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.
Summer has fully arrived and it’s too damn hot to go outside. So it’s time for me to try—yet again, to get through Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
This will be my fourth attempt at reading this book (separate from the college age what-the-flying-fuck-is-this-nonsense glances). It is so seductive in its use of language, and the puzzle of overlapping contexts that even when it has driven me mad with its inscrutability, I find myself drawn back to it. Beyond the first several attempts, where the entire experience felt like self-flagellation, I discovered that the most basic way to enjoy the text is by reading it aloud. The language is a music all of its own. Ulysses was Joyce’s book about a day from start to finish. Finnegans Wake is the book of the night, the song of our collective unconscious.
Even if literally all meaning eludes me, I feel that I’m speaking a truth in a tongue I don’t understand. I’m connected to the entirety of human art and history as I sing-song my way through in my affected Irish lilt. So in my tenuous thematic connection from column preamble to album discussion, I will sing the praises of humans who reach beyond our understanding to connect us with the profound. I know Joyce spent the last seventeen years of his life writing this book that countless people view as unreadable trash. He was far more intelligent than most, but like any artist of true vision, he is giving us the tools to reach out of our own experiences and connect with something much larger than ourselves.
Amulet by Threshold Houseboys Choir (Infinite Fog Productions)
It’s interesting to see how a lifelong band member performs when removed from their context as a constant collaborator, dropped nude into sounds that are solely their own. The Threshold Houseboys Choir is Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil) left to his own devices, and living in Thailand following the death of longtime lover and Coil co-pilot, John Balance. Their falling out, John’s alcoholism, and the dramatic disruptions this caused seem to have left a lasting impression on Peter. Eschewing the need for a living breathing lead singer and all the uncertainty that comes along with it, Christopherson opted for a frontman that “wouldn’t crash,” creating computer generated vocals for his compositions.
This newly reissued version of Amulet contains the original album (first issued in 2008 as a multi-CDr set), and collects the remains of Christopherson’s work as Threshold Houseboys Choir. In my reading about this album, many people state how it sounds like late era Coil, but that doesn’t seem fair, or entirely accurate. Of course, it’s easy to identify the timbre of Sleazy’s contributions having removed him from the context of his former band, but putting his own musical idiosyncrasies aside, the music captures an odd juxtaposition between the synthetic and the timeless.
Somewhere in an interview I read, Peter and John were talking about their fondness for Thailand, saying that the veil between the living in the dead is much thinner there. Indeed, the music does seem to soak up this quality, distinguishably different from Coil’s own ghostly preoccupations. The computer generated vocals add to this aesthetic, manipulated as they are, it’s hard to tell if they are words at all or just sibilant, glottal, and formant tones. Sped up to a chirp or slowed down to a moaning crawl, reversed or stuttering through a phrase, they sit with the other instrumentation as an intangible phantom snagged from the aether like a lightning bug in a jar. None of the voicings are overly complex, they see-saw, or flow back into each other like a mantra. It is in these ways that the music departs from the Coil cannon. “The Hangman’s Ball” is one such song where this compositional method is displayed. Vocal lines bounce around, thickening into a confusion as new loops are added with each passing verse.
One thing that never left Christopherson was his ability to compose and build songs. He was the man behind the sequencers, programming and treating sounds. He was often found in the studio in the early morning, having stayed up all night learning the ins and outs of a new piece of gear. Though he and John have been dead for a long time now, their work continues to breathe, living on through these reissues and finding new listeners. In this way, perhaps the veil between the living and the dead is thinner than we realize after all.
Excelsior Mill by Sun Ra (Modern Harmonic Records)
Here’s another great contribution from a deceased wielder of mysticism and madness—pulled out of the context of his full band, no less. Though you wouldn’t know that just by listening to it. This is a monstrously huge recording. Sun Ra sits on his own with the Wurlitzer pipe organ at the Excelsior Mill in Atlanta. For all his obsession with outer space, he sure looks more like a pilot than a musician behind the controls of a massive organ. Ooo, and that cape. My guy!
The joy in listening to this recording is that it’s easy to forget this is one anatomically correct individual making so much noise on a single instrument. Not only in listening to albums, but in my own personal life as well, I love to watch (listen) to people discover how a musical instrument works, and where they fit in relation to it. Sure, the presence of traditional keyboards on the organ lays some aspects squarely in the musical realm, but it’s abundantly clear that there is so much more to this organ than the keys. So, moving beyond Ra’s undeniable skill as a pianist, we hear something more aligned with his talents as an arranger, he can whip up the sound of an entire band from this bench, casting out his extremities across an entire orchestra and pulling down percussion, strings, horns, and keys. There’s plenty of bizarre sonic wizardry living between these recognizable elements as well, and these unconventional approaches to a familiar instrument are all Ra’s own.
The track title “Beyond Hiroshima” lays bare the era’s cold war fear of nuclear annihilation. At times the blasts from the pipes are so loud that the microphones distort and the tape warbles and undulates under the sound pressure. It feels like traversing a landscape pockmarked with craters, wandering among the smoldering remains of irradiated flora and fauna. In this way, the music has a sort of funhouse mirror effect. Every reflection, every corner that’s turned, there is a new perversion waiting to corrupt the previously held baseline of normalcy.
The thunderous bass frequencies immediately reminded me of a trip I took to New York where I tinkered with David Byrne’s art installation “Playing the Building.” Giant motors would vibrate the girders and shake the walls of the space, plumbing would whistle, and hidden devices would rhythmically tap and hammer on resonant surfaces. To be in the presence of a sound as immense as that—an immersive experience of sound as space, is the closest comparison I have to this performance.
Excelsior Mill is a truly rare performance from the most prolific and visionary jazz musician. Sun Ra has been dead for over 30 years and we are still getting new music from him, this album is one of those. The power of his performance here immediately made me wonder why he didn’t try his hand at scoring films. It may be the sound of the organ that made me think of him working as an accompanist to a silent film. Imagine this album playing over Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, for example. Though Excelsior Mill was likely recorded in the mid-to-late 1980s, it harkens back to a sound of the past with eyes firmly fixed on a future that only Sonny Blount could make manifest for the rest of us lowly terrans.
Thank you for the interesting evaluation of these wonderful artists.