For this episode of Arthur Radio, our dear friend Michael (aka warbling troubadour Mountainhood) left his woodland home in northern California and trekked across the vast continent to join us in wet, grey Brooklyn. His live set, recorded in Hairy Painter’s living room, somehow captures the dewy green landscape he inhabits out west; the quiet of the wind rustling the treebranches, the feeling that a four-legged creature may be watching from nearby, protectively…
Mountainhood’s songs capture a sense of both solitude and oneness with nature that is for the most part difficult to find in the concrete jungle of New York City. Michael, however, feels at home in both environments– and is more than happy to share his stories, songs and artwork with friends new and old alike, wherever his journey takes him.
“I insist on sensuality. I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet as jealously as any miser guards gold. They can do far more to protect me from what we humans have become: insensate, insensitive, inhuman. For the millions of years of evolution that made us, the ability to fully sense food and sex was the foundation of our humanity and the core determinant of survival. For ten thousand years, those same pleasures have been reserved for a few of us. Complete indulgence of sensuality is rare, and, as a rule, the purview of the rich. For ten thousand years, Homo sapiens has been unable to take its humanity for granted. Those who would resist dehumanization do so by daily staking a claim to it, by self-consciously adopting an aestheticism our hunter-gatherer forebears practiced by simply living. With the advent of agriculture, those qualities that united us—in fact, quality itself—came to divide us. Civilization did indeed modify the human genome, but only slightly, around the edges. We remain at our genetic core largely what our hunter-gatherer history made us, which is to say, sensual beings. All of humanity at some level still requires the aesthetic. What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.” —Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (North Point Press, 2004)
Six and a half this-just-in minutes off Peer Amid, a new album by Swedish band Skull Defekts, who now feature the sui generis tattooist-shaman-Lungfisher Daniel Higgs on vocals. It’s a brilliant album, and I wish we could share a different track—as good as this one is, it’s not quite representative of the album’s overall occultist Sonic Youth vibe—but here you go. Figure it out for yourself. Cover artwork by Frederik Söderberg.
Originally published in Arthur No. 16 (April 2005)
(Hipped to this particular clip via Blastitude)
FREEDOM ROCK John Payne on new albums by Magma and The Mars Volta
MAGMA Kohntarkosz Anteria (Seventh)
THE MARS VOLTA Frances the Mute (Virgin)
We all know the cliché about France, that it is incapable of producing Great Rock Music, a condition said to owe to the French language itself, which is said to be too soft and nuanced to make the properly heavy rock impact. So it’s ironic that in 1969 France gave birth to one of the heaviest bands the rock world has ever known, and simultaneously not a rock band at all.
Magma was formed in Paris by drummer Christian Vander, the stepson of French jazz pianist Maurice Vander. Christian had been playing jazz and pop professionally since his early teens—he received his first drum set from jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who stole it from his drummer. Vander gathered players from all over the country who were dissatisfied with the typical French habit of slavishly copying American or British rock and jazz musicians. At the time, he says, “Everyone had flowers on their clothes, but I preferred to see flowers in the meadows.” Magma dressed in black.
A raven-haired, powerfully built man of swarthy hue and wolfish glare, Vander was and is of a darkly cosmological bent, and had an early fascination with Gurdjieff. Musically, John Coltrane was his god, and Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones made a big impact on Vander’s multilimbed, badass drum style. Not wishing to play jazz, exactly—he still considers it a specifically black American art form—for Magma Vander drew on the folkloric music of his Polish Gypsy forebears. The band’s signature sound evolved via chanting, guttural vocals and much use of repetitive motifs pumped out on multiple acoustic and electric pianos and horns, atop militaristically hefty bass and drums.
But Vander felt that the French tongue was too perfumey for this kind of hard music, and he disliked the sound of English as well. So he made up his own language, a vaguely Germanic, craggily mellifluous thing called Kobaïan, which came to him, he said, in his sleep. Meanwhile, Vander’s vision was grand, and apocalyptic: He developed a high-concept project for Magma, a nine-part opus that would tell the story of the Kobaïans, a race of humans who’d fled the degradation of life on Earth and settled on another planet, only to find they’d dragged Earth’s miseries along with them. The solution, of course, was annihilation. The opus was never completed; after the release of Part 4, Mëkanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh (1973), the plan seems to have been abandoned, though the group continued to sing in Kobaïan and a mixture of English, French and vocalese.
Vander’s arcane world-view—requiring concept albums, quasi-operatic vocals and a distinctly non-rock & roll harmonic/melodic language—was sneered at by American rock critics, naturally, ‘cause it sounded nothing like a bar band from New Jersey and totally neglected lyrical themes of sports, cars and pussy. Yet Vander’s trip was not that far removed from the eccentricities of critics’ fave Sun Ra, or, for that matter, John Coltrane. At its best, Magma’s music, in particular MDK and its 1974 follow-up, the eternally cryptic Köhntarkösz, defined a sound roughly intersecting progressive jazz, Bartók and heavy metal, related texturally to Mahavishnu Orchestra and Red-era King Crimson. Köhntarkösz concerns an exploration of an Egyptian tomb, its serpentine, mozaical structure redolent of incense, mold and fire.
Magma’s sound grew wicked, culminating in the 18-minute metal masterpiece “De Futura” from the album Üdü Wüdü, written by the band’s then-bassist Jannick Top, who was in the habit of tuning his bass down to C for an extra-resonant brutality. Vander’s music could not, however, sustain all that dark hubris, and over the years Magma became lighter, more vocal-oriented and lyrical, even. Band members for this technically demanding enterprise came and went; many of France’s best players, including violinist Didier Lockwood and bassist Bernard Paganotti, joined the ranks. Vander himself has frequently been called, well, “the world’s greatest drummer” (it’s a prog-geek kind of thing to say, but there’s some validity to it in this case). A powerfully original and audacious maelstrom of controlled polyrhythmic fury, he’s a feral cross between Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Rashied Ali and, of course, Elvin Jones. In recent years he’s formed two other bands, Offering and the Christian Vander Trio, to further explore his jazz roots, and has engaged Magma in varied instrumental frameworks, including performances with large choirs and a version of MDK sung by a children’s chorus. And Magma has inspired an actual genre in France and Japan, called Zeuhl Music, with several bands (Japan’s rough-hewn Ruins, France’s very scary Shub Niggurath, among many others) adapting the Magma model of folkloric chants, twinkling ostinatos and raging rhythm sections to their own forbidding ends.
Circa ’05, Magma is still at it. Vander revived the band in the early ‘90s – primarily, says his wife/manager/bandmate Stella Vander, because a new generation of Magma fanatics begged Christian to reform the unit and let them have a turn devoting themselves to the rigors required by this strange obsessive music. A couple of months ago Magma released their first album of new material in many years, K.A.—not entirely new, however, as it’s a reworking and augmenting of a one-hour epic from 1972 they had never recorded or performed live. Musically it’s the missing link between the Gypsy-metal-jazz chant & throb of MDK and the Emëntëht Rê (descending into the tombs) sound as heard on the more angular and spare Köhntarkösz. (Apparently Magma abandoned K.A. after Mike Oldfield stole several themes, including the famous Tubular Bells main motif, while living at Manor Studios when Magma came to record MDK. Or so Vander claims. Funny to ponder the possibility that it was Magma who in fact provided the seed money to launch the Virgin Records worldwide mega-behemoth…)
Longtime Magma fans and curious newcomers will find a lot to rave about on K.A. The studio band is the same lineup that toured the States in 1999, a young, lean and incredibly mean crew that doesn’t pussyfoot too reverently around the material and which boasts, significantly, a simply fantastic bass player named Philippe Bussonnet who is the equal in fierce inventiveness and true threatening heaviness of his forebears Jannick Top and Bernard Paganotti. It’s not heavy like “De Futura” was metal-band heavy, yet in the spectacularly disciplined interplay between the complexly polyrhythmic and odd-timed bass, Fender Rhodes, mesmerizing chants/vocals and, of course, just totally wicked drums, drums, drums, it’s got real magic—a kind of black magic—deep inside.
Punk rock started in 1976. It’s almost 30 years later, and you know something? Some of us don’t want to pay our hard-earned bread to see a buncha yobbos in T-shirts drinking beer onstage and grinning like regular joes as they play the same three chords, in roughly the same progressions, as any beginning guitar player. Sometimes, we want a bit more. A bit more proficiency, a bit of ambition, some exploration. Maybe even some grandeur. POMP. Spectacle.
Perhaps it’s the Mars Volta (and their sillier corollary, The Darkness) who’ll bring that awestruck feeling back to the masses. Perhaps not—perhaps it really is too late to erect the wall again. But let’s just suppose…which is just what guitarist/composer Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez does on his band’s Frances the Mute, the new Mars Volta disc. It’s a concept album, about what exactly I couldn’t tell you, and I think the band likes it that way. Some of it supposedly concerns itself with AIDS—perfect metaphorical stuff for these guys, allowing for an extremely inconclusively worded multipart song cycle in five sections, spread out over what must be the full 74 minutes a CD can hold. They give their pieces names like “Cygnus . . . Vismund Cygnus” and “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore,” with sections entitled “Vade Mecum,” “Pour Another Icepick” and, need you ask, “Pisacis (Phra-Men-Ma).” Lyrically, unlike musically, it’s what’s between the lines that attempts to speak volumes.
Musically, though, it’s everything under the prog sun, times 50. It’s Yes. It’s Rush. Mahogany Rush, too. It’s Metallica. It’s Crimson. It’s Neu. Perhaps more than anything, it’s Pink Floyd circa Umma Gumma and Atom Heart Mother. It’s pretentious as hell, and clearly, that’s the precise, full-on point. On the surface you hear a lot of seriously impassioned, gonad-grabbing ’70s-rock wails, and very well sung, too, by Cedric Bixler Zavala. Interestingly, Zavala’s insistent caterwauling about a jillion tiny obscurities and moods and atmospheres and smells and prickly feelings and cobwebs and the moon and disease and so on doesn’t wear on you. That says something. Maybe it’s ‘cause he gives the impression that he’s telling a story, and ‘cause Rodriguez-Lopez’s music is so varied and surprising: metallic staccato juggernauts of drums/guitars/bass, liberally laced with ’70s Brit-jazz (Soft Machine) horns, violas, ‘trons and, significantly, huge portions of Mexican and Cuban musical shades and styles.
It’s when they let these Latin sections or dolorous prog-jazz weirdness sections go on for such a loooong time that you sense a kind of integrity and seriousness of purpose about the Mars Volta. What’s really interesting is that neither these extended non-typically-rocking passages or the inevitable returns to heavy-band machine gun carnage seem to blur interest. (That is, if you’re someone who actually likes to sit and listen to albums all the way through, like a lot of the original progressive rock records of the early ‘70s allowed for and encouraged.) To say that this music is “overplayed”—a common complaint about MV from critics who sealed their punk rock- and/or minimalism-inspired minds back in the ‘80s—is way beside the point; this is maximalism, and it’s supposed to dominate your body and mind, splatter your face, then melt back down in a big puddle, into which you can gaze and see a reflection of yourself . . . I’d argue that its proper reception will depend on how you much sleep you got, how much of the good stuff you imbibed/smoked, and – more importantly – how young you are. Because, technically speaking, it’s working with your levels of testosterone or ovum.
These rather amazing quagmires of sound were most fortunate to be crafted by an obsessive weirdo like Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez, someone who, like Christian Vander, is just consumed with his vision, and the moral of the story is that, actually, in rock, any kind of obsession is where it’s at, no matter the “pretension” of the outcome. Surely we’ve all realized by now that one never really says anything in “rock” music by holding back one’s real impulses; not holding back—and risking ridicule—that means being honest, just as “honest” as Bruce Springsteen.
Well, no need to defend it, I don’t think. But here’s another moral to the story: Without a doubt, a younger generation of musicians in recent years have radically upped the ante, as players, songwriters and real musical imaginers. The Mars Volta are 100 times the band that Metallica ever was, not just technically but in terms of artistic ambition. There is something undeniably thrilling about any group of young musicians who are so focused on what they’re doing, so fucking into it, and you’re hearing it and grasping that what they’ve accomplished has taken an enormous amount of work—discipline—and they’re carrying it out with precision and guts. That the Mars Volta play the fuck out of these well-constructed and amazingly shaded pieces is just plain inspiring.
You hear a lot of “serious” musicians going on about the importance of paying attention to the space between the notes. Fact is, some music depends a lot on cramming in every note you’ve ever heard, in a desperate, obsessive, mad rush. The Mars Volta, like other young musicians, shouldn’t worry too much about the space between notes. At this point, like Magma, they do what they do because, sounds like, it’s what they were put here on Earth to do. Which gives us the opportunity to say, “Whew. The fuck was that?”
A REAL American explains how the Immigrants caught Stockholm Syndrome while the banks robbed us. WARNING: DO NOT DRINK WHILE VIEWING. Thanks to http://spectregroup.org
Peppermint Twist: The White Stripes’ blues in the red zone
by Jay Babcock
Originally published December 28, 2000 in LAWeekly
“I don’t want to talk about that. It’s kind of a personal thing.”
Jack White of the White Stripes is on the phone from Detroit, and he’s not giving up the secret. I’ve got a lot of questions for him about the astonishing things I saw him do at Spaceland last week. Things like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” done straight-up, gritty and desperate. Slide runs on a weird semi-acoustic guitar during an “In My Time of Dying”-esque number that would make Jimmy Page swoon. Sweet, almost Kinks-y pop-tinged songs with titles like “You’re Pretty Good Looking” and “Apple Blossom.” A monumental cover of the country-blues standard “Death Letter” that was full of spit ’n’ bitterness. Vintage Cramps-like menace riffs slowed down to two-player bombastic blues, topped by gasp-worthy field hollers. This was honest, open-hearted music by someone with preternatural skills and an ambitious range — music that not once lapsed into strutting licksmanship or bonehead cave-stomp. Music as much evocation as invocation, a congeries of train whistles and assembly-line clangor, of the scent of buttercups and bacon grease.
It was a performance so good that I witnessed an act that’s usually beneath members of L.A.’s infamous bet-you-can’t-impress-me audiences: After the show, a dude stood at the foot of the deserted stage, thought for a few seconds, then furtively pocketed one of Jack’s spent guitar picks.
At Spaceland that night, something mighty powerful happened. The kind of thing that can get you thinking that deeper, potent forces are at play. I don’t know if this is the devil’s music, but I do know it’s something well beyond what a red guitar pick can reveal.
The White Stripes are Jack White, 25, on guitar, vocals and piano, and Pippi-tailed sister Meg, 26, on drums. They were born and raised in southwest Detroit in a Catholic family in a Catholic neighborhood. They are the youngest of 10 children. Jack is the seventh son.
Their latest album, De Stijl, was recorded on 8-track in the living room of the house Jack owns — he bought it from his parents when they moved out.
“It’s a wooden house, three floors,” says Jack. “I think it was built in 1911 — my whole life I grew up here. I was a drummer for a long time, from 11 on. About 15 or 16 I picked up the guitar — I used to play guitar with my friends after school. We’d record Bob Dylan songs on 4-tracks. When my parents moved out, they left a piano and I taught myself how to play it. I don’t really know what it is I’m doing. I’ve got this thumb-and-pinky technique and I just base things off of that. I know how I want it to sound.”
When did you start listening to blues music?
“Since I was 18. I’ve always loved blues, especially Son House. A few years ago, I didn’t have a lot of money to go out and buy records, so I only had, like, the major things — Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. But some friends in Detroit started working at record stores where I could get discounts! So now I have a pretty nice collection. Blind Willie McTell I only got listening to last year. I fell in love with him immediately.”
The records a musician hears can change everything. Robert Johnson listened to phonographs by Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson. Son House listened to Charley Patton’s records, he once said, “before I ever started to play or think about trying to play.” House also learned from a Clarksdale musician named Lemon, who had in turn listened to [Dallas] Blind Lemon 78s. Dylan checked out records by “Bukka” White — who had learned from Patton’s records. It doesn’t sound like the White Stripes have been spending much time listening to the wheedle-ee beer-commercial boogie stuff that’s passed for mainstream blues in this country for the last 30 years.
“I’m not too big a fan of electric blues. I don’t like Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan and all those guys. I like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, that’s the only electrics that I think are any good. It’s a difficult line to walk, though, being white, and having had the influence of the Yardbirds and Cream and other bands in the ’60s that already did this kind of electric blues in a hard style. At least they knew they wanted to go where the dirt was, and go where that real feeling of soul was.”
White people have been doing blues in the last five years in “alternative” circles, but it always seems to be done with smarmy, ironic cool.
“An easier way for white people to be involved in the blues is to make it like it’s a parody of wild, bluesy antics. All this stuff with raunchiness and swearing and talking about naked girls and all that, I’m really turned off by that kind of stuff. Lyrics are real important to me. I wish music could be more like Cole Porter and different Broadway writers from back in the ’30s and ’40s — more melody and idea instead of just chords and lamenting about girls and cars or drugs. That’s really getting old.”
The album artwork for De Stijl — as well as for the White Stripes’ first album, in fact the band’s whole visual aesthetic — uses the red-white-black color scheme, which is the strongest color combination in alchemy and most of the West’s magical systems, as well as in voodoo.
“I’ve never heard about that one. I’ve heard of red, white and black being the most powerful combination. That peppermint candy, that’s where we got the band name from. I thought we’d call the album De Stijl because [the early 20th-century Dutch De Stijl art movement] broke the art form down to the simplest parts, and they had to abandon it because they couldn’t get it any simpler than it was. It was a question of how simple should the White Stripes be, what’s out of bounds for us, and what are we supposed to be doing with this band?”
The White Stripes do a lot of covers — Son House, Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Dylan, Joe Primrose’s “St. James Infirmary Blues” — and the new Sub Pop single is all choogle-n-yelp Captain Beefheart. Beefheart did the theme song (“Hard-Working Man”) for the Schrader brothers’ 1978 film Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel as beat-down workers at one of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” — a Detroit auto plant. It’s a lost classic.
“I’ve heard the song from that movie, yeah. For the single we did ‘China Pig’ from Trout Mask Replica as an acoustic blues song, and on ‘Ashtray Heart’ and ‘Party of Special Things To Do’ we used different recording techniques, going straight into the board, with fuzz guitar and bass. That was the first time we’ve ever done that. When a song feels like it needs something, I just wanna have it there.
“We want to start working on our new album, I think it’s gonna be called White Blood Cells. We’d like it to be a double album, ’cause there’s enough material. I’m thinking about doing one disc at a real studio and one disc here at home. Just a bunch of country songs and a lot of piano songs that I’ve written.”
All of which are helpful answers. But the main question. It’s something like what people asked Robert Johnson when he came back from his trip to Arkansas, or what Pete Townshend wondered after he first saw Hendrix: How did Jack White get those sounds onstage?
“There’s a technique I have where I can put my pick in the palm of my hand and pluck with my free fingers. And I can pull it out whenever I want to switch it back to the pick to play loud again. It just came naturally, I dunno . . . ”
And what about those two guitars: the snazzy red-and-white electric one, and that acoustic guitar that looked like it was made out of paper?
“The red one is an Airline, a guitar that Montgomery Ward sold in the ’60s. And the other one is, yeah, it’s . . . um . . . Actually, I don’t want to talk about that. It’s kind of a personal thing.”
God is in the details, said architect Mies van der Rohe. And sometimes something else lurks there too.
Gorgeous title track off Reverend John Wilkins’ debut album You Can’t Hurry God—which is otherwise pretty foot-stompin’ and hand-clappin’—just out on CD for 13 bucks from Mississippi’s Big Legal Mess Records, a label all music fans should be keeping an eye on. Big Legal Mess is an offshoot of Fat Possum Records, more in line with their ’90s/early ’00s commitment to releasing new albums by underheard local blues musicians like Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside, Cedell Davis, T-Model Ford, and many others, that were free of the studio polish and cheesy showboating of most American blues recordings from the last three decades. This treasure of an album, produced by Amos Harvey and recorded by Fat Possum vet Bruce Watson, is very much in that ’90s Fat Possum vein.
There’s a lot to say about John Wilkins, and where this music comes from—go to the Big Legal Mess website (address below) for the full scoop—but real quick: Wilkins played guitar with O.V. Wright in the ’60s, as well as performing in local churches, parties and clubs, very much in the North Mississippi Hill Country country-blues style of his father Reverend Robert Wilkins, whose 1930s version of “That’s No Way To Get Along,” entitled “Prodigal Son,” was later covered by the Rolling Stones on Beggars Banquet. Since the early ’80s, Reverend John Wilkins has been pastor at Hunter’s Chapel Church in Tate County, Mississippi. Past members of this congregation include Fred McDowell and his wife Annie Mae, Other Turner and Napolian Strickland. Its singers recorded the album Amazing Grace: Mississippi Delta Spirituals By The Hunter’s Chapel Singers Of Como, Miss. for Testament Records in 1966.
You Can’t Hurry God sports a full bass-drums-guitar-Hammond lineup, with Reverend Wilkins’ daughters on backing vocals. Wonderful and hallelujah!
Arthur Magazine 