Irreducible: Colossamite live (finally)

I've been on an Alice Coltrane kick lately (working my way through the Impulses right now) and also going back through some of the late Coltrane material from when Alice was in the band (Stellar Regions, Expression, etc.). It occurred to me — esp. given how much great footage there is out there of the classic quartet — what a huge loss it is that there's no high-quality extended footage of that final group with Alice, Pharoah, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali. (This brief and fragmentary footage from Newport '66 is all we've got, as far as I know.)

The truth is that, in the YouTube era, we as fans are incredibly spoiled, in that we can dial up pretty much whatever we want at any moment, whether it's the Cecil Taylor Unit live in Paris in 1969, or Zeppelin live at a tiny teen club in Denmark that same year. It's incalculable how much this circumstance has enriched my musical understanding in the past 10 years or so, giving me the chance to lay eyes on countless bands — from Last Exit to '84 Black Flag, the Stanier-Bogdan-era Helmet lineup and Sabbath in their absolute prime — that whether due to age, geography or circumstance, I never got to see in person.

That collective archive extends about as far into the underground as you want to go — all the way to, say, a 1996 Karate show in my hometown of KC, where I was one of maybe 30 people in the audience. But somehow some bands seem to have slipped through the cracks, and for the longest time, it seemed like Colossamite was one of those. If you've heard of them at all, chances are you're about as obsessed as I am; if not, you're in the great majority. Though they put out two mind-searing releases on the great and relatively visible Skin Graft label in the late '90s — All Lingo's Clamor and Economy of Motion — they're barely remembered these days, even among those who might be die-hard fans of prior or later bands involving some of the same musicians (Dazzling Killmen, Deerhoof, etc.). 

Among a few friends and me, these records quickly became legendary for their combination of the calculated fury of bands like the Killmen and craw with the chaotic blurt of free improvisation and hints of esoteric and offbeat humor. In short, in my eyes, this was some of the most challenging, original and inspired music of its time. But the band sort of came and went and I never found myself near any of their performances during their too-brief lifespan.

All throughout the YouTube era, as the fossil record, so to speak, grew more and more comprehensive, I kept waiting for the day when some Colossamite footage might surface. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Colossamite guitar masterminds John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez — who first came on my radar via their participation in this band and then went on to well-deserved renown as members of Deerhoof — for my Heavy Metal Bebop series in 2012, we talked at length about Colossamite (see here and here), and Ed mentioned to me that he knew of a single show that had been recorded, and that he thought he might have a VHS copy stashed away somewhere. Well, apparently the person who filmed that gig recently dug it up and deemed it worthy of posting because — as Ed has just informed me in an email — it's now sitting there on YouTube for all to see. 

 

As I type this, I'm only about halfway through it but I wanted to take a second to document that feeling of joy and enrichment that comes with laying eyes on something you truly never thought you'd see, of witnessing a band in performance that you assumed you'd only ever hear. I tell you, friends, it's as awesome as I could have ever hoped for. Considering the vintage, the quality is excellent and, though John is sadly out of frame for a lot of it, the video really clues you in to what a fearsome organism this band truly was. 

Being a drummer myself, and having had the good fortune to see Colossamite vocalist-guitarist Nick Sakes play many times in later years in the outstanding bands Sicbay and Xaddax and guitarists Dieterich and Rodriguez play together in the mighty Deerhoof and separately in a handful of projects, a major focus for me watching this is the drummer, Chad Popple. Chad has been (at least to me) a bit of a shadowy figure in the years since Colossamite ended. From what I understand, he's been living in Europe since that time, and though he's been active this whole time in various experimental/uncategorizable contexts (including the great and underrated Gorge Trio with Dieterich and Rodrigez), he's been a bit harder to keep tabs on than his ex-Colossamite bandmates. Anyway, my first exposure to the Colossamite records came before I really had a grasp of the free-jazz/free-improv continuum but over the years, especially as I heard drummers like Han Bennink, Tony Oxley and Paul Lovens, it started to become clearer to me how ingenious Popple's style really was: the way he combined the startling aggression of the best post-hardcore and metal drummers of the '90s with a turbulent flow that seemed to have more in common with the Euro improv greats mentioned above or, say, Drumbo circa Lick My Decals Off, Baby. (Regarding the latter quality, it's interesting to note that my old friend Kevin Shea seems to have been thinking along similar lines around the same time, as heard in Storm and Stress and, later, Coptic Light.)

Anyway, all of these qualities discussed above, namely both Popple's terrifying force and precision and his warped, destabilizing eccentricity, are on full display in this video. And all of it is also evident in the entire band. From what I can tell, the material comes mostly from Economy of Motion, so we get the diseased lurch of "Mr. Somebody Does Something" along with the surrealist spoken word of "The Eagle and the Seal" and the tense build of "Arkansas Halo." (Listening further, I'm thrilled to hear "No Entran Moscas" from All Lingo's, with its endlessly unspooling chorus riff.) It's such a pleasure to watch the band tear into every aspect of this material, absolutely raging through the loud moments and relishing the wobble and fragility of the freer passages, and then smiling and joking nonchalantly between songs. 

I love how willing Colossamite were to send their audience mixed signals, never aligning themselves with any subset of metal or post-hardcore or the conventions of free improv or of more well-established avant-rock practices. They were just a thrillingly weird band that honed a beautifully organic writing style that implored the listener at every second to buckle up for what might be coming next. In my own mind, they certainly helped to redefine what a "band" could be, and helped to further drive home the idea that some of the music that would hit me the hardest and stick with me the longest would be the most personal, the least relatable to known styles or pursuits, but at the same time, the most carefully and meticulously engineered. I'm reminded a bit here of something that Dazzling Killmen bassist Darin Gray said to me when looking back on first encountering craw in the early '90s:

[From a 2015 Noisey interview; emphasis mine]

"…I think probably at the time, live, [craw] was the most unique band I had ever heard. There really isn't another band like craw. They're a completely unique entity. And I remember just thinking, like, 'Wow, someone has worked as hard as we have on a completely different thing.' It wasn't that craw sounded anything like Dazzling Killmen, and quite the contrary, really nothing like it. I could tell, I could hear that they had honed it and worked on it to the highest level. And at the time, there weren't a whole lot of bands out there touring that were like that, that had honed something to that high of a level. … The only reason I felt that they did hone their craft the way they did was because they felt they had to; they felt compelled to be great. And to be the best they could be. And for no other reason. There was no gain. There was absolutely nothing to gain, and I could tell they knew that." 

I feel the same things watching this, and am reminded why I was so drawn to this area of music — whatever you want to call it — in my youth and still am now. There was a compulsion to be great coupled with, not a desire to alienate any potential audience exactly, but a distinct refusal to pander to one either, to put up familiar signposts of genre that might orient a casual listener. If you were dealing with this music, either on record as I was, or in a tiny venue, as was the case for these lucky attendees at this Knoxville, TN, Colossamite gig more than 20 years ago, you were dealing with it full-on. That, to me, is one of the great pleasures of underground music — that you might be standing in a room with, say, 15 other people and — as the idle drift of a pre-gig lull snaps suddenly into the crush and overstimulation of the show itself — suddenly have your consciousness forever altered by some shockingly powerful and carefully honed statement. 

I love bigger shows; I love more universal and relatable aesthetics (in addition to the Coltranes, I've been listening to a ton of late '70s and early '80s AC/DC lately); but I will always hold a special place in my heart for a band like Colossamite, who developed and refined such a personal language among themselves that it's essentially irreducible and incomparable to anything other than itself. As it is on the records, that achievement is frozen in time on this live video, and I'm thrilled that even after all this time, it still feels utterly alien, invigorating, and alive.

Join us: Skryptor's first shows

This coming weekend marks the live debut of a new band I'm in called Skryptor. The lineup consists of Tim Garrigan on guitar, David McClelland on bass and myself on drums, playing music we've written as a group, plus (so far) one cover.

This is a significant project for me, and not just because I'm excited about how the songs are shaping up. If my 15-year-old self could somehow read the first paragraph of this post, his mind would be blown. Tim (formerly of Dazzling Killmen, You Fantastic! and other projects) and Dave (also of craw) are musicians I've looked up to for more than two decades. It's no exaggeration to say that the music each of these men helped to create in the early '90s significantly influenced the direction of my life from that point on — as a musician, I consider myself to be a product of an unofficial movement they were each an integral part of: progressive Midwestern post-hardcore, if you want to put a name on it (see also: Season to Risk, Colossamite, Cheer-Accident and many others). I've collaborated with both of them before — with Dave in the band Bat Eats Plastic (originally known as Today) and with Tim backing him in his solo singer-songwriter work — but never at the same time, and never as what I'd consider to be a mature (or at least maturing) musician who has significant experiences and ideas of his own to bring to the table.

For a little preview of the music — concise yet complex instrumental rock that falls somewhere between prog and punk, and sounds (to me, at least) not all that much like anything any of the three of us have done before — check out the clips posted on our Facebook page.

Here's all the info on our first two shows, taking place in Kingston, NY, on Saturday and in Queens on Sunday. Joining us for both will be the awesome Xaddax, featuring Tim's old Dazzling Killmen bandmate Nick Sakes. Ultraam — a psych-meets-jazz improv band featuring members of Mercury Rev, Luna and Trans Am — will top the Kingston bill and maniacal local avant-death-metalists Pyrrhon (featuring onetime DFSBP contributor Doug Moore) will headline in Queens. More info below and at the FB event pages I've linked to.

Saturday, March 4
@ BSP Lounge, Kingston

Ultraam
Xaddax
Skryptor

9pm, $8 

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Sunday, March 5
@ Trans-Pecos, Queens

Pyrrhon
Skryptor
Xaddax

8pm, $10

Lately

A few recent and future happenings in my world:

*There is a new Aa album coming out in November on the Brooklyn label Fire Talk. I've been working with this band on and off for something like 11 years, and my collaboration with founding member Aron Wahl stretches back even further. In the past, I've played more of a sideman role in Aa, but this time out, I'm more creatively invested: I helped to compose and arrange the music on ZebrAa along with current ringleader John Atkinson, fellow longtime/sometime member Mike Colin and more recent recruit Julian Bennett Holmes. John and Mike are old friends, and Julian a newer one — it's been a pleasure honing this body of work live and in the practice room with these guys during the past few years. I feel that songs like first single "Trash Hits" (see below) add meaningfully to an already rich catalog. There is talk of an NYC record-release show in December, so stay tuned.



*Also out in November, via the venerable, long-running Skin Graft label, is a new deluxe reissue of Dazzling Killmen's Face of Collapse, one of my favorite albums, full stop. (As mentioned previously on DFSBP, the LP's centerpiece, "In the Face of Collapse," is the song that inspired this blog's name.) I'm proud to have contributed a new oral history of the record to the package, a document that draws on interviews I conducted with all four band members earlier this year. Both collectively and individually, these men — Blake Fleming, Tim Garrigan, Darin Gray and Nick Sakes — are musical heroes of mine. If you're not familiar with their work, Face of Collapse is the place to start. Preview and preorder the new edition at Bandcamp.

Related: I'm working with Tim in a new-ish band called Skryptor, also featuring David McClelland of craw. We've got a good amount of music written — which, I'm excited to say, sounds very little like anything any of us have done with our other projects — and I hope we'll be performing before too long. More news when I have it.

*I also contributed interview-based liner notes to two other recent releases: the Cookers' The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart on Smoke Sessions and the Jim Black Trio's The Constant on Intakt. I love both of these groups and would have been tuning in to either album as a fan even if I weren't involved behind the scenes, so these gigs were an absolute pleasure.

*It was a thrill to attend and review Cat Stevens' first NYC show in 40 years on behalf of Rolling Stone. A truly legendary artist who, I was happy to find, can still astonish in the live setting.

*Likewise, I loved speaking with Maynard James Keenan about music, comedy, family, the military and many other topics touched on in his upcoming biography, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things.

Beyond that, I've been working hard at the day gig; spending time with my wonderful girlfriend, Alex (and watching her awesome company grow); listening to tons of Crowbar (with a bit of Meshuggah, Asphyx, Immolation and Entombed breaking things up); studying music (ear training, keyboard, etc.) with my friend and bandmate Nick; reading Raymond Chandler; running regularly; and cooking more than I ever have in my life, thanks in large part to the easily recommendable Blue Apron.

As this blog nears its 10th anniversary, I'd just like to say thanks to anyone still tuning in, regularly or irregularly. Your attention and encouragement are greatly appreciated.

Playing the tortoise: 20-plus years of Unsanity

Via Pitchfork, here's my review of the new Unsane album, Wreck.

My current thoughts on Unsane tie into a post I wrote last November on the veteran death-metal band Obituary. I enjoyed both of these groups in high school, but my enthusiasm for each was lukewarm; back then I was looking for something more ambitious, and neither quite fit the bill. Unsane was up against craw, Dazzling Killmen and other purveyors of extreme post-hardcore, while Obituary competed against the mighty Morbid Angel.

It's telling that none of that competition really exists anymore. Craw and Dazzling Killmen have broken up, and while Morbid Angel persists, I feel okay admitting that none of their future releases are likely to affect me as much as Covenant did back in '93. In the Unsane review, I referred to them as the tortoises of the NYC noise-rock scene, and Obituary have played a similar role in the Florida death-metal movement. Each has barely progressed since the early '90s; instead they've both chosen to simply dig in and micro-refine over a steady stream of albums.

This is the kind of achievement that's easy to overlook. (It's also the kind of achievement that's not always praiseworthy: A "tortoise" band only seems continually respectable if their current work feels as true and from-the-gut as their vintage material.) What I've realized recently is that, for me, unchanging-ness is no longer a knock in and of itself. And Unsane has certainly endured its share of knocks on just that count; Pitchfork's reviews of its previous two records, Visqueen and Blood Run, were not kind. If I feel that a band continues to mean what they're doing over time, and if what they're doing sounds good to me, I'm completely okay with that essentially anti-evolutionary approach. This flies in the face of that whole "Better to burn out than it is to rust" concept. There's a third alternative there: Keep driving the same car, but make sure it stays polished. I'm not an expert on, say, Motörhead, but I think they've followed the same principle.

What I'm saying in short is that I still believe Unsane. They don't surprise me, but I like the feeling they give me. The dire-ness does not feel forced. Not every band has to "progress." Sometimes progression really means diffusion. Take, say, Mastodon. I enjoy their latest record just fine, but it doesn't have that "Holy shit…" quality. It feels almost casual, in comparison with a back catalog (Remission, e.g.) that at its best has felt deadly serious. That's the risk of evolving, I guess. (And it's worth keeping in mind that records are not always these sacred texts, removed from reality; sometimes they're just a collection of songs to play live. Another thing Unsane and Obituary have in common is that they're both hard-touring bands who continue to kick ass live precisely because they don't mess with the formula onstage or in the studio.)

For me, the real takeaway is that there's no one right way to play it. Longevity is the first priority, and if a band can hang around and still make vital, enjoyable records 20-odd years after it started, I have no problem with the fact that those records sound pretty much exactly the same in the macro sense. (Nor, I should make clear, do I have a problem with progression and evolution; the trick, though, is how to accomplish that without forsaking intensity and conviction.) I've listened to the entire Unsane discography over the past week or so, and while I was barely surprised at all, I rocked out pretty much nonstop. Now, later in life, that means more to me than it did. I don't think it's that my aesthetic palate has dulled; I think it's that I appreciate the raw craftsmanship of rock more. Pick a style and churn it out. That's good enough for me.

P.S. For more on these themes, see last December's Immolation post.

Sums of Parts: Nick Sakes from Dazzling Killmen to XADDAX

You often hear about artistic entities that are "more than the sum of their parts," as though it's somehow shameful or inadequate for something to simply be the sum of its parts. What if those parts are each excellent on their own, as in the Brooklyn band XADDAX (a duo with Nick Sakes on guitar/vocals and Chrissy Rossettie on electroacoustic drum kit, pictured above)? I would think that adding them together would be an achievement worth celebrating.

If you're not familiar with the work of Nick Sakes, let me try to put him into a context. There is a certain category of well-known (or even just "known") DIY-rock lifer who's been around forever and has been in a long string of bands. Folks like Ian MacKaye, Tim Kinsella (Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc), Geoff Farina (Karate, Glorytellers, etc.), Mike Hill (Anodyne, Tombs), Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil), J. Read (Revenge, Axis of Advance), Mira Billotte (Quix*o*tic, White Magic), Ben Weasel (Screeching Weasel, The Riverdales), Fred Erskine (Hoover, The Crownhate Ruin), Pen Rollings (Honor Role, Breadwinner), Tara Jane O'Neil (Rodan, The Sonora Pine), Dave Pajo (Slint, Tortoise), Jared Warren (Karp, Big Business), Walter Schreifels (Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand), Rick Froberg (Drive Like Jehu, Obits), Mick Barr (Crom-Tech, Orthrelm)—even icons like Robert Pollard or Kathleen Hanna fit in this general classification.

That was a pretty long list and sort of an arbitrary one (I worship, say, Schreifels and Read but could take or leave a couple of the others). The point I'm trying to make, though, is that there is sort of generally accepted canon of these types of independent musicians: Everyone would include, MacKaye, e.g., but move down the list and you'll get a different set of names depending on whether the person you're polling happens to be into punk, post-hardcore, metal, folk, indie rock, what have you, and depending on where they grew up or reside. But if anyone's keeping some sort of master ledger of these sorts of folks and Nick Sakes isn't on it, that list is incomplete. And if you, kind reader, are into extreme/experimental-minded rock-based music of any kind and have not checked out Mr. Sakes's various projects stretching from 1990 through the present (including Dazzling Killmen, Colossamite, Sicbay and now XADDAX), you really need to remedy that. In terms of combining raw aggression with unconventional yet totally memorable form, Nick Sakes is one of the most potent musicians I've ever heard.

More than that, though, and this is where I circle back to my initial point about sums of parts and whatnot, Nick Sakes is one of the finest collaborators I've ever heard. I've been following his career since the early ’90s (just after the Killmen's demise), and in a way, my entire view of the American rock underground revolves around him. He's played in bands with some extraordinarily talented musicians—to name two of the more well-known ones, John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez (both currently of Deerhoof) were both in Colossamite—and in each of those bands, you can hear (A) a whole lot of Nick Sakes and (B) a whole lot of whomever else was working in the project. None of these bands is merely Nick plus Some Other Musicians. Each of them has been a true, start-from-scratch collaboration.

The St. Louis–based Dazzling Killmen (active from the early-to-mid ’90s) was a whole band of master collaborators: the surgically precise rhythm section of bassist Darin Gray (Grand Ulena, On Fillmore) and drummer Blake Fleming (Laddio Bolocko, The Mars Volta), plus the uncategorizable avant-rock soundpainter Tim Garrigan (You Fantastic!, folky solo material) on guitar, along with Sakes's more riff-oriented guitar and bloodcurdling shrieks. Put all that together, and voila:



Colossamite, a late-’90s Twin Cities band, upped the post-Beefheart vibe in a major way, thanks to the free-improv/art-metal pedigrees of Dieterich, Rodriguez and drummer Chad Popple. (Rodriguez and Popple both played in the fascinating post-hardcore fusion band Iceburn around the same time they played in Colossamite, and all three of these musicians have worked together on and off as Gorge Trio for years.) Sakes in Colossamite was not at all the same as Sakes in Killmen; the former project brought out a loopier, more off-the-wall side of his personality. He retained the core of what he did (see: bloodcurdling shrieks) but added a major dose of cryptic humor. Check out his insane Spanish-language ranting on this track:



Sicbay (also Twin Cities, early-to-mid aughts), which made three incredible albums that I really wish were better known, was Sakes's most pop-oriented concern, a perfect channeling of his trademark seething tension into brief, super-melodic and super-memorable—yet still very unconventional—songs. (For a more detailed discussion, see my 2003 Dusted review of Sicbay's awesome second album, Overreaction Time.) Again, we saw a totally different side of Sakes here—his most overtly tuneful vocalizing to date, for one—and that's due in large part to the brilliance of his collaborator Dave Erb, whose guitar playing was sort of like if you took those gorgeous Thin Lizzy leads and scrambled them in a blender so that they were still every bit as gorgeous but also alarmingly jagged and disconcertingly shaded, a concept which, if I'm correctly recalling several conversations I've had with Erb, was very much coming out of a progressive-postpunk (e.g., XTC) sort of place. But again, it's also due to Sakes's willingness to meet his collaborators halfway. Like Colossamite, Sicbay was very much the sum of its parts, not just the Guy from Dazzling Killmen and Some Other Guy. (Sadly, YouTube only has one very blown-out, and nearly pictureless, live clip, but it'll have to do.)

Which brings us to the present day and the band known as XADDAX. Sicbay petered out a while back (’06 or ’07?), and about a year so ago, Nick Sakes from Minneapolis to Brooklyn. (It's probably worth mentioning at this point that I began corresponding with Nick on a fan level sometime in the late ’90s and that we've since become friends.) Right away, he began playing music with the drummer Chrissy Rossettie—who had been in a number of projects, including the Chicago-based My Name Is Rar-Rar (admirably batshit post–No Wave noise-punk)—and after a long gestation period, the two emerged as XADDAX.

It's been wonderful to reside in the same city as a steadily gigging Nick Sakes and to observe his latest collaboration up close. I saw XADDAX for the third time last night—my band STATS had previously shared two very fun Cake Shop bills with them—and I was newly struck by this whole Sum of Its Parts aspect of Sakes's musical career. I guess what I'm saying is that there's no typical Nick Sakes band. Everyone in the Killmen, Colossamite and Sicbay (I should give a shout-out here to that band's succession of drummers, Greg Schaal, Ed Rodriguez—yep, the guitarist from Colossamite and Deerhoof, plus the Flying Luttenbachers—and Jonathan Warnberg, the latter a fantastic and underdocumented player who was also in Signal to Trust) had an equal stake in what was going down, and the very same is true of XADDAX.

Since there are only two members of XADDAX, that division-of-labor vibe is right in front of your face: What Rossettie brings to the table is quite literally half of the band's overall presentation. More specifically, her contribution—as drummer and full-spectrum sound generator—is an inspired short-circuiting-cyborg vibe. As she discusses in this excellent interview, Rossettie plays a hot-wired electroacoustic kit, which she wields like a post-industrial orchestra. On the bottom, there are her driving hypnotic, martial, daringly lengthy patterns. The obsessive detail and emphasis on repetition in her playing reminds me a lot conceptually of what's going on in Obscura- and From Wisdom to Hate–era Gorguts. Go here (skip to about 3:57) to watch Luc Lemay discussing this concept: As he puts it, "The drum was like a riff itself, which loops with the riff." (This idea of a through-composed drum line, i.e., not just an accompaniment to a guitar riff but an actual part of a song's fundamental DNA, as it pertains to Gorguts specifically, came up in my recent interview with Dan Weiss.)

The same sort of thing is happening in XADDAX, but rather than blast-beat-oriented death metal, here the concept of the through-composed drum riff is filtered through a perversely danceable postpunk or No Wave vibe. Furthermore, Rossettie has equipped her aforementioned cyborg kit with various electronic pads and triggers (being a totally acoustic drummer, I'm 100% unqualified to even begin to explain how this all works; see the Q&A linked above for details). Some of these produce "in time" noises, like you might hear coming from a MIDI keyboard (i.e., you press a key and you get a brief, rhythmic sound), but some of them seem to set off bursts of pure chaos (i.e., you press a key and you get a long, arrhythmic string of sonic INFORMATION, like a sample that doesn't loop, or something).

So you put all that together with Nick Sakes, who continues to abuse his vocal cords in various bellowing, hissing manners and contributes a kind of awkwardly-clanking-machine riffage—math-rock-ish in a way, but much rawer and looser than, say, the Killmen—and you get this:

Xaddax - Lives On Nerves by Xaddax

So after hearing that (incredible) track—look out for it and others on a forthcoming Skin Graft full-length—if you check out the various Sakes projects discussed above and check out My Name Is Rar-Rar (there are a bunch of tracks streaming on Bandcamp), you'll see that XADDAX is once again a deeply collaborative, sum-of-its-parts affair. There is no possible way that either Sakes or Rossettie could've or would've made this music without the other, and that no-element-is-replaceable specificity is the key ingredient in almost all great bands.

Again, Sum of Its Parts, simply that and not necessarily "More Than," isn't a negligible concept. It's quite enough for two elements to coexist in pleasing harmony—like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's cup—or in inspired disharmony—like Rossettie's haywire beats and Sakes's dire guitar and vocals in XADDAX. There's probably a corny message about the give-and-take of all human relationships buried somewhere in here ("Can't we all just get along, or agree to squabble productively?"), but I'll just say that Nick Sakes's two-decade career, from the Killmen all the way through XADDAX, has demonstrated again and again the huge potential of strong musical personalities colliding in wholly fruitful and mutually respectful manners. You take those parts and you add them together, and that's more than enough.

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Check out XADDAX on SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Raging against the machine: Another look at Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun

"…an abstraction painted with a flame-thrower…"—John Corbett

"mindblasting… a smashing clanging wonderland of noise"—Thurston Moore

"The first day went over with rehearsing…, trying to find a way to get the music on tape. After all this trouble, it was a good thing to find some bars, the day/night ended with some tasty beer. Finally I had stashed all the comrades in some friends['] beds or on some ma[t]tresses, Buschi and I were left over, as usual. After some more beers we had to find a place to sleep a couple of hours, next to the club there was a building site under construction. We entered, slept a bit on some cardboard, had a beer for breakfast, went to the club, waiting for the comrades, ready to go."—Peter Brötzmann

The quotes above refer to the album Machine Gun, by the Peter Brötzmann Octet. Machine Gun is one of those agreed-upon landmarks: widely proclaimed as seminal, five stars and a crown in The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, etc. Not to mention the street cred, evidenced by the Thurston Moore quote above. It's a bogeyman of a record—purportedly the most extreme free jazz there is. I remember seeing a copy in a friend's room in college and asking about it; the response I got was a pair of raised eyebrows, i.e., "Shit, man, I don't know what to tell you about that one." The Thurston Moore quote says it all: Machine Gun is a NOISE record, in the foretelling-of–No Fun Fest sense.

I've been listening to Machine Gun over the past few days, and—just like I always am when I pull out this incredible record—I've been newly struck by the fact that this "wonderland of noise" really isn't that at all. What it is, is a very early, very great example of midsize-ensemble free-jazz composition and arrangement. This recording has a thousand times more purpose and direction than anyone seems to want to admit, least of all Brötzmann, who has been perfectly happy to feed the mythology with his tales of sleeping on cardboard and beer for breakfast.

Machine Gun is not simply a document of eight men—most prominently, the stampeding reed section of Brötzmann, Evan Parker and Willem Breuker—blowing their brains out. There is a lot of that to be found on the record, and what of it there is, is majorly amplified in terms of its cacophony by the insanely in-the-red engineering. (The album was, after all, recorded in a concrete-block basement jazz club—though not in front of a live audience—in Bremen.) But what makes the "mindblasting" improv sections on Machine Gun so effective is how they're contrasted with a number of very different textures. Make no mistake: The three pieces that make up the original record, which sound beautiful on the Atavistic reissue The Complete Machine Gun Sessions, are meticulously MAPPED. There are free-jazz blowouts (Dave Burrell's "Echo" comes to mind) and then there are free-jazz compositions; the pieces on Machine Gun are the latter. (Note, for starters, Brötzmann's account of a full day of rehearsal.)

Take the title track. The signature opening section—the head, as it were—that staggered, jagged, broken-glass reed shudder, with the two drummers and the two bassists scraping up a racket underneath, only lasts about 45 seconds. Then Evan Parker begins to solo, with comparatively delicate accompaniment underneath—just one of the basses (I'm pretty sure) and the tamer of the two drummers, Sven-Åke Johansson. The fundamental principle that makes this record a compositional masterpiece in addition to a cacophonous one is already here: You blast with the full ensemble, and then you peel away layers. You plot out an arc. "Machine Gun" is like Coltrane's "Ascension" in a way, but it's a much more engaging piece of music because it's not simply BLAST-solo-BLAST-solo, etc. During Parker's solo (man, that serrated tenor sound—so beautiful and so fully formed, even in 1968), the full ensemble comes in at times to goad him, to blast him out. They're RIFFING in the classic big-band sense, that great old trick where the band will take up a momentum-maintaining theme behind the soloist. Unlike in "Ascension," the players don't politely wait till Parker is done—they rudely interrupt him. It's fantastically effective.

Fred Van Hove's piano solo begins around the 4:00 mark, and you hear something very different going on here. Again the band settles down; this time, it's Johansson and both basses swirling around busily but sensitively underneath. And right around 5:02, the riffing begins again, but this time it's different: not a full-band BLAST as before, but a quick, repeated swooping figure from only the horns. This is the kind of arrangement I love—each soloist is treated to a customized background context. Han Bennink enters eventually, clanging away on what sounds like a trash-can lid and upping the chaos. The swooping figure returns, and eventually the piece escalates into mania, but it quickly dies down. The two bassists play a tense duet at around 8:00, and then around 10:00, the band enters with a slurry, boozy roar, escalating in pitch and tempo, as though a dial were being turned up. Then Breuker solos on bass clarinet starting around 10:52, and note that he gets still another background context; I can't tell if the basses are playing, but the drummer is Bennink, not Johansson, and unlike in Parker's solo, Van Hove is on board. Eventually everyone drops out but Breuker, and after a brief unaccompanied section, he duets with Bennink for a few tense seconds.

Then, at 12:22, comes a new theme, a strident, national-anthem-sounding motif, that grapples with white noise and then exhausts itself, collapsing in a boozy heap (roughly 13:20). Then it's time for Brötzmann to solo and he gets the wildest accompaniment, centering around Van Hove and Bennink (his trusty triomates then and for years after). Intruding on his freak-out is the classic, college-football-halftime rave-up (around 15:00). Pure, shrieking noise again triumphs and the saxes fan out in the staggered, swarm-of-bee-stings formation of the piece's opening. Several unison jabs end the piece.

If it's not clear yet, what I'm trying to say is that "Machine Gun" is absolutely, positively not a mindless, aggro blowout. What it is, is a SUITE, packed with EVENTS, with contrast. "Ascension" sounds like a crude scribble in comparison. Any reader of this blog knows that I love it when jazz compositions don't tip their hand at the outset, where you are rewarded for listening through to the end of a piece (and not just with another iteration of the head). "Machine Gun" is like that—there's always something new around the corner. When you get to the fight-song rave-up at 15:00, you brighten up: "Ah, here's some new info." It's not a fussy piece of music; everyone colors outside the lines and the transitions are imprecise. But there is a roadmap. We're not dealing with, like, slash-and-burn Japanese noise here, in other words; we're dealing with big-band-style arrangement, scaled down for an eight-piece ensemble and pitted AGAINST pure abstraction. "Against" is the key. Without the contrast, this would be a boring piece, merely extreme and not exciting or built to last.

You don't hear much mention of the other pieces on the record, but they're great. And just like Brötzmann's title track, they have a lot to offer compositionally. Van Hove's "Responsible" quickly enters blowout mode, but not before a more-or-less swinging intro featuring the two bassists (one of whom is basically walking) and two drummers. Brötzmann gets out front with a brilliant chest-thumping solo on baritone, pretty much the blueprint for Mats Gustafsson's entire career. The background orchestration is looser here; Van Hove is noticeably absent, but the other horns seem to throw in commentary as they wish rather than in any sort of predetermined or conducted riff pattern. At around 3:00, there's a fascinating textural shift and we're into classic Euro free-improv mode, with small sounds prevailing: Van Hove's harplike inside-the-piano tinkering (I think that's what he's doing), Bennink's bongo drums, etc. Parker solos here, again bringing the staccato ruckus.

And then what's this? Around 4:50, the bassist on the left starts up a tense eighth-note pulse, around which Van Hove, Johansson and the bassist on the right quickly orient themselves, setting up a pensive mood. One of the saxes (I think it's Breuker) enters with this very deep ballad-like theme, a slow, swaying, elegiac sort of thing. And then around 6:00, the drummers and one bassist fire up a groovy, Latin-ish groove. See? Again, so many EVENTS here. This is through-composed music. It's wonderful and absolutely nothing like the more crudely sketched American free jazz of the time. Machine Gun is free jazz as, say, Mingus might do it, had he been so inclined. Momentum is always a concern, the skillful deployment of first this element then this one, successive textures unfolding. "Mindblasting," yes, but also thoughtful as hell.

At 6:41, what's this?!? It's another theme, a pleasant, almost mambo-like dance that instantly brings you right into a Vegas-y frame of mind. All of a sudden this band of marauding, sleeping-on-cardboard, beer-for-breakfast, spirit-of-’68 Euro-free-jazz renegades has morphed into a Rat Pack cocktail orchestra. Considering the overall picture of Machine Gun (a picture that includes 40 years of hyperbole re: this record's ULTIMATE EXTREMITY), this intrusion of chilled-out tunefulness is more shocking than any noise outburst could ever be.

Breuker's "Music for Han Bennink I"—the "I" (as in the Roman numeral) appears in the title on the LP-jacket reproduction found in the reissue but not in the new liner notes—is another riot of THEMES. This is the most meticulous piece on the record, yet it's every bit as exciting as "Machine Gun." The opening theme, consisting of a bar of seven followed by a bar of six, is total proto-jazz-punk. Listen to this alongside Little Women and you'll see what I mean. After a few seconds, the band drops out and lets Johansson groove alone for a bit. Then they reassemble, play the theme again and peter out. At the :58 mark, a spastic bridge of sorts: a quick riff, then a hit; then the quick riff again, then two hits. It's an almost proggish device (Dazzling Killmen use a very similar figure midway through "Dig That Hole", and given the avant-jazz inclinations of their rhythm section, it wouldn't shock me if the reference was an intentional one) yet delivered here in total punk, aggro manner.

Next, the horns stumble around as if in a daze and then the band lays out again, this time for a Bennink solo, which starts calm and works itself up into a righteous froth. Then at 2:55, the turbo-polka opening theme returns briefly, setting the stage for a bellowing Brötzmann solo. Note that the drummers lay out at the beginning; it's just bass and piano. Johansson enters first, setting the stage for Bennink's grand entry, a flurry of proto-blast-beat mania, at 4:19. Again there's this skillful organization, this question of who exactly will play underneath whose solo, who will enter when, etc. (Some of this organization may very well be spontaneous, but it's still a kind of arrangement/plotting.) Bennink sets off a riot in the ensemble, but it's short-lived. Right around 5:08, the texture morphs drastically into a soft, exceedingly gentle three-horn meditation. The spastic bridge is back at 5:46, followed by an opening-theme statement that's quickly blown to bits. Some genuinely fearsome improv, probably the most intense on the whole record ensues. The opening theme keeps threatening to return, but no, this is a total meltdown—the kind of thing you think you're going to hear for 40 minutes straight when you read up on Machine Gun lore.

Right around 7:12, one of the saxes cues a new theme (the fourth motif of this piece, by my count), a marching-type figure that makes a bid for the spotlight but has to grapple with not only the marauding ensemble but the opening theme, which keeps reemerging in shadow form. Chaos reigns in this section, but it's a chaos born of competing orders. An unaccompanied Van Hove solo starts around 8:13: deranged, flailing, making its way into runaway-player-piano territory before receding into ominous silence. I love it.

Thus ends the piece and the original record (the Complete edition includes alternate takes of both "Machine Gun" and "Responsible," as well as a live version of the former). I think it's clear what I'm trying to say: Machine Gun is the most thoughtful kind of barrage. Brötzmann wants noise, but he also wants a PLAN. And moreover, he wants the plans of his collaborators, as evidenced by his inclusion of pieces by Breuker and Van Hove. This entire scheme—large-ensemble blow-your-brains-out improv meets big-band smarts—of course came to full flower in Brötzmann's Chicago Octet/Tentet/Tentet+1/Tentet+2/etc., founded in the late ’90s. (You can hear the concept developing on "Fuck de Boere," from ’70, and "Alarm," from ’81.) I've lately been really digging the Tentet's inaugural release, a self-titled three-CD set on Okka Disk, which is packed full of varying compositional strategies.

What am I saying, overall? Sometimes it's good to fight the received knowledge re: a CLASSIC, and get back to it and see what's actually there. Brötzmann himself may have done much to perpetuate the image of Machine Gun, and his body of work as a whole, as a sort of macho-meltdown sort of thing, but there's way more to it than that. The fact is that he is a brilliant composer/conceptualist/bandleader/arranger, over and above his status as a leather-lunged saxophone beast. This combination of meticulousness and total abandon is why Machine Gun endures.

Release me: New music from STATS

I am pleased to announce that STATS, a band I play in with guitarist Joe Petrucelli and bassist Tony Gedrich, has completed a new recording. It is called Crowned, and it comes out November 22 on CD via The Path Less Traveled Records, a great indie metal label based in Normal, Illinois. The cover art once again comes courtesy of the brilliant night photographer Remi Thornton. You can buy Crowned now as a $3 download from iTunes or Amazon, and you can listen to it here (in high-quality WAV format) via Bandcamp:




We will be celebrating this release on Monday, November 15, 2010 at Cake Shop in NYC, where we will be joined by three outstanding bands: Cheer-Accident, Inzinzac and Xaddax (the latter of which features Nick Sakes, formerly of Dazzling Killmen—DFSBP namesakes, as you might recall—Colossamite and Sicbay). The show starts at 8pm and costs $10. Listen, enjoy, and please do attend the show if you are able.

UPDATE: Go here to read a blurb about the show from The New Yorker.

Time machine and namesake: Dazzling Killmen, live '93

I've often pondered the ever-fun "time machine" query, i.e., what one band or artist whom I never got to witness live would I go back and catch if I had the chance. John Bonham and Walt Dickerson are both near the top of the list, but neck and neck are Dazzling Killmen, one of my most treasured musical entities.

Above is the next best thing. In a fortunate turn of events, a pristine Killmen bootleg vid that I've had on my hard drive for ages has recently found its way to YouTube. This to me is the ideal of rock music. Better than metal, better than prog, better than hardcore -- internalizing the lessons of all while avoiding their pitfalls.

This is probably my favorite Killmen track ("In the Face of Collapse," which starts at about 9:15 in the video above), the epic centerpiece of their 1994 desert-island masterpiece, Face of Collapse, which I was unlucky enough to discover just after the band had broken up. Now is as good a time as any to reveal that this song, "In the Face of Collapse," is the namesake of my blog. "Dark forces swing blind punches" is simply a misheard lyric from this song (listen closely around 13:10), which I liked enough to let stick. For the record, the line is actually "Don't force it / Swing blind punches," as verified by frontman Nick Sakes, currently living in Brooklyn and prepping his latest project, Xaddax. (Guitarist Tim Garrigan now works as a rootsy solo artist; bassist Darin Gray plays in On Fillmore and various other projects; and drummer Blake Fleming can be heard in Future by Now.)

Anyway, listen, watch and marvel, and as a bonus track, here's another recently surfaced Killmen vid from an earlier vintage, crazy cable-access style: