A Donkey that Brays a Sweet Vermouth

As interesting as the Swing Revival of the 90's seemed (and relatively long-lived for fads, lasting the whole decade and dripping into the 21st century), it's had little long-term impact on pop culture at large, aside from fastening fedoras to the heads of awful young men the nation over.  Oh, sure, a tiny handful of bands gained impressive fan bases and piles of cash, the two big ones being the Cherry Poppin' Daddies (of "Zoot Suit Riot" fame) and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, but even mentioning Royal Crown Revue will bring most music fans to a screeching "Huh?".  That being said, for somebody like me who isn't an expert on Swing Revival bands, encountering a band like Donkey, who were most likely tangential to the movement  but could have only seen widespread success within its confines (not that they did), is an interesting moment.  Formed in Athens, GA, Donkey was the house band for The Point, a nightclub in Atlanta that is now a clothing store, and they released two albums in the mid-90's (or three if you believe Amazon lumping in the '97 album Stroke My Wings Gently by an unrelated indie rock band).  They crafted a unique mixture of Swing Revival, the Fine Young Cannibals, and Steely Dan-esque lounge rock in their brief time in the sun, and came to my attention primarily as a dollar CD at In Your Ear in Boston.  The value of their album Slick Night Out is inversely proportional to the amount of information about them online, and considering their Allmusic entry is only two sentences long you can take my word for it that it's a dang good time.

Donkey was never really meant to be seen on a national stage, and in that spirit Slick Night Out is a live album, capturing a typical, yet gleaming, night at The Point with everybody's favorite music boys.  As much as we all adore Thad Jones's big band from the 70's it's easy to forget that they were the Monday night house band at the Village Vanguard, and their songs could be heard any given Monday simply by walking there.  What gives Donkey their beauty is that they seem free to explore many different avenues, maintaining a healthy allergy to pigeonholing.  "Phantasmo del Gato" seems almost Tom Waitsian in its bar-music synthesis, with the guitar solo at 1:00 ripped from whatever glorious universe Progressive Rockabilly exists in.  This quality is kind of hard to detect on a song-by-song basis, but maybe a song from their second album, Ten Cent Freaks, will help:

Many of their songs possess a rock intensity and focused songwriting that jazz is so very good at eschewing.  Jazz's most individual quality is improvisation, and Donkey never much bothered with extended solos, instead finding its drive from the vocals of founder T. B. Ferster, a voice more akin to Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page than a stereotypical crooner, the latter of which was a prized possession among Swing Revival bands.  As is the case with obscure groups the most interesting songs of theirs never make it to YouTube, so I can't play you one of their rockiest and most musically interesting songs, "Sweet Vermouth".  The one that immediately follows it, "Baby Mae", is of course fully available-

-and Ferster has slipped so much into Steven Page's singing voice I thought I was hearing "Brian Wilson" all over again.  The song also illuminates how well a horn section fits into a rock context, a lesson you'd think we already learned from Blood Sweat & Tears but we apparently forgot.  While every member of the band does click Donkey never really raised their voice, perhaps because of their nightclub gig but also due to a wisely laid-back persona reminiscent of the Grand Saturday Night.  This is probably the biggest factor that kept them from the big time - as well as the fact Slick Night Out was released on Georgia-based Steam Records, though I have no evidence they released anything other than this album.  The live recording lacks the booming presence and polish of a bells-and-whistles studio recording, and "Zoot Suit Riot" will always sound better on your car stereo because of equalized, overcranked levels.  Donkey seemed masters of the club stage, and while I'm glad their stuff was captured on disc ripping them from their small pond may have done more damage than good.  I also like that they weren't going for an artificial gloss like the other Swing Revival groups, rather stretching out into their own little groove - and that freedom ensures its relative timelessness, while Swing Revival may seem more and more embarrassing in the future.  Slick Night Out won't become your favorite album or change the way you look at rock, but it's a great CD for your next party and is a welcome alternative to the more dated 90's music that gained more fame in its time.  Take Donkey in slow and deep, like a fine single malt, and you'll do just fine.  And hey, what bar band do you know that got their own music video (before YouTube, of course)?

~PNK

Drop in the Bucket - Inflatable Boy Clams

While many rock groups remain obscure that doesn't mean info on them is difficult to find, and nearly any group you've never heard of has a fanbase waiting in the wings to tell you all about them.  Inflatable Boy Clams isn't one of those groups.  Their sole EP is a bizarre anomaly in rock music, akin to the Shaggs covering Siouxsie and the Banshee's "There's a Planet in My Kitchen", then playing it reverse.  I was considering swapping the "Post-Punk" tag for "Post-Music", and I haven't even played a single track for you yet.  Just listen to this:

I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes*.  Writing about these guys is a unique challenge, and the only suggestion I have is to keep an open mind.  I can only assume the name is nonsense, and that trying to decode it will result in a nice long stay in a padded room with a Chinese finger trap for sleeves.  The best information I've been able to find is on this helpful site dedicated to the group's EP and unraveling their mystery.  It's actually a little shocking to see that people made this - I would have assumed it materialized from the Mongo Dimension.  The four women went on to play with other obscure San Francisco Post-Punk/New Wave groups like Voice Farm, The Pink Section and Longshoremen, but I have no idea how they formed, except to speculate upon back-room plots conducted in their private loonspeak.  I have a theory about what they're going for, but I'd like to play another track just to be sure:

The fansite includes a section called "Stories", and at the top Jojo Planteen, one of the members, wrote a poem about the group that includes the line "sounding like 10-year-olds."  The songs are all purposefully sloppy and seemingly improvised, and the singing and instrumental skills all point to a massive dose of "cute".  After I thought their Post-Punk credentials were dubious, it hit me that the album works best as the tape a bunch of 10-year-olds would make in imitation of their favorite Post-Punk band.  "I'm Sorry" infers a demented sense of humor akin to the bantering inside the piano in between bouts of music on Frank Zappa's album Lumpy Gravy.  This can't be seen as unintentional, Shaggs-style, because everybody involved is an adult, and from what I've gathered from stories about the band they considered it a goofball art project.  While "Skeletons" may have been borne out of Halloween memories, "I'm Sorry" seems to refer to the complaints and stories that fly around female friend circles, so analyzing the group as an airtight conceptual project is a lost cause.

The EP is one of those odd cases where I can't explain what it is or whether or not I like it, but now that I've experienced it I can't imagine a world without it.  It's a credit to democracy that something like this can exist, and I can imagine most listeners getting annoyed after 30 seconds (like I did with Cibo Matto**).  The fansite wasn't created by a hardcore fan, but rather by somebody like me - a curious listener who stumbled across the album not knowing what it was but in the mood to find out.  I'm glad they got in contact with some people involved with the group, as that can be a rare experience.  Inflatable Boy Clams shouldn't be viewed as anything more than an object unto itself, making a home outside of trends and fashions.  I'd be tempted to call it a brilliant piece of outsider art if I didn't know the members' pedigree.  If you don't like any of it I certainly can't stop you, and maybe that's what they wanted.  This whole article may have been a waste of time, but I certainly had fun speculating and any chance I can get to link to their songs is a good chance to me.

The only way to end the article is with the last song on the EP, "Snoteleks".  I'll let you guess what it sounds like before you listen.

~PNK

*Yes!

**PSST!  Don't tell anybody that I don't like Cibo Matto, they'll revoke my Music Critic license!  I'm not kidding!

Recalling My Eves Through Slang

There isn't much Halloween music out there, aside from Thriller and Monster Mash.  There are some great horror-themed classical pieces but they're reserved for another pair of blogs I run - and aside from that the only thing left is horror movie soundtracks, which are largely free from the pressures of repeat listening.  I'm not sure why there isn't much of a market for scary popular music, and there haven't been too many groundbreaking hits from the past few decades to sway the market in its favor.  I guess it makes sense in the same way it makes sense there isn't a lot of Thanksgiving music - the holidays that have their own music are Christmas and Easter, and they have the ancient and bottomless liturgical repertoire at their beck and call.  Halloween's origins are much more distant to modern celebrators, and the concept of scary music evolved in its own enclosed space.  That being said, many people associate certain artists, albums and swaths of music with Halloween for various personal reasons.  Arbogast on Film, one of my favorite movie bloggers (now sadly finished with reviewing), did a post many years ago on a short-lived 90's band named October Project whose two albums he played every Fall.  He admitted that some may feel the music was too "precious or pretentious or twee"*, but it perfectly captured the moods and textures of Autumn in his heart, and inspired a particularly beautiful piece of descriptive writing:

"...they really do communicate for me the exquisite electric sadness of Fall in general and October in particular. In their harmonies I hear the scratch of dead leaves swirling on the upwind and sense a bit of wood smoke in the air."

In trying to come up with a good Halloween post for this blog I was struck with the fact that Halloween is primarily an anchor of memory, much like Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Most of the proceedings revolve around children who, being drawn from the existential drudgery of school with the lure of the fantastic and unnerving, inhabit a unique state of wonder wrapped up in macabre make-believe and pageantry.  Much like the subject of the cover of October Project's debut album, the magic of Halloween lies not in what it is but rather what it infers, in the moment and in the recollection of all the moments prior, and a child's costume can't possibly communicate all the emotions and sensations the Eve has to offer.  No two Halloween histories are alike, and mine doesn't have as strong a connection to a particular music as Arbogast's, but there are a couple of things that spark my synapses this time of year.  One is David Darling's incredible album Journal October, but the one I'm going to write about today has a certain distant, lost feeling about it that has endeared it to me - Slang.

Slang was the brainchild of Layng Martine III, an engineer and mixer based in Nashville, and the album's music was created by him and Widespread Panic bassist David Schools along with a large cast of Not Ready for Dick Clark Players.  Though the liner notes to their first album, The Bellwether Project, say next to nothing about the genesis of the group, it's easy to see from song titles and the sound palette used that their inspiration draws from the music and landscape of the South.  Martine's father, Layng Martine, Jr., was a country songwriter who scored some Top 10 hits in the 70's, and the influence of the Down Home is hard to miss, though filtered with a great deal of taste and restraint through modern electronica techniques.

The Bellwether Project holds a special place in my heart as it was an album that, much like Seks Bomba's Somewhere in this Town, my father purchased after hearing about the group on NPR, probably the most press they ever got in their seemingly short lifespan.  I've had some trouble finding detailed information on Slang as they only released two albums across four years (the latter release, More Talk About Tonight, dating from 2004) - as with many electronica entities, such as Autechre and Boards of Canada, maintaining a personal face for the music isn't a priority.  I feel that electronica is a genre that feeds off the relative anonymity of its authors, a mystique of distance and unnatural inception, and the often eerie and haunting music of Slang is drenched in this fuel while keeping an Earthy tangibility via acoustic sampling.  It's also music very much of its time, taking cues in digital technique from late 90's/early 00's chillout and lounge electronica, somewhat like the briefly successful group Ivy** but much more cock-eyed and funky.

If I had to pick a genre for this kind of music, aside from the overly broad and slightly irritating Electronica moniker, I'd have to settle with the vaguely-defined Chillout genre that includes such disparate groups as Zero 7 and Bonobo.  Slang never felt a need to raise their voice or break their grooves, and while many groups thrive on that crisp energy it may have kept Slang from breaking farther up than they did.  However, that implies that they had any interest in that, and I can't make a case that Martine and Schools wanted anything more than a small-scale project to experiment with the fractured side of a back porch.  I wouldn't have it any other way, as a lot of past albums survive on their inception in the minds of the Lone Inspired, such as Vyto B's Tricentennial 2076.  The album art is a superb counterpart to the music, a recollection stuck in between moments of waking life, as electrifying as it is unanchored from context.  It's connection to my nostalgia is impossible to describe fully except to hold up nostalgia on a pedestal, and in that way holidays like Halloween will survive for as long as its celebrators raise children of their own.  If you decide you don't connect with Slang as deeply as I do that's just fine - everybody's got their own October Project and the variance of those memory touchstones*** is what makes human life worth remembering.  Your Halloweens will always be yours to keep, and if you let Slang in you can consider it a small gift from me to you on this finest of Eves.  I'm going to spend this Halloween holed up with some of my favorite horror flicks, including the unbelievable Eyes of Fire, so if I don't see you I wish you a very Happy Halloween.

~PNK

*Allmusic's entry on the group was somewhat suspicious of the whole thing, slapping them with the unfortunate label of MOR (Middle-of-the-Road) Goth Pop, terms that cause a blistering of the skin among savvy critics.  My favorite sentence is the final one: "The trick to enjoying October Project is to simply not take it nearly as seriously as it takes itself."

**This might not count for much, but the song I've linked here was used in the opening credits to the Stephen King-developed 2004 TV miniseries Kingdom Hospital.  It's more a mark of the times than anything else but I still get a healthy wave of nostalgia every time I hear their Long Distance album which features this song.


***This really doesn't count for much, but I'll always remember the word "touchstone" as being introduced to me by Touchstone Pictures, the studio behind The Nightmare Before Christmas, and if there's a stronger force of nostalgia in my psyche than that movie I don't know what it is.

Drop in the Bucket - Mogul Thrash

Drop in the Bucket is a new series, created for the exploration of groups that only released one album before disbanding.  These lonely discs, often riveting and sometimes mysterious, are the sole eternal output of an enormous range of artists that are more often than not left in the dustbin of history (dollar CD racks).  Drop in the Bucket aims to investigate as many as possible, taking the good with the less than good, and giving these artists the consideration they deserve, because even getting one album out there is quite a feat.  And who better to start with than one of the best-named: Mogul Thrash.

Mogul Thrash was a British progressive funk rock supergroup, formed in 1970 from members of such bands I've never heard of as Electron, Colosseum, Splinter and Brotherhood.  The most recognizable name is John Wetton who would go on to found such groups as Wishbone Ash, Roxy Music and Asia*.  I'll save you some search time and point you to the best information on the group I could find, an interview with member James Litherland (who as in Colosseum).  The name apparently comes from a spoof of a British TV show called the Michael Miles Show by Spike Milligan, where he would wear a fake nose and be called Mogul Thrash.  I think this band should be less spoken about and more listened to, so on with the songs.  Soon after forming they dropped this single:

Miles Davis fans should spot at least a passing similarity to "Freedom Jazz Dance" there.  Damn, that's a hard beat drop, and the horns just sell it.  Why horn sections don't show up in rock more will forever be a mystery to me.  Anybody who insists that every group in the early 70's was on drugs needs to shut up for a second, because you can't possibly be sub-sober and pull this off.  They actually released this after the album had come out, flying in the face of most debut paths.  There other tracks included saxophones to great effect, another indicator that Pink Floyd had the right idea with Wish You Were Here:

There's a fine art to minute-long noodle, and Roger Ball here has it down.  The soprano saxophone is an unusual sound in rock music, and the groove it drops in to is unparalleled.  All the tracks are groovy as all heck, bringing early 70's prog to the front steps of the hard groovers with ease.  It's a fantastic album, one for all seasons and moods, and it invites repeat listens with memorable hooks and digressions both distinctive and nicely concise.  As far as single albums go this is the one to do - hard-hitting and sumptuous.  As the CD's get a bit pricey used, somebody was kind enough to put up the whole thing on YouTube so you to can thrash mogully.  More entries are to come, so hold on to your socks - they will be blown off.

~PNK

*One particularly funny bio I found said that Mogul Thrash was primarily of interest to Asia fans.  Just think about that for a second.

Seks Bomba and the Art of Retro-Respect

Today’s band was one I first encountered about 10 years ago but hadn’t thought much of in some time. That is until I rediscovered their stuff on YouTube and eventually wandered over to their site. I then learned they originated in Allston, MA. Allston. The tiny sub-town in which I currently reside. The blogging was on.

A self-described “surf-spy-cocktail rock” group, Seks Bomba formed in 1996 as a quintet consisting of vocals/guitar, organ/flute, drums, guitar, and bass, their name coming from the only recognizable phrase in a Czech magazine frontman Chris Cote was leafing through. Their musical language can best be summed up by looking at the cover of their first album, Operation B.O.M.B.A.; all of the kinds of music you could expect to hear on the soundtrack to a post-Goldfinger 60’s spy movie. No decade has been more eulogized than the 60’s, from Mad Men to the hundreds of hippie throwback genres and here as what has usually been seen as the most disposable genres of their era. The genius of Bomba is their ability to take music meant to be ignored (lounge exotica, cartoon jazz, cheap spy suspense) and bring out all the best qualities of each one, causing the listener to wonder how they could have forgotten them in the first place. “Rum Holiday” is a great example of their craft; their musicianship is super tight, their songwriting is lovely and inventive, and they have a great deal of passion about each note. Some of these hooks I have a hard time getting out of my mind, especially the bridge section in Cmaj7 (at 1:52). And as much as I like their second album, Somewhere in this Town, is even better, featuring stuff like a great cover of “Charade” and the inescapable “5-0-5!!!”

Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this the same thing as what Pink Martini does, but with less singing? Well, yes, but firstly I don’t think there can only be one famous band for a possible niche, and Pink Martini didn’t get famous until Seks Bomba had already effectively quit. Both groups occupy an interesting subgenre that probably only could have arisen after the success of the Swing Revival of the 90’s with groups like Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. And I’ll admit that Pink Martini have a bit more variety than Seks Bomba, but Bomba is special to me for nostalgia reasons (I listened to Somewhere to death in both Middle and High Schools), and I think they get a lot of memorability for a mostly instrumental group. They Bomba’d for the last time in 2005 with the release of their third album Thanks and Good Night, but all three albums are available for download on amazon.com and other DRM-ridden channels (and possibly under-the-table ways which I won’t link here). Their albums stand as a testament to respecting and glorifying the past rather than mocking it, the latter of which is all too prevalent these days. You can tell that they deeply love their supposed “disposable” music, and their high level of musicianship and songwriting prove their case. Pass the martinis and watch out for knife-shoes.

~PNK

I Hairpsrayed Your Mom’s Remote - The Fuzzed-out Dreamland of James Ferraro

It’s happened. For the past few years we’ve been living in a world of manufactured nostalgia. And why shouldn’t we? We all like snuggling in the big, fuzzy blanket of cloudy memories that is our old VHS tapes and sing-along CDs. Maybe that’s the real impetus behind the hipsterist trend of thrift store scouring, the eternal quest for semi-baffling artefacts from a not-so-distant past (for hipsters my age that past is apparently the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s). That way we can pop in our very own VHS copy of Space Mutiny and laugh ourselves into nostalgia, even though only a handful of us actually saw that particular movie back in the day. It’s not about actually reliving memories; it’s about the feeling of dumb relics, those fetishistic objects that allow us to shake our heads and say, “Man, things sure were goofy and loveable back then.” It’s this same mentality that has brought mid-fi electronic music to the fore, whether via actual synthesizers, 8-bit compositional programs, or revving an Irish folk tune on an old Hot Keyz.

Obviously these things become tedious after a while, as irony keeps about as well as bananas. However, some electronic artists have made sweet ecstasy in Casioville, and I have yet to find one more creative than James Ferraro. Based out of the Bronx, Ferraro’s palette is very wide, and he’s covered a lot of ground in his more-than dozen albums and his work in the avant-garde duo The Skaters. I first got introduced to his music through the favorites list of an experimental video artist on YouTube. And boy, if nostalgia is like watching your favorite show through TV snow, then this song is like the best NY-post-punk-band-recreation-of-a-50’s-soda-fountain-dance track I’ve heard through a bad Walkman:

It’s all here: the gorgeously crappy fidelity, the adventurous feeling of flipping TV channels at 3 in the morning, and utterly gooftacular synth jamz. Other track titles from this album and others include “Buffy Honkerburg’s Answering Machine”, “Find Out What’s On Carrie Bradshaw’s iPod”, and “Jet Skis and Sushi”. I think the closest analog to his sense of humor in a band people may have actually heard of would be Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the people behind the Kids in the Hall theme and creators of instrumental tracks with such titles as “Cheese in the Fridge” and “Plastics for 500, Bob”. And in case you’re wondering if his humor makes it to his Skaters work, here’s a track that comes with a free picture of hanging meat:

Obviously not all his tracks are jokes, and I wouldn’t even call “Moonshocked Dudettes” a joke, either. Even though he employs expert comedic presentation, his sound sculpting is top notch and his song have a great sense of construction and arc, not to mention a huge range of sonic components which make the whole albums worth it. When paddling through the algea-ed rivers that is modern electronica, variety is a huge and somewhat uncommon plus. For example, another mid-fi artist called Com Truise has a few albums out, and I liked them. Then I realized that every single song had the same tempo. Every. Song. You might not notice it at first, but when you do your heart sinks with each passing beat. Ferraro has a lovely awareness of his work that keeps things like that from happening, and his more recent work seems to have moved on from the crappy fidelity altogether, perhaps sensing that his music would attract the wrong kind of fans (those who decoupage Markey Mark onto their Biker Mice from Mars lunchboxes, which carry iPhones instead of lunch). And even though he has managed to actually grow as an artist (which is always a bummer for shallow fans), don’t worry: his new stuff keeps the wonderful and endearing sense that you’re filming a promo video for an 80’s office building:

~PNK

A Voyage to Distant Lounges with Caldera

I’ll be the first to admit that the avalanche you just witnessed is a bit more “70′s” than we’ve done on DOTE. Perhaps it was just in the ash-encrusted air. I know I got black lung just looking at that cover (as stretched it is on YouTube), but enough with the zingers. Caldera was an excellent group that fell victim to that all-too-unfortunate planned obsolescence of distribution: an art object that’s owned by a major label (in this case Capitol Records) and didn’t sell. As a result, their work is pretty hard to find on CD (at least legitimately or for reasonable prices), but thankfully the piracy juggernaut that is YouTube has helped out a great deal. Let’s hear it for team work.

Founded in 1976, Caldera was a multi-American effort to combine the then thriving jazz fusion scene (their primary influences being Return to Forever and Weather Report) with Pan-Latin influences. Pan-Latin may seem like something I just made up (as I did), but it fits what Caldera considered to be Latin music, which encompassed everything from Afro-Cuban to Flamenco to Salsa and anything else written in Spanich. The mind runs wild. Pulsing rhythms. Synths. Bongos. Keytars. The best-yet-found precursor to Earth Wind & Fire (who would be supplanted by a former member of this group). Perhaps we should just take another listen.

After floating off on a Tomita carpet ride, we hit Heavy Weather and all is right in the world. It’s almost too lovely to behold, swooping from acid to sitcom opener to soul-enriching sax in the blink of an eye. And yet it all works. This track isn’t as Latin heavy as the previous one (aside from a surging auxilary percussion drive), but I’m not one to pigeonhole. I’ll let this track make up for that:

This kind of brilliance lasted them four albums (1976-1979) but they just refused to sell. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of a Sam Hill shame that is, and everybody on YouTube, AllMusic, and Discogs agrees. They broke up after their fourth album The Dreamer and split into other projects, such as the aforementioned Earth Wind & Fire participation. A discussion on why they didn’t get the Big Break could shoot all over the place, with tangents on the public’s willingness to cross-breed genre tropes, to speculation on Capitol’s marketing, to the general direction of Jazz Fusion at the time and what people were expecting to hear if the words “Latin Flanger” are uttered. My first question is to whether or not record company executives actually listen to their product before making decisions (Answer = ? and 1/2). A lone track on the suspicious looking Capitol Rare, Volume 1 compilation isn’t doing it for me.

I’ll leave you with this last portal to a mythical land, with keyboards by Larry Dunn (hey, didn’t he co-found EW&F?)

~PNK

Fresh Princes - the delights of the Vegetable Orchestra

Carrot Recorder. Bean Shaker. Pumpkin Triangle. Radirimba. Gurkenficke with variable vacuum hole. Krautscratch. Celery Guitar. Bohrmaschinenlauchzellerpropeller. I think I’m in love.

One would be hard pressed to locate the true birth of noise music in the 20th century, as anybody has the potential to drop a stack of dishes and wonder how it would sound as Dubstep. But in the fast-moving world of alternative instrument makers, one collective has investigated the sonic possibilities of the salad. Based out of Vienna, The Vegetable Orchestra has produced produce instruments to fit any thinkable timbre, and the more the merrier. Their album Onionoise features all of them, and out of the sheer fun and ingenuity of it all the group turned out one of the best experimental albums I’ve heard in a while. They also know how to drop a beat or two.

The why isn’t important, and they don’t answer it (though they do mention that they are delicious). Perhaps a concept of what a vegetable orchestra is “about” would sully things. The group prides itself on how its members come from all different musical backgrounds, and this shows through in the wide variety of styles and moods present on Onionoise. I’m all for layers (oniony ones, especially), but the last thing I want is a guy in an armchair tapping a radish with a stick and pondering its place in the universe. They aren’t a political message, or a SITTM (Stick It To The Man) collective. It’s aural soup. It doesn’t have to be anything more than itself.

And perhaps most people will view the whole thing as a J-O-A-K. That’s before they’ve heard the slow-burn atmosphere tracks and the pretty-dang-good dance music. That’s before the (inevitable) tour opening for McCoy Tyner. TITK (Those In The Know) are fine with the initial guffaw. It’s a sieve. Those left in the pan will be invited to barrel down the highway blasting distorted cabbage. I’m ready for the next album already.

Here’s their site: http://vegetableorchestra.org/

~PNK

Thus Spake Pianola - Superhuman Music for Player Piano

Special thanks to YouTuber “playerpianoJH”!

It’s odd to imagine machines playing music beyond human capabilities before synthetic sound and computers. This of course wasn’t the first time we had performable music played by non-human entities (mechanical orchestras, anyone?), but the whole culture of musique concrète (music that exists as a single “performance” by a machine or recording) developed around tape manipulation and analog synthesizers, and flourished when digital techniques became advanced and accessible (see my previous article on Easley Blackwood for examples of this era). However, there was a remarkable predecessor to this and all electronic music that must be discussed: the player piano. You can probably remember the player piano from period pictures of the late 19th century, a relic of la belle époque, quaint and lacking in depth. While it’s true that the majority of music for the instrument was either transcriptions of popular classical works of the day or forgettable dance music, it contained a secret power. Beginning in the mid-1910′s (with the above piece by Stravinsky) modernist composers started to see the instrument for what it was: a vehicle for superhuman music, unplayable by normal people.

The Three Pieces by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella are a beautiful demonstration of the new capabilities of this mechanical beast. The Prelude features fast chord jumps that would be impossible to play by three people at the speed required, and also has a chord that would require hands as wide as your legs are long to play. The Waltz uses a melody that stretches across several octaves. The ragtime seems more fitting for exploding cars than dancing people, or maybe somebody attempting to swat flies with a refrigerator door. In a way these pieces are musical jokes, because anybody listening to them would scoff at their byzantine player requirements and the loud and abrasive tone of the instrument, which was attractive to composers at the time because of how it fit into the current craze for “grotesque” music. Casella was no stranger to massive stacked chords, either, and these pieces are chock-a-block with gigantic piles of notes. In the same spirit but taking the unplayability (and some would say unlistenability) up a few levels is this absurd piece by Hans Haass, who I had never heard of before finding this piece:

I personally feel that the work is better art if one looks at the piano roll than if they listen to it (I imagined a scenario where Haass glanced at his patterned wallpaper one day and declared “This is the future of music!”). There were many other pieces (all availabe on the same YouTube channel) but it is necessary for us to jump ahead a few decades. Enter Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who had been exiled to Mexico after some time tinkering in the murky waters of modern music. Unsatisfied with musicians’ inability to play his exceedingly difficult music, he discovered the player piano and its ability to play extremely complex rhythms very quickly. He got himself a manual piano roll punching machine so he could make his own pieces, and then proceeded to write some 50 studies for the instrument during the next 40 years, entirely in seclusion in Mexico. When he was rediscovered in the late 70′s he was lauded by the likes of György Ligeti as one of the greatest composers of his time, and it’s pretty hard not to appreciate his work, in its intellectual aspects and its emotional and entertainment qualities. All of them are worth investigating, but I'll feature my current favorite right here:

The use of harmony, the captivating and totally original approach to rhythms, and a number of truly miraculous moments make this piece a real joy, and is a great showoff work for the instrument. As the description notes, all modern player piano compositions stem from Nancarrow’s work, and the channel features a number of contemporary works by many interesting composers. Because of the many wonders to behold on this channel (you really should get cracking on the Nancarrow studies) I’ll leave you with a particularly funny piece by virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin that transforms a moldy oldy piano lesson staple into something wholly sinful. Have fun and don’t bang on normal pianos too hard to replicate these works. You might hurt yourself.

~PNK

"Alexander" and the Guttural Cough of Psychedelia

(I understand that this isn't the most factually accurate piece of writing I've done.  However, it was part of my initial burst of blogginating and I think it's pretty funny, errors notwithstanding.  There aren't too many of the older posts left anyways, so just hang tight and new material will be on its way :))

It had been dragged in the patchouli ditch, overstuffed by an uninvited foreign exchange war, and came up from the drink in a rented hangover costume two weeks behind in payments. It was 1969 and, though the American Industrial Music Conglomeriana wouldn’t admit it for the better part of a decade, the Psychedelic movement was pretty much over. As with all outgrowths of 60′s drug culture the original point had been lost and accessible and well-known headliner groups (such as the Doors) had catapulted what started as subterranean and murkily understood by its inventors into that ever-so-dangerous “clean-cut” realm. And at the peak of the buzz two groups attempted to take things up a level: Vanilla Fudge (now considered a seminal cross-genre band and very much worth investigating) and Alexander’s Timeless Bloozband.

I don’t know who Alexander is, or the contents of the Bloozband. I don’t want to know. It would diminish the magic. Careening wildly between a genuinely vervy psychedelic jazz blend (such as in the above Horn Song) and a Bouncing Betty in the form of back-of-the-basement blues revivalism, I’ve never heard a record capture a genre’s collective direction quite like this one. I can’t be sure if most of you will like every track you hear. That may be part of my point. Actually, this first track is probably the best, with a neat grove and harmony, and less boozy than most late psychedelia. However, many other tracks (all available for download on Amazon) smack of a different beast. And all are defined, alpha and omega, by Alexander.

I can’t imagine a better descriptor than “big floppy lawnflamethrower.”. His voice is a hairball expo on karaoke night, almost too lovely to behold. From what little information I was able to gather on the group they played venues all around SoCal in the late sixties. I’ve never heard of any of them (Greasy Slew Duck Club?!), so I can only assume they were flattened by Alexander’s visionary warble.

In a way this record is a testament to just how much the psychedelic movement owed to the blues. Perhaps if this record had sold better people would have latched onto this notion. I think a big part of why nobody did is a central conceit to the genre, in that most psychedelia is about as bluesy as the Beatles. One thing is for certain, though: Alexander was at least channelling the spirit of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and every whiskey he ever played footsy with. He understood the Bloozband for what it was: a vehicle to let his wobbly soul dance. Perfection is out of the question.

I apologize for rambling, but maybe I was trying to skirt the real reason this record exists, and has to exist. It is the last genuine psychedelic blues statement of its time, and between the maybe-once-rehearsed ensemble effort, a recording quality that suggests a garage at the bottom of the Hudson, and the incomparable Alexander, we realized that it couldn’t go any other way. It’s both glorious and disarming. The glory is obvious, but the disarmament comes when the weight of the thing comes crashing to our shoulders. Did the gods bless this as a living funeral, or was Alexander really as clairvoyant as I hope he was? Was it planned from the start to mark the death of the psychedelic music in LP form? Is this what a death rattle plays on the guitar?

I see now why the Bloozband is Timeless. The gutteral cry of humanity’s search for answers in the face of oblivion can never be silenced. Alexander’s unique art merely made it timely.

~PNK

Quixotic Harmonies - the Microtonal Music of Easley Blackwood

The 70’s was a time of prodigious drug use. I don’t mean to say that in any judgmental fashion, just as a statement of fact. The bomb had detonated and previous established rules of conduct were scattered across the floor. In this newfound, confused verve, electronic music was gaining a lot of speed. After a couple decades of cloistered experimentation there were a handful of electronic works that broke into the mainstream, chiefly records by two individuals: Walter Carlos (later Wendy) and Isao Tomita.

These are from 1971 and 1974 respectively, and if you recognize them (or not) it is their defining trait to be electronic recompositions of well-known classical pieces (by Henry Purcell and Claude Debussy, respectively). It was a stark contrast from the previous community of electronic composers, whose compositional devices were avant-garde and largely inaccessible to the general public. I think that these records became so popular chiefly because, rather than composing new music, they offered new ways to hear old music. Regardless of their creators’ intents, these works are much like walking out of your house while high: same shit, different glasses. These records may have also struck a chord with enthusiasts of progressive rock, not just in the shared use of synthesizers, but also in helping bring classical music to the colloquial drug crowd. Though never a drug user, my mother has admitted that hearing the Tomita record featured above (Snowflakes are Dancing) was her introduction to the music of Debussy, just as it can be easily said that the theme to A Clockwork Orange was probably most people’s introduction to Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Both Carlos and Tomita went on to make a number of best-selling records recomposing the classical rep, and the arts community started to notice.

In the late 70’s the National Endowment for the Humanities approached a dynamic composer-pianist named Easley Blackwood with the idea of exploring microtonal music. For the uninitiated, microtonal music that uses scales that contain more notes than the one most used in Western classical music, which has twelve evenly-spaced notes. Composers had been tinkering with microtonal scales since the beginning of the 20th century, but this was a new bag for Blackwood, whose previous works had been described as atonal and polyrhythmic, but formally conservative. His approach could have gone countless routes, including composing works like he had done for the previous twenty years, or adopting a different experimental style. What he chose instead was not only remarkable, but extremely timely.

What you’ve been listening to is from the 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, released on LP in 1980. In what Blackwood likened to being a “sequel” to Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, each piece is first composed in a traditional tonal harmonic language, and then filtered through a microtonal pitch set, a different one for each etude. Glancing at the sheet music moving past the viewer of the included videos will reveal music that would have fit in nicely at the turn of the 20th century in Russia, with the works of Scriabin and his ilk. The beauty of the use of scales is that the listener doesn’t need to be aware of each exact tone being used, or even how many there are in each scale. He simply has to be anticipating what normal music sounds like, and become swept away by the new quixotic soundworld Blackwood presents. The new scales don’t actually align to any of the notes in a traditional 12-note scale, but they’re often close enough to trick the ear, and listeners are taken on an aural roller coaster, following the tones up and down. It’s intoxicating, and the music by itself would be rich and lovely, pleasant to the ear. These new scales have the power to make good music even better.

The Etudes became some of blackwood’s most well-known works, and the record was reissued on CD in 1994 along with two other microtonal works: the Fanfare using a 19-note scale, and a Suite using a 16-note scale for a guitar with a modified fretboard. These works actually had such a profound effect on Blackwood’s composition that he largely turned away from atonality, instead focusing on sophisticated use of traditional harmony. It’s as if he went through the looking glass and came out even more conservative than he already was. Not that his soundworld is a bad place to be.

~ PNK