Moondog • Moondog and his Friends (Epic, 1953)

The Doctor is free...for the moment...and what a wonderful opportunity to wax poetic on one of New York's transient sons; Moondog. 

   Standing on the corner of 54th and 6th avenue dressed in Viking regalia, he was the oddballs oddball. An imposing blind standing with spear in hand as if to refute the 1950's workaday world. He lived on the streets for 20 of his 30 years spent in New York, but Moondog was just more than a visual oddity, he was a street musician of incredible compositional skills. Playing percussion on home made instruments, he welded the Native American drumming he heard as a child with European rounds creating something fresh.

   La Monte Young is often credited with being the father of minimalism, if that's the case then Moondog was the milkman. Both Phillip Glass and Steven Reich have sited him as a direct influence and it shows. The intricate percussion pieces of Right and Glass's repetitive keyboard figures are far close to Moondog than Young's one long note approach, yet Moondog was against minimalism.

   Recording as early as 1943 on his own private label, by 1953 he had come to release his first mainstream recording: Moondog and his Friends". At this point he was beyond a mere only in New York entity, but a well respected composer, who just happened to like living on his own terms.  The "and Friends" Lp showcases both sides of Moondog, the percussive workouts and rounds, interspersed with philosophy lessons. While on side two points to future compositions; Suites for classical strings with a underscoring of rhythmic klip klop drumming. All the while keeping things short. Rarely does a composition of his break the 10 minute mark, keeping the classical rooted in pop.

  

Please click on the review title for selected track: Suite no. 2 - First Movement in 7/4

Terry Riley • Persian Surgery Dervishes (Shanti, 1972)

There are some stars that while invisible to the naked eye, pull strings of influence still. The Dogon tribesmen for centuries swear by the (somewhat faulty) information that the Space Ark Captain Nommo gave them, and keep their hopes of a celestial world beyond this unwavering. Other stars blaze brightly in the night sky then for all it's intensity burn out, leaving vague memories, and radioactivity as a calling card. Terry Riley by the early 1970's had reached the height of his above ground carrier. He was name checked by Pete Townsend in the song Baba O' Riley, and used in it's opening bars a truncated Rainbow In Curved Air. The Soft Machine were starting to adopt the same Rainbow style of playing, and the majority of Krautrock was certainly an off spring. Perhaps Riley's popularity could be that he's the only Minimalist that understands the need for a middle eight...

   By the time the Persian Surgery Dervishes appeared in 1972 he was just about to pull the plug on his popularity, and go to India to study. Nothing he would do afterward would sound so thick or funky. Over two LP sides taken from two live performances a year apart the piece moves from musical mode to mode. One moment it's Middle Ages fugue like, slipping in bits of R & B slight of hand, only to give way to rapid fire cascades of pure Minimalism filtered through raga. The real time tape loop pulses in a way that points to a future musical style that (regretfully) he has been tied to, Techno... 

   What makes the first performance so amazing is the use of an emotion that is rarely if ever evident in Riley's work, that of menace. There is a determined presence in the playing that was foreshadowed on The Church Of Anthrax record obvious here. The endless cascading of notes never gives one time for rest, I can not stress the cold menace here. If techno is to far a stretch for you too grasp, then the next comparison would be John Carpenter, only played much better.

    Record two presents a more textured reading of the piece. Using the style of an evening raga, there is funerary air to it. Here the piece wanders, the same melody sections are used, but this time it seems that Riley is choosing what comes next.  Quiet contemplation arises between the long drawn out organ tones. The tape loop even seems to have less notes. 

   Released on the tiny label Shanti in France, this was never an easy record to find. After the first pressing, the Shanti gallery had a flood and the master tapes were damaged, resulting in no reprints. In the early 1990's a CD issue came out from Italy. This was taken from a well worn copy, with the usual pops and clicks of vinyl. Normally I wouldn't mind. There is a warmth to vinyl that CD's just haven't gotten down yet. The real shame here is the mastering. Everything is muddy. Not having heard the original, it's had to say if that's from the Shanti issue. I'm also not too sure how much I believe the lost tapes story. A few years back Sun Ra had his record from Shanti reissued and they sounded fine.

   All the sound issues aside, it's good to have this document still around showing the depth and mastery of Terry Riley before he imploded back to willed obscurity.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Persian Surgery Dervishes (performance one, part one)

Nurse With Wound / Organum • A Missing Sense / Rasa (United Dairies, 1985)

"Music to clear a room by" is how a colleague once put it. This is coming from he who is a proud owner of that record which has a rotoscoped demon baby on it's cover...Black Sabbath, ugh...and with Dio no less...

To go into the ever growing history of Nurse With Wound would be an act of futility. Organum presents the same challenge. Both are less bands than artists embracing the tenet Pop Art; brand name over identity. Nurse With Wound is really Steven Stapleton, and respectively Organum is David Jackman.

Side one is perhaps the only cover that I know of anything by Robert Ashley. Using Automatic Writing as it's base (the mumbled words, quiet organ tones), Stapleton then adds the typical NWW sound on top; abrasive scrapings, bursts of white noise, low tuba notes, and all manor of studio trickery. This piece was originally a private tape Stapleton made for himself to listen to while tripping. Automatic Writing was the only other music he could listen to in that state without feeling paranoid.

A Missing Sense has that late night feeling where ambient sounds are amplified once they are no longer competing for space. A dog barking in the distance has more dramatic implications once the din of cars, cell phone conversations, or even just the low level hum of daytime activity ceases. The listening instructions are that the piece is to be played at a very low volume. In comparison, but clearly from another dimension, Brain Eno's Discreet Music has the same request. But where Eno has you watching the afternoon drift along, A Missing Sense is not unlike that state of paranoia that Stapleton wished to escape from. Voices that are barely legible seem to come from all sides. The air is never calm, little cells of events erupt without any resolution. It's as if the negative space around us has been reviled to be full activity, unknown to the naked ear.

Organum's Rasa fills all of side two, having heaviness of a Tibetan ritual. Long drones, some sort of metallic clanging, and a whispered vocalise come at you immediately. There is no buildup here, all sense of western musical notion is dispelled. The moment the piece starts, it's all various drones; some drones are shorter, some longer. The metallics play what would be considered a solo, but even then the notion of a pre determined random even to have a conclusion must be dispersed. If this description sounds very La Monte Young, it's because it does. There is some aahhhhing in the background that comes close to Drift Study, you would think there is a sampling of the Shandar record going on.

Like almost all early Nurse With Wound releases at some point in the 1990's they were reconfigured. Some long out of print record had a few of it's tracks placed next to something also from a long out of print record and this configuration was given a new name. When A Missing Sense was reissued, the Organam piece was gone, but you got two other NWW rarities in it's place. Roughly about the same time, Jackman had started to reissue compilations (getting as far as volume two) that worked on the completion through obscurity theory. Rasa, uncredited as to it's original source was placed on Volume One.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Rasa 

Richard Wright • 1943 - 2008

Define the obvious...
it's easy - and the same could be said of the reverse. Tucked between the overt and the obscure are the things that are taken for granted. Long after I'm gone, and this blog becomes one more dead URL, musicologists of all stripes will still be arguing who was the best guitar player, composer, conductor, producer, etc. But should they delve further, will they ask who was the best psychedelic keyboard player...I understand that"best" is subjective. Everyone's favorite is the best, that's why you prefer them. Yet think for a moment, who really even qualifies as a psychedelic keyboardist?...

I had to think for a while, and even then I only came up with a hand full; Sun Ra, Terry Riley, and Dave Michaels certainly were on that list, and sitting in an ever changing pecking order was Wright.

If Pink Floyd had a defining sound outside of Syd Barret's non repeatable guitar chords - then Richard Wright's keys were the perfect foil, adding texture and drone to hold it all together. After Barrett's departure, the sound of the band was moving towards a more melancholic atmosphere and Wright had come to define that sound. If anyone should ever ask you who this Wright was, please ignore the urge to play "Great Gig In The Sky", and play instead Mother Fore from the Atom Heart Mother Suite, or even the whole of Echoes. The spidery opening piano note processed through the Leslie speaker, the Stax church organ, to the pieces mournful coda, all that was him. This is not to suggest that he outshone the other band members - it's quite the contrary. Where most musicians have a disastrous habit of over playing (paging Mr. Emerson), Wright seemed to stay in the background, but all the while possessing an ability to draw attention. Leaving the listener the choice to wander in and out of the music. Later albums by Pink Floyd were less sonically adventurous but Wright's playing was still one of incredible timing and restraint.

Please click on the obituary title for selected track: Sysyphus Parts 4 and 5

10/22/08 Addendum: I had Sysyphus as the review track, but for what ever reason I am now able to upload what I had originally wanted; Love theme version 4. This is from the ill fated Pink Floyd soundtrack for Zabriski Point, and it showcases Wrights playing beautifully.