Gubbey!

So, I'm old enough that 7"s were the way you bought your music, or at least if you were an AM radio kid that's how you did it.  Now, of course, 7"s are a little more esoteric.  This little nugget is the second edition of Gubbey Records' split series: the series places Gubbey chief Dave Rucinski's Furlong on Side A, with a special guest on Side B.  The first edition featured dark troubadour Anderson on Side B (with a solo version of Sean Garrison's "White Flag") along with Furlong's "Egg McMan" on Side A (also including a very nice cover of Leadbelly's "They Hung Him on the Cross" as a special bonus).  The latest edition takes an altogether different tack, pairing Furlong with Louisville improv/NRG jazz monsters Sick City Four.

Furlong rips into the proceedings with "Sex Bunker", a stoner metal sprint that plays a bit like a Saint Vitus LP on 45 rpm.  There's only one thing to ask from this, really . . . ROCK! . . . and, rock it does.  But that's not all . . . the more you listen to Furlong in general, the more you notice the little things, and not just the little production-type details that make a "professional" sounding record: sure, Furlong stacks up the guitar tracks, but they stack up the ideas, too.  So, you get the stoner metal lunge at the core of "Sex Bunker", but you also  get the punk velocity, nods to shit as diverse as Edgar Winter, Spinal Tap, Seattle sludge, the Stooges, and a whole bunch more sunk so deep into ideological mix as to be mere texture.  Perusal of the bonus track on the digital download, "Hoarder Fire", leads you down the same road by a different path: Zeppelin by way of Stone Temple Pilots, with the nervy guitar(s) tweaked into a psychotic benzedrine edge instead of STP's insipid junkie redolence.  Taking Zeppelin bombast and translating it into punk rock is no simple task, and Furlong nails it here.

This is, no question, a tricky path to walk down.  The only thing worse than pastiche is rock pastiche.  But Furlong never falls into that hole: everything here serves the purpose, and that purpose is . . . ROCK.  Having said that, Rucinski does manage a lot of mileage out of a deceptively simple surface.  Three songs is an extremely limited sample size; but is he (as Dan Willems has implied) transforming into a punk rock Brian Wilson?

Side B roars to life with the bellowing growl of Dan Willems's baritone sax (and that's a low B-flat baritone to you, bitches!), with the horns and guitar falling behind into a menacing cord, and Bart going apeshit on drums underneath.  Starting out very much like early 90's Ken Vandermark-era Flying Luttenbachers NRG jazz, "Burundi Punch Clock" establishes its head and quickly falls off the table as horns, drums and guitar slide all over each other briefly, only to tumble even further into a brilliantly abstract Chris Willems guitar break.  While the "solos" stack up in a way that roughly approximates jazz, this is less about musicians taking their turn, and more about each adding another piece to the jigsaw puzzle, for each part is inextricably linked . . . and, in spite of the amazing playing throughout, "Burundi Punch Clock" is about the links.

Essentially, the band forms four poles, and "Burundi Punch Clock" writhes in between.  Bart Galloway (drums) and Chris Willems (guitar) are the staccato jab, throwing accents and pulses all over the place (somewhat ironic, considering the traditional rhythmic role of both instruments in jazz).  While not specifically melodic (though very close), Bart's percussion lines alternate between small masterpieces of phrasing and spiky contrapuntal texture.  Falling into a dialogue with Bart's drums, Chris ups the ante by continually frustrating any expectations of melody and rhythm: you will always find Chris's guitar where you don't expect it, and when you're there with him, he hits you jaw dropping fragment and is gone again.

That leaves Dan Willems and Heather Floyd to define the other two poles.  Dan's baritone supplies the main riff of the head, as well as a lot of texture (not to mention a lot of the character of the song, given the singular sound of the baritone).  Dan's parts on this cut have a familiar "out" jazz sound to them (and he's as good on his horn as just about anybody you care to name), but his lines are pulled apart by the other polarities in play, making them more abstract and richer for their incompleteness/abstraction.  Heather, on the other hand, cuts across and through everything with her trumpet like a dry laser: the economy of her line organizes the chaos around her like metal shavings around a magnet.  Quite often, through the force of her playing, it is Heather who organizes/defines the Sick City Four.  Except, of course, when she chooses not to.

Antithetical to the ordered unfolding of jazz improv as well as to the fire-and-reload nature of most other free improv, "Burundi Punch Clock" is a small masterpiece of interlocked improvised parts that form a dramatic whole.  And the Sick City Four managed to squeeze all that onto a 7" record (!); usually their pieces are dramatically longer.  BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: buy this Furlong/Sick City Four single, and you get not only a slice of Furlong stoner punk heaven, not only a roiling Sick City Four miniature demon, not only a free download for a head-pounding Furlong bonus track, BUT ALSO SICK CITY FOUR'S "THE ANACREONTIC SONG" - AN INTERPRETATION OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER!  I'll leave that one to your imagination, at least until you buy the single.

NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?!

Furlong and the Sick City Four are joining Humongous for a double record release party at Astro Black/Quills Coffeehouse on Saturday, October 13th.  $3 gets you admission PLUS a free copy of the Furlong/Sick City Four 7"!

Sailing Away on a Sinking Boat

Humongous - Miniature Pinschers
Adept Recordings/Black Velvet Fuckere/Chinstrap Productions/Consanguineous Records

Jess Myers - Voice, Cornet
Jamie Pickerill - Drums, Voice
Matt Pickerill - Guitar, Voice
Erin Reed - Keyboard, Voice

Recorded and Mixed by Dan Willems

listen to "Hook Up the Keyboard":



Ever driven the back roads at ridiculous speeds in a rickety-ass old heap?  You go grinding across gravel roads, like the ones that wind through backwoods everywhere, wheels on the ground but never quite locked up, rocks flying everywhere, always a degree or two off straight ahead, trailing a dust cloud as big as a storm front . . . there's that wingless & wide open feel you get driving on dirt, where precision is belied by response lag, where power and velocity are compressed into the great mean, and the edge is only visible in your rear view mirror . . .

Leave that Ferrari in the garage, Ruben.  Better light 'em up & kick down that Crown Vic, Clem, 'cause once I get off pavement that 4.6 Liter 8 in your Police Interceptor don't mean shit.  All y'all are gonna see out of me is a cloud of dust, & you'll know I'm gone when I stop bouncing gravel off your windshield . . . see, because on dirt & gravel, aerodynamics are worthless, traction is gone, horsepower is worthless: all you need is a stick shift and the nerve to push that rustbucket all the way to the edge and beyond.  A redneck in a rusted-out S-10 can outrun a city slicker in a Dodge Viper; the gal or guy with the most nerve wins.

Good rock -n- roll bands understand this.  Ever since Keith Richards plugged in his first Harmony, the good ones understood that playing rock -n- roll wasn't about precision.  Rock -n- roll is like driving on dirt: whatever boat you're piloting, the point is to get it going as fast and crazy as possible without losing it into the ravine.

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Not that Humongous has exactly peeled off the fenders and uncapped the headers.  Their rockism isn't a stance, it's a compulsion, unlike the new macho rock ethos of the tattoo boys & girls.  Humongous has nothing to do with the narcissistic pose:  they only have one self-identifying raver, "Hook Up the Keyboard"; but it's all about nerd swagger, and it doesn't even show up until almost the end of the record, after which it is immediately smoothed out/undercut by the epic "Intervention".  No, they flail away like a bootlegger's Mercury because, as far as they know, that's the way it's done.

Humongous started as a bluegrass band (if you've ever listened to much real bluegrass, you know that the whole dirt driving thing has as much to do with bluegrass as rock), and there's a part of that which still sticks, in spite of the adrenalin-fueled twitch-rock they play now ("twitchcore", if you will).  The nervous energy, the speed ("always play just a little bit faster than you can actually play"), the keening vocals, the off-kilter feel of much of the music, all owe a debt to bluegrass . . . as does a lyrical viewpoint that tells the stories of the locale (though now, of course, the "locale" has been electronically expanded).

Miniature Pinschers starts out with some twitchcore jazz: a nice little cluster of barre chord, & then the guitar sprints off in a jerky scat, followed by the wheezing coronet.  The saga of  "Panty Boy" starts ragged and funky, hits a bridge, and then plunges into darkness and death (that, again, is a touchpoint with bluegrass), with oozing synth and repetitive guitar figure as Jess haltingly tells us precisely how Panty Boy fucked up . . . and so, the blueprint of the album: immediate songs with stereoptic images set to rock that is fast, crazy, and loose, with a ton of insane changes that are like prog rock without the math.  The musical vocabulary ranges far and wide; from almost obsessive lapses into funk, to the C & W of "If P had W" (one of the more charmingly direct statements of female lust you're ever likely to hear), from the straight rave-up of the aforementioned "Hook Up the Keyboard", to the almost Brechtian "Intervention".  There are songs about murder, incest, Czech girl illegals and healthcare, drinking, sex, the cops . . . all the biggies.  And through it all, Humongous sprints along at breathless pace, barely slowing down enough to land the punches.

For music that has the coherence and velocity of a sawed-off shotgun blast, it comes as a bit of a surprise just how unified the dramatic arc of the album is.  It doesn't sound exactly operatic, but you almost get the feel of Miniature Pinschers as a song cycle, where ideas pop up only to quickly disappear, then resurface again mutated & re-contextualized.  Images come in jabs and starts, stark photos with ragged tendons connecting them together . . . the mutant surf spank of guitar chords built from the ground up (how does he keep that low E in tune?) anchors the proceedings . . . the tootling of the coronet bounces between the guitar line and the vocal line . . . the keyboard's bass runs & sparkling chime makes the New Wave argument . . . the chugging splatter of the drums bring the funk  . . . the roiling vocal dialogues between Jess and Matt dislocate the center . . . Humongous manages to take simplicity, throw it on the floor, and smash it to bits; then they rearrange the fragments for maximum nervous overload.  More, they manage to make the schiziod chunks a broken mirror for our schizophrenic culture.

While never repetitive, the songs are all of a piece, with the exception of "Intervention", which is nothing if not operatic.  It's here that the schizo voice of the band shows to the full effect, with Matt and the rest of the band turning on Jess, demanding an intervention ("We've decided we know what's best for you" repetitively delivered in an impossibly hooky sing-song line), while Jess resists, eventually drifting off into nothing ("I'm sailing away, on a sinking boat, I'm getting away, to Miami FLA").  It's as if the twitchy immediacy of the album finally straightens out on "Hook Up the Keyboard", goes all big brother with the voice of "Intervention",  only to dissolve into a hazy abyss of Mai Tais with little umbrellas by the end.  It's Humongous's best song, even if it's the most atypical.  But here, as everywhere else, sparkling pop hooks and chugging punk/funk alike are chopped and twisted, to the same dislocating effect.  And yes, it does drift off in a way that no other Humongous song does, but only because there is nothing left to do.

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Humongous does have a sonic connection to the infamous Louisville sound, but by way of the lesser-discussed Ethan Buckler/King Kong branch of the scene . . . indeed, Humongous sounds like you imagine King Kong would if you locked King Kong into a dark room, kept them alive with coffee, Captain Crunch, and benzedrine inhalers, then cut them loose on stage with a bank of strobe lights all going at different speeds . . . and as outsiders, they tend to circulate in crowds that run from experimental (Sapat, The Belgian Waffles!, Sick City Four) to outsider punk songwriters (Brian Barbee/Janitors of the Apocalypse, Furlong).  Ten years from now, Miniature Pinschers will be considered one of the local classics, and the scenesters will be writing a new history to incorporate Humongous.  Why not beat the rush?

Humongous's Miniature Pinschers will be released October 13th at an album release party somewhere or other (update when I get it) at Astro Black/Quills Coffeehouse.  Pick it up at Astro Black Records (in Louisville) and other discerning media dealers.

Why Do You Think They Call It Noise?

For the sake of context, I will point you to various musical projects I have been involved in, past and present.  My band of 20 years has documentation here, my current band is represented here, and of course you can score some downloads at Bandcamp if you wish.  An overview of what I do is at my Soundcloud page, which just happens to have a very sweet version of "Amazing Grace".

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We called it noise when we started in the 80's; industrial noise, to be precise.  But even then, what was called industrial noise was becoming restricted, reduced, and reterritorialized*.  All these guys that were beating on metal together, I suppose it makes sense that, sooner or later, they grasped rhythm as the way to communicate.  Or normalize, I would say.  After a while it sounded like a hippie drum circle with tubes and sheet metal instead of hippie drums.

Punk rock came about when what was called "rock -n- roll" at the time became bloated and irrelevant.  The Ramones (most visibly) stripped it down to three chords and a cloud of dust.  But by the mid 80's, when we first showed up, punk rock had evolved (devolved?) into hardcore, there were rules to be followed, there was a club to join, there was a cannon to master.  Punk rock was becoming daddy, and even if daddy had tattoos, leathers, and a funny haircut, he still wasn't essentially different from polyester cocaine dancer daddy, or long hair groovy judgmental-in-a-different-way daddy, or Mad Men daddy.  Bands who wanted to be more creative, to move outside the strictures of punk rock, by and large moved back toward mainstream rock (creating "alternative" or "college rock"), which by that time began to look like a bastion of freedom compared to punk rock.  And then there were the freaks.

So, noise was our punk rock.  It was our way of breaking things down, similar to the way the Ramones broke things down . . . except instead of three chords and a cloud of dust, we just had the cloud of dust - no chords.  First called industrial noise, the "industrial" faded away when the inherent rhythmic stupidity started heading ever closer to disco, and when it became more about lifestyle (which always seemed to me like clubbing with an attitude) than about breaking down music.  "Noise" stripped of other connotations was much more elemental, much more primal.  Historically, noise could collect non-industrial types like Einsturzende Neubauten, the Butthole Surfers, and even experiments by more rockish avant-garde bands like Pere Ubu ("The Book is On the Table").  It could reach back to the no wave of Mars, DNA, Red Transistor, and Lydia Lunch; back to the sixties free improvisation groups like AMM, to the free jazz of Coltrane, Coleman, Ayler, et. al., and to the non-idiomatic free players like Derek Bailey and Evan Parker who bridged that gap.  It could reach back to Stockhausen, Xennakis, and Cage; it could reach back even to strictly regimented late 19th/early 20th Century composers who produced complex music that broke the rules of the time.

The elemental, primal aspect of noise also means it is irreducible.  Like "music", "noise" is a subset of sound.  These two subsets are generally thought to oppose each other, with music being a pleasing arrangement of sound, and noise being an anarchic and (to varying degrees) annoying occurrence of sound.  They are not, however, totally exclusive of each other: the differences between music and noise have a strong cultural bias, and what is normally considered noise is often included in the arrangements of sound that make up music.  But while music will stretch and change (which is, by the way, the beauty of music), noise remains outside, remains irreducible.  

This whole rant came about because, recently, I've posted my band several different places online, and I've been asked to classify the band each time.  I consider my band, Black Kaspar, a noise band.  Now, you will see "noise" as a qualifier quite often when it comes to current music; I often had the choice of "noise pop", "noise rock", the old standby "industrial noise", and so on.  I, for one, reject noise as a qualifier, because it's nothing more than an attempt to reterretorialize noise, to bring it back into the fold as a musical spice rather than the main course of sound.

Now, it's not the mainstream that is trying to reclaim noise, not by a longshot.  It's the outsiders that crave acceptance, that crave recognition on some level no matter how small, that crave to cleave back to the hierarchy.  It seems that an artist always wants to claim to be special, and there is nothing special about noise; one makes noise accidentally as soon as your feet hit the floor when you get out of bed in the morning.  The artist always seems to need to claim a space for himself that is his own, so for him, "noise" is just too pedestrian, too normal, too . . . unmusical.

And that is why I choose "noise" for my tag.  I certainly hold my music up against most of what gets made these days, but I don't claim any special expertise, I don't lay claim to any sort of cannon that needs mastery.  I make NOISE, simply and irreducibly, and you can like it or not, but you can't tell me I'm doing it wrong, because there is no right way.  I'll leave it to others to write clever songs; I'll continue to sculpt my sound.  And when you ask me what makes my noise special, interesting, or worth listening too, I'll not bore you with conjured complexities: I'll just point at what I've done and say "there it is - you tell me".  For me, the beauty of pure noise is that it is the anti-cult: join if you wish.
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*  Through no fault of the first industrial noise band, Throbbing Gristle, who showed up just a year or two after the Ramones.  It was probably the Throbbing Gristle folk who coined the term "industrial noise".

This Ain't No Heartfelt Shit, This is Halo of Flies!

Halo of Flies began recording in 85, released their first 7" in 86, refined their sound by 88, and stopped recording in 91. They never released a full album that wasn't a compilation of singles. They were never particularly popular, even by 80s/90s underground standards. Mainly, they were known as Tom Hazelmeyer's band - Hazelmeyer himself was better known as "the guy who runs Amphetamine Reptile Records". AmRep was a popular/influential 80s/90s indie label with a distinct sound that rivaled contemporaries Sub Pop, Touch and Go, Homestead, SST, and so on. AmRep had many name bands on its roster: Melvins, Helmet, The Cows, Boss Hog, Chokebore, Helios Creed, Nashville Pussy, God Bullies, Dwarves, etc. Perhaps the single most overlooked band on the entire roster was HoF, Hazelmeyer's own band. It was also one of the most overlooked bands of the entire indie explosion.

HoF was an unholy amalgamation of 60s garage psych, the MC5/Stooges protopunk axis, the spirit of 77, sharp British Mod, and outright noise. From the very first single, they were all about desperate, linear forward drive: "Rubber Room" sprints ahead like muscular vintage Detroit sheet metal & iron. As the short time passed, our heroes became more practiced in the studio, and their sound progressed from driven to compressed to claustrophobic to explosive. Songwriting, never HoF's strong point, became progressively more irrelevant as the band evolved. The final studio single, Big Mod Hate Trip, was the most blatantly Mod work they did, and as such did feature a lttle more in the way of songwriting, but otherwise displayed the same undifferentiated nihilism of the later HoF work.

Punk rock is always rock - that is, it always has a certain conceit to hang its hat onto. The Ramones were nothing more that a fast and loud pop band (with the Phil Spector/Shadow Morton/New York street sound being the epitome of pop for them). The Sex Pistols were a fashion statement. The pre-punk New York scene was heavily associated with the visual/performance art scene, as well as the Romantics (not the band!) as patron saints. The Clash had their proletariat politics, Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys had their political satire, the West Coast generally had their rebellion to American bourgeois culture. Halo of Flies has none of that: they only have the raw primal roar of negation, they only have the noise.

HoF is a punk power trio that reveals itself with aggressively buzzing distorted guitar, raw-throated grunting midrange vocals, Keith Moon-styled drums, and major compression. Hazelmeyer's guitar riffs are less song components than gestures, and Anglim's drums run forward with the sputtering logic of shortwave static (not unlike Moon himself did all those years ago). As mentioned, HoF doesn't deal with song writing per se, but rather produce objects (songs) with different scars and textures. The band's preferred method of releasing their music (all 7"s, no albums except to compile the singles) is apropos, since every single song is an expression of the same raw, pre-verbal demons. There is plenty of variety within the songs (much more so than the average pop/punk band), yet taken as a whole, a HoF collection is a bit brutal and overwhelming. In this sense, HoF is more like grindcore bands such as Napalm Death than other punk bands.

Punk rock is simple. It also doesn't bear repeating ad infinitum. Punk bands either evolve beyond punk, break up, or become parodies of themselves. So, The Clash restyle themselves as the new Rolling Stones with updated reference points, the Sex Pistols break up, The Ramones keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. Halo of Flies had a short, intense career, a career that may have ended up completely off the radar if not for the success of the other bands on Hazelmeyer's record label. Halo of Flies is the epitome of raw, nihilistic angst, and they don't let music or musicianship stand in the way . . . more than music to represent the thing, HoF comes closer than perhaps any other band to the thing itself.

Raw, spectacular, and stripped of artifice, Halo of Flies is the ultimate punk rock band.