Transportamiento

If you get the chance before the 16th of January, go to the Wellcome Collection and immerse yrself in the mesmerisingly beautiful Sound Seam, a breathtaking short film by Aura Satz, then wander back downstairs and check out the equally brilliant and fascinating High Society exhibition, and gaze in wonderment* at the cannonball sized sphere of opium (sensibly kept behind very thick glass) before buggering yr eyes up completely by looking at one of Brion Gysin's Dream Machines for too long, and filling yr brain with the deeply bizarre history of intoxication and our species somewhat skewed attitude to it. Then buy Mike Jay's equally fine book that accompanies said exhibition. Truly excellent and mind expanding stuff.

*And lust, if you share my predilections.

Helios Creed: Lactantes Púrpura

Even though Lactating Purple was the last of the three records under review here to be released, I've decided to put this up before the Boxing The Clown article, because these three records (massive pretentiousness alert!) feel like a triptych to me, and the centrepiece which is BTC is best viewed in the light of, and between the outer panels, namely The Last Laugh and this glorious bugger of a record, the exceedingly bizarre, yet curiously catchy (by HC's standards anyway) Lactating Purple. It's the most traditionally (again, I'm using that word advisedly here) song-oriented album of the three, and the first to feature what would become his (almost) regular band for the next few years, but it's recorded before they'd settled into the more fixed style his records would display for the next few years.

It's the first with a four piece line-up as well, instead of the previous ever-changing power trio, consisting of the man himself (obviously), Paul Kirk on bass, Paul Della Pelle on drums and Z Sylver on synths and sampler, the slightly higher emphasis on synthesizer lending the record a more Chromeian feel than the previous two, as reflected in the cover art which is a fucking dead ringer for one of Chrome's magnificent sci-fi collage sleeves, yet still retaining that totally fried atmosphere of the previous two LPs, just contained within some of his more coherent and concise songwriting as opposed to the more freewheeling feel of much of the previous LP. 

In that, it feels more like a sequel to The Last Laugh, especially as it launches off with another triple header, beginning with the sublime title track, a mid-paced monster featuring some his most densely effected vocals ever, something of a hallmark of this particular release, the (for HC anyway) guitars not quite so prominent, but still squallingly fucking odd spiralling together with the synths to create an tapestry of sublime oddness where it's hard to tell what's what, and we all know how I love that shit. This leads into Flying Through The Either, a piece of psychedelic, weirdly ambient chicken scratch funk smothered in some of the most filtered guitar imaginable and underpinned with that almost ancient feel that creeps into his music courtesy of Z Sylver's droning synth overlaid with seriously fucked with spoken word that smacks into one of those whirling backmasked Chrome jump cuts and launches into Ub The Wall, where that lysergic angle grinder guitar finally roars in with a fucking murderous intent pushed ever higher by the fucking hurtling rhythm section and an hysterical vocal just on the edge of feedback until the whole thing unexpectedly flies backwards again, only to return with increased aggro. I love it so much, just one of the finest ways to open a record I've ever heard.

Next up is the whirling maelstrom of Nebuchadnezzar, another middling speed track featuring yet more astonishing guitar/synth interplay that rides in on some of the best vocal fuckery I've ever heard, then the slower, darkly melodic Modular Green which boasts a vocal so heavily flanged that you may well be sick and acts like this album's parallel to Nirbasion Annasion. The next real standout though is track 7, The Radiated, two minutes of angular spacerock that harks back to the rhythmic complexity of BTC, contains more great guitar than most fucking albums, ends with a fucking big explosion and sets the tone nicely for the next song, Spider. A genuine so-fucking-wrong classic, which crawls along on a bed of profoundly fucked riffage, a spinning, almost Fripp like guitar line and a completely screwed and pitchshifted vocal which tells a warped tale of fuck knows what kind of cosmic degradation before ramping the speed up into a rolling muted riff driven groove that eventually just flies out of orbit before dropping you into the most fucked track on the LP, the gloriously titled Martian Sperm & Bagpipes*, which seems to be an attempt to beat the world record for the most gratuitous flanging and phasing, the vocals pitched even fucking lower and every sound circling and twisting round every other in a desperate attempt to communicate... something. The LP ends on an elegiac note with Amenti, all slow motion synth and guitar held down by the minimal rhythm section, slowly bring you back down to earth in a quite wonderful manner.

*Probably best not ask. 

Helios Creed: La Última Risa

Now my devotion to Chrome's masterpieces Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves isn't exactly a secret. But it occurs to me that I've never written about Helios Creed's solo stuff on here before. Which is a little odd given that he's probably my favourite guitarist ever, I'll freely admit that sonically he's influenced me more deeply than any other musician and is certainly the one who opened my ears further than anyone before or since to the infinite possibilities of using a stupid amount of effects pedals*, and crucially, possibly even more so than Matt Bower et al, branded into the core of my musical being that going too fucking far is a damn good place to start.

There are three albums in particular (out of many) that will always be the killers as far as I'm concerned, the untouchable triumvirate of 1989's The Last Laugh, 1990's Boxing The Clown, and 1991's Lactating Purple (all on Amphetamine Reptile)*. A trio of albums that fused together every disparate strand of psychedelia and spacerock, filtered through a vicious hardcore/punk sensibility, occasionally refracted through an angular proggish prism, sometimes infused with a deeply unsettling almost mediaeval ambience in their (admittedly rare) quieter moments all wrapped round a noiserock core of unswerving viciousness and nailed to the fucking floor by whatever rhythm section the mad fucker had got on board for that particular album. Helios Creed used to go through rhythm sections like Spinal Tap go through drummers or the Melvins through bassists, and weirdly, his records were all the better for it then. He never seemed to attain the same heights of ultrapsych lunacy once his band actually coalesced into a stable unit.

The first of the three, The Last Laugh, featuring the rhythm section of Jason Finn (drums) and Daniel House (bass) starts with a three part blast that recalls the disjointed structures of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves, kicking off with the straight-for-the-jugular Some Way Out, a careering piece of psychedelic hardcore, powered along by that fucking guitar sound, that stuck wah'ed chainsaw that just cuts through yr brain like a monofilament garrotte with the heavily distorted and filtered vocals of Mr Creed insanely gargling through the maelstrom and then suddenly, with no warning, cuts straight into the unsettling ambience of The Dream, all heavily reverbed backward and acoustic guitars, massively detuned chant and and atmosphere of real hypnagogic dread before slamming back into The Diplomat, a mid paced spacepunk cut with some fucking astonishing guitar that sounds like a writhing psychedelic hydra during the solo. Track 3 (I'm not going to go into all the tracks here, I just want to whet yr appetite if you've never heard this shit), Nirbasion Annasion, is one of his greatest moments, like spacerock turned inside out, beginning with a wonderful persian sounding guitar line, it's rolls into full power on an insidious, sinuous bass line and minimalist drums as the man himself unleashes a torrent of just fucking amazing acid guitar lines forwards and backwards (and as ever with Helios, it's sometimes hard to tell which is going which way, or if it's one, two or four guitars), intertwining with each other and the bass to create a philosophers knot of a track, with his relatively buried, and as usual, heavily processed vocals adding to the glorious confusion. It's just brilliant, and deeply weird. It's everything spacerock promises to be, but almost never quite becomes, except when this man pulls his acid soaked finger out of his arse and gets it right like he does here.

Side 2 is just as fucking good, leading off with Late Bloomer, a track drenched in the same paranoid Ballard/Dick atmosphere that was soaked right through Chrome's Third From The Sun, before kicking into the deeply unsettling Where The Children Are. One of the most traditionally structred songs on the album, yet one of the most disturbing, (along with Road Out Of Hell which ends side 1), it's a seemingly innocuous slowish rock song, well, at least until the guitars really get going. The phasing bandsaw is back with a vengeance, allied with a howling, crying solo line that splinters and recombines as Helios deadpan intones the lines "As you wish upon a star, wondering where yr children are" and other lovely sentiments, it's not a song you necessarily want to examine too deeply, there's an undercurrent of reined-in violent perversity to it that's never explicit, just felt as a deep unease in the back of yr throat. The tension built up by that piece of masterful freak horror is perfectly defused by the next song, the most playful track on the LP, The Rant, which is sort of what would happen if you took a fast 60s r'n'b or soul number, preferably one that tells you exactly how to do the monkey, or the watusi, or the boogaloo, and rerecorded it with a Venusian harcdore band. Fantastic madness, and it contains some of the best fucking guitar you can imagine. There's not a duff track on the album, and it would be a stone cold motherfucking classic if it wasn't for the LP that followed it, Boxing The Clown, a record which I can safely say, that if The Last Laugh blew my mind, then Boxing The Clown gave it the single best musical fuck it had up until that moment, and which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

So yeah, part two will be coming when I have the time as I suspect this week could be a bit chaotic, and I can't be arsed to write any more this evening because those lovely blue valium tablets someone very kindly gave me last week have just kicked in and I'm starting to giggle at everything, so yeah part two very soon. And yes, I'm much less discombobulated now, and that's not because of the valium, but because I now know what I really needed to know before. Cryptic? Yeah, but you know me.

I wouldn't normally post anything from youtube without any visuals, but I don't have Nirbasion Annasion on any digital format, but the man himself has posted the bugger up there so I'll make an exception as it is such a fucking amazing piece of psych. Enjoy. Or run away...



*A live engineer once sneeringly asked me do you think all those pedals are really necessary? To which he received one of my two customary answers to the fucking stupid things some live engineers come out with, that is to say a look of withering contempt coupled with a skull fracturing blast of phased to fuck feedback, followed by the one word answer "yeah". The other answer is just "oh fuck off", it depends how much of a cock the engineer is, and what sort of mood I'm in at the time.

** The preceding LP, Superior Catholic Finger (Subterranean) is fucking excellent too, as were the two  LPs that followed these three on AmRep, Kiss To The Brain and Planet X, but that's for another day and another article.

Pájaros Con La Guitarra

Found this lovely little film over at the BBC arts blog. It's a short clip of an installation by Celeste Boursier-Mougenot and you should watch it immediately.

Technical Ecstasy? Fuck Off

What is fucking wrong with so many of my fellow guitarists? I've been playing for 25 years, and one thing has consistently puzzled me, namely the obsession so many guitar players have with technique, the desperate need to become a virtuoso without having a fucking clue what to do with all that knowledge and ability, or having any idea how to do something new with their instrument. What is the fucking point of mastering all the traditional techniques of your instrument, absorbing an enormous shitload of music theory when all you then do is exactly what everyone else has been doing for the previous fuck knows how many years, just faster?

It was Steve Lacy, that late genius of the soprano saxophone who said "the instrument, that's the matter - the stuff - your subject", yet for so many guitarists that's just not true, to them technique is all, they have seemingly no interest in how their instrument actually works, why it sounds the way it does. It's a shallow kind of virtuosity underpinned by a linear, horizontal way of thinking and it leads to flat two-dimensional music that goes from A to B in a manner which anyone with ears and a half-working brain will be able to predict pretty damn accurately.

The electric guitar especially is an astonishingly malleable instrument, both sonically and physically, and microscopically sensitive to nuance, yet most guitarists are content to draw from an extremely limited palette of sound, and the toss-merchants are the worst offenders. They compress and/or eq the living shit out of their guitars for an illusory clarity, seemingly believing that removing the frequencies which give a guitar a large amount of it's tonal personality (the midrange) and removing the volume differences from individually played notes will let everyone who listens focus on their 'art'*. The way they set their instruments up aims to do the same thing, the thin strings sound like they look - tinny and harmonically lacking, the stupidly low action** that precludes any serious dynamic range in yr picking - if you play with any balls the strings whack and buzz against the fretboard and sound like shit, these approaches just lead to a polite uniformity of sound devoid of feeling, power or subtlety, robbing the music of any personality or emotional resonance it may have once possessed. A string of notes devoid of variation in dynamic or timbre, of the player's touch, is just that, a string of notes executed by a technician for the edification of a similarly limited audience. You don't judge a writer by how fast they can fucking type without making a mistake do you?

It dismays me that so many guitarists really do think and play like this. If you really want to know what technical virtuosity is actually for, then I suggest you listen to John Coltrane, or Eric Dolphy, or Cecil Taylor. Musicians whose knowledge of the technical and theoretical aspects of music far outstrip any classical musician, living or dead, yet are/were capable of subsuming that knowledge into a greater whole, one which encompasses the physical and acoustic properties of their respective instruments, a drive to push forward what the music they play can encompass, sonically, emotionally and yes, theoretically and structurally, a burning need to discover what music can be and become, not to settle for what's gone before and refine it like a formal mathematical proof.

Music, at it's most basic is sound in a perceptual frame, and the electric guitar is frankly only rivalled by modular analogue or ludicrously complicated digital synthesizers in the spectrum of possibilities it offers. Listen to Albert Ayler, a man who managed to coax a new register from the tenor saxophone just by the way he blew, by altering the contact of a piece of plastic reed with his mouth and breath as he played, and these fuckers can't even manage to sound different from each other with their mounds of technology. There are of course exceptions, Robert Fripp (a virtuoso if ever there was one) and Fred Frith have probably managed to extend the vocabulary of the guitar in a rock context to greater extent than anyone else who springs to mind, yet never does their technicality intrude on the actual music. Sonically, musicians as disparate as Helios Creed, Kevin Shields, Jim Plotkin, Oren Ambarchi, Keith Rowe, Neil Young and Matt Bower (to name but a very few) have taken the guitar into places few others previously suspected the existence of, and none of them would claim (or want) to be thought of as technical wizards, simply because the need to create, to push, to discover far outweighs any concerns of technique. For a real fucking musician, technique is nothing but a means to help bring about not even an end, but a moment.

For a lot of guitarists though, it's everything, and I think it explains the serious lack of good guitarists in the (especially free) jazz world. Think about it for a moment. Go right back to bebop. How many guitarists can you think of in jazz who pushed the music the way that sax, or trumpet, or piano, or double bass players, or drummers did? Not fucking many. Even at the height of free jazz, in the 60s, when musicians were breaking apart the front line/rhythm section divide, it's still easier to list the violinists*** than the guitarists.

Frankly, there's only three that matter from that time, Sonny Sharrock, Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey, all of whom understand/stood the guitar as resonating pieces of wood and metal, as physical object, and as a sound generator as much as a machine to play notes on, and all of whom tore up the rule book as to what guitarists could and couldn't do, Bailey to the extent of renouncing jazz practice as such and forging a new path based on pure, non-idiomatic improvisation§, Sharrock being the only guitarist at the time who thought more like a horn player, and crucially played bottleneck like a motherfucker, something still rare as hen's teeth in jazz circles, lending his playing a vocal quality that no one has come close to (and very fucking few jazz guitarists even dip their toes into the murky waters of slide guitar) not to mention an attitude to echo that had more in common with Syd Barrett than any jazz musican. And Keith Rowe, the man who completely deconstructed the guitar and it's role in the music, creating a whole new way of approaching the instrument single handedly, through his utter disregard for what the instrument was supposed to be for.

And fuck they Listen/ed hard when they play, which is the most important fucking thing you can do, even if (and especially when) y're right up front, but most guitarists seemingly can't (or just won't, I'm not sure which is worse) do this seemingly simple thing, to listen, to allow yrself to just be in the music and play what the moment, the music demands of you. Sun Ra didn't bang on about discipline for nothing you know. When you just play, the technique you use should be the last thing on (or in) yr mind, it's there to serve the music, the sound, the moment, the feeling.

When Coltrane blew fuck knows how many hundreds of notes a minute, does it sound like wank? No, because the sound itself, and the process of the creation of that sound was rooted in a deep knowledge of the sonic possibilities, and limitations, of his instrument, a total awareness of the musicians he was playing with, how his sound, not just the notes he was playing, related to what each and every musician there was playing, and where they were at together and individually. It was part of a whole, the solo an intrinsic part of the ensemble, indivisible, one.

Now I know we can't all be John Coltrane, and I sure as shit ain't, but fuck, isn't that level of playing something to aim for? Better striving for that than Mick Barr.

Technique is totally fucking meaningless when it exists in a void. The lack of knowledge, or even interest in the physical and acoustic properties of your instrument is, as far as I'm concerned, the worst kind of musical ignorance. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for your tools, and for your art, and for the idea that there must be more to be discovered in this infinitely variable abstract world we call music. You might as well just have a wank in the mirror.

*It's 2 o'clock in the morning, the guitarist has attempted to record a solo many, many times: "But dude, I NEED all the notes to be exactly the same volume"

"Well why don't you fucking play it that way then?"

(Long pause, sheepishly looks at floor) "I can't"

"That's why I suggested you play something that you're actually fucking capable of playing an hour and a half ago"

or, "But dude, I NEED all the notes to be exactly the same volume"

"Why?"

"So you can hear how I played every fuckin' note"

"But that's not what you'll hear if I squash it, you'll hear the note, but not the how"

"?"

You have no idea how many times I've had similar exchanges. And it was always a guitarist, every single fucking time...

**height of strings above the fretboard for the uninitiated.

***The violin has never really been that popular an instrument in jazz, despite great players such as Stuff Smith, Stephan Grappelli and Billy Bang.

§Which, I suspect much to his disgust, solidified in the heads of many musicians into a style of it's own with philosophical problems on a par with Gödel's incompleteness theorem and it's implications.

Synthesis, 17th Century Style

"Wee have also Sound-houses, wher we practise and demonstrate all Sounds, and the Generation. Wee have harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds, and lesser Slides of Sounds. Diverse Instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter than any you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet. Wee represent Small Sounds as well as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diverse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originalle are Entire. Wee represent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds. Wee have certain Helps, which sett to the Eare doe further the Hearing greatly. Wee have also diverse Strange and Artificiall Echos's, Reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it: And some that give back the Voice lowder than it come, some Shriller, some Deeper; Yea some rendering the Voice, Differing in the letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve, Wee have also means to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines, and Distances."

Roger Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1624
This was also pinned on the wall in the old BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Which explains a lot.