CAN I GET AWAY WITH USING THAT 'TICKET TO RYE' PUN ONE MORE TIME...?

For the next two weekends I am going to be relocating to a holiday camp on the South coast to listen to a lot of men and some women express themselves in small ensembles utilising guitars, drum kits, their voices and maybe some other things.

So expect periods of silence interspersed with the inevitable colossal reviews.

In the meantime, please enjoy this post I wrote last week;


NO NO NO NO NO NO NO...

A few highlights from the recently released compilation ‘New York Noise Vol.2’ on Soul Jazz records.

Rhys Chatham – Drastic Classicism

Rhys Chatham was/is a minimalist composer who, like Glenn Branca, enjoyed hanging around the underground rock scene, and drew musicians from within it’s ranks to create large scale electric guitar ensembles to perform his work. Whether Chatham or Branca came up with the idea first is, I dare say, a point of conjecture and bitterness and not worth going into here, but either way you’d better believe ‘Drastic Classicism’ fuckin’ shreds. Clearly a devotee of the school of minimalism that emphasises GETTING STRAIGHT TO THE POINT, Chatham’s rock n’ roll ear-dream goes as follows;

A bouncy 4/4 drumbeat over which is layered what sounds like half a dozen out of tune guitars being repeatedly pushed against an industrial grinding wheel, with the amplifiers set up in a circle to create a dense web of ‘Psychocandy’ feedback.

About every 90 seconds or so, the guitars cut out, and there’s a brief drum-fill or a long, descending bass note. Then a moment of silence, then the beat resumes and the guitars come back in again, louder than before.

This continues for nine minutes, at which point it ends.

In purely utilitarian terms, it is perhaps the most perfect piece of rock music ever recorded.

The Static – My Relationship

Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess’s rock(ish) band, The Static, here cook up a definitive example of crushing urban paranoia. Matching book-smarts to pure brutality, it sounds rather like the Talking Heads going to hell and being taken care of prison-style by an early line-up of Swans. Yikes. I think it is probably safe to assume their relationships at the time of recording were not happy ones.

Red Transistor – Not Bite

A terrifyingly feral rock beast that lived fast and died young, led by Rudolph Grey of the Blue Humans and the legendary Von Lmo of, well.. see below, Red Transistor here take on board the aggression, repetition and anti-musical minimalism of the No Wave formula, but ditch any notions of artistic deconstructionism in favour of an all-out macho assault in the tradition of the Stooges. As you might expect, the results rock it fucking mad style, abrasive like being cornered by a sandpaper-wielding maniac in a burning down supermarket – a howl of pure out-of-nowhere geek violence to rank alongside Electric Eels, Crime, Teenage Jesus, Monks, Scratch-Acid and the like. There’s a ‘solo’ about half-way through which has gotta be the most demented piece of guitar-playing I’ve heard in an age – Arto Lindsay must have worried for his crown of the Kingdom of Skronk when these guys were in town!

Fun Facts about Von Lmo:

1. His debut performance at CBGBs consisted of his coming on stage in a straightjacket and chainsawing his guitar to pieces.

2. He claimed to have been born “in the black light dimension in the early 1900s” and to have been in a band called ‘Why You… Murder Me?’, the existence of which is entirely unsubstantiated.

3. It is rumoured that he was the inspiration for Elmo in The Muppets.

(sources: New York Noise Vol.2 sleevenotes, Galactic Zoo Dossier Damaged Guitar God trading cards)

Information of Von Lmo’s solo career is hard to come by, but it sounds fucking amazing . Who the hell is this guy?? – Uncle Julian tells all , and as you might expect, ‘normal’ is but a distant memory...