MAUSIM CD (HP
CYCLE)
 I
dig getting this kind of shit in the mail, a CD encased
in two pieces of plywood tied together neatly by decorative
twine and cloth. I got the CD from Tyler Elyea of Orangeville,
Ontario, Canada, but there's no name anywhere on it -- maybe
inside there's a group name, or maybe it's credited to Tyler
Elyea, or maybe he didn't even play on it, he just put it
out...we'll find out...I haven't opened it yet because I
wanted to scan the 'cover' for the representation you see
just to the left here without upsetting the utter neatness
of the package, and I doubt I'll be able to retie it so
well. The second paragraph of this review will document
me opening the CD.
In fact,
I'm gonna stop writing now, long enough to use my hands
for the (grand?) opening. The time it takes will be represented
by ellipsis.............okay, I haven't opened it yet, but
I did try, and I wanted to write that jeez, this guy Tyler
Elyea must've been an Eagle Scout, this knot is tied perfectly...hell,
I'm gonna scan  the
back so you can see what I mean....................alright,
see that little knot on the upper left side? That is one
TIGHT knot..........
............okay it was hard but I finally undid the knot...still
can't get the CD out without mak ing
a mess of the binding.........
okay, it's out, and it's a lovely screen-printed envelope
and jeez, whaddaya know, IT'S completely bound too, this
time by masking tape! Better scan this one too, before I
take off the tape....okay, there it is, to the left, an
interesting green color with a nice black screenprint in
the middle. Looks like that word on it says "MAUSIM"--maybe
that's the name of the band. The tape is the same white
as the background this is printed on, so you might not really
be able to see what it looks like....anyway, it's perfectly
sealed. Okay, now that we've gotten this far, I'm gonna
tear it open and listen to the damn thing!...stay tuned,
paragraph three will be about THE MUSIC......okay, all I
had to do to get the disc out was just undo the top piece
of tape....
Looks
like it's a fully-pressed CD, not a CDR...still no information
really, just a  little
slip of paper (visible in image #4) with an e-mail address,
hp_cycle@hotmail.com.
The CD itself is just plain green. Tyler described it as
"live, improvised music using four guitars." I
am now about 5 minutes into track one. It's a 20-minute
track, sounding like a pretty dense squall of loud, distorted
guitars, creating a thick drone. One guitar is doing something
spacey and melodic while others churn in a more slab-of-sound
fashion. Comparable to Pelt, RH Band, Handful of Dust, Ashtray
Navigations, MCMS, Bardo Pond without a drummer, bass player,
or chord changes, somewhere in there....okay, I'm just gonna
listen to this without typing about it and then after several
ellipsis I'll be back for my final thoughts..............................
...............................(two days or more pass)............................................
.........okay, it's a good disc! Recommended to fans of
the above, especially Ash Nav (except that it's group, not
solo) and RH Band (except that it's entirely guitar-driven).
It's concise, three longish tracks taking up 40 or so minutes
(with a fourth track that's 30 seconds of silence), adding
up to a concentrated trawl through a pretty specific set
of guitar frequencies. You know the drill, it's like holding
up a microscope to what seems at a distance like a flat
surface and finding all kinds of bumps and textures and
patterns. Isn't that basically what this kind of music is
all about? As a bonus, Mausim throws in some psychedelic
fun at the mixing board every now and then.
In closing,
I'll let Mr. Elyea himself give you some more info: "you
are correct in assuming that the project is entitled 'mausim'.
the cd consists of live improvised recordings using (mostly)
four guitars. the music was actually recorded back in 1997
using two mics and a four track. over the subsequent three
years the band dispersed over three continents and my brother
and myself worked sporadically on sorting through hours
of tapes and working on various 'mixes'. due to a number
of factors, most notably the time and financial constraints,
the process of getting the cd mixed, pressed and finally
offically 'released' took quite a bit longer than originally
planned. however, now that the four members of mausim are
all living on the same continent once again (three in toronto
and one in chicago) we are planning on recording another
album sometime in the next couple months (tentatively planned
as a double lp!) which we hope to release by the end of
2001. as for the quantity of cds, we ended up pressing three
hundred. as you can imagine, it takes quite a bit of time
to complete the packaging for each cd. as a result we make
them as we need them. anyway, thanks again for the comments.
if you know anyone that would be interested in a copy, please
let me know..."
WANDERING ARCHIVE ONE (Wandering
Archive Press)
 In
the last ish of this here incredible (stupid) magazine
Blastitude, I tried to describe Richard Meltzer's
book The Aesthetics of Rock by using what seemed
like several metaphors, probably all mixed and none seeming
quite complete. My basic point was that it is an unreadable
book when approached from beginning to end.
However, it can be
looked at randomly, with any one page yielding several
lines of readable text (about the subjects at hand, rock'n'roll
and an aesthetics thereof). So perhaps a more accurate
way to describe it would be as a readable unreadable book,
or to borrow from Brad Sonder in this very issue, an "open
text." While it is ultimately unreadable, any one
page is certainly readable, therefore it is both. In this
sense, the book becomes like a river, the river,
Heraclitus's river, the river of which He (raclitus) said
"You can't step in the same river twice." (Gregory
Corso made this thought even trippier when he amended
it to "You can't step in the same river once.")
Other
examples of books that are rivers: The Bible, Finnegan's
Wake, Tropic of Cancer, Absalom Absalom, cut-up period
William S. Burroughs, Visions of Cody, Webster's Dictionary,
etc. When
a book is a river its text is so dense with poetry instead
of light with narrative that the average reader would
no sooner try to FINISH the thing than he or she would
FINISH (what, drink? swim the length of?) a river.
What the average reader would be much more likely to do
is visit a riverbank now and then and sort of hang out
there and play in the dirt, throw rocks and sticks and
stuff into the river, and MAYBE even step into it with
rolled-up jeans. That's like just opening up the book
somewhere, anywhere, and reading a few pages and getting
something out of those few random pages before quitting/leaving
the book/river. Reading nine or ten pages can be a REAL
intense experience with books like these, comparable to
actually stepping and wading into a river or maybe (as
in the case of Daniel Carter) swimming in it or (as in
the case of D. Derbyshire) floating downstream in it.
Daniel
Carter and D. Derbyshire are contributors to the 'literary
journal' Wandering Archive One. Naw, it's not a
'journal,' it's a book. Despite the "one" in
the title, who knows if there will be another one? And
how are we ever gonna finish this one? A
text that collects several (sub)texts. Twelve
(thirteen if you count the inserted photo essay by Sara
Press, and of course you should count it) pieces that
are each readably unreadable in their own ways. Hell,
editors Jason Meagher and Adam Mortimer are kind enough
to include an "Introduction" that says just
that: "i wonder if it might be a worthwhile product
to write a lot of stuff that's unpublishable for various
reasons. this may be an interesting satellite element
to put in the grand order of [apocrypha]." So they
even have a 'tag' for it: apocryphal text, apocryphal
writing. It's better than 'cut-ups.'
The half-page
preface by second-generation rockwriting legend Byron
Coley is the most readable piece in the book, simply because
it's only half a page. It's quite difficult to fathom,
but sage advice is offered: "Where this anthology
points is not easy to say. Having absorbed its contents
slowly for a couple of months now, I am tempted to say
that it lies in the cavities that mar the teeth that chatter
inside the ring of the o-mind." Then comes the aforementioned
introduction from the editors, and then a major readable/unreadable
bomb is dropped by Mr. Carter's nine-and-a-half page "Work
In Progress," a bomb in the form of one long typed
stream of small-print run-on prose poetics (stream of
consciousness sentence fragments rammed up against each
other so hard that the punctuation just disappears). Here's
how it begins: "angry rush beloved
mad man that breeze fold hem thin vast signals redesign
velocities (read the signs) of the air in homeopathic
fashion garment inhibit and increase thus after and is
IS with all its meaning and power does flower the earth
for life until all cycles unwind and wind up (the) wind
(itself-)echo assert not after nor break bets begs yearns
to be broken thus altered altered thus in some way broken
from what it appeared to be offers the clue to eternal
being (the) unmentioned term its force and effect also
its being yet as if it were not there but it is and is
of grave consequence though often subtle so what (?!)
abrupture bracketed may this be in the key of June (an)
old favorite entre question about any and all marks as
slight and delicate as poseable hawkword catch caught
tight now gone without a discernable trace nor scratch
a perfect leisure erasure of bridge preciptated the decision
to enter that grimly lit womb in the House of Elision
with fear and delight yet something's always on the bed
other than people why don't I tell you things write away?
why don't I tell myself things write away? why is deception
so necessary?...." Okay, on and on like that
for nine and a half pages, and that wasn't even one-third
of the first page. Carter has given us a nine and a half
page text that is practically as impossible to finish
as the 346-page text of The Aesthetics of Rock!
However, what joys can be gleaned from dipping in (the
river) periodically...even just sticking a pinky-toe into
Carter's text can yield such linguistic music and dance
as "break bets begs yearns to be broken" in
which each word can be heard as the notes of a jazz improvisation
(Carter is a top-notch saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist,
most notably in NYC free jazz group Test) or as the punches
of a boxer during an intense workout. (Or, in a metaphor
that sort of combines those two, each word can be heard
as each note of a hand drum solo by Angus MacLise like
the one on his Brain Damage in Oklahoma City CD.)
In summation: Carter's "Work in Progress" is
definitely a fucking river when it comes to writing/text/prose/poetics,
and as such it contains many fine banks to set up camp
at.....I've only been to a few of 'em so far....
The
next piece, "I Am No One" by someone known as
The Catfish, opens like it might be finishable, evoking
a sort of post-Spillane and/or Bukowski 'noir' signpost
with the line: "So I stood on the corner wondering,
what's next." In fact, the four-page piece is divided
into twelve numbered stanzas (chapters?), and the second
one begins in a "noir" kind of way also: "And
so I sat down another day to lose the stress. We're all
gonna die. Nobody needs a guilt trip about it. And so
there's this little bird that lands on the hedge-row and
I concentrate on the little bird, nothing else."
(Note: the "noir" description is put in quotes
because of this line from the editors' introduction, "the
only solution for you...to turn these strange pages into
a kind of noir reading experience.") Of course, the
third chapter/stanza/part begins "Through down you,
through down to the dew, where will you walk through the
wood chip stew." Um, that's not really noir, but
neither was this, from back in the first chapter: "Redford
had it right, no rest for the wicked. I've been there
that place. The zone exists just as sure as I'll drop
dead and call Hornswaggled. Fuck the zone, I don't know
what the hell it is but who's tuned in? Cuzz I'm driving.
Next bus leaves at eleven." It could be totally sane
stream-of-consciousness role-playing and it could be the
mumblings of a crazy street person. It could also be the
ecstatic preaching of a crazy street person or some other
unknowable person on a radically different plane of reality
because who's to describe the religious thought of such
a person? Maybe "fuck the zone" really nails
it.
The next piece,
"a black lotus: the fade letter (recd. 2/14)"
by John Fell Ryan, is a xeroxed, typewritten seven-page
letter defaced by copious unintelligible pen-markings.
It's a quite hysterical account from a subject whose DNA
has been mutated enough (by repeated doses since age thirteen
from a nerve gas known as Sauron 12) that it's starting
to alter his spine. On page three, the subject says "I
can not  communicate
by telephone, nor by any electronic (technological) means
such as telephones, computers, television, video, or any
of the arms of mass media which I fear is being used against
me and the integrity of my spine and DNA." In other
words, this is a tract by a paranoid schizophrenic. More
crazy person stuff! I haven't even been able to read a
third of it, it's too crazed, but I dig Fell Ryan's piece
anyway, just because it strikes me as the old Poe/Lovecraft
"I found this 40-page letter that tells a strange
tale..." approach taken to a wacked new post-Kinko's
extreme that really plays up the visual component.
So what am I gonna
do here, describe every piece? I've only mentioned five
pieces out of thirteen, and this review is already way
too long. Somehow these Wandering Archive folks have managed
to condense what reads like one big cut-up between The
Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs, The
Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard, some of the more
wacked-out Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom or Oxford
Pigeon), poetry from the back covers of random free
jazz albums, and the manifestos and memoirs of convicted
serial killers. Like the Sun City Girls said about a different
artifact, "There will never be a critic who will
ever be qualified to critique this." This one is
barely 100 pages long and it reads like about 5,000, and
although I'd probably sooner be able to read all 5,000
pages of, say, The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
than I would be able to 'read' everything in Wandering
Archive One, I'd much rather have the latter on my
shelf at home. And I put 'read' in quotes because you
actually don't read Wandering Archive One at all,
it's more like you just SEE it. All I can say is see for
yourself. Available for $15 postpaid from W.A. Press,
638 W. 131st, NY NY 10027. Checks to Jason Meagher. (Oh
yeah, I barely mentioned the D. Derbyshire piece -- a
great comic strip about a man being indoctrinated in the
ways of an arcane cult that has hallucinations when they
imbibe a fluid secreted by the statue of their Holy Mother..."The
product of the idolatrous glands proved to be a previously
unknown substance reflecting the greater properties of
the moon. Thus, even when taken in dilution, it bleached
out the normal drab coloring, gilding his gorged eyes,
and enlivening the divine grey. Taken in excess, this
was repsonsible for his sudden perception of the curious
pinkish light, an infra-pink normally invisible to humans,
which heralded the annual migration of the vampire gulls."
A-friggin-MEN....)
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