(This show preview originally appeared in the SF Weekly.)
Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice is the cryptic name for this media-shy outfit from New York that, over a slew of releases in ’04 and ’05, has drained the traditional folk-blues template of just about every aesthetic touchstone save a sparse assortment of shattered riffage, creaking percussion, faintly whistling woodwinds, and quietly rippling feedback. In a way, it’s the hovering specters of space and mood trailing these remnants that serve as the real building blocks of WWVV’s extended, best-listened-to-by-candlelight trance-folk. However, what you really ought to know is what exactly makes WWVV any different from other practitioners of this popular free-folk drone-thing like Sunburned Hand of the Man, No-Neck Blues Band, and the Davenport Family. My best answer is the group’s occasional use of these classic, male and female, white-soul vocals. Think a more meditative version of the Jefferson Airplane’s triple-throat approach from …Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow, an association that’ll make perfect sense when Wooden Wand performs with the Skygreen Leopards — the best San Francisco folk-pop combo since the Beau Brummels — on Thursday, June 30, at the Hemlock Tavern.
The Mountain Goats is the name used by this singer/songwriter John Darnielle, who initially emerged during the golden age of cassette-released, lo-fi indie-folk circa ’92. So, yeah, the dude is definitely one of them weathered indie-survivors. Now, my problem with Darnielle’s latest release, The Sunset Tree, is not his gratuitously verbose, grad-student poetics, which are considered his fundamental artistic strength. Nor do I mind his harshly nasal vocals. I love Scott Walker and Randy Newman, and they both possess cringe-inducing voices, and they both write some pretentiously dense lyrics. The problem I have with this disc is the fact that it’s filled with nothing but super-bland, one-dimensional pop music. Fuckin’a — every track sounds like some quaint little theme song written for one of these television shows like Scrubs or the now-defunct Ed or whatever hip new program features a mildly handsome Caucasian dude who’s really a bit goofy-looking but is terribly charming, silly, and well-versed in pop-culture allusions and ironic humor. How can I be expected to appreciate Darnielle’s lyrical artistry when his cookie-cutter music makes me feel like I’m hunkering down for a painful night of prime-time network television?
Blasted, indeed, because this collaboration between Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare of Animal Collective) and Eric Copeland (of Black Dice) is a collection of some truly mesmerizing minimal electronics. Each one of these 11 tracks is built from fluidly percolating clusters of crusty, barely audible machine-produced whir and chatter fortified with rippling low-end effects. What sounds like a formless, opaque goop when my ears are preset for tuning in ordinary, everyday life quickly transforms itself into this lean crystalline pulse when my ears have been tweaked from, say, drowsiness, meditation, pensive moods, or… uhh… marijuana. And, there, I said it. Weed! I don’t fucking meditate; I pack a bowl, get ripped, and listen to this disc because it’s all trippy in the head, and it busts this zoned-out listening-to-the-crickets-all-night-long stoner groove. Hell, all that New York hippietronics freakery, including Animal Collective and Black Dice, is tailor-made for dedicated stoners, and that’s all right by me as long as the music is this profoundly psychedelic.
In the late 1800s, this esoteric philosopher and mystic G.I. Gurdjieff scoured Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for the secrets to attaining “direct knowledge” (i.e., meaning). He consulted reclusive dervishes, chased shadowy mages, and immersed himself in foreign cultures. It’s a rare but ageless quest that resonates in the modern-day mission of Sublime Frequencies, a label and collective of intrepid sound-explorers navigating the same geography that Gurdjieff once did and recording every sound and noise that moves them. They then tackle the job of editing these recordings and releasing them as discs packaged in brilliant colors and exotic photography with titles like Harmika Yab-Yum: Folk Sounds From Nepal and Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan, which are just two of the label’s 21 releases to date.
Gang Gang Dance is from New York and utilizes female vocals, guitars, drums, bass, piano, synthesizers, percussion, and digital editing. The quartet’s latest release, God’s Money, consists of two incessantly mutating, seamlessly shape-shifting sound collages, which feel as if they were actually beamed from GGD’s collective mind straight into my head. I say such an odd thing because this music moves, unfolds, and evolves in ways indicative of the realm of the imagination, not the physical world; nothing is as it seems, and everything changes all the time. Rhythms are inspired by foreign styles (African ceremonial music, Middle Eastern grooves, Jamaican dub, etc.), but every time these influences become too obvious, the rhythms then atomically reconfigure into coolly rippling machine-generated ambient feedback. Liz Bougatsos’ exotic chirps and chants multiply, becoming many voices only to shatter into dozens of tiny, electronic fragments. What at one moment totally felt like a group of humans jamming now marches on as ONE, entertaining the possibility that this entire disc is actually a computer-produced composition, and GGD is nothing more than a bunch of digital avatars, hallucinations. It’s such a beautifully constructed dream that I fully endorse losing yourself in it.
The Roots of Madness were a group of teenage ‘heads from the early ’70s who attended Leigh High School in San Jose. Their LP of full-blown psychedelic freakery was locally released around 1970 and descended into hyperobscurity, until now. It’s a reissue so totally needed because this music is such a stinky, boiling stew of fractured blues, primitive electronics, free jazz, and scatological spoken word, given an excessively potent kick from heaping doses of juvenile “hormonage” and some serious drug consumption. It opens with “Réalisation II” (they apparently skipped right over “Réalisation I”), which is a fierce, 11-minute crescendo of maniacally tinkling bells, gray blasts of shortwave radio, walkie-talkie gobbledygook, feedback, freely stabbing percussion, a chorus of throat-shredding howls, and pig-squealing horns. And that’s just a warm-up for the real freaky shit, such as “The Old Man’s Ass,” wherein this incensed voice chants such anally obsessed verse as “The old man’s wretched ass… Grown nonfunctional with constipated eons of nonuse… And the old man’s crack? Watery, jelly skin dripping through fingers… Turning the hills of youth into a canyon. A canyon eroded by venereal shankers and fiery and proud hemorrhoids.” Amen for gratuitously disgusting weirdness.
