MUSIC PHANTOM POWER Guitarist Loren Connors
KNOW YOUR PRODUCT Noise, grooves, and noise grooves from three local releases
resurrects a 28-year-old recording made in a legendary Connecticut cemetery BY M A R C M A S T E R S
NEAR THE ENTRANCE to Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Conn., a pinkgranite tombstone bears a warning in pitch-black letters: THE PEOPLE SHALL BE TROUBLED AT MIDNIGHT AND PASS AWAY. Beneath lies the coffin of Mary E. Hart, who officially died of apoplexy at midnight on Oct. 15, 1872. But local legend claims that Hart was actually buried alive— and ever since, visitors who linger by her grave past its curfew are never seen again. In 1981, fully aware of these ghost tales, guitarist Loren Connors took his Gibson acoustic and a tape recorder to Hart’s tomb, and began to play. “It was a cold morning in early March,” he recalls over the phone from his apartment in Brooklyn, NY. “The crows were out. I might have seen one or two people, but generally no one else was there. It was kind of desolate.” After improvising for about a half hour, Connors wisely left the cemetery long before midnight, escaping the fate of legend. But the tape he made wasn’t so lucky. “It got kind of lost. I knew I had it somewhere but I couldn’t find it for years,” he explains. “I only made 10 copies of it at the time, and I’m not sure what I did with nine of them. But I did send one to Cadence Magazine, and they reviewed it. I didn’t know if they kept it, but recently a friend of mine asked them about it, and they copied it and gave it to him.” Last month, Family Vineyard released the rescued recording under the title The Curse of Midnight Mary, adding cover art of a dark, spectre-like figure painted by Connors himself. The music is even more haunting, filled with impulsive plucks, abrupt chords, and the guitarist’s stirring moans, inspired by dogs that howled outside his window at night. But even though the album often sounds spooky, it also courses
LOREN CONNORS SUMMONS THE GHOST OF ALBUMS PAST.
with immediate, joyful energy—a message from the past that still speaks loud and clear. For Connors, who is now best known for his electric guitar improvisations and collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, Alan Licht, and Jandek, hearing this recording almost three decades later was like stumbling upon his own ghost. “It’s a whole different person, that stuff,” he says. “I can’t even do that [kind of playing] now.” Yet the album fits well into Connors’ vast discography. At the time it was recorded, he had just finished releasing a series of “Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations” via his own Daggett label. They were equally influenced by abstract art—especially the work of his hero, Mark Rothko—and the raw blues of musical ancestors like Blind Willie Johnson. On Midnight Mary’s nine tracks (titled “Chants 1-9”), you can hear those influences continuing. Connors even veers into covers of Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” and the traditional “Amazing Grace.” Most unique is the chopping “Chant 9,” which sounds more like a war dance than a blues
NOI S E B OX Michael Byrne hides in the back corners of some concerts and reports on the view, and finally gets around to reviewing the new pair of 7-inches from Wildfire Wildfire (Hint: he likes them) . . . Al Shipley spectates at the 8X10’s open mic night and checks in at some more shows around town . . . and plenty more up-to-the-minute local music news, rants, and apologies.
improvisation. Overall, Midnight Mary feels more up front and animated than the Daggett material, as if the musical ghosts Connors was conjuring had suddenly become flesh. He chalks this up to the atmosphere provided by the cemetery. “All my other records at the time were done inside, and they have a kind of indoor echo on them,” he explains. “But this has a wide-open sound, with the crows and wind in the background. I think it was my best playing of that time, better than the records before. I should have done them all outside.” So if the aural advantages of this setting were not a particular motivation at the time, why did Connors decide to record in the graveyard? “I guess it was just a silly whim,” he admits. “I could say something else, but it would just be kind of made up.” So, outside of the inspired passion of the music, there’s little evidence that he felt the presence of ghosts that day. But an interview done not long after the recording suggests Connors was open to spirits, and the dangers of toying with them. “I just play, and whatever comes out just happened,” he told Cadence in August of 1982. “I need to play guitar and I don’t have the slightest fuckin’ idea where the hell it comes from. It’s just there and I just have to keep on directing it. If I stop and say to myself, Christ, look at how new this stuff is—sure as hell it will turn around and slap me.”
NOISE .CIT Y PAPER .COM FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT FVREC.COM/ LORENCONNORS.
THE HUMAN CONDUCT DETOX PROGRAM (HUMAN CONDUCT) Fourteen suitably abrasive and demonic noise, noise-punk, and freeeverything tracks burned onto a CD-R and packaged in a dog shit bag with a page of explanation/endorsement that includes the promise that the compilation will “detoxify your entire system, temporarily ‘shocking’ your nervous system into a position of imbecility and servitude.” The eight artists represented here aren’t necessarily local—it’s a regionally agnostic mix—but find their common ground in Baltimore-based Human Conduct, a rough and raw little local label with a cassette-tape-heavy back catalog featuring more aural jagged edges than a glass recycling plant. Of course, to virgin ears, much of this stuff is going to fall into the broad categories of “abuse” and “why?” With the exception of the instrumental pop d rea mscape of M . Cicca rel la and J. Zagers’ “The Flight of the Feral Pigeon,” The Human Conduct Detox Program isn’t conceding anything to squa re tastes—wh ic h, cer ta i n ex-noise bands be damned, is how it should be. For example: gnashing punk brute the New Flesh collaborating with Philly’s God Willing, one dude making caustic pure-electronic noise, on a song called “Who Wants Corn?”—some tormented screaming of the titular line, pummeling drums, and some jet engine sounding
combination of guitar and electronics. The next song, “Egg Bag” by (D) (B)(H), sounds like a kitchen garbage can being emptied onto a sidewalk, for about a minute. citypaper.com
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Mountains CHORAL TH RI L L JOCK EY
ELECTRO -ACOUSTIC duo Mountains does one thing rather well on Choral, its first album for Thrill Jockey. Strike that—two things. The first thing Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp excel at is slowly evolving and layering a few gossamer elements—a gently plucked guitar, a shimmering synth tone, the occasional wordless faux choral wash or tinkling bell—from a quiet preamble into a numinous drone, building in volume and complexity to a modest peak, then subsiding into a somnolent coda, long or short. The second thing Mountains does rather well, though less often, is start with the drone and work backward to the guitar. If that sounds like faint praise, it shouldn’t. The duo’s third album is undeniably gorgeous, a 21 st- centur y up dating of the kind of limpid prog Popol Vuh promulgated in the ’70s. Other than what sounds like pouring rain emerging from the mounting white noise that tails out “ Te l e s c o p e ,” A n d e r e g g a n d Holtkamp seem to have mostly skipped the “field recording” elements that distinguished previous Mountains releases, focusing on immaculate studio-bound suites. And immaculate they are, indeed, with each struck string, plain tive keyboard note, and ambient hum on tracks like “Map Table” or the prescriptively titled “Add Infinity” nestling into lapidary settings. The opening title track and “Melodica” even factor in the aforementioned wordless washes for an added heavenly effect. So Choral ravishes, but perhaps fails to transcend. Maybe it’s due to a musical version of Stendhal syndrome brought on by having one’s hushed-awe button pressed track after track. Maybe it’s the sneaking feeling that such button pressing is a sign of overreliance on quietly getting louder, the new quiet-loud-quiet of indie-music tropes. Many listeners will no doubt find sonic Shangri-La amid Choral ’s gently sloping peaks and valleys. Those less trusting of surface beauty will search on. (Lee Gardner) MARCH 11, 2009
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