In Bloom: Monder/McHenry at Cornelia Street Café

[Photo: Laal Shams]

If all goes as planned, I will hear Sunn O))) live tonight at Brooklyn Masonic Temple. It will no doubt be a guitar/amp communion, and I'm definitely looking forward. Heading over to a duo set by tenor saxist Bill McHenry and guitarist Ben Monder last night at Cornelia Street Café, I didn't realize I was in for a prelude of similarly glorious semi-abstracted dronesmithery, but as it turned out, Messrs. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson may have a hard time living up to what I beheld this evening.

If I was surprised by McHenry and Monder's set, it's a fair bet that the musicians were as well. Mere seconds before they began, I saw Monder turn to McHenry and ask, "So what are we doing?" What they did was a freely improvised 45-minute set - divided into four or so longish pieces and a brief coda - and it was a killer. You really don't hear spontaneous musicmaking of this coherence and grace very often.

From the start, the music had a prayerful quality. The first piece felt palpably humid, with Monder gradually constructing this hazy sort of drone, abetted by his volume pedal and a bevy of effects, employed tastefully. He held the pick in his mouth and coaxed the notes, shaking the body of his instrument to draw them out. McHenry drifted slowly alongside him, blowing meditative tones and seeming utterly committed to an aesthetic of melting, of hovering ooze. It was hot in the room. The players' faces were slick with sweat early on, and you felt that in the music - static and singing and luminous, hanging in the air.

From there, the pieces blur together in my mind. I know that Monder at one point (or two?) slowly worked up an ominous cloud of distortion, a harsh, scary shape on the horizon of the music. McHenry stepped forward on the stage and dug in. The music was completely abstract, but in a very physical way. The musicians were wrestling with the sounds, and there was deep tension in the music. You honestly didn't know where it was going to go, and neither did the players.

Monder began one improvisation solo, with a few minutes of jagged sci-fi riffage. Brusque, hard-edged - like cyborg fusion (anyone who's heard 2005's mighty Oceana knows that he's completely at home with robojazz). McHenry entered tentatively and then stopped. It was easy to sympathize. The tempo Monder had suggested was just too brisk, his syncopations too thorny, for any horn to find its way in. So Monder backed off and McHenry came back, and together they began another steely, hovering prayer. It was music that wasn't about anything at all, but it was so unpretentious, so listenable. No bullshit difficult-for-the-sake-of-difficult sounds, no ostentatious experimentalism. What it was, was a humbly free music - created totally in the moment but without that self-congratulatory or "What I'm doing is the most unprecedented thing ever" vibe that you get from bad experimental improv.

There were moments later that hinted at starry-eyed jazz balladry, even at twangy Metheny- or Frisell-ism, but the music wasn't jazz, anymore than it was, say, post-rock. It was just an atmospheric feat, one of those sets where you're marveling at the concentration of the players as much as the music. And at the heart of it all was this hovering drone, this glacial "om" sort of thing, with McHenry painting artful squiggles over top. It never got all that loud, but you could feel it oozing into the room and into the mind. I took off my glasses for a lot of it, and the blobby shapes I saw seemed more complementary to what I was hearing than the clear lines I'm used to. The set had that special kind of diffusion and amorphousness and yet it didn't overstay its welcome. I know Sunn O))) will get at that smokelike, room-filling ambience - how could they not, with all those amps and those taffy-stretched riffs? - but will they get there so unfussily, so organically? I've got to say, these two jazzers in street clothes just might beat the cowled avant-metalists at their own atmospheric game.

P.S. Haven't heard the new-ish Monder/McHenry duo CD, Bloom - and I didn't even know it existed till just now, since the musicians did not hawk it whatsoever from the stage or, as far as I know, sell it at the gig - but I nonetheless have a very strong feeling that a better ambient CD will not be released this year.

Creeping death: Goodbye Khanate

There's been a fair amount of eulogizing/stock-taking/tying-up-of-loose-ends going on re: Khanate and if this were a lesser band, I might be a little fatigued by the hubbub over the demise of a project that only really existed for five years. But the devotion evident in both Phil Freeman's killer Voice homage and this remarkable interview with bassist/sound-manipulator James Plotkin are wholly justified. This was a special entity.

Strolling after work today, I took in the entirety of "Every God Damn Thing," the sprawling 33-plus-minute concluding track off Clean Hands Go Foul, a new posthumous Khanate album on Hydra Head that seems to officially close the book on the band. I struggle with words here. I want to say things like "horrifying" or "scary" or "fucked up" or what have you, but those seem like placeholders for what I really think and feel about this music.

There is a very heavy element of abstraction to what Khanate did, zeroed in on and unpacked excellently in the Plotkin interview above. He discusses how the band's utter abandonment of tempo made it unique in the metal universe, and indeed, it's a herculean thing these musicians did, to just toss meter out the window. Again I struggle, though: What is the unique achievement? What is it that makes this stuff feel so bone-deep? Because it's not simply the freeformness. You could call "Every God Damn Thing" a "soundscape," I guess, peg it as some sort of ambient-metal drift piece. But that's just a bummer as well.

Let's call it cave music, then. A feeling of humidity, of sad, sad delirium in Stephen O'Malley's absent-minded wisps of melody. And these creaking, dragging sounds in the background. Like a mind limping. There's that line in Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen's character recalls entering Kurtz's chamber: "It smelled like slow death in there." That's what "Every God Damn Thing" sounds like. (Another movie that springs to mind is Blair Witch Project. A line from the Clean Hands track "In That Corner"--"I made that corner for you to stand in!"--makes me think of that film's unforgettable last shot. O'Malley's humid guitar again sets the mood: a grisly, epic sadness.)

I also think of the phrase "horror vacui," for some reason. Not really a fear of open space, but rather a fearful open space, this awful sparseness, a drift of crazed thoughts, shouting. Nothing to respond. You imagine vocalist Alan Dubin, brilliantly one-dimensional on "Every God Damn Thing" as always, locked in a basement, just clanking toward madness. Raving. Shrieking things about people, roaches, hell. Some sort of ubiquitous blackness. The instruments creak and moan terribly.

Considering how visceral and haunting Khanate's music is, they make me think a whole hell of a lot. First, I ponder the notion that Khanate is widely considered a metal band. "Every God Damn Thing" bears even less relationship to metal than most Khanate, which is really saying something. There's nothing remotely resembling a riff here. Just that murmuring guitar, stray drum thumps, zapping feedback and ugly string scrapes. It's like this canvas of lulling mania. The sounds drift, and they'd really mean very little if it weren't for the vocals and the words (Dubin's screaming being really the only element signifying "metal," or any genre whatsoever). Amazing, considering that the instrumental track was, apparently, entirely improvised, with Dubin layering on his part afterward. The shrieking and the cruel, horrified monologue--"It's all bad! It's all bad again!"--somehow renders the weird stasis of the music profound, makes you hang on every little gesture. If you saw an improv group perform this background track, you'd think "eh." The reason this is so great is because even in a freeform setting like this, Khanate is a band--the music animates and responds to (or at least seems to respond to) the vocals. And also they are a metal band, which means they care deeply about atmospherics and mood-setting. Improv musicians could learn a lot from an outfit like this, specifically about how to make abstract, gestural playing feel enormously weighty.

If Dubin wasn't so hugely evocative, he could ruin the music. Instead he makes it. The music becomes a manifestation of the diseased consciousness of this man-monster-poet that he portrays in pretty much every Khanate song. And the players give voice to the feelings. It's music about a sick mind, totally adrift, music that doesn't let you do anything other than be mesmerized by it. You can't put Clean Hands, or any of the other Khanate records, on and just do something else. You're either listening to it fully or you're not. There's a lot of avant-garde metal floating around these days, but very little of it deserves and commands your undivided attention the way this does. It's a sickening kind of hovering suspense with no payoff and for those of us with masochistic listening tendencies, it's something like heaven.

Things Viral ('03) was the first Khanate disc that grabbed me, and it grabbed me hard. I never spent much time w/ the first, self-titled disc, or '05's Capture and Release, but I always retained these very strong memories of sitting alone in the dark in my former apartment, an East Village studio, just tripping out to Things Viral. I saw them around the same time at Tonic. I remember a lot of splintering drumsticks and tense anticipation. In a way, though, Khanate is more something you deal with alone. It's music about solitude and it's best experienced in that state.

I've read that there are military torture methods where the perpetrators isolate the feeling of panic or terror and simply extend it ad infinitum in the victim. "Every God Damn Thing" is sort of the same thing, but with pure dread. "Even flowers disgust!" Dubin yowls. There's nothing to make of this but what it is: a revolution in scaring the living shit out of you via sound. Pick up Clean Hands Go Foul and go somewhere where you won't be disturbed and just live with "Every God Damn Thing" in its entirety. It's a chore to stumble back to reality afterward, but it's worth the trauma. There's a very delicious kind of madness on display here. In other words, hail to these guys: Don't take for granted the magnitude of what they did.