The driving force behind the drum/noise project BEAST is Daniel Menche, though he is often accompanied by Joe Preston and John Haughm. Both Menche and Preston have been active in the experimental scene in the Pacific Northwest for many years. Menche has released a ton of material under his own name, much of it based in field recordings and other ambient noise. He recently put out a split release with William Fowler Collins on Sige Records. Use of natural recordings in Menche’s work goes all the way back to his earliest releases, although the processing techniques have shifted over time. Preston appeared on some of the earliest releases from Earth and Melvins and contributed to one of my favorite records of all time, Altar from Sunn O))) and Boris. Not to be outdone, Haughm is a member of Agalloch and has a few splitreleases with Matthias Grassow, another favorite here at Orion’s Bastard.
Nossa Bova comes from Bröselmaschine’s self-titled debut, but is also featured on the excellent Soul Jazz Deutsche Elektronische Musik 2 compilation. Their debut was produced by Rolf Ulrich-Kaiser, who was an influential music critic and label owner in 1970s Germany and who also produced Tangerine Dream’s Zeit as well as Sergius Golowin’s debut record, which was featured as a track of the day a few weeks back. Like Golowin, Bröselmaschine’s founder Peter Bursch was a folklorist who has published a number of books about German folk music as well as guitar instruction books in Germany. Despite vocalist Jenni Schuckes really making the tropical vibe here, she only appeared on this album with the group and as far as I can tell didn’t record anywhere else, which is a shame. I’m gonna take another opportunity to plug that Soul Jazz comp because it is really excellent.
Since he passed away 15 years ago today, it seemed fitting to devote today’s track of the day to John Fahey. As I touched on in my post about Robbie Basho, Fahey was a foundational figure in American Primitive Guitar. He was born near Washington D.C. in 1939, but it was after his family moved to Takoma Park, Maryland that he first became interested in guitar, buying his first from the Sears catalogue for $17. His first album was self-released in 1964, and he recorded it while studying philosophy and religion at American University. He then moved out west to study Musicology at UCLA, where he completed a master’s thesis centered around the blues music of Charlie Patton.
He was a longtime admirer of delta blues musicians such as Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, and Bukka White. In many ways Fahey’s career ran parallel to some of these blues greats, though Fahey was able to record and release music to varying degrees of success for most of his life. Starting in the 1970s he struggled with alcoholism and other health conditions, and while he recorded throughout that time his career appeared all but over by the 1990s. He was destitute, living in cheap motels, and pawning guitars or records to make up sagging income from performances. Similar to the blues legends he helped to revitalize in the 1960s, admiration from popular musicians like Sonic Youth and Jim O’Rourke, led to renewed interest in his work that has remained constant, particularly in experimental music circles, from then on.
Even this post feels a bit lacking, but I’d encourage you to listen to as much Fahey as you can find. He was not only an incredibly talented guitarist, but unlike some virtuosos he was not showy unless the occasion called for it, although just to be clear he apparently wrote Sunny Side of the Ocean when he was 14. Rather, he honed his talent and created some of the most beautiful, complex, and timeless music I’ve heard. I only wish I hadn’t discovered him after his passing.
For those interested, there’s a concert from 1978 on Youtube that shows the man in action. I’m particularly fond of the rendition of Poor Boys Long Way from Home.
People of the Trees comes from Indigo Aura’s Deep Dreaming in Minecraft release from July of 2015. Along with three beautiful ambient tracks, the release also features a 75-page PDF booklet of images created by Google’s Deep Dream Generator, which uses neural network computing to analyze images and classify them according to their contents. The computing side of it is certainly beyond my understanding, but try to tell me these pictures don’t belong in a head shop right above the incense and Tibetan prayer flags. The images associated with this release were created from Minecraft screenshots, and Indigo Aura has found a way to get images that don’t just look like weird dogs.
Much of Indigo Aura’s music can be placed pretty firmly in the new age camp, which certainly has its share of misses. Much of Indigo Aura’s work focuses on demonstrating the benefits Pythagorean tuning. Attributed to Pythagoras, the thinking behind this system, at least in modern times, goes something like this: much of western music, starting in the 20th century, tunes their instruments to “concert pitch” of A-440Hz, meaning that the A above middle C on a piano, for example, would be tuned to a frequency of 440Hz. While this standard is in widespread use, it’s interesting to note that well-known orchestras like the New York Philharmonic use 442Hz for A above middle C. There are conspiracy theories that accuse Nazis of supporting adoption of tuning A to 440Hz because it is more likely to induce feelings of fear and aggression. In any case, an effort to come up with a standard which started in the 19th century eventually led to widespread adoption of A440Hz as a common concert tuning.
Because Nazis and their evil tunings have to be stopped, some claim that tuning the A to 432Hz and tuning the other notes around that frequency puts an instrument in alignment with the vibration of Earth and the rest of the Universe. Indigo Aura has a webpage which discusses this concept in a more in-depth way and has in fact an entire release, Mathemagical Music Production, which demonstrates this slightly different scale and comes with a booklet about Pythagorean tuning. People have uploaded a shocking number of versions of popular songs that have been tuned to 432Hz. Maybe this is musical Wind turbine syndrome, but since nobody’s making you buy a peasant shirt, get one dangly earring, and start learning the didgeridoo, I’d encourage you to take it for what it’s worth. Like a lot of new age stuff, you gotta separate the wheat from the chaff and I think Indigo Aura is more wheat than chaff. Or chaff than wheat. I don’t really get that expression/know anything about wheat separation. Just listen to the music.
One example of the many fun things that new age musicians get to do. Photo Source
You Can’t Change was the b-side of the only single released by Nervous Patterns, which was a collaborative project of Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout, who is perhaps better known as the owner of Memphis’ Contaminated Records. The duo released one self-titled album on both Cochon Records and Contaminated, which had a small pressing of hand-decorated LPs. Good luck tracking those down! The two first worked together as members of Lost Sounds and based on the chronology of that group I get the sense that the Nervous Patterns material was recorded around the same time (early 2000s) that Lost Sounds was still active. According to Discogs, the material for the Nervous Patterns album was recorded at Trout’s home studio, the Tronic Graveyard. Before Lost Sounds formed, Trout was a member of the group The Clears, which has a cool blend of the aggressive pop-punk vocals with synths, which is a pretty good combination at least to my ears. Trout has also released a few singles under the alias Alicja-Pop, the most recent coming in 2011. Sadly, Reatard passed away in 2010, but lucky for us he was active enough in the Memphis scene that new great projects of his keep surfacing.
More Eaze is a performance alias of Marcus Rubio (not to be confused with the walking kernel panic currently running for president) that focuses on fusing dissimilar genres unified through tonal similarities. It’s a really fascinating project, and while I typically only pick one track a day I’ve added the whole release because he synthesizes so many disparate things so effectively that it’d be a shame to leave any out. Blending long synth drones with fingerpicking guitar and chopped and screwed sampling, he manages to blend a lot of things I really like but never thought could be put together. fine. was released on cassette by Full Spectrum records at the end of last year. While he’s released a few cassettes under the name More Eaze, Rubio also records under his own name and performed with {{{Sunset}}}, a group who may or may not be active considering their last release came in 2010.
Oren Ambarchi began playing jazz in his native Australia in the mid-1980s as a percussionist, active in the free jazz scene in Sydney. At a session he began messing around with a guitar and from then on it has become a staple in his solo releases and live performances. He described his relationship with the instrument in an interview with Australia Adlib:
I picked it up and starting hitting it with drumsticks and using it in whatever way I wanted to use it in, and one thing led to another. I’m glad I wasn’t trained. I’ve always loved rock music, I grew up listening to pop and rock, so that was in my mind, but I’ve also been interested in electronics. I never wanted to learn to play it properly, it was an object as much as an instrument.
The drive to integrate other electronics with his guitar works and an overall interest in experimentation can be heard on one of his early releases from 1999, Insulation. A shared interest in improvisation and experimentally-driven approaches to composition has led to collaborations with many notable experimental artists like Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O’Rourke, and the drone doom duo Sunn O))).
He has collaborated with Sunn O))) on a number of occasions beginning with Black One in 2005. The story goes that Stephen O’Malley was DJing in New York and played Ambarchi’s track Corkscrew and it set off the fire alarm at the venue, prompting O’Malley to reach out and insist on a collaboration. Ambarchi described the artistic relationship between himself, O’Malley, and Greg Anderson–the other half of Sunn O)))–in an interview with Wire magazine:
It’s great being able to work with Stephen and Greg and in some ways doing exactly what I would do in a solo context. However with Sunn O))) I get to do it in a completely different context, to a different audience, and using a much bigger backline. Since I’ve been working with them my solo work has become much slower, lower in the frequency spectrum and much more physical, especially when I perform live. Since I began working with Sunn O))) I’ve learnt a lot about sound pressure, resonance and feedback and how pleasurable it can be to bathe in physical soundwaves.
In the lead up to recording their 1970 release Hooteroll?, Garcia and Wales had a standing gig playing Monday nights at The Matrix in San Francisco. This track is a live recording of one of those sessions released on Grateful Dead Records in 1998 under the title Live Side Trips Vol. 1 featuring Bill Vitt on drums and long-time Garcia collaborator John Kahn on bass. Around that same time, Wales would sit in on organ for the Dead’s sessions for American Beauty. Kahn, Vitt, and Garcia would also joined with Merl Saunders on organ for a number of releases, including this cover of “I Second That Emotion”. An active studio musician, Wales appeared on the soundtrack to Alexandro Jodorowsky’s surreal masterpiece El Topo in addition to live performances with Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Wales released one album of his own, 1976’s Rendezvous With the Sun. You can find a complete list of his credits on his website. You can also find this amazing picture of him flying an airplane organ:
I’ve focused more on Wales because he’s less known than Garcia and with Jerry I wouldn’t even know where to start. I can say that I’ve really been digging his playing on China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider on 12-6-73 in Cleveland lately, but honestly I’ve yet to hear a version of that I haven’t liked.
Gimmer Nicholson had been poking around the Memphis blues/folk scene for a number of years before moving to San Francisco in the mid-1960s. He recorded a few demos on a crude reel-to-reel deck and sent them to his brother, who brought the tapes in a brown paper bag to Terry Manning back in Memphis. When Nicholson returned from the Bay Area, he went into the studio with Terry-the same studio where Big Star would later record-and they began combining Nicholson’s acoustic playing with electronic delays.
In a forum post about this release at ProsoundWeb, Manning described the recording process
I recorded on an 8 track 1″ Scully at 30 ips. Although most of the guitar is acoustic, there is actually some electric also. Gimmer had a Gibson Howard Roberts, a beautiful jazz guitar that is almost an acoustic (I liked it so much that I bought one a few years later, but I stupidly sold it when I moved here to Nassau in ’92). He played that through a Fender Bassman blackface amp, through some kind of guitar delay/repeat box I had, which had just come out. Gimmer was euphoric about the delay, and loved to set it very long, then play a phrase, and when it repeated, he would play live a copasetic second phrase, then do the same for the next bar, playing with the second phrase, and so on (sort of like a “round”). When we did the acoustics, I got the longest tape delay that I could to accomplish this. It had to be carefully timed to the tempo of the composition. EMT 140 plate reverb was also used.
With recording finished, Manning began the mastering process only after providing a rough mix for Nicholson to take home. This proved disastrous, as Nicholson was outraged when he heard this new, cleaned up mix and left Memphis in a huff. The album gathered dust and Manning moved on, but not before the sounds of the album would infuse other artists in that milieu, most notably Chris Bell. Manning released the album, titled Christopher Idylls on CD in 1994 on his own imprint, Lucky Seven Records, the first time the songs got any wider audience. However, the good folks over at Light in the Attic Records have recently announced a new vinyl reissue of Christopher Idylls that is available for pre-order and set to ship later this month. Gimmer Nicholson passed away a few years ago after years of working for the Red Cross, according to Manning. He had contacted him regarding some new compositions, but nothing materialized. It appears this beautiful release will have to suffice.
The Trees Community was a communal musical project based out of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. The group were a religious order of sorts in that community, splitting their time between performing music, giving tours of the church, among other duties. A key feature of their work was the use of an array of instruments from around the world including the sitar, tamboura, and Venezuelan harp accompanying complicated vocal arrangements.
According to their website they began meeting in an abandoned loft in New York’s East Village to share meals and discuss all manner of spiritual matters, eventually incorporating music into their spiritual practice. When the building was set to be demolished, they–in true hippie fashion–purchased a bus and began living communally within and performing across the country. A member of the group has written a book documenting their experiences that you can read here. A few years after leaving NYC, they recorded an album called The Christ Tree, which was the only official release that the group ever put out. In 2006, Hand/Eye released The Christ Tree on CD for the first time. This box set contained all extant material recorded by the group, including live performances and a cassette released by the group called Portrait of Jesus Christ in Music. It looks like Discogs is your best bet to track down the release, although digital files can be found on CDBaby if that’s your bag.
Orion's Bastard 