MUSIC REVIEWS
LAFMS
The Lowest Form of Music
RRRecords/Cortical Foundation
In the mid-1970s, the Los Angeles Free Music Society threw down the gauntlet to those who were willing to accept a true musical challenge. Call it what you will - art damage, industrial noise, deconstructed bachelor-pad music, pre-, post-, or parapunk - the broad range of LAFMS's experimental music flourished in its own underground way. Inspired by a crazy quilt of composers and styles from John Cage to Frank Zappa, Esquivel to Ennio Morricone, and New Wave to No Wave, these artists used sampled records, low tech electronics, homemade instruments, and a mélange of cheesy sounds to create a body of music that is difficult yet fascinating.
Their names may be utterly obscure and their music incredibly strange, but it becomes clear that the artists on this limited-pressing compilation had a passion for sonic exploration, reveling in pure, unadulterated sound - sometimes including noise for its own sake. The music is characterized not only by weirdness, but also humor, reverence (though never piety), honesty, and imagination. Even when things roam into familiar musical territory, it is intentionally raw, quirky, wacky. If you want a fusion of Shonen Knife and The Residents, check out Slimey Adenoid and the Pablums's Rolling Stones parody "Under My Gums"; Le Forte Four's take on "The Ballad of John and Yoko," dubbed "Ballad de Forte Four," is similarly bizarre. For sheer strangeness, try Doo-Dooettes's "Po-land," which combines Henry Cowell-inspired inside-the-piano scraping with bizarre moans and squeals.
The CDs, which feature cuts from other LAFMS titles as well as previously unreleased material, are housed in an accordion-fold wallet replete with graphics created by LAFMS composer/performer and Warner Bros. art director Tom Recchion. Also included are a miniposter featuring artwork from all LAFMS releases and two booklets with photographs, liner notes, essays, homages, and cool graphics. This is brazen musical audacity, by and for those with ears wide open.
Vikings of the Sunrise
New Albion
Vikings of the SunriseNew AlbionWhen Stephen Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble performs "Fantasy on the Polynesian Star Path Navigators," 10 people simultaneously stick their heads inside an open piano and gently excite the strings with various implements, creating a modern-minimal classical-conceptual piece based on the exploits of various ancient seafarers. No, it isn't New Age: the ensemble elicits a celestial string section with great currents of sound that swell, loom, and recede like the ocean itself. The piano sings like a harp and cries like a cello, while Scott's bold composition weaves a spell of organic, orchestral magic.
p53
ReR
Recorded live at the 25th Frankfurt Jazz Festival, p53 is a surrealist adventure that must have been stunning to witness. Cutler - low-grade electronics, drums, "objects," - joins a host of noisemakers, including pianists Marie Goyette and Zygmunt Krauze, sampler Lutz Glandien, and Otomo Yoshihide on homebuilt guitar and turntables, to paint a remarkable 44-minute dadascape. A clash of conventional and modern, the disc's transitions from sonic tranquility to chaos and back are unpredictable and delightfully abrupt. It's comforting that someone somewhere is still ignoring musical orthodoxy.
New Era
H.O.L.A. Recordings
These masters of merengue hip hop illustrate urban demographics more tellingly than any pie chart. The foursome's main creative engines, Nelson Zapata and Magic Juan Wilson, propel their inspired Spanglish patter through a dense landscape of pile-driving backbeats, burbling tambora rhythms, buoyant brass, and keyboard samples. Ultraslick production blends these elements without diluting Proyecto Uno's palpable street cred. Though velvety ballads and rap-inflected elegies lace the disc, its essence, distilled in manic tracks like "¿Qué Sabes Tu?" and "Candela," is a latter-day Latin house party.
Backsaturday
Jetset
While the term avant-garde is thrown around with astonishing carelessness, Saxon sextet Prolapse does, in fact, peddle serious postalternative soundage. Linda Steelyard's lilting vocals - counterpointing the nasal burr of Scot Mick Derrick - are one of the CD's best qualities, and while Backsaturday may strike you as a monomaniacal exercise in one-chord bass thrumming, the album's sameness is actually a slowly evolving gestalt. Song titles ("Zen Nun Deb," "Strain Contortion of Bag") are as curious as the music is weird and beautiful. Trendoid twits beware: if you're trainspotting for Britpop, steer clear of this.
Athens by Night
Shell/Stickshift
Inside the gypsy tavern, faded velour booths are stained by cocktails lost. Raucous laughter fills the air like smoke; orphaned emotions huddle in corners. Athens by Night, the beautifully crafted release from San Francisco singer/ songwriter J. C. Hopkins, wraps Waits and Kerouac in a folk cabaret cloak and bellies them up to the bar. A melodic menagerie of lost love and good intentions, Athens's achievement lies in Hopkins's strikingly personal lyrics. Songs like "Amsterdam" and "Emission in Blue" are windows into another time, each a conspiracy shared with a cheeky grin. This dive is worth the visit.
Dan Bern
Work
Musiki Wa Dansi
Africassette
Subtitled "Afropop Hits from Tanzania," this spectacular compilation chronicles four dance bands that recorded in the studios of Radio Tanzania from 1982 to 1992. The groups have a great deal in common: all are big bands (up to 24 members) strongly highlighting brass, percussion, and electric guitars, and all traffic in the Africanized form of rumba known as soukous. Lyrics, offered in English translation, contain touching moral allegories and poetic epiphanies. While Tanzania's pop music is less known in the US than that of South Africa or Nigeria, this collection finds it just as rhythmically galvanizing.
Angel Eyes
Verve
Jimmy Smith has a rep from the 1960s for his frothing, hunched-over the-keys approach to the Hammond B-3 organ. With a whirling style based on equal parts gospel and juke joint, his every note bespeaks the blues. But this time out, Smith takes the tempo way down, chooses a repertoire of slow ballads, and surrounds himself with several outstanding young musicians. The results are understated yet sublime and serve to deepen his indelible niche. Beautifully recorded and richly textured, Angel Eyes forwards Smith's bluesy trends with some of the most consistently tasteful playing heard in a long while.
