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.

the FUGS • the FUGS (ESP-DISK, 1966)

We are a country of heathens...well, we always were...but now we have become the something worse; clucking our tongue at the sight of genitalia, and jerking off with a free hand. How did we become so joyless? Wasn't there a period of general hilarity only some 30 odd years ago?

One of those relics is the second album by The Fugs. Titled simply the FUGS the advancement from the first record is evident. Losing the Holy Modal Rounders Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver were now becoming, with the aid of some ESPdisk's better side men a formidable entity, one that was not afraid to show it's collective intelligentsia coated in pure greasy teenage pimple cream. Songs about Group Gropes and Doin' Allright ("I get more pussy than a Spade") sit along the political aggression of Kill For Peace, and the gentile sadness of Morning Morning. This song shows the same direction that The Velvets would take a year later with Sunday Morning, but where Reed's poetry is based on simple street wise rhyming schemes, Sanders and Kupferberg use the meter of classical Greek poetry. Both band came from the fertile cesspool that was the Lower East Side in the 1960's. Some how even though they were locals, they couldn't have any more been from two different worlds. The Velvets being sexually ambivalent with an scoring of violence, and the Fugs goofy (with out being hippy dippy) and decidedly straight.

Lyrically a reference point that modern readers can use is the (loathsome) Bloodhound Gang. But thank God that the Fugs had a brain. One that could point out the hypocrisy of "normal" society and the lurid mind that the Counter Culture would swear they left behind.

The last track gives a glimpse at what would be the pinnacle of the Fugs recording carrier; "It crawled into my hand, honest", done for Reprise in 1968. Virgin Forrest is a Naked Lunchesque suite of seemingly random yet interconnected routines. Sound effects give way to Ovidian proclamations of sex. Before you can get worked up from the command to Aphrodite to take the penis, Tarzan breaks the mood explaining basic fucking to a noisy jungle, in appreciation come a chorus of turkey squawks. At some point the Photo Falling, Word Falling, Breakthrough In The Grey Room is quoted and the mind is clearly destroyed. In requiem delicate melody is rolled in, and logically a rousing hymn of Death Stay Thy Phantoms closes the cut up. Proving once and for all this world is hilarious, but man, it has to be taken seriously...

Fleshing out the CD reissue on Fugs Records are two live tracks recorded in 1967 and three from the aborted album for Atlantic. The live tracks are so-so and are nice to have for historic value. The same could not be said for the unreleased material, beside the reworking of Carpe Diem from the first record, and the embryonic take of Wide Wide River, is the unreleased Nameless Voices Crying For Kindness that's amazing in it's deceptiveness.

It's practically a discourse on the self, it's place in the universe, and purpose. To keep things from getting too dry, there's some references to fucking and it's all scored to a Doors back beat...Socrates enters the Hollywood Bowl stage, behind him the band, dressed in paisley togas tune up...he leans over the lip of the stage zeroing in on a honeydew of a teenybopper asking the nubile girl seated in the front row "How are ya? Where'd yah go to skewll? Do you know where the seat of man's soul is located ?" She faints dead away, her mind and pussy wet...both moist with ideas and possibilities...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Kill For Peace

Created by Bruce Haack • The Electric Lucifer (Columbia, 1970)

There are some holly grails a mere mention will send an obsessive nut packing his bag, to mythic plateaus where it's said in hushed whisper there are man eating trees. Or under the ground, looking for tombs, only to be rewarded with finding a room strewn with junk and artifact alike. Such is the makeup of this doctor, but my objects are to be found not in the Artic deserts but flea markets, combing through crates that smell of stale basement and forgotten purchases.

It was at a then local flea market where under the broiling summer heat of 1988 I stumbled across this oddity. Sandwiched between Boston Pops and Eagles records was this Milton Glaser like cover. It showed Jesus as green skinned Imp, his sides flanked by mock demons. The title alone was worth more than a passing curiosity: The Electric Lucifer"...At that point of the late 80's most older people were tossing out the contents of their youth. Beside the endless stream of CSN&Y, Derrick and the Dominoes and the like, Switched On style records were showing up. I had been burned enough times that I was getting wary of records that featured the Moog. Checking the back cover and it's nearly impenetrable liner notes, I discovered no cover songs. Good sign number 1. From what I could make out from the liner notes, the album was attempting to paint Lucifer as his first incarnation - The Light Bearer. Fortuitous omen number 2.

The tipping factor? It was a white label promo cover, with boxes suggesting to DJ's what tracks to play...and none of them has been checked...

As I wrote earlier, I'm not a fan of Switched On LP's. For the most part they become a listening affair punctuated with observations along the lines of "Look! The lead line in Winchester Cathedral is being played with multi timbre", or "so that's not a bass"? I prefer electronic records where something new is being tried, and that's exactly what I got.

Straight off the bat with the first cut of the album opens with this carnival spook house song, clownishly cavorting in. The singing voice vocodered to almost unrecognizably. Images of Betty Boop trapped in a haunted Bakelite radio, besieged by demonic cathodes.

From here the LP straddles the fence of serious electronics and a children's record. Infectious melodies are broken up by blasts of heavy echo and sine waves. And why wouldn't this all sound like a Freak Out for the Sesame Street set? Unknown to me at the time, Haack made a living doing children's records. Years later those LP's were reissued and they have the same quality as Electric Lucifer. The main message is think for your self, rebel from constraints, do your own thing. All the things Anton LeVey suggested, even with the same Sunday Funnies take on the Horned One.

My then room mate (I have mentioned him before, he's the one who got the hot foot while sleeping) came in to my room wide eyed and smiling. "What is this"?! It fell out of the realm of what I knew, I didn't know. At that point in history, ESPdisk sides while somewhat obscure were pretty easy to obtain, and concurrently Nonesuch electronic records had elements of adopting some rock music but never came close to this. This was pop music for a brightly colored Will To Power future. The room mate and I marveled at the cover with it's promo slick, could this really have been released on a major label?

As the LP played on, a uncredited male voice doing his best Jim Morrison psychedelic croon, adding another layer of accessibility. I guess Satan was really trying his best to convert the teeny boppers...

Like most records of the late 60's and early 70's, the Vietnam war had to be addressed. Used as a template for art, here it's simply called "War". Perhaps the heaviest track, it starts as a break neck Walter Carlos fugue, and then for further comedic affect the focus shifts to a lopsided military march, punctuated with machine gun fire. Eventually the Musique Concret is stopped short. A child intones "I don't wanna play any more", then fades out as a mournful dirge / lullaby.

Even with the Switched on Bach move used in the above track, there really isn't any reference point for what your hearing. Just like Trout Mask Replica is of it's time but from an alternate universe, Electric Lucifer has that same feel. At one point a track called Super Nova condenses A Rainbow In Curved Air to five minutes, but even then it seems like it's coming from left field.

With such an auspicious introduction to the mainstream what could follow? Haack had already been a guest on quiz shows, debuting his latest home made Synths that plays a persons electro magnetic aura to the delight of the studio audiences. He'd composed pop songs for Theresa Brewer, did music for commercials, and incidental music for theater. The world with it's newly turned on ears would fall at his feet...no...he sunk back into undeserved obscurity.

Bruce died in 1988 (ironically the year I found this, one of my favorite records). In between the year of The Electric Lucifer and his death, to pay the bills he made more children's records, along with two more parts to Electric Lucifer. The history is a little sketchy as to where the second part (called Book Two) released posthumously a few years back falls. There seems to have been two Book Two.

By now, the children's records have a harsher edge to them, and the Book Two is down right bitter and angry. The cartoon music is still the bedrock, but the words are now from the point of a leering Pit Boss.

And perhaps rightfully so...Reagan and Bush I were invoking the other end of the dark forces; strength without a hint of compassion. Children's minds in school were not being engaged, but merely numbed with repetition. The smart ones to the office, the dumb ones to the front lines, and the odd? Marginalized...

The Omni Group has reissued Electric Lucifer with a alternate tale of the opening track, and half hour interview with Haack on Canadian Radio promoting the LP. Here he goes on at length for his love for rock music, especially The Beatles and The Moody Blues.

Do your mind and soul a favor and go by this CD. Perhaps it'll remind you of a time when evil meant just rebellion, and good was not an excuse for a totalitarian movement.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Program Me

Sun Ra And His Solararkestra • Other Planes Of There (Saturn, 1965, 1966, or 1967)

Is that the past I am viewing from the spaceships porthole? The inhabitants of the planet we have landed on are upright crab-men. Clothed in Neanderthal loin cloths, they are armed with laser shooting spears...you'll forgive me, I was looking through some old photos I had taken...wonderful times the 1990's...

There are places in the galaxy where the primitive and modern rest side by side. How often have I heard the drunken party guest mutter "Ape with a microwave", only to be reassured by the host that it was just a general observation. I shouldn't take it personally...

Sun Ra understood these contradictions. Listening to the title track of Other Planes of There ones ear has to quickly reassemble it's inner calendar. While the album as a whole is a study in contrast, it's the opening that embodies the concept.

Opening with a blast of dark chords , not unlike modern 20Th century classical, quickly it shifts to lopsided jazz consisting of sharp piano chords and reeds. Meandering in this mode for a while we are gradually taken to some sort of ancient Melody. Oboe painting a picture of the Serengeti. Not content to stay too long there, Ra's piano starts rumbling low end notes bringing us back to modern times. Content to shift from focus to focus, like most Ra compositions it ends when he's run out of notes.

Side two uses the same floor plan, only breaking the focus up into separate pieces. Quietly skittering in on sparse snare drums, tapping out a rhythm that seems more like a lead line, Sound Spectra/Spec Sket is then married to hunting call horns bathed in reverb. From there the maelstrom of side one resumes.

Next comes the tack Sketch. Duping the listener with what would seem like a normal swing style played by the piano, it's John Gilmore's sax that ups the oddball factor. What is the more Fortian moment here? The presentation of swing as a primitive movement, or Gilmore solo that sounds like he's playing along to a radio broadcast heard through the wall of the next room? The sonic slight of hand is the reverb. Used a cloaking device, it starts to muddy the sax to the point where the treatment becomes an instrument in it's self. Then jarringly shut off, the sax appears almost out of nowhere.

Sandwiched between the Sketch and the mammoth album closer Spiral Galaxy, is the aptly titled Pleasure. Languidly drifting in a sea of bowed bass and light piano, we are given another example of a sax solo that plays around the tune rather than join in.

By albums end, Spiral Galaxy show us that the tempo of the Heavens can be marked in 3/4 time. An ancient sounding military precision is kept here, framing a fussy sounding woodwind section - not unlike a tornado visible on the horizon. Jabs of shrill oboe crackling over piano.

Reverb is heavily placed on the woodwind segments, only to be quickly withdrawn for the other instruments to come through. All the while the 3/4 is being kept, but with small additional beats, shifting the focus. Just as it seems that it's winding down, some new squall of sound arises and your off again. Eventually it does end, but not in grotesque crescendo but with the tapping of some percussion. You've arrived safely back to the present time. Ra and Arkestra have taken you through various time shifts, and you barely moved an inch.

Like most Sun Ra recordings, it's a little hard to pin down the where and whens. While this session was recorded in 1964/65, it may not have seen print until 1966, or 1967. By then Ra had moved the Arkestra further in to space, employing the Moog as his main instrument. So a piano based record seems even further antiquated.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Sound Spectra / Spec Sket

The Advancement • The Advancement (Philips, 1969)

The Doctor is sick...not only a fine book by Anthony Burgess, but a personal observation...remember faithful readers; if it's hot outside, eating pushcart chicken might not be such a good idea.....

So here I am, cooped up at home with not much to do. No way am I venturing out to see any colleges or patients. Then what better way to pass the time, then wax poetic about this fantastic LP...

The Advancement were the cream of two combs; Lou Kabok and Hal Gordon from Garbo Szabos band, and Lynn Blessing from Bill Plummers Cosmic Brotherhood. Rounding out the Advancement are a a few other players of note: Colin Bailey, Richie Thompson, Art Johnson, and David Kinzie. These members are a sort of B Wrecking Crew.

Jazz in the mid to late 60's was akin to a rudderless ship. There was no clear idea as where to go. The rock crowd was now accepting of longer song form. Odd meters and noise had been appropriated. What once seemed musically non conformist was now coming out of the tiny speakers of any teenager's stereo. But like any American art movement it did what it did best...amalgamate...

Beatles covers would sit next to reworking of Bop standards with new names. Records were packaged in the latest colors. Whole Jazz departments at major record labels were saved by having photos of the band members wearing Nehru Jackets...Predictably the results were often awful. Note for note readings of Robbie Krieger guitar solos, drained of all their inventiveness, were tacked onto the umpteenth reading of Light My Fire...but every once in a while something like The Advancement would come out. For something that was released in the dark days of 60's Jazz, there isn't a cover tune on the whole LP. At most, two tracks come a little too close to plagiarism; Fall Out is practically a Doors track, only without Morrison belching his way through the vocals. The other, Hobo Express, is reworking of Van Dyke Parks reading of Donovan's Colors.

Elsewhere on the LP the mood is generally laid back, and would not sound out of place in a Hollywood psychedelic movie. The opening track "Juliet", brought to mind immediately AIP's The Dunwitch Horror. It's wistful air undercut with melancholy... and in counter balance, Stone Folk is a sort of hip Gregorian chant, The guitar solo panned from speaker to speaker.

The playing is nimble throughout. Everyone is in their element. No embarrassing moments of playing the new sound without understanding it.

Fallout has added this to their continuing list of excellent reissues. Once again, it's another recording taken from an LP, but the sound is clear. Kudos also to them for taking care in packaging the music with it's moody cover intact.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Stone Folk

Cosmic Eye • Dream Sequence (EMI, 1972)

I remember once, when I was a young intern, after a night of chemical studies that I had stayed up so late that I saw the sun rise. Realizing that it was way past my bedtime, I bid my fellow students (ironically) a good evening and drifted home. After arriving home, I climbed the stairs and went to bed at 8 o' clock. A few minutes later my eyes popped open I saw that the clock hands had barely moved a inch...what a disappointment, my blasted insomnia had returned, and here I was in a false state of being awake. All I wanted was some rest. There the morning sun crept in the sky, another Summer day about to begin...and then it hit me, it wasn't 8:15 AM, but PM...I had slept twelve hours, and it only felt like five minutes...

Cosmic Eye's album has that same affect. I had somehow found this album, or at least a track, on line. This persons blog was full of Bollywood and Sitarpoitation tracks. For the life of me I can't recall how I got there. As I heard Sequence 9, I was struck how similar it was to George Harrison's Wonderwall Soundtrack. It was from that likeness, that I had conjectured the music had to be from the 60's.

As luck would have it, I found a CD of the album at Kim's St. Marks. Not too cheaply I might add, but that one track with it's running time of under two minutes was so intriguing. Like I had said, it reminded me of Wonderwall, with it's juxtapositions of jazz and Indian music.

Playing it immediately when I got home, the music was so intense I could do nothing else. I was listening to music that was in collage form, a melancholic Procol Harum like tune would give way to a restrained free jazz work out, from there that in turn that blended a spy music like theme with traditional Sitar music...How is it other Psych-Heads have not raved about this? And then I looked at the copyright date, disbelieving my eyes...it read 1972...that explained it all. Most Psych fans are forgiving of of certain musical styles coming from other countries at later dates, but not England. If this came from Germany, or even France lets say, high praise would be heaped on it. But it hails from England, when Sitars , flanging, and artistically treated echo, were well past their hip sell by date.

It seems that this album was the brain child of one Alan D'Silva. He was noted for playing jazz in a raga style, but much later than Garbor Szabo. D'Silvas first album is from 1969, and he recorded up until his death in 1976. Yet I cant help but think this was perhaps his first recorded work. In 1969 this would still sound relatively fresh, but by 1972, very much like yesterdays papers.

There's very little information about D'Silva online. I was able to find a pitifully uninformative web site run by his family. They mention there the CD issue, and it being a bootleg of poor quality. I've listened to this CD numerous times, and found nothing wrong with the sound. Unlike most legitimate reissues where you can tell the music was remastered from a vinyl copy, here everything is surprisingly clear. I'm not sure how easy it will be to get this CD, but it's well worth hunting down.

Please click on the review title for selected track: 4

Kawabata Makoto • Jellyfish Rising (Funfundvierzig, 2005)

Just as much as the lateness of the hour affects what I decide to listen to (The Madcap Laughs seems awkward at 3:00 pm, but brilliant at 12:30 am), weather can also play a part. Temperature rises and out goes the Minimalism, or anything with too many notes...so, what to play when everything is a bother? Somehow Jellyfish Rising is an amalgamation of those two styles and fits perfectly.

Here Makoto is in full Gamelan music mode. Shifting tones from the guitar cascade over repetitive figures. It never really goes anywhere, but there is a feeling of sonic rushing around. Think of this as a more gentile version of The Monkey Chant, and you'll have a beginning.

On the occasions I was subjected to The Grateful Dead, or read various band members name dropping composers, I could never figure out what the big deal was. I'm sure Garcia must have had a voracious ear, but it never seemed to inform his fingers. And with Kawabata, it's the complete opposite. He wears his influence on his sleeve. When he's not destroying his guitar a'la numerous guitar Gods, or thumbing his nose at sainted rock albums with Acid Mother's Temple, there is a serious side that comes out. It's in these albums where he shines brightest. Yes, he's playing here like Steven Reich filtered through Jerry Garcia, and the cover is a hideous throw back to New Age album graphics, but the playing so beautifully becomes a oxymoron - simple complexity. The two tracks on the CD never get mired in flashy playing. It's all pulsing and flanging, no real guitar solos. Repetition is the key here, and it's in that you find yourself with room to think. Where albums like this tend to get bland in their desire to be cosmic or even worse, soothing, here there is no down side.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Astral Aurelia Aurita Laavarek