The chaotic cohesion of improvisation - Slocombe's Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience

Many of us – maybe even most of us – like to think there’s a bit of a plan to things: our day, our grocery shopping, our future, our universe. But the reality is that most of these things happen in their own way and, more often than not, all of them surprise us. Things always seem to happen arbitrarily – the person who drops in for a visit without notice; the extra block of chocolate that we accidentally buy; the new job that comes our way went we’re not looking for it, the old friendship that finishes without us noticing it; the star that darts across the sky when we just happen to casually look up.

But what’s amazing is that, with so many big things and so many little things all happening so randomly, it all somehow holds together and, when we stand back from the chaos, it looks as though it might have all been meant to be that way all along, after all.

That’s how you feel when you listen to the music of the Paul Kidney Experience – a multi-coloured Melbourne band who improvises everything they do but whose efforts build themselves into the kind of chaotic cohesion of which only the very best music, like the very best universes, is made.

I have written about the Paul Kidney Experience previously on this blog, but their new album, where they are joined by members of Slocombe’s Pussy, is quite a different beast. Things are not quite as terrifying here and you get the impression, except perhaps for the final track, that it could be safe to listen to Slocombe’s Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience reasonably close to bedtime without risking nightmares.

The music might be less scary this time, but it’s no less weird, no less daring. Still unidentifiable sounds mix with those that are, or have been, familiar; still instruments and voices push themselves in strange directions; still old worlds and new worlds clash and coalesce. And here, just as on Radio Transmissions, the incredible improvisation skills of these musicians take you everywhere other than the places you expect to go.

Things kick off perfectly with ‘Emulsion’ and its sense of unbridled, unrefined celebration – a bunch of primordial freaks waking up, unkempt, unclothed, and dancing the day to life. Nell Day weaves her half-rustic, half-medieval, violin through the pagan pounding of drums, guitars and Paul Kidney’s vocals-in-tongues.

The mood quietens down, and spookens up, for ‘Albuminurophobia’ – the sounds here are more dense, more drone-like, as dissonance swells and howls: an ocean that heaves to the choir of all the souls that have ever been lost to it.

A more solid, insistent, almost tribal, beat invades the music for ‘Wet Kidney’, and everyone else responds as they should – roused to the dance again, fuelled by blood pumped from the heartbeat of an ancient and angry earth, the vocals now animalistic, the guitars and electronics whirring and whizzing each other on. It is impossible to stay still to this music.

There is a contemplative, almost dreamy, respite with ‘Velocity Addition Formula’. The guitar sings you through a melody that is somehow searching, somehow yearning, and yet somehow at peace too, despite the bed of noise on which it seduces you, and makes love to you.

But it is only a respite. And the screeches and chaos of ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors’, which closes the album, awaken you from any complacency, from any urge to see, in the old, old roots of civilisation, an opportunity for nostalgia.

In its 40-ish minutes, this album, in its amazing single arc of improvisation, takes you to many places in a universe where everything is happening for the first time and where nothing is every really at rest.

They are places where all the elements of creation are in harmony, but they are not the harmonies of a settled, civilised space – rather they are those harmonies where one bit does something crazy, and all the rest become crazy with it, in perfect, crazy sync.

Outrageously limited to just 100 copies, Slocombe’s Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience is issued through Supercriticality Records.

Post-punk avant-garde Judaism - The Alter Rebbe's Nigun

While religion might have had a lot to answer for over the centuries, the millennia, one thing that it will always be able to put forward in its defence is the music it has inspired. Whether your mind’s centre of gravity is being shifted by the alien sounds of Hindu quarter-tones; whether your innermost self is weeping to a Bach Passion or leaping to some black American gospel; whether the history of everything you are is being wedded to the red earth by the drone of an Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo – whatever it is, the human search for something bigger, something deeper, something universal, has always found, in music, a lush fertile ground in which to sink its roots.

Judaism is no exception. It, too, has found a place for itself in music – not least (as I discovered in a fascinating presentation a couple of months ago at my local music group) in the Eastern European tradition of “klezmer”, with its sense, in its wavering ornamentation, of always searching for a home. It is music that somehow seems to give a voice the tradition of Judaism, and to the culture of the Jewish people, in a way that is instantly identifiable as “Jewish”.

But the voice that Australian avant-garde post-punk Hasidic Jews, Oren Ambrachi and Robbie Avenaim, give to that tradition, and to that culture, is something that surely no one could ever have expected. Their 1999 album, The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun, produced under the unfathomably creative oversight of John Zorn, brings together what feels like a world of irreconcilable musical differences – free jazz, punk rock, Japanese noise and, somewhere in the midst of it all, klezmer.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is in four parts, and is based on the philosophical and ethical compositions of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745 – 1813) who was known amongst his followers as ‘The Alter Rebbe’. The parts correspond to the four main stages in the ‘tzimtzum’ – a sort of Alter Rebbe version of the Big Bang: Atzilut (Emanation), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation),  and Asiyah (Action).

With ‘Atzilut’ – the highest, most God-like, stage – the music opens with notes plucked out of timelessness and spacelessness, and yet with a tired, old, vulnerability, as if the music is being played on an ancient, priceless, but dilapidated music box. It gives way to heavy post punk guitars and drums that drench the music, and you, in a dark, imposing density.

It’s an arresting start to this strange, eccentric, cosmic musical journey. From it emerges the chaos of an unformed mass, with ‘Yetzirah'. There is a barren darkness here, but within it, and around it, you can hear light flickering, pulsating, in its birth-throes. The music is minimalist – just electronic notes stretched and throbbing in the middle of nowhere – and yet it has a sense of bigness about it until, right near the end, you could swear that a lullaby is being sung to lull the baby earth to sleep.

'Beriah’ bursts into life with a fanfare of sonic madness – brass-like sounds blustering out as if the whole universe is caught in a traffic jam, blasting a million horns. It’s a rallying cry and, after a few minutes, we hear the empty dark cosmos again, breathing, stirring in its sleep, woken, in spite of itself, by the alarm, as dissonant guitars and drums at last pound it into shape.

In the final and longest part, ‘Asiyah’, we hear, for the first time, the voice of Rabbi Yankel Lieder, narrating some of the Nigun text, underscored and punctuated by rumbling, trembling noise that slowly creeps in on the spoken word, giving it life and strangling it at the same time. The voice gives way to a kind of spectral, choral chant, with drums beating and tolling within it, driving it forwards into the unknown, the unknowable, until everything suddenly stops and is unexpectedly put to bed by an almost unsettlingly gentle, homely, klezmer ditty.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is an extraordinary piece of music – earnest, passionate and daring beyond all boundaries, creating a uniquely Jewish universe: ancient, oppressed, but strong and formidable and, above all, enduring. It leaves you shattered but resolute, and full of all the contradictions that music, and religion, do so well.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is released on Tzadik – one of those recording labels where you can pretty well pick anything, and it’ll be worth listening to.

The creaking sound of rigging on the Mary Celeste - Takehisa Kosugi's 'Catch Wave'

If you could hear  the sound the sea might make, when every living thing has gone from the Earth and nothing remains other than a few stranded ghosts; and grey water laps against abandoned shores under endless grey skies; or if you could hear, as Julian Cope describes this music, the creaking sound of the rigging on the Mary Celeste after all human life had vanished from it; if you could hear the last bird left on Earth, soaring through a measureless and sullen sky, you would find, I am sure, that it would sound just like Takehisa Kosugi’s extraordinary album from 1975, Catch Wave.

Takehisa Kosugi is a Japanese experimental composer and violinist, born in 1938 and and has worked with musicians as diverse as John Cage and Sonic Youth. His music, usually associated with the neo-Dadaist ‘Fluxus’ movement, a word that derives from the Latin word for ‘flow’, is liberated from all the conventional notions of structure and boundaries and instead flows, aimed nowhere but not aimless, in a limitless, timeless space.

Catch Wave is undoubtedly his most famous recording. Its opening piece, ‘Mono Dharma’, is built on a single, barren drone above which hovers a distorted, oscillating solo violin sliding in and out of notes that have no name. It is music that conjures up an unspeakably haunted loneliness, music that speaks of abandonment, emptiness, the end of things. There is a minimalist vastness in its textures, like you are hearing the trapped souls of things that have long gone – the cry of a whale from a hundred thousand years ago, still echoing from the cliffs.

The second of the album's two pieces is ‘Wave Code’. More unsettled than the earlier track, this music, too, is rooted in a long, forlorn drone; but what grows from it here are strange, alien groans and grunts and chants: voices in the dark – perhaps the new bud of grotesquery that grows, slithers, out of the abandoned apocalypse of ‘Mono Dharma’.

It’s that drone – that empty, thin, desolate drone – that brings these two very different pieces together and leaves you feeling that they are perhaps just showing you different sides of the same picture, telling you different versions of the same story.

The simplicity of this music is in some ways what makes it most remarkable, and most haunted. Stripped of every ornamentation, of every convention, of every bit of structure, you are left wondering, horrified, that this godforsaken place might be how things really are.

The whole thing goes for just under 50 minutes, but this music makes you feel that you have been immersed in something much more timeless than that. It is music which, despite its avant-garde experimentation, feels like it could have been dug up from underneath the earth, where it had laid buried – perhaps a secret, perhaps a prophecy – for millions of years.

Catch Wave is music that you feel has been around long before you ever were and will stay around long after you ever will be. Your place in it doesn’t even create a bleep on its endless, empty heaving sea.

Thanks to Paul Kidney at PBS FM's Ear of the Behearer for introducing me to this stunning piece of music.

The loving songs of hate - Boyd Rice's 'Music, Martinis and Misanthropy'.

There is a dark side to everything. We all know that. And most of us are at some stage or another fascinated by it, and at some stage or another we stare into it and take a sort of reassuring relief when we see how horrifying it is. It somehow restores our faith in the established order of things – good is good and bad is bad.

But what is much more unsettling is when we stare into that abyss and find a comfort, a peace, an embrace, in there – a sense, even, of coming home.

This is the side of darkness that Boyd Rice shows us in his classic, and very, very unsettling 1990 album, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy. It is a piece of terrifying musical blackness – the sort that presents you with hate, clothed in soft velvet, its ice-cold arms stretched out to enfold you. Here hell really has frozen over.

The music itself is a richly textured neo-folk, with lush guitars, opulent keyboards, and fertile electronic noise, all blending into a dark and alluring molasses of sound that, like quicksand, absorbs the nihilistic, hate-filled lyrics of Boyd Rice delivered, usually spoken, sometimes sung, without even a neutron of emotion. The effect is shattering, jarring, but irresistible.

This strangely evocative, deeply horrible, stage is set in the album’s opening ‘Invocation’, a grotesquely morbid cover of The Carpenters’ song of the same name. It’s a somehow fitting mirror – The Carpenters’ angst-filled lives clad in sunlight and roses, reflected here in songs of hate clad in a soft, Kashmir black.

Whether it’s the musings on killing all the weak and ugly people, to a gently strumming guitar and rich, comforting chords, as in ‘People’; or the haunted soprano vocals that sing, ethereal and lullaby-like, behind ‘Disney Land Can Wait’, where the fantasy funpark is a distant dream, and shooting all the shuffling soullessness of modern life with AK-47s and B-52s is the immediate mission; or whether it’s the ghostly toe-tapping rhythm of ‘An Eye for an Eye’; or the trippy, druggy, ditty of murder in ‘Down in the Willow Garden’; or the barren, deadpan, invitation to rape in ‘Tripped a Beauteous Maiden’, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy constantly draws us into everything we want to be repelled by.

This is not music you want to be left alone with for too long – and not just because it is so disturbing (and it is certainly that), but also because you just can’t trust it. And that means, when it takes you so totally into its embrace, you can no longer trust yourself either. Is the music trying to lure you into its lair of hate, or is it trying to warn you, arm you, against a world dressed in majesty but drowning in mediocrity?

Ultimately, at the end of its 50 minutes, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy leaves it for you to decide. It has made a big black bed for you, with soft silk sheets, but you’re the one who has to choose whether or not to lie in it. All that the music, in all its dark, lulling richness, has done is show you what a comforting, loving place hate can be.

H P Lovecraft's Unnameable cosmic horror of the mind

H P Lovecraft wrote stories of cosmic horror. And they weren’t just stories of horrible things that happened in the cosmos – but, even more, they were stories of the horror of being part of it all: stories of the horrors of humanity, dwarfed by a big, bad, black universe. A universe twisted and distorted by alien malevolence, where humans are nothing and blackness, bleakness, are everywhere.

It’s the sort of universe that springs out of xenophobic paranoia – big and dark and full of foreign threats, but closed and claustrophobic too, where every breath is stifled and scared, endangered, alone.

H P Lovecraft wrote mostly in the 1920s. But, since then, his influence on literature and art and even on music has been profound, with traces of him popping up especially in bands like Metallica, Black Sabbath, the Black Dahlia Murder and Dream Theater.

But all of that plays just lip service to the real terrified, terrific, horror of H P Lovecraft. There’s something much more profound, much more disturbing, going on here than what a bit of black metal nihilism, however good it is, can show you.

And it wasn’t until Melbourne avant garde musicians Clinton Green and Andrew McIntosh released their 2001-2 album But of that, I will not speak …, under their moniker The Unnameable, that the real ghastliness of cosmic horror was, at last, captured and preserved.

Inspired by Lovecraft’s writing, the music of But of that, I will not speak … takes you deep into the dark and troubled regions the human psyche, the real place where his cosmic horrors were born and bred. It is the music of a haunted soul, much more than of a haunted cosmos.

The album opens with ‘This, no human creature may do’, where primordial groans and drones, chanting like an ancient ritual of the wind, draw you into the loneliest, most frightened crevices of your mind. The music is big, but entrapped, and there is no light, no escape.

It’s an uninviting place, but it is the right one for this music because, in this blackness, when you hear the lifeless, lumbering heartbeat of ‘You fool, Warren is DEAD!’, or the yawning, cavernous rumble lurking beneath ‘Life is a hideous thing’, you know that it can really be nothing other than your own blood, throbbing, congealing, within you. There’s nothing else here, other than you.

There is a grim megalomania in ‘Space belongs to me, do you hear?’, a sustained drone that seems to have every tone and semitone and quartertone drawn into it – like a psychic black hole that takes everything, every bit of light, hostage.

Were it not for where this music has already taken you, you might think that something really was hovering around you in ‘The Orbit of Yuggoth’, where a strange, sinister whistle dives down and creeps up again, in and out, backwards and forwards, like a spacecraft circling you, waiting to pounce – but, by now, you know that it’s not out there, it’s in here and, no matter how much you block your ears and try to hide from it, it won’t go away.

The first real hints of melody come in the album’s final track, ‘Only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called Him…’, where wraithlike notes are plucked out of the gloom to make a little tune, a macabre lullaby, perhaps, singing you into the endless sleep of loneliness and paranoia to which you were doomed from the moment the music started.

The Unnameable’s take on H P Lovecraft is fascinatingly outlined in Andrew McIntosh’s liner notes essay, and brilliantly captured in this unique music, where Lovecraft’s bigotry and racism and conservative nostalgia for a fabled past are seen not as incidental deficits to an otherwise brilliant creative mind, but rather as the essential and only real way of understanding the dark and unfriendly universe that he created.

But of that, I will not speak … takes you into that universe in the most unexpected of ways: by turning out the lights, closing the doors and the windows, and leaving you alone.

Available, once again, from Shame File Music.

Star Wars on acid: Tomutonttu

I was born long enough ago to have been around in the days when computer games first started to appear in pubs and arcades and, even then, I was enough of an oddball to have been at least, and probably more, fascinated by the noise they made than by the aliens you could shoot with them. Those beepy, bleepy noises. They didn’t do much but, even back then, I remember thinking that someone could probably do something pretty interesting with them.

And, I guess, lots of people did. Just listen to anything by Kraftwerk and follow your nose from there.

But one thing that you might not find, unless you know how to sniff out the really rare, delectable treats that are buried in far away corners, is the music of a contemporary solo Finnish project, called Tomutonttu, the work of Tampere-based Jan Anderzén, musician and artist and leader of Finland’s avant garde freak-folk band Kemialliset Ystävät.

Tomutonttu, I am told, means ‘dust gnome’. And if you can imagine a peculiar little alien gnome, shooting freaky little bits of cosmic dust through space, like he is playing some little intergalactic video game, then you might know a little of what to expect on the two freakily titled Tomutonttu albums, Tomutonttu (2007) and Tomutonto (2009), that I happened to stumble across, quite by accident, a few days ago.

There is a toy-like innocence to this music, with its electronic, psychedelic notes that bounce and pop and skip amongst the noises of animals and birds and ancient chants, like a child’s kaleidoscope of time and space, especially in Tomutonttu, the earlier album.

But it’s a child who has, perhaps, stolen a tab of acid, because there’s an unsettling uncanniness about this music, too, like its playful naïveté is just a sham, and the music, despite how it sounds at first, is having not fun but hallucinations. Rhythms that started out squarely and steadily disintegrate into a dizzy free flow; melodies that were full of sunlight, without a care in the world, slowly become just a little creepy, even while they’re still shining and glistening. It’s like one of those mechanical child toys that you begin to think might be possessed by something.

Tomutonto, the later of the two albums, is also the more aggressive, the darker. Its sounds are more deconstructed, more noise-based, and there is less of Stars and more of Wars in the feel of it all.

Both of these albums are fascinating explorations of that strange place where old things and new things, where innocence and corruption, laughter-filled playgrounds and empty voids, where music and noise, intersect.

Just like today’s adults who, as yesterday’s children, shot thousands and thousands of aliens, to the sound of bouncy computer bleeps, in the arcades of their local shopping centres.

Available through Fonal Records.

The industrial sleep of the Earth - Spectres by Monolith

If you can imagine the sound that the Earth might make when it’s sleeping – if you can imagine its pulsating, heaving breaths, its snores, its slow, dark dreams – if you can imagine how it would grumble and groan when it turns and stretches in the night, and then goes back to sleep again; and if you can imagine how every sleep is a billion centuries old, but still new and now – if you can imagine even a little of that, then you might have a sense of what  the Melbourne –based solo ambient drone project Monolith sounds like on his 2011 EP release, Spectres.

But only a sense. Only a bit. Because there is much more to Spectres than an old, sleeping Earth.

Spectres is a bit over half an hour of dark industrial hums and whirs, where the sounds pulsate and resonate, sometimes creating the feel of a thousand harmonic overtones bouncing off infinite walls, sometimes pared down to a single thread: but always, somewhere, you can hear the music’s heartbeat, slow and strong, as old as the hills.

But, even with its roots in a subterranean past, the music of Spectres is very, very new. It gives you a different take on minimalist drone music, relying less on those ground-rumbling bass lines where the guitars are tuned down to Q flat, and instead building its droning throb out of today’s world, like a spectre, if you will, of a factory siren held in suspension. It’s a sonic world kicked into being by the nerve and mettle of modern life – and kept alive by the sounds of the blood that flows through cities.

And when you hear the relentless sound of that blood, pumped through the music’s veins, and are hypnotised by it, so that those hard industrial sounds take on a spirit of the eternal, the picture Monolith paints becomes an unsettling one. It is a picture of that sleeping Earth made not out of rock and water, but out of steel and cement: cold, harsh, inhospitable.

Creating these deep, enduring images through long arcs of music that are moulded out of the barest of elements can only ever be done by someone who knows how to pace and shape sounds, as minimalist as these, in a way that gets your body to beat to its beat. This is music that slows you down and draws you down; it lowers your heartbeat and your body temperature until you, too, find yourself curled, foetus-like, not in the Earth’s womb, but in its bowels.

Just a few minutes before Spectres ends, its sleeping rest is disturbed by what could be the sound of dozens of metal sheets pounding into a concrete floor. It's a haunting portent of what this music seems to have been warning you of all along - this sleep is not a peaceful one, and it lulls you only to make you captive to its nightmares.

Thanks to 3 PBS FM's Ear of the Behearer for introducing me to this amazing piece of music. Available from Shame File Music.