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C.O.B.: Spirit Of
Love CD (LADY ELEANORE)
 Just
now listening to this for the second time, and I like
it better than the first run-through...this is considered
an all-time well-worth-crying-tears-over classic in the
'psychedelic folk' genre, but I'll admit the first time
through I was just a bit underwhelmed. It seemed good,
certainly a little strange, but maybe only a little,
the same way I thought old Sun Ra stuff was maybe only
a little (strange) the first couple times I listened to
that. Now I think all Sun Ra stuff (old and new)
is fully strange, and it gets more that way the more I
listen, and I'm sure this Spirit Of Love album
will behave the same way. Yep, as it moves on (now on
track seven "Evening Air") it's getting better
and better -- so many albums require a second listen or
even third listen to sink in -- like the warning on the
Spectrum album, "Play Twice Before Listening."
Like that album (Soul Kiss Glide Divine by Spectrum)
there are no drums on Spirit of Love, just hovering
songs driven by simply acoustic guitar, bass guitar, occasional
flute and mandolin, natural room reverb, and especially
the haunting one-two-and-three-part vocals, leads mainly
by Clive Palmer (C.O.B. stands for "Clive's Original
Band" or "Clive's Own Band," depending
on who you ask) with great harmony backing by multi-instrumentalists
John Bidwell and Mick Bennett. I still think the opening
title-track is a bit too cute or cheeky (Tower Recordings
improved it when they recast some of the lyrics for a
track of the same name on their Fraternity of Moonwalkers
CD), but something was starting to happen to me the second
time through the next track "Music of Ages,"
when I started reading along with the hand-printed lyrics
about "A whisper from the river/Of gracefully gliding
swans/In ripples steady circling/The silence of the ages
gone/For time entwines my very soul/A tangled briar kills
the tree/I cannot hear--The music of the ages/The silence
of a million tongues...." as Clive Bell sang them
over the trademark C.O.B. groove, which is slow, forlorn,
softly droning, and in a minor key. Weird, on this seventh
track "Serpent's kiss," which is also slow,
forlorn, softly droning, and in a minor key, Clive Palmer
sounds a lot like Ozzy Osbourne does on "Planet Caravan,"
same kind of phase effects on the vocals too. He even
sings a tritone in the melody (the flatted fifth, an interval
that was actually deemed "Satanic" and ommitted
from most early Christian music, hence a favorite note
in Ozzy's repetoire). Holy shit, on this next track, "Sweet
slavery," he still sounds like Ozzy, without the
effects (and without the tritone, though the melody is
just as mournful as anything from Sabbath's black-cloud
oeuvre). Not only does he sound like Ozzy, but "Serpent's
kiss" is a pretty sinister song that seems to be
about pagan ceremonies with the word 'sacrifice' in the
chorus, and I wish I could quote you on that but I returned
the CD to Mr. Rolfsmeier without copying the lyrics.
Okay,
in the time it took me to write and revise the previous
paragraph a few times, the disc started over again and
is now on the second track again, the already-even-better
"Music of Ages." And the third track is the
real stunner this time, Mick Bennett singing the eerie,
wobbling "Soft Touches Of Love" backed by Clive
on acoustic guitar and Mr. Bidwell contributing sweet,
haunting, echoing recorder accompaniment that really makes
the song. Hell, "Spirit of Love" sounded better
this time too -- it still has this 'cute album intro'
status, where all the songs that come after are really
very melancholy, but its cheekiness did sound more dusted
and dragged (almost like cynicism) this time (and I mean
cynicism in a refreshing way). Ah hell, Spirit of Love
is a classic, sure, just like all those early 'swing-era'
Sun Ra albums....I'll just stop doing this track-by-track
write-as-you-play gimmick review right now, 'cause I don't
even wanna try and describe track four "Banjo Land".........oh
nevermind, "Banjo Land" isn't even on here (although
it is on the cover art), I guess they omitted it from
this reissue. Instead we go straight to "Wade in
the Water," which is another cheeky cute song, but
like "Spirit of Love" also quite dragged and
hollowed out. (The only other potentially cute song on
the album is "Skranky Black Farmer," although
it's really as gritty and menacing as it is cute, and
also quite zoned out...)
Er--anyway,
I'd better wind this review up so I'll just end with some
band history, as written by Billy Kiely on the Forced
Exposure website:
"C.O.B stands for Clive (Palmer's) Original Band;
he had originally formed The Incredible String Band in
1965 with Robin Williamson, who were later joined by Mike
Heron and recorded ISB's self-titled debut in 1966, signed
to Elektra by Joe Boyd, who said at the time they were
reputed to be a 'Scottish' bluegrass group. After the
first ISB LP was released, Williamson split to Morocco
to gather exotic instruments, and Clive went to Afghanistan
for some other reason. Upon his return he hooked up with
John Bidwell and the remarkable vocalist and player Mick
Bennett."
BROSELMASCHINE CD
(TEMPEL/SPALAX)
 Now
I'm listening to this for the second time right after
listening to Spirit of Love for the second time,
so I just did the unthinkable, I broke Blastitude's record-reviews-in-alphabetical-order
policy. I did it because I thought it was neat that I'm
listening to two psych-folk classics recorded in another
continent during the same year (1971), and this way I
can give ya the goods on My Baptism by Classic Euro Psych-Folk
as it's happening, right?
I
gotta say, even just about ten seconds in, I like Broselmaschine
better than Spirit of Love. note
There's just something dusted about the spare and melancholy
acoustic guitar arpeggios, something dusted that all Krautrock
shares, whether it's from the zoned-out moaning swarm-jamming
of Amon Duul (both I and II, in different ways) or the
spacious trance-funk of Can or the jump-cut weirdness
of Faust or the gauzy bliss of Neu! and Harmonia, that
I don't quite get from British stuff in general, even
though the instrumentation is much the same (acoustic
guitars, recorder flute, choral vocals...). Of course,
track two on here is as genteel sounding as C.O.B., and
not near as melancholy...let's see, it's called "Lassie,"
and it's a traditional song, so no wonder it sounds more
'trad,' but as it continues on it begins to take a pretty
stretched-out shape after all, seeming longer than the
listed 5:06, a length illusion that creates a cumulative
folk-rock glow.
Track
four, "The Old Man's Song," features almost
harsh but ultimately spacy female vocals by Jenni Schucker,
as well as creamy-mellow wah-wah guitar soloing by Willi
Kismer. I don't know, maybe Spirit of Love is a
little better...at least it has more discernible hooks,
such as the winding melody of "Music of Ages,"
but Broselmaschine is still very good -- ah yes,
the wah solo is being pushed along by congas and tablas
of Mike Hellbach as the song builds -- and Ms. Schucker
comes back in with a whisper-chant and more spacey wordless
vocals while a couple of the guys do a goofy chant over
very loosely played James Brown guitar chords!
Ah yes, there's the Krautrock/Ohr Music/Rolf-Ulrich
Kaiser spirit we've come to expect....I didn't mention
track three, "Gitarrenstuck," which is probably
something about a guitar, although you can't tell from
the lyrics, because they aren't in German or English,
just a wordless, sad, mystical multi-tracked performance
by Shucker. Only two minutes long.....track five, "Schmetterling"
is a nine-minute journey with spoken, slightly distorted
vocals from Jenni, much propulsive but laid-back interplay
between the guitars and hand drumming, and late in the
game, an appearance by that psych-folk ace-in-the-hole,
a solo from a recorder flute!
I
could go on, but again, you get the picture. I don't want
to blow all the rest of the songs before you hear it for
yourselves...actually that only leaves you one song, the
sixth and final track, "Nossa Bova." That's
another thing that makes these albums classic: they're
concise. Broselmaschine is 35 minutes, Spirit of Love
is like 38. Albums that are made
to be listened to in one ritualistic sitting. I fit 'em
both on one CD-R, so it's like going to a really intense
epic melancholic C.O.B. show and then having this nice
mellow and loose cool-down set from Broselmaschine. Ah,
those were the days...which brings us to our NOTE:
Which is this sentence, written a couple weeks later,
to say that Spirit of Love has grown to become
a much more important album to me than Broselmaschine,
which I still like but after say four or five listens,
the melodies and moods of Spirit of Love found
their way deep into my heart, and I have fallen very much
in love with it, where Broselmaschine remains merely
a good friend. Thank you. back
to the review
COMUS: First Utterance
2LP (GET BACK!)
 Okay,
back to alphabetical order to round up this little 'as-it-happened
at-home musical baptism by the hand of the forefathers
of British and German psych-folk' trio of reviews. Comus,
Comus, Comus...I've heard so much about you, so I knew
you'd be something....but I didn't know you would be so
beastly. This is one of the strangest albums I've
ever heard. I knew it would be strange -- apparently there's
actually a genre tag for this kind of thing called "wyrd
folk." This genre was defined by the folks from mail-order
service New
Sonic Architecture as "[a combination of] pseudo-medieval
reels and airs with a psychedelic dementia by turns gentle
and harrowing." Either way, I can't imagine actually
saying the words "wyrd folk" out loud, but reading
about it did prepare me for this record to be a weird
one -- excuse me, "wyrd" one....
It
still didn't prepare me enough, though. About fifteen
seconds into the first track I had to get up and check
to make sure it was playing at the right speed, due mainly
to the helium-inflected vocals of Roger Wooton but also
just because of the overall herky-jerky scary oompah band
nature of the track, "Diana." And lyrics about
"steaming woodlaaaaaaaannndds...." What the
hell is going on here? And then things get intense, Wooton
starts yelping and screaming, an arsenal of hand drums
starts pounding at high speeds, and I feel like I'm falling
into the same trap door that Amon Duul II open up on Phallus
Dei and Yeti. Beneath this trap door, as Marcel
Koopman says on the Forced Exposure website,
"the music twists and oozes as a vile bunch of snakes,"
except that Comus is indeed vile and make Amon Duul II
seem sort of cute in comparison....
Vile might even
be an understatement. This is horror-folk. I had already
read in The Wire that "two songs...on First
Utterance draw on
mythology and Milton's poem Comus, about threatened
female chastity..." but I forgot about that until
I listened to the album and started to hear weird (excuse
me, wyrd) subject matter on the occasions when I could
discern Wooton's yelping lyrics. Looking at the lyric
sheet confirmed this as I read lines like these from "Drip
Drip": "You dangling swinging / hanging, spinning,
aftermath / Your soft white flesh turns past me slaked
with blood / Your evil eyes more damning than a demon's
curse / Your lovely body soon caked with mud / As I carry
you to your grave my arms your hearse." Jeez! He's
singing about cold-blooded murder! Of a girl with "soft
white flesh" and "a soft breast." It's
not just vile, it's downright lurid! And, as I listened
and read more, I realized that no less than three of the
six songs sound like they're about the same woodland sexual
assault -- the "two" that The Wire refers
to are "Diana" and "Song To Comus"
(with its creepy absurd prog-rock lines like "Chastity
chaser virile for the virgin's virtue") -- but I
think "Drip Drip" is about the aftermath of
the same terrifying scene, with the rapist killing his
victim. It's the closest a folk album has ever gotten
to Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left...
There's
also "The Bite," which is an explicit account
of the hanging of a Christian prisoner, and "The
Prisoner," which is such a frank account of mental
illness that it actually begins with the lines "I
was mad and was accepted for treatment at a hospital /
For the mentally sick." It continues with hardcore
shit like "Then they gave me shock treatment / And
when I awoke I was numb and remembered nothing / Probe
me mould me reassemble my brain / Schizoid paranoid just
terms just names / Why can't you leave me don't drive
me insane."
And amidst
all of these churning folk-rock rave-up investigations
into really dark shit is the song "The Herald,"
the second track on the album, and one of the most mystical
things I've ever heard. It's eerie rather than vile, contemplative
rather than churning, and boasts the album's only lead
vocal by the glorious Bobbie Watson. She sings lyrics
like "Herald of morning walks across the earth eternally
/ And somewhere in the black distance / Another herald
puts down his flute / And the dewy day creeps on / And
the night withdraws" in a high diaphanous register
that mingles with the violin and flute melodies as they
come and go, hovering, alighting, fading out into the
mist only to emerge again from above (the song completely
fades out for a few seconds two different times during
its epic 7-8 minutes)...listening to it on beer and a
bit of marijuana with C.L. and B.A. one night we all envisioned
it as the soundtrack to some spectral early-70s Disney
animated feature, during a melancholy and/or eerie scene
in which sprites and nyads emerge from matte paintings
of leafy glens that reveal mist-enshrouded streams. For
"The Herald" alone, I recommend this album completely.
I recommend the rest too...but I honestly don't think
you're gonna be ready for how evil it is.....
LINKS:
a
good article on Comus
BLACK DICE 7-inch
(VERMIN SCUM)
As
you might have noticed in this issue's letter's section,
"it's all about the Black Dice in the year 2G."
So many people are talking about 'em, I just had to head
down to the only independent record store in Lincoln,
Nebraska (Zero Street) and see if they were selling anything
by 'em. They were sold out of the infamous 10-inch on
Troubleman Unlimited, but they did have this little 7-incher
on Baltimore's Vermin Scum label. So I plopped down $3.75
and bought it. Kinda expensive, 7-inchers these days,
especially in this case when it's just a one-sided 7-inch
to be played at 45 RPM. Comes out to about two or three
minutes of music, and then when it's over and I want some
more I don't get any because the other side has no grooves.
It's blank! (I even tried it out and sure enough, the
needle just skated right to the center....) So, I feel
like this record should've only cost $2, the silk-screened
artwork isn't THAT great. (In fact it's pretty damn creepy
in that punker-kid-drawing-shit-while-on-bad-acid kind
of way.)
But
the music, all two or three minutes of it, is pretty damn
great. I'd heard how Black Dice blended noise and hardcore,
expecting something like early Gravity Records output
with a welcome Dead C inflection....but this sounds more
like Discordance Axis or something, tightly structured
death-metal-influenced exploding hardcore with screaming
vocals and the 3001% intensity that this kind of madness
is usually played with. The grooves on the record and
the printing on the insert suggest that there are five
songs here: "Printed Paper," "Studdered,"
"Ten Days," "Godliness," and "The
P Document." I played it before noticing all that
and I thought for sure it was just one long stopping and
starting belch-from-hell song. That's a compliment, of
course -- I even thought the whining guitar feedback that
happens in between each song was a composed element bridging
one 'verse' to the next. This is a damn good record, but
it's too short and with 7-inch prices what they are these
days, it might leave you feeling a little ripped off too....
LINKS:
Troubleman
Unlimited
DE LA SOUL: Buhloone
Mind State CD (TOMMY BOY)
 What
a blasting album! Starts with a chanted manifesto "It
might blow up but it won't go pop
" over some laid-back
Stax sample-groove shit
.the beats change up, continue
on
.it's a laid-back album
"Change my pitch up?/Smack
my bitch up?/I never did it," the first defiant anti-gangsta
statement on a defiantly anti-gangsta album. A couple
quick hard hitting tracks later, the long, dreamy instrumental
interlude in the middle of the first half of the album
featuring Maceo Parker "blowin' the soul out" of his alto
sax. And then a minute-and-a-half of Japanese rap! ("Oh
shih
") "Cause Long Island is whylin'!" And how about
the exhiliarating screaming that opens "Ego Trippin."
I don't know if that was Prince Paul's idea, but it's
total Prince Paul anyway. The appearance throughout from
Shorty, a lady MC who rips it up on at least two or three
tracks, and as far as I know hasn't been heard from since.
"I am Shorty, I be four-eleven." I saw Shorty rock a joint
live when the 1993 Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul/Souls
of Mischief tour hit Lincoln's lame-ass Rockin' Robin
nightclub, one of maybe two nights in the two years they
were open I had any reason to go there - she did two or
three songs with 'em. Trugoy the Dove was super-cool onstage
- at one point between songs he spent about five minutes
rappin' with the audience about their favorite hip-hop
music
"Ya'll like Del?" "Ya'll like Wu-Tang?" The crowd
"hell yeahed" to the breakadawn. (Or at least to Nebraska
closing time 1AM.) Tribe Called Quest were probably the
best hip-hop show I've ever seen, edging out Public Enemy,
the Beastie Boys, Digital Underground, and De La just
before 'em, in their Low-End Theory/Midnight Marauders
prime, Q-Tip coming on like a younger cuter Bill Cosby
and Phife Dawg doing his Phife-the-Dawg dance. (Also saw
Tribe play the Smashing Pumpkins-headlined Lollapalooza
a year later and they even rocked that incredibly lame-ass
scene, which George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic
could not do at all in the 45 minutes they were allotted
(although the Beastie Boys, going after P-Funk, were this
time even better than Tribe). Smashing Pumpkins were incredibly
boring - I was with about five people, and we all just
mutually agreed to turn around and leave about three bars
into their second song. Shit, we'd been there since noon
(to see the Boredoms rock holy ASS to an extremely lame
stadium crowd of NO ONE (it was too early) except us,
and the very well-staffed security team wouldn't even
let us down into the empty front-row section because our
tickets were marked 'green space' for the big sloped lawn
far away from the stag)
What
else? A phone message from Prince Paul in which he disses
The Source magazine and says "you can quote me
on that, and you can take this phone message and put it
on your next album, I don't give a fuck." A phone message
from "Dave" featuring what is my choice for the best recorded
orgasm performance ever. (People's choice: Meg Ryan in
that "When Mary Met Hallie" flick with Billy Crystal.)
"Breakadawn" is a luscious slow jam (the one-word hook
snipped from Michael Jackson's sweet vocal on "I Can't
Help It" is one of the greatest hip-hop samples of all
time), with another classic and oft-quoted dis on gangsta-rap:
"Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated." I always dug
Posdnuos.  His
real name is Kelvin Mercer. His MC name, I once saw him
explain on MTV News, is "Sound Sop" backwards. As if anyone
knew what the fuck "Sound Sop" was s'posed to mean, which
was - hey! - DADA before I even knew its name. I was 17,
Kelvin Mercer was like 19 or 20, so we were peers, which
I didn't realize at the time because with his cool poetic
demeanor and young bearded and bespectacled look he was
about the most mature rock star I'd ever seen, which made
him seem like a welcome foreigner appearing on MTV, which
as you know stands for Keep-Your-Entertainment-Stupid
Television. He was also a Total Dadaist, talking about
the Daisy Age as being about "DA Inner Sound Y'all
,"
wearing psychedelically-colored clothes, rapping dense
poetic self-affirming non sequitirs over Funkadelic samples,
participating in mad skits (joke songs) occuring as interludes
during De La Soul albums, such as "Ya'll got doo doo in
your pocket? Ya'll got doo doo in your pocket? I want
ya take it out and wave it back and forth over your head,
and say "DOO DOO!
.DOO DOO!
..say DOO DOO! Now scream!!!!"
or a hundred others like it. And the laid-back game-show
skit that opens the album was at least as widely heard
of a Dada (or excuse me, Theater of the Absurd) masterstroke
as any Beckett play besides "Waiting for Godot"
.there's my own little Dada minorstroke (ya know, the
old 'way-extended ellipsis' gag)
..and to continue with
De La
.oh nevermind, you get the idea, I'm gonna go break
out my 3 Feet High And Risin' cassette....................................
EMTIDI: Saat CD (TEMPEL/SPALAX)
Oh
lord, I'd thought I'd already written an Emtidi review.
I don't relish the thought, but hey, this is just journalism
here, I can knock something out: I acquired this one from
psych archivist Steven Rolfsmeier at the tail-end of my
recent psych-folk baptism. (See above.) In fact, I've
already given it back to him, hence no cover image. (Can't
find one on the internet either.) On first listen, it
rang okay, but nothing fantastic. Sounded like decent
'traditional' folk stylings, like a less-loose Broselmaschine,
rather awkwardly appended by sub-Heldon synth swirls.
After fourth and fifth listens, well, I like it better,
but it's still 'second-tier' when it comes to the overall
quality of The Early Seventies German Psych Explosion
(can't we just go back to calling it 'Krautrock'?) .
My favorite
song is the first one: "Walkin' in the Park."
It starts as epic melancholy cathedral folk, with a great
sad vocal by Canadian Dolly Holmes that wastes no time
going into a chorus of "Don't sit on the grass...it's
too cold for your ass..." while somehow retaining
the majesty of the song. Then, for the last three minutes
it goes into an instrumental mini rave-up outro, with
great loose-limbed choppy soloing by German Maik Hirschfeldt.
(That was the whole band -- a male-female German-Canadian
space-folk duo...)
The hip favorite
is the third track, "Touch The Sun," but I think
that's just because it's over ten minutes long and has
"sun" in the title, a combination that has always
granted 'instant classic' status to psych tracks. Much
of the song is taken up by synthesizer soundscapes that
sound like outtakes from "Florian Fricke: The Kindergarten
Tapes." The song is pretty good, but if you took
out the beginner's soundscapes, it would only be about
five minutes long instead of a "12-minute epic."
I don't
really remember how the rest of the disc was, though I
did make a cassette dub of it. It's really not bad, and
"Walkin' in the Park" is great, but there are
definitely about 30 or 40 other discs from this scene
that you should buy first, and they all cost 17-20 bucks
a pop, so you might wanna wait on it or borrow it from
someone like I did.
MARK-ALMOND
LP (BLUE
THUMB)
Jay "drummer of Think" Bayles lent this to me
and I feel like I should hurry up and review it before
it becomes 'a lost classic of British folk adorned by
low-keyed psychedelics' or something like that. Actually,
that probably won't happen, this album is not a 'classic,'
though side one is surprisingly good.
Okay, how 'bout some back
story on the band....first of all, Mark-Almond is not
the singer from Soft Cell. I kept asking Jay that when
he'd tell me about the album...."I've got this album
by Mark-Almond".... "Oh yeah, Marc Almond, from
Soft Cell?"..... "No"..... "Are you
sure"...."Yep." That sort of thing.
In order to steer
me out of confusion, Jay just brought the LP over and
left it at my house, so now I know that "Mark"
is Jon Mark and "Almond" is Johnny Almond, hence
the name of the band. (Note the hyphen.) Jon Mark is the
songwriter -- there's only one song on the album he didn't
write, and that was by Rodger Sutton, the bass player.
Johnny Almond gets his last name in the band name, but
he doesn't even so much as co-write a single song on here,
he just plays "Baritone, tenor, alto and soprano
saxophones, vibes, vocal harmonies, conga drums, concert
alto and bass flute." So he's like the 'winds' player
of the group, and though two others are credited with
"percussion," he's also the only one credited
with any "drums." And conga drums are just hand
drums, which he evidently plays when he's not playing
solos/atmospherics on his sax. (The lack of a drum kit
adds to this record's low-key mellow seventies sound,
as well as associating it with the psych-folk scene...all
of the psych-folk bands mentioned above used hand drums
when they used drums at all.)
The first track
is sort of iffy, sounding a bit like substandard Van Dyke
Parks, but it's not terrible either, especially in the
context of the next track, an 11-minute suite called "The
City," which really opens the album up. It's a two-chord
vamp with mellow vocals and mellow conga drums setting
up a light but insistent 'nossa bova' kind of groove,
which especially kicks in with the chorus chant: "I
do'wanna go, I do'wanna go, I do'wanna go back to the
city..." After that, " " closes out the
side, reminding me of a shorter version of Tim Buckley's
"Love From Room 109" -- I think fans of that
vibe might actually like this record. However, side two
is not as good...it has another 'long cut' with the 12-minute,
but unfortunately it's not another sinuous psychedelic
groove like "The City," but an attempt at a
'slow orchestrated ballad' that ends up not saying much
more about beauty than its title. Though I've spun side
one several times, I haven't even made it through this
side once.
I need to get a good rock reference book -- right now
the only one I have that has anything on these guys is
The Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1979, edited
by Dave Marsh (with John Swenson, whomever he might be).
It says "alumni of John Mayall's group," which
is actually kind of disappointing, because it grounds
the ethereality of "The City" in the mid-70s
blues-rock radio industry. But then that reminds me, radio,
and even blues-rock radio, was much better in the 70s
-- how else woulda weirdo band like Blue Oyster Cult gotten
famous?
Marsh gives all of Mark-Almond's
(five!) LP's two stars out of five, calling them "mood
music for the Valium set." I actually like mood music,
and if I wanna feel like I'm on Valium, which sometimes
I do, I'd much rather do it by listening to mood music
than by having to take Valium. About a Jon Mark solo LP,
Marsh says "so smooth and relaxing, you'll wonder
if you've been drugged." Well sorry Dave, but that
sounds like an album I'd like to hear, and that describes
"The City" pretty well. As for side two, what
a disappointment. I'd give it two stars too, or maybe
even one, but not because it's 'druggy,' because it's
NOT druggy, instead being kinda distractingly pretentious
like all second-tier 70s pomp-rock, offering the same
sensation as when you're listening to Pink Floyd and you're
not able to go all the way and just LOSE IT, only it's
even more 'just okay' than that. -- Matt Silcock
R!!!S!!!: Lake CD
(VHF)
 Lake
was a double-LP released in an edition of 300 copies in
1990 on a label called No Fans Records, based in Harpenden,
England. The musicians behind Lake were also the
owners of the label, and were named Richard Youngs and
Simon Wickham-Smith; their first initials, excitedly presented,
making up the name of their 'group.' Album sales didn't
exactly take off, and they still had 297 copies left when
a single rave review in Forced Exposure magazine
inspired tuned-in households worldwide to order a copy,
and it promptly sold out. Those 297 Forced Exposure
readers are pretty much the only people who've heard
it until now, as VHF Records has pressed up a special
"10th Anniversary" CD reissue of this legendary
album. Now another couple thousand interested households
can let this music play. The following document, found
scrawled in ballpoint pen on scattered post-it notes around
my listening room beanbag, might give you an idea what
it sounded like in mine:
'Side
One is immediately baffling, packing 8 tracks into its
14 minutes, not so much songs as they are recorded found
objects and/or performances of inscrutable mini-manifestos
and/or well, songs. (The last track "Hymn,"
all two minutes and fourteen seconds of it, is definitely
a song.) The record begins in a pretty disorienting way,
with Richard and Simon chatting nonchalantly while weird
humming sounds swirl around them and much-louder-than-everything-else
jarring percussive hits keep the bewildered listener at
attention. As if it were the most natural thing to do,
Simon starts reading the posted rules sign from some public
place that evidently they took down and shepherded home
to Harpenden to make a spoken-word piece out of. (Voila!
A found object.) The next track, "Anti-Social Behaviour"
is another near-inscrutable
spoken-word
found-object mini-manifesto, this one sounding like Richard
and Simon simultaneously reading separate treatises on
anarchy, perhaps from some old book by Emma Goldman, or
perhaps from a punk zine, or maybe written by R!!! and
S!!! themselves -- the mystery is starting to unfold.
As are several tablespoons of genial dada humor: the next
track, "Anti-Social Behaviour In Iceland," is
the same spoken text played backwards with the improv-drone
backing mixed out. As the side continues we get more experiments,
such as a three-minute-long full-fledged electro-acoustic
performance that could've come straight from INA-GRM or
whatever, called "Ricardo Ibarruri (b. 1961): String
trio with live electronics (1985)," a one-line zen
koan ("The only thing to do with money is to lose
it") repeated over and over by R!!!, S!!!, and special
guests Gareth and Yvonne, who all sound like glassy-eyed
Zen zombies with avant-folk gtr and flute backing. Then
there's another barely scrutable mini-manifesto on "Art
and Literature," and then the aforementioned and
rather lovely "Hymn."
Side Two has
only three tracks in 21 minutes, and hence follows a more
A-Band-like long-form approach to beatless countryside-inflected
space jamming that's heavy on the oven tray bowing. At
least the 7-minute first track "Let Them Eat Records"
is in that zone, building up a nice slow head of rattling
steam after some more talking. The second track "Dance:
Help The Aged (Give Them A Heart Attack)" sounds
like percussion tracks played both forwards and backwards
- possibly a remix of "Let Them Eat Records"?
Chris Moon didn't like this side, he doesn't like what
he calls "fuck-off" tracks, like half the stuff
on Neu! 2. I think it's got it a nice 'burrowing'
sound, it definitely works for me, but then I can listen
to Neu! 2 beginning to end no problem. Ah yes,
side two track three "Wasp" is another backwards
piece, this one even sparser than the last but just as
rhythmic.
Okay,
side three is where they get down to the usual drone improv
underground business of the side-long album cut. Here
it's called "Chord," a single track clocking
in at 19:17. The name would imply something like "Duet"
of the later LP Enedkeg, but R!!! and S!!! were
defying drone improv underground side-long album cut expectations
before there were even expectations: "Chord"
is a duet for Classical Guitar and Reed Organ. And on
the Reed Organ, S!!! plays an ugly farting atonal staccatto
chord over and over again ad infinitum. 3 minutes in,
the chords still going, and maybe I'm hearing the Classical
Guitar by R!!! but I really don't think so. Okay, 5 minutes
in I can definitely hear him, but he's barely playing
anything, just sort of plunking along with the Reed Organ,
just as atonally but more occasionally and much more quietly.
I have to listen to 14 more minutes of this? Give me side
one again! No, it's pretty cool -- again, it's a sort
of found object piece, with the object being the chord
Simon's playing, hence the title of the piece. In Cubist
fashion, the object is repeated over and over again so
that the viewer can glean multiple perspectives on its
being. (Because if you listen close, you'll realize that
you can't hear the same chord twice...) And of course,
seven minutes in the chord's repetition is speeded up
a bit (motif and variation, theme and development....see,
this is classical music!)...and it sounds like Richard's
got his classical guitar plugged into an amp because I
think I can hear static in between chord pumps....notice
I haven't used the word 'minimalism' yet in this review?
I guess 'minimalism' is what I mean by 'found object'...it's
not music so much as it's just an object, one sound-thing,
presented for some duration. With five minutes to go,
Simon has speeded up his object presentation quite a bit....when
he speeded up I'm not quite sure, 'cause I was writing,
and it just sort of started to happen after I quit listening,
sort of the way Steve Reich's "Four Organs"
slows down, or elongates, after you quit listening
to it. Except "Chord" is just one organ. Oh
jeez, now there's just three minutes left and now that
the chords are closer and closer together they're really
starting to build up a drone -- and whaddayaknow, they
just broke into full-fledged drone, with a beating percussion
sound underneath (that's not "Classical Guitar"
is it???) and man it's glorious...an actual payoff!
Okay, I'll stop now.
Maybe
I should take a break before writing about Side Four.
Or maybe I should just let you hear that one yourself.
Twenty minutes, three tracks: "Bells," "Redenhall,"
and "Goat." "Bells" is a duet for
"clock chimes." And "Redenhall" really
does hearken forward to "Duet" from Enedkeg.
(Or is it "Urban Music From The Middle Of Nowhere"?)
And "Goat" is a pretty heavy song-object (that
hearkens forward to Ceaucescu). That's all I'll
tell you.'
Okay,
wow. This really is a great album, thank you thank you
thank you to VHF for the reissue. By the way, despite
all the individual pieces/cuts/tracks, it's presented
on the CD (like the Drag City CD of Royal Trux's Twin
Infinitives) as just four tracks, one for each
LP side. I can't imagine what it was like back in 1990
or 1991, to have the original LP pressing arrive in your
mail and to ritualistically play each of the sides in
order so as to hear these goofy mysteries unfold.....to
slowly walk deeper and deeper into the Lake...........
LINKS:
VHF
RECORDS
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