Great news for Joy Division fans. Peter Hook is touring Australia performing his original band's protean debut album Unknown Pleasures (see press release below). Many people still associate Joy Division primarily with their hit single, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', a song that has become a pop standard approaching the exalted status of The Beatles or Frank Sinatra's greatest ballads, but their other work is of equal cultural significance. Their albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer are two of the crowning glories of the English post-punk scene and what 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' is to the realm of pop music, 'Disorder' and 'Twenty Four Hours' are to rock - simultaneously archetypal and transcendent.
Inspired to form by a 1976 Sex Pistols gig in their native Manchester, Joy Division's sound was initially steeped in British and American punk and its antecedents (Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Pere Ubu, the noirish side of David Bowie, some of Hawkwind's sci-fi menace and Lemmy's driving basslines, a little of Black Sabbath's Ur-doom/black metal power atmospherics). The group and their producer Martin Hannett also drew inspiration from Northern Soul, dub reggae and the European avant-garde. Hannett's celebrated work is often compared to and seen as the next evolutionary stage of Phil Spector's wall of sound technique, but there are also links to the innovative genius of Lee Perry and Krautrock's finest producers. The luminous spatiality Conny Plank gave to some of the major releases by Neu!, Kraftwerk and Guru Guru is key, as is the psychoacoustic vorticality of Holger Czukay's mixes on the classic early Can albums. Joy Division's single 'Transmission' presents a sublime hybrid of the Spector and Czukay production sensibilities. The Gothic reverbscapes through which Dieter Dierks irradiated the sounds of early Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Walter Wegmueller and the Cosmic Jokers suggest at times a similarly psychogeographic sonic evocation of Cologne as Hannett, according to contemporary residents and critics like Paul Morley, created for Manchester in Unknown Pleasures (see Grant Gee's fine 2006 documentary).
Hannett's sonic alchemy served to illuminate the shadows cast by Joy Division's songs, Cyclopean structures of deceptive simplicity. Isolate Peter Hook's bass and Bernard Sumner's guitar lines in 'Disorder' and there doesn't seem to be anything more basic and straightforward. Put them together with the bleak impetus of Stephen Morris' drums and they pierce the affective core of your psyche in a way comparable to Miles Davis at his most incisive. The essence of Joy Division's genius was not any typical musical definition of sophistication, virtuosity or formalist innovation, but rather an emotional intelligence; a musical channelling of emotion minus the obstruction of any extraneous filigree.
Coupled with Ian Curtis' lyrics, this is music that penetrates some strange region of the subconscious where despair and hope seem to intermingle. Consider the lyrics of 'Disorder': just what is the "spirit, new sensation" Curtis keeps referring to? Given the context of the music and the soundscape in which it is enclosed, it could represent a symptom of malaise, the harbinger of imminent and complete societal collapse, or a genuine spiritual renewal. And perhaps it is both. Curtis' main literary influences were J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs, initially as filtered through David Bowie's fascination with the cut-up method and apocalypticism as psychological lens. The truest parallel may well be with Peter Hammill, another strange and visionary British songwriter, also an influence on Bowie, who combines science fiction dystopianism, surreal, cinematic imagery and urgent inquiry into the soul's more alluring and treacherous geometry.
I'm usually not a big believer in musicians reviving past glories - they're too often a recipe for embarrassment or boredom. But in this case, the body of work is too significant to ignore. As led by one of the finest bass guitarists to emerge from the punk scene, these concerts should be essential for long term fans as well as those who appreciate the experimental edges of contemporary acts like Radiohead, Arcade Fire and The Horrors.
RED ANT TOURING AND MAX PROUDLY PRESENTS
UNKNOWN PLEASURES
A JOY DIVISION CELEBRATION WITH PETER HOOK AND FRIENDS - ADELAIDE AND PERTH SHOWS ADDED
Due to overwhelming demand, two more dates have been added to the Unknown Pleasures: A Joy Division Celebration with Peter Hook and Friends Australian tour this September.
Tuesday September 28. Her Majesty's Theatre. Adelaide.
&
Thursday September 30. Astor theatre. Perth.
Tickets for the new shows go on sale next Friday August 13 through Red Ant Touring and Ticketek.
Tickets for the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane shows are selling fast.
Australian Tour September 2010
Proudly Supported by MAX
Friday September 24. Melbourne. Palais Theatre
Proudly supported by Triple R
Tickets from Ticketmaster.com.au
ON SALE NOW
Saturday September 25. Sydney. Enmore Theatre
Tickets from redanttouring.com and Ticketek 132 849 or Ticketek.com.au
ON SALE NOW
Monday September 27. Brisbane. Tivoli Theatre
Tickets from redanttouring.com and Ticketek 132 849 or Ticketek.com.au
ON SALE NOW
Tuesday September 28. Adelaide. Her Majesty's Theatre Tickets from redanttouring.com and Ticketek 132 849 or Ticketek.com.au
ON SALE FRIDAY AUGUST 13
Thursday September 30. Perth. Astor theatre
Tickets from redanttouring.com and Ticketek 132 849 or Ticketek.com.au
ON SALE FRIDAY AUGUST 13
To commemorate the 30th Anniversary of Joy Divisions’ seminal debut album
Unknown Pleasures, founding member Peter Hook and Friends will perform the album in its entirety in Australia for the first time. The epic show will include live performances of all of the songs from the album including She’s Lost Control, New Dawn Fades and Disorder. Audiences will also be treated to performances of other early Joy Division tracks, as well as the classic non-album singles Transmission and Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
DENNIS HOPPER TRIBUTE
Before Dennis Hopper's appearance in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, Chef, the patrol boat crew member played by Frederick Forrest, receives a letter from the US with a newspaper clipping about Charles Manson. It's a great example of movie foreshadowing because when the crew finally arrive at Colonel Kurtz's Cambodian compound, Hopper's character of The Photojournalist, in a barbed symbolic sense, embodies some of the qualities of Manson, both in appearance and in rambling discourse. As the film's sole representative of the hippie movement back home that opposes the war, The Photojournalist evokes some of the walking libertarian/fascist contradiction of the acid guru mass murderer from Ohio (the home state of Captain Willard, the film's assassin protagonist played by Martin Sheen). However much he rails in disgust over the US administration's blatant lies in justifying its pursuit of the war (as seen in one of the deleted scenes available in the limited three disc special edition DVD), there's no doubting how much Hopper's character admires the "poet-warrior" renegade Kurtz's single-minded and ruthless approach to achieving the same end ("He can be terrible. He can be mean. And he can be right... There's only love and hate. You either love someone or you hate them").
Then Marlon Brando's Kurtz throws a book at him in a moment of pique and he scuttles off in a childish huff as though removing himself from a party scene turned bummer trip ("And with a whimper, I'm splittin', Jack"). Hopper's appearance as court jester brings an apposite absurdism to the film's journey towards the psychopathic godlike figure of Kurtz as national Id run riot.
The laser beam glare of Hopper's pale blue eyes often seemed to be oscillating between poles of feverish fanaticism and a capricious moral vacuity, nowhere more so than in the role of The Photojournalist. Peter Fonda apparently described Hopper as a "little fascist freak" during the making of Easy Rider. In both his fictional and real-life personas, Hopper represents all the nervous energy, the social/cultural dissatisfaction and the quest for freedom and self-determination that fuelled the sixties counterculture, but also all the contradictory, self-destructive elements that doomed the hippie movement's half-formed utopian desires to failure. It's good intentions had great outcomes like ending a needless and wastefully destructive war, as well as advancing the causes of various civil rights agendas; it's libidinal outpouring spiralled into a druggy, occult twilight and the sociopathic nightmares of the Manson Family and Altamont. It wasn't Hopper's role as actor/character creator to resolve these contradictions, but to embody them. Likewise, Coppola's role in making the film, contrary to popular opinion, was not to create an anti-war statement, rather a meditation on power as a universal condition; a cinematic embodiment of a dialectical conflict between freedom and power within a collective unconscious, precipitating the American war's prosecution and producing the seeds for the eventual withdrawal.
It is typical of Hopper's bravery that he often chose characters that were not immediately appealing or outright unappealing and made them his own; he made them, if not always sympathetic, then definitely compelling and believable. His style was a refinement and sublimation of Method technique that was comparable to Brando at his best and certainly represented an advancement on his personal hero James Dean. The character of Billy in Easy Rider is probably one of the least likeable in that film, but Hopper's performance is never less than engaging. Whereas Captain America (Peter Fonda) clings to a kind of cannabis-clouded idealism, Billy has no real objectives following the pair's drug deal other than the pursuit of a shallow hedonism: you sense that of the two characters, Hopper's has that mindset closest to the delusional short termism of the true criminal. The actor further penetrated and also poignantly humanised the criminal psyche for his performance in the titular role in Philippe Mora's Mad Dog Morgan (1976), one of the great films from Australia's cinematic revival of the 1970s. On recent viewing, this period movie about the famous Irish outlaw and Australian folk legend is still an impressive achievement, juxtaposing stark depictions of human brutality with extraordinary visual lyricism - an aesthetic unrivalled in Australian cinema until the arrival of John Hillcoat's The Proposition (2005) and Jonathan auf der Heide's Van Diemen's Land (2009).
You wonder how much of his own personal demons Hopper exorcised through the character of Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Did directors choose him for these kinds of roles because of his reputation as hell raiser and drug-fuelled trainwreck and therefore the best man for the part? Did Hopper seek them out because he saw aspects of himself reflected in screenplays that represented not only paying gigs but opportunities for psychic purgation? Then again, it would be disrespectful to the departed to indulge too much in psychological speculation - certainly, the calm, measured, likable persona in later interviews suggested someone who had found some degree of peace with himself and the outside world.
In addition to his acting talent, there's no doubting the scale of Hopper's contribution as filmmaker to American culture. Easy Rider, of course, was the film that helped kickstart the New Hollywood, America's great cinematic renaissance whose apotheosis was Apocalypse Now, the film that, appropriately enough, marked his return from the wilderness. Then there's The Last Movie, the 1971 epic, still sadly unavailable on DVD, whose commercial failure precipitated his banishment to that wilderness, but whose reputation continues to be elevated over the years into a cult sphere inhabitated only by the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Samuel Fuller.
Hopper died aged 74 on Saturday, May 29, 2010 - by any standard, a unique talent who will be sorely missed.
BY JONATHON KROMKA(C) 2010. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Then Marlon Brando's Kurtz throws a book at him in a moment of pique and he scuttles off in a childish huff as though removing himself from a party scene turned bummer trip ("And with a whimper, I'm splittin', Jack"). Hopper's appearance as court jester brings an apposite absurdism to the film's journey towards the psychopathic godlike figure of Kurtz as national Id run riot.
The laser beam glare of Hopper's pale blue eyes often seemed to be oscillating between poles of feverish fanaticism and a capricious moral vacuity, nowhere more so than in the role of The Photojournalist. Peter Fonda apparently described Hopper as a "little fascist freak" during the making of Easy Rider. In both his fictional and real-life personas, Hopper represents all the nervous energy, the social/cultural dissatisfaction and the quest for freedom and self-determination that fuelled the sixties counterculture, but also all the contradictory, self-destructive elements that doomed the hippie movement's half-formed utopian desires to failure. It's good intentions had great outcomes like ending a needless and wastefully destructive war, as well as advancing the causes of various civil rights agendas; it's libidinal outpouring spiralled into a druggy, occult twilight and the sociopathic nightmares of the Manson Family and Altamont. It wasn't Hopper's role as actor/character creator to resolve these contradictions, but to embody them. Likewise, Coppola's role in making the film, contrary to popular opinion, was not to create an anti-war statement, rather a meditation on power as a universal condition; a cinematic embodiment of a dialectical conflict between freedom and power within a collective unconscious, precipitating the American war's prosecution and producing the seeds for the eventual withdrawal.
It is typical of Hopper's bravery that he often chose characters that were not immediately appealing or outright unappealing and made them his own; he made them, if not always sympathetic, then definitely compelling and believable. His style was a refinement and sublimation of Method technique that was comparable to Brando at his best and certainly represented an advancement on his personal hero James Dean. The character of Billy in Easy Rider is probably one of the least likeable in that film, but Hopper's performance is never less than engaging. Whereas Captain America (Peter Fonda) clings to a kind of cannabis-clouded idealism, Billy has no real objectives following the pair's drug deal other than the pursuit of a shallow hedonism: you sense that of the two characters, Hopper's has that mindset closest to the delusional short termism of the true criminal. The actor further penetrated and also poignantly humanised the criminal psyche for his performance in the titular role in Philippe Mora's Mad Dog Morgan (1976), one of the great films from Australia's cinematic revival of the 1970s. On recent viewing, this period movie about the famous Irish outlaw and Australian folk legend is still an impressive achievement, juxtaposing stark depictions of human brutality with extraordinary visual lyricism - an aesthetic unrivalled in Australian cinema until the arrival of John Hillcoat's The Proposition (2005) and Jonathan auf der Heide's Van Diemen's Land (2009).
You wonder how much of his own personal demons Hopper exorcised through the character of Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Did directors choose him for these kinds of roles because of his reputation as hell raiser and drug-fuelled trainwreck and therefore the best man for the part? Did Hopper seek them out because he saw aspects of himself reflected in screenplays that represented not only paying gigs but opportunities for psychic purgation? Then again, it would be disrespectful to the departed to indulge too much in psychological speculation - certainly, the calm, measured, likable persona in later interviews suggested someone who had found some degree of peace with himself and the outside world.
In addition to his acting talent, there's no doubting the scale of Hopper's contribution as filmmaker to American culture. Easy Rider, of course, was the film that helped kickstart the New Hollywood, America's great cinematic renaissance whose apotheosis was Apocalypse Now, the film that, appropriately enough, marked his return from the wilderness. Then there's The Last Movie, the 1971 epic, still sadly unavailable on DVD, whose commercial failure precipitated his banishment to that wilderness, but whose reputation continues to be elevated over the years into a cult sphere inhabitated only by the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Samuel Fuller.
Hopper died aged 74 on Saturday, May 29, 2010 - by any standard, a unique talent who will be sorely missed.
BY JONATHON KROMKA(C) 2010. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Recommended video - 'Rush to Relax' by Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Just had to discuss a great video by Melbourne band Eddy Current Suppression Ring called 'Rush to Relax'. Musically, this is balls out garage rock in that thrillingly scrappy and primal Saints/The Fall/Captain Beefheart-inspired tradition that flows amongst the finer practitioners within the post-punk revival, combined with a Devo/The Monks edginess in band presentation (mongoloid dance styles, bathrobes and face masks conveying a kind of blank, Nixon-era domesticated alienation). Good enough in itself. But the inspiring simplicity of the video and the sheer audacity of the extended song coda/movie epilogue that comprises its second half is something else unique and admirable in light of the thrill-a-millisecond/ADHD-oriented approach prevalent in the music video field. It shifts the standard low-budget pop clip into a abstract and timeless zone closer to world art cinema; i.e. the 'pillow shots' of Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni's use of cinematic space and extended shots of deserted urban/semi-rural/industrial environments to convey alienation (The Eclipse, The Red Desert) or the nature meditations of Werner Herzog's early black and white films and documentaries (Signs of Life). This is not to suggest it's overly arty, though - the Super 8 home video approach of filmmakers Chris Middlebrook, Johann Rashid and John Huntley is far too humorous and down-to-earth for that, yet beautifully surreal and atmospheric all the same. Just a first class effort and inspiring to think of the sort of work being done in our own backyard geographically speaking.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Stutter Episode Three: ROBBIE AVENAIM
Vile Vortices Productions' third episode of STUTTER features esteemed percussionist, electroacoustic artist and What is Music? festival curator Robbie Avenaim. This video captures highlights from a performance at Horse Bazaar from 1st July 2009 featuring some of Avenaim's inventions. Drawing on some of the oneiric moods of his latest release Rhythmic Movement Disorder, this extended improvisation is an aural feast of meditative sine tones, aleatoric automata, vibraphonic agitations, Cagean theatrics and some stunningly executed solo statements.
Third Maximum Arousal clip - AUS/COKIYU/CUUSHE
Our third clip for Maximum Arousal features Japanese pop electronica artists Aus, Cokiyu, Cuushe and Yugi Tanaka performing at The Toff on their first Australian tour. The song is 'Vertigo', a haunting variety of dream pop written by Aus. Reminiscent of Bjork and the Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti collaboration for Twin Peaks, Cokiyu's beautiful torch rendition floats on the twin currents of ambient laptop glitch and Tanaka's tight, funky drumming. Filmed 15th, September, 2009.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Live Reviews
Here are some reviews I wrote about Maximum Arousal shows in late 2007, early 2008 with publications/sites like The Wire, Signal to Noise and The Sound Projector in mind. The Mani Neumeier piece found a place on the Guru Guru site - thanks Mani. Just in case anyone who reads this is interested in publishing the pieces or using them in some other way, get in touch with me - jdkromka@yahoo.com.au
MANI NEUMEIER
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE, SUNDAY 30TH DECEMBER 2007
Legendary German drummer Mani Neumeier’s first Australian concert was organized under the aegis of Melbournian guitarist/sound artist Oren Ambarchi who has chosen Brendan Walls (second guitar) and Edmondo Ammendola (bass) to play behind the Guru Guru leader. The Toff show is divided into three parts: a dual percussion and voice set between Neumeier and his wife Etsuko Watanabe, a drum solo, and a band improv session with Ambarchi, Walls and Ammendola. Watanabe brings her own intriguing musical pedigree to the venture, being a former member of 70s Japanese psych free folk collective Maru Sankaku Shikaku.
Sprightly and slight sexagenarians, Neumeier and Watanabe introduce themselves to their audience with a shy friendliness. They perform their percussion set as though it were a ritualistic blessing for the whole gig, sitting cross-legged and opening with a simple, affecting form of Oriental plainchant before tapping out busy cross-rhythms on coral shells. There is a lot of reaching across into each other’s performance space, a practice accentuated when they switch to small hand drums, their arms arcing through the air like taiko players restricted to tiny instruments. The joyous incantatory intimacy on display suggests Neumeier has finally found in his partner the ‘Woman Drum’ he first eulogized on Guru Guru’s eponymous fourth album in 1973.
Neumeier then moves behind his drum kit for an extended polyrhythmic exploration. His formative influences as a free jazz drummer in the 1960s with the Irene Schweizer Trio and Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra are discernable within the rock energy on display. The exquisite dynamic control in the execution of complex kit-spanning cyclical patterns at low volumes brings to mind Chico Hamilton while the exuberant forte attack and sensitivity to the harmonic and tonal qualities of tom toms is comparable to Max Roach.
If his famous krautrock power trio comes to mind when Ambarchi and co enter the stage, then the version that plays tonight is a Guru Guru for the noise/sound art generation. The cosmic psychobilly anthems and ur-stoner rock of yore have been abstracted via the alchemical reductionism of the Ambarchi/Walls/Ammendola guitar axis into a burnished sonic alloy equal parts Big Black’s ominous amp hum afterglow, the La Monte Young- avant metal drone connection and the concentrated force of Keiji Haino’s mystical psych rock emanations. Such parallels, however, can only give some slight pointers for identifying a unique sound.
Ambarchi and Walls share the same open tuning through which they fabricate reverbed laminae of sympathetic resonance encrusted with distortion, ring modulation and wah-wah to form a buzzing, raga-less tamboura drone. Ammendola’s bass is an amorphous, subliminal rumble of low tones. This ambient setting provides Neumeier with a substantial amount of musical space in which to operate – a different working situation to Acid Mothers Guru Guru in which the energy of his own playing is often matched by the spiraling banshee scree of Makoto Kawabata’s teeming guitar lines. He goes with the freedom cautiously at first, employing a variety of rattles, cymbals and small gongs to add textural counterweight to the electrical pressure systems swirling around him.
Before long he’s in full swing, deciding perhaps that attack is the best form of defence, or playing the Electric Miles wise old captain role - providing guidance through sheer musical authority to the wild avant garde youngsters. There is one truly thrilling passage in this group’s extended set redolent of those moments of almost psychic genius scattered like jewels throughout kosmiche history: a huge collective increase in volume and intensity from out of nowhere engulfs the room like an uberklang tsunami.
Eventually Ambarchi decides he’s done with the texturist role and steps forward for a psych rock solo redolent of his hero Keiji Haino, but also the malefic microtonality of White Light, White Heat-era Lou Reed or, most fittingly in the context, the stratospheric screams of Ax Genrich. As though in recognition of the spirit of an old colleague, Neumeier throws some rockabilly rebel yells into his microphone, at last conjuring the Guru Guru of old.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
HI GOD PEOPLE, ZOND, MUTUAL LOATHING, KYNAN LAWLER
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE, SUNDAY 13TH JAN 2008
This split 12” launch by Melbourne groups Hi God People and Zond occurs under the aegis of Maximum Arousal, a weekly program of experimental musical events curated by Oren Ambarchi. As with any such platform, the acts provoke a range of responses from divertissement to epiphany.
Kynan Lawler generates clusters of microrhythms with a contact-miked cymbal, a laptop’s low drone and amplifier vibrations. Electroacoustic improv practice like this has been going on since Stockhausen’s Microphonie I: a more labyrinthine signal processing chain might have given the act greater impact. Mutual Loathing (AKA Michael Lenin) has an intriguing take on the drum solo as neurotic performance art; slithery extended technique gives way to whimpers, defiant whoops and thuds as Lenin ensconces himself within the kick drum.
The Hi God People transmit a more polished interface between humour and raw methodologies. This indeterminate collective of Melbourne musicians have been mining since the late 1990s a seam of surreal prehistoric improv laced with space rock that has parallels with New Weird America. Their stage presentation mixes the anonymous Dada semiotics of The Residents, the cargo cult costumery of Sun City Girls and the space ritual of Sun Ra. The intergender ensemble assembled for this performance is hived off into separate vocal groups: Situationist slogan chants are mixed with atonal wailing as though three barbershop quartets were all performing their own versions of Stimmung. The introduction of ecstatic drumming propels the vocals into a kind of hyperventilating voodoo doo-wop, the lines “come out of the ocean like a prehistoric birth” interspersed with shrieking harmonicas and orgasmic sighs somewhere between Yoko Ono and Kate Pierson in tone. On the plateau of a sustained crescendo, the slogans mutate into animalistic sounds: dogs bark, apes jabber, birds scream.
Sound rock act Zond begin playing over Hi God People’s eerie wordless intonations as they drift into the audience in a trail of kiddies’ fluorescent tubes, toilet paper and eucalyptus branches. Like an Australian version of Sonic Youth, this one girl/three guy rock group lays down shimmering feedback overtones that gradually coalesce into punkish songs. Bass lines reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag’ throb underneath ‘Interstellar Overdrive’/MBV-shaded descending chord detonations. In a pummeling onslaught of feedback Zond comes to resemble a time-traveling Jesus and Mary Chain with its roots more in Bardo Pond or Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ than 60s surf pop. Eventually even this distinction is lost in a white out interlaced with undulating pitch shift sweeps and rotor blade delay rhythms.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CHRIS CORSANO, PSYCHEDELIC DESERT, DUKE MISERABLES
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE
The first support act for Chris Corsano’s solo percussion set seems to have been chosen to provide variety rather than to form part of a strictly complementary programme. Duke Miserables is the bedroom acid-folk project of Romy Hoffman, leader of hiphop outfit Macromantics. Her delicate minor-key tunes for acoustic guitar and delay accumulation weave a weblike canon effect that at times recalls Solid Air-era John Martyn's space folk approach, Popol Vuh pastoralism or the multi-tracked mandolin counterpoint of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Battle of Evermore’. Despite an unfortunate tendency towards standard two-chord angst when Hoffman turns off the sampler, there‘s an appealing Joanna Newsom-like whimsy in her modal nursery rhymes: ‘keep your head down/gargle with the salt water/that you evolved from’.
The Japanese laptop duo Psychedelic Desert live up to their name with vast, echo-saturated expanses of sound: mountainous drone oscillations peak on the verge of feedback and temple bells drift through phase envelope valleys. Eerie, embryonic melodies rise above the droning miasma; deep moaning plainchant (live), flute tones and disjunctive percussion shards in a similar vein to the Fourth World ambient passages of their Pharmafabrik release Keshiki. The echo vortices of this set reach a crescendo of disembodied choral harmonies striated with atonal tension.
Psychedelic Desert’s sustained intensity provides an appropriate entry point to Corsano’s mind-boggling solo percussion set, a tour de force of polyrhythmic/sonic invention. Studying his playing outside of collaborations with the likes of Paul Flaherty, Evan Parker and Vampire Belt or the miniatures of The Young Cricketer is a most revelatory entertainment. The trademark perpetual motion is on display: incessantly evolving Sunny Murray/Rashied Ali-style rolls broken up with gamelan-toned bell strokes form a turbulent undercurrent for extreme feedback overtones. With the introduction of metapercussive elements it’s obvious there’s something more substantial going on here than a talented musician throwing in some weird gizmos to spice up a drum solo. A genuine, if sometimes humorous, compositional sense is at play, whether he’s summoning Ayler-like high pitched multiphonics/didgeridoo drones from a plastic tube, alloy song from bowed cymbal in the manner of Neu!’s ‘Sonderangebot’ or double bowing the snare’s shell to produce wailing glissandi that suggest microtonal vaguely Korean bluegrass harmonies emanating from a Harry Partch viola adaptation.
More than just one of the most exciting drummers of his generation, he’s a Stomu Yamashta for the noise generation - a percussionist/composer in the process of developing a unique language.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
MANI NEUMEIER
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE, SUNDAY 30TH DECEMBER 2007
Legendary German drummer Mani Neumeier’s first Australian concert was organized under the aegis of Melbournian guitarist/sound artist Oren Ambarchi who has chosen Brendan Walls (second guitar) and Edmondo Ammendola (bass) to play behind the Guru Guru leader. The Toff show is divided into three parts: a dual percussion and voice set between Neumeier and his wife Etsuko Watanabe, a drum solo, and a band improv session with Ambarchi, Walls and Ammendola. Watanabe brings her own intriguing musical pedigree to the venture, being a former member of 70s Japanese psych free folk collective Maru Sankaku Shikaku.
Sprightly and slight sexagenarians, Neumeier and Watanabe introduce themselves to their audience with a shy friendliness. They perform their percussion set as though it were a ritualistic blessing for the whole gig, sitting cross-legged and opening with a simple, affecting form of Oriental plainchant before tapping out busy cross-rhythms on coral shells. There is a lot of reaching across into each other’s performance space, a practice accentuated when they switch to small hand drums, their arms arcing through the air like taiko players restricted to tiny instruments. The joyous incantatory intimacy on display suggests Neumeier has finally found in his partner the ‘Woman Drum’ he first eulogized on Guru Guru’s eponymous fourth album in 1973.
Neumeier then moves behind his drum kit for an extended polyrhythmic exploration. His formative influences as a free jazz drummer in the 1960s with the Irene Schweizer Trio and Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra are discernable within the rock energy on display. The exquisite dynamic control in the execution of complex kit-spanning cyclical patterns at low volumes brings to mind Chico Hamilton while the exuberant forte attack and sensitivity to the harmonic and tonal qualities of tom toms is comparable to Max Roach.
If his famous krautrock power trio comes to mind when Ambarchi and co enter the stage, then the version that plays tonight is a Guru Guru for the noise/sound art generation. The cosmic psychobilly anthems and ur-stoner rock of yore have been abstracted via the alchemical reductionism of the Ambarchi/Walls/Ammendola guitar axis into a burnished sonic alloy equal parts Big Black’s ominous amp hum afterglow, the La Monte Young- avant metal drone connection and the concentrated force of Keiji Haino’s mystical psych rock emanations. Such parallels, however, can only give some slight pointers for identifying a unique sound.
Ambarchi and Walls share the same open tuning through which they fabricate reverbed laminae of sympathetic resonance encrusted with distortion, ring modulation and wah-wah to form a buzzing, raga-less tamboura drone. Ammendola’s bass is an amorphous, subliminal rumble of low tones. This ambient setting provides Neumeier with a substantial amount of musical space in which to operate – a different working situation to Acid Mothers Guru Guru in which the energy of his own playing is often matched by the spiraling banshee scree of Makoto Kawabata’s teeming guitar lines. He goes with the freedom cautiously at first, employing a variety of rattles, cymbals and small gongs to add textural counterweight to the electrical pressure systems swirling around him.
Before long he’s in full swing, deciding perhaps that attack is the best form of defence, or playing the Electric Miles wise old captain role - providing guidance through sheer musical authority to the wild avant garde youngsters. There is one truly thrilling passage in this group’s extended set redolent of those moments of almost psychic genius scattered like jewels throughout kosmiche history: a huge collective increase in volume and intensity from out of nowhere engulfs the room like an uberklang tsunami.
Eventually Ambarchi decides he’s done with the texturist role and steps forward for a psych rock solo redolent of his hero Keiji Haino, but also the malefic microtonality of White Light, White Heat-era Lou Reed or, most fittingly in the context, the stratospheric screams of Ax Genrich. As though in recognition of the spirit of an old colleague, Neumeier throws some rockabilly rebel yells into his microphone, at last conjuring the Guru Guru of old.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
HI GOD PEOPLE, ZOND, MUTUAL LOATHING, KYNAN LAWLER
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE, SUNDAY 13TH JAN 2008
This split 12” launch by Melbourne groups Hi God People and Zond occurs under the aegis of Maximum Arousal, a weekly program of experimental musical events curated by Oren Ambarchi. As with any such platform, the acts provoke a range of responses from divertissement to epiphany.
Kynan Lawler generates clusters of microrhythms with a contact-miked cymbal, a laptop’s low drone and amplifier vibrations. Electroacoustic improv practice like this has been going on since Stockhausen’s Microphonie I: a more labyrinthine signal processing chain might have given the act greater impact. Mutual Loathing (AKA Michael Lenin) has an intriguing take on the drum solo as neurotic performance art; slithery extended technique gives way to whimpers, defiant whoops and thuds as Lenin ensconces himself within the kick drum.
The Hi God People transmit a more polished interface between humour and raw methodologies. This indeterminate collective of Melbourne musicians have been mining since the late 1990s a seam of surreal prehistoric improv laced with space rock that has parallels with New Weird America. Their stage presentation mixes the anonymous Dada semiotics of The Residents, the cargo cult costumery of Sun City Girls and the space ritual of Sun Ra. The intergender ensemble assembled for this performance is hived off into separate vocal groups: Situationist slogan chants are mixed with atonal wailing as though three barbershop quartets were all performing their own versions of Stimmung. The introduction of ecstatic drumming propels the vocals into a kind of hyperventilating voodoo doo-wop, the lines “come out of the ocean like a prehistoric birth” interspersed with shrieking harmonicas and orgasmic sighs somewhere between Yoko Ono and Kate Pierson in tone. On the plateau of a sustained crescendo, the slogans mutate into animalistic sounds: dogs bark, apes jabber, birds scream.
Sound rock act Zond begin playing over Hi God People’s eerie wordless intonations as they drift into the audience in a trail of kiddies’ fluorescent tubes, toilet paper and eucalyptus branches. Like an Australian version of Sonic Youth, this one girl/three guy rock group lays down shimmering feedback overtones that gradually coalesce into punkish songs. Bass lines reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag’ throb underneath ‘Interstellar Overdrive’/MBV-shaded descending chord detonations. In a pummeling onslaught of feedback Zond comes to resemble a time-traveling Jesus and Mary Chain with its roots more in Bardo Pond or Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ than 60s surf pop. Eventually even this distinction is lost in a white out interlaced with undulating pitch shift sweeps and rotor blade delay rhythms.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CHRIS CORSANO, PSYCHEDELIC DESERT, DUKE MISERABLES
THE TOFF, MELBOURNE
The first support act for Chris Corsano’s solo percussion set seems to have been chosen to provide variety rather than to form part of a strictly complementary programme. Duke Miserables is the bedroom acid-folk project of Romy Hoffman, leader of hiphop outfit Macromantics. Her delicate minor-key tunes for acoustic guitar and delay accumulation weave a weblike canon effect that at times recalls Solid Air-era John Martyn's space folk approach, Popol Vuh pastoralism or the multi-tracked mandolin counterpoint of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Battle of Evermore’. Despite an unfortunate tendency towards standard two-chord angst when Hoffman turns off the sampler, there‘s an appealing Joanna Newsom-like whimsy in her modal nursery rhymes: ‘keep your head down/gargle with the salt water/that you evolved from’.
The Japanese laptop duo Psychedelic Desert live up to their name with vast, echo-saturated expanses of sound: mountainous drone oscillations peak on the verge of feedback and temple bells drift through phase envelope valleys. Eerie, embryonic melodies rise above the droning miasma; deep moaning plainchant (live), flute tones and disjunctive percussion shards in a similar vein to the Fourth World ambient passages of their Pharmafabrik release Keshiki. The echo vortices of this set reach a crescendo of disembodied choral harmonies striated with atonal tension.
Psychedelic Desert’s sustained intensity provides an appropriate entry point to Corsano’s mind-boggling solo percussion set, a tour de force of polyrhythmic/sonic invention. Studying his playing outside of collaborations with the likes of Paul Flaherty, Evan Parker and Vampire Belt or the miniatures of The Young Cricketer is a most revelatory entertainment. The trademark perpetual motion is on display: incessantly evolving Sunny Murray/Rashied Ali-style rolls broken up with gamelan-toned bell strokes form a turbulent undercurrent for extreme feedback overtones. With the introduction of metapercussive elements it’s obvious there’s something more substantial going on here than a talented musician throwing in some weird gizmos to spice up a drum solo. A genuine, if sometimes humorous, compositional sense is at play, whether he’s summoning Ayler-like high pitched multiphonics/didgeridoo drones from a plastic tube, alloy song from bowed cymbal in the manner of Neu!’s ‘Sonderangebot’ or double bowing the snare’s shell to produce wailing glissandi that suggest microtonal vaguely Korean bluegrass harmonies emanating from a Harry Partch viola adaptation.
More than just one of the most exciting drummers of his generation, he’s a Stomu Yamashta for the noise generation - a percussionist/composer in the process of developing a unique language.
BY JONATHON KROMKA© 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Make It Up Club Ep1 - The BAXTER BROWN HENDERSON MAJKOWSKI TARNAWSKY WANDERS Sextet
MAKE IT UP CLUB - Episode #1 features a sample of the 40 minute free form improvisational set by SEAN BAXTER (drumkit), RORY BROWN (double bass), JEFF HENDERSON (baritone saxophone), MIKE MAJKOWSKI (double bass), ANGUS TARNAWSKY (drumkit), & KRIS WANDERS (tenor saxophone). An intense journey. Watch as we try & keep up with the musicians.
An awesome display of Fire Music at its most incandescent, channeling the spirits of Coltrane, Ayler and Brotzmann in full meltdown mode. A fine example of the kind of improvisatory pyrotechnics that regularly emanate from this decade-plus old Melbourne avant-garde institution.
An awesome display of Fire Music at its most incandescent, channeling the spirits of Coltrane, Ayler and Brotzmann in full meltdown mode. A fine example of the kind of improvisatory pyrotechnics that regularly emanate from this decade-plus old Melbourne avant-garde institution.
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