BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 10 (May, 2004)

Holy crows of March. The SUN CITY GIRLS, a trio first of Arizona, more recently of Seattle, are amongst the very busiest of bees. There have lately been new recordings by them, archival tapes dubbed to vinyl, associated releases, a series of CDs and DVDs they released documenting Asia non-popular culture. And we’re sure there’s more, because, hey, there’s always more. And the latest package of SCG genius contained the six videos that they have released through Abduction; videos which span from 1990 to 2003, showing the incredible sonic and textual evolutions that have gripped the band in that time. Watching them sequentially makes for a heck of an interesting evening.

The first is Cloaven Theater (:57) and it kinda sets the procedural stage for all that follow. The format is largely based on hand-held cameras, recording both live performances as well as set pieces, random blasts of junk, and plenty else, presented in a way that suggests a post-nuclear vaudeville review. Bits of this, bits of that, all strung together with a specifically-wrecked sense of humor and a genuine urge to confuse. The elements here include lip-synching, live improvisation, beverage guzzling, crudely exotic costuming, video burn, a JFA t-shirt (slyly acknowledging the band’s hardcore roots), noise jams, musical rituals, globe balancing, one-eyed food slurping, chicken puppets and even a dramatic reading of a surrealist cartoon strip. Musically, in the very early ‘90s, the band was in a transitional stage, really beginning to incorporate heavy Asian thinking into their sound for the first time, and this tape gives a fairly swank overview of this period.

The Halcyon Days of Symmetry (:48) includes footage recorded between ’90 and ’00, and is again, all over some maps. It includes film collages, “found” Asian pop music samples, footage from a very stripped-down gig at a record store, manually-conducted studio experiments, and a a great live take of the epochal “Space Prophet Dogon” (from the Torch of the Mystics album). My only caveat would be to those parents who might like to purchase this as a birthday present for some special tot: there is one long collage sequence of a decidedly erotic nature, which may be unsuitable for young children. So take note!

It’s Not Over ‘Till the Skinny Arab Lights the Fuse (:52) is another potpourri. It showcases their first truly sophisticated use of puppet musicians (don’t ask, just watch), an excellent example of the band’s avant-garage approach to the questions raised by gamelan orchestras, another great live take of “Space Prophet Dogon” (with Evynd Kang on violin), and some more extended forays with Alan Bishop’s “Uncle Jim” character, a true king of certain kinds of knowledge. Another parental warning must be issued for this one, however, as one of “Jim”’s soliloquies has a mockery of race-baiting that might not be suitable for tiny ears. In a way, though, this one really seems to revolve around a line from one of the skits: “I’m gonna shoot those birds someday. I don’t like no one singin’ around my house.” In these words lies a mysterious key. Don’t be afraid to burrow for meaning.

If It Blows Up Park It (:52) is much more of a straight live documentation of the band than any of the other tapes. And that may make it one of the better ones to use as an intro for the unfamiliar. Documenting several performances from ’93, this one really shows the band approaching their fulsome and fatty width. The way they combine the dialectics of free-rock with an unsurpassed aptitude for gobbling (and excreting) the music of the world is just stunning. There are, of course, a few comedy routines tossed in, as well as a brief trip to Rick Bishop’s rare book store. Which looks really nice!

The Burning Nerve Ending Magic Trick (:57) has live material from the ’96-’97 season, plus more of a focus on solo forays (in all known dimensions). There’re also dancing statuettes with rather enormous penises, “Uncle Jim” begins to start sounding a bit like Beefheart in terms of word-construction, and Evynd Kang again guests on violin. This is not really one of the more music-heavy entries in the series, though; just so you know. But it does have one of the best smoking puppet scenes on film anywhere (we dare you to name a better one) and there are many confounded laughs to be had here.

Myths and Legends of the Blue West (:45) contains the most recent live stuff, shot just last year. So it is easily the best demonstration of what the band is like currently, and the strength of their mature sound is overwhelming. All of the turf they have stripped really comes together in a big flaming ball. And the sidebars are pretty neat, too. The Saddam mask is a nice touch, as is the Mike Tyson footage, the film collage, and the “Uncle Jim” footage, which is more hardboiled this time around, and includes some of the finest smoking pedantry we’ve seen in a year of goddamn Sundays. So, really, this may be the very best point of entry to their video shelf. And we hope like mackerels that you will take the splash.

Really fine little art ‘zine arrived from an Amsterdam club called ANTI STROT. It combines ratty graphics with punky drawings and collages, visual jokes that cross language borders easily, and even some smuts! Hey! Beautiful eye candy also comes in the form of NATIONAL WASTE #5 (Paper Rodeo), edited by LEIF GOLDBERG of Providence, RI. (Mr. Goldberg’s artwork was featured in the last ish of Arthur — see his full-page piece on page 10 — and also in this ish, on page TK.–Ed.) The drawings have a spectral crudity that makes me think a little of Bruce Duncan and also of some guy who used to draw for Arcade. And, as it’s from Paper Rodeo, it naturally has a ginchy silkscreened cover. And don’t forget to ask Paper Rodeo about Goldberg’s National Waste 2004 Calendar! It tweets! Ginchy art is also what one expects from the fantastic GEORGANNE DEEN, and her new book Season of the Western Witch (Perceval Press) has plenty of that, as well as some of her fine fine super-fine poetics, and a goldarn CD as well! LOOK at Georganne’s cracked and visionary art! READ Geoganne’s organic baby-meat wordspew. LISTEN to Georganne’s voice as she decants her lyrics in full-color with music tappling nearby (by Viggo Mortensen & Thurston, no less). It’s a gas, baby! Also got a nice little DIY art/rant ‘zine called DREAMLOGIC, which is another explicit example of how having a friend who works at a copy shop can help feed the revolution to free the souls of humankind. In the same bag, but slicker than fudge, is the first issue of Sleep Tight , which is a sweet little color ‘zine filled with images, drawings, photos and other visual fuckeroo. And it’s only a buck!

Has anyone seen VAMPIRE BELT? They’ve only played twice as far as we know, but both gigs were supposedly ferocious enough to scare even the cops called to the scene to squash the riot. All we know is it’s the first real hardcore exposition of mysterious noise snake Bill Nace and his buddy, Chris Corsano. Chris you know from the multitude of critical slather his liquid fire drumming has demanded these past few years. Bill, on the other hand, no one knows too much about, except for his brief sojourn in the UK wood-shedding with Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Lollypop of Decaer Pinga and Smack Music 7 infamy. Bill ain’t a Brit, but he ain’t anti-Anglo either. He’s a New England boy and he likes to crank out relentless raunch. At least that’s what’s in evidence on the one and only CD release of Vampire Belt, Dead Is OK. It’s released on the way too long dormant Hot Cars Warp Records, Corsano’s label, in conjunction with what is probably Nace’s own label, Open Mouth. The whole affair rocks like congealing lava after a heavy broil, which may be due to the fact it was recorded live in a bait shop.

For psychedelic reading, two of the best ‘zines ever have new issues out. There’s Phil McMullen’s PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE #34 with great archival pieces on the Electric Prunes, United States of America, Ill Wind and Quicksilver, amongst others. And contempo coverage of England’s Lazily Spun and Clive Palmer, plus such doughty Americans as Comets on Fire, Steven Wray Lobell, Steve Wynn and plenty more. Plus, of course, a CD featuring many of the above. There’s also George Parson’s DREAM MAGAZINE #4, which mixes good music stuff (Terry Riley, Fursaxa, Tanakh, Volcano the Bear, etc.) with other cultural coverage (Gary Snyder, Rick Veitch, Bernard Stollman, Last Visible Dog), with eight gazillion record reviews, in a way that will keep you glued to the toilet for hours. So get one of those squishy seats and lean back.

YOUNG PEOPLE are as unassuming-looking a band as we’ve seen since Lovechild came along. They’re two friendly, duppy-esque guys, and a girl who looks like she secretly runs the show. The music they make on their second album, War Prayers (Dim Mak) has a lovely kind of stutter to it. In a way, it’s basic drums + guitar (by Jeff Rosenberg, former tubster for Pink & Brown) + female vocals material (think many bands of the post-K galaxy), but it really kinda avoids cliches of both bigness and smallness, as well as loudness and softness. And yeah, this naif turf has been well worked in the last few years, but there is something really special about the quality this Brooklyn (‘though L.A.-born) trio purveys. The drums click like fingers applauding the play, the strings cavoot with nice little slides and stagger around like skunks fresh from hibernation, the vocals float in and out of everything like silver clouds. People say that their live shows are more like a cross between cracked country and sonic booms, but this whole thing’s as smooth as a butter rub from Jesus’ own fingers. Which is a pretty cool thing. Come on, admit it!

Anyone with a serious interest in the history of underground comix is hereby directed to pick up Bob Levin’s THE PIRATES & THE MOUSE (Fantagraphics). Although Levin writes like the lawyer he is (meaning this is no fast read), the story he tells is so cool you won’t care. In the early 1970s a group of underground cartoonists (some more willing than others) decided to fuck with Disney and copyright law in general by producing a comicbook that used Disney characters in thoroughly counter-culture fashions. Thus Air Pirates was born. Disney ignored them for a while, but eventually went after them and the ensuing lawsuit wound through the courts for years. Levin has written a completely thorough history of the case, the context of its times, and individual portraits of many of the key players. There are good illustrations, tons of oral history about previously-unknown topics, and it’s a great thing to have consumed. Just make sure you have the spare time to tackle it first!

Not since Black Flag jammed with the Minutemen to create Minuteflag has a collaboration between two rock blasts been so anticipated as that of BLACK DICE AND WOLF EYES. As legend has it the Dice, on one of their subterranean jaunts cross country, hit the Club Olson basement and spewed so freaking loud that it created a “quiet center” in the space; all the volume manifested itself as physical “concrete trash” outside the basement doors. I remember seeing BD do this in some sterile gallery scene in Chelsea at a Richard Phillips opening. I was a little put off as BD were wearing gun muffs for protection, but it was nice to see the art poodles blown out into the streets. Anyway, Wolf Eyes were very turned on and the beer bongers from Ypsilanti decided to tie one on with the Northeastern aesthetes. A couple of CDRs appeared on Olson’s American Tapes label but it’s this LP on Fusetron which is a total mindmeld. You would think this was going to be brutal darkness, and sometimes it is, but for the most part it’s a sophisticated study in patient noise unfolding. What could have been a speaker ripping festival of noise gore is instead an emotional soul burn at the speed of death. Up there with Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow (Load) for progressive USA noise moves.

Very few combos have the brains, guts or chunks to actually use Richard Hell’s sound as a specific model, no matter how huge his cultural influence has been for the last (almost) 30 years. Well, THE PONYS (of Chicago, Illinois) kinda refute that operational contention once and for all on their debut LP, Laced with Romance (In the Red). Lurking within their mix of garage spumage, ‘60s/70s punk revisionism, and Thunders/Velvets’ mood-cops, there is a huge sprawl of Hell’s unique vision. A certain kind of yelp, a special brand of slur, a way of chopping up guitar riffs, it is all referenced in a buncha places throughout the album. And it sounds hot as fucking tar! In the Red really knows how to sniff out the best current rock & roll on the planet. If you are not hip to their chuff, you are out of some loops, pal. Way out.

It’s good to see John Fell Ryan back on the boards. ‘Though I suppose he never really left. John is the Olympia, Washington rhythm riot rocker who was a founding member of No Neck Blues Band, but had to split cuz well maybe he was just too weird for those guys (if you can imagine such a thing). I do remember first time I saw NNBB live, John really got his head wrapped around playing a lengthy sewing scissor mantra. It was great! As was hearing him play some solo junk machine beatbox wrecked techno damage at a party on Canal Street one summer’s eve. At the end of his NNBB tenure he fancied hisself a lead vocalist, which gave the band a unique twist away from whence they came (improvised instrumental whatsis). Indeed, it was the era of No Neck’s boogie fried research, which culminated in a legendary weirdo tour across the USA with John Fahey. John split and every time I had asked where the lad had disappeared to, all I’d get were shutdown stares. I was doubly curious, as John had published a fascinating graphic staple zine called The Yellow Spade in 1998. But he’s back, or like I said he was never gone, he was in Brooklyn. Hey, Brooklyn is a thriving zone, but we don’t walk the streets there too often and maybe we’re too old and too tall and maybe we just didn’t “see” John ambling about. Nevertheless he’s in goddamned Brooklyn and he’s mixing it up with a pretty hot clam collective called EXCEPTER. They have a 12” called KA (Excepter Records 01) available thru the sleepless Fusetron enterprise. The music is fluid yet bleeping electronic improvisation with definite cosmic swoops in titles such as “Breast of the Wave Offering”. The exquisite Caitlin Cook lassoes yr brain with siren improv-vox, whilst Ryan and pals Dan Hougland, Macrae Semans and Calder Martine dance in gleeful psychosia.

Table of the Elements’ recent RHYS CHATHAM box set seemed pretty definitive, but the new LP they helped with, Piano Music: Echo Solo (Azoth Schallplatten) is totally unlike anything else in Rhys’ previously known bag. The two piano pieces on this album are wonderful blends of different modernist threads, combining a somewhat percussive attack based on post-Cage dynamics, and a lyrical compositional voice rooted in early 20C French guys like Satie and Poulenc. The pieces are spacious and lovely, with lots of breathing room and a wonderful weightless quality that comes from somewhat unresolved melodic motifs. They hang on the air like tendrils of opium smoke and are just as comforting to breathe. If we could find that old Jefferey Lohn solo LP, we could check to see if this reminds us of that, too; but it’s filed in a country far away. Sorry!

WOODEN WAND & THE VANISHING VOICE are arisen from the ashy grave of the Golden Calves Band (prime progenitors. Along with Tower Recordings, of the Hudson Valley Mystique) and their debut LP, XIAO (De Stijl) takes things in all kindsa fine and lost directions, somewhat in the style of ESP-Disk legends, All That The Name Implies. Flute, piano, percussion, voices and strings combine in gently anarchic ways, sheering great hunks of hair from all available heads with soft, blunt clippers. The band is listed as an octet and it sounds like there might be even more of them, lurking in the shadows, panting through their noses and waiting for their turn to pounce out of the pumpkin patch and scare the heck out of improvisational thinkers everywhere. But truly, the table manners of this set are as mild as toast. Even babies will love it. Honest. And if you like the lighter side of underground free-though action, you will too!

LISA JARNOT is a fairly young poet, younger than us at least, from the intensive workshops of the 1980s/’90s years at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She’s just published her third collection of verse, Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions), which collects early and contemporary work of hers in fast sharp economic relief. As a student of Robert Creeley’s you can feel Lisa’s poetic eye drawing spare and heartbeat fast word action to paper. The poems are off-putting and sometimes crazy/funny, which lifts them from heavy mind spew. With high recommendations from John Ashbery and the late Stan Brakhage she is very much worth checking out. She’s currently hunkered down writing a book-length bio of Robert Duncan.

Damn, what a great record! We are talking, of course, about JEFF FUCCKILLO’s Disturbed Strings LP (Roaratorio). Jeff has previously tooled for Wham-o, the Irving Klaw Trio and others, but this is solo acoustic guitar stuff, not unlike that of the great Alvarius B. That would be enough to raise the temperature here. The hepness of the way this guy bends and hammers strings makes it impossible to peg stylistically, seeming as it does, to owe equal debts to Derek Bailey, Robbie Basho and that Jandek. But what makes our personal air even warmer is the accompanying sound effects, which arose from John Fahey’s garbage bag of tricks. Fahey, it seems, had met Jeff and proposed an LP session. When Fahey showed up, he was laden with cassettes of all sortsa junk, and he feeds those sonics into the mix like the possessed maniac he most surely was. There are antic similarities to Parachute-era Chadbourne, and maybe that’s why Fahey deemed the session “too nice” to be released on Revenant, but we have no such qualms and you shouldn’t either.

The writing scene in Baltimore, MD continues the left-of-reality vibe that area has been warping with since John Waters scripted Hag in a Black Leather Jacket in 1964. Local scribe Blaster Al Ackerman’s motto for lit life in Baltimore is, “live unknown, die unknown, but bun a knee.” And those are words any of us should only hope to measure up to. Ackerman is a great writer, some say as good as heavy American stalwarts Fredric Brown and Theodore Sturgeon, for depicting reality drop-out in daily bizarro life. He, and other like-minded folk (such as the long running, always happening John M. Bennett and the frighteningly surrealist Mary Knott), throw down little pieces strewn about in Balto lit journal SHATTERED WIG REVIEW–now on it’s 23rd ish. SWR is edited by Rupert Wondolowski, himself an interesting writer, particularly in short form broken synapse pieces. His latest sole effort is The Whispering Of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press) and like the journal is very ready for yr bedside endtable.

Sheesh. Just realized it’s been 30 years since I first heard THE RESIDENTS and, while that makes me feel even more codger-like than usual, it also gives me a chance to get excited (as a mature adult) about their new DVD, Demons Dance Alone. Although I did not see the tour, the Demons album was one of my favorites of the band’s recent ouevre. It is a suite of short, rather poppy songs that recalls their classic Duck Stab/Buster & Glen-era in all its glory. The DVD is a live document of the tour, and although it is fairly straight-ahead (for the Residents, anyway) it has a damn peculiar look and feel. Shot in infrared, everything has a rather odd glow to it, and this makes the way that the characters interact on stage seems especially sinister. Which is good! The music is superb. In Eric “Kitabu Black Jew” Feldman, the Residents have found a wonderful collusionist, and other key players include guitarist Nolan Cook (the goddamn second coming of Snakefinger) and vocalist Molly Harvey (who sounds at times like she’s channeling Jandek’s partner Nancy). Watching everyone cavort around the stage set, with bizarre dancing lights accompaniment, and the fart-joking demon, is really a nice visual cocktail after a long day spent shoveling snow. Let the Residents tend to yr sore muscles, their fingers might work even better than Jesus’s!

Austin has been a veritable hotbed of small press poetry these recent weird years and a new one has just hit called EFFING PRESS. The first two chapbooks they’ve published are Isle of Asphalt by Travis Catsull and Underpony by Doug Warriner. We’ve ripped through Catsull’s book and it’s a killer. His thoughts wing their way through burning tire smoke all in search of sweet rejoinding sleep. Or at least a baked snack. Effing Press also has a po’ journal called effing magazine natch which presents a rollicking selection of young word snappers, local and beyond. Of note is Dale Smith, co-editor of Austin’s Skanky Possum Press which we hipped you to a few issues back. Remember?

Token “regular” CD of this issue, is an artistic set that is credited to NIAGARA, although is really a little more broad-based than that. Beyond the Pale (Amphetamine Reptile) is a glorious 3CD block in deluxe silk-screened packaging that was put together for a recent show of paintings by the Michigan songstress, hosted at one of Tom Hazelmyer’s booze emporiums. And there is a bunch of Destroy All Monsters on it (mostly stemming from the band’s Asheton era), an equal amount of Dark Carnival (the band Niagara and Ron Asheton formed subsequent to DAM), and a few tracks by Venus in Furs (Niagara’s newest unit). The DAM material includes their singles and some other tracks (most of which were on a French LP a while back), plus a few live things previously unheard, including a small selection from a reunion of the band’s proto-art-rock-devils-line-up (with Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw in the ranks). DAM were a great band in all their incarnations. Much as we love the rugged sloth of the early unit, the Asheton version had some great Stooge/5 power, and Niagara’s vocals always have a total chirp-sex edge. Hard to resist. Dark Carnival we have had less contact with, but the disc with their live set, recorded at the Knit in ’95 is pretty cool, too. They’re slower than DAM, but tackle the same sorta material (indeed, many of the same tunes) with swell abandon. The third disk has the reunion stuff, some more Dark Carnival live tracks and a handful by Venus in Furs. These are all pretty good, but perhaps not as nice as the package itself, which is signed by Niagara in an edition of 200, and packed to gills with visual beauty. But hey, take a bow, all you dudes.

KEVIN DAVIES is a poet from Vancouver. Nanaimo actually, homeplate of Jack T, you know the big dude who sells rare garage and psych records at the WFMU fair and runs Lance Rock Records? Kevin has a new book out which is amazing and Jack has issued a new Lance Rock 7”, first one in like ten years, by a slashing group of Texas oldster punks called the Ka-nives. Whether Kevin, who has since moved to Brooklyn, or Jack, who still resides in Nanaimo ever met up is hard to say, but they both have a magic grip on the intangible thought-world of today’s rocket riding youth. Davies blew open minds when he published the volume Comp. (Edge Books) in 2000. Comp. took the fearsome breath of Charles Olson and the (let’s say) playful breath of Frank O’Hara, and shot it through with a very approachable blend of the experimental and straight-ahead. It was modestly exhilarating and he’s taken it to an even keener climb with Lateral Argument (Barretta Books). Funny (“Refusing to work requires great discipline. Waiting in troll clothes under a bridge requires great discipline.”), angry (“Send a ham to the widow Cheney”) and musically alive, this guy Davies has got a killer beat. As do the goddamned Ka-nives, ex members of Houston garage grunts 1-4-5’s, Junior Varsity and sister group, The Jewws. And one guy supposedly is the son of Jandek. Whatever. I you dig the wayward snarl of protop-unkers Joe and The Furies’ “Weasel” and Chuck Berry’s schlong-bonging “Dear Dad” then yr in luck cuz both masterpieces are ripped into bloody shreds on this 7”.

Ben Chasny, better known as SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE, has been creating singular vistas of acoustic guitar suspension for a good while now. And some of his releases have been more obscure than ancient doughnuts. One such is the Nightly Trembling LP, originally issued as a lathe-cut in an edition of 30. Now Time-Lag has put it out in a populist version of 500 or so. And it is as lovely as stone–a juggle of gorgeous flourishes, vocals drawn from the well of mystery, and even some passages of refined raunch. There’s plenty of other Chasny around these days, too, especially now that he’s part of the Comets on Fire juggernaut. (Six Organs and Comets On Fire were profiled in Arthur No. 7, out last November, still available for five bucks from arthurmag.com – Ed.) So grab yr ankles and take a whiff. On us!

But, perhaps, maybe the most amazing record this time out is the picture disk LP, Iconic Distortions by THE GUITARS PROJECT (Box Media). Hampshire College grad, Jenny Sheppard (also a member of Bride of No No and Metalux) was doing investigative art work with elderly women, some of them suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, when she decided to lead six of them in an experiment in improvisational guitar. And it is nothing short of astounding. Rhythmic, minimal, flowing and wild, the pieces here are immediately stripped of any novelty aspect by their sheer beauty and otherness. This could easily be the work of several avant garde composers and like all such works, really raises a lot of questions about technique and art in the post-Duchamp’s universe. Easily the best LP by a Hampshire grad since Orchid Spangiafor’s Flee Past’s Ape Efl, and that’s saying something!

Like, so long!

HAVE YOU SOMETHING NICE TO SEND? PITCH TWO (2) COPIES TOWARDS:
PO BOX 627
NORTHAMPTOM MA 01061 USA

Abduction: http://www.suncitygirls.com
American Tapes: http://www.geocities.com/americantapes/index.html
Amphetamine Reptile: http://www.ox-op.com
Anti Strot: http://www.antistrot.com
Azoth Schallplatten: via http://www.forcedexposure.com
Barretta Books: http://www.barrettabooks.com
Box Media: http://www.boxmedia.com
De Stijl: via fuestron
Dim Mak: http://www.dimmak.com
Dream: http://www.dreamgeo.com
Dreamlogic: 910 West 17 Ave., Eugene OR 97402
Edge Books: http://www.aerialedge.com/edgebooks.htm
Effing Press: http://www.effingpress.com
Fantagraphics: http://www.fantagraphics.com
Flood Editions: http://www.floodeditions.com
Fusetron: http://www.fusetronsound.com
Lisa Jarnot: http://www.connectotel.com/jarnot/
Lance Rock: http://www.lancerock.com
Load: http://www.loadrecordings.com
Paper Rodeo: Po Box 321, Providence RI 02901
Perceval Press: http://www.percevalpress.com
Ptolemaic Terrascope: http://www.terrascope.org
Residents: http://www.residents.com
Roaratorio: http://www.roaratorio.com
Shattered Wig: http://www.normals.com/wig.html
Sleep Tight: c/o Easy Subcult, PO Box 37, Virginville PA 19634-0037
Time-Lag: http://www.time-lagrecords.com
Vampire Belt: http://www.yod.com/vampirebelt

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 9 (March, 2004)

Santa’s little helpers, or Yod’s little dwarfs, or whoever the fuck they are, were busy as beavers this past year. Those wily rascals loaded down our stockings with more treats than you shake a rat’s ass at. Thanks guys!

Boston’s Nmperign are the kings of small improvisational gestures. Early recordings for the Twisted Village label, and collaborations with other members of the New England (and world) underground have been great, but their new double LP, We Devote Every Effort to Offer You the Best That You Deserve to Have for Your Enjoyment (SIWA) seems like their best effort yet, The first LP was recorded in France, the second (I Am Sitting in a Fucking Room) was done at Wesleyan, and the records are as different as they are similar. Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey (who ARE Nmperign) mix cuss-like use of extreme breath control with electronic huzzing and screeched vocals like no one else in yr carpool. And the French LP is as buttery and dense as some sort of magical cheese that melts in your pillow late at night, while the Wesleyan one creaks and weevils like bedsprings after a week of ape-fuck. This is a beautiful piece of sonic exploration that defies genre tags (jazz, noise, free, experimental, whuh) and is packaged in typically gorgeous SIWA stylee. And if you’re second-guessing these toots as hot shots who know NOT how to play REAL jazz then we suggest you bite your fuckin’ tongue. A challenge was made by Wolf Eyes’ Johnny Olson that Greg Kelley may play a mean horn but did he REALLY know how to play? “Of course I can REALLY fuckin’ play, noise boy!” recanted Kelley and with puffs of steam blowing out his ears he raced home to Eastern Massachusetts and recorded what has to be one of thee most fucked documents of obsessive-repetitive jazz dementia since the Charles “Yardbird” Parker Dean Benedetti recordings of 1947. Take after take after take of Kelley just blowing the living krap out of Dizzy Gillespie ‘n Kenney Clarke’s “Salt Peanuts” (just the head, mind you), you can hear the spittle flying with each take a brutal and savage point nailed into Olson’s brain. And just when you think you’re gonna smash your head thru your speakers he runs a few dozen maniacal variant runs thru Bird’s own “Donna Lee.” The coolest thing is after Kelley fedexed this sonofabitch to Olson, Olson released it on his label (American Tapes)! Quite a fucking showdown and, needless to say, highly recommended.

Stefan Jaworzyn may be best known to some as a guitarist (Skullflower, Descension, Ascension, solo, etc.) or as the proprietor of one of England’s best record labels of the ‘90s, Shock. But he first made his mark as an amazingly smart and savage writer and editor, covering exploitation and strange art films of all sorts in his magazine, Shock Express, as well as via various freelance gigs. He has edited some superb Shock anthologies over the past few years, but really seems to have outdone himself with Texas Chainsaw Massacre Companion (Titan), which is a fascinating history of the original film, its follow-ups, the work of Tobe Hooper, the movie’s creative germ (Ed Gein), and everything else in the exploit-o universe. There’s amazing info on Hooper’s pre-Chainsaw work, the Austin hippie scene, the mechanics of producing splatter films, jokes at Dennis Hopper’s expense, and lots of sharp writing and great pics. Even if you don’t like this sort of thing generally, this is a totally wonderful read.

If you wanna watch this kinda thing, rather than read about it. Let us suggest a couple of hot numbers. The first is The Living Corpse (Zinda Laash) (Mondo Macobro), which is a long-thought-lost Pakistani vampire film from 1967. It has similarities to some of Hammer’s Dracula films, but is full of curious details, and has an absolutely unique feel. Much of it is directed almost like a silent film, and the pacing and lighting mirror that as well. But there are berserk musical interludes, inferences of baby eating, wild dance numbers and many other mind-blowing touches. If you are a devotee of the psychotronic, this is a must see. As is Happiness of the Katakuris (Chimera Entertainment), a Japanese film from 2002, directed by Takashi Miike. Colored heavily by the scenes that parody The Sound of Music, this movie is an insane mix of horror film, musical, heartwarming family saga, and claymation nightmare. Sorta hard to describe it without going through it scene by scene, but it’s a very whacked out story about an extended family that runs a rural hostel in which every guest seems to end up dead. You should just see it, okay?

For reasons of sheer cussedness, we have always considered Curlew to be the weakest link in the musical chain forged by Alabama surrealists. By this, we mean that the combo never really seemed like Davey Williams’ best unit. Their records were okay, but they were a little too Laswellish in parts to really excite us. But hey, here is an archival live LP by the band, Gussie (Roaratorio), recorded at a defunct Minneapolis club in 2001, and it is a monster of soul-churned improv snacks. Everybody seems to be extremely loose and lateral here. George Cartwright’s saxes, Williams’ guitar, Chris Parker’s piano, Fred Chalenor’s bass and Bruce Golden’s bass are all making great small noises and big splats, and there’s none of the surgical riff-handling that marred some earlier records. The freak register reigns in all quadrants, and there are some truly singular squeals here. And since this a Roaratorio product, it is also packed in some fine original art, and is pressed in fidelity that can only be described as dandy. What a treat.

One of the hippest jam records to enter our sphere lately is The Beast LP (De Stijl) which pairs the glapsy Midwestern otherness of Wolf Eyes, with the solid dunderage of Smegma, the band perhaps most responsible (along with the Residents) for a real underground noise continuum in the US of A. Smegma, originally from San Diego, then based in L.A., and then in Portland, have been clucking out their own frantic brand of post-form madness since the early ‘70s. And it’s as untaggable now as it was then–instruments, random noises, voices, electronics, everything flutters into a big vortex of wet cement, emerging as a perfectly-realized sculpture of confusion. This session happened because Wolf Eyes were touring out in Oregon and wanted to meet their heroes. So they did. And the results are just ducky. This is the first real extended recording we’ve had of Richard Meltzer vocalizing with Smegma, and he sounds great; almost like hearing Yogi Bear bum-rushing the stage at Company Week. And the combination of the two units’ sounds is pretty seamless. You could break your neck trying to figure out where one stops and the other begins, so be careful as hell when you listen to this. But do listen, ‘cause it’s good.

And the only way for us to stop talking about frikkin’ Wolf Eyes is maybe talk about some other Michigan madmen. How about this cat, Charlie Draheim? No one’s too sure who this joe really is, but he has issued a cassette called March of Slimes and it has already proven to be one of the best goddamned underground USA noise releases of the last full moon cycle. If, after absorbing Jaworzyn’s Texas Chainsaw opus, you want to know how some kid who grew up with repeated viewings of said film and had to just set his ass-on-fire to MUSIC, then search out Draheim’s tape. The only distributor we know who’s carrying it right now is Hanson.

The Sun City Girls’ organization has moved into new fields of endeavor with their new Sublime Frequencies project. This is more or less an ethnographic odyssey into the music and culture that informs the SCG’s own strange trip. The first batch of stuff includes a few CDs (which we haven’t played) and a couple of very interesting DVDs (which we have). The vids are both documentaries of musical events from what Capt. Beefheart called “the other side of the fence.” Jemaa El Fna is a 50-minute film by Hisham Mayet, shot in Marrakech in 2002. It basically documents a strange evening of music and ritual (and very bizarre record cleaning techniques) in a large town square that serves as a meeting place for local musicians. It is very crude, but it is pretty spellbinding anyway, because the music, the scene, the whole goddamn thing is just a weird as anything. And man, those record cleaning scenes are unbelievable! Nat Pwe was shot by the band’s Alan & Richard Bishop, and Robert Millis, in Burma. What’s depicted here are a variety of performances at a festival held every year to celebrate these kind of mean ghosts. The ghosts who are the focus of this particular event seem to have transvestite tendencies, so the film shows a crazy pastiche of sword-music, cig-dancing, cross-dressing, and scotch-juggling. It’s another eyeful, lemme tell ya. And both of the DVDs had lotsa digital glitches, but they didn’t really distract that much from the otherworldliness of the visuals’ flow. Beep.

Norwegian label Humbug has released some sweet swill these last couple of months. Of particular note is a new 7” by Portland, Maine’s leading ladies of electric dada pollution, Crank Sturgeon, E-Z Voice over Box-Top Living Solutions (Humbug030). Here we have the Sturgeon alone at his desk in his room shuffling noise clutter around and talking about it out loud. Weird and decidedly warped. There’s also the 7” lathe-cut by Rats With Wings titled Black Label 7” (Humbug025) with nice percolated noisetronik action courtesy of Australia’s Bill Burston. A five-inch lathe-cut by idm theftable, “A just B” B/W “B or A” (Humbug021), shows off the more flux-mouth music by this Windham, Maine resident (Maine noise rules!) in conjunction with the attached CD (which is more machine/found sound stimulated flux-huff). The identity of this cat is one Skot Spear and he’s a registered one-man fluxus wrecking crew. A lathe-cut LP by Edward Ruchalski, Having It Out (Humbug020; edition of 50), lays out superb swathes of mood/noise using homemade instruments, sound sculptures and motorized string machines. He is also known to incorporate event sounds, primarily recorded from his back porch (family picnics, etc.). Ruchalski resides in Syracuse, NY and has been kicking around the new music scene for some time. Like the deep playing of Organum and Mirror, Ruchalski is the real deal. Lastly, there’s an LP by Bill Wood and Fredrik Ness Sevendal, Song of Degrees (Humbug016; edition of 200). Sevendal is in Slowburn, a hazy Norwave outfit, and used to be in some band called Gom we’ve yet to catch up with. Wood is a New Zealander who has recorded extensively as the excellent 1/3 Octave Band in his native Kiwi. This dynamic pairing is a freedom ride of various synthesizer and miscellaneous sound improvisations and all rather great. So ask for Humbug at your local record shack.

The latest, greatest book by Canadian poet Valerie Webber is called One Night Stands (VW). It is a sequence of 20 poems, written in 20 bars, while Ms. Webber enjoyed a rum and coke, and smoked a single cigarette. The results are funny and brutal, a kind of travelogue of the lost, filled with a great tumble of details, and written in Webber’s crisp, acerbic style. I guess we should just all be glad that there’s still smoking allowed in the bars of Quebec. This book’d taste a lot different without the tang of nic. More Canadian content comes in the form of the new issue of Fish Piss, a bi-lingual (‘though mostly Anglo) ‘zine from Montreal, which combines strong comix and graphics with an excellent review section, and great features. Of special interest this time are a few inter-related pieces on the recording industry (a general history of the early days, a snazzy bit on K-Tel, etc.) and a fine obit of strongman/street person, The Great Antonio.

Probably named after a bass clarinet player from Sun Ra’s organization, Eloe Omoe is an extremely raunchy free-rock duo from Eastern Massachusetts. Using bass and drums (but not drums n’ bass), they make little swirls of dirty fever that rise into the munge of the night before collapsing like so much puh-dust on the floor of the warehouse. There are a few tracks on their eponymous debut MLP (Infrasound) that seem to have been recorded live, and they kinda remind of what a very stripped-down version of Demo Moe might have sounded like. So perhaps their name is more a tribute to that long-gone NY outfit than it is to anyone who wielded a licorice stick, be it a bass one or not. Stylish!

Of all the eccentric wildfolk in NYC past present and future not too many can hold a candle to the real life weirdness of Edgar Oliver. He’s a dramatic actor and prose artiste cum urban vampire. He’s been stalking the lower depths of Manhattan for well on 30 years. His first book, the novella The Man Who Loved Plants (Panther Books), is an astounding journey through obsession and dark desire. Imagine Hubert Selby trading lines with J.T. Leroy and you may come close. Or not. And the voting is in: best broadside poem by a lawyer this issue goes to The Bodhisattva of the Public Defender’s Office (Remitittur) by Richard Krech. Krech has, of course, been producing important and liberation-oriented poetry since the ‘60s. But his legal work has not been largely documented in artistic ways before. Now, here’s a very nice synchretic fusion of two of his main threads. And it’s a gas. Very splendid words, illustrated by Richard’s daughter, Briana Miller. Meanwhile, #4 of Miller’s own cool mini-comic, Break (Break), is also out. This one documents the utter stupidity that befalls poor working retail stiffs on a day-to-day basis. Excellent work. And if you contact her, be sure to ask about back issues.

Meerk Puffy is one of the inventors of modern Providence, and his work with Forcefield, as well as his solo efforts, have put a new, more thoroughly stupid (read: American) face on electronic field action. And finally, after a small pantload of releases in other formats, there is a Meerk Puffy LP available to the discerning. Nung (Animal Disguise) is a wonderful battlefield of real lockgrooves, fake lockgrooves, sequences collapsing in anger, notes exploding in rage, and all kinds of other throbbing noise. It’s a hell of a pleasing platter, and it looks pretty hip, too! And, naturally, another wonderful basket of Providential slunk has arrived from Load Records. There’s the eponymous debut LP from Vincebus Ereptum. As might be expected from a combo taking its name from Blue Cheer’s debut album, the sounds here are as loud as cottage cheese. But unlike some similar volume-mongers, these guys seem to remember what a great band Flipper was. Love live Pet Rock! There’s also the debut LP by Kites (who were ballyhooed in Arthur No. 5). It’s called Royal Paint with the Metallic Gardener from the United Sates of America Helped into an Open Field by Women and Children, and it mixes alternatingly skuzzy and static electronic hair-wall-doodles with an aesthetic taken from the meanest playground on Earth. Which is a cool mix of stuffs. The rest of the Load vinyl load (as it were) is from non-Prov artists, but that’s not to discriminate against. Brooklyn’s USAISAMONSTER’s new LP, Tasheyana Compost, is a brilliant as its two predecessors–stylistically reminiscent of some of the Minutemen’s most casual Boon tunes crossed with a more spasm-oriented version St. Vitus, plus plenty of uniquely contempo strangeness. What a South Bay concept! And San Francisco’s Total Shutdown have released a posh eponymous LP that is partly their patented, staggering, stop-start free-punk fusion, and partly a new, more diffuse, sputsy, post-core atmosphericism. No complaints here.

As regards the world of magazines, Swingset #4 is out. Steve Lowenthal puts together a real fine read, with good music stuff (Catpower, Iron & Wine, Susie Ibarra), plus enough art, lit and whatnot to separate from the pack. Issue # 4 of Astronauts music ‘zine from Australia has just been sent over and it’s full-on killer. Healthy, revealing interviews with percussion stud muffin Tim Barnes, starkissed folk punk Matt Valentine, soul bunny P.G. Six and Wooden Wand’s James Tothe gets deep inside the murky psyche of Hall Of Fame. Also, fresh as hell is a solo book of prose by Matt Valentine, Small as Life & Infinitesimally as Pure (Child of Microtones), which is a wonderfully cracked yarn about record-collecting, Buddha nature, drugs, sex, and many other important topics. If you like his musical work, you will certainly shit yourself sideways reading his fine words. There’s also a new issue of Mineshaft. Everett Rand’s great lit ‘zine features art by Crumb, Deitch, Bruce Duncan and Ace Backwards, plus a d.a. levy collage, publisher Jeff Weinberg’s memories of long ago political vandalism. Also included are poems by Irving Stettner, Wanda Coleman, A.D. Winans, and plenty more. Duncan and Backwords have also put together the 15th Telegraph Street Calendar (Twisted Image), which depicts a year’s worth of Berkeley’s finest streetnicks. Send one to yr mom. And a companion piece to this is Backwards’ Surviving on the Streets (Loompanics), which is both a memoir of Ace’s journey from New Jersey to the Bay Area and beyond, as well as a good hands-on guide to homeless living. Not brand new, but interesting and useful. And Stettner also has a new issue out of Stroker, one of the best, longest-lived underground poetry ‘zines around. #76 has a long tribute to Howard S. Levy and a great sample of his work, plus the usual Japanese content, Tommy Tratino investigations, and much else.

Spires That In The Sunset Rise are a female trio from Chicago who mine the Wicker Man tradition better than anyone in recent memory. Their eponymous debut LP (Galactic Zoo Disk/Eclipse) sounds something like Alva pretending to be mid-period Current 93. There is a nice, tense, wheezy otherness to the way that the strings breathe in and out in concord with the harmonium, and that the vocals blend incantational tones with barks right out of Polansky’s Macbeth. There are other raw touches to the music that bring to mind the early Godz, but the hoot-ritual aura eventually overwhelms any sense of art-anarchy. Which is a pretty hip thing to do, eh? The same label offers the Flashing Open LP by Plastic Crimewave Sound, another Chicago band, whose previous 45 was a nice slab of futuristic pulse-rock croak. The album is more of the same. Great touches of Krautrock, Hawkwind, Chrome, Pere Ubu and whatnot, draped across a large, echoey avant garage. Park your cup here!

Readers who are fond of silk-screened art and pornography are probably already well acquainted with Le Dernier Cri, long France’s most distinguished oddball art press. But should you not have “gotten down” with them as yet, might we suggest seeking out L’oraison des orifices by Quentin Faucompre. This fine new volume has more bizarre, handsomely-printed pictures of genitals in unusual action than you’ll see in a year of regular church going. It’s “really” “something.” If you have the nerve, they have the images.

In terms of a mighty-fine, one-sided LP series, one would have a tough time naming one superior to the recent set on Table of the Elements. There are six of them. San Agustin’s Triangulation (Hoof and Mouth Blues) is a fairly clamorous set for this instrumental trio, having, as it does, an opening sequence that approaches as close to rock-action as these guys are likely to get, before ascending into blue clouds and clots of lightning. Loren Connors’ The Murder of Joan of Arc is a ringing string of electric guitar strikes. It lacks the outright brutality of some of Loren’s recent recordings, but has its own devious agenda. It spurts majestic rolling amp barrels that will first knock your legs out from under your ass with gusto, then quiver loudly in a corner. Which is nearly all anyone could ask. John Fahey’s Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues (1-4), recorded live in ’97, typifies some of his late period pre-hardball beauty motion. This era’s languid acousticism was something I used to find particularly spiritual, and that memory seems borne out here. Cool. Laurie Spiegel’s Harmonices Mundi is a performance of Johannes Kepler’s 1619 musical piece, based on the spatial relationship of the planets and their paths in the solar system. Spiegel’s computer music realization of this swirling set of drones was actually shot into space on a 1977 NASA probe. But now you can enjoy it in the comfort of our own planet as well. Rafael Toral’s Harmonic Series is just that, a splendid sequence of tones, generated by guitar, analog electronics and computer, surging against each other (and your eardrums) like little tin foil bulldozers skirting the edges of the universe. Arnold Dreyblatt’s Point Source/Lapse has those two pieces recorded in ’97 by two separate groups of young musicians. These performances give the work of this (ostensible) minimalist a shockingly antic quality. Indeed, “Point Source” reminds me of nothing so much as the Theoretical Girls’ “U.S. Millie.” Sheesh. My only caveat on this series is that the pressings can be a little noisy at times, but that goes with the turf on clear vinyl, silk-screened editions, so clam up.

First issue of Pitchfork Poetry Zine we’ve run across is #10, and it’s a good one. Cover image by Loren Connors, poetry by Ira Cohen, Lyn Lifshin, Guy Beining and others, with good graphics and a feature on the wonderful California poet, Gerald Locklin. Locklin is probably best known for his long association with Charles Bukowski, but he’s a great “street” writer in his own regard and has a ton of books to prove it. The most recent is a prose collection called The Pocket Book (Water Row). There is the long title novella and a bunch of short stories (some of them very short), which are both funny and sad as hell. Locklin’s mature writing is great, like others of his generation of underground writers who have survived to tell their tales. He has a thoroughly great handle on the dynamics of blue collar day-to-day grunting (emotional, intellectual and social aspects, inclusive) and he just nails it time and time again. This would be a great place to start reading him. But be warned, his backshelf is vast! And is you get in touch with Water Row, be sure to check out their stock of new and used underground lit. It is quite staggering.

Also, we must offer a correction on something from a couple of issues back. It was said that Benoit Chaput was the sole driving forced behind Montreal’s Slow Movement. “Not so!” Say many readers. It appears that the wonderful visual artist, Julie Doucet, is the genius behind many of the gestures and concepts. So we apologize and commend to you all of the great work that Ms. Doucet has done under her own name. Great wads of it are available from Drawn and Quarterly Press, or you can seek out her newest collaboration, which is Chroniques de New York (Seuil) by a young French writer, Jean-FranÁois Jouanne, who wrote the stories to be read on the radio. Julie’s illustrations are great. And although the press seems to be hard to contact, the book is available through Montreal’s Fichtre.

CDs are hard to actually pick up and stick inside a CD player, very difficult, but once in a while Bull Tongue takes a little road trip just to see what’s new on the peeps’ market. And seeing as how most mid-size rentals have fucking CD players in ‘em, we hoist a tote bag or two of CDs into the ride and just fucking wail thru ‘em. From South Deerfield, MA to Pensacola, FLA (and back) one weekend we must’ve jammed at least 2,000 of these shiny repellent pieces-o’-shit into the “player” and y’know, four of ‘em weren’t half bad:

1. Sixteen Bitch Pile-up: B.F.F. (Gameboy Records) Five females who regard themselves as “charalambides possessed by morbid angel mutilating merzbow’s bloody corpse with a combine.” Whoa. And they’re not too far off. An unholy recording of a holy nun’s mass saturates the top of this monster and it gets propulsively taken over with guitar feedback, machine terror and turntable destruction. Nice.

2. MOUTHUS (Psych-o-Path 6) Mouthus is Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson of Brooklyn and they absolutely destroy. Super great feedback and overload squall w/ a hep no-wave edge. The label touts them as a brain-gouged cross between Jandek and Fushitsusha but our ears catch something more of a Rudolph Grey-jamming-with-Sightings vibe.

3. Various: SPACE IS NO PLACE (Psych-o-Path 5) Wait, another release on the same label? Not fair! But fuck, this is kill city great. It’s also the first place we heard Mouthus. Their track on this comp is better than the heavy shit on their own CD. And it’s surrounded by excellent other New York area weirdness. Flaming Fire deliver a bent cabaret-chaos piece, No-Neck Blues Band, Sightings, Axolotl, Enos Slaughter, and the great Breast Fed Yak (featuring Controlled Bleeding’s Paul Lemos and Samlas Mammas Manna sitarist Hakan Almkvist). This label not only also released the great Egypt is the Magick # How Many Pieces Of The Puzzle Can The Mind Go Without? and the Sightings Michigan Haters CDs but reissued the Kraut Klassik In The Poor Sun by Zippo Zetterlink. No Shit.

4. Various: Rap Pouch (Breaking World Records 35) As Bull Tongue does most of its daily stomping at the foothills of the Berkshires, it’s only natural we’d respond to the local flavors of this comp from Hadley, MA. A 3” CDR in a sewn pouch, it contains an amazing tune called “Rad Melting Plastic Box” by the already legendary Fat Worm of Error, which comes across as the only Bonzo Dog Band meets GTOs as freezing 21st century noise freakdom we’ve heard to date. There’s other goodness here from Barn Owl, Noise Nomads, Josh Burkett and others but that Fat Worm track is haunting us.

So long.

AS ALWAYS. IF YOU HAVE MATERIAL TO BE LICKED BY BULL TONGUE–VINYL, BOOKS, MAGS, VIDS, ETC. SEND TWO (2) COPIES TO:

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA 01062

Contact:
American Tapes: http://www.geocities.com/americantapes/
Animal Disguise: PO Box 2191, Dearborn MI 48123
Astronauts: c/o therhizomelabel, POB 319, Torrensville Plaza SA 5031 Australia
Break: breakcomics@yahoo.com
Child of Microtones: lunarmv@hotmail.com
Chimera: 519 Belmark Ct., San Antonio, TX 78258
Crank Sturgeon: http://www.muteantsounds.com
De Stijl: no address, try http://www.forcedexposure.com
Drawn and Quarterly: http://www.drawnandquarterly.com
Fichtre: http://www.fichtre.qc.ca
Fish Piss: Bix 1232, Place d’Armes, Montreal, Quebec Canada H2Y 3H2
Galactic Zoo Disk: c/o Eclipse http://www.eclipse-records.com
Gameboy : http://www.gmby.net
Hanson: http://www.hansonrecords.com
Humbug: http://www.tibprod.com/humbug.htm
id m theft able: http://www.kraag.org/id/
Infrasound PO Box 382163, Cambridge MA 02238
Le Dernier Cri: http://www.lederniercri.org
Loompanics: PO Box 1197, Port Townsend WA 98368
Mineshaft: POB 884, Lewisburg, WV 24901
Mondo Macrabro: www/mondomacabrodvd.com
Panther Books: http://www.goodie.org
Pitchfork: 2002A Guadalupe #461, Austin TX 78705
Psych-o-path: http://www.psych-o-path.com
Remitittur: c/o RK, Ste. 1000, 1611 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley CA 94612
Roaratorio: http://www.roaratorio.com
Edward Ruchalski: http://www.phonography.org/phonographers/r.htm
SIWA: http://home.earthlink.net/~siwa/front-1.html
Stroker: 174 Huntsville Rd. #5, Dallas PA 18612
Sublime Frequencies: http://www.sublimefrequencies.com
Swingset: wwww.swingsetmagazine.com
Table of the Elements: http://www.tableoftheelements.com
Titan: http://www.titanbooks.com
Twisted Image: PO Box 12642, Berkeley CA 94712
VW: c/o Webber 87 Troy, Verdun, Quebec Canada H4G 3CG
Water Row: http://www.waterrowbooks.com

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 8 (January, 2004)

Interesting to see and hear the Tarot or Aorta: Memories of a PRE Festival CD right now. It’s one of the first three CDs released by sex-muzak kingpin Tom Smith’s rather recent label stab The Smack Shire (www.smackshire.com). Along with the remarkable Georgia peach new wave sci-fi teen toilet graphic is the actual document of what was an outsider-music festival, curated by the sad pockets of Mademoiselle Smith. When Tom sent the call out to the chosen sensualists to partake in the Tora Tora Tora fest it seemed then, in 1997, as an incredible venture. Surely he was nuts, this was already proven through his years as slaughter-poet/vocalist with To Live and Shave in L.A. and Peach of Immortality. What was exciting was Tom’s vast net slithering through and past the most obvious noise-boy contenders in search of deeper, more bizarro authentica. And it was beautiful: Loren Mazzacane Connors, Davy Williams & LaDonna Smith, Monotrona, Harry Pussy, Liquorball, leslie q., and a dozen or so more true American genius originals. If you were there it must’ve been swell, if you weren’t it all seemed to come and go quickly and the wild flurry of post-post-noise underground mania pulsed forward in bunny-fucking multipludiny–to the point where the Tora Tora Tora festival was a faint memory of some lost Mayan era. So much has come and gone with babies and grandmas and pas making all kinds of wonderful free-rock racket. There’s a whole new stream of blood-contingency today and Tom’s issuing of this live document is goddamned timely.

Stopping for a quick breath (or smoke, if you wish) and flipping thoughtfully back to the mid-late ‘90s, when Harry Pussy was a wholly magical signifier to new noise rock nowness, makes some kind of holistic sense. Particularly since Adris Hoyo (drum/vox of HP) has been seen returning to the stage as of late with a fascinating, new-thought edge. Listening to the throwdowns that run through this snapshot of Tora Tora Tora is at once quaint and curious. Most of the music freaks involved are still locked in devotion to their creative light, either in the same guise or anew, but some of them are possibly relevant only as historical archaeologics. Regardless, they’re all excellent or near-excellent in the way they rip the fabric of rock and roll, avant-garde music, free-anything into sputtering future delight. The curious thing is what the future delight has turned out to be in late 2003, a crazy six years hence. What’s going on now is an excited fusion of disparate intelligentsia, young pups and old dogs, preternaturally sophisticated though raw like dripping meat.

This sentimental conclusion was made painfully obvious when we trucked out to Minneapolis in early October for what was the Destijl/Freedom From Festival of Music. Both Destijl and Freedom From are deep underground labels from Minneapolis. While Freedom From is notorious for wallowing in the slop of any and all scum noise and chatter (with mixed technical results), they have achieved a well-earned nutso celebrity status. Label boss Matthew St. Germain is a hard-puffing cherry pop of a lad entering into the conflicted adult world with a hellbent Brother Theodore madness tempered with LSD-driven Kaptain Kangaroo positivism. His other love is the culinary arts and he paused hardly once to see how much greatness was being consistently exhibited on stage so as to run home and cook up whole fresh turkeys, pot roasts and soup pots for the rumbling artist appetites. For a real live punk freak he’s a bonafide super chef and last I heard he was in deep sushi prep studies. Destijl, in contrast, has a rather low-key stance, releasing very limited recordings of super-lost folk/psych woodsmen. No catalog listing or website presence but a recognized and honorable profile. It is also the label that initially spearheaded this event and it is a token of its appeal to absurdity that they would actually conjoin themselves with the rampant lunacy of Freedom From. It was a meeting destined for either total hell breakdown or magical mystery success. Fortunately, for all in attendance, it was the latter.

Friday, October 3rd was the pre-festival night at a hip rocking bar in St. Paul called Big V.’s. Hair Police from Lexington, KY, who we squawked about a couple of Arthurs ago, hit the stage and were sick. We mean literally sick. After playing guitar as if it was an alien bursting from his Whitehouse t-shirted chest, lung shredder Mike Connelly proceeded to puke into his upended guitar case. Many electric devil signs and middle fingers and power fists were flailing as Hair Police moved through a set of experimental action rock which proved that they, and Michigan kingpins Wolf Eyes, are the most exciting bands from the American Midwest since The Stooges and MC5. A number of sporadic sonic releases by Hair Police exist on vinyl and cassette but this weekend saw the band celebrating their new cassette, Probe Cutting, on Mike Connelly’s own Gods of Tundra label. This tape is remarkable as it offers an alternative view into the band’s group sound. While some may write them off as just another spazz attack, here they seriously delve snuffle deep into warp group cosmosis. An insightful interview with the boys Mike, Trevor and Robert can be read at the bettawreckonize webzine.

Next up was The Dream/Aktion Unit which was Chris Corsano drums, Paul Flaherty sax and Jim O’Rourke and T. Moore guitars. It’s a conflict of interest for us to talk about our participation here but let us just say moist nips were way erect by gig’s rosy dawn. And speaking of moist nips, it was a gas to catch the legendary Michael Yonkers romp through a set of hard blues slice-and-bake guitar rock. Yonkers has been busting with intensified singular outsider yowl in Minneapolis since the ‘60s, when he led teen garage dynamos Michael & the Mumbles, to the 70s, when he weaved improv slink with Milo Fine’s Blue Freedom’s New Art Transformation, into the ‘80s/’90s/’00s, where he continually pumps shards of gut from his axe unlike any other electric six stringer around. All this is apparent on the Microminiature Love LP which Destijl released in microminiature quantity. Thankfully, it has been rescued again and it is easily attainable as a Sub Pop CD. At this fest he was slipping a few of his new It’s Only Yonkers CDRs around and it’s already being touted as the most fried-inside of modern Yonkers yet. It demands release.

The next day was the official first day of the fest and Aaron Dilloway was chosen for the opening invocation. Dilloway is the one connective tissue ‘twixt this event and the six years prior Tora Tora Tora fest, as he had appeared at that affair with the trio known only as Hercules. Dilloway is like the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original Tobe Hooper film, not the MTV rip), but instead of googling the knifeblade along his arm he transubstantiates noise-gore energy through mind/machine improv. The last couple of years have seen him primarily involved with the ultra-ruling Wolf Eyes so to see him play this solo lunchtime slot was a precursor to an unflagging mindblow of a trip. With stringy locks hanging, black boots kicked forward, he drove his machine like a pit mechanic investigating a sweet ride. Dillo delivered an ace. He also runs the longstanding distro/label Hanson Records where you can seek out some solo Dilloway laceration as well as a host of other fine meats.

Up next was Metalux. Two women in association with the amazing Bride of No No, whose second, possibly posthumous, LP on Atavistic is in frantic rotation here. Like that group, Metalux give off a distinctly dispossessed alien zap. Songs take on a grey whoosh with blurposette whizzing vox and oddball sampled guitar crackle to make you maybe think you’re drunk on the moon. A curious display and not too far removed from the hep qualities found on their Fluorescent Towers LP available on Hanson. A forthcoming split LP on the Belgium Veglia label with the UK’s phenomenally fucked Evil Moisture has us all panic sweating.

Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice is the new project of ex-Golden Calves Money Band and this performance had ringleader James Jackson Toth joined by Tovah O’Rourke (of Dead Machines), Matt Krefting (of The Believers) and a few other sprites out for adventure. It all slipped from some faerie aether into a sweet lyrical pronouncement from Toth and within eight minutes he bailed into the audience and sang his way into the basement thus winding the rather extended ensemble to a finish. WW&TVV’s future plans are that they will hitch-hike tour across the USA. Give ‘em a lift and maybe they’ll turn you on to their Book of FM cassette released on their own Polyamory label. It’s an initial clatter of a session and downright weird but no weirder than what will be their future LP release on Destijl.

Emil Beausoleil, the performing guise of RRRecords’ resident genius Ron Lessard, blew the house down. He plugged a table lamp in, and set it up on stage next to a couple of Ron-rigged turntables. A semi circle of curious elves gathered to see what this hurried man was up to. He chose his materials and set the needles down and listened to the front of house speakers emit their conservative rock and roll output. “Can you please turn up the PA??!!” he yelled to the soundman, who obviously had NO idea how to deal with Emil. The soundman, in his learned judgment, thought that the noise was loud enough as noise, unlike some lame hard rock band which he’d probably knee jerk to deafening decibels. But this was obviously wrong and to have it any louder would be criminal but Ron pleaded, “Turn it up! I am a professional!. The pleading became part of the show and Emil mixed it up with the great noise blowing out from the electric stylus hotcha all the while infuriating the soundman. After about 20 highly entertaining minutes of this back and forth Emil went into a wonderful choreography of preparing his self with the adornment of a button down sweater and tie. Now he was ready to go! But the soundman had to remind Emil that his time was pretty much up. Everyone was told to stay at the 30-40 minute mark as there were so many acts. At Emil’s 30 minute mark he exclaimed “I was just warming up!” and from there he fucking thrashed. He always does.

We were spent and ran out to fish for some liquids and missed Devendra Banhart but returned duly to be melted by the exquisite vocalese of Bridget St. John. Bridget released four dark folk LPs whilst traversing 1960s psychedelic London, Greenwich Village and the West Coast. She was a confidante of Nick Drake and had played in settings with Kevin Ayers and Mike Oldfield amongst others. Her four-and-a-half solo LPs Ask Me No Questions (Dandelion 1969), Song For The Gentle Man (Dandelion 1971), Thank You For (Dandelion 1972), Jumblequeen (Chrysalis 1974), and The First Cut (Shagrat 1996), are haunting masterpieces of folk charmed drama. Many thought her vanished but she has been alive and well on Bleeker Street, NYC for some time and appeared shockingly a few years back at a memorial concert for Nick Drake in NYC. Destijl plans on recording a new Bridget LP soon (a CD, Take The Fifth, containing a pastiche of odd session tracks was released on the UK See For Miles label, which also reissued the Dandelion sessions) and if her appearance at this fest was any indication of the beautiful nature that LP may contain, then be prepared to have mind and heart embraced. What was most telling of this festival is how much the boundaries between extreme noise slash and classic hippie dawn folk have blurred. The new generation’s appreciation of all outsider music as common aesthetic is as remarkable as it is organic, yet it’s also nutso in its record collector absurdity. The one performance I saw Wolf Eyes noise queen John Olson stage front at was the Bridget set and he was obviously digging the honest sublimity flowing like sweet clotted cream through his oracular scope. Or maybe he was just trying to cadge a beer from someone.

As soon as Bridget began to head for the basement zone she noticeably stopped and turned in quizzical response to an immediate sound happening back on stage. Fursaxa, the lone figure of Pennsylvanian Tara Burke, had immediately begun a chime tree incantation of readiness. All minds seemed to gravitate towards this non-break in action and it took the classicism of Bridget’s world and delivered a wholly other ‘scape of folk/psyche contemplation. Fursaxa swept the audience off its collective squat, emoting swirled long note vocal lines floating atop mystic pump organ balustrades. Her closing piece was a layered accordion texture composition that dropped all to enchanted grace. She has two new self-released CDRS on her site Trobairitz Are Here From Venus and The Cult From Moon Mountain, both of which are highly recommended.

We took another spill into the streets in search of reality and missed Espers, a folkish conglomerate from the East Coast, but made it back in time to catch a formidable excursion by Nmperign. Like John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Nmperign (Greg Kelley-trumpet, Bhob Rainey-sax) evince music from small free actions and are fully inside the compositional propulsion, granting the listener a steam head experience of fresh born creativity. A helluva time; but you got to be right up in it to let it flip and canoodle around your psyche, otherwise it becomes so much tick-tock inside the environment. Which is not altogether a bad alternative. They had unboxed their new double LP handsomely packaged by the Siwa label entitled We Devote Every Effort to Offer You the Best That You Deserve to Have for Your Enjoyment. Siwa takes great care in producing high quality editions. This Nmperign LP is downright beauteous and it wonderfully captures the work style of these cats.

The MVEE Medicine Show is Matt Valentine and Erika Elder and, as evening began its nudging arrival, these good practitioners of earth/magic love played a welcome set of radical animal head jam. It’s Matt and Erika’s Child of Microtones outfit which put on the Brattleboro Free Folk Fest which The Wire splashed on its “New Weird America” cover and, in a more outside/rural way, pre-dated this now full blown orgy of groove.

At this point, the group mind of the audience was in superbake mode and it was due time for some regal ass-kicking, ‘though we weren’t quite in agreement as to how that should take place. The Wayne Rogers Unit took the stage and a cynical perspective took hold. These guys are gonna play some psych-rock noise jamz? That might be a cornball bummer! Within 30 seconds of Kate Biggars’ awesome rock + roll guitar goddess power swings and Wayne’s zapped lead scorch, the club was a burning hole of high time energy. Completely and totally ass blasting, the entire dumbstruck audience lit up with raging rock energy and pushed this band into sheer sonic epiphany. They shut down with a weepingly great rendition of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air.” The night time is the right time and all systems were jumped. Wayne and Kate have plenty of different sides available from their record label/store Twisted Village. Hopefully they’ll kick out a Wayne Rogers Unit disc quick.

Before exiting the smoked stage, Kate raised both hands in the air and yelled “Borbetomagus!!!” as that was indeed the next salacious course. We’ve been tracking the Borbetomagus monster since its mid-‘70s inception and tonight they strode onto the stage like feted royalty. It was legend time and in celebration of such mythos, Don Dietrich sported an oversized Jimi Hendrix t-shirt which was a visual call to arms. Dietrich and Jim Sauter, within a hot minute, locked their horns “bells together” and sent out snaked multiphonics careening with total life over the guitar driven field of concrete miasmas courtesy Donald Miller. Unusual for Borbetomagus, at least in our experience, the trio actually got into some quietism, which opened their palette of intensity to a neo-sophisticated, freakish level. To the delight of everyone, the reedmen whipped out rubber hoses and attached them to their horns and blew out jettisons of grunt ending with Dietrich on his back gurgling up a mouthful of beer through the sounding rubber. This was sex Nyack NY style and the room was dripping.

The midnight hour threatened as last call would be in effect and it was in giddy anticipation as Tony Conrad dropped a white sheet across the front of the stage and set up his violin/electronics unit. Tony Conrad = fucking heavy. In collaboration with LaMonte Young in the ‘60s Tony formed the Theatre of Eternal Music, where a newfound investigation and reckoning of drone music dynamism was put to action. This was a direct current through John Cale into the Velvet Underground, a premier influence on just about everything moving in this room. And that’s but a segment of Tony’s history in multimedia. Long, sonorous electric bowed tones filled the space and at each pause a percussive moving whomp of a signal punctuated the environment. All the while, a surrealist shadow of the performer bellowed in gargantua across the stage. This was pure and utter mesmer music. As heavy as God. First night over. All crawled home and slept for the coming Sunday.

A different vibe this day, as second days usually are. Bleary brained mortals ready to bust a second nut but knowing they really need to find some fucking java and soon. We missed Ian Nagoski’s opening set but heard it was a sublime offering to the rising tribes poking about the aether.

Neon Hunk decided to caffeinate the gathering heads with hard spiked electro slap adorned in knitted tumble-wear. Each hyper bonk karate chopped its way through our skulls, not unlike their wicked LP on Load Records Smarmymob or the bonkers cassette Neyan Honkies (on Twig from Nautical Almanac’s label Heresee). This duo, Jennifurmium on lead synth/ vox and Pink Diamond on drums, modular ‘tronics and vox are always a sweet kick to catch but we were still seeking the sex charm left the night previous.

It was within the grasp surely of Burning Star Core. We raved about these little fuckers an issue or two ago and they’ve only grown in amazingness. The violin slicing Spencer Yeh, electronix arbiter Mike Shiflet and drummer Trevor Tremaine had spent the last 36 hours noise slamming in the pits, from the Hair Police Friday kill-down to last night’s Tony Conrad mind-crush. They were ready to slay and they did and in their own time. They didn’t beat off and blast, they let the music take its own path and guided it masterfully. Zipper fuck violin amp rock intershot with improvised quarktronix grabbed us back into the beast. It was topped off with Hair Police’s Mike Connelly joining for a vocal necksnap and we were on our way to a fucking killer day of sickness. Connelly’s Gods of Tundra label has just released the Amplified Body Sound cassette and we suggest you grab a couple now.

Into a room abrim with pariah visions, shuffled the crown prince of outsider U.S.A.: the soul-blamming persona of Arthur Doyle. Arthur has heard the noise of God penetrate Satan’s sacrum in more ways than most of these pups have had teeth in mouth, but does he lord this wild wind about their shells? Naught! He calls a dog a dog, and today he was the diva with the hand cream notion. His recorder and voice songs were gracious Nivea to the grey matter of towelette consciousness. The ladies in attendance I saw, Heather Leigh Murray of Scorces and Rita Ackermann of Angelblood, silently evoked this man’s great hands in bliss everlasting with smiles and eyes betwinked. Arthur Doyle can lay waste to any jaded preconception and though today’s salutation was noteful for its brevity it was nevertheless relentlessly religious.

An event a lot of us were salivating for was the appearance of Dead Machines, the romantik-noise union betwixt John Olson and Tovah O’Rourke. Olson runs American Tapes, possibly the most recognized of contemporary U.S. underground noisetronix labels. It’s also one of the most infuriating as releases come roughshod out of the gate in extreme micro numbers (editions of 15 are not unusual) and are discontinued post haste. And their iconography is hardcore psychoslash making them rather difficult to differentiate. Which, of course, is their beauty, as it constitutes a universe of living music. The label is just past its 300th release with no sign of slowing down. Since Tovah (ex-Golden Calves) relocated to Michigan to take Olson’s hand in sacramental rite, as well as to do her own thing, she’s released some of the coolest sounds from the American Tapes factory to date. Together they’ve exhibited stretches of improvised junk machine counterplay which bring to mind a feminized Wolf Eyes with a gonad butter dish of bohunk. Olson is insane in his fabric splitting military fatigue t-shirt and drink-fight-and-fuck keychain belt and Tovah is resplendent in her natural gorgeousness. When Olson walks over, kisses her, grabs the mic and proclaims “fuck the cops,” you know you’re at the center of the universe. If only just for a while. They have a one-sided handcut LP “The Things” (edition of 15 – available as of press time but probably long gone). There’s a great cassette in a large edition of 40 called “Future Funerals” which is really the real deal.

Jack Rose, continuing his investigation into folk blues guitar text, sat his ass down and ripped through his blue mountain repertoire. Jack came out of the mighty drone psyche world of Pelt and with the same southern charm that combo identified itself jack does so in solo stance. The process of breaking-through is as meritorious as the actual blow-out and Jack languishes at this acoustic door showing us all things we may have been dulled by through the years of post Tora Tora Tora exposition. He has just released a great document of this time of his travel on the Eclipse label called Opium Musick.

What seemed like a dude-laden day got busted as Angelblood made a completely rare appearance on the live stage. Angelblood forms from the uncategorizable flares of NYC’s Gang Gang Dance, Diadal and No Neck Blues Band as well as the ricochet finger jab-guitar licks of Orthrelm. Indeed it was Orthrelm’s Mick Barr who was responsible for a lot of the compositional guitar action, but his lickage is now played by a strapping Swede improviser who gave the group a new sense of metal flow. And metal is the elemental catalyst of this odd yet sultry swagger. What began as a three woman night-trip (Jess Holzworth left for warmer climes) is now just Rita Ackermann and Lizzie Bougatsos singing/chanting/evoking/crying/screaming the spirits of earth and moon, driven by the right-on dark metal skin pummel of No Neck’s Dave Nuss who got this shit down cold a long while back whilst a lad named Bambi in the Texas metal circuit with Angkor Watt. Rita moves with a sensual Hungarian nightclub lilt with a smile and a cigarette and a voice howling into the soul of dark dreams while Lizzie stands in black with an early Ozzy intensity, her banshee shreeks breaking any freak spell within 9000 miles. The tunes were killer and the girl/girl sex possession rituals were uncaged eros. The scent was dizzying. After the Angelblood and Masses of the Daggers CDs on the Japanese Captain Trip label they now have a new CD of this crazed line-up being readied for issue by Printed Matter.

With boners engorged, we crawled to a bar around the corner to drown the heat, missing the over-excited hard rock of No Doctors. But we returned in time to see the last half of Noxagt who were on a rampage of crushing blackball bass (Kjetil Brandsdal), whamming drum constructions (Jan Christian Kyvik) and hyper violin shard spray (Nils Erga). These three Norwegians have been at if for a few years now and recorded a killer document of their moves released by Load Records called Turning It Down Since 2001. This disc just plain slams and tonight’s gig showed the crux of their group gush. A perfect soundtrack to our horndogged oats.

Jackie-O Motherfucker played an extended piece of music completely beyond anything we’ve ever heard them do. It was an exhilarating display of mass instrumentation in active repetition. They had the sophisticated wherewithal to let the composition have its own accord, whilst gracefully directing it to new wide-open levels of positivism. Astounding and assured and joyful. Head honcho Tom Greenwood runs the U-Sound Archive where much JOMF is available (as well as a new limited edition book of illos by legendary Chocolate Monk/Prick Decay/Decaer Pinga wizard Dylan Nyoukis—brilliant).

After JOMF warmed the club to a sweet sizzle, the mood was buzzing in warmth and grooviness. No Neck Blues Band set the stage up with their classic array of urban fire music percussion and prepared guitar/sax. And there was Michiko, long-haired Japanese woman adding a vibe of actual Noh-wave spontaneity. And Keith Connelly with Stooges aviator shades and wildstyle red beard. People were ready for this. Many here knew No Neck as some mythical sub-world improv OUTfit. All the band had to do was do what they do best: wrap the music round their heads and let it rip. It certainly started off this way and the audience was latching on, but then it went into bloopersville. An attempt at living danger was in effect, but to a crowd of hardcore Midwesterners this was about as dangerous as the Knick City Dancers. Drums and cymbals flew into the audience, ashtrays were tossed off the balcony blasting glass bits around the onlookers feet (cool!), blindfolds were worn across the stage (though there was obvious peeking going on), and a beer bottle shard was used to cut into skin (ouch…fuck!). It was entertaining, regardless, especially Keith’s antagonistic “hey why dontchyou shut the fuck up?” patter to the heckling crowd. The club owners threatened to pull the plug on the festival after witnessing the backstage fruit tray being tossed in the air nearly shattering hanging light fixtures (cool!) and demanded to Clint Simonson, the Destijl organizer, to stop the band. Clint was digging it, we all were—retardo chaos is a gas—so he refused. It ended with most of the band winding down in apoplectic disengagement. There was the feeling of divisiveness and regret, as a chance to prove how good No Neck can be was overshadowed by a food fight. A general review of, “whatever,” was handed down. It certainly would be one of the more discussed sets of the event but for total mindblow it didn’t even enter the race.

NNBB had been touring around with Trad Gras och Stenar (Swedish for, Trees Grass and Stone) and everyone was waiting to see these legends from Sweden. They came out to a riotous welcome, four elder gentlemen with shirts tucked in, and proceeded to trip out into a long classic drone rock groove. Lead guitarist Bo-Anders Persson was 60-plus years old and severely kicking everyone’s ass. A mainstay of TG+S, Bo first formed the group Parson Sound in 1967 as a way to explore minimalist rock raga. The band changed their name to International Harvester in 1968 and re-arranged members a bit, and got very involved with hippie “free” culture, recording two excellent LPs Sov Gott Rose-Marie (Love Records) and Hemat (Decibel Records). In 1969 they got more into it traveling throughout Sweden playing outside any mainstream confine with a freaked light and happening performance aesthetic, changing their name this time to Trad Gras Och Stenar and proclaiming “you are the music we are just the band.” The next four years saw them release a self-titled LP on Decibel, Rock for Kropp och Sjal (Silence) and Djungelns Lag (Tall records). They split up in 1973 and released the posthumous Mors Mors LP (Tall), but regrouped every once in a while (once during the 1981 punk days as T. Gas). The Ti’llinden label released a 1970 live CD in 1995 called Gardet 12.6.1970 and a double CD of Parson Sound music, both which are awesome, and Silence issued a 2002 session on CD “Ajn Schvajn Draj”. And now they are in fucking Minneapolis jamming heavily and we are more than mellow. Jim O’Rourke is passing out free LSD to anyone who’s ready and much to everyone’s pleasure Rita Ackermann comes dancing onto the stage to muse the men into a higher key. Sweet!

For almost everyone in attendance this was the end, but one more act was ready to go and it was Dwight Frizzell, the man who released the weirdo 1976 out jazz LP., Beyond the Black Crack. The talk was that this LP was going to be recreated live tonight but instead….well it was a rather softcore take on mid-‘80s Arkestra action and pretty cornpone. We bolted to get some sick pizza around the corner and returned to see Matt St. Germain boogieing like a mouse on fire as the club personnel swept away the dust of goddamned good time.

Where a festival of this consistent greatness can lead is only to a next generation. What seems to be in the cards is the idea that anyone can put on a festival like this if they have the focus to do so. Also 3 to 5000 dollars helps. The next one in the works right now is the No Fun festival in Brooklyn this March 2004, as curated by Carlos Giffoni of Monotract. What distinguished the Tora Tora Tora fest and the Freedom From/Destijl fest was the curators’ devotion to the tapestry of artfulness and original soul power running through avant garde jazz to dark folk dreams and buzzbomb noise power. Note to Giffoni: can’t fucking wait, dude.

AS ALWAYS, IF YOU HAVE MATERIAL TO BE LICKED BY BULL TONGUE – VINYL, BOOKS, MAGS, VIDS, ETC. SEND TWO (2) COPIES TO:
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CONTACTS:
American Tapes: http://www.geocities.com/americantapes
Atavistic: http://www.atavistic.com
Bettawrechonize: http://www.bettawreckonize.com/interviews/hairpolice.htm
Borbetomagus: http://www.j51.com/~borbeto/
Burning Star Core: http://www.dronedisco.com/bxc/
Captain Trip: http://plaza14.mbn.or.jp/~captaintrip/
Child of Microtones: lunarmv@hotmail.com
Tony Conrad: http://www.geocities.com/hstencil/tonyconradintro.html
Aaron DillawayHanson Records: http://www.hansonrecords.com
Arthur Doyle: http://www.furious.com/perfect/arthurdoyle.html
Eclipse: http://www.eclipse-records.com
Fursaxa: http://www.fursaxa.net
Gods of Tundra: http://www.geocities.com/godsoftundra/
Heresee: http://www.heresee.com/heresee.htm
Load Records: http://www.loadrecords.com
Metalux: http://www.metalux.com
Ian Nagoski: http://www.redroom.org/documentation/nagoski.html
Neon Hunk: http://www.angelfire.com/super/neonhunk/
Noxagt: http://www.noxagt.com
Polyamory: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/1590/
Printed Matter: http://www.printedmatter.org
RRRecords: http://www.rrrecords.com
See For Miles: http://www.seeformiles.co.uk
SIWA: http://home.earthlink.net/~siwa/front-1.html
Smackshire: http://www.smackshire.com
Sub Pop: http://www.subpop.com
Trad Gras och Stennar: http://www.tgs.nu
Twisted Village: http://www.twistedvillage.com
U-Sound Archive: http://www.usoundarchive.com
Veglia Records: http://www.vegliarecords.com
Michael Yonkers: http://www.michaelyonkers.com

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 7 (November 2003)

While a newfound farmhand glam seems to be tripping through the hearts of American underground noise folk, it’s the unpinned nature of trad-surrealism, which seems to be guiding the Euro-scene. Case in point may be the remarkable sound cantations of Raymond Dijkstra and Timo van Luyk. Both have had involvement with an ongoing array of slippery activity through the years (Dijkstra with Razoul Uzlu, Indra Karmukaand and Dadaphon; Luyk with Af Ursin and Noise Makers Fifes amongst others.) The two have recently combined their spirit force as ASRA and have released an initial document Souvenir ‡ ASRA la PoupÈe Vivante on the Le Souffleur label. An engaging outsider dada stroke vibe pulls you into this weirdo soundcurrent and it breathes a serious and graceful drift into the air. Chamber LSD expositions for the new mind. Edition of 300. No web presence found though they reside in or around the Netherlands and the Dutch noise/industrial distributor Staalplat may be of service. In the USA try Self Abuse. Also check out the Dadaphon 10-inch on Le Souffleur for further kosmische scloob.

One of the real bonuses of all the recent archival and reissue frenzy has been in the genre of avant garde composition. Many of the composers whose work was most talked about by people who seemed to be on the right track was all but unavailable. Over the last few years there has been a goddamn glut of the stuff, however, and we aren’t complaining—far from it—we’re wallowing. And two of the most wallowsome recent LPs in this field are Charlemagne Palestine’s Negative Sound Story (Alga Marghen) and Tony Conrad’s Fantastic Glissando (Table of the Elements). Neither of these guys was well-represented by recordings any time in the past, but what rich loam has been dug! Negative Sound Story is a one-sided LP, recorded in 1969, documenting one of Palestine’s first pieces, predating the influence of Pandit Pran Nath and long tones. It is a somewhat crude but quite involving series of generated synthesizer waves that splutter in sequence and shift in the air like clay pigeons, expanding towards nirvana. Fantastic Glissando was also recorded in 1969, and is one of Conrad’s experiments for a sine wave oscillator. The album presents four different versions of the work. The original piece sounds something like standing at the end of a runway at JFK while a 747 takes off over your head in slow motion. But as the channels become more separate, the effect becomes more and more like being torn apart by two subway trains. Either way, the results are invigorating.

Back in the USA the summer was blown to bits by the reformed Iggy & the Stooges shows. The first one, in Palm Springs, CA, as part of the Coachella Festival, was brainsmoking. Mike Watt, holistically woodshedding with Ron and Scott Asheton and J Mascis (as Asheton, Asheton, Mascis & Watt) for the last two years, is the new recruit on bass (original Stooge Dave Alexander left the planet in 1975). As absurd and perfect a choice Watt is, it was equally nutso to see and hear Steve MacKay, the Funhouse sessions saxophonist, appear on stage to reprise his classic howl. Unlike the peripheral players from Iggy’s subsequent Hollywood years, like Scott Thurston and Zeke Zettner, MacKay was a Michigan boy hooked in with the Asheton scene, the real high energy family of the Midwest ‘60s/early ‘70s. Before, during and after the Funhouse era MacKay blasted around in a weirdo patchwork of playing situations. He had his own free jazz/rock group in 1969 called Steve MacKay with Carnal Kitchen which existed as a precursor to the Stooges’ “L. A. Blues.” He can be heard with integral Detroit late-‘60s rock group the SRC (in an incarnation then known as Blue Scepter) on the Lost Masters CD (One Way Records, UK). He recorded with the Commander Cody Band in 1977, as well as a bunch of different Commander Cody & The Lost Planet Airmen sessions through the years. Also in 1977 he recorded with “Blue” Gene Tyranny on “Blue”’s signature new music art/roots LP Out Of The Blue (Lovely Music). He then recorded with Snakefinger in 1984, the Violent Femmes in 1985 and Andre Williams in 2000. Carnal Kitchen still exists as a concern for MacKay in residence in the California Bay Area even though VH1, Mix Magazine, Nick Kent and other doofus media dipshits have claimed the man dead. As interesting an underground career MacKay has had, what he’s doing now with the Radon Ensemble is the most mind-blowing. The Radon Ensemble is Tyler Armstrong (Nequaquam Vacuum) drums, steel cello, signal processing; Marlon Kasberg (Liquorball) bass, clarinet; Sam Lohman (36) drums; Travis McAlister (Nequaquam Vacuum) reeds, brass, string can; Noah Mickens (Nequaquam Vacuum) scrap percussion, vocals; and Scott Nydegger (Sikhara) drums, electronics. This collective has been active on the west coast incorporating aspects of electric improv and performance for a few years now, almost as a contemporary version of the classic Los Angeles Free Music Society. Since 1988 the Radon Ensemble has extended its work into booking, distribution, publicity, and recording/mastering services for like-minded creativists. On first glance their aesthetic seems to stem from hard-goth hell-rave stainage though from proof of their recordings they exude a future-blowing energy such fringe-genre music can readily use. A recent Radon Ensemble gig in L.A. featuring Steve MacKay (as well as the electronic zap frazz of Bastard Noise a/k/a John Wiese) was killer. Tripping and metascoping tenor sax jowl-action interwove with the ensemble’s thrash-trash percussion, loose-wire fuzzplay and bass amp anarchy all cutting loose through the astounded listener’s gawp. There are recordings available from these lads, along with archival MacKay music at their site and chances are this full ensemble will unleash some righteous sides soon enough. An extensive overviewithinterview with Steve MacKay exists in Black To Comm magazine issue #12. Tell him Bull Tongue sent ya.

Also at the above gig (along with Smegma’s triumphant return to L.A. with Richard Meltzer and, again, Steve MacKay and LAFMS stalwarts Solid Eye, who played a mesmerizing drone-drift) was a young woman duo from Japan called Afri Rampo. They went on last after Smegma, the purported headliners. I had heard about these two from a friend in Japan who had mentioned something about the most insane and fantastic girl duo ever to land on earth so I was duly curious about why they were in L.A. with absolutely no forewarning or even the slightest of subterranean media profile. The few people who were there at the show were ambling away to get homewards when these girls began to soundcheck a little. This did nothing really to spark anyone’s interest too much and the girls then disappeared for about 15 minutes. All in all not a good move seeing as how the place was emptying. But for those of us still finishing our $5 beers we were thrown into group headscratch and breath gasp as Afri Rampo took the small stage dressed in micro stripper wear. This was either going to be groaningly tacky or groaningly embarrassing (for us, particularly). What happened next was the aging chins of Don Bolles, Mike Watt, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Meltzer, all of Smegma, myself et al just HITTING the goddamn floor.
Using electric guitar and a full scale drumset Afri Rampo relentlessly destroyed us. Each piece was a journey through hyper-irreality as the two musicians called and responded with vocals nailed with reverb. The playing went through passages of Boredoms style aggression, scratch-improv wildness and Sabbath groin-pummel. Anyone en route out of the club turned slowly and came back to see just what in the hell was happening. And what was happening was a new musical experience most of these very experienced individuals had never thought would happen again. But it did and this event became a celebration. Afri Rampo, demurely entering a jaded arena, ripped a whole new sonic slit into the fabric. At times the performance flamed so hot that it could only melt into a sex-scream lava flush. Both women injected proto-gorge guttural yowling into our already heavily ass-kicked psyche to the point of near-fucking-death. I think they brought a few CDRs with them, which at gig’s end, vanished into trembling L.A. boy hands. The next day they played again, as the promoter was so mind-scorched that he demanded they play every day he was alive. I didn’t catch that show, but I heard they went to Disneyland and then flew back to Osaka. Here is the only info I’ve yet to glean via e-mails:

AFRIRAMPO
We are star?
Nice to meet every one!
We are AFRIRAMPO!
from JAPAN
oni Guiter & Vocol
pikacyu drum & Vocol
very enjoy fun YO!
You should feel the AFRIRANPO.
(pika)
It was started ’02 spring, when they are18-19 this time 1 years old “AFRIRAMPO”.They are so cute and little barbarous pair naked mind, and brain open feel give to all kind poeple.
They play G.Vo.-Oni and Dr.Vo.-Pika very heavy kind of rock and so improvised feels catch everytime-different sound. They are like 60’s hippys. But try a lot of new interesting things .
Oni: 1983 born, She was started play band in1997-8 sit in many band now through going it. she is singer song writer. Kind of lyricist. She play in Evellive (20 peace improvisation band, she also pikacyu play there Chorus and Percussion)
Pikacyu:1983 born, she is a more from visual arts she and Oni were gradurate same art unique public high school. they were same photography club. Oni and Pikacyu is different from class grade. they are working together now. Pikacyu play a drum and sing acting statement. AFRIRAMPO make Drama, thier compose drama and sing, expressing anyway!
They are play with a lot of Japanese bignames ex member of Boredoms, Yoshikawa Toyohito…Hiromichi Sakamoto……Namaiki……a lot of session work, Now ‘s Osaka’s Scene is infuruenced from them many things!
In Osaka Castle Park(like brooks),They organize jam session party every month. Last party is 50 musician (guitar 20???,a lot of drumers…dancers.and all kinds…audience a lot include this park’s homeless people was collecting many I saw) play started from evening sun to in the morning sunrise.
Great Rave Culture.
This Party was No Drug Natural Trancing Very Silent Minds party was last year, a few times police came but They talk to Oni&Pika soon go back their statement.
They are Star like shine flash, Interesting funny and sexy cute …so real.
Same of in the stages or every lifetime this is great thing I think.
Pika write is “our’s real music CuleCule stir Japan Drop in River Nake. SOON OVER THERE STIRING. Everybody Smile.”
Oni also Supponpon (naked) brain rock sing and guitar ! So Amazing.
“SUPPONPON ROCK AFRIRAMPO!”
Sound man / Bun
2003. June. LOVE.
NUDE MIND. FEEL!

Wow.

The great Richard Meltzer was mentioned above and, lest you think he is just functioning as the vocalist for Smegma these days, it should be noted that he has just had a new book released, and it’s a honey. Autumn Rhythm (Da Capo) is Meltzer’s book about becoming a self-proclaimed geezer, and it may well be his best yet. He has really mastered the flow of his muse over the last few years, and the boil of his “mature” style is fucking incredible. Some of the pieces have seen print in various places, but the blend of prose, poetry and sheer cussedness is magnificent to read. Meltzer has always seemed to be one of the two most influential writers of his generation (the other being Pynchon), but the saddle of “rock crit” that he was forced to wear for so long gave people an easy way to not-take him seriously as either a stylist or a thinker. Death, non-death, meta-death, quasi-death, death of youth, death of sex, resurrection, etc., these are all topics that are dealt with here in scabrous, hilarious terms. If this isn’t enough to get the guy into the rolls of “serious” writers, it’s time for a revolt. Anyway, it’s a monster of a goddamn read. So do it today.

The printed page seems to be alive and well in England as well, with two fine new shelf-stuffers courtesy of Ed Pinsent. The first is the eleventh issue of his occasional music omnibus, The Sound Projector. Perfect bound and filled to bursting with reviews, this number also has a special section on the Seattle experimental scene with great interviews with Climax Golden Twins, Scott Colburn, Dave Knott, Jesse Paul Miller and Matt Shoemaker. It’s a wonderful bathroom read, as is the first decent sized collection of Pinsent’s comics. Voice of the Wilberforce: A Book of Signs (Kingly Books) is a truly bizarre set of stories, following the diminutive, rotund intellectual Windy Wilberforce through a series of metaphysical adventures that are equal parts kid’s stories and adult-style bad dreams. Soothing!

A couple of other notable Japanese things have recently come out on American labels. The Don’t Forget to Boogie LP by Tetuzi Akiyama (Idea) is one of the more disorienting things to arrive. On the cover, Akiyama, a guitarist best known for his free improvisations and noise efforts, is portrayed as a refugee from an early line-up of Electric Flag or something. And the music is a mutant strain of solo guitar choogle, taken to extreme minimalist/maximalist lengths in a way that suggests intellectual underpinnings of John Lee Hooker’s sound that have never (to the best of our knowledge) been previously posited. I mean, did even the Mysterious Al Wilson ponder the connection between “Boogie Chillen” and “Metal Machine Music”? A bit more straightahead is the Heavy Acid Blowout Tensions LP by Splendor Mystic Solis (Galactic Zoodisk). This was an ad hoc live band that Plastic Crimewave (the editor of Galactic Zoo Dossier as well as a fiercely weird guitarist) assembled for a ’99 tour with Mainliner. Using members of Acid Mothers Temple, the Ruins and High Rise, Mr. Crimewave managed to get them through a short, explosive psychedelic tour that is captured here. Less about form than sound, the three long tracks here are wonderful meandering psych jams, shorn of the hard rock bombast that can mar some such outings. Cool, loose and spaced. Okay!

Out of Brooklyn, a steaming hotbed of potential sqwooge, comes the first release from the Skul Record Label. It’s a shrouded affair titled Tuck Tuck Tuck and on first spin you may want to scream and bolt as yr confronted with a loner boy with barely touched acoustic guitar and what may be just a cassette recorder. The attempt here is of something shot with Palace Bro alien-stream and pre-Palace Nick Drakeanism, neither of which can withstand too much more investigation by contempo ears, but no one says you can’t at least try. In distress we flip the sucker and a whole nother slew of gush rips forward. And it’s nice: improvised scrape and amp shudder with a bitching deftness. More of this shit would be extremely welcome. Edition of 300 with handmade covers.

From elsewhere in New York (the Lower East Side, mostly) comes the poetry of Irving Stettner. The long-time editor of Stroker, and a favorite of Henry Miller, Stettner is one of those street poets whose work grew out of the beats without ever really becoming a part of their stream. There’s a solid new collection of his work, Pigeon Feather: Selected Poems (1967-2002) (Stroker/Papandrea) that puts a lot of his best poetry in one place for the first time. Stettner writes about the road and the Village and art and love and all else like a master. He doesn’t have a dry, academic bone in his body and allows himself to be swept away by passion like a smoke-ring in a hurricane. His style is great and readable, somewhere between Jack Micheline and Allen Ginsberg, and he should be so much better known it hurts. Stettner’s buddy Everett Rand has also gotten out a new issue of his great zine, Mineshaft. This new one has drawings by R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, Ace Backwards and Bruce Duncan, wonderful pieces by Everett, Tommy Trantino and others, and a nice photo portfolio by Olivier Berthe. Definitely worth a check (as are back issues).

Another fine zine is Wildflowers (Shivastan) edited by Shiv Mirabito and printed on beautiful handmade paper in Nepal. The focus here is poetry by people in and around Woodstock, NY and their circle. As this includes Janine Pommy Vega, Hetty Maclise, Ira Cohen, Ed Sanders, and Andy Clausen, the wordsmithing here is rich as hell. The four issues thus far are uniformly lovely in both content and format, really nice to handle and read. The same press has also published Festival of Squares by Andy Clausen, probably the best poet around, although weirdly unknown in too many circles. Clausen’s new chapbook is a long poem taking apart George W and the whole fucked yuppie culture that allowed him and his whole family to be shat out onto our heads. It’s a damn fine read. I just wish that someone would publish the text of Andy’s “The Old Days” (thee epic poem of the last twenty years) somewhere. Thus far it has only appeared in an issue of Charlie Potts’ late, lamented ‘zine, The Temple. And even if I’m sure Potts still has an assload of copies, it’s not exactly on the stands.

One of the Bay Area’s treasures for the last many years has been Barbara Manning. An incredibly gifted musician and human, Barbara has made so many fine records, my mouth waters just thinking bout them. The newest one under her name is a sweet-looking picture disk LP, One Starry Night at the Shop (Swamp Room), recorded live with her current band the Go-Luckys. It has 18 songs, old, new, borrowed and blue, all of them powered by her exquisite vocal sense and the playing of the reckless Steinbach brothers. From the electric folk perfection of “Scissors” through Faine Jade’s psych-snot-classic “Don’t Underestimate Me” to the thug-slunch of “Don’t Neglect Yourself,” this is music as sharp as a tic’s pincer, and twice as grabby. Ms. Manning’s more perverse side is on display with the Tubular Bells LP (Starlight Furniture Co.), by Glands of External Secretion and Decaer Pinga. Glands is the experimental duo she does with Bananafish editor Seymour Glass, and Decaer Pinga is the English unit formerly known as Prick Decay. Together, they approach Mike Oldfield’s lazy-prog opus with pitchforks, and toss it rudely into the air by “covering” it using only pre-recorded sounds, electronic pucks, and dithering effects barrages. How it relates to the original is something best left to individual listeners, but it is a weezily strange suite of blinking sound-sheets no matter what side of yr bread is buttered. How sneaky!

Back in the cosmic farmland of New England we have an LP document of a rather wigged out night at Brattleboro, Vermont’s Common Ground space. This is the scene where David Keenan of Wire magazine became so irreversibly turned on by “New Weird America.” It so happens one summer night in 2002 Mr. Brinkman (Mindflayer, Forcefield), Neil Burke (Men’s Recovery Project) and Fast Forward showed up for a collaborative performance at Common Ground, which is a fairly well-known Brattleboro hippie event pad. As it was, no one there let anyone else know this was happening, no flyers, nothing. The manager had gone home and the P.A. was locked in his office. Legend has it the performers broke into the office, liberated the P.A., set it up and proceeded to blow a mighty blare into this hallowed den of bearded burnout. Wabana Records have released this hippie attack and it is a big, deep noisefuck glissando roiling through dimensional organix. Available from the label’s distributor, Surefire.

Lots of great print stuff has been popping out all over. First up may as well be our old friend Valerie Webber, who has a swell new poetry broadsheet called cigatete (Webber). This evidence of her newest work is pretty dazzling, a mix of sex and anger that will pin you to your seat. There’s supposed to be a French language edition of her Figure Order collaboration around too, as well as hints of a new bilingual book in the works with Benoit Chaput’s great l’Oie de Cravan press. In the meantime. Monsieur Chaput has come through with a selection of goodies associated with his organization, Mouvement Lent (Slow Movement), who are dedicated to decreasing the hectic pace of contemporary life. In concord with such great visual artists as Julie Doucet, ML have created some small manifestos, cardboard readymades, beautifully packaged unplayable CDs by their band, les Slow, and a variety of other gorgeous stuff, guaranteed to make you stop in yr tracks and just smell the day. The stuff is unbelievably nice and you should write them (by slow boat) and ask how to join the gang tomorrow (or the day after) (or the day after that). Another visual feast is the one provided by Steven Heller’s Merz to …migrÈ and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (Phaidon). This is a big, beautiful coffee table book with great illustrations of legendary mags from the beginning of the modern design revolt through Dada, Surrealism, hippies, punks, mimeo, Raygun, RAW, and tons else. The text is excellent, but it’s the numerous illustrations that will suck the eyeballs out of yr head. Naturally, there’re things you might think they should have covered, but hey—that just means it’s time to do your own goddamn book! Or if you wanna do a newspaper, try to style it after the incredible Paper Rodeo, which is this freebie from Providence full of totally insane graphics that spring out of ratty graphics into deep space. It seems like these guys are almost impossible to deal with by mail sometimes, but it’s really worth a try. Also, on a recent trip to Cleveland, turned up a booklet by the wonderful poet, T. L. Kryss, who once ran the legendary Black Rabbit Press. This new volume, 7 Poems (Ferguson), is the first new work of Kryss we’ve seen in a while, and like so many others, he seems profoundly touched by the current state of the world’s affairs. Between the lines of personal introspection and blue collar muscle, Kryss’s work lets out a baleful sigh about the ways things have become. Send a couple of bucks to sigh along with him. You’ll be happy you did.

West Germany’s Peter Brotzmann is one of the great figures of the age. Both as a visual artist and as a musician, he has created vast neural pathways of his own unique design. His first two albums, self-released on the BRO label were legendary pieces of the European avant garde puzzle, later re issued by FMP. But the original copies, with silkscreened covers existed as virtual art pieces and, together with a later 3-LP set on FMP that included pieces of a balloon from an event by Fluxus artist Nam June Paik, they have long represented the sole fusions of Brotzmann’s arts. Now, 35 years down the pike, there is a third release on BRO, the ink is gone LP (distributed by Eremite), which has a lovely silkscreened cover and contains evidence of a fine set of duos for Brotzmann’s reeds and the drumming of Walter Perkins. Perkins has been around for a long time and figures into the discographies of everyone from Mingus to Roland Kirk to Booker Ervin to the birth of the AACM and onward. The shows they did together were splendid surges of back and forth, giving Perkins’ spare kit action plenty of space, and pulling Brotzmann into some of his most reflective playing ever. The album is a true document of this, and breathes with such beauty and open-ness it is impossible to resist. Peter’s gorgeous blend of sweet and sour combine with Walter’s protean Murray-esque free-formalism just perfectly.

Back in Brooklyn the sick style spazz gods Japanther have released a motherfucker of an LP called Leather Wings (Menlo Park). It truly is a ping pong of dipsorhythmic mania. Using loose tapes of radio bonkerisms and stink-fried grooves Japanther is a lean slam boogie machine with no time for boredom. A titillated mix of Germs and no-wave and drunken noise is Japanthers screed. By the time this is published their anti-Rikki Lake CD should be out, also on Menlo Park. They have friends too who are all just as invitingly damaged – http://www.tapesrecords.com

AS ALWAYS. IF YOU HAVE MATERIAL TO BE LICKED BY BULL TONGUE – VINYL, BOOKS, MAGS, VIDS, ETC. SEND TWO (2) COPIES TO:
Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA 01062

Contacts:
Black to comm: chris stigliano, 714 shady avenue, sharon, PA 16146, usa
da capo: http://www.dacapopress.com
eremite: http://www.eremite.com
ferguson: 1330 west blvd. #512c, cleveland, oh 44102
galactic zoodisk: c/o eclipse – http://www.eclipse-records.com
idea: http://www.idearecords.com
kingly: http://www.kinglybooks.com
steve mackay: http://www.geocities.com/detroitrockandroll/bands3.html#mackay
menlo park: http://www.menloparkrecordings.com
mineshaft: p,o box 884, lewisburg, wv 24901
mouvement lent: cp 48115, 5678 av. du parc, montreal, pq, h2v 4s8, Canada
paper rodeo: p.o. box 321, providence, ri 02901
phaidon: http://www.phaidon.com
radon ensemble: http://www.radonstudio.com
self abuse: http://www.selfabuserecords.net
shivastan: 54e tinker street, woodstock, ny 12498
skul records: http://www.skulrecordlabel.com
the sound projector: http://www.thesoundprojector.com
staalplatg: : http://www.staalplaat.com
starlight furniture co.: p.o. box 424762, san francisco, ca 94142-4762
stroker/papandrea: 174 huntsville rd. #5, dallas, pa 18612
surefire: http://www.surefiredistribution.com
swamp room: http://www.Swamp-Room.de
webber: 87 troy, verdun, pq, h4g 3c6, canada

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)

Let’s start this time with a little political play we wrote. The setting is a children’s park in Northampton, Massachusetts. Two middle-aged men are sitting on the swings, drunk. Their toupees are askew.
GALLANT: What would you do w/ the Bush twins?
GOOFUS: I’d eat the fat one first.
Okay, that’s it. Back to our regular log haul.

New England now – beyond Providence:
One of the weirdest gigs I’ve seen/heard lately was by a Providence, Rhode Island duo called KITES CAN’T. Their name alone was a curious alliteration of chitinous promise. That and the fact they were riding along with another Providence duo called Mindflayer (being B. Chippendale of Lightning Bolt, and Mr. Brinkmann of Meerk Puffy, Force Field, MC Brinkmandibles, and Danse Asshole). The CAN’T of Kites Can’t is Jessica Rylan, a “noise performance artist” (according to her “pop”), who, unlike the scallywags notoriously involved with said genre, is a NICE-natured individual. Though when she springs into performance I suggest you hold onto your moorings: Jessica bolts her tall-drink-o’-water body to and fro like a flesh-spear controlled by a caffeine-spiked jerkin’ joystick. Kinda scary and amazing as the oddball galoomph of it not only shreds whatever gender-tradition Jessica is obviously liberated from but acts as an affront to the high percentage of male noise nose pickers agawk at her spectacle. In tandem with her performative rite are her “Can’t machines”–noise boxes with a visual aesthetic both positive and alarming. One such machine is a modified Arvin boom-box which she presented in the Boom Box show early in 2003 at the Boston Center for the Arts. Because of this exhibit she was featured on a WGBH TV special on Boston sound art. She has her own label called irfp (the name of a transistor she has utilized in amp construction) releasing a trio of CDs and a limited handbound book called Noise Show where she writes of dreams, noise, politics, social anxiety. The 3-inch CD-R morse code vs. can’t is a screaming match twixt Can’t (synth, voice, mxr, acoustic 150 amp) and Morse Code (Tim Morse using sax, seven pedals, two Peavey amps) in a numbered edition of 99 copies. It suggests distorted anarchy yet realizes an intelligent spray of heartfelt expression. A Bard graduate furthering the expanded field of post-gender, post-boundary noise work Jessica is delivering a welcome shot of sonic funtime.

KITES is a new cat (Christopher Forgues) from the more-alive-than-ever Providence scene in and out of the Fort Thunder nexus from which the supernovas Lightning Bolt, Black Dice and Force Field blasted. Kites wears handmade grey-scale splattered noise-wear and sexulates his odd-machines to harried levels of distracto-crunge. He also creates spiked comic art which seems to be a shared vision/vocation for a lot of this area’s enclave, be they wasted Rhode Island School of Design denizens or simply localized noise rats. Kites, along with Chippendale and others (including grafik great Gary Panter), squirts jizzed n’ jamming inksplot inside the newsrag Paper Radio, now in its 14th issue. Not only is the art mania here insanely inviting but the host of micro-ads are a compendium of underworld (specifically east coast) noise/art scuzz beneficial to any jonesing noise-jack’s junksick. The Kites music available right now is strictly in cassette format in wonderful normal-bias outage. CDs suck, vinyl’s better and normal-bias cassette is the best—always has been. Wanna make a hot CD? Transfer your audio file(s) to normal-bias cassette (no dolby no noise reduction) and then use that as your master. That’s good listenin’. Kites Vol. 3: The Miracle of Thought (Unskilled Labor U.L. 004) is for digging on headphones with all EQs rammed to peak level. It won’t hurt, it will help; indeed it may heal (particularly the side-2 long track “Total Peace”). Kites’ liner notes exclaim, “FUCK YOU SELF IMPORTANT NOISE SLOBS AND BLAS… SCENESTERS ALL OVER WORLD” and there does indeed seem to be a new breakaway from genre purism as practiced by the likes of Kites and Can’t that seems almost like a euphoric new-birth with a reinvestment to junk manip/control. Sweet.

I doubt the Providence extreme noise outfit PRURIENT qualifies as an example of what Kites is ranting on, as the ringleader of this active emission is a humble lad. The Prurient vibe is aligned with a more traditional and classic noise world. The label it’s involved with, Hospital Productions, has released a steady stream of well-worn sociopathic hyper-scree through the years. They’ve documented such uber-discharge as Black Leather Jesus, Skin Crime and Macronympha, as well as a heavy sick dose of house-band Prurient. They’ve also been home to even more nefarious concerns such as the near-unapproachable Nuclear Pig Shit and Whorebutcher. What excites us is Hospital Production’s cassette release of more wig-fry by Lexington, KY’s HAIR POLICE. Anyone who has subjected themselves to multiple pops from the classic Blow Out Your Blood LP these guys did on the bedraggled-yet-delirious Freedom From label last year, or from any of their head-on bonkers gigs of the last 12 months, will know how utterly noise-freak genius Hair Police is and any release by these fuckos is essential. Look for more soon come from Providence’s infamous Load Records and a split 10-inch with Crystal Fantasy on the Liquid Death/Hello Pussy label. And scour Hospital Productions’ site for much great Providence noise Prurient and otherwise.

Not every mother’s son and daughter in Rhode Island is unleashing harsh rainbowtronics. There is the psych/folkcentricity of Iditarod who have been active for a few years now and are wonderful. As well as the remarkable free-improv/modern comp hybrid music of BARNACLED. Both these bands fit dynamically in excited context with their more wilded-out contemporaries. Last year when the Bay Area’s plague-assault core unit Total Shutdown blew through the northeast they had Barnacled along for the ride, which made for a far headier night than just full time destructo. A booking much appreciated by myself and the other eight people in attendance. Barnacled looked scary, as if they were academic musos caught in the wrong dorm, but as they propulsed forward with their energy-ideas it was obvious why taste-mongers of Total Shutdown’s caliber had requested their company. Hot-shot arrangements treated with no wave mind play were in charged abundance. I recommend the CDs available from Corleone Records. All these Providence labels and bands’ sites have linkage far more subterranea to explore (such as Noise Nomads, Neon Hunk et al). The connection to scenes in the Midwest, West Coast, NYC and elsewhere is a unity that’s pretty fucking happening.

When Kites Can’t played the aforementioned gig it was in conjunction with a weekend full fest of out-reaching musics under the banner The Brattleboro Free Folk Festival which happened May 1 thru 4 2003 in Brattleboro, VT and Easthampton and Amherst, MA. It was organized by a compendium of Western MA and Vermont peace groovers with a streak of rough play across their souls. Such heroes as Matt Valentine and Erika Elder of Tower Recordings and MVEE Medicine Show and the label Child of Microtones, and the label Spirit of Orr from Cambridge, MA, which has released the LP debut of spangled wizards Sunburned Hand of the Man, and Dan and Pat Ireton (Dan being Dredd Foole) threw down an awesome event of new free-breath expression.

Along for the journey were such amazing purveyors of field-psych as Texas lad Tom Carter (Charalambides, ex-The Mike Gunn), Jack Rose (Pelt), Dredd Foole (exhibiting his deep-tho-far-out vox improv majesty), Elk Link (a duo of Graham Lambkin, ex-Shadow Ring, and Adris Hoyo, ex-Harry Pussy), Willie Lane (previously known as Willie “Gutbucket” Lane as Matt Valentine felt his gut overflow like a bucket of love after first hearing Willie’s electric folk-wild fret work–Willie has an LP due on Child of Microtones) and a host of other various profile masters (Michael Hurley, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Glenn Jones, Mindflayer, Tower Recordings, Charalambides a.o.). The most startling event hands down would be the premier performance by BABES ON THE LOOSE, a group comprised of Chris Corsano (drums), Paul Flaherty (sax) and SCORCES. Scorces is Heather Leigh Murray and Christina Carter of Charalambides who have a reputation for heavy flow trance drone atmospherics. The question was how they would jibe with the free-fire spark of Corsano/Flaherty. What happened was life-changing for anyone present as Flaherty and Carter kept the engine cooking and Murray and Corsano destroyed and howled all negative light from the immediate environment. Crutches were thrown down and blood streaked Heather’s pedal steel in a psyched ritual of deliverance.

The following evening CHARALAMBIDES settled into post-partum sway and played what was to be their first fully improvised set of live music ever. They were accompanied by Marcia of New York’s DOUBLE LEOPARDS. Double Leopards, along with Amherst, MA’s SON OF EARTH-FLESH ON BONE, have become two of New England’s most rewarding of improvising groups. Neither are featured much at the acclaimed outposts of this music (NYC’s Tonic and Knitting Factory) but, along with their co-joined ensemble Shackamaxon, have become far more challenging and spirit-forward than the stalwarts consistently booked at these joints. So they’re pretty submerged below the pop/improv strata but the recordings bear them out by greatness. Son Of Earth’s label Apostasy released a split LP of these two which is remarkable (and very limited—act fast).

A few of the Son Of Earth/Apostasy clan have decided to rise from their tap-tap tinker knees to celebrate their more erectile rockist desires. A distinct lust for things Bowie and Reed has birthed a horribly attractive no-boogie glam gloop called THE BELIEVERS. Bass player Matt Krefting, at 6 foot 6 inches, had singer Jessi Swenson hold a copy of Lou Reed Live next to his scalp in one hand and with the other scissor his hair in direct proportion to Lou’s. With black fingernails and extremely ill high-water leather pants, he struts and strikes his instrument like a primo new wave gork from the backwoods of 1977. Jessi in hot hot hot pants spiels wonder-glam recitations whilst the others, in varying degrees of hairy transition, groove a thorny hybrid of woodsy punk and neon junk. The Believers join local legends Magic Markers and Scott Foust and Karla Bolecky’s Swill Radio band bonanza (Anti-Naturals, Idea Fire Company, Tart, The New Peculiars a.o. – I suggest procuring Scott’s solo The Fighting Sensualist cassette on his new Pineapple Tapes label. This tape is a 1981-2002 overview of Scott’s outstanding glam-noise dialogue with reason. Indeed, it is Scott’s glamitude in dress and swagger that has given this contempo New England scene its underlying style) as a new voice in post-versatile punk/glam/improv. MAGIC MARKERS heartthrob drummer Pete Nolan has readied a fresh master of the premier Magic Markers LP which will be co-released late summer by Apostasy and Ecstatic Peace. Both bands will be touring together this summer though how far from New England they can stray is hard to tell. As long as they return!

***

Chad Stockdale seemed like a pretty unassuming guy when we met, but his recordings on tenor saxophone, recorded in duo with percussionist Nate Beier, are really wild. Under the procedural soubriquet, KLONDIKE & YORK, the pair has recently released an LP, The Holy Book (Weird Forest) that treads outsider jazz ramps as strangely as Arthur Doyle might. Stockdale’s tone is fractious and scattery, but follows neither the bellow nor the tinkle of the Euro free jazz tradition. If anything, he recalls the strangest players of the American fire music underground, who investigated internal chambers of passion with their reeds blazing softly. Skronky sax, scuddering drums, some wall-eyed synth, everything blended like some sorta weird stew of darkly boiling orgone. It’s one of the best free jazz duo records from Sacramento since [yr favorite here]. And frankly, it’s even better than that.
If you can read French you might wanna check out a nice new collection, edited by Vincet Pecoil. It’s called Prieres Americaines (Les Presses du Reel) and collects a few really good essays about the intersection of semi-popular music and art in the furnace of American underground culture. They use a nice bit of Pettibon art for the cover and the individual texts are pretty heavy. There are good interviews with Christian Marclay and Mike Kelley. There’s a nice piece on Dan Graham’s importance in tickling the crotch where high and low culture meet. Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether both unspool extremely pleasant thoughts (an ode to west coast art, and fake Sun Ra texts, respectively) and so on. Worth translating. Honest.

The best Japanese LP released by an American label this time out is probably Anoyonodekigoto by IKURO TAKAHASHI (SIWA). As far as we can tell, Anoyo No Dekigoto is actually the name of a duo which includes Takahashi and dancer Yoko Muronoi. This album captures some of Takahashi’s amazing electronic creations and they are so beautifully strange and space-altering, that you’d better make sure your seatbelt is good and tight before you play them. The work sounds like nothing else, really. Well, it might be a little like hearing a swarm of locusts eating your family from the toes up, but even that doesn’t really capture the metallic, head-bending edge of the sonics. It really is an insect rebellion soundtrack unlike any other. Too bad there’s not a video to accompany it. It’d be bitchen to see the dance that goes with it.

Took a while, for some reason, but finally conjured up a copy of THE MEKONS’ Hello Cruel World book (Verse Chorus Press). And it’s great. It doesn’t collect all of this incredible band’s lyrics, but it has lots and lots of them from one of the more wonderful canons a Brit combo has created in living memory. Interspersed with handwritten drafts, illustrations, and a good section of road photos, are lots and lots of good words, from a group that has always made a point of seeing the political as personal and vice versa. It may be a bit daunting for songwriters to read a book of stuff as strong as this, but that’s no reason for you to sluff off. So don’t.

Was great to get a few things from Mondo Macabro, who seem to be about the most insane movie reissue house around. If the three DVDs that came along are indicative of the company’s wares, it’s probably a good idea to see them all. Alucarda is a totally nutty, bloody, out-of-control witch movie, shot in 1975 by Juan Lopez Moctezuma, who was a protege of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Convents full of burning Sapphic nuns in bloody gowns, spinning and screaming galore, orgies, antlers, nude girls with knives, what more could one ask for? Well, how about a 20-foot-long tongue that extends out of shrubbery and makes little magic tattoos on girls’ thighs? That is but one of the crafty features of Mystics in Bali, an Indonesian horror film that is crafted a pace of high hysteria as piercing as the Sun City Girls at their most demonic. My favorite part is probably the bit where the main woman’s head comes flying off, attached to its internal organs, then goes around sucking babies out of wombs. But you may dig something else better. Regardless, there’s something for everyone here. The Nude Princes may be less of a crowd pleaser, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s ostensibly an Italian Pam Grier softcore movies from ’76, without Pam Grier. The star is Ajita Wlson–a statuesque-as-hell African American actress, but the only really transcendental scene is the one in the Milanese hotel room with cheeb and ritual dancing. But hey, if that’s your bag, so be it.

If pressed, we would probably still have to say that OREN AMBARCHI’s most utterly fantastic music is that which he does with his band, the Menstruation Sisters. Their stuff is the kinda wild-eyed chaos that really fuels dreams. But Ambarchi, who is often absent from his native Australia, wears many other lab coats. He does techno stuff. He does weird experimental electronic stuff. He does spectral solo guitar stuff. Anyway, his latest LP is Triste (Idea) and it’s a really beautiful set of solo guitar ruminations. Quiet and electric, the vibe here is somewhat congruous with that of Loren Connors’ most slowly wound electric pieces, but Ambarchi’s inability to resist evil gesticualtion takes things into a new place, a not entirely friendly or even knowable place. But it’s nice. At least if you like to walk along the edges of dark, long, sizzling tones that lead to a pit of cartoon insanity worthy of Raymond Scott. Then there is a bonus 7-inch, with the material dicked with and crackled up by Tom Recchion (historically linked with both L.A.F.M.S. and Sonic Youth). This single is almost more tiki-like than you could imagine, detourning Ambarchi’s music into a nest that is almost like Solid Eye or one of the other World imitation off-shoots in both stance and valor. How fitting!

The always wonderful Abaton Book Company has outdone itself with its newest release, JD FLEISHMAN’s Looking for Maya. The book is collection of photographs taken at a Manhattan escort agency, interspersed with texts. There’s an excerpt from Black Alex’s Privelege, an interview with “Maya” by Lori Bortz that includes the timeless philosophical question, “Does a woman at the sperm bank fuck a Dixie cup?” And a great poem about being a john by Jeff Burns. The photographs are fantastic–sexy, weird, intense, arty. And this is a really great take on a ubiquitous, important and almost entirely ignored part of our culture–sex work–and should be dug by everyone.

Finally dug up a copy of MAMMAL’s Fog Walkers LP (SNSE) and all the talk about this one man Michigan space-noise-aktion-beat unit rings pretty goddamn true. It is impossible to not hear this jumble of vaguely-dancey, totally corrupt electronic huzzing as an outgrowth of the old Industrial Records ethos, but the guy who’s doing this probably wasn’t even born when Throbbing Gristle packed it in. So what’s that tell you? I dunno. But this is the real thing–the kind of Olympian munge experience that the Wax Trax crowd and a certain period of Foetus were always shooting for, but were too bogged down in intellect, knowledge and technique to actually achieve. Shorn of society’s hideous rudders, Mammal is able to surge into pathways beyond the reach of many’s imagination. A total victory.

Good new mags this time include Dream #4 (Dream), which is George Parsons’ wonderful attempt to recreate the universe in a pattern that makes sense to him. There are good pieces on post-psychedelic pioneers like Peter Scion, Green Pajamas, Iditarod and Sand Pebbles. There’s excellent historical stuff on the poet Robert Creeley and the folksinger Vashti Bunyan. There’s a ton of well-written reviews, and plenty more. Swingset #3 (Swingset) is pretty hep, too. There’s a good Liars tour diary, very fine spurts on the artists Robert Beck and Cecelia Dougherty, stuff on Black Dice, Little Walter, Henry Jacobs, and plenty more. Always a pleasure to file this one in the bathroom.

Best rant zine this time is definitely the first two issues of Valerie Beth Webber’s Why Missing the Mark (Webber). Originally started as a high school project, these zines combine polemics about living in out of the way places, with a kind of primordial grappling with world politics, in a way that is very cool. Hand-written and sketch-filled, there should be some new issues out by the time this column appears, and let’s hope she includes some of her poetry next time, ‘cause it is great.

Another key piece of Canadian content is The Waxathon by Blake Hargreaves LP (Fluorescent Friends). It’s not entirely clear what the artist’s name is, but the brunt of this fucker is lovely. The sound goes all over of the place, crudely distorting vaguely post-core motion through the use of creaky guitars, spoon-darkened vocals, some kinda goddamn electronic hijinx, and presumed turntable leakage. Sounding like the hand-picked gems from many months of vastly stoned late night jam sessions, the music here really moves around in your head like a little truckload junk, looking for just the right corner in which to take a dump. In ways it has some textural similarities to the Midwest and Northeast U.S. underground space-core-improv scenes, but its flavors are unique and it also features two of my favorite song titles of the month “I beat cops up the rope ladder” and “I am standing on a fucking mountain.” Wow, the story of my life. In song!

Originally planned as a CD on Wholly Other, CHRISTINA CARTER’s Bastard Wing is now out as an LP (Eclipse) and it’s a real hoss. Playing a piano that is not exactly in known-tuning, she moves through wonderful passages of meditation strategies using fingers, voice, body and soul. Anyone familiar with Christina’s work with Charalambides or Scorces won’t be surprised by how powerful and rapturous the sound is–sad, deep, thoroughly human, it is another kind of blues, as sure as anything Loren Connors does, but unique in focus and equally in the spirit of Patty Waters. Great stuff. The same can be said of the new SCORCES LP, Vivre avec la Bete (Eclipse), which album combines all the quivering feather energy for which they are so rightly famous. Strings get plucked like courageous chickens, notes hover in the air like ballpeen hammers in zero gravity, hints of melody lurk behind clouds of sheerest joy, and vocals weave through holes like pixies.

Very extremely easy on the eyes is JACKIE O MOTHERFUCKER’s new video, Forestry Center (U Sound). Shot by Theo Angell, in the forests of Oregon, this is semi-abstract rural footage, accompanied by music from the last few Jackie O CDRs. Lotsa continuous motion, lotsa simple effects, lots slow spinning…this is as realistic an evocation of doing acid in the forest as I’ve seen in a good long time. The band was using some of this footage (I think) and a lot more as projections for recent live shows. This presumably means there might be another volume in the works. And who could argue with that? Not these elves.

You know how sometimes when you’re in a Finnish restaurant, the waitress will turn to you and say, “Avarus is not just a band in Finland?” Me neither. But, still, AVARUS is a band in Finland and a good one. There new LP seems to be called III (HP Cycle), and their members include Jan Anderzen (of so many other notable Finnish units). But where much recent Finnish action-hunch has been very thoroughly rural in its vibe-creation, Avarus combine this woodsy tribal thing with a noise rapture worthy of the Holy Modal Rounders at their most amphetamined. Tongues babble, flutes unroll their teeth, logs are struck with hollow crania, bones begin to whistle, and then thing get electric.

Hey hey hey. THE FRAMES’ new album is out, it’s called Frames 2 (S-S Records) and it is as much of a motherfucker (maybe even more of one) than their debut. This Sacramento band has the thickiest bass sound since King Snake Roost or feedtime or something, and they wrap that huge thug cable around some of the most glorious snats of Rough Trade classicism we’ve heard in ages. Their songs are really a lot more poppy than they sound when you first hear ‘em, and really, playing this thing is not too unlike listening to a good Brit late ‘70s DIY mix tape. Throw in a little bit of the Urinals, and maybe mid period Middle Class (for requisite American content) and you’ll be howling with pleasure.

Should you have anything to send to Bull Tongue, please direct two (2) copies to:
Bull Tongue
P.O. Box 627
Northampton, MA 01061
USA

Apostacy: http://www.apostasy.tripod.com
CAN’T: Coreleone Records: http://www.corleonerecords.com
Dream: http://www.dreamgeo.com
Fluorescent Friends: 1 Highland Road, North Hatley, QC J0B 2C0 Canada
Scott Foust: http://www.anti-naturals.org
Hair Police: http://www.geocities.com/hairpolice000
Hospital Productions: http://www.hospitalproductions.com
HP Cycle: unknown
Idea: PO Box 461333, San Antonio TX 78246
Iditarod: http://members.cox.net/iditarod
KITES: unskilled labor / p.o. box 913 / providence, RI 02901
Les presses du Reel: c/o Pecoil, 69 rue Monge, F-21 000 Dijon, France
Liquid Death/Hello Pussy label: http://www.ldr-hpr.com
Load: http://www.loadrecords.com
Mondo Macabro: http://www.mondomacbrodvd.com
paper radio: http://www.paperrad.org — (box 913 / providence, RI 02901)
The Scorces: http://www.scorces.com
SIWA: siwa@earthlink.net
SNSE: PO Box 51021, Kalamazoo MI 49005
Spirit of Orr: http://www.spiritoforr.com
S-S: 222.s-s-records.com
Swingset: 532 La Guardia Place #102, New York NY 10012
U Sound: http://www.usoundarchive.com
Verse Choris Press: POB 14806, Portland OR 97293
Webber: 3551 rue Gertrude, Verdun, QC H4G 1R4, Canada
Weird Forest: weirdforest@yahoo.com

BULL TONGUE
by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 4

Literary and poetry journals have been having an interesting resurgence the last few years with a whole new breed of young(ish) writers taking fresh editorial steps into publishing. What distinguishes a lot of them is either their reference towards historically hep models from the 60s/70s like Angel Hair (edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh), United Artists (edited by Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer), The World (edited by Anne Waldman and a host of guest editors), Fuck/You (edited by Ed Sanders of the Fugs), Artists’ Workshop Press (edited by John Sinclair, manager of MC5) or a total disregard for said history. The latter usually results in impenetrable anarchy (which is only sometimes inviting) and/or a contents page devoted exclusively to unknown writers (ditto).

Tight from Bennington College in Vermont is all its name implies (the first issue employs the motto “It’s almost a noun”). The format is somewhat similar to Richard Hell’s infamous late 90s poetry anthology Cuz (which only saw 3 issues)—small, perfect-bound wraps with a fine balance betwixt recognizable greats like Tom Clark, Theodore Enslin, Amy Gerstler, Jackson Mac Low and Pierre Joris and a host of newer cats like Anselm Berrigan, Elaine Walters McFerron and April Bernard. The first two installments have been cool reads with a nice non-plussed rock/roll aesthetic.

Most lit journals have limited life-spans due to editors realizing they’ve spent all their time and money with no return, balance or feedback. But karmic glory resounds as their ephemeral epiphanies connote a history of radical expression breathing life into language. But regardless of such kozmik pleasures, a lack of coin can surely nail a lit journal dead. Skanky Possum, out of Austin, Texas, has just published a remarkable seventh issue with great poems by, again, well-versed scribes like Tom Clark, Duncan McNaughton and Sotere Torregian and new bloods Julie Reed, Ethel Rackin etc. The editors are the husband-wife poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen. Dale has been involved with poetic journal publishing for some time with the legendary Mike and Dale’s Younger Poets series (Mike being poet Michael Price of S.F., CA.)—a somewhat precursor in style to Skanky Possum. Within the Mike and Dale’s pages were startling and economic works by poet giants Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan and Clark Coolidge. Also part of this S.F. gang were poet/editor Kevin Opstedal of Blue Press publishing the like-minded Blue Books anthologies along with striking work by Lewis Macadams (himself a critically lauded radical poet from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s) and Noel Black who ran Old Gold Press. Noel now lives in Colorado Springs and publishes the Angry Dog Press issuing a series of tiny efforts called Angry Dog Midget Editions. #10 in this midget edition series is our aforementioned pal Richard Hell with a slight and excited tome entitled 2-D Beckoning.

The creative punk rock mind from whence pioneers like Hell et al spring continues to burn within these contemporary texts–they are living extensions of the omfug underground. The poets Gerard Malanga, Piero Heliczer, Lou Reed and Angus Maclise still infuse rock n roll w/ a mystic yet earthly/urban intelligence w/ their work from the 60s—it continues to kick the ass of any mersh slobbo decree. Punk rock emanated from this sex-mind artist life—the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas’ fluxus film/performance world, Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye bookstore (and that’s just the East Coast. John Sinclair’s Artists Workshop in Ann Arbor, MI., Wallace Berman’s art and literature Semina journal in L.A. etc. etc).—it all begat punk as a rock n roll form to annihilate its antipathy towards whatever creeped out vibe hippie had taken on. We’ve all surely come to terms with this now and we all, hippies, punks, poets and high schoolers alike are ready to kick fucking George DIPSHIT Bush’s dick out of D.C. like NOW.

Got a savagely pleasant set of new releases from Thin Wrist Recordings, an outfit whose aesthetic stance veers toward nicely pressed/presented LPs in editions of 500. This latest batch includes Brighter Summer Day by Burning Star Core, a really fine debut LP by a combo from the Kentucky/Ohio underground DMZ. One side has skin-destroying violin drone-dynamics, amped the hell up, and run through shards of electronic hell-dither. The other side is synth/key-based form-whackery that sounds like an out-of-control toad carnival taking place in yr brain. Next is Open City’s sophomore effort, L.A. We Revise Your Neglect. Based in L.A., this trio (two guitars + drums) combine howls and clanks into a sweet slop of semi-aggressive free rock improvisation. Then there’s Fast Talks by The Curtains, a San Francisco trio with connections to the most beloved Deerhoof. Instrumental, and gently overlaid with Magic Band rhythm jewelry, these guys produce smoke most delightful for sniffing.

Most people may not know it, but Peter Brotzmann was first known as a visual artist. He was an associate of the fluxus community, and indeed, the original edition of one of his FMP sets included shards of a balloon used in a piece by the great Korean flux-master, Nam June Paik. This all comes together in a set of two card decks that Brotzmann recently assembled for a show of his paintings in Sweden. Comprised of two games, Signs and Images (Konstmuseum Ystad), these decks propose that you take a group of musicians out into the woods, shuffle the cards, and perform improvisations based on their symbology. This would be fun to do. But the cards are nice just to look at, too. And are a very attractive example of the flux-multiple concept as well. Really boss–all the way around.

Boston’s Abunai seem to have broken up some time in the last few months, but their passing has not gone un-noted, at least in Australia, from whence hails their apparent swansong, the Two Brothers MLP (Camera Lucinda). This record revolves around two versions of the Childe Ballad, “Two Brothers.” And neither of them is handled in what you’d call a particularly delicate fashion. With a few friends along, adding flutes and more vocals to the band’s basic kraut-psych-space-pop dynamism, things get pretty gone here. And the punky live take of “Lord Hampton” (an Abunai original in the Childe style) is equally cool. It may not prove the existence of an actual folk/punk/psych hybrid, but it sounds good anyway.
Kinski, from Seattle, have run through some of the same scene troughs as Abunai, but their version of contemporary non-mersh prog is pretty different. And on their third album, Airs Above Your Station (CD on Sub Pop; 2LP on Strange Attractors Audio House), they really kinda coalesce. Largely instrumental, they build their songs slowly, like the bands of the Texas Space Rock scene. But where those guys usually keep their loud and soft stuff separate, Kinski are into allowing the soft stuff to transform itself into the loud stuff. This makes for long tracks, but they really weasel their way into your brain. The guitars move like sloops through the thick air, bumping again and again into your forehead before they burst in a rainbow of fire.

Because there’s not really much in the way of alternative newpaperage out where we live, the first exposure we got to Tony Millionaire’s Maakies comic strip was via The House at Maakies Corner (Fantagraphics). This oddly proportioned hardcover is quite nice. If you don’t know the strip, well, visually it’s a weird cross between Dame Darcy, the Dutch clear line school, the Katzenjammer Kids and Shari Flenniken. Textually, the strip has to do w/ savagery, drunkenness, crows, monkeys, and plenty of other good stuff. Good one!

Pengo are from upstate New York, and for some reason we usually think of them as being associated w/ a somewhat brutal form of post-industrial free-form noise-hunch and/or bass-heavy ass-rumblage. And yeah, they still do that, but on this new LP, A Nervous Splendor (Haoma Recordings) they visit all kindsa other space, as well. There’s good avant-psych formulating, passages of free-jazz honk, answering machine messages, mock ethnological field recording, even semi-folk-swabbage in a vein that would appeal to fans of the Sun City Girls. That all these shenanigans emanate from inside a great cover design, swiped from the BYG Actuel series, is only icing on an already rich cake.

Mike Watt, the bard of San Pedro, is a person who should be well known to everyone. With the Reactionaries, Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Dos and various other aggregations, Watt has been churning through the constellations of prole art heaven since the late ‘70s. Now he has a book out, and it’s great. Spiels of a Minutemen (L’oie de Cravan) collects Watt’s Minutemen-era lyrics, and also his tour diary from the first time the Minutemen hit Europe (w/ Black Flag). This stuff is great. Watt’s lyrics are wonderful–telegraphic spurts of sheer genius. There’re also essays by Richard Meltzer, Joe Carducci and Bull Tongue’s own Mr. Moore, plus repros of Pettibon art (and one Joe Baiza illo editorially mistaken as Pettibon)utilized by the band, and a nice historical overview by Mike. All packed in a fine silkscreened cover (by Montreal artist, Simon Bosse)—you’ll have a hard time finding better value for money this shopping cycle.

Newest batch of archival punk LPs are out on the Italian Rave Up label and they’re as raging and obscure as usual. The Violators’ Gun Control collects a batch of crude demos and live tracks, recorded by this Denver band in ‘79/80 (I think). The material isn’t exactly outstanding, but it’s solid, raw garage punk in the melodic, but rough post-Heartbreakers style that guys who liked pop but didn’t want to admit it used to play. The Products’ Fast Music was recorded in san Diego late ‘80/early ’81. By the sound you’d have probably called it a couple years earlier, but the notes indicate that the scene was a bit behind the eight ball there. The tracks here are from an unreleased album. They’re very riff-oriented and snotty in a real pleasantly garagey way. But it sounds really ’78, if you know what I mean. There’re lotsa semi-obvious Brit rips, but they’re used with a certain native charm. The Transplants’ Vegetable Stew captures a full set of demo and live material by a Boston band I’d never even heard of before. Friends of the great La Peste (whose Roger Tripp guests on a few tracks), the Transplants have a great, raw garage punk sound with few frills and fantastically ornery lyrics. This, to me, is the gem of the bunch. The Foreign Objects were also from Massachusetts, and their LP, Violent World is a beautifully apt depiction of their reality. Firmly operating in the Dictators/Gizmos/Rattlers tradition, these guys puke up great TV-obsessed garage rock with the best of them. The final LP in this suite is Contrast Disorder by the Doubt. This Irish band plays in the Good Vibrations tradition–fast, down-slammed punk-pop with short songs, slapped drums and heavy hook action. The album contains their sole single and other demos from ’81. And would be a nice addition to any serious punk collection, as would all of these.

Another interesting selection of stuff came by way of WhiteWalls, a press in Chicago that has been putting out good shit for a while. Helen Mirra’s small hardcover, Names & Poems is the documentation of a piece she did, in which people were supposed to write their name on a small card and put it into a box if they wanted her to write them a poem. She would write short (generally two word) ones based on their names. And they’re all here: fast, funny and good. She provides a little glossary in the back, too, to prove that she’s not making up as many words as you think she is. Another fave from this stash is a trade paperback called Hotel Terminus by Stephen Lapthisophon. This is something like a set of essays, done with collaged pictures, about violence, loneliness, art, fascism and much else. The pictures (and some text as well) are lifted from films, magazines, books, and assembled in a way that suggest a variety of narratives. It can also just be perused as a visual experience, but the more you look at it, and start to notice patterns, the more interested you become in decoding its essence. The index in the back is very useful in this, but let’s just say it’s quite worthy of yr detective efforts.

Dan Melchior sorta gives off a veddy Brit vibe, due to the fact that his best known collaborators are people from Medway scene, such as Bill Childish and Holly Golightly. But he has been expatriated to New York for a while now, so let’s call him a New Yorker. That said, he has two new albums that are pretty swank . This Is Not the Medway Sound (SmartGuy Records) is nicely crude, home-recorded urban blues in a distinctive Hangman Recs stylee. Regardless of the LP’s title, the music has the twang and snarl of Childish’s solo work, and is great. The new record w/ his band, Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue, is called Bitternbess ,Rage, Spite and Scorn (In the Red), and is a full-bore garage punk version of his grunty solo work. Using purloined punk mega-riffs, and crazy ‘60s studio touches (like handclaps, for fucksakes), Melchior and band really rip the shit up. This is blasting thug menace at its most bracing.

Nicest music ‘zine this time is probably Sound Collector #8, which is put together by somebody at Arthur, but we only met him once and don’t remember what he looks like. Anyway–the mag is great. Includes everything from a nice intro to Eric Dolphy, to a good interview on the films of Richard Meltzer, the low-down on Chuck Warner’s Hyped 2 Death series, an illustrated memoir of Rock & Roll Camp for Girls, Susan Archie (who designs those Revenant Records sets), Stephen Basho-Junghans, Iron & Wine, and on and on. As a general guide to interesting non-mainstream culture it’s a winner. And they put all the ads in the back, just before the CD, so you don’t have to worry about visual clanging! A no-goddamn-ads-at-all treat is Teen Star ’69 (Magick Markur Publications). Assembled, probably, by Eddie Flowers, this is a xeroxed compendium of odd music pics from ’69, interspersed with commentary, a few nudie shots, and generally strange crawlspace vibes. It’s a great evocation of the year I first did acid, and has a genuinely pan-generic grasp of the era’s wide potential. Sweet!

While we generally shy away from CDs, an especially good one just showed up from a young Japanese band called LSD March. Due to all the brouhaha lately about the Naked Rallizes (a legendary Japanese pysch band begun in the ‘60s), we figured that you ought to know about these guys, who come from Himeji, and a scene that is lorded over by ex-Rallizes bassist, Hiroshi. LSD March’s self-titled CD (ADS) is a pretty amazing gush of mostly instrumental sludge-psych-heaviosity in a Rallizes/High Rise direction, and is totally recommended.

Just about the time you feel like you have a fairly good handle on, say, the Japanese underground scene, along comes something like the debut issue of Improvised Music from Japan (Japan Improv) to make you shut up and sit down. A fully bilingual magazine designed to append the work that its editor, Yoshiyuki Suzuki, does on his similarly vibed website, IMFJ is a treasury of amazing information. There are interviews, overviews, and CD reviews, filled w/ arcane information on the known (Phew, Otomo Yoshide, etc.) plus lots of stuff on people you’ve probably never heard of, but who you’ll want to investigate once you’ve discovered them via the text & CD here. It is a massive, beautiful effort, highly recommended to anyone w/ even the mildest interest in the Japanese avant garde.

The latest LP by the No Neck Blues band, Ever Borneo (Seres) is quite different from their more recent, rockoidist work. Vocals are at a minimum and there are long swallows of key/percussion interchange very much in the combo’s classic mode. The sessions for this album were recorded over the course of a couple years (or so it has been said), but it all holds together like a wonderfully fragmentary leap into the gizzard of a very large chicken. The way it grinds is really nice, and there are Robbie Basho-like moments that will make you feel like you’ve died and gone somewhere.

That‘s all for now. Should you have anything to send (archaic formats: vinyl & print & vhs especially), please direct two (2) copies to: Bull Tongue. PO Box 627, Northampton MA 01061 USA.

(ADS: ads57100@rio.odn.ne.jp)
(Angry Dog Midget Editions: 2412 W. Bijou, Colorado Springs, CO 80904)
(Camera Lucida: http://www.cameraobscura.com.au)
(Fantagraphics: http://www.fantagraphics.com)
(Haoma Recordings: 309 S. Goodman St., Rochester NY 14607)
(In the Red: http://www.intheredrecords.com)
(Japan Improv: http://www.japanimprov.com)
(Konstmuseum Ystad: http://www.konstmuseet.ystad.se)
(L’oie de Cravan: 5460 rue Waverly, Montreal, QUE, H2T 2X9, Canada)
(Magick Markur Publications: http://www.slippytown.com)
(Rave Up Records: http://web.tiscalinet.it/raveup)
(Seres: 619 Union Ave., Brooklyn NY 11211)
(Skanky Possum: http://www.skankypossum.com/)
(SmartGuy Records: 3288 21st St., PMB #32, San Francisco CA 94110)
(Thin Wrist Recordings; 12920 San Vincente Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90049)
(Tight:Whit Griffin and Andrew Hughes, Bennington College, Bennington, VT 05201-6001 tightmagazine@hotmail.com)
(WhiteWalls: PO Box 8204, Chicago IL 60680)

For more fumes from the literary underground you may want to check the Small Press Distribution site: http://www.spdbooks.org

BULL TONGUE
by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore

first published in Arthur No. 3

Surely, Raymond Pettibon is best known as a painter and illustrator (the lines between which can be especially blurry in his case). But one can only suspect that it is a case of public tunnel vision that has consigned him to such a narrow role. Pettibon has made significant public contributions to other fields as well: writing, music, performance, publishing and film. It would, indeed, be well within anyone’s grasp to make a solid case for Pettibon as Southern California’s renaissance man of the fin de siecle period (and beyond). But that is not our assignment today. Right now, right here, we are interested in celebrating Pettibon the filmmaker.

Pettibon’s graspable extant film canon consists of four videos that are all available through Joe Carducci’s Provisional Films. Recently, Raymond has been working on another one, Red Tide Rising, reported to be a saga of the Doors starring Mike Watt as Jim Morrison. There is also a lost film, shot in the early ‘90s, entitled The Holes You Fill, purportedly telling the Beatles’ story the way you’ve always wanted to see it. Carducci reports that these two titles may see the light of day at some point, beyond that there’s little info. But that still leaves a rich tetralogy of films, all of which deal with the transmutation of ‘60s “revolutionary” culture into something commodified and directed by the hands of the media.

Pettibon’s graphic sensibilities are not lush. Just as his art has often been wrought in the most stark visual terms imaginable, so his films are raw, and almost hermetic in terms of their visual vocabulary. The milieus are often defined as much by the actions that take place within them as they are by specific visuals. At times one almost has the sense of watching one of John Cassavetes’ opuses being redone by the Kuchar Brothers, so simultaneously surreal and gritty is their look. And as with much of Pettibon’s art, the visuals are highlighted, annotated and driven by a rich layering of text. As visually compelling as it might be to see the late Joe Cole wearing an insanely huge walrus moustache to round out his role, we are rarely left to quietly ponder the implicit meaning in the images. Pettibon’s writing and visual direction in these films are indivisible. They virtually drip with dialogue. It’s true that you can follow and “get” the basic plots if you watch these vids with the sound off, but the scripts–even when read off wall cards in the most perfunctory manner possible (as they are at times)–add layers of irony, honesty, humor and cutting insight that are entirely separate from the scenes-as-viewed.

The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman ’69 (122 mins., 1989) is a kind of homage to Emile de Antonio’s Underground, which was a documentary about members of the Weather Underground who were living on the lam in the U.S. Pettibon takes this idea and turns it on its side. For his version, the documentary is being funded by CBS, and the Weathermen exist almost exclusively as a media organization, measuring themselves constantly against other revolutionary groups, and attempting to make their own actions the cultural equivalent of rock concerts. Bernadine Dohrn is portrayed (by Kim Gordon) as a woman whose primary motivation is to use revolutionary zeal as a means to overtake the movie career of Jane Fonda. The rest of the left wing cabal is played by Mike Watt, Joe Cole, Bull Tongue’s own Thurston Moore and various other tangential members of the SST gang, circa 1989. The story here is less linear than it is horizontally episodic. Although Dohrn’s trajectory is forward, the bulk of the movie sprawls in all directions.

There are visits by counter-culture luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Tome Hayden & Jane Fonda), there are fantastic self-critique sessions (the one in which they judge the revolutionary qualities of their record collection is a stone classic), and there’s tons of great Pettibon dialogue. The text sends up some of the ideas of the era in hilarious fashion (the equation of Communism and sexual satisfaction is particularly great). Pettibon’s turn as the CBC cameraman gives him a certain ability to knock down the fourth wall, but he doesn’t overplay it. In all, it’s a very bodacious place for Raymond to have begun his retelling of underground history.

Judgement Day Theater: the Book of Manson (118mins. 1989) deals with one of the most frequently-present iconic figures in Pettibon’s early artwork, Charles Manson. Like Weatherman ’69, it is also an ensemble piece, but the textual movement in this film is largely carried by Robert Hecker (from the band, Redd Kross), whose portrayal of Manson is riveting. Hecker either actually memorized his lines (something about which Pettibon the director seems ambivalent) or the way he wore his costume allowed him to read the scripts in a way that was very non-obvious. Whatever the truth, Hecker delivers his Manson raps with Castro-like length and strength. It seems at many times as though he’s just rapping off the top of his head, jumping between images with the shaky logical of a master conman, building in Biblical and Beatles references where called for. It’s really a bravura performance, and the heat that Hecker generates coaxes some excellent performances out of others as well.

Joe Cole returns, this time as a memorable Tex Watson–football star turned confused thrill killer–and Shannon Smith is quite amazing as Sexy Sadie. Sadie is the orgone center of the film, and she plays the role with gusto. There are some good cameos as well; Pat Smear (of the Germs) as Hendrix and Pettibon as Roman Polanski are particularly interesting (if fanciful). The violence of the group has a cartoonish quality that some may find a bit repugnant, but it is somewhat mitigated by the way Pettibon constantly drives home the point that violence was both an extension of sex to the group, and also a way for them to generate media attention. Throughout Judgement Day they speak of themselves as creations and prisoners of the media, yearning for rock star status, but unable to understand the actual process by which it could be achieved. The underlying message is that Manson’s group would have never committed any of the acts it did without the existence of a media stage. Whether or not that’s true is certainly open to debate, but it’s an interesting question to ask. And has the weird ring of truth.

Citizen Tanya (87 mins., 1989) deals with the saga of another of Pettibon’s most frequently referenced cultural images: Patty Hearst, and Tanya persona she assumed after her kidnapping at the hands of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Again, Pettibon paints the core group as media junkies. Field Marshall Cinque (Pat Smear), Tenko (Dave Markey) and Tanya (Shannon Smith) are the main characters, but everyone is cooped up for the bulk of the vid, and it is a constant grovel through sex-as-politics, media-as-sex-as-power, class-war-as-power-as-sex and all the implied variations on those themes. Fuelled by plum wine (which tastes as sweet coming up as going down), Cinque creates a completely cock-eyed, scam-centered revolutionary philosophy that seems to suck the others in solely by playing on their racial guilt. Smear is great, as are Smith and Markey. Due to its shorter length, the scenes seem a but more focused than they did on previous go-rounds, with some of the vignettes—Patty’s soliloquy about the communal toothbrush, for instance–being as funny as anything I’ve seen in a while. My personal favorite touch is the enormous (I mean ENORMOUS) moustache that Joe Cole wears as Patty’s former boyfriend, Steven Weed, but that’s a personal bias. I’m sure you’ll formulate your own.

The final part of the extant series is Sir Drone (57 mins., 1989), Pettibon’s take on the early L.A. punk scene and, for me, his magnum opus. Because of his closeness to the actual history (Raymond was, after all, the one who gave Black Flag’s Greg Ginn his first guitar), the details here are absolutely right and they cut to the fucking bone. The story follows two guys from San Pedro, Duane (Mike Watt) and Jinx (artist/musician Mike Kelley), as they try to get a punk band started in Hollywood, in the days of the Masque. It’s amazing. Watt and Kelley are both perfect as wahoos with a dream, constantly bemoaning hippies, poseurs, and anyone else who doesn’t measure up to the rigid aesthetic criteria they are developing on the fly as they evolve. Unbelievably great, there are scenes of ritual razor cuts, hanging in front of the Masque, practice pogoing, and other stuff that will make you keel the hell over if you have any sense of the scene’s history at all. Jinx’s girlfriend, Goo, and the band’s singer, Scooter (nee Gun), will also prove interesting characters to those schooled in Sonic Youth hagiography. But whatever, Sir Drone is a must-see. And I can only hope that Raymond’s other stuff sees the light. Having watched all of these back-to-back twice, I can attest that they are very much worth yr while.

We will try to deal with the rest of the Provisional catalogue next time, as it has the most consistently interesting catalogue in the country. In the meantime, I can also suggest checking out Arthur Doyle Electro-Acoustic Ensemble Live at the Analog Shock Club video (QBICO: http://members.planet.it/frewww/qbic). Shot in Buffalo NY, this documents that crazy Doyle band (with Leslie Q, Dave Cross and Ed Wilcox) that toured the Northeast last year. Anyone who had his or her interest piqued by Kim Gordon’s description of this band in a recent issue of The Wire will get a well-deserved eyeful. Rock? Jazz? Free? Noise? Well, it is all those things and more. There really is no accurate shorthand description for what it is this band was doing on this tour, but it is frighteningly wonderful to watch and hear.

Chris Touchon’s NFJM label released the coolest Deerhoof 7” last year (The Shaggs cover “My Pal Foot Foot”) and has now gone one step beyond with NJFM 019 an amazing 10 band split 7” with very short stabbing trax by Erase Errata, The Sissies, Missing Tooth, Bebe + Serge, Zeek Sheck, M.C. Trachiotomy with XBXRX, Tracy + The Plastics, Panty Raid, Chromatics and Peaches. Each tune is a quick and delightfully deadly tongue dance. The label is promising a new XBXRX video (the first one they issued a couple years back is phenomenal garage noise insania), a final XBXRX 7” and a Quix*o*tic/Orthrelm split 7”. We’re talking good times here folks. (NJFM, 4001 Leandro #8, Oakland, CA 94601-4053 http://www.njfm.org)

Out of Norway comes the most exciting noise LP I’ve heard to date. It’s the pink vinyl Sykubb fra HÊlvete by Fe-mail (TV5#2). The duo consists of Maja Solveig Kjelstrup & Hild Sofie Tajford. These two women romp thru stimulating noise compositions fresh and clean w/ a distinct Scandinavian frost. But there’s always an undercurrent of warm embrace. Sweet and masterful. Maja may be familiar to some of the more in-depth Norwegian experimental music aficionados. She has won numerous kudos in her homeland, such as being the first Norwegian composer to win the Arne Nordheim Prize in 2001, and receiving the Second Prize at the Luigi Russolo competition for her piece “Sinus Seduction (moods two)” for saxophone and electronics, also in 2001. She is a singer/voice user, whistler, keyboard, violin and theremin player as well as a computer assistant and studio engineer; all this, mainly in connection with the contemporary improvisation ensemble Spunk (Hild Sofie Tafjord is also from Spunk). Maja also plays with (x,y,z), an electronic improvisation trio with Risto Holopainen and Asbj¯rn Fl¯. And she is in a duo with accordion player Frode Haltli as well as a solo voice/electronics project with backing from the group Jazzkammer. She has also played with Oslo Industrial Ensemble, Norwegian Noise Orchestra, No Spaghetti Edition with Evan Parker and Rhodrie Davies, Paal Nilssen-Love, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Zbigniew Karkowski, Sachiko M, Gino Robair, Jaap Blonk, Oslo Sinfonietta and Lasse Marhaug. She has performed a chamber opera by Dagfinn Rosnes, especially written for her voice, among many other things such as Icelandic film music by Hjalmar Ragnarsson. She performed her own music for Ibsen’s play “Ghosts” at Northlands festival in 1999. In 2000 she had two performances in Tokyo. So Maja is busy and I suggest you get busy digging her sounds. This LP is a surefire way to dig in head first. (www.notam02.no/~majar/main.ph)

The improbable and insane state of Texas has challenged music convention consistently through the ages. Not only in its roster artists, but by the craziness of the record labels themselves–from the world of International Artists in the 60s (13th Floor Elevators, Red Krayola, et al) to the wild academia of Innova (composer Jerry Hunt, David Dunn) to the ongoing experimentalism of the N D label (John Watermann, Voice of Eye). Idea Records out of San Antonio is one of the more recent entrepreneurs of quality soundworks. Nothing they’ve released is specifically Texas-bred, but it is music that has come to Texas from far regions of the globe, all of it outside any margins of easy assimilance. Some of the artists may be familiar to those interested in post-post-Throbbing Gristle form extensions (!), but heard from within the context of a deep-in-Texas label, the work begins to take on an indefatigable and uniquely blended spice. One such release is a new split 7” by Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heeman who work in typically blithe compliment to each other. Here they involve themselves in the sincere, simple exercise of remixing music from the Idea CD Casia Fistula by Brendan Walls–itself a remarkable, out-of-nowhere (well, Sydney Australia actually) homemade machine sound collage mindblower. Both sides of the 7” exist as om-motion morsels of drone beauty. What gives them especially spectral distinction is their gasping brevity in a field where slo-eyed expansion is the norm. I suggest perusing Idea’s catalog. (Idea; http://www.idearecords.com/); Innova: http://innova.mu/); (N D: http://www.desk.nl/~northam/).

Ian Nagoski has been an interesting presence on the eastern seaboard the last few years. Primarily a sound artist involved with maxim-drone evocations, he is one of those cats who spent almost every waking hour of his youth pummeling minimalist stooge chord rock art in various rec-rooms. Along with pal Chris Rice, who edits the pretty jake new music mag Halana (fifth issue due this year), Ian let the heavy chording take him into the contemporary activity of unlimited beyond-genre improvising. It brought him to an exclusively solo performance situation, which has produced astounding experiences. From Philadelphia he’s relocated to Baltimore where he’s been active with the radical vibe-hang the Red Room and has been music writing for Halana and Wire. There’ve been a few CDs released (some in very limited editions as lathe-cut CDs), a video on Halana and just recently a one-sided Czech-pressed pic-disc LP called Violets for Your Furs (edition…xxi). The LP is remarkable as it enters the time-space with a wonderfully slow emission of minute and hyper-layered sound. Gaze at Daniel Conrad’s “rotating illusion” imprinted on the disc’s face and you got yrself a pretty cool time. (Ian Nagoski: http://www.redroom.org/individuals/nagoski); (Redroom: http://www.redroom.org); (edition…xxi: http://editionellipsis.hypermart.net); (Halana: http://www.halana.com)

The early/mid 1970s punk rock scene in NYC was a surreal miasma of slut trash glitter and starving art school inspiration. An elemental dose of its annunciation came from the underground poetry scene situated around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from whence Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith had been sniffing. The specific swagger of such writers as Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Larry Fagin, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett and even (still) Allen Ginsberg duly informed the style of proto-punk. It is an actuality never lost by Hell, Verlaine and Smith to this day. And it has always been a distinctive thread through the intervening years at the Poetry Project even after the giant passings of Berrigan and Ginsberg. So it was an utter mindblowing amazement to see and hear the young poet Anselm Berrigan (Ted’s son) incinerate St. Marks Church recently with a wholly contempo continuance of the language and street rock vocabulary that punk rock walked out from, fists rubbing eyes. The take on generational experience both shared and personal and the laughs from the backroom were remarkably acute and loaded. And delightfully inspired in form. The cool thing is Anselm ain’t alone here. I suggest Googling young Berrigan and fall into the lake of tongues you’ll find. “I sit down calmly in someone else’s recliner/Wearing someone else’s shirt, pants, shoes and socks/Though I’ve torn my own holes into all of them.”- Anselm Berrigan. A good troika of Berrigan’s writing (They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack, Integrity & Dramatic Life, Zero Star Hotel) can be had from the Aerial/Edge. (www.aerialedge.com/edgebooks.htm)

Good mag action this time from a couple of rock ‘zines that appear less often than perhaps they ought, but manage to pack in pounds of good reading. The first is issue #6 of Bob Bert’s bb gun (www.bbgun.org), which has gone from being something like an excuse for Bob to print pics of his favorite garage rock gals, to something quite substantial. This one has juicy interviews with Michael Gira, Vinnie Gallo, Mick Collins, Rowalnd S. Howard, Jim O’Rourke, Mick Farren, James Chance and plenty more. The writing staff is fucking choice as well, so do yourself a favor. If you actually still like rock-qua-rock, pick the thing up. The Broken Face (http://brokenface.fupp.net) is pretty much a rock mag as well. Edited by the other Mats Gustafson, they just got out issue 15, and it’s a hot compendium of psych & experimental underground whatsis, that operates almost as a codicile to Ptolemaic Terrascope. Included are pieces on Nagisa Ni Te, Parson Sound, Fursaxa, Arco Flute Foundation, and a truly useful review section, among other things. Either of these mags will make time spent on the toilet infinitely more rewarding, so give them a try. Then flush.

Another nice word batch is an anthology called the long march of cleveland (Green Panda Press, 14314 Superior Ave., Cleveland Heights, OH 44118). Edited by an Ohioan named Bree, this volume was assembled in honor of the visionary Cleveland poet, d.a. levy, who would have turned 60 last year, had he not blown his brains out in 1968. Levy was a fascinating guy, a wonderful poet and artist, and a prolific publisher and editor. There have been a few good books about him, and if you have any interest in underground culture of the post-WWII period, you’d be doing yrself a favor to do some reading up on him. That said, this anthology is pretty nice. Not sure that everything is exactly as related to levy as all that, and there’s a distinct lack of CONCRETE, but there is plenty of good visual and written work, much of it indebted to Cleveland, the city that levy was connected to at both ends.
Let me end this subjective review scene with a letter re: last issue’s Bull Tongue:

David Newgarden from Ocean Grove, NJ writes:

“Hey–if Jean Francois Pauvros is “40-ish” than I’m 12-ish still listening to Chicago IX and Frampton Comes Alive. Also–Gilbert Artman was in Catalogue. It was Artman, not Pauvros, who was in Lard Free and in Urban Sax (a dozen parachuting saxophonists).

“Back somewhere in the ‘80s, while touring with Haitian voudou combo Boukman
Eksperyans, I met blind Tex-Mex accordion recluse Steve “El Parche” Jordan on the streets of Rennes, dragged him to ‘see’ a Catalogue/Silverfish double-bill (Jac Berrocal and Lezley, I swear, had the exact same stage moves) and picked up non-english-speaking mini-skirted coeds in a biker bar and puked french fries/mayonaise and red wine on the clean cobblestone streets of Brittany. At some point in the night, I think Esteban & I almost got into a fight with ‘El Vez’ but my memory is a little hazy.

“Following week, saw Rhys Chatham and 100 guitars in weird deserted Paris suburbs, got stranded by late nite bus schedule, and Pauvros hooked me up with a ride back to Pigalle–coincidentally I was staying in apt. building where Catalogue’s manager lived. (somewhere, out of alphabetical order, in my rusting, overstuffed rolodex is a Jac B. business card, more treasured even than the one Charles Gayle handed me in Milford’s back yard).”