STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-029)

Jon Hassell, Wolf Eyes, Blue Cheer, Isaac Hayes, Sugar Minott, Tsuki No Wa, Ichiko Aoba, Fishmans, Tenniscoats, yumbo, Ego Summit, Grant Green, Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock Jazz Festival (1981)

My trusty 12-year-old iPod just made the sickest “shuffle all: albums” transition, and I’m here to tell you about it, from Jon Hassell’s Dream Theory in Malaysia right into a Tumblr-posted audience recording of Wolf Eyes’s headlining set at their own Trip Metal Fest on May 25th, 2017 at The Metro (Chicago, IL). It was one of those magical transitions where you don’t think a new album has begun. Granted, I was washing dishes and the tap was running with the music playing pretty quietly in the background, so I simply didn’t know the Hassell album had ended and that a new album had started, Nate Young’s 1-minute spoken intro somehow sounding like just another ambient Fourth-World interlude insinuating far underneath the sounds of the running water. When the music kicked in I assumed it was still Hassell, admittedly taking on some sort of late-album darker/weirder turn, but duh, it wasn’t Hassell, it was Wolf Eyes playing live in Chicago in 2017, a show I happened to have attended. I mean, Trip Metal Fest right here in my own hometown and it’s headlined by Wolf Eyes? How could I miss it? Incredible bill too, no less than Pharmakon, Aaron Dilloway, Twig Harper, and Hogg, not to mention a scorching clarion-style opening drums & sax duo set by Ben Baker Billington and Carlos Chevarria. Listening to the Wolf Eyes set now, almost 8 years later, in this shuffled context, I find Jon Hassell and John Olson to be strangely similar in the way they attack their respective horns. Atonal whistles and long-held wash-outs that finally end in funky note-tumbles like a flash-vision of a riverine cliffside slowly crumbling over centuries? But one of the riverine cliffsides (Hassell) is in a remote tropical rainforest and the other one (Olson) is at the rocky shore of an underground river where it’s pitch dark and the only sounds besides the hum of the slow current are the chittering of bats. Yep. I think that’s it.

Sometimes I publish some insightful musical epiphany of mine and then later realize I already published the same thing 5 or 15 years earlier (recently I said basically the same thing about “Pathway to Glory” by Loggins & Messina on Instagram posts that were only six months apart, so the gap appears to be closing). Some epiphanies do bear repeating, after all, and surely I’ve already told you how much I love the song “Sun Cycle” by Blue Cheer, but here I am telling you again because it has the best slinky verse groove to set up an even better soft-to-loud surge when it goes into the chorus, thanks especially to the best heavy drumming ever by Paul Whaley. The guitar tones and bass tones are so sick too (Leigh Stephens and Dickie Peterson respectively), like all the psych-noise promise of Hendrix and Sabbath isolated and extracted and served on a big fat yummy platter. And, the track after “Sun Cycle” (this is Blue Cheer’s superb 1968 album Outsideinside we’re talking about) is the also stone-killer “Just A Little Bit,” which I just learned was released as a single at the time. I’m telling you, the ferality of this band is even more intense when you picture a song that sounds like “Just A Little Bit” blasting from an AM radio right after Bobby Goldsboro or Dionne Warwick or whomever — but hey, their almost-as-feral previous single “Summertime Blues” did make it to #14 on the Billboard Hot 100, so I guess the world was ready.

My latest descent on Torn Light Records of Chicago IL yielded a couple nice two-dollar-bin finds, another Isaac Hayes record, The Isaac Hayes Movement, to go with my beat-but-beautiful copies of the massive Hot Buttered Soul and …To Be Continued and of course the ubiquitous Live at the Sahara Tahoe I’ve accumulated over the years, always very cheaply. I mean, rule of thumb: if it’s an Isaac Hayes record with roughly 2 long tracks per side and it’s cheaper than $5, just buy it. There was also a Sugar Minott record in the $2 bin, which I insta-bought without even looking closely at it, only to get it home and find out it looked even better than I’d expected. The record is called Buy Off the Bar, and it’s a discomix dub style LP where track one is “Buy Off The Bar”/“Bar Dub,” track two is “Can’t Cross the Border”/“Border Dub,” and so on, and it has an amazing front cover photograph of Sugar clutching like 11 bottles of beer b/w amazing back cover cartoon art of Sugar and his homies pounding brews (that I would presume were indeed bought off the bar). The art is by the marvelously named Wilfred Limonious (credited with “album design”), the label is Sonic Sounds, and I’m ready to get into some “Buy Off the Bar”/“Bar Dub,” so I take the record out . . . and it’s the wrong record. It is a Sugar Minott record, but it’s not Buy Off the Bar on Sonic Sounds at all, it’s Wicked Ago Feel It on Wackie’s. Which is actually also very cool. After my initial disappointment of it not having dub versions, just nine straight vocal tunes, none of which are about buying anything off of any bar, I start playing it and realize I’ve never heard anything on the Wackie’s label that wasn’t completely excellent, and that every song on here is in that delicate-and-smooth-yet-hard-as-hell style that Sugar Minott mastered in the late 70s/early 80s. Even though both records are from 1984, the production on Wicked Ago Feel It is actually better and even more inherently dubby, even during the vocals, than the more explicitly digital production on “Buy Off The Bar/Bar Dub” (you can A/B’em above for reference).

TSUKI NO WA playing live, presumably in Tokyo, presumably in the early 2000s…

One thing I keep coming across on my way-overgrown Shitify “FULL ALBUMS ON DECK” playlist is contemporary (?) Japanese twee (?) pop. It comes up on shuffle and I hear it and always like it, but never understand more about the artists, their time period, their origin, their biography, their milieu. That’s largely a Shitify problem, because the musicological context they offer is so intentionally terrible, but it’s also an admitted blind spot of my own. Right now I’m looking at Tsuki No Wa, Ichiko Aoba, Fishmans (who I’ve written about before), Tenniscoats, and Yumbo (which is apparently never capitalized, oops). Who are these bands? Are they part of the same region and time period, or am I just assuming they are? I don’t even really remember putting any of them on my playlist, but I must’ve had a reason. Even Shitify doesn’t just put stuff on your playlists without asking — yet — although they do try very hard with their insidious “smart shuffle” bullshit. Tsuki No Wa is a Tokyo band that released three albums in the early 2000s, such as this one Moon Beams from 2003 or the one on my playlist which is called Ninth Elegy, and was released in 2000. Bandcamp says “Led by visionary singer/songwriter Fuminosuke, early 2000s Tokyo group Tsuki No Wa masterfully mixed jazz, electroacoustic, latin and folk influences for a spellbinding, shape-shifting sound of their own.” That’s pretty accurate; bassist Takuyuki Moriya was also a member of Ghost, first appearing on that band’s lush Hypnotic Underworld album (Drag City, 2004), the sound of which is a decent reference point for Tsuki No Wa, though the latter are more floating and free-form, occasionally with a bit of non-Ghost-ly accordion/cabaret cosplay in the mix. Ichiko Aoba is a solo female singer/songwriter, for lack of a better term (orchestrator? world-builder?), who seems to have been recording and performing pretty steadily since she released her first album Razor Girl in 2010 at age 19. I’m listening to her 2020 album Windswept Adan, even though she has a brand new 2025 album called Luminescent Creatures (which she’s apparently now touring on, and is going to play in Chicago in just a couple weeks at Thalia Hall — cheapest tickets are $50 and I’m thinking of going on a whim just to do something completely different but almost certainly won’t). I should listen to that album too, as it’s said to be a continuation of Windswept Adan, which is a striking album of widescreen semi-ambient eco-folk that can go from her singing on top of a mountain while rainforests mist below, right back down to earth where she’s hiding in the far corner of an empty inn (tavern? saloon? izakaya?) cooing and whistling wordlessly along with a tack piano. But just when I start to wonder if I’m hearing the second coming of Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra or a Jade Warrior reunion with Djong Yun herself sitting in on vocals, it starts to drift into your standard generic modern Squarespace cafe pop and I just can’t quite commit. It looks like there is an Aoba/Fishmans connection, through the mysterious producer/engineer known only as ZAK. As for Fishmans, I’m not going to get back into them as I already wrote plenty (that aforementioned once before). Still not sure if I really even like them. Sometimes I’m just like “wait, this is just cheesy pop-punk pseudo-reggae that I’m forgiving because of unique unknown-tongue vocals.” Tenniscoats are from Tokyo and are “a Japanese band with two members, Saya & Takashi Ueno, but they often have guest musicians (and non-musicians) playing and performing with them . . . Their music has been classified as avant-garde, folk, psychedelic and indie; Saya herself has been known to label their sound, ‘avant pops’.” They have several various releases that all fall between the years 2000 and 2015, so they’re not exactly current. They’re one of the more legitimately twee bands on here, perhaps verging too far into the aforementioned light/pleasant cafe pop that all of these bands seem to flirt with. Including yumbo, who I think avoid that pitfall of blandness by being a little extra goofy and playful and acoustically present, in the room with you, not inside an Instagram/Squarespace simulacrum. They are “led by songwriter, pianist, and occasional vocalist Koji Shibuya” and have “released four albums since forming in 1998.” Four albums, but it sure looks like they have almost 50 on Bandcamp. The one I’m listening to is called The Fruit of Errata, which is actually not on that Bandcamp page, and was released on CD and 2LP by the German label Morr Music in 2021. In fact, it was the Morr Music website that the press quotes above came from. So who knows. OK! Thanks everybody for reading this random semi-survey of #contemporarytweepopfromJapan.

Remember, you hardest of core readers, when I was semi-recently talking about how Ego Summit sounded very “New Zealand,” as in “Flying Nun/Xpressway,” and that it could only be a case of parallel development through shared inspiration, rather than direct influence? Well that was even before I had heard this CDR-reissue-only bonus track “Fuck the Clock” (embedded above), where it’s so easy for me, and I’m gonna guess many of you too, to imagine Mike Rep’s dour narrative in a thick Kiwi accent instead of flat Midwestern, and unspooling on a vintage late 1980s Xpressway cassette instead of streaming on Shitify. What can I say, it really works. (I also just learned about this massive 2018 tribute to and anthology of Jim Shepard, particularly massive in an elusive 5CD+DVD edition, that “Fuck the Clock” was also released on. Does anyone actually own this?)

#Nowplaying “It Ain’t Necessarily So” by Grant Green, the version from the Nigeria album (recorded in 1962 though not released until 1980), and I keep thinking I’m hearing those soft piano stabs from “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” by Isaac Hayes as menacingly sampled by the Bomb Squad on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” I’m not, but it’s all up there, in my head, in the air, in the mix. Sonny Clark played piano on “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and Marvell Thomas (unless it was Isaac himself) played it on “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” about six or seven years later. The Public Enemy sample was 19 years after that, which was now 37 years ago, but aside from these musings on the shifting sands of time, I just had the unrelated genius idea to host a Hip-Hop/R&B/Jazz/Funk Song Title Spelling Bee, for heads only. You start off easy with something like “Aquemini,” then move into intermediate territory like “Journey to Satchidananda,” and then get into the final boss round with songs like “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” “Aqua Boogie (a Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” and so on.

JIMI HENDRIX STUDIES CONT. DEPT.: Did you know Greg Tate wrote a book about Jimi Hendrix called Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience? That’s right, we’ve got the greatest black music writer of all time writing about the greatest black psych/rock/blues/R&B/funk/soul guitarist of all time, and the book is as great as that might imply, even if it’s short, barely 70 pages of Tate’s original brilliant treatise and then another 80 pages of (great) interviews and addenda, which almost make it feel more like a one-off Hendrix zine by Tate, but published as a slim hardcover book, and thank you to Laurence Hill Books (an imprint of Chicago Review Press, Inc.) for getting that done back in 2003 . . . and now I need to go right on a tangent and say out loud that Jimi’s bass playing on “All Along the Watchtower” is fucking amazing. I’m talking about the studio version from Electric Ladyland you’ve heard 1,000 times on classic rock radio and on soundtracks of movies about the Vietnam War. It was Jimi, not Noel Redding, who played bass on it, and his part is pretty low in the mix, as it has to be, because it’s so active, expert, improvisational, creative and downright busy that it would overwhelm the rest of the track, like if a bright hot ray of sun was suddenly shining directly into your face. All of the British (and British-descended) bass players at the time were playing in the style that James Jamerson invented for Motown Records, but on “Watchtower” we don’t just get James Jamerson on acid, we get Jamerson on acid TIMES TEN. Hendrix makes his distorto-Jamerson peers like Entwistle and (Bruce) Palmer and Bogert seem relatively ham-handed and stiff, and even (imho) goes well beyond Jack Bruce himself. Again, it takes some focus to actually follow all of Hendrix’s astonishing bass moves on “Watchtower,” as the playing is definitely low in the mix, but there’s an “unreleased version” on the South Saturn Delta compilation (1997, MCA) that sounds to me like a different mix of the same album version, with the bass being much more prominent. Check it out.

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And thank you for reading the 29th edition of Blastitude’s “Stuffs & Things & Things & Stuff” column. I leave you with some great footage from the 1981 Woodstock Jazz Festival, a benefit for Karl Berger and Ornette Coleman’s Creative Music Studio in upstate New York. Wild personnel mixing and matching throughout: Chick Corea, Marilyn Crispell, Julius Hemphill, Baikida Carroll, Ed Blackwell, Pat Metheny (just going nuts with that weird guitar-synth like on the Song X LP), Karl Berger, Nana Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott, Dewey Redman, plentiful helpings of a Miroslav Vitous and fully bucket-hatted Jack DeJohnette rhythm section, and you might’ve already seen the footage of Anthony Braxton hanging backstage, singing one of Lee Konitz’s own solos back to him note for note, and then onstage, blazing through an insane alto sax solo on a version of Coltrane’s “Impressions.” Much more within all of these videos, with maybe some overlapping footage, but surprisingly not too much:

This (^) would appear to be the official cut, 59 minutes and 37 seconds, as was released on the then-brand-new DVD format in 1997. Appears to have been shot on video in 1981, without any camera/videographer credits, though Alan Douglas (see also Depts. of Hendrix Studies, Proto-Rap, and Loft Jazz) gets a “Post Production Producer” credit.

There’s also this 58 minute and 20 second edit known as “Bart’s Cut.” I’m not quite sure if there’s footage in this cut that isn’t in the DVD edit, but you never know. Bart is apparently Bart Friedman, or at least that’s the name on the host YouTube channel, which is pretty interesting to poke through. (I watched several of his “Conversations with the Deadheads” from a 1992 parking lot scene in Albany.)

And finally check out “The Night Before the Woodstock Jazz Festival 1981,” Jack DeJohnette (in a casual moment without bucket hat), Nana Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott, and a couple Paiste reps getting ready for the next day: