Sound Collector Audio Review #7

JULIE GERSTEIN HIGH ROADS THE PASTELS

NIKKI KARAM

BREAKS FAST ON THE THIRD SEX

TEXAS TWO-TONE YONI KROLL VS. LOS KURADOS

ANNE ISHII IN COSMIC UNION WITH HYUNJIN CHA

Plus sonorous notations on the subject of AMBARCHI, BERTHLING & WERLIIN / 10cc / XIU XIU

JACK NITZSCHE / HARVEY MILK / THE FALL

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM / TIERRA WHACK / NICO

JON SAVAGE / ISAIAH OWENS / DEPECHE MODE

ERANG / SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS / CATE LE BON

TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA / THE LADIES / ALEX SILVA

HIS NAME IS ALIVE / RON JOHNSON RECORDS

HELADO NEGRO / THE GO-BETWEENS &

“There is no time that I don’t want to disappear into sound.”

—Kristin Hersh,

In high school, my car was a snapshot of my musical identity, proudly displaying two bumper stickers: on the left a Throwing Muses decal, & on the right a Melvins sticker styled like the KISS logo. These seemingly different yet psychically connected bands were the never-ending soundtrack of my waking & dreaming life. Between these aural bookends was an ongoing cacophony of punk, jazz, noise, math rock, folk, indie, pop & more.

from Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood (University of Texas Press, 2021)

If you’re reading this issue, you too dwell in a world where all sounds coexist & collaborate in unimaginable ways.

Sound Collector Audio Review reminds you to be curious. May the reviews in this issue expand your musical horizons & bring new excitement to the spaces where you escape & explore.

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Hope Gangloff is an American painter based in New York City who is known for her vividly colored portraiture. @hopeloff

Eileen Wolf Echikson has completed work for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, World Cafe Live, Vans Shoes, & Philadelphia-based musician Sad13. Peep their latest pages on Instagram, @soupywoman

Paul Rodriguez is a painter who lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Ian Holman is an illustrator & cartoonist living in Brooklyn. He self-publishes a comic-book series titled Minotaur’s Daughter

Chicago-native Steve Krakow is known as a “psychedelic guru” of sorts, & is the creator of the Galactic Zoo Dossier a hand-drawn magazine published by Drag City since 2001.

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Derek Stukuls works as an illustrator in the town of Krumville nestled deep within the Catskill Mountains. When not drawing, Derek wrestles bears & helps turtles cross the road

Hanna Lee is a Korean American artist, art therapist & art educator who resides in Philadelphia, PA.

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Dale Flattum (TOOTH) is the bass player, vocalist & tape wrangler in the band Steel Pole Bath Tub. When not making noise, he makes artwork & takes photographs

Jodie Vicenta Jacobsen Melrose is a visual artist,designer & professor living in Brooklyn, New York, with her talented husband, two kids, two dogs & a whole lotta love.

Jess Rotter is an illustrator & artist based in LA.

David Edelsztein is a passionate music collector & enthusiast. He has worked as an animator, illustrator & designer for diverse companies such as Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, BBC, etc.

Benjy Ferree is a singer-songwriter & visual artist. He lives 7.5 blocks from Fats Domino’s house in Arabi, Louisiana.

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Branko Jakominich is an artist & musician living in South Philadelphia. He is 6' 3".

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JULIE GERSTEIN

SIMPLY NOTHING TO BE DONE

When I was in my late 20s & early 30s, I went on a lot of very bad & very mediocre dates. So many bad dates that I started thinking of dating as a sociological experiment aimed at uncovering the deepest, weirdest corners of Brooklyn & the outer boroughs—including, unfortunately, Staten Island. It was, embarrassingly, almost pathological. I took so many first dates to Lodge, the restaurant around the corner from my apartment, that the Lodge host eventually called me out on it. I ended up going on a date with him too.

These dates. What can I say?

At one point a year or so before I met my now-husband, I ended up matching with a book publisher who lived in Prospect Heights on OkCupid. We met up at a restaurant in his neighborhood for a casual midafternoon drink, picking a couple of seats at the bar. Sadly, the date was over before it really began because a lanky redhead wearing a holey, faded Pastels tee walked into the bar a few minutes after us & took the stool next to me.

tHE PASTELs

Truckload of Trouble

PAPERHOUSE 1993

Suck on The Pastels

CREATION RECORDS 1988

Sittin’ Pretty CHAPTER 22 1989

Up for a Bit with The Pastels

GLASS RECORDS 1987

were the likes of Primal Scream & the Shop Assistants. They were pretty far removed from what we were doing, so I’m not sure how relevant that tag ever was, really. I feel a kinship with those bands, for sure, but past that, it’s hard to see the similarities.”

I did not want to fuck the book publisher. The drunk indie rocker in the Pastels tee on the other hand…

What is it about The Pastels that makes them so laconically cool?

The original Pastel, Brian Taylor, was a friend of Alan Horne, the founder of Glaswegian indie label Postcard Records, which released bands like Orange Juice & Josef K. Taylor recruited Stephen McRobbie (who later adopted the moniker Stephen Pastel) to start his new band. Taylor taught McRobbie how to play rudimentary guitar & added drummer Chris Gordon to the lineup.

Gordon didn’t last long, & his short stint marked the beginning of a revolving door of players. The list of former members & collaborators fills a CVS receipt. All told, nearly a

dozen musicians have been members of The Pastels at some point during the band’s 40-year tenure, & another two dozen have contributed to Pastels projects in some way, including Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, Dean Wareham, & The Vaselines’ Eugene Kelly. This fluctuation may be owing to McRobbie’s rooting The Pastels in socialist collectivism, or it could be that people are just kind of flaky.

Early on, McRobbie & Taylor honed the sound, a shambolic guitar pop heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground & the Modern Lovers, but also edged up by coming of age during the Thatcherite era. The band’s “anyone can do this” mentality led to a pleasantly primitive sound.

They released their first single, “Songs For Children,” in 1982, fol-

lowing it up with a slew of singles on Creation, Glass, & Rough Trade. Some of those early songs were compiled onto 1987’s Up for a Bit with The Pastels, the band’s first full-length release, most notably “Crawl Babies,” a languorous track that would make its way to a million mixtapes.

They got their big break—or a break anyway—when they were chosen to appear on the NME’s C86 comp alongside other indie groups of the time, like Shop Assistants, The Mighty Lemon Drops, & The Wedding Present. The release became a defining moment in indie Brit pop mythos. But to McRobbie it didn’t make sense.

“I think that C86 tag is something I always felt weighed down by,” he told The Line of Best Fit blog in 2013. “I mean, we were on that tape, & so

The C86 association would, for better or worse, follow them around forever. The band became lumped in with the “twee” indie pop of the era, a categorization that irked McRobbie.

“Being subversive is not a natural state for me. But I always feel horrified at certain things,” he told Pitchfork in 2013. “For instance, we’re all in our 30s & 40s, so we’re all connected to each other’s families. We have that strong sense of community, & I like the idea of people doing well in a kind of equal society. As a socialist, I’m always into that. So I feel angry at people calling a lot of these ideas we have twee because I can’t think of anything less twee.”

I’m not really sure when I first encountered The Pastels, but it was likely in the early ’90s, when fanzines, mail-order catalogs & mixtapes were the way you found out about music. I had a pen pal— of course he was named Simon— from Glasgow who included them on a mixtape for me. The song was “Speedway Star,” one of their more discordant & rambling tracks.

I had been big on Sarah Records bands, which I’d discovered via Prodigy message boards & ordered from record distro catalogs like Vinyl Japan & Parasol. In pre-internet times, it was so much harder to learn the lineages of your favorite bands, & it was only later that I came to realize that it was The Pastels that had influenced bands like Boyracer & BMX Bandits, & not the other way around.

If you ask a Pastels fan—or at least

Julie Gerstein is a writer, editor & record collector living in Philadelphia with her husband Evan & their adopted cat from Singapore.

Hope Gangloff

me—what song epitomizes the band, it’s “Nothing to Be Done,” appearing on their 1989 release Sittin’ Pretty, which I just learned is also a repeated phrase in Waiting for Godot

The band’s best songs are those where McRobbie lets his voice fall heavily & loosely on the melody, where his vocals flirt on the edge of going off tune, & it lends songs

sound, but we’re always trying to expand the parameters of that sound.”

The band waited 16 years to release their next record, Slow Summits, which padded out their spare sound with horn & string sections. In the intervening years, they scored a film & a stage play. Early member Annabel “Aggi” Wright (the subject of the wry 1992 Black Tambourine

It’s a voice that evokes a slackery, petulant vibe. You can practically see the anorak falling off his shoulders.

like “Speedway Star,” “Baby Honey” & “Nothing to Be Done” extra charm. It’s a voice that evokes a slackery, petulant vibe. You can practically see the anorak falling off his shoulders (a look that was, btw, captured in the 2013 photo book A Scene in Between).

During The Pastels’ most fertile period in the ’80s, the band was releasing up to three singles a year, most notably “Comin’ Through,” a seriously catchy song about an ambiguous relationship. In 1989, they released Sittin’ Pretty, a grungy, riffy, dirtier take on their pop songs. A contemporaneous New York Times review offered a backhanded compliment for the record: “Their brute-force passion is a slap in the face of acknowledged limitations.”

The Pastels followed up Sittin’ Pretty with the 1993 album Mobile Safari & 1997’s Illumination, neither of which achieved the same carefree fuck-off tone of the band’s earlier work—though maybe that was by design. McRobbie told Pitchfork in 2013 that he wasn’t interested in rehashing the past.

“We always feel new when we do something, & it always seems to connect in some way with what we’ve done before. But there’s always a freshness for us when we play together. It never feels like we’re trying to play a new version of ‘Nothing to Be Done’ or ‘Crawl Babies.’ We have a certain group

track “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge”) left the band. McRobbie & drummer/ singer Katrina Mitchell worked on projects with Tenniscoats, Jarvis Cocker, & Jad Fair. McRobbie went in on a record store, Monorail Music, in Glasgow, & he & Mitchell started their own label, Geographic, an imprint of Domino. The band’s Instagram was somewhat recently updated, though it’s unclear if they plan to release more music.

It’s rare nowadays that anything is inaccessible or off-limits. Anyone with a few minutes & a Spotify account can peruse “related artists” to learn about their favorite band’s favorite bands. Even still, The Pastels feel hidden away, a band that’s never quite gotten the audience or appreciation they deserve. That may be why seeing a guy in a wornout Pastels T-shirt had such a strong effect. Because finding out about bands like The Pastels felt more effortful than listening to whatever rotated on the radio or played on 120 Minutes

I never saw the Pastels T-shirt guy again, though it turned out he was in a band I knew—a band that had, in a classic 2010s way, placed a song in a Starbucks commercial, which was probably what was funding his Saturday afternoon bar escapades.

But the try-less energy of The Pastels remains something to aspire to & something to love.

JESSICA HUNDLEY

THOUGHT FORMS OF AN ENDURING MYSTICISM

One of the greatest psych-folk albums of all time was first birthed in the unlikely environs of a Beverly Hills dental office, spawned from a friendly dialogue between patient & practitioner— amid the heady rush of nitrous-oxide fumes & the murmuring drone of the dental drill. The patient was Leonard Rosenman, a classical conductor & composer who had become singled out for film scores after meeting & befriending James Dean & composing music for both East of Eden & Rebel Without a Cause. Rosenman would later work on soundtracks for the original Planet of the Apes & Star Trek franchises, & would win Academy Awards for Music—in 1976 for his score for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon & in 1977 for Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory

But even that day in the dental chair in 1969, Rosenman was a powerful Hollywood figure, already well on his way to becoming one of the most influential film composers of his era, with a private home studio outfitted with cutting-age recording equipment & access to some of the most talented session players in the industry. Rosenman would eventually utilize all of the latter in what would become perhaps his most remarkable collaboration—a multilayered, ambient, experimental psychedelic concept album, written by the young woman who, that day in the dentist’s office, just happened to be cleaning his teeth. Nearly 50 years later, in an LA Weekly interview, that very same dental assistant would clearly recall the moment. “One day Leonard looked up at me while I was working on him & said, ‘I can’t believe this is all you do.’” Rosenman’s instincts were in fact correct. Cleaning teeth most certainly was not the then26-year-old Linda Perhacs’ only skill. She had in fact been conceiving & writing music—dreamlike, meditative tracks which she had been recording, using a 12-string guitar in her sunny Topanga Canyon kitchen. “I gave him a cassette of all the little songs I had been making,” Perhacs remembers. “He

linda perhacs

Parallelograms KAPP 1970

Eileen Wolf Echikson

called the very next day—woke me up on a Saturday morning—& said, ‘How soon can you get here?’”

Perhacs arrived at Rosenman’s home studio the following morning & was immediately immersed in a luxuriant deep dive into musical history. “Leonard told me, ‘We’re going to fill your whole being with music, from every century & only the best music. All to help speed your growth pattern.’” The two spent the day listening to Rosenman’s favorites: baroque, classical & jazz masterworks, as well as contemporary film scores & orchestral compositions. Until then, Perhacs had been self-taught, drawing much of her inspiration not from other musicians or the pop & folk music of the era, but from spiritual & fine art, as well as from her passion for theosophy, the 19th century philosophy that embraces a mix of

ancient Eastern, esoteric, & mystical traditions. Perhacs also drew upon her own dreams & meditative visions. She had been affected since childhood by the sensate condition known as synesthesia, where one confuses the senses, sometimes mistaking sight for sound & vice versa. For Perhacs, the musical creative process did not mean writing scales or classic notations. Instead, she had been creating her o wn visual-musical language for decades, writing her songs as illustrated “scrolls.” These were essentially visual compositions, music as image & art as a mirror for sound. After her initial, daylong immersion at Rosenman’s, Linda headed back to her Topanga cabin. It was then, while driving Ventura Freeway at night, that she had one of her most cathartic synesthesia visions. “I looked up in the sky,” she recalled

later, “there were lights—not stars but lights, very bright & vividly colored, & I realized, ‘You are seeing music.’ So, I pulled over & started writing & drawing as quickly as I could.” The following day she shared her song scroll (as well as the others she had created over the years) with Rosenman. After seeing these, the composer decided to go ahead & immediately start recording sessions with her, working both at his home & sneaking Perhacs into the massive state-of-the-art soundstage at Universal Studios during off hours. Together, Rosenman & Perhacs would translate her prolific archive of illustrated compositions into an album that remains singularly unique, a wildly heady mix of groovy folk jams, sensual ballads, & truly cosmic experiments. There is the funky, folksy strut of “Paper Mountain Man,” the misty morning meditation of “Chimacum Rain,” the under-the-sea fantasy of “Dolphin,” the nonchalant ennui of “Hey, Who Really Cares?” (which would serve as theme song for the brief run of a 1970 ABC drama called Matt Lincoln). The entire record resonates with experimentation, underscored by Perhacs’ distinct warmth, openness & idealism, the album a remarkable reflection of both her innate, intuitive talent & Rosenman’s prodigious production skills.

All this magic ultimately culminates in the title track, “Parallelograms,” an epic, complexly layered space-age adventure—Eno-esque long before Eno would explore similar ambient territories. The piece is the intricately eloquent sonic translation of Perhacs’ Ventura Freeway starry sky scroll. In the end, “Parallelograms” is more an experience than a song. Running nearly five minutes long, the track is a jaw-dropping example of Perhacs’ weirdly spiritualist approach to composing—a kind of psychic psychedelia. She would later describe her most well-known song as “a sound sculpture, an air-painting in motion, a series of three-dimensional shapes in color & sound, moving from speaker to speaker—all musical notes forming color & shape

Jessica Hundley is an author, filmmaker & journalist. She has written for the likes of Vogue Rolling Stone & The New York Times & has authored books on artists such as Dennis Hopper, David Lynch & Gram Parsons.

to reflect their unique frequencies.”

The drawings she had created that first evening—after her & Rosenman’s inspo/history download session, after seeing colored lights blinking in the dark & pulling over wide eyed onto warm SoCal pavement—were not scribbles of common musical notes, but bright watercolor splotches of colors, bold, unexpected shapes & vaguely mathematical equations. For Perhacs, the scroll was a definitive guide to her musical vision for the track. Yellows translated to “high flutes,” blues to “a splash of table” the geometric shapes represented, “the wavelength of that particular sound.” The song would take over

Perhacs would languish in relative obscurity for decades. She would dutifully drive to her job at the dental office in Beverly Hills each day, cleaning teeth & doling out wisdom. Parallelograms’ small initial pressing ran out quickly, but against all odds it did not disappear. For over 30 years it was passed around, bootlegged, & obsessed over. With the re-release of this lost classic in 2008, Perhacs was suddenly thrust into the limelight, the album earning her the admiration of a new generation of fans who connected to her futuristic masterpiece. Since then, Perhacs’ sound has been embraced by the likes of Daft Punk & Devendra Banhart &

She had been creating her own visual-musical language for decades, writing her songs as illustrated “scrolls.”

three weeks to record, with Rosenman at the boards, Perhacs’ scroll as key inspiration. The looping, dronelike chorus of “Parallelograms” features 24 interwoven tracks of Perhacs’ voice echoing through ring modulators. The result is a hypnotic science-fiction symphony, that has yet to be replicated. Parallelograms the album, is 11 tracks of some of the greatest in pioneering psych-folk songwriting. But the song “Parallelograms” is something else entirely—a visit to another planet, a message from a future we’ve yet to arrive at, an aspirational utopian soundtrack, a vision that just might correlate with, say, the paintings of Hilma af Klint. Perhacs would recall Rosenman saying of the track: “This piece will carry the album. Even if the executives don’t understand it right now—this track will keep this album alive for years to come.” Rosenman was right on both counts. The executives didn’t understand. The album, released in 1970 with little fanfare, was not a success. Although Parallelograms would be dubbed by the LA Weekly in 2010 as “one of the most mystifying & beautiful moments of the psychedelic era, on par with any outré work of the time,” the album was a resounding commercial flop.

sampled by acts as diverse as The Notorious B.I.G., Lowkey, & Prefuse 73. Perhacs would go on, at age 70 & onwards, to perform, collaborate & experiment with a slew of contemporary artists, among them the aforementioned Daft Punk & Banhart, as well as Sufjan Stevens, Four Tet, & Mikael Akerfeldt of the Swedish death metal band Opeth.

In 2014, she released her first album in 44 years, the acclaimed The Soul of All Natural Things, followed by I’m a Harmony in 2017. She toured Europe & the United States, all while retaining her job as a dental hygienist before finally retiring in 2019. Her legacy as one of the most unprecedented & pioneering voices in psychedelic, ambient & new-age genres still endures, crystallized in her groundbreaking debut.

Parallelograms is an album that feels miraculously fresh & continually nuanced upon each listen, a multifaceted gem of a record that reflects the contemplative folk of the era, alongside acid-tinged grooves, technological experimentation, exploratory symphonic compositions, the first stirrings of revolutionary feminist angst, & the unbridled, unapologetic visionary journeying of a modern creative mystic.

Robert Forster is talking on my deck in The Gap, Brisbane. Cicadas hum, the sun beats down. Swimming pools are hidden by the barrage of green. “Those cicadas are so loud,” he says. “My wife can hear them down the phone from Germany.”

A few years ago, Forster wrote an article for Australian magazine The Monthly—“The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll.” The rule I most agree with is his final one: “The three-piece band is the purest form of rock & roll expression.” It’s a theory I propagated in my 1991 review of Nirvana’s career-destroying Nevermind: “Trios are perfect. Live, & on record. When they get the balance right, there’s no stopping them. Think of The Jam, Young Marble Giants, Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü, Cream, The Slits…”

I was being sarcastic about Cream, but to that list, I should have added The Go-Betweens. Typical though: their windswept, insular beauty hidden by the glare of the spotlight on others (most obviously, The Smiths in the decade when the Australian group could have easily broken big). A major influence on my London gig-going days in the early ’80s, The Go-Betweens’ laconic, jarring yet romantically inclined songs soundtracked the aftermath of many a useless, confused tryst. The band confused me too: so weirdly normal, so normally weird on stage & in the flesh. I listen to their 1983 album Before Hollywood now & am torn between two vistas—the rainy backstreets of an oddly gentrified Willesden Green in London, & the open spaces & cruel spring rain of my former adopted hometown of Brisbane. At that stage of their “career,” there were three of them: the trio of Forster, the sadly missed Grant McLennan, & much underrated drummer Lindy Morrison.

Appropriate then, that a good deal of Before Hollywood was recorded among the decaying former glo-

EVERETT TRUE VULNERABLE WITHOUT APOLOGIES

the go-betweens Before Hollywood ROUGH TRADE 1983

ries of Kevin Coyne’s beloved Eastbourne on England’s faded south coast. The album resonates with an awkward English gait & yearningfor-Queensland roaming that feels both timeless & rooted in one specific era.

“The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley remarked in his book of useless, confused trysts, The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.”

And always the rain. There are a lot of mentions of rain

in Go-Betweens songs. They sing of it on their third album, 1984’s sumptuous Spring Hill Fair: “The rain surrenders to the town” in “Bachelor Kisses.” In “Spring Rain,” on 1986’s Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, we hear: “When will change come/just like spring rain.” Living in The Gap, surrounded by green & infuriating birdsong—our home was a few streets down from Robert’s, who we’d bump into in the local Woolworths—you could understand

why. During the spring, water teems down the streets, creating rivulets & flurries. Sometimes it threatens further. The humidity becomes overwhelming, & there’s no escape.

The Go-Betweens had an attention to nature & surroundings that belied their youth, & a love for the girl-group-influenced pop of the Velvet Underground & Jonathan Richman, & strange rhythmical noises of Talking Heads.

The songwriting team of Forster (tall, eyeliner, iconoclastic) & McLennan (smaller, frank, romantic) understood that, as one music critic put it, while poetry doesn’t always fit into pop music, “pop music can fit into poetry if you hold it at just the right angle.” The Go-Betweens had a lack of self-consciousness that was intoxicating. On Before Hollywood, listen to the haunting future nostalgia of “Dusty in Here.” Or McLennan’s gorgeous, autobiographical “Cattle and Cane.”

I recall a boy in bigger pants like everyone just waiting for a chance

“Cattle and Cane” is rightly listed among the greatest Australian songs ever recorded. As fellow Aussie musician Paul Kelly recalls, hearing it for the first time while driving in Melbourne, “My skin started tingling, & I had to pull over...[it] had an odd, jerky time signature which acted as a little trip switch into another world—weird & heavenly & deeply familiar all at once…I could smell that song…What planet was this from?”

I loved The Go-Betweens because their songs felt so vulnerable, without apologies. Their tunes & image ran contrary to so much of what macho swaggering rock music was about. A bridge between adolescence & adulthood. Melody offset by darkness. A strange, strange beauty.

Everett True is an English music journalist & musician also known as The Legend, a moniker that served as title for a zine he produced early in his career. His written work has appeared in New Musical Express Melody Maker The Stranger, & The Age

Paul Rodriguez

DANA KATHARINE

THE INCANDESCENT DISCORD OF RON JOHNSON RECORDS

In May of 1986 the NME released a snapshot of the contemporary UK indie scene in the form of a cassette called C86. While the term C86 is now synonymous with the kind of shambling indie pop associated with The Pastels, Shop Assistants, & early Primal Scream, there was a more abrasive, discordant, & altogether more challenging side to the original compilation. This aspect of C86 was largely represented by five tracks—those by The Shrubs, A Witness, Stump, MacKenzies, & Big Flame—all contributed by the Long Eaton-based label Ron Johnson (this isn’t to ignore the brilliant Bogshed, who were on their own Shelfish label).

There was nobody named Ron Johnson. Instead the label was started by a man named Dave Parsons. Parsons was swept up into the nascent punk scene as a teenager in the late ’70s, traveling to Nottingham to see bands such as The Damned, Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Jam, Scritti Politti, Cabaret Voltaire & more. He collected records from independent labels such as Rough Trade, Fast Product, & Small Wonder.

Parsons had this to say about his younger self: “I collected monomaniacally & gained a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of punk/new wave around the time. I also lived the punk dream out in a determined, tunnel-visioned fashion.” Parsons’ early experiences in punk motivated him to start the band that would become Splat!, who were active in the Nottingham/Derby area. Influenced by contemporary (and confrontational) bands like The Fall & The Birthday Party, Splat! members Mark Grebby & Paul Walker also took inspiration from such disparate genres as jazz & prog.

Splat! recorded their first self-titled EP in 1983 & managed to convince a distributor—Red Rhino (later called Nine Mile)—to sell their records. The EP drew the attention of John Peel, & brought about an

V/A

The First After Epiphany

RON JOHNSON RECORDS/CONSTRICTOR 1987

interview in Sounds magazine. The band called their brand-new label

Ron Johnson, after the fake name drummer Paul Walker would give to policemen. At this time, Parsons famously worked the night shift at a biscuit warehouse (cookies, for our American readers), which later led the NME to title their Ron Johnson piece “Biscuit Maker’s Break Out,” a cheeky reference to The Fall’s second single.

Apart from Splat!, the first band signed to Ron Johnson was Big Flame (stylized as bIG fLAME), a fervently left-wing act (named af-

ter the British socialist & feminist organization) who made blistering avant-punk played at breakneck speed—a sort of Minutemen on amphetamines, or simply “Manchester’s premier jazz fuck trio.” Parsons had heard Big Flame on John Peel’s program & sent them a letter asking if they’d like to be on his label. This resulted in 1985’s Rigour, catalog number ZRON3, which made its way into the UK independent charts. Big Flame would continue their relationship with Ron Johnson until they broke up in 1986, with the “Why Popstars Can’t

Dance” single being released that same year.

In September 1987, over a year after C86, Ron Johnson released its own compilation, The First After Epiphany, catalog number ZRON21. It was intended to be a sampler, an attempt at generating interest in the label. It was only the second full-length album (after A Witness’ I Am John’s Pancreas) over the course of 21 releases (Ron Johnson dealt in 7-inch & 12-inch singles almost exclusively). Each of the bands on the label were asked to record a unique song, which were then organized in chronological order according to when the bands were first signed. The product was an aural history of the label & an introduction to the distinctive Ron Johnson sound.

The First After Epiphany began with Parsons’ own Splat!—“Mistook” is a nauseating dirge with shades of early Public Image Limited. The aforementioned Big Flame provided the obscurely titled “XPQWRTZ,” a blast of fierce, jagged noise emblematic of the group. XPQWRTZ was later the name of an aughts music blog (run by Simon Williams of the band Sarandon) that would introduce the author of this article to a staggering number of obscure UK indie bands—more than any teenager from New Jersey should rightfully know.

Hailing from Stockport, Greater Manchester, A Witness were the only band to have a measure of financial success on Ron Johnson, with their full-length album I Am John’s Pancreas drawing a modest profit. A Witness were in possession of a drum machine instead of a human drummer, which added an aura of menace to their songs. “Dipping Bird” was indeed menacing, purposefully slowed down, with distorted vocals & mechanical percussion. Tragically, A Witness’ guitarist Rick Aitken passed away in a climbing accident in 1989.

Stump, best known for the Beef-

Dana Katharine lives in Philadelphia & hosts Don’t Back the Front on WPRB 103.3 FM. She graduated with a master’s in human rights from the University of Glasgow, but currently makes a living working at a record store.

Ian Holman

heartian lurch of “Buffalo” (how much is the fish?), contributed “Big End” to The First After Epiphany Stump had signed to Ron Johnson to record their first EP, the charmingly titled Mud on a Colon, which received a positive reception from the music press & attention from major labels. Stump’s relationship with Ron Johnson turned out to be brief & they left before the recording of their album A Fierce Pancake, which was released on Ensign Records. Stump had difficulty finding the crossover appeal they were looking for when

ny they provided “Knock,” a propulsive track with prominent cowbell. The Ex also released the 1936, A Spanish Revolution double 7-inch on Ron Johnson, which came with a 144-page book consisting of short essays & previously unpublished photos of the Spanish Revolution. Artistically this was a triumph for Ron Johnson, but financially it was a failure despite selling 15,000 copies. Ron Johnson’s distributor, Nine Mile, had set the price before the records were manufactured in Europe, resulting in the label losing

The band called their brand-new label Ron Johnson, after the fake name drummer Paul Walker would give to policemen.

they signed to a major label, & the band broke up in 1988.

Scotland was represented by Glasgow’s MacKenzies & the disjointed funk of “Man with no Reason,” which came complete with a wailing saxophone. MacKenzies released only a small handful of 12& 7-inch singles during their brief existence, all on Ron Johnson.

The Shrubs sounded like no band before or since, manic & swirling, with vocalist Nick Hobbs’ howl at the forefront. Hobbs (who had been kicked out of Stump for being “too serious”) claimed Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Pere Ubu, Henry Cow, & The Fall as influences. For The First After Epiphany they offered up “Blackmailer,” which found Hobbs hollering surrealist lyrics over a snaking bassline & skronky guitar.

Dutch band The Ex, with their revolutionary leftist politics & metallic clangor, were the only band on Ron Johnson that came from outside the UK, & they remain the only band still active to this day, having released an LP as recently as 2018. For The First After Epipha-

Johnson acts, but it predicted the direction the group would soon go in. By the time they had recorded the “Who Works The Weather?” single, the very last record on Ron Johnson, they had added a glossier sheen to their sound.

Bringing up the rear was the very last band signed to Ron Johnson, Leamington Spa’s enigmatic Jackdaw With Crowbar (this is ignoring the Sewer Zombies, a hardcore band along the lines of Napalm Death or Extreme Noise Terror, who didn’t fit in with the label’s established sound). “Crow” consisted of deranged clucking & hollering over a dark-&-dirty blues riff. It was enough to garner the attention of John Peel, who played it on his program & had Jackdaw With Crowbar on for a handful of sessions.

Parsons admits that The First After Epiphany perhaps had a greater influence at the time than he realized, having now encountered people who were introduced to the label through the compilation. Besides being a history of Ron Johnson, The First After Epiphany provided a look into just one aspect of a DIY music scene united by a commit-

site in 2011, Parsons stated that “without [Peel’s] support, those six or so years of indie industriousness would never have been the same, or, possibly/probably, even possible.”

By 1988 Ron Johnson had folded, due to the simple fact they didn’t sell enough records to cover costs— 7-inch & 12-inch singles, the label’s release format of choice, weren’t purchased as much as LPs. (Recall that A Witness’ full length was one of the few releases to draw in a profit.) Parsons admitted that if they had been more business minded, perhaps the label would have lasted longer. But he also conceded that “if things had been different, it wouldn’t have been Ron Johnson.”

Quoted in John Robb’s book Death to Trad Rock, A Witness’ bassist Vince Hunt recalled that “Ron Johnson had five bands on C86, all hugely different & inventive, but a cult about that label never developed around C86 like it did about the jangly bands.” It makes a certain amount of sense that the pop side of C86 would be the one most widely remembered & celebrated (not to mention mimicked). However, it seems unfair that the music released by Ron Johnson remains comparatively forgotten, particularly in the

money on every copy sold.

Like Big Flame & A Witness before them, Twang were also from Manchester. Their contribution to The First After Epiphany, “Here’s Lukewarm,” is bass heavy, with spurts of spastic guitar & shouted lyrics. Following Twang was Birmingham’s The Noseflutes, who had existed since 1980 under various names, all uniformly bizarre (The Blaggards, The Cream Dervishes, Extroverts in a Vacuum, & The Viable Sloths being just a few).

“Bodyhair Up in the Air” is as weird as the title suggests, featuring a wiggly jaw harp & bizarre lyrics about body hair.

The Great Leap Forward were founded by former Big Flame member Alan Brown. They had stronger pop inclinations than Big Flame, but were no less strident in their politics (as evidenced by their name, an overt reference to Communist China). “Drowning Speechless,” with its horn section & sampled vocals, still maintained the scratchy, roughshod approach typical of Big Flame & other Ron

It seems unfair that the music released by Ron Johnson remains comparatively forgotten, particularly in the United States.

ment to making radical & uncompromising music, with Thatcher’s Britain serving as a backdrop. Like thousands of other independent bands & labels, Ron Johnson had a champion in John Peel. Peel recorded sessions with ten out of the 12 bands on the label, with A Witness & Big Flame racking up four sessions each. John Peel’s year-end Festive Fifty included Ron Johnson bands in 1986, 1987 & 1988. In a celebration of Peel featured on the Louder Than War web-

United States where our own ’80s noise-rock bands are allowed a certain measure of posthumous renown. Despite the label’s relatively short existence, the unapologetically confrontational & innovative bands on Ron Johnson make for thrilling listening to this day. Dave Parsons likened the label’s brief run to “a bright, shortlived incandescence—much like Big Flame at their best—& the second half was more of a falling spent firework.”

STEVE KRAKOW

10 GODLY POP LPS BY CREAMY UK TUNESMITHS

It’s been a thrill watching 10cc finally get their due as true sonic geniuses, rather than a lightweight ’70s AOR nostalgia act. From vids of audio nerds picking apart the insanely beautiful layers of “I’m Not in Love,” to kids hearing the same song on some Marvel movie’s soundtrack, I’ll support their rediscovery in any way. The beyond-quirky band has even reformed this year for an American tour, so the time is ripe for their criminally cheap oeuvre to be reassessed. Their catalog & list of credits/side projects are fairly deep & intimidating, so here’s a primer that also acts as a loose timeline of the band’s unique tale.

Various Artists

Strawberry Bubblegum:

A Collection of Pre-10cc Strawberry Studios Recordings 1969–1972 Castle Music compilation 2003

Every member of 10cc started off as a cream-of-the-crop industry player or songwriter, with Graham Gouldman being the most famed for writing “For Your Love” for the Yardbirds & “Bus Stop” for the Hollies. Gouldman also wrote for bubblegum labels like Buddah, as did Kevin Godley, Lol Creme, & Eric Stewart. Stewart played guitar for the Mindbenders of “A Groovy Kind of Love” fame & invested in his own Strawberry Studios. All four could experiment in this bunker, recording catchy but sophisticated 45s under monikers like Festival, Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, Hotlegs, & Grumble. Some of the best are included here, including the first sessions where they all played together, like the mind-melting-but-melancholic “Umbopo” by Doctor Father.

Ramases

Space Hymns Vertigo 1971

At Strawberry, the fellows recorded all genres, from the very nor-

mal Neil Sedaka to the unearthly Ramases & Selket. Ramases, a.k.a. heating repairman Barrington Frost, served in the army before he received divine word he was the reincarnation of the Pharaoh Rameses—so he shaved his head & began wearing flowing robes. His gentle, space-glam voice graced some of the most transcendent singles of the era, & one more album before he sadly committed suicide. All of 10cc dish out their cosmic chops on this LP, with Creme/Stewart’s modulated guitars/synths & Gouldman’s tasty bass featured on the spacious “Life Child.” The ethereal “Molecular Delusion” has deep coatings of voice & sitar, & “Earth People” utilizes fried backward effects nicely. “Jesus Come Back” anticipates the ultramelodic 10cc ballad sound,

complete with acoustic guitar, bubbly bass, & perfect harmonies.

10 cc 10cc

UK RECORDS 1972

It’s a mystery to me why the lesser UK Records put out 10cc’s incredible debut after Apple Records balked. The Dadaistic Bonzos territory of ’50s pastiches “Donna” & “Johnny, Don’t Do It” seem way up the Fab Four’s alley—but my fave is the bizarro pre-post punk “Sand in My Face,” which takes its subject matter from a Charles Atlas comic ad. Side two is where things get really brilliant, with the progressive groove pop of “Speed Kills” with its mad pitch shifting, freaked solos,

Steve Krakow a.k.a. Plastic Crimewave is an artist, musician & writer based in Chicago.

& tight throb. The massively intricate hits “Rubber Bullets” & “The Dean & I” have that “Brian Wilson produced by Todd Rundgren” vibe, where everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into a bed of dense sound. There’s the catchy but dirty “The Hospital Song” with its chorus about getting off, as yes, the 10cc name refers to the average amount of semen in, er, a release.

10 cc

Sheet Music

UK RECORDS 1974

Their second album is my top pick for consistent 10cc greatness, & it slaps right out of the gates with the bonkers “The Wall Street Shuffle,” before launching into the genius cut-up pop of “The Worst Band in the World.” “Hotel” epitomizes their brainy, studio whiz aesthetic, with passages of pure sonics, a jam-packed vintage Caribbean art-pop groove, sizzly guitars, polyrhythms, & canned vocals. The quartet worked in all combinations for this LP, & Godley declared: “We’d really started to explode creatively and didn’t recognize any boundaries. We were buzzing on each other and exploring our joint and individual capabilities. Lots of excitement and energy at those sessions and, more importantly, an innocence that was open to anything.” Those sentiments are displayed on the sublime & ethereal “Old Wild Men” & the skittery, complex “Clockwork Creep,” which describes the final minute before the detonation of a bomb on a plane. The propulsive “Silly Love” is full of bizarro changes galore, while pure ambient sounds à la Cluster start off the cynical, lovely, talk-boxed “Somewhere in Hollywood.” The sophisticated “Baron Samedi” has all sorts of rhythmic innovation & vocals that spiral into oblivion, whereas “The Sacro-Iliac” is a misleadingly gentle tune about new dance crazes & getting trashed (“I’ve never been freaky or funky or laid back” seems to sum up the 10cc aesthetic).

Steve Krakow

10 cc

The Original Soundtrack

MERCURY 1975

10cc finally hit the big time with their third LP & signed to Mercury, mostly due to the strength of “I’m Not in Love” (which the label got a preview of). This maudlin but groundbreaking anthem is still a breathtaking mix of meticulous voice choir perfection & downer melody (and you need the full sixplus-minute LP version!). It was also 10cc’s first major US chart action, & the rest of the album is also brilliant. Godley & Creme’s over-the-top “Une Nuit a Paris” is a nine-minute, multipart “mini-operetta” that tells the tale of a tourist in Paris who sleeps with a prostitute & is conned in the red-light district, then is shot dead by a cop. “Blackmail” is a strange dancegroover not far off from the Stories; “Flying Junk” is pure Beatley psych pop turned inside out; & the infectiously goofy minor hit “Life Is a Minestrone” harkens back to the ’50s-meets-’70s sound of their first few albums. The album closer, “The Film of My Love,” has an early drum-machine stammer, & a similarly silly, retro-gazing croon. While I do love the band Yes, I have to agree with Rolling Stone’s Ken Barnes, who wrote, “Musically there’s more going on than in ten Yes albums, yet it’s generally as accessible as a straight pop band.”

10 cc How Dare You!

MERCURY 1976

Their fourth platter was sadly the last with the full original genius lineup, as Godley & Creme would soon depart to form their own duo. This LP went to number one in New Zealand (so you know it’s gotta be good!) but only a few singles barely made the charts stateside, like “I’m Mandy Fly Me” & “Art for Arts Sake.” Both represent 10cc’s brand of progressive pop well with compositional anarchy, brainy lyrics, hooks, dissonance, insane playing, & studio manipulation— what more could you want? “Lazy Ways” & “Don’t Hang Up” are gorgeous baroque-psych tunes on par with prime-era the Left Banke, whereas “I Wanna Rule the World” & the title track are forward-think-

ing, bizarre art rock (with their trademark speed/pitch adjusting of instruments). In an interview at the time of its release, Gouldman told Melody Maker: “I think there’s been a progression on every album, & I think we’ve done it again. It’s a strange mixture of songs. There’s one about divorce, a song about schizophrenia, a song about wanting to rule the world, the inevitable money song, & an instrumental.”

10 cc

Deceptive Bends MERCURY 1977

Losing Godley & Creme made for an intentionally streamlined LP effort. Stewart’s production & tunes still glimmer, along with Gouldman’s expert songwriting & new live drummer Paul Burgess. Despite the press snarkily calling them “5cc,” “Good Morning Judge” was written by the full quartet previously, & still has that odd swagger of past 10cc. Smooth smash “The Things We Do for Love” conjures a Carl Wilson/Emitt Rhodes collaboration. “Marriage Bureau Rendezvous” recalls Parachute-era Pretty Things with its elongated harmonies, & “People in Love” is a nice weeper with mellotron textures, though both were the most softly straightforward 10cc tunes yet. The sleazy blooz-groove of “Modern Man Blues” counters this, with schizo changes & guitar wank, & “Honeymoon with B Troop” is similarly weird, almost resembling the art-glam of Cockney Rebel.

“You’ve Got a Cold” has a funky & stoned Wings vibe, while the still forward-thinking “Feel the Benefit” starts as a lovely string-soaked ditty à la ELO, before it morphs into a few different movements from dancey to prog rock. Sporting a great Hipgnosis cover, the title was taken from a sign on the road to their studio. Gouldman said, “Every day I used to travel down from London & see the sign DECEPTIVE BENDS. It struck me to be quite a subtle word the Department of Transport was using, & Eric agreed it was a nice title.”

10 cc

Bloody Tourists

MERCURY 1977

Gouldman & Stewart were augmented by a live band for the Bends

LP tour, & for this album they utilized most of that crew, including ace keyboardist Tony O’Malley. The dubbed-out & infectiously weird “Dreadlock Holiday” was 10cc’s last major commercial success—but the spaced-out moog ballad “For You and I” also graces the LP, along with the sophisticated power-riffer “Take These Chains.” “Shock on the Tube (Don’t Want Love)” has a mutant hard-rockin’ disco vibe, & the slow blues cabaret of “The Anonymous Alcoholic” morphs nicely into a psychedelic soul/dance floor thumper, proving 10cc could still get freaky (even with the serious subject matter of addiction at its core). “Life Line” is a lovely & heady tune (with more reggae touches) & “Tokyo” nearly resembles Eno or Mark Hollis’s ambient-pop moves. “From Rochdale to Ocho Rios” finds the band dabbling in Caribbean rhythms & steel drums, & maybe it’s not terribly well advised. “Everything You Wanted to Know About!!! (Exclamation Marks)” wins some kind of best title award for sure, & it’s a pretty odd slice of dynamic guitar shredding. It should be noted the Hipgnosis cover was rejected by Genesis previously & this was also the first album to feature the distinctive 10cc logo.

Godley & Creme

L MERCURY 1978

I’d be remiss to not mention the brilliant works by 10cc’s Godley & Creme. Their second duo album pits Todd R’s Wizard production overload against Queen’s bombastic suites, adding something uniquely their own. As with Queen, there’s goooooooey harmonies on “This Sporting Life,” a song about jumping off a ledge. Truly bizarre dub/post-punk elements are sprinkled into the madly sliced-up tunes “Punchbag” & “Sandwiches of You,” the latter being a single! There’s an element of wacky Zappa too, who is name-dropped on the plaintive but satirical “Art School Canteen.” Andy MacKay from Roxy Music plays sax on the demented “Foreign Accents,” & there’s elements of Roxy’s postmodern glam through the LP too, especially on the oddly groovin’ “Group Life.” The intense proto-new-wave “Hit Factory” (which almost sounds like Cabaret Voltaire meets The Normal) transforms into the dark “Business Is

Business,” which comes closest to old-school 10cc territory, or maybe Nilsson on a bad trip? The cover depicts an “L-plate,” used in some countries to designate vehicles with novice drivers. Who knew?

Godley & Creme

Consequences

MERCURY 1977

Though slightly out of sequence, I had to end on the most excessive, extravagant, & confounding 10cc-related project. I’m not even sure where to start with this triple LP, which was conceived as an excuse to show off their guitar manipulation device, the Gizmotron (which vibrated strings to get a symphonic sound like an EBow). The concept of the album is “the story of man’s last defense against an irate nature” & took 18 months to record. The first platter veers from hallucinatory soundscapes to musique concrete, & dips into tripped-out dub & old-timey opera. It’s an ambitious trek into production possibilities, with a track mimicking a burial from the inside of a coffin! The other two discs feature sublime tunes like “Five O’clock in the Morning” & “Lost Weekend,” which features Sarah Vaughan. The last album side has some 17 movements, so the perhaps overreaching album became a bit of an albatross for the group when punk hit. Godley stated, “There was a seismic, paradigm shift. I knew we were doomed. We emerged blinking into the light, and everyone was wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. We’d been working on a semi-avant-garde orchestral triple album with a very drunk Peter Cook, while outside it was like a nuclear bomb had dropped.” The album was savaged by critics, & Godley was devastated, but Creme got it. “I could see why it was laughed at, it does look like a pretentious pile of old stuff. We were self-indulgent pop stars, there’s no question about it.” The album was also released in two abridged versions that focused on the tunes, like the doo-wopi nfused “Cool, Cool, Cool” (with King Crimson’s Mel Collins on sax), & the blissed-out “Sailor.” This opus demands repeat listens to fully absorb, which is surely the hallmark of a great work.

All of 10cc’s various sonic endeavors reveal new details with age, so time to dig back in.

Afew nights ago I started rereading the article Lester Bangs wrote about The Marble Index, Nico & John Cale’s acclaimed 1968 collaboration.* It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, full of memorable phrases & images:

Warholvian deathly otherness… The only trouble is that there is so much beauty mixed in with the ugliness… A jewel with facets of disease running all through it… “He built a cathedral for a woman in hell, didn’t he?”… a soft look would kill her… a junkie for the glimpses of the pit… There’s a ghost born every second... The only sin is denial… groanings of bowed basses like famished carnivores in some deep bog… when I first set out to write this article I got very high—I was so stupid I thought I’d just let the drugs ease my way into Nico’s domain of ghosts, then trot back & write down what I’d found there…

Bangs’ review is in two parts. The second, shorter section consists of an impressionistic analysis of two songs, “Frozen Warnings” & “Evening of Light.” At the start, Lester announces that he will “quote from the lyrics with a minimum of interpretation, & then tell what Cale’s music sounds like.” He sticks to this quote-andtell formula for “Frozen Warnings,” but when he gets to “Evening of Light,” so powerful is the spell cast upon the young rock scribe by Nico’s words that Lester the Interpreter can’t hold back—& indeed,

Meredith

MEREDITH BROSNAN A DRAGONFLY LADY IN A COAT OF SNOW

The Marble Index ELEKTRA 1968

why should he?

The lines that set him off are these:

In the morning of my winter

When my eyes are still asleep

A dragonfly lay in the cold dark snows

I’d sent to kiss your heart for me

In response to which, Lester writes:

(Nico’s concept of love: While she lies interred in the endless wastes of the arctic night, she has sent an insect to the object of her affections, to kiss his

heart yet. But even the insect must die before it can reach him, the soft rustling of its gentle wings stilled under drifts that eventually preserve its frozen corpse for eternity under a snowbank that becomes an ice mountain, the insect & Nico having become one in endless sleep, for they were the real lovers in the first place after all.)

Gentle wings yet.

The original aim of this note—modest enough—was to point out that Bangs’ remarkable parenthetical reverie might be based on a misunderstanding of Nico’s lyrics. After reading the above lines as Lester transcribed them, it occurred to me that maybe he got it wrong; maybe it wasn’t a dragonfly Nico sent to kiss her lover’s heart; no, by another reading, she “went big” & sent the cold dark snows

As it turns out, we were both wrong.

In 2007—25 years after Bangs’ death from an accidental drug overdose at the age of 33—Rhino Entertainment put out The Frozen Borderline 1968-1970, a two-CD compilation comprising The Marble Index & Desertshore (the other much-lauded Nico/ Cale collaboration, from 1970). The Frozen Borderline offers remastered versions of all the tracks on the two albums, alternative versions of many songs, demos & outtakes. On the alternate version of “Evening of Light,” Cale’s instrumental accompaniment is lower in the mix, so it’s easier to hear what Nico is singing:

In the morning of my winter

When my eyes are still asleep

was born in Dublin, Ireland. He lived in New York City for many years, where some of his plays were produced by the Tribeca Lab theatre group. He published a novel in 2004 & relocated to Northern California in 2021.

Brosnan

NICO

Derek Stukuls

A dragonfly lady in a coat of snow

I’d send to kiss your heart for me

A dragonfly lady in a coat of snow

I’d send to kiss your heart for me

So, Nico’s emissary is the dragonfly—I was wrong. The dragonfly doesn’t expire in the cold dark

Meanwhile, John Cale is busy weaving a sound apocalypse—cruel, distressing, bass heavy, exploding worlds of pain— around Nico’s fairy-tale imagery; worlds that Bangs will describe with great imaginative verve...

snows—Lester was wrong.†

Here’s the thing: Does it matter if the dragonfly is alive or dead?

A meaningless question, you may say—the dragonfly lady exists only in Nico’s mind; she’s the object of a wish, an intention (“I’d send…”). Here, Nico’s imagery is in good compliance with folk Ro-

mantic poetic conventions. Meanwhile, John Cale is busy weaving a sound apocalypse—cruel, distressing, bass heavy, exploding worlds of pain—around Nico’s fairy-tale imagery; worlds that Bangs will describe with great imaginative verve in the final paragraph of his review.

But wait a minute. What exactly is a “dragonfly lady”? A female dragonfly? Or a human being whose appearance or demeanor somehow evokes that beautiful creature? We’d give anything now to ask the songwriter what she had in mind, but no one is there. (For J.H.)

*Lester Bangs, Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico,” New Wave Rock magazine, 1983 (submitted 1978). It can be found in Mainlines, Blood Feasts & Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, edited by John Morthland, 2003.

†Lester Bangs was, no question, a very gifted writer & critic but there’s no ducking the fact that he was also, at times, a willfully sloppy researcher. A couple of examples come to mind: in one of the several articles he wrote scolding Miles Davis for failing (in Lester’s opinion) to live up to his genius, he refers to the soundtrack album Davis recorded for Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows). According to Bangs, this was a recording that “Miles laid down with some European nobodies way back in 1958.” Quite apart from the chauvinism evinced by labeling French jazz luminaries Barney Wilen, René Urtreger & Pierre Michelot “nobodies,” if you, Lester, had just taken the time to dig out your copy & check the personnel info, you’d have seen that the drummer on the session was the great Kenny Clarke a.k.a. Liaqat Ali Salaam. Another time—an even more egregious example of Bangs stomping on the facts— he accused Miriam Linna (of The A-Bones & Norton Records fame) of being a white supremacist!

ANNE ISHII

A PERFECT BREATH ENERGY CONTROL BEFORE SOUNDS

It would be inaccurate to say that there is a surge of new music from the Asian continent surfacing in American scenes. But that is how the moment presents itself when one attends a concert showcasing the music I am describing: traditional instrumental music originating from Korea, played or created by Koreans in America, often in ensemble with others in the Asian diaspora. Today I will just talk about three out of many astonishing performers in this cadre. So back to the idea of this being a surge. One reason we might describe this moment as a “surge” or even a resurgence, is because for the most part, the music is presented in arts settings where all work needs to feel superlatively novel. This may be a defect of the improv scene, but I do not mean to disparage scenes just to make fun of my friends. I am mocking, instead, the museum-led high-to-low cascade of pretension that imbues so much promotion of “different” musical performances. Performances that should be deemed extraordinary for having done its one & only job—to excite sensation in listeners. But no two shows may be alike in a museum unless it’s a pithy community program washed & repeated in some performative demonstration to their funding overlords that the establishment has not forsaken the literal neighborhood it oppresses. I’m sorry if I sound like I have a chip on my shoulder. It’s because I do. The kind of music I am trying to describe is not given a lot of commercial access, but its practices are not promoted with the purpose of recruitment. That is not just because it avoids Western acceptance, or necessarily because it is denied Western privileges. It is not due to the esotericism of style or

Doyeun

Leo Chang Transference

MUNG MUSIC 2023

Kim (with Joe Morris) Macrocosm

GLACIAL ERRATIC 2018

Hyunjin Cha

[Live Performance]

the mental/geographic distance listeners have to traverse just to understand cultural context & specificity. It may be that the music gets to exist without opportunity, as long as it can be occasionally used as an appendage. This, to me, still

feels suspiciously like colonialism, & is why I insist on spelling it out. Everybody knows where Korea is now thanks to the internet, & most of us can even identify the major cultural touchpoints, thanks to the Asian internet. The geography mat-

ters less when I speak of artists like Leo Chang, whose blended cultural extractions & various childhood homes—in China, Korea & the Pacific Rim—give him many ideas of literal folk. He plays traditional Asian musical instruments that complement raw voice & noise, like the piri, a flute-like wind instrument, excited gongs, & acousmatic digital inventions (the VOCALNORI most notably). With operatic agendas carried out by itinerant ensemble groupings, his craftwork is both a diorama & an oracle of Asian identity & epigenetic memory.

One of his latest ensemble formats is Nakji, or octopus in Korean. I watched their Philadelphia outing in the fall, shortly before Chang released his album Transference with the Mung Music label out of Seoul, Korea. The album is ethereal & atmospheric in equal & opposite ways that the live show was kinetic & punctuated. The Mung label, run by musician & recording engineer Sunjae Lee, is also worth following. Lee records everything on an old TASCAM recorder in what looks like a very intimate studio. In the Philadelphia iteration of Nakji, Leo was accompanied by another Korean traditional musician, Doyeun Kim. She plays the gayageum, a Korean lap-string instrument. Most notably, Kim is also a vocalist, & in both instruments, she wields the bravery of experimentalism & improvisation, while exposing the potential for the traditional mouthfeel sound touch of Korean sonics. That is to say, it feels uncannily old & new at once. For example, Kim says that her vocal practice is not itself derived from pansōri, a traditional shamanistic singing style requiring an absurd level of chord train-

Anne Ishii is a writer & musician based in Philadelphia. She is Executive Director of Asian Arts Initiative & has published over 20 translations & writes a lot about Asian idendity & gender.

Hanna Lee

ing, but the comparison is begged at least viscerally when one hears the outlines of jagged noise enveloping her pneumatic voice. These vocals are not present in her albums available for purchase, but even the simple pairing of a gayageum with guest acoustic guitarists proves profound in her lovely album Macrocosm

Readers may allow me the hackneyed metaphor: in the record-

traditional Korean percussion, she was first taught ho-heu, or breathing-based movement. She learned how to move her body, & control her energy, before making any sounds. This mind-body connection, the channeling of energy, & correlating breathe to voice to stick to drum, is the embodied practice we think of when listening to jazz drummers like Milford Graves & Susie Ibarra, but I am here

For the many Asians in the world with the kind of energy exhibited by Cha, Kim & Chang, I feel more cosmic continuity within the body than ever.

ings of Chang & the performances with Kim, I picture a ripe persimmon falling in slow motion to the ground, as we listeners witness its nectar reveal itself in a perfect semblance of liquid wholes, while the shredded flesh breaks up the plane of air like a wooden stake.

The musician who provokes me most in this appreciation of current Korean instrumentalists, is one who doesn’t have an album to be cited here. One who requires a live audience. Hyunjin Cha is a Korean percussion, string & voice performer. I had the opportunity to interview her years ago, after being floored by her drum ensemble Uriol. I failed to get the original recording published in a timely manner, which I still hope to get broadcast if I ever find the time to get my dream radio show off the ground. I digress. I’m taking this opportunity to share a gem from that conversation, for her words have permanently imprinted in my thoughts as I process what it means to broker Asian American sound, & be an Asian drummer.

“When I first struck the big drum, I thought to myself, Oh my god, I am FIGHTING THIS DRUM. It is my entire body playing the drum. And though people may find it ridiculous—that movement & energy & vibes are what control all sound—I can prove it in my performance & in my classes. It is! It is!” Cha talks about how in learning

to say no one is doing it like Hyunjin Cha. I’d describe her style as athletic, powerful but also empowering. If Kim & Chang’s persimmon falls to the ground & bursts with passion fruit, it is because of the gravity of this drummer.

There is a unique opportunity for an artist who thrives in the spontaneity of a time-based practice, in the unique “retro-acculturation” that the generationally moreAmerican-than-Asians of us are obligated to perform. In our lives, cultural labor is freedom. For the many Asians in the world with the kind of energy exhibited by Cha, Kim & Chang, I feel more cosmic continuity within the body than ever. A purposeful revelation between what is moved & what is moving. These bodies are making some really big sounds. And now to return to my incredibly solipsistic preamble. I issue a warning meant as much for myself as it is for you: If you want to consume music informed by the mythologies & history of the Korean peninsula, or to see Koreans in the diaspora perform the music of psychic energies of this magnitude of spiritual purity, you, dear reader, must be willing to become consumed with no imperial clothing. Surrender the chips of distinction, historiography, politics. You, my dear listener, must be ready to afford this music a belief system, & to believe it when you hear it

BEVERLY BRYAN

DEEP-LISTEN REWARD

The term Deep Listening was coined by the late American contemporary composer Pauline Oliveros. The concept is hers too. It’s a practice of focused yet open listening, both for musicians in performance & for humans existing. Oliveros said that Deep Listening means “expanding the attention.” As a philosophy, it’s a call to open the mind & the heart to others & the world around us via the ears. Oliveros gets a shout-out on Helado Negro’s latest album Phasor. The lead single & first track, “LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros),” links the composer to Lupe Lopez, a Fender employee in the 1950s who wired amplifiers, now a legend among guitar gearheads for the quality of sound her amps produce. What’s the connection between a patron saint of tuning in & an alchemist of electrical amplification? There are many, & this is just one hypertextual rabbit hole on an album with plenty of them.

Incidentally or no, Phasor itself rewards close listening. Roberto Carlos Lange, the artist who makes music under the trippy, slightly confounding name Helado Negro, has released his most precise & restrained collection of songs, & one of the quieter in a discography full of quiet gems. The careful dialing back allows the songs more room to breathe, or maybe it gives the listener more room to listen.

This is also his most artfully elusive album. Many of the songs on Phasor have no center. Lange layers bright synth lines, guitar riffs & upbeat rhythms weightlessly & sets them in motion. They interlock & slide past each other, sometimes creating the transitory illusion of a pop song. Lean in closer & you’ll hear intricate patterns, elements of free jazz, South American folk, sounds collected & synthesized, but few simple melodies, & yet the album is always delightful listening. Some of Phasor’s sounds were gathered from the output of the SalMar Construction, a one-of-a-kind generative synthesizer, which uses a supercomputer to control analog oscillators. It was built in 1969

Helado Negro Phasor 4AD 2024

by American composer Salvatore Martirano with musicians & engineers at the University of Illinois. It still resides at the university. Lange had the opportunity to visit & interact with the Sal-Mar in 2019 & recorded the five-hour session.

Speaking over Zoom from his home studio in Asheville, North Carolina, Lange recalls his encounter with the instrument as bewildering & exciting. “It’s just a really strange machine and, in regard to how it operates, not very intuitive,” he explains. When working on this project, he pulled out the hard drive with the recording of his time with the Sal-Mar. Some of those sounds are now woven into the album’s many layers. They’re present on

“LFO,” for one, though chopped up & almost impossible to identify. Lange says working with the sounds of the Sal-Mar inspired him, in particular, “to always be open & curious & make sure I’m not restricting myself to being dogmatic about anything, to make sure I’m not thinking, ‘The song must have a chorus,’ or ‘The song must have a hook.’” Indeed, many songs on the album don’t, though they still come off breezy & sweetly tuneful. Lange’s excellent pop instincts obscure his experimental interests. This is far from the only apparent contradiction inherent to Phasor For example, aesthetically, it’s both lush & meticulous, an English garden in a biodome. The album might

be easy to listen to from start to finish, a mix of down-tempo funk & warm acoustic psych, but it’s tougher to approach analytically, constructed as it is from all these moving parts & slippery paradoxes.

One of the most interesting of these tensions is that it’s driven by a fascination with sound in the abstract, but also full of human stories about love & pain. The abstract & the conceptual are foregrounded, but there is still a lot of content that is emotional, even directly autobiographical. One of the album’s catchiest & most fully realized songs is “Best for You and Me,” a musical vignette that sketches, in writerly detail, a night from Lange’s Floridian youth during his parents’ divorce. Here sound serves storytelling, & Lange is a terrific storyteller. Everything is wrapped in a gauzy quality, like the gentle, humid breezes of a South Florida evening.

This is one of Phasor’s paradoxes that resolves easily: Lange’s search for the right sound is often in service of the emotional tale he is spinning. Lange offers a moment on the final track “Es Una Fantasia” as an example.

“After I come out of the verse, when I’m like, ‘Dime otra vez,’ you hear this voice that’s reverbed out. It speaks to the concept of the song, of this fantasy that’s in your head, & these voices in your head that are kind of bouncing around. I know reverb is a really simple, overused thing, but I think it’s such an effective tool. It takes you somewhere immediately. I love using it in those ways where you can be effective in driving home where you are in a place in a song,” he shares. Critical listening is possibly antithetical to deep listening, at least in the way Pauline Oliveros meant it. Listening critically is a process of filtering, separating & naming, even if it’s with the benign goal of identifying different elements in music to discern their meaning. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of listening, but the most rewarding way to approach Phasor, or anything in Helado Negro’s discography, might be to simply listen deeply.

Beverly Bryan writes about music & lives in Queens. There’s a chance she made that playlist you like.

Anna Rodriguez

JOHN KIRAN FERNANDES STONED LAUGHTER, KAZOOS & HALLUCINATION

DISCMEDI BLAU (REISSUE) 2004

Created in Barcelona, Spain, by Jaume Sisa of the band Musica Dispersa, Orgia is an absolutely brilliant album from start to finish! Produced in 1970 (though originally released in 1971 by Concentric), the solo record is more song-oriented than his group’s i mprovisational Musica Dispersa from that same year. The work is a bizarre mixture evoking both Bob Dylan & Os Mutantes.

The first song “Carrer” starts with stoned laughter & kicks with thick, super-compressed bass, layered percussion, harmonica, Jaume’s totally original singing supported by swirling, wild backing vocals. On the next song, “Joc De Boles (Simfonia Atomica),” Jaume’s voice ventures into crazy territory à la Robert Wyatt, winding in & out of a slippery acid-bent guitar line. A layered kazoo section with lots of little percussions ends the track. The short “Comiendo pollo” follows with floating organ, clicking typewriters providing the rhythmic accompaniment. “En El castell” is a typical Spanish acoustic piece with more harmonica, reverbed-out whipcrack percussion, & lovely female vocals.

arrangement. “Cap A La Roda” is one of the strangest of the lot: an acoustic song with stereo hand drums, a dimension-opening break with crowd noise, & weird spoken bits popping out on top of the mix.

The moving “Els Reis De Pais Deshabitat” is a haunting number with ghostly female backups. The song builds gradually with an accordion/piano section eventually joined by chord organs & group vocals.

“El Casament” is another psychedelic masterpiece. Its Morricone–esque slide guitar transports me to a black-&-white spaghetti-western desert, where I hallucinate vividly from peyote & heat. From there, I stumble towards the visage of a crystal palace during the instrumental “L’Amor

A Les Rodes De La Presó” before being greeted warmly by brass cascades on the epic “La Presó De Les Rodes De L’Amor.” The last track, “Pasqua Florida a L’Illa d’Enlloc,” provides closure with an angelic choir of friends & bandmates.

“Relliscant,” a 30-second Dada snippet, precedes “Paisatge,” a Beatle-esque piano-based tune with a beautiful string-&-horn

Orgia’s cover art is surreal & the reissue comes in a nice digipack. The lyrics are in Catalan, which was at one time banned in Spain in an effort to suppress the identity of a population whose roots stretch back to the Middle Ages. There are unfortunately no translations provided, but this is still one of my favorite recent reissues.

John Kiran Fernandes of The Olivia Tremor Control is owner of the Cloud Recordings record label.

sisa Orgia

Eric Schack

YONI KROLL

LOS KURADOS WANTS TO PARTY WITH YOU

It’s Friday night & Los Kurados—“Austin’s Premiere Ska Party Band (that also has a shit ton to say)” according to their official description—are about to take the stage for the first of three gigs scheduled for the pre-South by Southwest weekend. The seven-piece band has been around for more than a decade, playing countless shows & putting out a number of albums. Their music is dynamic, exceptionally catchy & incredibly fun.

Made up of four musicians born in Mexico & three from the States & with songs mostly in Spanish, Los Kurados considers what they’re doing as being heavily influenced by the Mexican ska—or MexSka genre. Their name stems from the popular Mexican beverage curado, a mix of pulque & fruit with a history traced to the Aztec period. The band was actually conceived in Mexico after guitarist Poncho went back home to visit around 2012 & decided it was finally time to follow his dreams of playing music. He grew up in Mexico City, home to a vibrant ska scene stretching back decades.

“I called a meeting with some friends & explained that I always wanted to have a ska band [and asked] everyone to pick an instrument,” he told Sound Collector “The next day only one person showed up.” That was Juan, the band’s first drummer. Well, potential drummer, Poncho noted with a laugh, as Juan didn’t own any drums at the time.

The two decided to come back to Austin to try & put together the rest of the band. Vocalists Angel Ortiz & the luchador-mask-wearing Chester Chetos—who doubles as hype man—were the next recruits. Although the lineup fluctuated a bunch in those early years—as the group figured out not just what they were doing but also how to pull it off—it’s been pretty steady since around 2015. Members are the dual singers, guitarist Poncho,

LOS kurados

Rabia Ska

LOS KURADOS 2020

Eric Brown on drums, bassist Bruce Alvarez, saxophone player Rosey Armstrong & her husband Kurt Armstrong on the trombone. Backgrounds of the band members are Mexican, white European, indigenous, & African American, a union Ortiz refers to as quintessentially “Texican” in nature. Multicultural is the name of their 2017 album

The first Los Kurados show was, as depicted by Poncho, a bit of a disaster: “The crowd only let us play two & a half songs ’cause we sounded so terrible. We were so drunk! The only person with musical experience was Bruce. He was okay. Everyone else was a mess.” The fact that they went on at three a.m. probably didn’t help. Not a very

auspicious start but in many ways a proper one.

A shot at redemption came the following day at their next show, which thankfully went a lot better. Fast forward to now & Los Kurados is a well-oiled machine, able to captivate audiences that can number in the hundreds if not more. They’ve played with The Toasters, The Aggrolites, The Slackers, Mephiskapheles, Out of Control Army, Los Skarnales, & many other lauded ska acts in the last couple years. While shockingly they’ve never performed outside of Texas—it’s a pretty big state, though that’s not really much of an excuse—they’re finally rectifying that this summer. More on that later.

Tonight they’re on a bill with Young Costello from San Antonio, along with locals The Royal Space Chimps & Vision 98, at a venue called Flamingo Cantina in downtown Austin that mostly caters to the reggae & dub crowd. Watching them play, it’s remarkable to see all the various components that make up the band come together so beautifully. That’s not just referring to the different members but also everything they’re bringing to the table. Ska has never been monolithic as a genre or even a sound, & Los Kurados is proof of that. In their songs you can hear the influences of Mexico, of America, of England, of first & third wave, of punk, reggae, cumbia, & so much more. This is not music that crosses borders, it’s music that absolutely tears those boundaries down.

Looking back to the band’s beginnings, Poncho told Sound Collector the past dozen years totally exceeded any prediction he would have made back in 2012 about their success. “I never thought I’d be up in front of at times two people, at times a thousand people, playing the music that I like, that I grew up with,” he said. “When we started, I liked to see how my friends enjoyed it. Now I like to see how people I

Yoni Kroll is a reporter and college radio DJ in Philadelphia.

Lomaho Kretzmann

don’t know enjoy it.”

At the show in Austin, it’s clear the band is extremely popular with the crowd & for good reason. It’s impossible to stand still while watching them play, & almost immediately a small-but-energetic mosh pit develops, with people happily bouncing off each other. While the audience is mixed—the Spanish speakers in attendance do seem to revel in being able to interact with the band in ways that feel more personal—it seems like everyone is on the same page, even if they don’t totally understand all the lyrics or stage banter.

For Ortiz, that’s an amusing bit of self-reflection as a music fan growing up in Monterrey in the north of Mexico. As he put it, “My big inspirations were Rancid, Misfits, Bad Religion. I really like more of the hardcore, the skacore, but I still love [Mexican ska bands] Salón Victoria, Inspector, & Panteón Rococó. I like to play to the white people who might not understand our songs because they feel the same as I felt [when I was younger]: ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying but I like it!’”

Before joining the band, saxophonist Rosey Armstrong was one of those people. “The first time I heard Los Kurados I was that white person who was, like, ‘What is this?! It’s amazing!’” she recalled. In the almost decade since, she’s picked up a lot of Spanish & also learned about “Mexico & Mexican culture & the politics behind it & immigration & how fucking difficult that is.”

This awareness has extended to music. According to Rosey, both she & Kurt have garnered so much about ska (both Mexican & not), as well as reggae & cumbia, they’ve applied their knowledge to their other band, Hans Gruber and the Die Hards. Being in Los Kurados has helped out that band in other ways too, namely getting better shows in cities with Mexican American ska scenes. As she put it: “Los Angeles would always suck. Eventually I was, like, stop, Chris, you’re not booking it. I’m tired of playing a sad bar in Downtown LA with five white people. We’re talking to the Mexicans.” Instead of those bar gigs, Hans Gruber has ended up at the LA mainstay: backyard parties full of Mexican American ska & skacore acts. As you can probably guess from the name, skacore is an

aggressive mix of ska & hardcore punk.

While Poncho & Ortiz end up writing a lot of the lyrics in Los Kurados, the rest of the band also contributes. Rosey had a big part in the creation of the Rabia Ska song “Cows Can’t Read,” which is about the 1979 breach at a uranium mill in Church Rock, New Mexico, about half an hour from where she grew up. This disaster, which mainly affected Navajo Nation tribal lands, discharged more radioactive waste into the Puerco River than was released in the far better known Three Mile Island

from…you can throw a rock & hit a bunch of [ska] bands,” Poncho said. That’s not really the case in much of the United States.

It’s important to point out that even if a lot of these groups are not political in the same way as Crass or Rage Against the Machine, just living & existing in Mexico is inherently a politicized act. Poncho said, “There’s a lot of crime & corruption. Money never gets to people who need it. We see it every day.” This is something that shows up across all Mexican culture & media.

A good example is the Panteón Rococó hit “La Carencia” (the short-

The first Los Kurados show was a bit of a disaster: “The crowd only let us play two & a half songs ’cause we sounded so terrible.” Fast forward to now & Los Kurados is a welloiled machine.

accident earlier that year. This led to a poisoning of the land—the title is a reference to the fact livestock drank the water from the river & died—& a mass health crisis that continues to this day. When the band posted the video for the song to social media, they explained that while it’s about a specific incident, this is yet another example of how “disregarding indigenous peoples’ wants & health as well as our environment for the sake of wealth is all too common.”

Let’s cross back over the border again to talk about the scene in Mexico, where ska really is huge. Bands like the aforementioned Panteón Rococó play to thousands of screaming fans & even sold out a soccer stadium for their 25th anniversary show in 2020. The music there is heavily influenced by the first wave of ska—think Trojan Records, rocksteady, & Jamaican musicians like Desmond Dekker & Toots & the Maytals—as well as punk, Mexican & American rock, & especially reggae. There is also a big skacore scene. “Where I come

have a good time. It’s a fun show! But that doesn’t mean that all the lyrics are about nothing.”

Los Kurados actually got to open for Panteón Rococó a couple times stateside. Rosey, only half joking, said the only non-Mexicans in attendance were her & the other two American members. The band agrees playing in front of mostly Mexican & Latin American crowds is different because they tend to be more familiar with the music. That extends also to things like the choice in cover songs, a very important consideration for all ska bands.

age), which is about both the hopelessness & frustration of the working class & the importance of not giving up on your dreams for a better life. As wages go down & shortages increase, the band extols the listener to “vente vamos a bailar”— come dance—& never, ever give up. You can hear those same sentiments on “Rabia Ska,” the title track off Los Kurados’ 2020 album. Ortiz told Sound Collector, “It’s talking about how you’re coming [to the show] & you’re tired, you’re stressed, & then Los Kurados starts playing & boom! You are dancing in the middle of the bar with people you don’t know.” Rabia is a word referring to something that is incredibly angry or full of fury, an apt description. All of this very much speaks to that motto mentioned at the beginning of this article: “Austin’s Premiere Ska Party Band (that also has a shit ton to say).” It’s something Rosey said she came up with after seeing Los Kurados play & subsequently joining the band. “So we’re always a fucking party,” she explained. “Everyone comes & they

In fact when Los Kurados started, most of their set list was covers of Mexican standards, something that Rosey said went right over her head until she made the decision to join the band & was given a list of songs to learn. The repertoire currently includes “Monkey Man” originally by Toots & the Maytals & famously covered by The Specials. Their reworked version of Bronco’s “Sergio el Bailador,” changed to “Chetos el Bailador,” is identified in an Austin Chronicle article as the “secret Mexican handshake” between the band & their Spanish-speaking fans. They’re planning to release a cover of the popular technobanda “Feliz Feliz” alongside a slew of new originals soon.

This August those songs & the rest of the Los Kurados catalog will finally be heard somewhere other than Texas. After hundreds if not thousands of shows in The Lone Star State—which to be fair, is the biggest in the lower 48—they’re slated to play the Summer of Ska festival in Las Vegas, put on by Good Girlfriend Records.

“We always think [about] how it’ll be if we go on tour or how it would feel to go to another state far from our safe zone,” Poncho said. “We want to see if people like our music & the performance & the energy we have on stage.”

Considering the response they’ve gotten so far, it’s safe to say they’re going to be met with open arms, cold beers, & an audience that’s going to want more, more, more. Or as Poncho puts it: “We just want to invite all the people to make the party with ska music from Texas.”

MICHAELANGELO MATOS

JON SAVAGE’S POP LIFE PART 1

When you put them together physically, the nine CDs under view here don’t take up that much space. They’re a wide handful, easy enough to grip but heavy enough to slip out if grabbed wrong. They’re very pretty to look at; all Ace Record products are, particularly when you line them up by the spine. Playing them is another matter—there are worlds here, crisscrossing in the air & in the dust kicked up between them. Back to those spines. The fonts change, the time spans change— four double CDs covering individual years from 1965 to 1968, then spans of three to five years at a time. The musical focus goes from a mix of the pop charts & UK pirate radio to rock that shades into punk long before the latter acts as a cleaver between musical eras. The latter era’s effect becomes evident over the three most recent titles, in which the prepunk longueurs that dominate the middle chapters of this series are all but eradicated from memory.

The connecting thread is singles—45s & later 12-inches, As, Bs or EPs. Either way, these records made an immediate impression & stayed fresh over the haul. Presumably so, anyhow. Not everybody has ears like Jon Savage, after all, including his listeners & readers.

Jon Savage’s 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded

Jon Savage’s 1967: The Year Pop Divided

Jon Savage’s 1965: The Year the Sixties Ignited

Jon Savage’s 1968: The Year the World Burned

Jon Savage’s 1969-1971: Rock Dreams on 45

Jon Savage’s 1972-1976: All Our Times Have Come

Jon Savage’s 1977-1979: Symbols Clashing Everywhere

Jon Savage’s 1980-1982: The Art of Things to Come

Jon Savage’s 1983-1985: Welcome to Techno City

ACE RECORDS 2015-2024

Author—most famously of England’s Dreaming, still the major work on early British punk—Jon Savage had been compiling CDs for years prior to his association with Ace Records, which began a decade ago. Indeed, he issued an average of a CD per year through a number of labels, beginning in 2005 with Meridian 1970: Protest, Sorrow, Hobos, Folk and Blues on Forever Heavenly/EMI. His momentum included two equally ear-opening collections: Teenage: The Creation of Youth 19111946 for the legendary German reissue label Trikont-Our Own Voice in 2009, & two years later Teenage: Teenagers & Youth in Music 1951-1960 for Bear Family Records, another esteemed German reissuer. Both were based on Savage’s book Teen-

age—also the template for another collaboration with filmmaker Matt Wolf, also titled Teenage Savage’s pairing with Ace Records was occasioned by his next major book, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. It was probably inevitable that Savage would team with Ace Records for the double CD of the same title—the mid-’60s have long been very much Ace Records’ thing. But Savage’s subsequent titles (more on their chronology below) have been every bit as surprising, as catholic, as doggedly tied to its compiler’s own history.

Commonalities announce themselves across volumes. The opening of 1983-1985: Welcome to Techno City is Japan covering “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (a link back to the Velvet Underground’s inclusion on 1966 with “I’ll Be Your Mirror”), a razor-sharp starting point for the synth-edged

two-and-a-half hours to follow. David Bowie appears once as a performer in this series, with “The London Boys” on 1966, but on 1972-1976: All Our Times Have Come, he’s omnipresent—as producer (Lou Reed’s “Vicious”), songwriter (Dana Gillespie’s cover of “Andy Warhol”), & colleague/ spur/inspiration of Roxy Music, New York Dolls, Sparks, Eno, & Kraftwerk, all of whom do appear. The subtitle of the next volume, 1977-1979: Symbols Clashing Everywhere, could apply to Bowie for the entire decade. It & the subsequent titles in the Savage series contain plenty more music touched by Bowie, as well as by Reed & the Velvet Underground. It’s just as worthwhile—and telling—to consider the discontinuous presence in this series of another musical eminence, James Brown. He’s on each of the first four volumes: the world-changing “Papa’s

Got a Brand New Bag, Pt. 1,” nestled into 1965: The Year the Sixties Ignited; “I Got You (I Feel Good)” & “Tell Me That You Love Me” both on 1966; “Cold Sweat, Pt. 1” & “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” on 1967: The Year Pop Divided; “Say It Loud!—I’m Black and I’m Proud (Pt. 1)” on 1968: The Year the World Burned. Then nothing—the end of the ’60s & first two-thirds of the ’70s are entirely rock & roll on this timetable—more on that later. But when Savage’s collection rejoins the wider currents with 1977-1979: Symbols Clashing Everywhere, Brown’s rhythmic footprint remains, but has been transmogrified by disco (Space’s “Magic Fly,” Giorgio Moroder’s “Utopia—Me Giorgio,” Sheila & B. Devotion’s “Spacer”) & punk (Talking Heads’ “Found a Job,” the Slits’ “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”). Yet more derivations await on 1980-1982: The Art of Things to Come, not least from Zapp & P-Funk All Stars, selections that feature key former James Brown personnel. This is skipping ahead a bit, but for reasons that will shortly be clear: it’s safe to guess that if this series continues into the mid-’90s (and there’s no reason to expect it wouldn’t), chances are Savage will be including some drum & bass tracks. Of that litany of ’60s James Brown songs Savage included, all are easily recognizable hits but one. “Tell Me That You Love Me” was a B-side (the A “Don’t Be a Dropout” was included on the iconic 1991 box set Star Time) that began life, Savage writes in the notes, “as a live version of Junior Walker’s ‘Shotgun’ recorded as part of Brown’s set at Tampa, Florida, in April 1966 for a live album that never appeared.” Savage praises this track’s “sound field of such abrasive & futuristic complexity that it predicted the manic, hyper-speed breakbeats of jungle.” Each of these collections convey a sensibility in constant forward motion. Our guide is always staking a claim on pop’s future, whatever that was right then. These CDs offer the gift of hind-

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Sign ‘O’ the Times (Bloomsbury, 2004), Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year (Hachette, 2020) & The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (Dey Street, 2015). He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Joe W. Sams

sight, as well as sharply etched pop memories of someone who knew what he liked & why a lot earlier than most. They also don’t offer most of the biggest names of the eras in question. Say what you want about Spotify—I’ll agree with most of it—but you can add Beatles & Rolling Stones tracks to your playlists on them. The Ace collections don’t have them—though, in some-

in the ’80s, & going into overdrive as the CD rose & vinyl collapsed, historical rock-era compilations seemed to reach a peak of form. The compact disc offered the best & most sound, so we were told, & the coffin-like boxes the multidisc sets typically came in had a built-in gravitas. One after another, all those Rykodisc & Rhino & Chronicles sets seemed to offer the unimpeachable

These CDs offer the gift of hindsight, as well as sharply etched pop memories of someone who knew what he liked & why a lot earlier than most.

thing of a coup (the label trumpets it on the website), 1972-1976: All Our Times Have Come contains solo tracks from both John Lennon (“#9 Dream”) & Yoko Ono (“Yang Yang”), a very rare occurrence. (Precedent now set, catalog watchers will watch, with interest, for further developments.) However, neither of those songs have been exposed to the degree that lots of other related music has been, & they fit the collection like a glove.

Savage’s hindsight is important to these collections, but it doesn’t stifle them—his in-the-moment favorites from these years or periods aren’t retroactively reoriented toward a larger accepted canon. If a major classic appears, it means Savage loved it then & loves it now; if you don’t know what the hell this or that weird item is doing there, rest assured Savage loves it the same way he does the thing you know. In this setting you can begin to hear it that way as well. Compilations are snapshots as well as portraits, if we’ve learned anything these past 40 or so years. The rolling waves of rights ownership, endlessly changing hands or not changing hands at all, crisscrossing in the digital tide—all of this creates musical gaps in the whole statements that had once been pinned to a disc on behalf of an artist, an era, a style, a sensibility, you name it. Just look at all the version of Nuggets that have proliferated over the years. Starting in the ’70s, speeding up

history of rock & pop between Elvis & *NSYNC, & plenty else besides. As someone immersing themselves with pleasure in a lot of these titles, not to mention a heavily loaded present day, it didn’t seem conceivable that any other pathways to the past might be required.

The iPod, of course, changed that around again—made the whole of pop’s history seem fungible. In the early 2000s, I began trading CD-Rs full of MP3s with others. One of the great pleasures for me there was getting to immerse for a while, not just in someone else’s collection, but in someone else’s sensibility. This was familiar from having fallen for dance music, a DJ-driven medium where you gave yourself over to other peoples’ taste for an hour or a night; it was further familiar from a youth spent reading about rock & finding the records its critics had adjudged “best.” Often, I agreed; frequently I still do, though certainly not always, particularly from the ’80s forward.

Learning from other collectors, fans, historians, writers, geeks, in that very direct way, opened my ears decisively. Among those critics’ lists were those of UK magazines like Sounds & The Face, from punk through the acid-house ’80s. It turns out I could have just waited for Savage’s CDs. Savage helped shape those Sounds & Face lists, & their adamantly futurist sensibility is all over them. They’ve opened my ears in other ways, as well.

[To be continued.]

shimmering glacial melody that builds into dense layers of enveloping sound. Stone and Stichter craft songs primarily on guitar and bass, using careful techniques that often obscure their origins, and add accents of keyboard, electronics, and field recordings. 24,110 and Windscale Pile No. 1 are released on vinyl for the first time to accompany Soporus’ most recent release, DIVERS, from LoversWeekend Records that features Will Stichter’s 2023 Packaging Grammy-nominated design.

LUXURY

: AMAZING & THANKYOU / THE �TEST & THEGREATEST

Issued on double 180g colored vinyl for the first time. “Punk rock is mischievous and confrontational by nature, but so rarely does the music bewilder. Luxury nestled into an unexplored nexus of dreamy chaos and coifed dandyism, charged with a pretty-boy trickster spirit and Southern Gothic mystery. In these shimmering and shattered songs full of youthful rage, confusion and melancholy, there is also a pearl of the divine, waiting to be uncovered.” – Lars Gotrich, NPRMusic

Psych/Kraut-rock instrumental band hailing from Umeå, Sweden.

“As debut albums go, it’s one of the finest in the genre that I’ve heard, highly recommended.” – Andrew Young, Ptolemaic Terrascope

“Terrific spacerock jams set to Krautrockish motorik rhythms.” – Psychedelic Waves

“This music is incredible” – Bob Weston, Chicago Mastering Service UFOÖVER�PP�ND : SPÖKRAKETER

ROADSIDEMONUMENT : IAMTHEDAYOFCURRENTTASTE

This 1998 math rock classic, mixed and produced by J. Robbins is available for the first time on vinyl.

“it is a hulking rock-and-roll motorcycle apocalypse.. and that’s just the first minute and a half… the kind of opening blitzkrieg that thins out the herd; only the deepest listeners survive.” – Lars Gotrich, NPRMusic

SOPORUS : 24,110 / WINDSCALE PILE NO. 1

Soporus is the musical duo of Matthew Stone and William Stichter, childhood friends who have played in bands together for over 25 years. Formed in 2003 to explore their shared interest in ambient music and honed after-hours while playing together in instrumental rock group Saxon Shore, Soporus combines shifting drone with

TINA PLOTTEL

YOU CAN GO BACK, BABY, BUT THAT WON’T MAKE YOU YOUNG

Depeche Mode released a new record, Momento Mori, in 2023. It is a balm. A gorgeous tribute to Andrew Fletcher, & by extension, the last four years of pandemic living. They may not have intended to, but Martin & Dave have opened their grief & made it participatory. We began a collectively gloomy era in 2020, & crawling out of it has been exhausting. In that darkness, this invitation is more than generous—it’s necessary.

I’m not interested in any traditional review of this album. A determination of whether this or any record is “good” or “bad” is irrelevant. This kind of judgment call is (and always has been) a primitive way of understanding music—banal & binary. A power play created by elite opinion in the guise of music journalism & the curation of taste. Especially when said opinion lacks broader, expressive voices.

What’s more relevant is thinking about Momento Mori in terms of meaning & emotions. A critique that creates space for a discussion that includes sentiment. Depeche Mode are original masters of electronica, known to juxtapose the digital with the ephemeral. How to synthesize—literally—sound & meaning. How relationships between people work or don’t work. That theme is at the core of many Depeche Mode songs, but it’s truly the heart of Momento Mori. What it is like to create art & experience grandeur with someone, through euphoria & contention & what it is like when that person dies. Who will you travel with now? I think this record, & the most recent Depeche Mode live performances incorporate a particular honesty that wasn’t there before.

I heard “Ghosts Again,” the lead single from Momento Mori, on KEXP, a radio station in Seattle I listen to online. It was the first time the DJ played it on air, & it was so

depeche mode

Momento Mori COLUMBIA 2023

monumental that the DJ played it twice in a row. I heard that rawness in Dave’s voice in a way that was different than it has been before—a new honesty. A few days later, I saw Depeche Mode perform “Ghosts Again” on the The Late Show. Dave & Martin, now in their 60s, 30some years after their entrée & minus two founding members. All of their sordid, creative history on the stage, though both performers relaxed & enjoyed themselves. A

less bombastic light show than other performances, but still punchy, highlighted sanguine. Dave dark & tailored. Martin in silver sparkle. The ephemeral & the digital.

Two extra songs made it to YouTube, “Enjoy the Silence” & “Personal Jesus.” I saw both of these songs performed live at the time of their release—the Songs of Faith and Devotion & Violator tours, respectively. Big productions, backup singers, Anton Corbijn’s giant visuals cold

framing a strung-out, pained Dave. He was an obvious shell, hanging on. It’s all a prologue now. Martin & Dave seem to be sinking into the glory of a performance, which can only come about by getting through an enormous suffering. I think this is the most fully realized version of Depeche Mode. Past their impeccable virtuosity, they are in the heart of what makes them breathtaking. They have outlived their giant history & are received in this present, where the entirety of their experience is the truth.

As a person of a certain age, I know that I gravitate towards music I already know. In the car, I’ll shuffle through the songs I have meticulously curated on my phone, the personal radio station of my dreams. I might seek out bands or songs on Apple Music & create a “station” to get me from home to work, where I listen to KEXP all day, where John Richards plays the songs of our collective youth. At home, I ride my Peloton to ’80s playlists compiled by instructors with whom I’ve developed parasocial relationships, just like I did the DJs I listened to on my teenage radio.

I’m not unique in my desire to keep it familiar. A UK music streaming service conducted a study in 2018 & found that after people turn 30, they stop discovering new music. A thousand people were polled. They came up with all sorts of excuses for not venturing into new sonic territory: demanding jobs, parenting. It’s not that they didn’t want to, it was just that musical curiosity wasn’t a priority.

This was two years prior to COVID. Before those excuses became magnified distortions of what our lives used to look like. What time was there left for discovery? Working from home & Zoom school & just the sheer sense of pandemic overwhelming—the requirement for comfort was a void easily filled with

Tina Plottel is a librarian at Salisbury University, located on the unceded land of the Wicomico & Nanticoke Peoples. Her writing centers on themes of resilience, growth, & self-discovery. Her work has appeared in Washington City Paper, Willows Wept Review, Baltimore City Paper, Reserve and Renew among others. Tina has played bass in a few bands, most notably The Torches from Washington, DC.

things we already knew. It’s not so much about age but about expectations of responsibility. How can you keep up the pursuits of youthful passions if you have to sit in so many meetings? Or with the onset of kids, allowing playlists to succumb to a baby shark attack?

This would seem to suggest an entire abandonment of any kind of voluntary discovery. Music defines us, puncturing the atmosphere of our most crucial moments. Maybe once we turn 30, we look back on these moments, for good or ill, & we want to re-enact them as a panacea to aging. Music is the only sig-

coupled with the pictures of what had happened is how we do the basics of history. The film does a good job of documenting, but I’m not sure if it’s compelling as a story. It’s the show without the tell. I’m not sure what experience the film is trying to convey other than putting footage easily accessed on YouTube next to an interview with the person who shot it. It has the air of the old SNL skits where Chris Farley would interview the host by asking them about a thing they did & punctuating it with “That’s so cool!” Sometimes, nostalgia just isn’t that deep. The rendering of this Fugazi

I want my nostalgia to remind me that I once showed up excited & ready to be lost & maybe a little dangerous, & we can do that again.

nificant time-travel apparatus to which we have access.

This is how I want my nostalgia. I want it to bring me back to a place, back to safety & comfort, & I want it to say, “Time is a construct,” & we can make old things reborn whenever we want. I don’t want to relive the past. The past is triggering. I want my nostalgia to remind me that I once showed up excited & ready to be lost & maybe a little dangerous, & we can do that again. Because who we are now is who we will always be. We are the same, but with our experiences, we can be much, much better.

The flip side of Momento Mori, it turns out, is a collection of Fugazi fan footage. The 2023 documentary We Are Fugazi from Washington, DC was coordinated by filmmakers & a music journalist, & combines footage of live performances with interviews with the videographers who shot it. The subjects of the film are the half-dozen men, now middle-aged, who had the foresight to hold up a video camera in their youth, capturing these iconic moments.

We Are Fugazi captures nostalgia differently than Depeche Mode’s album. It’s straight storytelling. Hearing the account of how it happened

footage-as-document is inherent in the curation itself. It’s different than going down a YouTube hole, watching video after video on a loop. In that situation, I’m in control, making choices of what I want to watch, the order I want to watch it in, & how I want to experience this past. We Are Fugazi is telling a specifically organized story that, unfortunately, presents an exclusive nostalgia. There isn’t any attempt to discuss choices— either the practical choice the footage shooters made to capture the performances, or the filmmaker’s choice to present an all-male panel with no nod to how the documentary reveals how the scene it depicts was severely gendered.

If punk as a genre is about having access to the creative tools, then nostalgia might suggest that this access is an illusion. Do we have access to the tools or just to the presentation that is created from the tools? Sometimes, the presentation is all that’s required. But that’s only if we aren’t trying to make meaning from the past. The way we connect with our past can be a celebration of the shared aspects of our collective encounters (Momento Mori) or it can just be a fun ride (We Are Fugazi). Both experiences are valid.

I used to go to concerts. I used to play in bands. I used to dance unheeded in the house. I used to know all the lyrics & I used to love a closed loop, a community of fellow fans. Some time ago, I began to like a band from France quite a bit. Then I heard them at the supermarket & my husband laughed saying, “That’s the band you love when you don’t listen to music.” He was so right, but I didn’t mind. That was a circle anyways, an obvious one, but mine. The supermarket kind.

A young woman I work with is an unabashed Swiftie, leaves work to go stand in a virtual line for tickets that her job can just afford.

“She knows me,” the colleague announces.

My relative travels the world to watch BTS because every concert is once in a lifetime. The agony & bliss of being surrounded, in the vortex of song & lights & spectacle, is always the only time. The family member sputters with delight, making no sense to the uninitiated, the boys in BTS unreachable in the plain speak we use to describe the banal—breakfast, a job.

For me, it was Pavement & it was the 1990s. For me, it meant a Discman & the delight of being a snob, possessing everything a teenager in the suburbs could, knowing all the words & feeling like alienation was initiation. It was not the Swiftie community of my work colleague, it was not being absorbed into the miasma of celebrity like BTS. Music was a vehicle to pure self-possession. It was about feeling utterly my self—& transcendent, full-fledged, omnipresent. Is fandom associated with the era we live in? The ’90s being nihilistic & dysfunctional & emo. The 2020s wholesome & ready to rage together in a show of humanism & validation of everything normal because despair is too easy.

In Esther Yi’s 2023 novel Y/N the baffling obsessive state of being a fan is visceral, fevered. Y/N stands for Your Name, an homage to fan

JESSICA CHIU YOU WITH ME

CATE LE BON

Pompeii

MEXICAN SUMMER 2022

fiction where the reader steps in to live alongside the object of adoration. In Y/N, the protagonist is held in thrall by a boy-band member named Moon. She leaves her home in Germany to look for him in Seoul. When he drops out of the band, she must search him out. There is no other available option. One of the characters scoffs at the Y/N phenomenon:

There can be no story without

a proper protagonist. So there is never a story when it comes to Y/N…All of this amounts to a warning…Anyone who pursues the delusional fantasy of being Moon’s chosen one can expect to have their identity wiped out…This…is so much bigger than you. You are not Y/N. All of us are, all at once.

“No,” the fan counters. “Only I’m Y/N.”

In Yi’s book, the magic of fandom is a portal, the quantum impossibility of bringing yourself into view & belonging to a community by shedding self. In fandom, the way into being is through the convex mirror, an identity established only through transfiguration.

Is fandom possible without self-divestiture? In Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, the protagonist is aggressively so; the book is a fever dream of impossible satiation. In this version of fandom, being a fan is submission to a power that depletes you of the ability to consume. The protagonist mercilessly obsesses over a lover who spurns her until her identity is so stripped of meaning outside the myth of lover that she loses her humanity altogether. She is no different than a chair. Or the lover himself. All things equal & object. In I’m a Fan, being a fan is symptomatic of a market economy where all things are for purchase—the kind that grants advantage, status, power, as well as the verb that commodifies & replaces.

When I think about loving music as a fan now, I think about value. I think about youth as shorthand for the ability to believe in other futures, noncapital ones where one can believe without irony that the pursuit of money is a lifestyle choice. These days are spent in a perpetual linearity, moving forward, the days inching into months & the years moving into the adulthood of my childhood, my old age, extinguishing the elderly who once were authority. A lot of the time I’ve lost the loophole, the point of reflection, suspension, infinite life. Self feels, for better & worse, the real lifestyle choice. If fandom is a way into your identity & transcending our singular life (or something), then consumption of the creative goods should perhaps have a place in the higher register.

“Think of all the labor,” a friend said to me, “that goes into creating something without guarantee of

Jessica Chiu lives with her family in Maryland.

Karli Bresler

audience.” She was talking about art. What makes fandom so singular then is that it is a heightened state of consumption that makes consumption somehow equal in value, in psychic dissolution, to the act of creating itself.

All this to say I should go to a concert. I think this as I wash dishes. As I launder. As I think of Y/N. What is unchanged? When I find something I love—music—I run it into the ground. These days,

you said my face turned a memory

What you said was nice, when you said my heart broke a century Harbor Harbor, harbor

I listen to Cate Le Bon on a walk during my lunch hour. The trees are bare, then blooming. I debate whether to spend $10 for shipping on a T-shirt so I can say I like her

When I think about loving music as a fan now, I think about value.

Pompeii

Track 8: “Remembering Me”

If being a fan is an act of consumption, authentic or otherwise, “Remembering Me” is the glory of punking out at sentiment; the urge to self-mythologize; the stern too-cool directive of embracing a (dread) present. I love sentimentalism & a good self-myth.

Track 2: “Moderation”

A song I actually put down on a company card, when asked for a hype song, & later felt appropriately naked for having doffed my work suit in a moment of…fandom. A song whose lyrics are surreal & heartsick & whose anthem seems right for the middle-aged.

Picture the party where you’re standing on a modern age I was in trouble with a habit of years

And I try to relate…

Moderation

I can’t have it

I don’t want it

Track 5: “Harbor”

Because the lilting slightly electro sound of someone conceding romanticism is an eternal pleasure.

What you said was nice, when

to strangers without speaking. I buy the Mary Lattimore T-shirt because everything she does is beautiful & it feels good to support the labor. I listen to songs in the car on repeat & blasting, wearing sunglasses while the sun goes down on a neighborhood where I can still feel properly unknown. In the rare moment that Pavement comes on, I still know the words. I still feel the high ground. I don’t go to the show. Or buy the T-shirt. But I don’t despair because at this point, the interior life may be more interesting than the legible life. Maybe it was so all the time, but as a young person I could be persuaded of a different possibility. Where I want to go is actually a different album altogether, Mug Museum. The portal opens.

Track 2: “Are You with Me Now?”

Are you with me now Are

Are you with me now Are Are you with me now Are

And the afterimage, a percussive build that explodes into a universal memory—that of fans everywhere—the collective scream of being & present.

STEVE SILVERSTEIN NO-INPUT EVOLUTION STEVE SILVERSTEIN NO-INPUT EVOLUTION

An experimental musician producing a more-accessible crossover album always creates unique opportunities & challenges. The creative friction is especially pronounced when the musician’s primary instrument is purposely configured to obstruct the creation of melody, harmony or rhythm. While he began as an electric guitarist, Toshimaru Nakamura shifted in 1998 to using a standard sound-mixing console, without any external sources, to create a deeply personal sonic palette. His first release with this approach was Un, a duo album with samplers played by Sachiko M. While it’s sometimes impossible to discern sounds’ sources, other parts have the squeaks & burbling that would become central to Nakamura’s palette. In 2000, Nakamura released the solo album No-Input Mixing Board, & also began using this name to refer to the instrument that he had devised. Unlike the continuously morphing improvisations on Un, this album sometimes uses clear repetition of parts as an organizing principle. For listeners unaccustomed to free-flowing improvisations, these repeating elements might present an easier entry point to Nakamura’s work. Tracks on this album were simply titled “Nimb #1” through “Nimb #9,” a series of numbered experiments named with the acronym for his unique instrument.

These releases created a template for Nakamura’s work over the next several years. Solo albums like No-Input Mixing Board 2, No-Input Mixing Board [3], & Vehicle continued the deeply personal explorations in the series of numbered “Nimb” tracks. The majority of Nakamura’s joint releases in this era were duo albums with fellow improvisers such as guitarist & cofounder of AMM Keith Rowe, who since the mid-’60s explored texture & nonrepetition in their improvisations. This cross-generational collaboration of innovators is captured on 2001’s Weather Sky & 2006’s Between. Duets with generational peers like inside pianist Andrea Neumann

toshimaru nakamura Egrets

SAMADHISOUND 2010

Diane Barcelowsky

& expanded percussionist Sean Meehan reflected the similarities in approach & parallel results, between Nakamura’s self-designed instrument & these improvisers’ rethinking & reworking of more conventional tools. Even 2001’s Siphono, with French saxophonist Bruno Meillier of rock bands Les I & Etron Fou Leloublan, is only a modest shift toward extroversion, with no other obvious hint of Meillier’s background in having played songs in bands.

The story that leads to Nakamura’s surprising explorations in 2010, unexpectedly, involves the British songwriter David Sylvian, who is best known for having fronted the new wave band Japan in London in the mid-’70s. Sylvian first dipped a toe in experimental streams of music on his 1999 album Dead Bees on a Cake, on which collaborators from Asian Underground pioneer Talvin Singh to Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra added subtle color & nuance to his songs. Sylvian made a much more ambitious leap away from rock conventions with 2003’s Blemish, where his melodic vocals, while quite prominent in the mix, are the only element that references rock music. Sylvian’s vocals are instead backed by Austrian electronic minimalist Christian Fennesz & British avant-jazz guitarist Derek Bailey. Scott Walker’s work from the same era is one

of few points of comparison. Sylvian’s next album, 2009’s Manafon, featured a bigger group of notable experimental musicians, including Nakamura & his past collaborators Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Otomo Yoshihide, & Sachiko M. The arrangements on Manafon are both more diverse & better-integrated with Sylvian’s vocals.

After utilizing Nakamura as a backing musician on Blemish, Sylvian released Egrets the following year on his Samadhisound label. Egrets differs from his earlier work in two key ways. For the first time, Nakamura combines on a single release solo, numbered “Nimb” tracks alongside collaborations. Four “Nimb” tracks roughly alternate with duets, one with longtime associate Akiyama, & three with Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen of the group Supersilent. Henriksen’s 2008 album Cartography features Sylvian on vocals, & he & Nakamura collaborated during Sylvian’s 2009 installation in the Canary Islands, When We Return You Won’t Recognize Us

In addition to the overt structural change of interweaving solo & duo tracks, Egrets subtly departs stylistically from Nakamura’s earlier work. The recordings develop purposely, often with lush, modulating drones & hints of harmonic evolution—these traits clearly reference the ambient-music idiom. In contrast, when his earlier pieces leaned

sparse, they tended to use a stoic & stark palette, with its austerity more off-putting than pretty. The collaborations on Egrets bring especially familiar approaches to the foreground. For example, on “Semi,” Tetuzi Akiyama’s overtly pretty guitar pairs with a somewhat-tonal approach to the no-input mixing board. On “Heater/Refrigerator,” the combination of Arve Henriksen’s percussive patterns against Nakamura’s tonal drones provides intimacy. In contrast, a solo track like “Nimb Number 44” feels recognizable thanks to a slowly evolving ambient quality.

While Nakamura has continued to release albums at a steady pace since 2010, Egrets remains an outlier among his work. Structurally, he’s returned to separating his numbered solo “Nimb” tracks from his collaborative work, with four new albums & an EP of exclusively these tracks. These pieces have returned to his combination of chaotic loops & timbral, austere drones, without any of the rich ambience of Egrets. Even Re-Verbed—with digital reverb being central to these improvisations—marks less of a stylistic departure than might be expected from the title.

Nakamura has continued to work with improvisers probing the most extreme depths of unique textures. This includes both new explorations with Otto Willberg, John Butcher, & Mazen Kerbaj, & the return of longtime collaborators like Axel Dörner, Tetuzi Akiyama, & Ignaz Schick. One small surprise among his recent work is Elements, a remote union with David Lee Myers, whose own development of “Feedback Machines” resembles Nakamura’s focus on the no-input mixing board. While these collaborations unearth subtle evolution in Nakamura’s refined approach, none has led to material as drastic or surprising as Egrets. Since Egrets neither reached new listeners nor excited Nakamura’s existing fans, it’s unsurprising that he has returned to a comfort zone where he’s developed such a refined, impressive approach.

Steve Silverstein is a recordist & sometimes musician. His written work appears in Tape Op Magazine

MEGHAN TURBITT

OPTICAL REVIEW

Tierra Whack

World Wide Whack

INTERSCOPE 2024

Where is it, where is it?” I spent a few minutes this morning rifling through my apartment, looking for one of the only CDs I still own from my teenage years. Most of what I do have is in a box in storage, & I admit I don’t think about them much. But I feel the need to keep this one closer. It moves around though; sometimes I pick it up, regard it tenderly like a scrapbook, & then arbitrarily decide I’ll move it from Special Secret Drawer #1 to Special Secret Drawer #2. (I found it. It was in Special Secret Drawer #4.)

The album is Back To Go, released in 1999 on Chainsaw Records. It is the second & final album of Portland-based queercore band The Third Sex, a three-piece fronted by Peyton Marshall & Trish Walsh (who both sing & trade off equally on guitar & bass), with Shari Menard taking up the drums here. It was never released on vinyl, & isn’t on any streaming services*, so this CD I bought 25 years ago is still the best source I have to hear these songs.

*A random YouTube user has uploaded some of the tracks individually, so you can hear them if you search for the band & album names together; but it’s multiple video files with ads in between, so it’s not ideal.

The jewel case is rough to the touch, patchily opaque, & there’s a big crack in the front. But the hinges are miraculously intact. When I open the case, the disc tumbles out, because those little teeth that hold it in place are long gone, lost inside countless bags & passenger seats & moving boxes over the years. Back To Go is 13 tracks, & clocks in at just under 30 minutes. It is genuinely shocking how much storytelling is packed into this half hour. The lyrics are detailed, urgent, descriptive. I’m not sure who was the primary lyricist, Marshall or

NIKKI KARAM

LOVE & HEARTBREAK FULL TILT

the third sex Back To Go

CHAINSAW RECORDS 1999

Walsh, but it didn’t surprise me at all to learn that one of them (Marshall) went on to a career in literary fiction, wrote an acclaimed science fiction novel, & was recently an NEA Creative Writing Fellow.

Many of these songs are set in specific scenes—a therapist’s office, a grim holiday with family you don’t want to be around, a messy bedroom, a skidding car in the few seconds before a crash.

The most fully realized scene is in

the first track, “Maul 10.09.97,” my favorite of the album. The lyrics & the upbeat momentum of the guitar conjure up the fizzy thrum of excitement that comes with waiting out on the cold sidewalk of a beloved, decrepit venue; waiting for the show to start, waiting for your crush or your ex to show up & catch your eye. The friendships in these spaces burn so bright; some of these people will be your friends for life & some you’ll never see after 23. But

Nikki Karam can't shut up about music, & worries it might be kind of annoying.

we’re all on the same footing when we’re at the show.

This song touches on the relationship between fan & musician, how one person can be both things in different environments, & how being in the crowd near the stage can inspire someone to pick up an instrument & start a band themselves. This ethos was fundamental to the riot-grrrl scene The Third Sex came from, & it’s still one of the most enduring lessons I learned from that movement.

This theme comes up again later in the album, on “Lights Out,” with a dose of cynicism about what it means to be that person on the stage—and what it means for the people around you when that stage gets bigger & bigger.

Did you say what you thought you’d say

When you could some day?

...Never thought there would be a day

I pay to see you play

These dilemmas might land differently now, in 2024 when the music industry is so different than it was in 1999, but the concern at its core is timeless: what happens to those young, momentous friendships when the moment stops, when life gets bigger, & we make different choices about where & how to live— and what does it mean when your choices are so different than mine?

Heady stuff to think about then, & still now.

I think most fans of The Third Sex will say, though, that their true heart lies in the two themes they sing about the most: love & heartbreak, & being visibly queer in a hostile society. These themes go hand in hand, as this band well knows. In a very brief interview with The Oregonian in 2010, Walsh stated, “We wrote heartbreak songs, but they were political because they were about queer relationships.” Their previous releases

Noelle Egan

spend more time on the political side of heartbreak, & that material is sonically a lot more hard-edged than Back To Go (I love their entire discography, deeply). But this al-

secret identities all in two minutes. These songs blaze full tilt, almost too fast to squeeze in the lengthy lyrics, almost so fast that the thought crosses your mind, “Is

Their true heart lies in the two themes they

sing

about the most: love & heartbreak, & being visibly queer in a hostile society.

bum still has plenty to say on the matter, & the more polished production & songwriting is one thing that sets it apart from punk/queercore/riot-grrrl bands of the time, & from their own catalog.

When this album lived semipermanently in my Discman, I was a shy, weird, queer teenage white girl in 1990s suburbia, with lots of time to myself walking around my town or riding the train into the city. “Projected Arrival” is one of the only songs I had ever heard on coming out, & the knowing, vivid details of this song really helped me understand my own circumstances. Coming out was not a onetime event, as I had recently started to learn, but rather a constant, iterative process that shifted depending on who I was talking to, where I was living, whether or not the queer people around me were out, etc. It could be painful, confusing, tedious, isolating. I can point to songs like this one & “Wonderful Life” as tangible things that made life easier back then.

And then there’s the love & heartbreak, the romance of it all that swirls so head-swimmingly all over this album, & their previous album (1996’s Card Carryin’ ). At least half of the songs here are about getting together & breaking up. Some of them move so fast, lyrically & sonically, that they cover friendship, romance, breakups, future aspirations &

this playing on 1.25 speed somehow?” It’s not. These songs are built in extreme italics, the urgency audible in Menard’s relentless tom drums, & Walsh’s high-andfast vocal delivery. Marshall’s vocals are more even-keeled by comparison, which elevates the whole tremendously, & she does grace the listener with a few enraged snarls on occasion (not as much as on Card Carryin’, but it’s a gift nonetheless).

The longest song on this album (at just 3:16) is “Go Away,” & it’s the most straightforward of their many breakup songs:

And I know it’s hard on you All the things you said we’d do But you could never follow through I believed in you

This track is one of their most subdued, rivaled by the song that comes just before it, “Metal Skin,” & because these are the last two songs on their last release, I can’t help but wonder if this was a glimpse into their future material. (Such is the power of good track sequencing!)

I have often wondered what the third The Third Sex album would sound like. This, their second album, is so overflowing with catchy hooks & melodies & dual vocals, there is no filler, which implies to me that the unwritten material would’ve been damn good.

MARIETTE PAPI Ć

REBELLION POOLS OF SYNTHS & SAMPLES

Critics do a great deal of damage by wishing to discover “greatness.” It does not matter that all composers are not great composers; it matters that this activity be encouraged, among all the population that we communicate with each other in nondestructive ways.

—Pauline Oliveros, The New York Times, September 13, 1970

I remember standing in Le Souk in NYC on a Sunday afternoon. I was asking the DJ to show me some things, to maybe teach me about his approach. I noted the bpms, so we talked about rhythms. It was hitting around 127 bpm, a solid house-music pace, if ever there was one. Somewhere around 78 bpm was for the feel of a heartbeat. One was for making the dance floor go wild, the other for couples, the DJ explained as I barely dared to touch the console. The documentary Sisters with Transistors, directed by Lisa Rovner, would not exist if all women were like me.

We start the film with a dancing ’90s raver who has lost her car, providing our narrator, Laurie Anderson, with just the right amount of space to do her magical thing with timing & pauses. “This is the story of women, who hear music in their heads.” Leaving the lost raver, we go back in time, gathering knowledge from a busy stream, until we land with Clara Rockmore, born in 1911. Watching virtuoso violinist Rockmore play the theremin is like watching her plug into the frequency of invisible wings. Rockmore captivates as she pulls on energy, connecting us to the previously unseen strings of our history.

One artist’s story cuts into the other, circling back again to yet another. The result is a series of carefully constructed loops, gathering us into overlaps that illustrate a movement, an evolution more than any single individual. We travel deep into the mists of our shared ancestry, into the primordial pools of synths & samples. The narrative

lisa rovner

Sisters with Transistors (Film) METROGRAPH PICTURES 2020

weave grows somehow tighter as it becomes more expansive, taking in ten artists before it’s all done.

Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Clara Rockmore, Wendy Carlos & Laurie Spiegel are all profiled. Through these women we journey into a prequel of who we are today.

We meet Delia Derbyshire tapping her foot & recording a sound in a BBC studio. She notes a natural sound needs complexity & we witness her turning knobs & making loops. She seems placid but we will learn of Delia’s early life, “I was in Coventry during the blitz,” she says. “My love for abstract sounds were the sounds of the air-raid sirens…it’s an abstract sound & it’s meaningful, & then the all clear— Well, that’s electronic music!” She says the last line excitedly. We are transported to a survey of ruins. For some reason I think of Ukraine & its ravers, those who gather to dance & then clean up what’s left of their lives.

Daphne Oram sits prim & prop-

er as she quietly inhabits the Radiophonic Workshop, also at the BBC. A little while later we see her painting onto film that she will feed into a machine. It’s no big deal with Daphne. She’s simply creating her own kind of interactive notation, waving her hands around with her painted films. We follow Daphne to the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, to a screening of Poème Électronique, a collaboration by Edgard Varèse featuring photographs by Le Corbusier. Hearing this work with its accompaniment of abstract images, set over hundreds of speakers, provides validation & inspiration to young Daphne. “Electronic music was more than incidental, it was the sound of the future,” says the narrator. Then the sound in the film starts to build into a very big deal. We see a montage of working class people in pairs & in groups of four. They are dancing in modern enough clothes, but in old-fashioned ways. Twirling at times, stepping or jigging at others, old & young, they appear as a clip of Oram’s Birds of Parallax plays. A profound continuity of folk culture emerges. As a

raver, as an immigrant kid, one step removed from village life, I know what I’m seeing. It’s this montage section alone that makes this film required “reading.”

The sisters lead us one to another, towards the future where we will meet Laurie Spiegel, who was once told she was too old, too ignorant of music to ever be a serious composer. She then goes on to study anthropology at college. She also goes on to attend Oxford & Juilliard. Then we hear her 1974 composition, Appalachian Grove, a song whose title & execution feels like a knowing herald. Good thing Laurie persisted. Within this story of knobs & patches, is passion & personal exploration. As a young Suzanne Ciani explained on April 30, 1974, as she prepared for a performance with a Buchla synthesizer, “These instruments are designed by a manufacturer in Berkeley, California. They’re probably the most sophisticated system that’s available, & I think they’re sensual.” Then she asks for a cigarette & repeats the word, “Sensual.”

This sensuality takes us deep into abstract sounds & spaces, eventually leading to a vastness we call nature. This also brings me, & us, to Pauline Oliveros, a composer who played a world-shattering accordion amongst other talents. Oliveros came up with Deep Listening, a technique that is portrayed in the film with still photos of women in nature. They are wrapped into & around the rocks of a wilderness, bathed & draped in a landscape.

With Pauline we glimpse the power of paying attention, to the slow process of uncovering patterns through our physicality. Pauline would laugh at my fear of mediocrity, just as she disdained the notion of her own greatness.

Right now a young woman, not too different from who I was, is standing in front of equipment, scared to touch the dials for fear they might make a sound. When that fear is gone, we will have a new kind of culture. When that fear is gone, we will have liberation for all.

Mariette Papić obsesses at the intersection of image, text & everything else, including technology & art. She is the coauthor of From Behind the Chair, published by Auguries and Alchemy.

Dale Flattum

Having been part of a band is commonly considered a “cool” credential, but that notion doesn’t necessarily extend to those who were members of an indie-pop band. The genre’s simple songs & precious aesthetic are often considered unbecoming of a genuine music person. It’s a bit like claiming to be a chef, & then telling people your specialty is boiled hot dogs & boxed mac & cheese.

The only thing less cool than having been in an indie-pop band is having been in one that never really got it together. Because it doesn’t take much to pull off a twee act—no cost-prohibitive gear or technical virtuosity is required. At heart, it’s just three chords & the couth. Yet, that’s the predicament I find myself in because The Ladies*—the indie-pop trio I performed in at the turn of the last century—was more of an idea than an actual band. We played together for little over a year, & we never officially released any music. In fact, if you were to encounter a group of elder millennial music lovers at, say, a Philadelphia-area brewery or children’s soccer tournament & asked if they remembered a band named The Ladies, you’re likely to be met with a brief glance into the middle distance, a shuffling of HOKAs, & a resolute, “Naaaah.”

And yet we did exist. We wrote songs, practiced, played shows, & a few people not related to us even clapped. It could be argued that in our unrealized potential & near ghostlike passage through Philadelphia in the late 1990s, The Ladies were more representative of band culture in the United States during that era than every band you’ve ever heard of. Because for every Sleater-Kinney & Belle and Sebastian, there were a thousand groups that lacked the means, discipline, talent, and/or self-esteem to have their voices rise above the cacophony. The Ladies were one of those bands. What’s more, for a brief moment, we & indie pop were cool.

Most nights in Philadelphia circa ’97, you could spin the dial of your

BRENDAN FRANCIS NEWNAM MEET THE LADIES

the ladies

An Instant Message from The Ladies (UNRELEASED) CIRCA 1997

Photo by Jodie Vicenta Jacobsen Melrose

car radio & hear nothing but Zeppelin for an hour straight. Philly, on the surface—and the airwaves—appeared to be a middle-of-the-road music town. Gamble & Huff were in the rearview, Bowie had (allegedly) come & gone, & “All You Zombies” was not just the third-single name of the local & legendary The Hooters but an apt description for the scene. However, below the surface, far left of the dial, in the neighbor-

hoods abutting Rittenhouse Square & Society Hill, “indie” music was taking hold. All the ingredients were there—endless blocks of barely populated apartments, acres of thrift-store clothes, & a whack of middle-class kids biding time until college graduation. In addition, despite its small size, every indie band from Olympia to Louisville passed through Philly on their way to or returning from New York, just

two hours north on I-95. Which meant most evenings, the city’s corduroy-clad, shaggy-haired, pastiche de la bourgeoisie would attend concerts in venues with sensational names like the Khyber Pass, Silk City, the Trocadero, & venues with unsensational names like Nick’s Roast Beef.

This was The Ladies’ habitat. We were local students, music enthusiasts, & amateur musicians—in that order. Our origin story reads like an indie-pop song itself. I was a parttime barista at a coffee shop when I met Jessica Chiu, who was reading a book of poetry. My second gig was working for the Web 1.0 music site CD-NOW with my best friend, Laris Kreslins.** Each week, Laris & I would drive to an office park outside of town, pick up a few boxes of random CDs—opera, UK invasion, reggae—take them home, & select representative 30-second samples from each. We received $1.50 per album, a speedy education in the history of music, & a new appreciation for short songs.

On late afternoons between school & work, I’d walk down Pine Street to Jessica’s. There we’d eat—Jessica’s freezer was stocked with her mother’s frozen dumplings—gossip, share poetry, & play guitar. We also listened to all manner of music, but especially Lilys, Unrest, the Kinks, and, most dear to our hearts, a band we’d just embraced the year before: Belle and Sebastian. Part of the appeal of B&S’s music was that it felt within reach. We could mimic their chords. The characters they sang about seemed familiar. Their songs did not require loads of talent or a tanker of testosterone—two things we decidedly lacked. Instead, it consisted of a few chords on guitar, an arch yet sensitive worldview, & egos that could do with a little stroking. Those we had.

We decided The Ladies’ first album would be called Meet the Ladies, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Beatles & a saucy pun about why people throughout history have created bands. But due to the ramshackle nature of our project, recording an entire album seemed

Francis Newnam has replaced indie pop with the more venerated pursuit of podcasting. His most recent work is the travelogue Not Lost.

Brendan

unlikely, so we lowered our sights & planned on recording an EP. The name would draw from the dial-up internet era we were living in & invoke the ephemerality of our very band: An Instant Message from The Ladies

The first song we wrote & recorded was “Honesty Honestly,” a peppy paean to falsity sung over ascending & descending bar chords. The lyrics contained indie pop’s requisite allusions to romance & books, as well as suggestive double entendres akin to classic rock & roll, which indie pop sought to counter.

The perfume was heavy in the back of the Chevy and she’s got a strong wrist from reading books in bed written by men about lives she hasn’t led she borrows someone’s sorrows so her life feels full tomorrow

And later on we’ll quarrel when I say, “All these books haven’t helped you with your head.”

The strummy verses transitioned into a harmonized chorus reminiscent of a Frank Loesser musical. During each take, the recording engineer, Laris’s older brother Kristaps, would playfully mimic a vaudeville performer, tipping an imaginary straw boater hat & waving a cane. However, the lyrics are more Left Bank than Broadway: “These are the thoughts I was holding when my moments were stolen, ‘We pay. We submit. We get by,’” offering a somber commentary of capitalism & human nature itself. At some point along the way, we fell in with Transient Waves, a trio from Michigan who had moved to Philly with little fanfare. (With a release on Darla & a recent signing to FatCat, a case could be made that they were the most accomplished musicians in the city.) The Waves brewed drony, shoegaze-y audioscapes a world away from our homespun pop, but in keeping with the prevailing genre agnosticism of the time, we all ran in the same circles. When their guitarist, Loren Jackson, offered to record a few of

our songs at his home studio, we jumped at the chance. Well, The Ladies never “jumped.” We would think about jumping, fixate on where we were jumping & how we would jump, & then, slowly, holding on as long as we could, make our way over the lip of something until we were hanging off it, & then, finger by finger, we would let go. By the time we did, I had graduated from school & accepted a job in Europe. It was a week before my departure when we entered Loren’s bedroom studio & set about recording our music. We recorded two songs—one I hardly remem-

chords—a rudimentary C, G & D tempered by a few embellishments & a pathos-inducing A minor. Unaccustomed to playing with a click track, our first couple of takes of “Heads Out the Window” opened with a wheeze as each of our instruments bolted from the starting line alone before eventually merging. Finally, Loren provided us cover by overdubbing a droning guitar wail at the top of the track. It sounds like a train outpacing our road-tripping protagonist as he tries out words without breaking them in and, yes, puts his head out the passenger-side window to

What felt alchemical was, in fact, the accumulation of thousands of little actions by a group of people coming together to combine words & sounds to articulate the ineffable…

ber & one a bona fide gem. The gem was “Heads Out the Window.”

Falling down over three thousand miles away, I cut my thumb on a ticket stub just the other day, Trying out words without breaking them in. Driving through towns where I know you’ve been.

Before moving back to Philadelphia, I’d spent the better part of five years traveling across the United States. The simple yet disorienting act of driving away from the place you come from to find the place you need to be is embodied in the song’s

feel the rush & disorientation that comes with progress. Despite being a decidedly twee band with an unhealthy crush on Belle and Sebastian, the chorus also featured harmonized “oohs” & “ohs” that are more George Harrison than Talulah Gosh.

And in Philadelphia in 1998, it was this song that wormed its way into many a mod-cut-covered ear as we performed it live at the Ethical Society on Rittenhouse Square, the venerable Khyber Pass in Old City, & while opening for The Lucksmiths at a loft party on 2nd Street. Also at an indie prom in Somerville, MA. It was never clear to us whether the lyrics in the chorus

were “Nowhere you want to be” or “Know where you want to be,” but since we never published our songs, we never had to decide. It remains a Malkmusian riddle even as I write this, because all these years later, it’s still unclear to me which state of mind is preferable.

I only remember a couple of things about the other song we recorded. The first line of the track was, “I couldn’t tell if she was laughing when she said to me ‘Just follow your dreams…don’t fall on your dreams.’”

In retrospect, these lyrics are an early harbinger of a recurrent motif that has pervaded my adulthood—the dichotomy between actualizing my creative aspirations & the practicalities of forging a stable career path. The narrator’s inability to decipher whether the speaker was laughing or not underscores the ambiguity & inner conflict he grappled with, unlike her apparent clarity on striking an equilibrium between dreams & reality.

Beyond that, the only thing I remember about the tune is a small cello part in the bridge, spontaneously played by Sid Tucker, Transient Wave’s bass player. I first heard her contribution while listening to a rough mix of the track in my recently packed-up apartment. My body started to tingle & I felt my eyes well with tears. At that moment, it was the most exquisite thing I’d ever heard, & I couldn’t believe I’d had some small part in conjuring it. What felt alchemical was, in fact, the accumulation of thousands of little actions by a group of people coming together to combine words & sounds to articulate the ineffable—the very essence of being in a band.

It was the first of a few moments in my life that gave me a taste of the soul-enriching rewards awaiting those who diligently pursue a creative life.

We never made a final mix of the song. A few days later, for fear of “falling on my dreams,” I boarded a plane to Prague to start my new job. The Ladies. As ephemeral as a kiss. An instant message written but never sent—and no less real for it.

*The Ladies discussed in this review are not to be confused with The Ladies, a musical collaboration between Rob Crow of Pinback & Zach Hill of Hella that would release an actual album in the midaughts.

**Laris Kreslins is the publisher of Sound Collector Audio Review & he had no idea he would be the subject of this review until it was turned in...very late.

DAVID TOBOCMAN

PRIMORDIAL SOUP SPLASH LAND

Expecting to Fly’’ is as out of place on Side A of Neil Young’s Decade as it is on Side A of Buffalo Springfield Again. That’s because there is no context to understand this amount of pure dreaminess on a rock record. Always in the Buffalo Springfield orbit (he would have been the band’s producer if Lenny Waronker had succeeded in signing them to Warner Bros. Records), producer-arranger Jack Nitzsche finally got to work with kindred spirit Neil Young, cooking up their ambitious mini-opus “Expecting to Fly” during one of his many splits with the band, this time in the midst of recording the second Springfield album. Nitzsche the arranger was formerly part of the brain trust behind Phil Spector’s famed Wall of Sound, so we can see his own work as producer (much like Brian Wilson’s) as a refinement or development of the Spector sound. Like Phil Spector, Jack Nitzsche is known as one of the great rock & roll cranks (although Nitzsche’s version is significantly more lovable). Nitzsche’s career as a recording artist had been a zigzag by the time he set about to make the self-titled album in 1974, his debut as a singer-songwriter solo act. Born in Chicago & raised in rural Michigan, Nietzsche moved to Los Angeles for music school & stayed. His career started at Specialty Records, hired on as a music copyist by none other than Sonny Bono, with whom he would cowrite “Needles and Pins,” a minor hit for Jackie DeShannon (the song later went to #1 for the Searchers in the UK). His own instrumental composition “The Lonely Surfer” broke the top 40 in 1963 and Reprise Records followed it with an instrumental album of the same title, the cover featuring a studio photo of a young Jack Nitzsche in a suit and skinny tie, staged sitting awkwardly on a driftwood log, surrounded by sand & marine debris, holding a conductor’s baton. An inauspicious debut for someone who would lodge himself so firmly into the recorded history of rock music. While churning out orchestrations

jack nitzsche

Jack Nitzsche

REPRISE 1974 / HANKY PANKY RECORDS-MAPACHE RECORDS 2020

as part of Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew (which he also conducted) & playing around LA as a studio musician, Nitzsche put out two more album-length instrumental non sequiturs on Reprise in the mid’60s (rightly filed under Easy Listening). It was around this time that Nitzsche met the Rolling Stones & started appearing as session keyboardist on their records, notably on the “Paint It Black” & “Let’s Spend the Night Together” singles, & was a mainstay on the remainder of their ’60s albums. Always the catalyst, it was Nitzsche that introduced Ry Cooder to Keith Richards, a profound influence that, along with Gram Parsons & new producer Jimmy Miller, would help them move out of the Beatles’ long shadow & into their own as a heavy, dominating force in music. As the decade wore on, the blunt, irascible Nitzsche cultivated a heavy guru-raconteur vibe, wooing Neil Young away from his band to

launch a solo career on Reprise (Nitzsche’s sidekick Denny Bruce would refer to him as the “Yoko Ono of Buffalo Springfield”). His client list continued to expand & by the time he embarked on his own solo career as a singer-songwriter, Nitzsche had created orchestrations & arrangements on countless recordings (including his own St. Giles Cripplegate 1972 album, a healthy slab of epic orchestral weirdness). He had pounded the piano on a raft of Rolling Stones records as well as on the shambolic, drug-&-tequila-fueled Time Fades Away tour with Neil Young, & was producer on songs & albums for both teen idols & rock geniuses. It was 1974 & Jack Nitzsche’s accumulated influences & musical growth were coming to a boil.

Until recently, very few people had known about his 1974 eponymous album, let alone heard it, something that has now been thankfully rectified. Shelved upon comple-

tion, the album’s 11 tracks were first released as part of the Three Piece Suite: The Reprise Recordings 19711974 mini–box set released on CD in 2001, a year after the artist’s death, & finally, Jack Nitzsche was recently released on vinyl—& it’s glorious. Fans of his other work will expect to be impressed, even beguiled, but nothing can prepare one for the arresting beauty of the opening song, “Lower California.” Starting out as a somewhat plodding waltz on the black keys of the piano, Nitzsche sings wistfully of the reasons he is leaving the Golden State. The song moves to a more brisk 4/4 on the first iteration of the key lyric “goodbye,” & then downshifts into an easy, swinging doo-wop groove on the second “goodbye,” changing key up to the much brighter white notes of the piano but moving down with the melody, simultaneously bringing in luscious, enveloping Beach Boys–style harmonies. The song continues to toggle between the different keys & tempos with harmonies cascading all over the place, a head-spinning effect. From the opening measures of Jack Nitzsche, you are transfixed. Jack’s somewhat creaky vocals are forgiven, both because he communicates the world-weary lyrics so well & because we know he’s a novice vocalist. Also debuting on this adventurous singer-songwriter album is filmmaker & first-time lyricist Robert Downey Sr. (father of the actor), who takes a break from writing and directing absurdist comedies like Putney Swope & Greaser’s Palace to try his hand at songwriting and he fucking nails it:

I’m too old to fight you Too poor to tame you So goodbye Lower California, goodbye Nothing underneath you Goodbye Lower California, nothing is beneath you Goodbye

The album proceeds like the great lost eclectic ’70s album that Jack Nitzsche surely is, shifting

David Tobocman is an author-musician-composer-producer from Detroit, living in Los Angeles.

Jess Rotter

through various moods & styles, even within songs. The next track, “Who Said What to Who” is a brief, rollicking, mid-tempo boogie in the mold of “Savoy Truffle” with a Randy Newmanesque narrator offering wry, nonrhyming fragments of his somewhat sordid confession until he shouts, “Hallelujah, I’ve got the blues,” & the whole thing segues into the long, sumptuous, fully orchestrated, circus-aerialist music intro of the next track. We have left the ground yet we are unmistakably still listening to that eclectic ’70s rock album, & it is somewhere within this extended moment of gorgeousness when it hits you that Nitzsche must have really pissed off someone at Reprise—likely label head Mo Os-

the opener “On the Moodus Run,” showing us brief glimpses into multiple scenes: a raucous blues bar, a gospel church, a traveling circus, and finally, what sounds like a spooky glass harmonica concert. The cosmic cowboy love song “Marie” is here, but the balance of Side B is taken up by the two remaining major instrumentals. “Brace” & “Number Eleven” both dip into orchestrated modern classical terrain, which is something we come to expect from the arranger-conductor who once brought us the breathtaking “Expecting to Fly.” “Brace” is a bluesy, slow New Orleans funeral march transitioning into a warm, modernist string quartet that sounds like Dvořák on good drugs (the whole thing takes just over two minutes). The final track

Nitzsche must have really pissed off someone at Reprise—likely label head Mo Ostin—to have this amazing work held back, because this thing is nothing short of found treasure.

tin—to have this amazing work held back, because this thing is nothing short of found treasure. “I’m the loneliest fool…in the atmosphere” is that song’s only lyric & we cut, Zappa-style, to an oblique, not-quite-atonal piano intro, then it’s back into the barrelhouse with the chugging slow boogie of “Little Al,” its coarse striptease music offered as contrast & ballast to what precedes, & more importantly, follows. “Sleeping Daughter” is the album’s first bit of unalloyed earnestness. A brief but sincere dip into piano-ballad territory with lush strings as the backdrop, as a father dreams of what the future holds for his child: “I hope I live to see what you will be.” But it’s not long before we are suddenly launched headlong into a cantina somewhere in the midst of a spirited mariachi band accelerating through “New Mexico” & coming out the other side to emerge in the Bacharach-tinged “Hanging Around,” a pleasant enough place for this adventurous album side to momentarily land.

Side B is even more of a kaleidoscope, with some tracks like

on the album, “Number Eleven,” is a seven-minute experimental 20th-century classical piece that combines the droning texture of a string orchestra with rolling tympani holding an F in different octaves, joined in & out with a moog synthesizer, out of which bursts a brass fanfare, then a colorful, imaginative orchestral smattering that evokes Schoenberg at his most playful atonalness. It’s somehow a fitting end to the journey to splash land in the primordial soup before signing off.

Nitzsche’s next move was into composing film scores (The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, & Starman his most noteworthy) as well as continuing to produce & arrange for artists (he produced Graham Parker’s triumph Squeezing Out Sparks in 1979).

Nothing was ever heard again from his singer-songwriter career, or his extraordinary debut album Jack Nitzsche, now available as a standalone on vinyl. You can’t stream it—it’s not up on any of the platforms. You have to buy it. So buy it.

Killer Jack website: Spectropop.com/JackNitzsche

HERB SHELLENBERGER

VOICE ECHOING DOWN FROM HEAVEN

There are as many different types of sound collectors as there are sounds out there in the world to be collected. Each one is valid—they all complement each other. But there is a group (we are a persistent minority of the larger cohort) whose approach to sound collecting is archaeological, an impulse to scavenging the things left behind by others. In her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, filmmaker Agnès Varda casts a small scavenging incident from her life into a poetic framework. “[A man] looked at an empty clock but put it back down. I picked it up & took it home. A clock without hands works fine for me. You don’t see time passing.” Vinyl, tapes, shellac, discs or sundry other forms of media make their way into our world. They might have as practical a use for us as a clock without hands, yet to some the impulse to salvage & shepherd these cultural artifacts into the future is of paramount importance. Īnia Te Wīata’s album West Indian Spirituals and Folk Songs, originally released in 1968, is one such artifact to me.

Īnia Mōrehu Tauhia Wātene Iarahi Waihurihia Te Wīata was born June 10, 1915, in Ōtaki, New Zealand. His father was of Māori-Scots heritage, his mother Swedish. As a young teenager, Te Wīata’s voice shifted to the basso-profundo range. He was as prodigious a singer as he was an artist, particularly in the traditional Māoritanga art of wood carving. While his talents in both fields were enthusiastically supported by his elders through apprenticeship & instruction, eventually singing won out: in 1947, he sailed for the UK to attend Trinity College of Music in London. By 1950, he had successfully auditioned for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. But this full-time role only lasted a handful of years; Te Wīata preferred to vary his creative pursuits, giving solo recitals, performing in musicals & stage plays, & on television & radio.

On December 27, 1957, he appeared on the BBC radio program Commonwealth of Song, described as “Artists from the Commonwealth gather[ing] in London to send greetings to their folks back home & to listen-

Īnia Te Wīata

West Indian Spirituals and Folk Songs

ers in Britain.” We can presume he sang traditional Māori songs like “Pōkarekare Ana” & “Hine E Hine,” the works he is most popularly associated with. On the same program, Trinidadian singer & folklorist Edric Connor sang calypso music from his heritage. Like Te Wīata, Connor was an émigré, arriving to London from Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1944. Connor was himself a song collector, salvaging the music & lyrics of the West African slaves who had been brought to the islands over the previous 300 years.

Te Wīata fell in love with this music, adding many of these songs to his own repertoire. After a decade of finding his own interpretations, he went into the studio to record a session of eight calypsos from Connor’s songbook. Working with pianist Maurice Till & arrangers Max Saunders & Hal Evans, Te Wīata ably performs confident & soulful versions of these Caribbean folk songs. This duo performance for-

mat, with Te Wīata’s bass vocals & Maurice Till’s elegantly efficient piano playing, is maximally simplistic, allowing the listener to concentrate on each. This album was released in 1968 by the New Zealand label Kiwi (focused on Māori art & culture), & subsequently licensed in the United States by New Jersey’s Musical Heritage Society. One could compare the interpretations from West Indian Spirituals and Folk Songs with Edric Connor’s recordings of the same songs found on his 1955 album Songs from Trinidad. While sonically the two men’s voices are remarkably similar, there are subtle variations in their delivery. Te Wīata’s melodies are mostly straight, perhaps owing to his work in the contexts of opera & musical theatre, while Connor’s melodic lines stress a swing feel, giving a push-pull jerkiness that results in a more playful, exploratory approach. Connor also varies the arrangements: instead of piano, we

usually hear a guitar or ukulele, occasionally congas or other percussion, & male vocal group The Southlanders providing choral backing. But the simplicity & elegance of Īnia Te Wīata’s calypso renditions is stark & captivating, & I feel mesmerized by this ancient-sounding music. In addition to the eight calypso tracks, there are four “negro spirituals”—in this context meaning standards of the American south like “I Got a Robe” & “Deep River.” Overall, West Indian Spirituals and Folk Songs feels both febrile & eternal. Īnia Te Wīata’s voice is full of life, so expressive & warm. I’ve rarely connected with singers who operate in this register, but on these recordings, it sounds like Te Wīata’s voice is echoing down to us from heaven. Not coincidentally, Īnia Te Wīata died from pancreatic cancer three years later in 1971.

Reflecting on this project in a contemporary context provides an interesting tension. I think of discussions of cultural (and salvage) anthropology, intersectionality, appropriation, high & low culture & much more. There could be ways to consider the ramifications of a Māori singer (accompanied by white New Zealand musicians) taking on the music that West Africans brought to the Caribbean, which was then subsequently imported to the seat of the Commonwealth, i.e. London. Not to mention the music of the antebellum American South.

But interestingly, one could also say that both Edric Connor & Īnia Te Wīata clearly owed a debt to another famous bass-baritone singer, himself an American. While Connor & Te Wīata arrived in the UK during the 1940s, they were traveling the path that Paul Robeson blazed in 1920s London as both a musician & actor for stage & screen. It’s not coincidental that the four “negro spirituals” that Īnia Te Wiata includes on this album were all recorded by Robeson. That said, each of these three men contributed immensely to musical history, & this album— which can be found very inexpensively—connects each of their legacies in a fascinating way.

Herb Shellenberger is a curator, writer and worker based in Bethlehem, PA, where he runs the record label Love’s Devotee & the Lehigh Valley Cinema Club.

David Edelsztein

Among 60-some live Fall releases only a handful are worthy of attention, most from the early classic lineups, 1979-84. This record takes its place among them, & no self-respecting Fall fan should do without. If you aren’t a fan, St. Helens may or may not change your mind. The tape, from the soundboard, is excellent, Mark E. Smith’s vocals front & clear at their shouted, piercing, mocking best. No one in the post-punk period sang & harangued like MES, & none since. Certainly, no band at that time sounded quite like the Fall. (A clarinet, of all things, in the mix for “Slates, Slags, Etc.”) Here you appreciate the band—a regiment, really, always on forward march—as both muscular & vulnerable, aggressive & jaunty, often within the same song. In the aftermath of punk, the fact that the Fall would romp over “Prole Art Threat” in under two minutes, then churn their way through “The NWRA” (The North Will Rise Again) in as many as ten, set them apart, acts of concision & expan-

The last years of raw gospel compilations on labels like Mississippi Records have enabled many people an easy capsule glimpse into the preservation of the incredible amount of talent that has flown under the radar throughout the decades. The availability allows one to transport to the heyday of Folkways & Arhoolie: no fancy A&R, studio production, style management, just record & release. The connection to certain isolated locales & scenes have revealed some enigmatic approaches to the genre, but rarely as startling as Alabama’s singer-guitarist Isaiah Owens. CaseQuarter’s 2004 release of Owens’ material, You Without Sin, Cast the First Stone presents him pictured in a swank zebra-skinned, wide-brimmed hat, big shades, wrangling a white Strat, & the sounds contained within are nothing short of otherworldly.

I first heard Isaiah on a CDR made for me by the extraordinary gospel DJ Kevin Nutt, who hosted the Sinners Crossroads show regularly on WFMU from his home in Alabama, always a source of great enlightenment for unfiltered sounds from the South. Kevin had been recording Owens on Montgomery’s WMGY; Owens had entered the scene with the Flying Clouds in the ’60s, then performing with the Montgomery Gospelaires in the ’80s. In the ’90s the Gospelaires disbanded, leaving Owens to accompany charismatic host Deacon Jesse McWhorter’s

the fall

Live at St. Helens Technical College, 1981

CASTLE FACE 2021

BOB

sion to which they were equally adept. No wonder John Peel referred to them as “the mighty Fall.” So many of the accolades went to Smith, & still do, six years since his passing, but the band was a force in their own right, to be reckoned with. Propelled by a rhythm section genetically connected—Steve Hanley’s bass, a lead instrument & an ominous undertow, in sync & in contrast to his brother Paul’s insistent drums—around which the wiry, sensuous scrape of Craig Scanlon’s deft-handed guitar, & Marc Riley’s rinky-dink/manic keyboards coiled themselves, the Fall thrived on polarities, often reversed. Smith was at times his own stunt double, as on “An Older Lover,” alternating faux fey vocals & his usual sung-spoken delivery. On “Jawbone And The Air Rifle,” he

NICKAS

hails “Misanthropy, Misanthropy,” while on “Rowche Rumble” he snarls, “Got an addiction like a hole in the ass.” “The backdrop,” as Smith wrote in the early ’80s, “shifted & changed” continually. One may doubt Smith’s claim to rearrange space-time (doesn’t all the best music?), yet he & his cohorts excelled at a peculiar sleight of mind, another dimension in a twilight zone. It’s impossible to miss the opening of the liner notes: “Credit where credit’s due.” There follows the list of band members, who played which instrument on each of the songs, & who wrote them. One can’t help but wonder, is this a rare instance when the credits are accurate? (Smith had always written them out; the band saw them when the record was in hand, often registering confusion &

Isaiah owens

You

Without Sin, Cast the First Stone CASEQUARTER 2004

BRIAN TURNER

rants with his special, self-taught electric guitar excursions that lashed about like frayed cables. Stuttering, dissonant, weirdly formed around traditional chords that conducted the magic protogrunge electricity of Hound Dog Taylor, with the Venusian vocabulary of say, Haino Keiji or Mikami Kan. For the seasoned guitar muso, it was reason to pause, maybe even shake a head, but coupled

with the effusive power of Owens’ voice & vocation, it socked an incredible wallop.

Owens continued his spotlight on Ann Talbert’s Cheerful Angels broadcast until it ceased in 2001, & around this time Kevin Nutt’s faithful attention to the program resulted in a myriad of taped evidence that had to find its way somewhere, built-in radio commercial spots & all. Happily, Nutt got involved

annoyance.) Also acknowledged, the late Kay Carroll, the Fall’s formidable manager, soundmen Grant Showbiz & Dave Tucker, photographer Bruce Crawford & designer Matt Jones. St. Helens captures the Fall at an early peak of their powers on a crisp Friday night, their music in stark black-andwhite. Fitting then that the fine photos & the sleeve are as well. After all, this is a true document, over 40 years after the fact. The tape was unearthed by Riley, who recalled “the gig was poorly attended. So much so that the promoter attempted to pull our fee… which resulted in him being pushed to the floor by…Kay Carroll. Sounds about right.”

Closing the record is “Fit And Working Again,” one of their most tuneful, possibly their most “normal” song up until that time. But it hadn’t ended the set. A 7-inch single is included with “Slates, Slags, Etc.” & “Muzorewi’s Daughter” so that we have the show in its scrappy, majestic entirety.

with AUM Fidelity’s Steven Joerg & 50 Miles of Elbow Room’s chief chronicler Adam Lore, & CaseQuarter became a subimprint of AUM & issued this heady batch of radio outtakes. Also in the fold is material Nutt had arranged to record on 4-track in live services & at the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. A 2004 excursion to New York resulted in some enthusiastically received local gigs & a WFMU Record Fair live broadcast, both of which gave Isaiah an eye-opening glimpse into how he was viewed outside his local bubble, a great encouragement. The pure soul & spirit that flows through these songs implodes the mere accepted notions of what guitar gospel espouses, & the notion that not everything needs to traverse the traditional path of studio/label/producer to create beauty. Indeed, the release notes mention how Owens’ music can be “discombobulating to the untrained ear,” & Ann Talbert’s joint vocals & testimony to these songs (in particular “Everything Will Be Alright”) adds even more offkilter wobbliness to the solid rock these recordings come off of. Yet it is pure & simple. This release certainly not only captures the power of the music but the experience of listening to a local, low-power radio station through static gauze, electricity, & voice keeping its own time & place, to ease the most savage of souls.

Benjy Ferree

xiu xiu Knife Play

ABSOLUTELY KOSHER RECORDS 2003

VILNIS CHAKARS

In their 20 years of operation, Xiu Xiu has released nearly as many albums, each a collage of fears & memories from the band’s one consistent member, Jamie Stewart.

Stewart refers to the band’s music as “a reconstruction of negative emotions from something selfdestructive into something productive,” using Xiu Xiu as a vessel to bottle their pain, transforming it into something tangible. Xiu Xiu’s earliest record, 2002’s sorrowful classic Knife Play, is where the band’s most stress-inducing work is found.

Knife Play is chock-full of metallic instrumentation & discordant songs, yet they still remain catchy & danceable, with specific moments of aural pleasantry propelled by the synths & brass instrumentation on tracks such as “Luber” & “Suha.” Across the album, Stewart sings of their experience battling suicidal thoughts, violent breakups, STDs, & feeling like a stranger in one’s own body. Stewart

Even for a career as rife with zags as Warren Defever’s, Detrola represents a significant point of flux for his primary project. It was His Name Is Alive’s first release after more than a decade signed to 4AD, during which sole fixture Defever naturally shifted from home-taped meanderings (1990’s Livonia) & ghostly dream pop (1991’s Home Is in Your Head) to funhouse-mirror Pet Sounds homage (1996’s Stars on E.S.P.) & more traditional R&B & soul (2001’s Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth).

By the time of Detrola—named after a Detroit radio manufacturer that folded in 1948—Defever had been cut loose from 4AD & established his own Silver Mountain imprint. You might expect those circumstances to yield an even more counterintuitive turn, but instead, this record solidifies everything great about HNIA without dampening Defever’s inscrutable internal logic.

In fact, his finicky touches are still found in abundance here. Each song has two divergent titles (depending on whether you’re reading the back sleeve or the insert) & “Seven Minutes/Seven Minutes In Heaven” is intentionally mislabeled as being exactly

pours out stories of incredibly intimate & burning aspects of their life, the sorts that consume one’s being in every moment. It’s a brutally honest portrayal of their mind.

A sense of confidence is created through this intense revealing of anxieties. It’s empowering to see someone confront these issues so publicly & vigorously. The direct confrontation of these haunting memories through the music is a proactive & inspiring fight against their detrimental influence on Stewart. Most emblematic of this battle is Knife Play’s closing track, “Tonite & Today (What Chu’ Talkin’ About).” Here, singing over a lone piano, Stewart begins with the lyric “Tell me why they hurt you like that/I can’t see how you go on.” Someone has suffered greatly, but has continued to push forward through that pain. In the chorus & final lyric of the song, Stewart kisses this person, vowing that they “won’t forget it or why,” signifying their

his name is alive

Detrola

SILVER MOUNTAIN 2006

DOUG WALLEN

that length on the CD insert. That track also features gospel/soul singer Lovetta Pippen, a throwback to her stint as lead singer on both Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth & 2002’s Last Night There’s often an ouroboros element in Defever’s work, with motifs being reprised & callbacks to past points in HNIA’s discography. Then-recent recruit Andrea Morici may be the lead singer for most of Detrola, but her vocal approach comfortably echoes that of longtime HNIA singer Karen Oliver.

A third vocalist, Erika Hoffman, appears on three of Detrola’s most striking tracks. On “In My Dreams/ Sometimes Screw,” she fantasizes about a sex act whose circular aspect fits in perfectly with HNIA’s surreal self-containment:

In my dream it’s beautiful

We go down at the same time

It’s so beautiful

Just like a six and like a nine. Hoffman really highlights the incantatory quality of Defever’s lyrics, first in her whispery into-

commitment to follow this person’s lead, working to overcome their own insecurities & trauma.

Some other highlights include “Don Diasco,” which opens the record with a loud, jarring crash of bells, transitioning into a swirl of random, grating screeches, tamed by a consistent thumping drumbeat & piercing synthesizers. “Luber” is comparatively soft with smooth horns backing the majority of the song. The lyrics begin during a moment of near silence as Stewart sings of a close childhood friend who unknowingly “sav[ed their] soul.” Stewart reminisces nostalgically on this period of their life, wishing for time travel. “Suha” is a gut-wrenching study of the titular character’s depression, with gentle sounds akin to “Luber.” The most powerful moments of the song lack any vocals at all, leaving the listener alone to reflect on what they’ve just been told by Suha/Stewart.

Knife Play is an extreme & tearjerking album, one that inspires the listener to face their own condition. For those who appreciate startling music & want to feel comforted & crushed simultaneously, Knife Play should be the next choice.

nation of the infinity-minded line “Your same tears and your same rain/All your mistakes and you’re always” on “Bones/Your Bones” & then in her committed repetition of the title phrase(s) on “You Need a Heart/You Need a Heart (To Live).”

Meanwhile, the arrangements slip between buttery bass lines & ticklish synths to fleeting strings & woodwinds. Defever’s production is warm & layered, yet with plenty of space for his dynamic playfulness. The opening “Introduction/The Darkest Night” finishes with canned applause & audience whooping that’s turned up until it becomes a cleansing sheet of white noise. Similarly, “I Thought I Saw/Mama Don’t You Think I Know” is bookended by Bacharach-esque piano chords but courts a delightful crescendo within.

If all of this makes it sound like there’s homework required before diving into Detrola—which is currently absent from most streaming platforms apart from Bandcamp— there’s really not. It’s a gorgeous introduction to Defever’s expansive pop sensibilities & riddle-like twists. From there, infinite rabbit holes await.

Alex Silva

Now Is A Wave

CANADIAN DUCK TAPES 2023

LOGAN CRYER

It’s no secret that Baltimore is a preeminent hub for genre-bending electronica. Alex Silva was probably aware of this legacy as well when he relocated there from Spain, synthesizers in tow. By that point, Silva had already obtained a master’s in Music for Film Composition & was creatively committed to a radical DIY ethos. His musical background mirrors that of his friend & famous contemporary, Dan Deacon. Both artists explore ecstasy through high-tempo pop explosions, live drums, & minimalist compositions. In contrast, Silva solely uses instrumental tracks to convey the oscillation between the material & metaphysical.

Alex Silva has not garnered the same attention as other artists working at his skill level, but he should. His technical prowess as a composer & sound engineer is certainly noteworthy, but also his songs are just genuinely fun. On his sophomore album, Now Is A Wave, Silva builds upon the garage-rockmeets-synth-pop approach he solidified in his 2020 debut, Mind Pattern Explorer. His latest record is even more blissful, more sharp, & more colorful.

Standout tracks include “Now Is A Frequency,” which begins with a rising hum like the mechanical noise of an ascending aircraft. That hum crescendos until it bursts into twinkling arpeggios. After a stanza, the humming returns & builds up again. This pattern repeats itself over & over throughout the six-minute track. The instrumentation points toward the gentle oscillations that compose this present moment: breath, attention, sound & light.

The track before it, “40D,” is a danceable mantra featuring a deep tresillo rhythm that grounds the soaring & soulful chord progressions. A highly processed vocal sits at the top of the mix & punctuates each bar with a reverberant call. Halfway through the track the vocal drops an octave & can be heard as a ghostly whisper: “Feel/Just/Right/Now.” Throughout the record, Silva manipulates his voice into an abstracted percussion; however this simple message required clarity.

Admittedly, the dense ecstatic

frenzy found on Now Is A Wave may not be for the faint of heart. The body hardly knows what to do when the jubilant “Particles Became Waves” kicks into double time, clocking in at over 200 bpm, or the synths swell into a Wagnerian cadence on the back end of “A Sea Of Reception.” However, ecstatic confusion is the point. Experimental pop music forces our nervous system to find new ways to process the familiar feelings of exuberance with new methods of motion & expression.

It is fitting that the closing track “Bring That Place Always With You” features Silva’s new-age chops in full force, complete with chimes & bird chirps. With a 38-minute run time, Now Is A Wave is far from a long record, but it is a profuse one. A final shared breath before reentering the world is much appreciated.

Go Insane is a breakup album. For the most part, it’s Lindsey Buckingham working through the end of a seven-year relationship with Carol Ann Harris & the continued drama within Fleetwood Mac after he & Stevie Nicks broke up. But the last song on the record, a late & unexpected addition, is “D.W. Suite,” written in tribute to Dennis Wilson, who died as the recording for Go Insane was wrapping up.

Iharvey milk

Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men

REPRODUCTIVE RECORDS 1996

ADAM GANDERSON

n the lead up to the 1990 WrestleMania championship match between Ultimate Warrior & the opponent he called “Hoak Kogan,” there were a series of promos where, in a typically bizarre rant, Warrior starts to whisper, then yell, about not needing “the normals to protect me from what I find most comforting…the challenge of pain!” Creston Spiers is maybe about as far as you can get from a personality like Ultimate Warrior, except for the fact that slowing down the voice in those promos gives a close approximation to the way Spiers sings.

lindsey buckingham

Go Insane

MERCURY 1984

KENDRA GAETA

History remembers Dennis Wilson as an excessive emotional hurricane & his charisma is legendary. His brother Brian, who had his own addictions & mental-health struggles to contend with, described him as “[t]he most messed up person I know.” Though Dennis’ reputation preceded him, it was during his three-year rollercoaster romance with Christine McVie that Buckingham got to know Dennis, who he recognized as less a friend than a “window into the inner workings of the Beach Boys.” Detailed accounts of Dennis’ drug use & bad behavior are storied, & by the very end of his life, two years after his split from McVie, Dennis Wilson was homeless & had lost even his speaking voice.

Buckingham wrote & produced

A band who, on one album, credited Mayor McCheese & Adolph Coors as producers might not be normal, but also not as weird as has been reported. Sometimes labeled “unclassifiable” for their shifts in tempo & volume, these are qualities not all that different from older “classic rock” bands. But even though guitarist Spiers, bassist Stephen Tanner & (then drummer) Paul Trudeau are basically rock dudes, Spiers is also someone who listens to people like Miles, Coltrane & Aaron Copland, musicians with their own palette of light & dark, quiet & heavy. The result on Courtesy and Goodwill Toward Men was that no rock band had ever been both this quiet & this heavy. It’s an album that exists outside preconceived normal ideas of “doom” or “stoner,” its heaviness & distortion used only as the most direct route to meeting the challenge of pain.

“D.W. Suite” in a week, at the end of recording Go Insane It’s a musical elegy in three movements, capturing the rawness of a long-coming loss after a painfulto-watch decline. The song pays tribute in both structure & feeling, working through motifs most familiar from Wilson’s Beach Boys career—namely the sad song sounding happy gut puncher, layered vocals with the big sounds, & orchestral instrumentation. Rightly, though, “D.W. Suite” never loses sight that this is a (great) Lindsey Buckingham song.

Much has been written about the impact of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, & legacy recordings like Pet Sounds & The Smile Sessions have had on music. I’ll spill no ink there & instead end with the promise that “D.W. Suite” is loaded with beautiful contradictions that keep it fresh & devastating. The song is featured in an episode of Northern Exposure, a dramedy from the 1990s only just now available freely to stream & enjoying a new wave of fans. That’s how I stumbled on it, & I imagine a lot of people viewing the show now will be similarly struck by how contemporary this song feels & hopefully look it up, like I did.

On “A Good Thing Gone” Creston might be murmuring the phrase “Don’t ask why.” A destination reached from a backwards pilgrimage paying homage to things lost. What is “Pinnochio’s Example” if not a series of endings used as a beginning for a song/album? Throughout, Spiers’ shifts, from hoarse whisperer to unintelligible wolfman, become less an expression of pain, more a demanding of answers through a lyrical refrain of: “Why?” Why do kids turn into damaged adults? Why does the golden rule get broken? Why does Kiss loom so large in childhood consciousness? As with Melvins, there is no getting around the galactic-sized reach of Kiss. Harvey Milk’s relation to the band goes beyond riff worship into something more thematic. Once upon a time Kiss was magic. Those were their real faces, not makeup. Seeing them in concert was nothing less than a theophanic encounter. So when, midalbum, following a quiet piano rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer,” Creston draws forth the acoustic medievalism of Kiss’ “I Want You” intro, it does not seem by accident. Nor is it mere irony that we hear Paul Stanley’s line about “the thing I want out of life…” succeeded by the sky-covering black spaceship thunder of “Sunshine (No Sun) Into the Sun.” We can wonder why religion of both the organized & rock & roll varieties often fails or why there are differences between the things people pray for versus the things people want versus the things they actually get. There is no answer. Just the sacred & profane, the loud & the quiet.

Branko Jakominich

oren ambarchi/johan berthling/andreas werliin

Ghosted II

The photo on the cover of Ghosted II, the new record by the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling & Andreas Werliin, depicts a bronze statue of a jockey, head down on horseback, midrace & airborne. The statue stands under a street lamp illuminating snowfall. The image recalls the basketball shooter on the cover of Ghosted, the trio’s first collaboration from 2022. There the streetlights illuminate what appears at first to be an empty basketball court in a city park at night, until you notice a person there working on a baseline jump shot. Both the jockey & the baller are solitary figures, their faces obscured by the distance of the viewer. That both records place these figures in public spaces that have been abandoned seems like no accident; it’s as if they’re the only ones left in the world with the audacity to find potential in places where anyone can go. We see them as if from inside a passing car stopped at a light, a temporary scene. We’re on our way home while they remain alone in public, occupied with their inten-

About ten years ago I went in search of something new. Playing in the indie-rock music scene for over a decade made me allergic to the indie-rock sound.

I thought maybe I could graduate from indie rock (sad White-boy music) to metal (angry White-boy music), but it didn’t take. I loved the imagery: evil wizards casting death over a throng of decaying skeletons or screaming mutants lurching through tunnels of glowing green toxic waste, but the music was not for me. I needed 100% less screaming. How vaporwave was the therapeutic version of dance music, I needed the chillvibe version of metal. After a few years of subsisting off of ’90s PC RPG soundtracks, I found the answer: dungeon synth!

I was instantly hooked. The Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel had so much to discover, even its early stages. It was exactly what I needed. Medieval sounds created with sincerity & naivete. Some of it, like work produced by Fief, was extremely polished.

tions, no rest for the weary. Likewise, this trio bore down so we wouldn’t have to. Ghosted II, like its predecessor, is a record of repetitive, catchy upright basslines, rickety, high-frequency drum patterns, & organs & electric guitars, though never more than one or two layers at a time. Each bassline sounds timeless, borrowed from

erang

Imagination Never Fails

KATABAZ RECORDS 2020

JOSH JONES

Some of it, like Pumpkin Witch’s music, was straight-up outsider art. Some of it was both. Which brings us to Erang.

Erang is an artist after my own heart. He jumped into the movement with both feet. I should mention dungeon synth didn’t begin in the 2010s, but that time period was the start of its current renaissance, of which Erang has been a big presence. He donned a skull mask with corpse paint & cloak. He made simple fantasy-focused animations & drawings to accompany his music. He clearly wanted to build a world around the soundtracks he was creating (exemplified in the pentalogy Land of the Five Seasons).

In 2020, his 18th release Imagination Never Fails hit hard. It’s a coherent kitchen sink. His sound is rooted in ’80s fantasy-movie

modal jazz. There are no overt hooks or “heads” to these tunes, just four focused jams with funky, refusing-to-sit-still-in-the-pocket rhythmic interplay & wandering, space-is-the-place melodies & textures on top. The structures are simple, with plenty of air, all of it far from the high-concept sonic landscapes & thick propulsions that define much of Ambarchi’s prior work. More so than Ghosted, Ghosted II features intense builds that come on slowly. The sparseness that begins each piece is cool but coolness is not the whole story here. Your attention may waver at points but soon enough the music swells, pulling you back inside it. The withdrawn, aloof-seeming figure who’s been quiet the whole time does in fact have something to say: something about interiority, about the impossibility of stillness, & about what might happen if you leave the party & never come back. This is the music you play after you get home. It’s a reminder of the spirit that can emerge when, without a word or any warning, you’ve been left all alone.

soundtracks that are known for blending futuristic synth sounds with medieval themes. The opening title track tests the limits of that anachronistic magic with arpeggiated synths, new jack swing stabs & raucous guitar soloing. The track, like the entire album, is also laden with fantasy-evoking samples. Quotes from Jules Verne & Patrick Rothfuss help build the overall tone. If you were watching a movie such as Dragonslayer & the characters started quoting The Lord of the Rings, it might take you out of the experience—but here it works. The lack of perfection gives the work a childlike innocence & honesty.

The album sweeps from inspiring intensity with the Brad Fiedel Terminator-type drums on “Far Away” to the sweet melancholy of “Shipbuilding Memory.” Imagination Never Fails is a great introduction into the world of dungeon synth because its energy & creativity match that of any album while still holding onto what makes the genre so rad.

DRAG CITY 2024 EZRA FEINBERG

Melinda R. Smith