at the trees blowing gently in the breeze on a monochromatic grey day, and just as Iver’s gently rippling piano started to grow steadily louder and more assertive, the bass of Ismaily and vocals of Aftab following suit like one long collective trio inhalation, I shit you not, the sun slowly surged from behind the clouds, somewhere out of my view, and very slowly brightened the entire scene in my windowpane and brought into delineation the shadow of another leafy branch, also rippling in the breeze, overlaid over the already beautiful scene. This sun-surge held for about 15 seconds, and then receded back behind the clouds and the scene faded back to grey just as the music gently de-escalated as well. The sun and clouds played the music and/or the music played the sun and clouds.