PLAYING CATCH-UP

I was cleaning today and noticed a small stack of CDs I'd never bothered to listen to during '06, just kinda filed 'em away when they arrived. So I popped a couple of 'em in the player. The first was Whit Dickey's Sacred Ground (Clean Feed). This is the third album Dickey’s done for this Portuguese label, and I can't even remember the names of the other two, never mind what they sounded like. They all have the same personnel, more or less: Roy Campbell on trumpet, Rob Brown on alto sax, Joe Morris on bass (on one of the other two, there was a different bassist, so Morris played guitar), and Dickey on drums. Five or even four years ago, I'd have bent over backwards to find something nice or at least encouraging to say about a record like this, but I don't have it in me anymore to cheerlead for guys who are running on fumes, creatively. (If they're not, they're jacking off just to get the session fee and the few hundred guaranteed sales, and that's maybe even worse.) Can free jazz be formulaic and faceless? You bet your ass, and this is the proof.

I got better results with Catacombs' In The Depths Of R'lyeh (Moribund Cult). This came out in February, but I didn't pay any attention at the time, for reasons I can’t accurately recall right now. (It might have been because the label sent me some goofy solo-black-metal stuff at the same time – Fear Of Eternity, Striborg – and I probably couldn’t muster the energy to slot one more of their offerings into the player). It's doom metal at its most ponderous - basically, the tempo of early Swans with a lot more sustain in the guitar lines - and the vocals go down into Cookie Monster's sub-basement until they don't even sound like a human voice, let alone discernible words. Six songs in 72 minutes and some change (Track Two, “Dead Dripping City,” runs close to 17 minutes all by itself). It's not as good as Ahab's The Call Of The Wretched Sea, but it’s pretty good, and the title of the last track made me laugh – "Awakening Of The World's Doom (Reprise)."

RESCUED FROM THE COLLAPSING TOWER

I grabbed just under 60 CDs & DVDs from Tower on 4th & Broadway in Manhattan, two days before they went under - most everything in the place was down to 80 percent off, and it was pretty sparse, but there were still some things worth grabbing if you really knew what you were looking for. I got, among other things, the latest Kinky album, Joselo from Cafe Tacuba's second solo disc Lejos, a really nice 2CD Table of the Elements compilation, and Priestess's Hello Master. How did I miss this album when it came out earlier this year? I guess it didn't get much play on Pitchfork or ILM. Anyway, they're four Canadians playing retro-styled hard rock - mostly 70s, with a little 80s in the solos. They're on RCA, for some reason I can't figure out; they belong on Tee Pee. (The disc in fact was initially released on a Canadian indie in '05.) Big riffs, fleet enough guitar work, thudding rhythm section, a more than decent bawler up front. Guest organ on "Lay Down" brings 'em close to Uriah Heep territory. As the old saying goes, "Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." I figured I'd like this as soon as I saw the cover*, so I grabbed it for just over three bucks, and so far I like it just fine.


*External link because I'm posting from a laptop and this browser won't let me use Blogger's image-embedding capabilities.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

No, not Pazz & Jop. Voice jazz critic Francis Davis's first (maybe) annual jazz critics' poll, in which I participated with somewhere around 25-30 other writers, mostly NYC-based but some from other parts of the country, too. Here's the breakdown; Ornette Coleman won in a landslide, as he should have. Davis has an essay analyzing it all, while giving himself space for honorable mentions (which we mere voters didn't get, otherwise I'd have mentioned Kenny Garrett's Beyond The Wall and Odyssey The Band's Back In Time, both omissions I regret). N.B.: I'm the guy who said "hate jazz vocals, always have" on my ballot. You can see that ballot, along with most of the other contributors' ballots, here.

Speaking of critics' polls, how fucked is it that Celtic Frost's Monotheist made it to #32 on The Wire's Top 50 of 2006? I would have almost bet money that I was the only person who voted for it, but maybe someone else (Edwin Pouncey, I'm guessing) did, too.

THIS MONTH IN THE WIRE

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH
Twelve Tone Tales Volume One
Twelve Tone Tales Volume Two
Intakt
A confession: I don't understand twelve-tone theory. I looked it up on Wikipedia once, but by the time I got to the retrograde inversion, I was already yawning. And while this may well mark me as barely one step above a bug-eating ape, I don't care. Neither should any prospective listener allow self-doubt to keep them from exploring this pair of solo piano CDs. They sound great whether you approach after years of brow-furrowing study, or hear them after being raised to adulthood alone, in an unlit basement with absolutely no instruction in rudimentary human social skills, let alone the niceties of improvised and 20th century classical musics.

Schlippenbach sticks to keys and pedals throughout; no string-plucking or foreign objects to throw off anybody less than fully versed in avant garde pianistics. Occasional high-speed workouts like "LOK 03," which closes Volume One, are balanced by the title track and its three variations - each is as graceful and beautiful an exercise in balance as a cat crossing a ladder between two skyscrapers. The standards that close the set offer a 20 minute comedown from the occasionally stark heights scaled during the previous 90-100 minutes. They also serve as reminders that Schlippenbach can swing pretty hard when he wants to.

CONRAD SCHNITZLER
Trigger Trilogy
Important
Conrad Schnitzler began his musical career in Tangerine Dream, though he left after their debut CD, forming Kluster with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. He quit that group after three albums, and since the mid-70s he's been the creepy guy down in the basement, flinging cassettes and CD-Rs this way and that. A lot of his releases have titles that begin with "Con," but there's no scam to his scheme; he's just the Bartleby of the avant garde. Tour? Do press? Collaborate? He would prefer not to.

This triple helping of untitled electronica comes in eye-popping packaging. Each disc, if you believe the press release, was composed using slightly different methodology, but given the sameness of the CD layouts and the lack of information included with the item itself, it's safe to assume the sounds, not the means of their creation, are the point.

Disc One, "Solo Rhythmics," features Techno tracks so minimal they make Basic Channel sound like Gamble & Huff. Each thumps and hisses, crackles and zooms and eventually hums away into the void, subtly filtered into the next. Disc Two, "Mix Solos," is less pummeling and more interactive, the tracks blending into each other more seamlessly, even as they differ in style. Some sound like burbling and hissing 70s movie soundtracks, while others seem to come from a decade later. The stylistic shifting, between discs and from track to track, give the music a somewhat timeless feel, as long as one understands time to have stopped around 1985.

Disc Three, "Con-Cert," includes some eerily Autechre-esque moments, as well as some stuff that could have been culled from his earliest released recordings. That's the trouble with hermits - they tend not to notice that the world has kept on turning while they've been inside. Still, each of these CDs has an unsettling quality that, over the long haul of repeated listening, turns into something a lot like fun. Whether the maker intended his product to be greeted by anything so vulgar as listener enjoyment is a question destined to go unanswered, though.

OBLIGATION-FREE YEAR-END LISTENING

In the past couple of days, I've downloaded a bunch of records that have been highly rated by others throughout the year but which never landed in my PO box or crossed my desk. I guess I'm gonna spend some time next week listening to them. But the great thing is, I don't have to write about them, I just have to listen and either enjoy or not. Pure civilian consumption of music - a pleasure I haven't allowed myself much of lately.

My recent acquisitions:

Project Pat, Crook By Da Book: The Fed Story (gave this one its first run last night; it's great)
Z-Ro, I'm Still Livin' (checked this one out yesterday too, and was kinda disappointed but will give it another shot because the first song, "City Streets," is fucking incredible)
Blut Aus Nord, Mort and The Work Which Transforms God
Spektr, The Near Death Experience
Scott Walker, The Drift (I listened to the first song from this already, and I'm not sure I'm going to wind up liking it - the musical backdrop is really cool, sort of between "good" Jandek and a slightly mellower Abruptum, but the man's voice is just unbelievably annoying, both because of how mannered it is and because of his actual tonality.)