Words by Sean Victory
When Sean Victory isn’t writing music or writing about music, it’s likely he’s listening to music. As a lifelong artist, his current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
“Never play to the gallery,” said David Bowie.
“The audience comes last,” said Rick Rubin.
What can we learn from these creators who dare not keep us in mind? They are smarter by far than the algorithms that know the appetites of our thumbs, offering more of the same. It’s not a complex concept to admit that we learn far more from listening to others than we do from focusing solely on our own perceptions. Don’t believe everything you think and so on. Trust an artist to make music that is true to their Sound and Vision, and let the audience be responsible for listening. Nothing else is required of the listener, but to listen openly.
It’s the difference between being a Record Collector/Music Junkie and being a Heavy Metal Music Fan. The RC/MJ can pick a starting point and grok the sounds that float along, gleaming sprouts of beauty from the undulating field of infinite genres, plucking a favorite to place behind the ear and carry on. Wilt though it may, the field stretches onward, beyond all horizons. The HMMF, writhes in the sticky delight of the spider’s web, contemplating the outer darkness that lies within. Somewhere behind this black t-shirt there is a smaller t-shirt still. Shorn in its tattered hues of vanta the heart beats against a bleating oblivion, hefting along links in the great chain of being, passing cores and posts, subdividing the darkness into its constituent parts: death, black, black death, prog, sludge, stoner, thrash, doom, and on and on into the void. All the crayons are gray. All these flowers are wilted.
The distinction is one of openness, and learning to look up and out of the voice we’ve known our whole life. There is so much Everything to appreciate outside of our own small corner of the world. These dead flowers are just a part of a larger field. The gray crayons have many other brilliant friends.
So, what did artistic truth sound like in 1973, in Paris?
Live in Paris 1973 by CAN (Mute Records and Spoon Records). ← Like this!
For the uninitiated, CAN is musical creativity without precedent. Their songwriting process was usually centered around extensive jamming, recording the results and editing together the best bits into an album. On this most recent release from their archived live shows, we get one of their best performances, from their most commercially successful stretch. The tracks number Funf, containing familiar structures from their record Ege Bamyasi, but it makes much more sense to think of the album as one performance. Damo Suzuki’s voice stands as a signpost in this blizzard of vamps. Suzuki’s voice is ecstatic and distinctive, sharp as any of Michael Karoli’s guitar work. While I do enjoy most of CAN’s discography, I believe it makes the most sense with Damo as a focal point to the music. On these recordings, he sings a spell and the music stirs the cauldron. It’s easy to imagine why the band asked Suzuki to join them on vocals, having met him in the streets of Berlin as a busking young lad.
At one and a half hours in length, the band stretches way out in these five movements, but at no point does it feel bogged down in excess. Czukay and Liebezeit as a rhythm section hold these songs together with near-psychic vision. No matter where the improvisations take the band, the groove never fails, and dynamic shifts keep their, er… dynamics. Irmin Schmidt’s contribution on the keys/synths are the only elements I wish had more volume. They serve as ethereal elements, often lost beneath the other happenings, but behind the more noticeable elements his work on the keys form clouds, breezes, rain, and sun for the other instruments to dance beneath. I just occasionally wish they were more upfront in the mix. Some of the other entries in their Live series were done by a man with tape recorders and microphones hidden in his trench coat so I can’t complain too much about the end result here. It’s just a pleasure to hear the band outside the restrictions of an album. Free to pour their various influences and ideas into performing, improvising just to see where the road takes us.
The Collective by Kim Gordon (Matador Records)
“On this record, I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now. This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, convenient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.”
Her artist statement reads like a thematic synopsis of a Thomas Pynchon novel, but we are living inside this twisted work of fiction. The Collective is the sound of a person weaving their own personal truth, that sits like a patchwork cut in the larger tapestry of our reality, growing evermore nonconsensual with the outer world’s every stitch.
This record is a fantastically surefooted follow up to her solo debut No Home Record. While her ex-band mates in Sonic Youth have continued in their solo endeavors to create some iteration of noisy guitar-centric music, Gordon is the one who has drifted the furthest from the music the band perfected over three decades. There’s plenty of noise, and even some guitar, on The Collective, but the beats at the core of these songs are altogether foreign from Sonic Youth’s discography. The depth and quality of this music makes the title of her autobiography ring differently; Girl in a Band: filling a role and playing a part, fitting in. Here, she is the band, and the songs she makes are so huge. It is inspiring to hear where her creativity goes when she isn’t trying to fit into the context of the other musicians.
Her spoken and half sung lyrics sit perfectly astride the bombast of the feedback and drums set to 11. The juxtaposition of these elements seem to be both toss off and serious. Blasé statements coupled with these thundering rhythms seem to mirror an internal monologue translating the total chaos happening in the waking world into some sort of personal truth or narrative. An exercise in ruminative absorption of truths thrust upon our organism from without. We are left to our own devices to make sense of it all.
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis by The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis (Impulse! Records)
A special thanks to fellow OS contributor, Jonathan Stout for this recommendation [editor’s note: also an interview from last year]. I was so enthralled with this record that I binned another album review to write about it. Admittedly, I knew nothing about either of the parties that came together for this record. However, after being told that The Messthetics contained the rhythm section for Fugazi, I started to discern telltale sounds from these members. Especially on track “Emergence,” the bassline and progression sound like they could have been pulled from a Fugazi song. The drums fall into a familiar verse groove, accelerating into a bassline that bounces through a chorus. Without Ian, we have James Brandon Lewis trilling and barking his sax through this 3 minute cut of jazz-punk-fusion-something.
The music travels some very circuitous routes. Opening track “L’Orso” keeps the same theme throughout, but allows for the guitar to kick into overdrive and twirl decorously in the sizzle before returning to earth, tracing the melodic lead again, then tags in the sax for its own flight of fancy. All the musicians have serious chops. The guitar and saxophone each serve as the focal points for the music, singing lead parts, but they play off of each other in remarkable ways. They will dance in perfect mirror with each other, but sometimes the shadow will stray away from the shape that casts it, providing a clangorous contrast to an articulate little ditty. The same can be said for the bass and drums in that they create a mood by carefully minding their dynamics in order to bring a sharper focus to the music.
It’s interesting to hear Lewis in this context. I listened to some of his other albums, and while his tone is always a constant, he understands how to bend his horn to the work required. I found this collaboration to be incredibly satisfying, as I always love to see musicians from different backgrounds create a common language from their diverse talents.