STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-021)
Greg Norton, James Jamerson, Aretha Franklin, Ka Baird, Brightblack Morning Light, Roberto Matta, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pablo Echuarren, Federica & Ramuntcho Matta, Tabs Open On My Phone (Slight Return)
THIS WEEK IN CLASSIC ROCK DEPT.: The April/May 2024 issue of Perfect Sound Forever features a new and recent interview with Greg Norton from Hüsker Dü, in which he’s asked what drew him to bass guitar as opposed to guitar, and he says: “I really liked listening to the basslines in songs. I grew up listening to Paul McCartney play, and Chris Squire from Yes, and John Paul Jones, and John Entwistle, and Larry Graham. There was just something about the drive of the bass that resonated with me.” Just reading him reel off those names, none of them from hardcore or underground or punk rock bands, and thinking of all that great music they were part of, hearing their great basslines in my head and how they always hit the root notes and changes, but create constant movement and action and counterpoint in the beats between those roots and changes, and how that entire concept of playing electric bass might come directly from James Jamerson. Then I think of how all of them except Larry Graham are British, and once again see an example of British musicians appreciating and absorbing black music from America then exporting their version back to us. Even as late as 1983, MTV still wouldn’t play black music, but they sure would play exported soul music by white people from Britain, like ABC, Culture Club, and Spandau Ballet. Let’s face it, segregation messed us up here in the States. We couldn’t even trust a James Jamerson bassline until we heard it from the Beatles or the Who. I know Motown records sold well with white people in America, but not as well as the Beatles and the Who did. See also: the very black Chicago House and Detroit Techno movements blowing white Europe’s minds and then getting exported back to white America as techno/rave. By the way, I’m not trying to “call out” Greg Norton here or anything. I’m sure he liked Motown records and maybe he was into house/techno before Europe delivered it back to us too. And postscript, I was just hanging around today listening to the original “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd, released in 1966 on Stax Records (#1 R&B, #28 Pop), and noticed that the bassline underneath the “It’s like thunder, lightning" prechorus part might’ve very much inspired John Paul Jones’s beautiful line on the verses of “Ramble On.” I mean, of course these guys were into Stax Records.
And then a song like “Ain’t No Way” by Aretha Franklin comes on and complicates (or perhaps diffuses) any further discussion about white or black American provenance and ownership with regards to popular music. The song was recorded in 1968, written by the youngest of Aretha’s five siblings Carolyn Franklin, and it’s such a pure expression of how the Black American church can sing for all humanity, by in fact one of the greatest singers of all time (even if at times on here Aretha is almost upstaged by the background vocals of one Cissy Houston, in case you didn’t know Whitney’s mom was great too), and it’s notable that the glorious backing track is performed by a Jerry Wexler/Atlantic Records-produced band made up of Aretha on piano of course and thee Bobby Womack on guitar, but otherwise all white Southern studio all-stars such as Spooner Oldham on piano, Joe South on guitar, Tom Cogbill on bass, and Roger Hawkins of Muscle Shoals on drums, all of them completely fantastic on here.
And speaking of soul music and southern rock and white people, hilarious that this is by far the best live clip on the internet of Brightblack Morning Light. (It’s certainly not this one!) Hey, they always did insist on playing in the dark, just like Mazzy Star. I still don’t know what I think of them, as I’ve relistened to their Matador Records self-titled debut from 2005 a couple times this week. Everything runs long and samey, and the presentation can be obtuse and/or obnoxo-hippie, but they do a thing that I don’t think any other band does, and it goes very deep and gets very soulful. As Bill Graham said about a different and better known (and also quite obtuse and/or obnoxo-hippie) band: “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.”
BLASTITUDE BEST NEW (AND OLD) MUSIC DEPT.: Wild how Ka Baird has metamorphosed as an artist over the last 15 years or so. I had first encountered their music in August 2002, when they opened for Charalambides and Pelt in a band they founded with Taralie Peterson called Spires that in the Sunset Rise. This was right before the free-folk/freak-folk thing started to surge nationwide, and Spires were definitely part of it, but pretty much better and weirder than a lot of it, even if being from the Midwest might’ve meant they were a little less magazine-rack-ready than their NYC/Cali counterparts. Both Baird and Peterson were also recording solo music around the same time and into the 2010s, Peterson as Tarpet and Baird as Travelling Bell, and they continued to play in Spires as a duo, such as this frankly incredible appearance at the 2014 edition of the Tusk Festival. (Seriously, check it out.) In this set you can see Baird and Peterson aren’t afraid to push well past what could comfortably be called “folk music,” and Ka Baird’s solo career that started in 2017 with their Drag City debut record Sapropelic Pycnic has gone even further. One Drag City employee at the time told me when they overheard the record blasting in a neighboring office, they assumed it was an Alvin Curran solo LP. Now in 2024, on a new label RVNG Intl., Baird’s music has metamorphosed again still, incorporating the flute and overtones of opera already there into newer areas of performance art and sound poetry shot through with MIDI triggers, cut-and-paste, silence, depth, surprise, and other forms of disorientation, as evidenced by this new track “Gate IX” (official video embedded above), an advance single from their new album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos (2024, RVNG Intl.). POSTSCRIPT: The Haruomi Hosono track “Birthday Party” (aka “お誕生会,” track 7 on Philharmony) is so wild that when it came up on shuffle in the background, even though it was recorded in Japan in 1982, I just assumed it was more from the new Ka Baird.)
And sometimes I think about something else entirely, which is how I would like to read a family bio about the Chilean abstract expressionist and surrealist painter Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren, aka Matta, and his six children, most of whom became artists in their own right. Matta was born in 1911 to a wealthy family in Santiago, Chile, where he was raised and trained as an architect. A brief post-graduation stint in the Merchant Marines brought him to Europe, after which he stayed in Paris to work for no less an architect than Le Corbusier himself. This circumstance alone may have been his great purpose in life, if not for a vacation to Madrid where he met the poet and playright Federico Garcia Lorca, and the poet Pablo Neruda, not to mention apparently witnessing Pablo Picasso at work on Guernica. Lorca introduced Matta to Salvador Dali, who introduced Matta to Andre Breton, who invited him to participate in the Exposition International du Surréalisme in 1938, which made Matta at age 27 an official member of the storied and radical movement. And a pretty important member too, as no less than Marcel Duchamp wrote, “[Matta’s] first contribution to Surrealist painting, and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art.” Matta’s bio at Galleria d’Arte Maggiore elaborates: “The same year [1938] he started to paint with oil colours, creating a series of imaginary landscapes that he defined as inscapes, inner landscapes, or morphologies psychologiques where he adopted a technique of automatism: patches on colour laid out on the canvas directing the line of the brush with a gestural improvisation that give shape to mental architectures, spaces beyond the visible and traditional perspective.” In the New York Times obituary of Matta, published November 25 2002, author Michael Kimmelman elaborates further: “Matta talked about ‘inscapes,’ morphologies of the psyche, maps of the mind. Martica Salwin, the Matta expert, described inscapes as ‘visualizing the psyche, which means not just looking at one thing in one time, one point of time and space.’ Inscapes encompassed, she said, ‘the past, present and future all mixed into one.’”
There is another important point that Kimmelman makes about Matta: “In his private life a notorious womanizer and (some relatives say) erratic father, Matta left an unusually complicated personal legacy.” Matta was the father of six children with four different mothers, so the legacy is complicated enough just considering genealogy, but even more so when you factor in that almost all of his children have impacted or at least participated in the art world as well. This is why I feel like a book could be written, and if it was a brief genealogical synopsis might look something like this: in 1938, the same year Matta became an official Surrealist, he fell in love with an American expatriate artist named Ann Clark and moved with her to New York City. There he quickly fell in with painters like Arshile Gorky and had an immediate background impact on the New York School, possibly even singlehandedly kick-starting the Abstract Expressionism movement when he showed Gorky how to thin oil paint in order to get drippy and trippy on canvas. In 1943, Matta and Clark became the parents of twin sons Gordon and Sebastian Matta, but soon after the couple divorced and the twins were raised by their mother. Like his father, young Gordon showed great promise and was trained to be a prestigious architect (in his case at Cornell and the Sorbonne), but then quickly took this elite training into radically abstract and/or deconstructed realms that had a larger subcultural impact on the art world. In Gordon’s case, he conceived of what he called Anarchitecture (anarchy + architecture), helping to shape what has become known as site-specific art and relational art, not unlike how his father catalyzed Abstract Expressionism upon his arrival in New York City some 30 years earlier. Gordon was a key participant in the 1969 “Earth Art” show, and from 1972 to 1978 executed a site-specific series of what he called “building cuts” at abandoned or unused architectural sites. One of his best-known site-specific and relational artworks was a non-traditional restaurant called FOOD that opened in Soho in 1971 and lasted a remarkable couple years before the realities of running a restaurant outweighed the fantasies of running a restaurant as art installation. Matta-Clark did document FOOD with an interesting 45-minute film in 1972, currently on YouTube here, and yes, around this time Gordon changed his surname from Matta to Matta-Clark in honor of his mother who had raised him. In 1976 everything changed when Gordon’s twin brother Sebastian commited suicide by jumping out of the window of their apartment. Only two years later in 1978, Matta-Clark died from pancreatic cancer at age 35.
Gordon and Sebastian had gained an Italian half-brother in 1951 when Pablo Echaurren was born in Rome to Roberto Matta and Italian actress Angela Faranda. Echuarren grew up to be a major artist in Italy, known since the 1970s for avant-garde comics, political fanzines, book covers designed for the radical press, graphic novels, paintings, and more. And by 1954 the elder Matta had met another companion/muse, an American named Malitte Pope, with whom Matta would move back to Paris and father two more children. Federica Matta was born in 1955, and Ramuntcho Matta was born in 1960, raised mostly in Paris, I would assume mostly by Pope. Federica is a painter and sculptor with a fun Keith Haring-gone-tribal-psychedelic style that, of all Matta’s children, probably follows the closest to his vision. Ramuntcho is not a practicing visual artist, but is a post-punk musician who in 1985 made a pretty damn weird Eno/Byrne/Beefheart/Hassell-ish self-titled solo record, as well as a record with everyone’s favorite William Burroughs mentor Brion Gysin, and then the following year had a bit of a French club hit when he produced and played on Elli Medeiros’s rather deceptively funky “Toi mon toit.” There was also a Live in London 1982 release by Brion Gysin that came out in 2007, on which Ramuntcho was the producer/bandleader, which is where I first learned who he was when a promo copy showed up in the mail. As far as I can tell, Ramuntcho is still making records today; the last one was called 96 and came out in 2019.
It’s interesting to note that in 1975, when Federica was 20 and Ramuntcho was 15, Gordon stayed with them and their mother, his stepmother Malitte Pope Matta, while completing a site-specific artwork in Paris, the “rue Beaubourg cut” called Conical Intersect. Gordon seemed to be close to his stepmother, and presumably had interactions with his stepsiblings Federica and Ramuntcho. Pablo Echaurren seemed a little removed from this group over in Italy, as was Matta’s sixth and final child, a daughter Alisée Matta born in 1969 to her mother Germana Ferrari, also in Italy. Alisée is now on LinkedIn as the Presidente presso SPA of Società Prodotti Antibiotici in Milan, Italy, which is interesting. Apparently not a working artist, but she does have gloriously pink hair.
TABS OPEN ON MY PHONE (SLIGHT RETURN) DEPT.: Outer Sounds 034 - Interview with Jim O’Rourke on YouTube . . . See Creatures Too by Lisa Cameron & Sandy Ewen on Bandcamp . . . speaking of the name/word Sandy/sandy, how about this archive.org treasure trove of 675 xeroxed/scanned/photographed pages from many issues of the 1960s folk music fanzine Little Sandy Review, one of the major progenitors of modern rock criticism as we know it (for better or worse)? . . . Mayo Thompson: The Godfather of Post-Punk? The story of God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It Part 3 by Kelechi Wisdom as published in December 2023 at the venerable Perfect Sound Forever webzine. . . 101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen by Sight and Sound and I’ve literally only seen one of ‘em, Cold Water (1994, d. Olivier Assayas) . . . the self-titled album by Animal Piss It’s Everywhere on Bandcamp . . . Udder Milk Decay Take a Teat (FULL ALBUM) (1981, Experimental & Abstract) on YouTube . . . Finer Points by Matt Krefting on Bandcamp . . . A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War (essay by Hito Steyerl) . . . “Bend you Horns/Swan Song” split by Montclaire and Great Friend of Mine on Bandcamp . . . Demo I by Terminal Chastity on Bandcamp . . . the amazing Faith Ringgold exhibition I caught at the MCA back in February, curated by great Chicagoan Now Wave scene alumnus Jamillah James (never actually really met her, but she was the “host” who handed me a PBR in this review of a Get Hustle show I attended in 2002 at her legendary live/work space the Pink Section) . . . speaking of film lists, I might just have to get the 1,000 Movies book by cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Hopefully I’ve seen more than 9.9% of them. Seems to only be available to purchase from the Metrograph website — but is it really just a list of 1,000 title/director/year, no other text? . . . There usually seems to be at least one tab open on my phone dealing with the brutal statistics of the great “white flight” urban disinvestment movement of 20th Century America. This time it’s “Black and white population in Camden City, 1940-2010” at Researchgate.net. Incredible how white flight didn’t even really fully settle in throughout America until the mid-1970s, just in time for Reagan-era mainstream-media propaganda to fully exploit the crack epidemic and deploy city planners to design the inner cities of America as low security prisons, which has now dovetailed into the right-wing social media propaganda trope of the “failing Democrat-run city” . . . but hey back to film lists, actually my single favorite film list on all of the internet, and I think the one most rigorously updated and maintained, is the “sortable table” version of the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? 1,000 Greatest Films list at theyshootpictures.com . . . here’s World-systems theory as developed by Immanuel Wallerstein . . . Underground Resistance, Submerge, and the Detroit Way by Ari Rosenschein at Roland.com . . . an interview and more with the late great San Franciso counterculture poet Lenore Kandel (1932-2009) at Diggers.org . . . Where Is My Hand in Space? by Owen Gardner, on Chicago label Blorpus Editions, at Bandcamp . . . an interview with the late great Grant Hart by Luis Boullosa, published in August 2013 by Perfect Sound Forever . . . Watch a Two-Hour Conversation with Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Yorgos Lanthimos & Alexander Payne by Jordan Raup at Thefilmstage.com . . . All the Godzilla Movies Ranked by Matthew Chernov at Variety.com . . . Letterboxd user reviews of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I think is absolutely the most underrated Coen Brothers film . . . wiki page for Bruce Langhorne as I’ll always be fascinated by his amazing under-the-radar musical career . . . and finally Thought Noises by Sic on Bandcamp.
That Aretha album has been added to my May playlist. Thanks!
Brightblack Morning Light were great I thought. Recall seeing them on a hot Baltimore night in the dingy Talking Head Club and a breeze came through and things mellowed out. Tempo in that video seems much speedier than I recall; a lazy vibe on record even more lumbering live (in a good way).