Category Archives: Experimental Rock

DNA “DNA on DNA”

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DNA
DNA On DNA
(No More Records)
Available on CD and LP

When I was in junior high and high school and I was delving into all manner of music magazines, there were more records that I wanted to check out than I was able to actually lay hands on, and my tastes were already straying away from mainstream pop and rock for the most part in favor of punk and new wave material. One of the records I never got to check out – because I was never able to find it – was the No New York compilation that featured four of the most prominent No Wave bands of the time, including DNA.

Why No New York has never seen a proper domestic CD release (only two limited pressings of it ever happened, and from Japan) is beyond me – and no, even though I do like the work of James Chance and Lydia Lunch, both of whom are also on No New York, I am not going to pay seventy-five bucks on eBay for a used vinyl copy - but at least one of those bands, and their entire previously released output plus a bunch of other tapes from the period, has been on CD and LP for several years now.

DNA’s nucleus for their entire existence was Arto Lindsay on vocals and guitar and Ikue Mori on drums – but the band originally started with Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield, and Mori – who was weeks away from returning to her native Japan upon expiration of her visa and had never been behind a drum kit in her life – had been recruited at the last minute when Arto and Robin decided that they had to have at least a third member to play their already scheduled debut gig. Since both Arto and Robin were newbies at their chosen instruments, it proved to be the right thing to do. It went fine and the trio proceeded to record a 45, “You & You”/”Little Ants”, and their four No New York cuts. Sometime into the band’s existence, Crutchfield left and replacing him was former Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright. who was practically a virtuoso compared to the rest of the band.

In spite of what sounds like a bad combination of lack of experience and lack of everything else save for ambition, musically – even in this day and age – DNA are wild but not abrasive, save for Lindsay’s oddball singing style, where what he is singing isn’t as important as how he sings it. Mori turned out to be a very competent player, and first Crutchfield and then Wright would end up being the tonal center of most of the songs, leaving Lindsay room to take up the rest of the sonic field with his manic vocals and abrasive guitar. It’s noise – to an extent – but there’s a lot of organization afoot. Organized noise? Well, all right then, so be it!

The roots of everything from Sonic Youth and their countless disciples on down can be heard in DNA’s music. If you’re feeling adventurous, find yourself a copy of DNA On DNA and see if you can pick those roots out.

MINUTEMEN “What Makes a Man Start Fires?”

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MINUTEMEN
What Makes a Man Start Fires?
(SST)
Available on CD, LP, iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic and Spotify

he most prized record in my own collection, without a doubt, is my copy of What Makes A Man Start Fires by the Minutemen.

I obtained the record – definitely one of the early pressings, if not the first – through SST’s mail order after reading about the album through a review in Trouser Press magazine. I was anxious to hear how this sounded, but my normally often-enlighted favorite record store at the time (Listening Booth, a store since assimilated by The Wall and then by the accursed FYE chain) didn’t have this particular record in stock at first, despite its being the place where I had bought Let Them Eat Jellybeans, Damaged and Plastic Surgery Disasters.

So, having already done one relatively quick turnaround of a mail order with SST for two Black Flag records (Jealous Again and TV Party), and wanting to get the Flag’s Everything Went Black album anyway, I walked a few blocks down to the convenience store, got a money order for however much both albums were, and sent it off with a business letter written the way I’d learned how to write business letters in ninth grade.

And I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. And got both frustrated and worried. I wondered what was up with SST. I didn’t know at the time that SST was being forced to move their physical office/warehouse/living quarters from place to place from time to time by the cops, something that would have Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski (and no doubt the rest of Black Flag) going all over Los Angeles Country looking for their opened incoming mail and their warehouse stock amongst friends and associates who had rescued SST’s property from wherever their office was last, every time they came off the latest Black Flag tour. It wasn’t until, I presume, Ginn and Dukowski came back from their latest post-tour rescue mission that someone got around to opening my order, stuffing my overdue copies of Everything Went Black and What Makes A Man Start Fires? into one of SST’s familiar package-mailing manila envelopes, writing my name and address on it, stamping the familiar SST address stamp in various places on said envelope, and taking it, along with other overdue orders, to the post office.

Needless to say, once that envelope landed on my feet one afternoon upon returning from school, I was relieved. I ran right upstairs and proceeded to enjoy both records. What Makes A Man Start Fires? especially knocked me on my ass. Even though the relative compexity of the Minutemen’s music intimidated me at first as a novice musician (one time when I was sick in bed, I had sat down and figured out the changes to almost every song on the legendary The Future Looks Bright cassette on my unplugged Fender Strat, but didn’t dare try to figure out the Minutemen’s songs on that tape), I did manage to figure out Mike Watt’s bass lines to “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs”.

What Makes A Man Start Fires? quickly became one of my favorite albums, something I would tape and re-tape for my Walkman a few times until SST issued the My First Bells tape (with all of the Minutemen’s pre-Double Nickels On The Dime output) in 1985.

A few years later, having graduated high school, started college, and began playing semi-professionally in local cover bands (Hazleton, PA, sadly, did not have a punk scene at the time, although there were quite a few enlightened record buyers most of them didn’t play instruments), with that My First Bells tape becoming one of my favorite road tapes, I got up the nerve to write Mike Watt and ask him a few questions about bass. In the process of his response, he told me that the bass he had used on What Makes A Man Start Fires? was the Fender Precision Bass he had bought from Derf Scratch after the latter musican had left Fear. This blew my mind in more ways than one. I’d seen Scratch pound on that bass on Casey Casem’s American Top Ten syndicated show, New Wave Theatre and of course, Saturday Night Live, so my immediate reaction was, “Holy shit! That bass is on two of my all time favorite records!”

Fast forward to August of 2001. I interviewed Watt over the phone for a now-defunct webzine. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned the letter from 1988, which I have had framed on the wall of my bedroom long since then, and got to tell him my reaction to his mentioning his using Derf’s old bass on What Makes A Man Start Fires?. After the interview proper, Watt gave me the tour dates for Pennsylvania that he had planned and I told him I’d see him, if not on the forthcoming Philadelphia date, then on the next one.

Unfortunately, a couple of holdups (9/11, then my grandmother passing, then my mother going in for heart surgery) held up some of those plans, but I did get to finally see and meet Watt for the first time in May of 2003 at the Khyber in Philadelphia. On a whim, I pulled out my then-21-year-old copy of What Makes A Man Start Fires?, left the vinyl record behind as a precuation (even though I had the album on CD) and took it with me to Philadelphia. Once in Philly, I saw Watt hanging out in his van, and got up the nerve to approach him. Damn, a guy I’d idolized since I was in high school, took for a bass role model when the drummer in one of the cover bands I was in was trying to lure me away from punk and into jazz fusion, and had talked to on the phone a few times was a mere few feet away from me. Yes, I was nervous. So nervous that I didn’t get up the nerve to ask him to sign my album cover. I figured I’d wait until after the show itself.

I’d gotten a hotel room around the corner from the Khyber, so I went there, hung out for a bit, had something to eat, and went to the Khyber around 8:30, album cover in hand. The album cover ended up being an icebreaker to a lot of the folks I was meeting in the bar part of the club – including Watt’s sidemen on this tour, organist Pete Mazich (who I’ve long since become friends with) and drummer Jerry Trebotic. It was either Pete or Jerry who had told me that “Watt likes to sign stuff for folks”, which left me much less nervous than I originally was.

Folks were handing out flyers for a few other musical things,and I was idly putting them into the album cover. They still remain there to this day.

When it was Watt’s time to perform (after great opening sets from An Albatross and Jai Alai Savant) I happened to be standing at Pete Mazich’s side of the stage, and Pete very kindly let me rest my album cover on top of his organ so that I wouldn’t have to hold it for the entire set. Once the show (a great one, of course) was over, I lined up with the rest of the folks looking to buy merch, get stuff signed, etc. After buying a shirt from Watt and giving him a bottle of “Holy Shit” hot sauce (Watt is a huge hot sauce fan), I asked him if he would sign my copy of What Makes A Man Start Fires? and he agreed by saying jovially, “Oh, you want me to write on this for ya?” Which he did: “Love and bass, Mike Watt”.

I returned the record to its newly-endorsed cover when I got home, but haven’t played it in that format since. I didn’t get a chance to do it before I got married in June of 2010, but one of these days, I’m getting the record framed. :)

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND “Trout Mask Replica”

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CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND
Trout Mask Replica
(Straight/Reprise)
Available on CD and 180g double vinyl LP

Today would have been the 71st Birthday of Donald van Vliet, a/k/a Captain Beefheart. And yes, perhaps picking Trout Mask Replica is too obvious of a choice to commemorate the good captain’s date of origin. And no, I don’t need to go on and on about the album myself, when you can just as easily seek out the fine 33 1/3 book on the subject. You either know it’s not an easy listen, or you can sit and listen to it like it’s the most normal collection of music on the planet.

However, it’s always going to be a jarring listen at first, no matter how open minded you are, and odds are good that your first impression of this completely fucking out there music will not be its last and you’ll keep returning to it whenever the mood strikes. Perhaps you know how fucking crazy of an album it is after just one listen, and you want to give it another spin, but something is stopping you.

It’s understandable. I’ve been there. And I’ve pinned down why.

Now, I am far from a format nazi – when it comes to the three most accessible formats currently available for music – vinyl, CD, and digital format – I’ll take it in whatever way I can get it. 90 percent of my listening is going to be via digital format since I carry an iPod most everywhere I go.

My first exposure to Trout Mask Replica was via CD. One of my close friends had caught wind of a CD release of the album by Reprise/Warner Bros. before I did, and even went so far as to proudly display the longbox from the CD in his bedroom. I later got my own copy – from Columbia House, of all places! – and started to dig into it, fully appreciating it after a couple of listens, even though it tended to be overwhelming at first.

A few years ago, I started snatching up heavy-vinyl reissues of most of the Captain’s back catalog – primarily his Warner Bros. and Buddha releases (the rest, save for his infamous “commercial” albums, I haven’t seen on reissued vinyl yet, so I’ve dealt with the CDs there). Sitting with the heavy-vinyl edition of Trout Mask made me realize one thing. This is not an album you can easily digest from beginning to end like a CD or an iPod playlist. It’s best heard one side at a time. No, this doesn’t mean you have to go running out an buying a turntable and a vinyl edition of the album, unless you really want to. What I mean is you should program your CD player or do up iPod playlists that replicate each side of the original vinyl.

At the time of this writing, Wikipedia’s entry on Trout Mask Replica gives the track listing as it originally appeared on vinyl – apparently whoever edited the article also realized that the album is best heard one side at a time. In case someone rewrites the album’s track listing there to come off as a single CD rather than a four-sided album, just program your playlists (or your CD player) like this: The first six tracks on the CD are side one. Tracks 7 through 13 are side two. Tracks 14-20 are the third side, and the rest are the final side.

I emphasize how to listen to this because this album should be listened to more than it is talked about… unless you’re a musician (like myself) and want to talk about it with other musicians. Hell, later editions of Beefheart’s Magic Band (particularly the lineup that recorded his last two albums) ­consisted of younger players who actually had the balls to learn how to play the songs off of Trout Mask Replica by ear! Now go listen to it.

Happy Birthday, Don.

DAVID BOWIE “Low”

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DAVID BOWIE
Low
(Virgin)
Producers: David Bowie, Tony Visconti and (uncredited) Brian Eno

This album – one of Bowie’s many classic long-players – is 35 years old today. For all intents, especially if you believe the opening pages of Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, it was the first post-punk  album – an irony when you consider that punk rock itself was starting to take off when it was first released in1977.

A lot of urban legend surrounds this album. It’s considered the start of the Berlin Trilogy, even though the tracking sessions themselves took place in France (at the now-defunct studio where Elton John had recorded Honky Chateau, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) and the album was only mixed in Berlin. Brian Eno was involved in the album to a great degree, and people consider him the actual producer even though the actual credit goes to Bowie and Tony Visconti. Bowie was also in the middle of reviving Iggy Pop’s career at the same time – he produced and helped Iggy co-write The Idiot, his first post-Stooges recordings to see wide release, around the same time he was putting this album to tape. One of the reasons Bowie was living in France and then in Berlin at the time was because he was kicking cocaine – which begs to suggest that Bowie was working on his own comeback of sorts at the same time he was helping Ig.

On the album, synthesisers are considered to be the predominant instrument on the album – and yes, they’re here and an important part of the album. Eno had brought his EMS AKS synthesiser – a portable job that literally fit into its own suitcase – to the sessions, and it’s all over the album, particularly on the predominantly instrumental second side of the album. The track “Warsaw”, which opens side two of the original vinyl release, is primarily Eno’s doing – he is co-credited with Bowie as the song’s composer. Anyone appreciating this track would best do themselves the favor of investigating Eno’s 70′s solo albums (and yes, I’ll write about a couple of them eventually here) if they want more of the same.

A casual fan might not think of Bowie as being an instrumental composer, but it should be noted that around the time of Station to Station Bowie had also composed music for the movie The Man Who Fell To Earth, in which he also starred – but the movie’s director didn’t like the music, preferring more acoustic-based, “folksy” material – so the movie’s loss became Bowie’s gain, and he used the material here.

This being part one of a trilogy that Bowie and company hadn’t even planned on at the time, Low‘s musical approach would be taken to the next level on the follow-up album, “Heroes”…

SUNN O))) “Monoliths and Dimensions”

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This overview is dedicated to essential brother Ray Mescallado, who I know is a big fan of this album and this type of music…

SUNN O)))
Monoliths and Dimensions
(Southern Lord)
Available on CD, 180g double LP, iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, and Spotify.

 I put this album in my Top 10 list for 2009 at TGML, but I never actually reviewed it. Now that I have this less restrictive single-concept sister blog, I have an excuse to write about it.

The skinny: Sunn O))) is primarily the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, former bandmates in both Thorr’s Hammer and Burning Witch who, one day after both bands were but memories, decided to get together one day in a room with their guitars and a bunch of amplifiers turned up to levels that make Nigel Tufnel look unplugged, and see what happened. What happened spurred on their first recording, The Grimm Robe Demos, and a rather unique sound that encompassed black metal, drone music, ambient music, and anything else they could sneak into their sonic stew. Much of their output isn’t exactly easy listening, but their most recent studio release, Monoliths and Dimensions, is the perfect starting point for investigating the band’s modus operandi. It’s literally their most experimental – and accessible – release to date. The album consists of four long tracks – given the almost experimental classical leanings, one could look at this album as a four-movement symphony.

“Agartha” starts off with the typical massed guitars playing long, drowning, overtoning powerchords. A few minutes in several more instruments – primarily orchestral strings, the lower octaves of a grand piano, and sometime Mayhem vocalist Atilla Csihar kicking some rather bizarre and esoteric spoken word about ships, clouds, and Eskimos. By the time two thirds of the song have passed, the guitars have been mixed out of the sound spectrum, replaced by droning horns, upright bass strings being scraped by the backs of bows, and Csihar’s vocals. With less than two minutes left in the song, even the horns have disappeared, leaving behind Csihar’s spoken word and the sounds of water and wind.

“Big Church [Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért]” starts off with twenty seconds of a Viennese women’s choir before the guitars, accompanied by equally droning organ, interrupt things. The guitars rear back a little to let the choir back in, one guitar arpeggiating whole notes along with the choir while another comes in and out with powerchords. The guitars start to feedback alongside some Gregorian-chant-influenced male vocals before all of that is interrupted by a single church bell. Then the standard Sunn O))) superpowerchords come back in to start the whole cycle a second time.

“Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)” begins with very tinny, faded out, guitar playing, sounding almost like a broken speaker. Suddenly, a switch seems to get flipped and everything sounds like it should be sounding. Csihar is back, kicking a more musical vocal (well, about as musical as his vocals on Mayhem’s De Miisterias Dom Sathanas) over O’Malley’s and Anderson’s busy riffing during what could be considered the verse part. A brass section comes in for the choruses, playing a dark and foreboding – yet still major key sounding – fanfare.

“Alice” – said to have been written about or dedicated to the late jazz keyboardist/spiritualist Alice Coltrane (John’s widow) – closes out things in epic fashion. We hear the reverb of Sunn O)))’s guitars, which itself gets drowned out by a lone guitar strumming a semi-gentle, yet prominent chord, joined almost immediately afterward by a bass and then the orchestral players. Like the beginning of the album, the guitars are eventually mixed out of the picture – while orchestral elements more suited to a Disney movie, like harps and flutes take over the droning instrument duties.

Writing about this album,  one is left with a loss for words when trying to describe it. As experimental as it may sound, Monoliths and Dimensions should definitely be experienced by serious music lovers, if they haven’t experienced it yet already.