King Crimson exists when there is King Crimson music to be played

King Crimson yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but never the same—never the same group of musicians, even. What is a “band” when there is little or no continuity of members—members in the plural, that is. Robert Fripp is always there, of course, and yet he maintains that he is not King Crimson, nor is King Crimson simply his “project.” When King Crimson exists, it is a group, Fripp maintains—and King Crimson exists when there is King Crimson music that needs to be played. It is this music, Fripp claims, that calls forth the group, even if he might play a special role as leader or what might be called “convener.” What is the meaning of all this when, when all is said and done, there are more discontinuities to not only the groups that make up King Crimson, but also the music itself, than there are continuities? Perhaps most of all this: King Crimson has existed in every decade from the 1960s forward (which now means more than thirty-three years since King Crimson first formed—and also five different decades), and in each of these decades King Crimson has created music at the cutting edge of the possibilities of rock. I would even go so far as to say that an aspiring student of experimental rock music ought to take King Crimson as the most consistent guidepost to the forward edge of rock. Paradoxically, it is the discontinuities of King Crimson that makes this the case.

King Crimson has a special place in the hearts of those who came to musical awareness in the late 1960s. Robert Fripp has described the effect that hearing “A Day in the Life” had on him, the way that it showed the open-ended potential of rock music. In the Court of the Crimson King was one of those life-changing, knock-your-head-off albums that still resonates these many years later. It is often called the album that started progressive rock. At this juncture, I don’t want to get into the whole debate; suffice it to say that the progressive rock aficionados out there certainly claim Crimson as one of their own, and it would be hard to see that ever changing. Then again, there is a “wandering” side to the music that is absent from many of the other mainstays of progressive rock. Part of this is the strong jazz influence in Crimson, and part of it is the absence of the whole “multiple keyboard” thing (nineteen of them stacked in banks of six, six, and seven, or whatever) that is characteristic of bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The main keyboard in Crimson music up through Red was the Mellotron, the notoriously finicky instrument that used segments of recording tape to play back the actual sounds of orchestral strings, flutes, and choir voices. Most often used to give the impression of a string orchestra in the background, Fripp and company (generally Fripp and one other band member alternated on the instrument) played the Mellotron as though it was an instrument in its own right, instead of a substitute for other instruments. Other progressive rock groups had gothic elements (Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator, for instance), and jazz elements (Yes guitarist Steve Howe, for instance, was heavily influenced by Wes Montgomery and later by John McLaughlin), but few, if any, could invoke true heavy-metal thunder the way King Crimson did from the very first measure of “Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man.” What I referred to as the “wandering” quality—most apparent in Lizard and Islands, though partly because the group structure was not especially secure in that period—is instead a manic careening in the guitar and saxophone solos of “Schizoid Man.” The impression is of a brilliant Grand Prix driver pushing things to the absolute limit, where the line between control and loss of control can no longer be seen.

In the Court introduced a generation of rock musicians and listeners to frightening instrumental difficulty—if you were going to play music like this, you had to spend a lot of time in your room practicing. Obviously, a good many musicians and listeners rejected this, and the question of whether this was mainly out of mere laziness or an alternative aesthetic has been with us ever since that time. (In the final chapter I return once again to the technique question.) Part of the genius of King Crimson was to be able to combine musical parts that required everyone to play very difficult passages together—in a way akin to that “notation theory” that Brian Eno talked about—with other parts that were completely open and quite a bit like free jazz.

On Lizards and Islands these parts really are free jazz, as played by some of England’s best musicians, especially the brilliant Keith Tippett. The pianist had already made an essential contribution on what might qualify as one of rock music’s all-time great whimsical moments, “Cat Food,” from the second King Crimson album, In the Wake of Poseidon. The Ovary Lodge trio album from 1973, with Tippett, percussionist Frank Perry, and contrabassist Harry Miller, has not been reissued on CD, as of this writing, but fortunately the 1971 album, Septober Energy, is available. This is Tippett’s composition for a fifty-person jazz orchestra called Centipede. Robert Fripp produced both records. (Many other Tippett albums are available, including several with his wife, vocalist Julie Driscoll, a wonderful singer who was a member of Brian Auger’s Trinity back in the 1960s, and who made a good album with Jack Bruce back in the 1970s.) Debate rages over which of the first two King Crimson albums is better. They were both cut from the same mold, and the second features some significant recapitulations of the first. But In the Court of the Crimson King is the more essential of the two; it launched not only the project of King Crimson, but also significantly widened the possibilities of creative and complex rock music.

It is easy to get lost in the labeling system for the many versions of King Crimson (KC MK I, MK II, and so on; see the website “Elephant Talk” for information on this issue, from maestro Fripp and others). The third album, Lizard, represented one of the many major swerves that typifies the group. Andy McCulloch took over the drum chair from the superb Michael Giles; this was the beginning of a succession of remarkable percussionists—someday there ought to be a King Crimson Percussion Ensemble featuring all of them. Keith Tippett brought along three of his friends from the jazz world to play various horns, and Jon Anderson of Yes supplied vocals for one song. Whereas In the Court had a good deal of what I like to call “sci-fi medievalism,” that peculiar combination of pastoral and space-age utopianism that manifested itself in a number of progressive-rock groups (especially British ones), Lizard’s imagery was more solidly feudal. For the first seven albums, King Crimson had a full-time lyricist, and for the first four albums this was Peter Sinfield. As with a number of other progressive groups, the lyrics demonstrate the influence of John Milton and English Romantic poetry. An interesting line of examination would be to compare the influence of the English Romantics on groups such as King Crimson and Yes to the influence of the American Beats on Sonic Youth, given that the Beats were themselves influenced by the Romantics. A later, very different version of King Crimson recorded an album called Beat (1982).

By the fourth album, Islands, the group concept is wearing a bit thin—one could say that Islands is a B or possibly a B+ album in comparison to the first three, which does not mean that it doesn’t have some A-grade material here and there. Tippett and the horn players remain from Lizard, with the addition of Paulina Lucas on soprano sax, the only woman to have appeared on a King Crimson album. Bass and vocal duties were taken over by Boz Burrell (here listed simply as “Boz”), who was later to join the dreadful Bad Company, a move that is perhaps only exceeded by Ian McDonald, from the original group, who later joined the even more execrable Foreigner. Boz was a good singer for Crimson, but unfortunately he continued the weakness at the bass station already established by folksinger Gordon Haskell on the previous album. For the most part King Crimson has had bass players in the range of good (Greg Lake) to very good (Peter Giles, an under-appreciated musician who supplied fine lines on both the second King Crimson album, as well as the excellent album that he made with his brother Michael and the aforementioned McDonald) to great (John Wetton, Tony Levin, Trey Gunn). The group has also had some wonderful singers. And yet one sometimes gets the feeling that bass and vocals are secondary to the larger mission of the band—just a little observation that the legions of “crimheads” can debate endlessly, no doubt. Fortunately, Islands also features another Tippett associate, South African double-bass player, Harry Miller. The bass guitar often plays the role of holding down a pedal point, while Miller supplies a countermelody that generates a powerful tension.

The Lizard band tended to lack something that Robert Fripp values highly, namely discipline. The version of King Crimson that convened for Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was a radical departure from what had come before. Even though the sound was often full and rich even to the point of being overwhelming, the music also seemed more streamlined, going more directly “to the point,” so to speak. Improvisation was emphasized, but in a fully collective way; listening was essential. The musicians were stellar. Bill Bruford jumped ship from Yes, accomplishing the feat of being the drummer on what in my opinion are the two most creative progressive rock albums, Larks’ Tongues and Close to the Edge. John Wetton came aboard from Family, and for the first time made the bass guitar an equal voice in the mix—which not only strikes a blow for bass equality (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but also opened up new contrapuntal possibilities in the music. Wetton is also an excellent singer. A classically trained musician, David Cross, added a previously unheard sound in King Crimson, violin. The vocal aspect was further de-emphasized (Larks’ Tongues has only three, short “songs,” surrounded by three, longer, instrumental pieces), but once again Crimson had someone whose job it was to supply lyrics, Richard Palmer-James. There is a bleakness to his lyrics that makes a nice contrast to Sinfield’s. The coup de grâce however, was the inclusion of percussionist Jamie Muir, something of a mad genius who added a dimension hitherto not present in King Crimson, what might be called a cross between free jazz and John Cage. The Larks’ Tongues band did not deal in the refusal of intention, but rather the disturbance of intention—a constant spanner in the works. What made the music of this period different from some of the free playing of Derek Bailey or AMM or the Spontaneous Music Ensemble—improvisors who relate to the classical avant-garde as much as jazz—is that King Crimson did employ composition as well, they played pieces with parts where everyone needed to be together at a certain time and place, and they also played songs where the instruments supported the vocalist. In other words, their music was still rock, even while dramatically expanding the idiom in a way that remains a paradigm of experimentalism.

This basic group made three albums, but Jamie Muir left after Larks’ Tongues, apparently to enter a Buddhist monastery. He was a percussionist who was as likely to blow a horn or whistle, or, reportedly, swing a large bag of fall leaves around his head as to bang on a drum, and he made a big impression on Bill Bruford. The latter, I would say, is the most creative drummer to play rock music, and one quality that makes him so is the ability to make refraining from hitting the drum—in other words, silence—a powerful force. This ability is a natural extension of the fact that Bruford syncopates like there’s no tomorrow, and his brilliant and quirky “beat divisions” can be heard not only on King Crimson albums, but also on such Yes classics as “Heart of the Sunrise” from Fragile. He is a genius at setting up expectations and then confounding them; to wax Derridean, it’s a case of the absence that is felt as a presence. There are many great rock drummers, of course (half of them in King Crimson at one time or another!), but none who subdivide the beats and silences quite so subtly. The subsequent Crimson albums of this era, Starless and Bible Black and Red, are very good too, even if not as innovative as Larks’ Tongues, but the real excitement was in the band’s live playing. Fortunately, this is now extensively documented, most dramatically on the Great Deceiver 4-CD box set. I had the great fortune to see King Crimson in that period and I can say without exaggeration that it was a life-changing experience. Truly, the likes of that band was never heard before and most likely will never be heard again.

Red is an outstanding album, from beginning to end, and one of the strongest albums in the whole Crimson corpus. Many Crimson aficionados—including Eric Tamm, the author of books on Robert Fripp and Brian Eno—regard the closing piece, “Starless,” as the finest piece of Crimson music ever. There is an aggressive and muscular quality to much of the album—as Tamm puts it, “It seems almost impossible that this was the same Fripp who had made the delicate Islands a few short years previously” (Robert Fripp, pp. 78–79). Of course, one might say that whether or not this was the “same Fripp,” it was not the same King Crimson. One of the harshest and most striking aspects of two of the pieces on the album, “Red” and “One More Red Nightmare,” is the use of the tritone. As Tamm explains, the tritone,

so named because it spans three whole steps or tones, . . . is classed among the most dissonant of the thirteen fundamental intervals in music. (If you turn in your college harmony assignment and have idiotically included a tritone in the final chord, you’ll get it back marked in red.) Because of its searingly harsh, problematic sound, the tritone was called the diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) by medieval theorists, and some forbade its use entirely. The King Crimson metaphor—it goes deeper than one might think. (p. 78)

The melancholy tone of Wetton’s voice on “One More Red Nightmare” and “Starless” captures well the feeling that an era was coming to an end.

After this period, the Crimson King was silent for about seven years. The story of Robert Fripp’s “sabbatical” is a dramatic tale in and of itself, involving feelings that the world was coming to an end, that the lifestyle of a touring rock musician was no longer sustainable (for Fripp and perhaps not for anyone), encounters with the thought of G. I. Gurdjieff and J. G. Bennett (“I had a glimpse of something . . . the top of my head blew off”—Tamm, p. 76), and then the gradual re-immersion in music in the form of projects with Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Daryl Hall, and a solo “Frippertronics” concert at the Kitchen in New York in February 1978. (A fascinating, detailed account of the sabbatical period is found in Tamm, pp. 75–129.) In 1979, having quite substantially remade his life, Fripp launched what he called “the drive to 1981.” The intervening period involved the making of a very strong solo album, Exposure, and the formation of a “dance band,” The League of Gentlemen. (One member, bassist Sara Lee, would later join the Gang of Four and then the B-52s.)

Finally, upon the arrival of the magical year 1981, once again the call of the Crimson King was heard by Fripp, and the new group was once again a radical departure. After all, if you’ve said something, why say it again? (Incidentally, one might be excused for having an apocalyptic view of 1981, since that was the beginning of the bizarre and now almost unbelievable Reagan administration in the United States.) Bruford came back as part of the new quartet, along with two Americans, bassist Tony Levin and guitarist and singer Adrian Belew. For the first time in its history, King Crimson had a true “frontman,” someone who would make such over-the-top comments from the stage as “good evening” and “thanks.” Such frivolity had never been heard before from a King Crimson stage! Fripp encountered Levin, a top studio player, and Belew, an alumnus of Frank Zappa’s group, in his work with Bowie and Gabriel (and Levin was the bassist on Exposure). It might be argued that this was the most carefully put-together Crimson ever. In addition to playing bass, Levin also plays the Chapman Stick, a ten-stringed instrument that is played by tapping the strings with both hands—in this way one can play two independent lines.

The new music had almost nothing in common with any previous King Crimson sound, in at least four ways. For one thing, the new Crimson had two guitarists, something unimaginable in the previous formations—and, with Levin on Stick, the effect was sometimes that of three guitarists. A second element was the use of repetition. Whereas the idea in the previous formations was to always try to play something new with each measure—a strategy especially appropriate for Bruford, who rarely plays a straight beat or stock fill—now the idea was to work with minute changes, developed through many repetitions. In this the music was not unlike some of that of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Third and perhaps most important was the texture of the music, based as it was in interweaving lines, truly a musical fabric. In the spirit of the times, and even somewhat ahead of the times—into the 1990s, perhaps—there was an emphasis on the vertical, though not to the point of the sort of pure “cloud” of timbre associated with ambient music. Significantly, part of the subtitle of Eric Tamm’s book on Eno is “the vertical color of sound.” Clearly, the experiments that Fripp had undertaken with Eno, which resulted in the albums No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, had a lasting effect on both musicians. In some sense, or in part, the music that King Crimson played from 1981 to 1984 reflects an expansion of these improvisations and timbres to a group context. (Another path from that same context is Fripp’s work with soundscapes.) However, what differentiates the interwoven “cloud” of 1980s King Crimson from some techno and electronica—with which it shares some similarities—is the horizontal aspect, the propulsive forward movement that in the end makes this rock music.

One theory about King Crimson is that the band could be understood in each of its periods as, at least in some sense, taking the music of a dominant trend or even a particular group and raising it to the next level. Clearly, there is much more to King Crimson than this, but it’s a fun theory to think about. So, the first four King Crimson albums relate to the Beatles. The Lark’s Tongues period has something to do with John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (Significantly, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans—which I would call an audacious, if flawed, masterwork—was also made under the influence of Mahavishnu.) The Discipline era relates to new wave and even disco, and perhaps especially to Talking Heads. (Amusingly, concert videos from this period show disco dancers in the audience.) Just to complete the picture, the Thrak formation (about which I will say more in a moment) has some connection to grunge and even Nirvana, while the most recent version, the band that made the construKction of light, might even have something to do with Sonic Youth—except the Crims have a lot more chops!

Well, that’s just a little provocation to have fun with. If anything, the influence of the Beatles seems resurgent in the Thrak and construKction formations. But let it be said—before I get into a lot of trouble—the primary factors in King Crimson music are creativity and craft, and though there is a bit of transmutation going on, this music has been at the forefront of experimental rock for more than thirty years.

Staying with the Discipline-era group for one more moment, there is a fourth difference with the music, namely that you can dance to it. Surely followers of the group in the 1970s would never have expected this. The danceable quality of the music demonstrated—along with that of Talking Heads and other of the more creative new wave and punk groups—that creative listening was possible with other parts of the body than the ears.

There must be something about King Crimson music that makes it such that no version of the group can hold together for more than about three years. Furthermore, the pattern since the Larks Tongues period has been two- or three-year periods of activity by particular incarnations of the band followed by even lengthier periods of, shall we say, the withdrawal of the King. The Discipline-era band made three albums—a King Crimson record for making albums with the initial line-up intact. Discipline was really good, with some great songs such as “Elephant Talk” and “Thela Hun Ginjeet.” Although there was always more humor and wit in earlier Crimson music than most people gave it credit for, some of the new music was even funny—for example “Elephant Talk” (which reintroduced young people to such excellent expressions as “argy bargy” and “brouhaha”) and “Indiscipline.” The second album from this group, Beat, was also good; part of the fascination was to see how “American” this previously very English group had become, with references to beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the manic, urban scene. The lyrics for Beat are some of Belew’s best. The third album, Three of a Perfect Pair has some good moments, but it is considerably weaker than the first two. The problem with episodic incarnation is that, in human form, one encounters the forms of decay that affect all flesh—if one isn’t simply crucified outright. This has been a continuing problem for King Crimson, how to keep it going and not peter out. There is something about the initial Crimson idea, each time it incarnates, that seems unsustainable over the long haul. But one also has to recognize that Robert Fripp, as the convener of the group, knows how to walk off the stage if necessary. He is the best guide to when a particular incarnation has played itself out, and, arguments about what sort of thing King Crimson “really is”—a “real” group or an episodic project of one individual—aside, for sure Fripp is the leader. It is not unusual to hear Fripp called eccentric—but the way he deviates from the mainstream is by making decisions about playing rock music that have to do with the music and with ideas. It is sad that Fripp’s commitment to these things is treated by some as though it is nutty.

After the Discipline era, Fripp took an even longer sabbatical from “Crimsoning” (as I once heard him put it), this time for about ten years. Though he participated in a few musical projects during this time, one of the main things he did was to develop a new system of playing the guitar (and even for tuning it) and a school for teaching this method, both called Guitar Craft. (Eric Tamm provides a substantial and sometimes humorous account of Guitar Craft in Robert Fripp, pp. 150–209.) In 1994 yet another version of King Crimson emerged. This new formation included the 1980s group en toto plus two additional musicians: Pat Mastelotto on percussion and Trey Gunn on various “touch guitars” (offshoots of the Chapman Stick idea, but made by other manufacturers). The new group of four string players and two percussionists aimed to constitute a kind of “double trio,” with Fripp, Bruford, and Levin as one “unit,” and Belew, Mastelotto, and Gunn as the other. By Fripp’s own account, the double-trio idea never completely jelled, and the main studio recording of this group, 1995’s Thrak, is something of a mixed-bag. There are some powerful moments, however, and I would especially single out “One Time” as a lovely song, possibly the best piece that Adrian Belew has contributed as a member of Crimson, and certainly the most subtle. The really great thing about this formation was its live playing—though Fripp had espoused the “small, mobile, intelligent unit” since reformulating his musical philosophy in the late 1970s, and though he has mostly kept to this idea ever since, the Thrak group was King Crimson as “orchestra.” They made one hell of a sound. Even without completely realizing all of the possibilities, the intertwinings of doubled guitar lines (often not sounding at all like guitars, thanks to the digital revolution in effects—to deal with all of the sounds that Fripp has been able to coax out of the guitar would make a book in itself), doubled bass and Stick lines, and doubled percussion lines, and the further intertwining of all that led to a music not hitherto heard. This miraculous intervention can be experienced on two live double albums. B’Boom represents the entire concert that the group performed on tour. Even better, though, is THRaKaTTaK, a selection of improvisations from different concerts on the Thrak tour. This album shows what the six-headed beast was truly capable of, which doesn’t mean that it is unremittingly heavy—as always, the emphasis is on listening within the group, and on complex interplay, dynamics, and subtlety, as well as the periodic unleashing of overwhelming and frightening power.

There was some possibility of going further with this version of the group, but Bill Bruford and Tony Levin had their own projects and commitments to get on with. Thus the sextet became a quartet once again, with the remaining members releasing the construKction of light in 2000. However, this was no mere “remainder” of the Thrak group; instead it is yet another incarnation of the Crimson idea. This is the best King Crimson since the Larks’ Tongues era. (I discuss the construKction crew at some length in the last part of this book.)

I hope this sketch will entice those not familiar with the Crimson King to explore this essential chapter in creative rock music. In the liner notes to the live album from the Discipline-era group, Absent Lovers, Robert Fripp responded to some points I made in Listening to the future, especially the issue of whether or not King Crimson is a true “group.” There are a few points in Maestro Fripp’s essay that I would still take issue with. (For instance, Fripp says that the essential point is whether or not the money from albums and concerts is shared out equally—as it is in King Crimson; well and good, but there is also the additional and perhaps even more fundamental question of who decides that this is how things will be done. Of course, this question cannot be divorced from that concerning the decision that there will be a group to begin with. But hey, this can be grist for the mill for further liner-note essays.) None of these issues is very important in the long run—what is instead important, and the real reason why King Crimson has remained such a force for over three decades (during which the group has actually been “incarnated” for much less than half of that time) is the idea of hearing a call, feeling the force of a conception, and even a philosophy, and responding to that philosophy with music. Robert Fripp has been the one with his ears open to that call, and, when appropriate, he has convened and led the very different, discontinuously different, manifestations of the King. But I think Fripp is both sincere and right when he says that King Crimson exists when there is King Crimson music to be played—ultimately, the music speaks itself.

       Giles, Giles & Fripp, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles & Fripp (Deram LP, 1968).

      King Crimson

       In the Wake of Poseidon (Atlantic LP, 1970).

       Lizard (Atlantic LP, 1971).

       Islands (Atlantic LP, 1972).

       Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Atlantic LP, 1973).

       Starless and Bible Black (Atlantic LP, 1974).

       Red (Atlantic LP, 1974).

       The Great Deceiver: Live 1973–1974 (Discipline CD, 1992).

       USA (Atlantic LP, 1975).

       Discipline (Editions EG LP, 1981).

       Beat (Editions EG LP, 1982).

       Three of a Perfect Pair (Editions EG LP, 1984).

       Absent Lovers: Live in Montreal 1984 (Discipline CD, 1998).

       THRAK (Virgin CD, 1995).

       B’Boom: Live Bootleg (Discipline CD, 1995).

       THRaKaTTaK (Discipline CD, 1996).

       Robert Fripp, Exposure (Virgin LP, 1979).

       ———, A Blessing of Tears (Discipline CD, 1995).

       ———, The Gates of Paradise (Discipline CD, 1997).

       PROJEkCT TWO, Space Groove (Discipline CD, 1998).

      1998

       Beck, Mutations (Geffen CD).

       John Cale, Dance Music for Nico, the ballet (Detour CD).

       Diamanda Galas, Malediction and Prayer (Asphodel CD).

       Kev Hopper, Spoombung: New Music for Electric Bass (Thoofa CD).

       Portishead, Roseland NYC Live (London CD).

With Mutations, Beck continues on his path of the three Fs: freaky, funky, funny. This is probably overreaching, but there is something of The Who meets Parliament in his music—it sounds crazy, but it just might work. Although they are almost purely derivative, the songs “Nobody’s fault but my own” and “Tropicalia” are very entrancing.

John Cale demonstrates that the avant-garde classical impulses that led him to rock music are still very much alive in him in Dance Music for Nico, the ballet, a series of sensitive sketches for the Dutch chamber ensemble, Ice Nine. The music was composed for “Nico, the ballet,” and is appropriately austere and astringent. Even more harsh is Diamanda Galas’s Malediction and Prayer. It can truly be said that there is no voice like hers, and that to listen to an extended piece by Galas is to stare into the gates of hell.

Experimental bass guitar is in its ascendancy. Kev Hopper’s album, Spoombung, is a good example of what some of the younger bassists are doing. On Roseland NYC Live, Portishead gives a strong live reading to their sound, with the help of a small orchestra.

      Land of the rising noise: Ikue Mori, Keiji Haino, Ruins, Merzbow

There is a risk of chauvinism in presenting a selection such as this, given that, of the three artists and one group in the title, only Merzbow is primarily a “noise” musician and the true commonality is that they are all Japanese. No chauvinism is intended, and the risk is worth taking in order to point out the important place that Japanese musicians have in the experimental rock scene today. Indeed, these four, though they would most likely make anyone’s list of major figures, are only a part of a scene that has grown by leaps and bounds in the last twenty years.

Some introductions are in order. Ikue Mori is a percussionist who played drums in the band DNA with guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield (and, later, bassist Tim Wright). They were part of the No Wave scene, and appeared on Brian Eno’s compilation, No New York. She also played drums on the Death Ambient album with Henry Cow guitarist, Fred Frith, and brilliant Japanese bassist Kato Hideki. But now Mori rarely plays the drum set, and instead she concentrates on drum machines of various types, often several at the same time. In other words, she is not a “beat programmer,” such as one might find with some of the new electronic music, but rather someone who uses chance and improvisation in conjunction with an array of drum machines, from the primitive to the more sophisticated. Mori is also a graphic designer whose work can be seen on the CD covers from John Zorn’s Tzadik label.

Keiji Haino is known primarily as a guitarist, though another instrument that he often records with is the hurdy gurdy. He also sings, or sometimes wails, the latter being what he is famous for on the electric guitar. Haino is most often found in a trio setting with bass and drums, often with his longstanding group, Fushitsusha. Intensity is the key element in his music—though occasionally Haino backs off a little bit. It will not sound very complimentary in the context of experimental rock to say that “outrageous shredding” is Haino’s stock in trade—that’s the sort of thing that metal-heads are impressed by. For sure, despite the way that some probably want to see Haino’s playing, his music cannot be dissociated from heavy metal—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But this heavy metal thunder is further intensified with the influence of the hard tenor saxophone playing of John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders—and perhaps most of all Peter Brötzmann, who also specializes in unbridled overdrive (check out Machine Gun from 1968, and The Berlin Concert, 1971). Jimi Hendrix is also a major part of the picture. One of the funnier comparisons is with American group Blue Cheer, who were the loudest group in the world for awhile (in the late 1960s, before, as I recall, Deep Purple took over that dubious title), and who were called, even before Grand Funk Railroad (a Frank Zappa discovery!), the worst rock band in the world. Blue Cheer have gone from being goats to heroes in some circles these days (so, can Grand Funk be far behind?). The difference is that, even at its loudest and most frantic, Haino’s guitar playing has a logic to it that is more Coltrane than Blue Cheer, even if the latter deserves credit for showing what overdriven amplifiers can do.

Ruins are a duo of drummer/vocalist Yoshida Tatsuya and either Sasaki Hisashi or Masuda Ryuichi on bass guitar and vocals. Sometimes there are guests on keyboards, sax, or guitar, but sometimes they record with just bass, drums, and singing. Very few have pursued this combination, as one might imagine, though the Method Actors (discussed in the new wave section) and a little-known group from Atlanta, called Oh OK, used this set-up (though the latter was composed of a drummer, bass player, and singer, and they only ever released a three-song single). What Ruins do with it is much more harsh and manic, and they are influenced by progressive rock and Can.

A good account of the Japanese noise scene can be found in the book Japan Edge: The Insider’s Guide to Japanese Pop Subculture, edited by Annette Roman. Mason Jones, the author of one of the two extensive chapters on noise, argues that the scene in Japan initially sprang from two European sources. One was those Manchester (England) purveyors of terror and the grotesque, Throbbing Gristle. No doubt the Gristles have been unfairly ignored in this book. Strangely, Greil Marcus did not hear the call of Gristle in Lipstick Traces either, even though his orientation toward dada, surrealism, and situationism would seem more predisposed in that direction. Perhaps Marcus thought that a band whose live act so often featured soiled diapers, used tampons, and the like was another example of people who are more into celebrity outrage than music. However, starting out in 1975, anticipating punk as well as reenacting Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, Throbbing Gristle is certainly a good example of what at least one side of avant rock is all about. Rather than inventing something new out of the basic elements of music, or even learning to play their instruments especially well, they instead took some elemental impulses of rock and pushed them to one kind of extreme. As with many experimental rock musicians, the source of inspiration is the Velvet Underground.

The other big influence in Japanese noise, according to Mason Jones, is “a combination of free jazz artists, modern composers, and so-called Krautrock bands, such as Neu!, Faust, Can, and Amon Duul” (p. 77). (I’m pleased, by the way, that Jones says “so-called Krautrock”; it is not a term that I care to use either.) Jones explains that these influences also led emergent noise artists to find out about John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and also to form an informal network of experimental musicians who shared their work by means of cassette tapes. One of the first of these musicians in Japan was Masami Akita, who named his project “Merzbow” after a work by German collage artist Kurt Schwitters (Japan Edge, p. 77). Sometimes Masami has collaborators in his recordings, but often Merzbow is just Masumi and various forms of sound generation. Like many sound artists of the recent two decades, Merzbow is inclined toward the film aesthetic, especially the idea of the soundtrack—real or imagined. What sets him apart from most other such artists, however—though what connects him to John Zorn—is his interest in Japanese bondage films. Indeed, he has written essays for books on the subject of kinbaku—Japanese rope bondage—and created the albums Music for Bondage Performance volumes 1 and 2 (see Japan Edge, pp. 87–91).

The Japanese noise scene in recent years is both extensive and marginal. Among the major artists are Masonna (a name concocted by combining masochism and Madonna), Mne-mic, Aube, Solmania, Government Alpha, Building of Gel, and Yukiko. When Sonic Youth has toured Japan, they have often included one or more of these artists on the bill.

Jones concludes his chapter on noise with some interesting reflections on whether this music can be assimilated, the way that the rawer forms of industrial music (of which Throbbing Gristle was one of the first examples) were taken up into “more beat-driven music, which later helped spawn the techno craze” (p. 97). Significantly, Jones makes a comparison with free-jazz artists. Though he does not mention him by name, I think it is unlikely that Cecil Taylor’s music will ever be assimilated into some sort of jazz mainstream.

Is the issue one that is absolutely crucial for avant-garde music? There are some forms of music that are very far out to begin with, but by and by a sizeable part of the listening public comes around to them, or at least there is some kind of “acceptance.” The avant-garde musician, or for that matter, any creative musician, cannot be motivated first of all by the desire for acceptance—but does this mean that an element that is definitive of the avant-garde is that it does everything in its power to resist eventual acceptance or assimilation? In the case of Merzbow, or for that matter, Throbbing Gristle, is the attachment to the music of other “extremes”—of the grotesque, or of “strange” sexual practices—a somewhat artificial means of achieving and maintaining status as art that will forever remain on the outside of common tastes, or is it simply an extension of what led to this unholy noise in the first place? Mason Jones says of Merzbow’s interest in bondage, and the use of bondage photographs on his album covers, “Personally, I find the connection between noise and that sort of imagery embarrassing. [Noise artist] Hijokaidan’s choice of beautiful, pastoral photographs is far more interesting as a contrast to music that some people find ugly” (p. 87). One might wonder if there is a connection between sexual practices that are not only “extreme,” but that also seem mainly to involve tying up women (in a culture where gender inequality runs very deep), and forms of music where one’s subjectivity is pulled into a maelstrom so intense that ethical bearings are impossible to come by. I have a similar worry with the way that some techno music, often associated with “club culture,” is played so loud that prolonged exposure would certainly harm one’s hearing. The idea is that one “listens with the whole body,” and one achieves a state of ex-stasis, often helped by a substance similarly named. I suppose there is a rationalist side to me that is highly skeptical of such things (and we might keep in mind that, by contrast, Gilles Deleuze—the patron saint/philosopher of some of these musicians—called himself a “radical empiricist”). Without having any definitive answers to these questions to propose, it might at least be important to have them on the table. At any rate, Mason Jones is inclined to think that

the gap between “music” and “noise” is large enough to absorb the impact of the occasional contact between noise and the musical mainstream. Additionally, the sheer intensity of noise artists keeps the noise vision alive. In any case, I believe there will always be, somewhere in the deepest underground, noise artists at work, happily oblivious to the latest musical trends. (p. 97)

       Ikue Mori, Garden (Tzadik CD, 1996).

       ———, B/Side (Tzadik CD, 1998).

       Ikue Mori, Kato Hideki, Fred Frith, Death Ambient (Avant CD, 1993).

       Ikue Mori, Tenko, and guests, Mystery Death Praxis (Tzadik CD, 1998).

       Keiji Haino, with Greg Cohen and Joey Baron, An Unclear Trail: More than This (Avant CD, 1998).

       Fushitsusha, Withdrawe, this sable Disclosure ere devot’d (Victo CD, 1998; live performance from 1997).

       Purple Trap (Keiji Haino, Bill Laswell, Rashied Ali), Decided . . . Already the Motionless Heart of Tranquility, Tangling the Prayer called “I” (Tzadik CD, 1999).

       Ruins, Refusal Fossil (Skin Graft CD, 1997).

       Derek Bailey and the Ruins, Saisoro (Tzadik CD, 1995).

       Ruins, Symphonica (Tzadik CD, 1998).

       Merzbow, Pulse Demon (Release CD, 1995).

       ———, Pinkream (Dirter CD, 1995).

       ———, 1930 (Tzadik CD, 1998).

       Kato Hideki, Hope and Despair (Extreme CD, 1996).

       ———, Turbulent Zone (Music for Expanded Ears CD, 1998).

By now, all of the folks discussed in this section are heavily recorded. Indeed, like a lot of people these days, and perhaps especially in the Zorn/Laswell universe, there is a bit of overrecording. What is offered in the discography here, therefore, is just a smattering. Among Ikue Mori’s recent projects has been a trio recording with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, and DJ Olive, as part of the Sonic Youth Records series. Being fond of music that is spare and produced by only two or three people playing “small” instruments, I was impressed with Ikue’s collaboration with Zeena Parkins on the latter’s album, Isabelle (Disk Union CD, 1995). The second of two pieces on the album, “Hup!”, is a duo for Parkins on electric harp, sampler, and “East Berlin toy,” and Ikue on electronic percussion. According to the liner notes, the piece was inspired by “Wonder Woman and Super Heroes from English and American comics of the Forties and Fifties.” Parkins figures significantly into Björk’s album, Vespertine, about which there are a few comments in the concluding chapter. A good example of what Ikue Mori does in a group context is B/Side, where she performs with a group that includes Parkins (on accordion in addition to harp and sampler), Kato Hideki (bass), Anthony Coleman (organ), Erik Friedlander (cello), David Watson (guitar), Andy Haas (didjeridu), and Tenko (vocals). The album is a collaboration with filmmaker Abigail Childs, for whom Ikue has done a number of soundtracks. The album that provides the essence of Ikue Mori, however, is the solo effort, Garden. An entire album of drum machines might sound like the ultimate basis for a nervous breakdown. For some it will be, but not because the album is wall-to-wall beats, but instead because the main elements of the music are economy and silence. To say the music represents the Zen sensibility in the cybernetic age would be one of those phrases that has always already been a cliché, but still. In a profile of the artist in The Wire, appropriately titled “Cyborg Manifesto,” A. C. Lee gives an excellent description of what Ikue Mori is all about:

Treating her drum machines as a prosthetic extension of her own mental and physical processes, Ikue Mori embodies just such a (wo)man-machine interface [as represented by the figure of the cyborg]. On stage, barely visible above stacks of black boxes and their intestinal knots of cables, she taps out a broadcast of pulsing textural helixes in bright stereophony. In the flurry of coding and decoding passing between her mind, fingers and microchips, as she processes and patterns her beats and pulses, Mori and her machines merge as a single system, a biomechanical network of flesh and metal. But for Ikue, the merging of mental and mechanical processes preceded the drum machines that facilitated the cyborg evolution. “Even back when I was playing a drum set, I was playing it like a drum machine,” she recalls, “I would program the patterns in my brain and then repeat or change them in performance.” (June 1998, p. 20)

Donna Haraway wrote an essay that has become rather famous in some circles, with the title, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (in her book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature). Her central claim is that we have now entered a period where the human species has to be considered as part of a continuum, with apes on the one side and intelligent machines on the other. The more sophisticated the machines get, the more humanity is stitched into the continuum.

The question remains as to how close the machines have really come to us, or how close they can ever come, in terms of language. If language is mere symbol manipulation, then the machines are getting ever closer. If language is fundamentally something else—“world-disclosiveness” is Heidegger’s proposal, and the point here (to oversimplify, for sure) is that no quantity of the ability to move symbols or words around will amount to the quality of “being-in-the-world”—then our “conversations” with computers and the like will necessarily be limited. But is the limitation the same as that for any musical instrument—a violin is not a trombone—or is there an additional dimension, something to do with the new possibilities of technology? In some sense, Ikue Mori’s music is about what sorts of conversations are indeed possible, and therein lies its interest.

Returning to the useful and enjoyable book Japan Edge (which also deals with anime, manga, and film in addition to noise/music) for a moment, the author of the chapter on music, Yuji Oniki, uses a wonderful phrase to describe the music of Fushitsusha: “the annihilation of the comprehensible” (p. 112). The record with Greg Cohen and Joey Baron—the “rhythm section” for John Zorn’s Masada quartet, and among the most highly regarded musicians in the New York scene these days—is deeply strange. After many albums where there is no release from the unrelentingness of Haino’s full-bore guitar, here he seems to be deconstructing the quiet fire that one hears in more mainstream jazz guitarists such as Joe Pass or Bucky Pizzarelli. I’m not sure it works in its own terms; instead, it makes a fascinating chapter when sandwiched between a live Fushitsusha album (such as the one listed), and the Purple Trap album, where Haino is playing with Bill Laswell and former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali. The album and song titles sound a bit like the wacky rap that Hendrix would sometimes do from the concert stage, so one wonders if the idea here is that hard, psychedelic rock has gone from “haze” to “trap”—whatever that means. This is acid rock reinvented and extended. (Again, there are many recordings of Haino and his various groups—I just picked three of the ones I find most interesting.) There is subtlety in Haino’s playing, appearances sometimes to the contrary—but it is often found in that just slightly less raucous moment, a moment that passes quickly. In that respect it would be appropriate to call this absolutely urban music—the “quiet” of the gigantic city is not the quiet of the countryside, nor could it be.

Ruins are a vastly more versatile band than one would ever expect from a unit consisting in bass guitar and drums. For one thing, they have outrageous chops. For another, they are transmuting a large array of influences through those two instruments and vocals, the latter almost always in a “language” of their own invention. In this they show one of their many progressive-rock connections, namely that of Magma, the French group that sounds like Mahavishnu Orchestra meets Carl Orff (led by the extraordinary drummer/composer Christian Vander). Ruins shows the influence of Magma in its music, too, but then it also shows the influence of Yes and King Crimson. One of the funny things I came across that was said about Ruins on an internet site was, “they sound like atonal King Crimson, but way more obnoxious.” Refusal Fossil is a good example of Ruins with and without guests. On the more recent Symphonica they add two vocalists and a keyboardist and basically make their own progressive-rock album, updated to the millennium for sure. The discography entry for Saisoro is slightly inaccurate; actually, the album cover says “Derek and the Ruins,” clearly a twist on Derek and the Dominoes. There’s no rendition of “Layla,” however—more’s the pity. Ruins turn out to be a fine foil for the angularity of this Derek.

Bailey’s aim is to always do something different, not to repeat himself. That is probably a goal impossible to attain, and yet Bailey comes close, and his playing can be especially provocative when other musicians are trying to triangulate with it. In 2000, Tzadik released another interesting grouping for Bailey, Mirakle, with progressive funksters Jamaladeen Tacuma (bass guitar) and Calvin Weston (drums). Put Sairsoro and Mirakle together with the Purple Trap album, and the message to the makers of all of those guitar-wanker CDs out there, to quote Robert De Niro’s line from Taxi Driver, is “suck on this!”

Knowing where to start or stop with Merzbow is another impossibility: Masami Akita has released more than one hundred albums, including the fifty-disk Merzbox set. The best written introduction to Merzbow is Edwin Pouncey’s excellent overview in The Wire, “Consumed by Noise” (August 2000, pp. 26–33; this includes a survey of ten Merzbow albums by David Keenan), from which I draw in what follows. One of Masami’s funny comments about his productivity: “Initially I used to believe that Sun Ra released more than 500 albums . . . so my goal was 500 releases. Later I learned that it was not that many, around 120 something, or even 200. So now I aim for 1000” (p. 28).

Masami, born in 1956, came of age in the late 1960s. He was influenced by many of the same groups that his contemporaries were, including the Rolling Stones and Beatles, but with a twist: when they were listening to the Stones’ more blues-oriented music, Masami was into Their Satanic Majesties Request. And the Beatles’ music that Masami was especially attracted to was George Harrison’s Wonderwall and Yoko Ono’s and John Lennon’s Unfinished Music No.1 (“Two Virgins”). Among the other trends of that time that played a role in Masami’s early formation were progressive rock, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. It may be difficult to see these influences in the albums or concerts of Merzbow, but I think there is a connection in terms of an epic approach to composition. Indeed, for all of the many Merzbow albums, it might be possible to hear Masami’s music as a single, open-ended project, the full-dimensions of which will never be heard. In this respect, Pouncey provides a helpful bit of advice: “The knee-jerk response that ‘all Merzbow recordings/performances sound identical’ is a theory that only those with neither imagination or patience will adhere to. The fact is that to understand, enjoy and eventually reach noise nirvana through Masami Akita’s work, you have to listen to a hell of a lot of it” (p. 28). In other words, one has to devote oneself to Masami’s oeuvre, or at least one has to have some expert help in sorting through the noise.

There are many colors in Merzbow’s music, many influences—and the final product hardly resembles any of them. At one point in his conversation with Pouncey, Masami says that heavy metal is the biggest influence in his music. At another point he mentions having done a collaboration with a Japanese hard-rock band called Boris, where the aim was to reproduce what was already a reproduction: the cover version of the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus” by British hard-rock group Spooky Tooth. Is there a dialogue with Plato going on here? Plato, those who took Philosophy 101 will recall, was skeptical of art that was merely a copy of a copy—for instance, sculptures that are copies of the human form, which is itself a copy of the form of the human. While we’re with Plato, we might recall, too, that he believed that music is very important, especially as a preparation for understanding mathematics. Mathematics, in turn, gives us a sense of the eternal forms. But some things are so base, so low, that there is no ideal form for them. Examples would be excrement and dirt—but surely noise would also be in this category? Of course, Merzbow, like John Cage, does not make a distinction between “music” and “noise.” (One funny comment he makes on this subject is, “If noise means uncomfortable sounds, then pop music is noise to me”; Pouncy, p. 26.)

To return to the question of all of the influences in Merzbow’s music, Masami talks about the role that feedback and the ability to control it played in his early music. One of the people who made feedback a part of hard-rock music was Jimi Hendrix—he was both a pioneer in using feedback as an integral part of music, and he was the one who made feedback popular. Merzbow uses just the feedback, without the “source,” so to speak (whether it is a heavily amplified electric guitar or what-have-you), and this is a method in much of his music. He uses radios, but he especially uses static. And, again, there are many non-musical influences too, from dada and surrealism to Japanese bondage stuff, and he is likely to associate all of his influences in one way or another with “the erotic.” As Masami puts it, “Noise is the most erotic form of sound, that’s why all of my works relate to the erotic” (Pouncey, p. 29). Now, if you take all of this stuff and, so to speak, mix it very hard in a cauldron where the aim is to create noise, isn’t it likely that the result will be similar to what you would get if you mixed every color in the spectrum? In other words, isn’t the result the sonic equivalent of black—the point where all colors turn into the lack of color—or at least very, very dark shades of brown or gray? Even the noise artist must confront this question—especially the noise artist who hopes to issues a thousand albums! In principle, however, isn’t it this sort of line that it is the whole point of the avant-garde (in whatever art form) to explore and push? I have only heard a small part of Merzbow’s output, but what I have heard thus far is impressive in the way that it explores the different possibilities for going to the very brink of incomprehensibility.

Is this “rock,” even if “avant rock”? At one point in the interview with Edward Pouncey, Merzbow likens his approach to “punk and not like academic electroacoustic music.” Perhaps more than any other artist discussed in this book, Merzbow underlines the idea that rock can be the unlimited basis for experiment, just as much if not more than any other kind of music—even if the result of the experiment is not recognizable as rock.

      1998

       Thinking Plague, In Extremis (Cuneiform CD).

       Tom Ze, Fabrication Defect: Com Defeito de Fabricacao (Luaka Bop CD).

      1999

       The Ananda Shankar Experience and State of Bengal, Walking On (Real World CD).

       Cibo Matto, Stereo Type A (Warner Bros CD).

       The Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage (Flydaddy CD).

       Os Mutantes, Everything is Possible! (Luaka Bop CD; best of collection).

Thinking Plague is carrying forward at least one thread from the days of progressive rock, namely that associated with Henry Cow and Rock in Opposition. As some readers will know, there is now a large, though somewhat underground, trend called “neo-prog.” These are bands such as Spock’s Beard and The Flower Kings, and by some accounts Dream Theater, that are more in the vein of Yes and Genesis—and often the lighter side of these bands. The music of Thinking Plague is much more harsh and jagged, in the spirit of hard Brechtianism, and, unlike some of the new bands that are relating to progressive rock, they have their own things to say. Deborah Perry has the kind of sharp-edged voice that goes substantially beyond what is taken for “astringent” these days, and the lyrics are in the acidic tradition of the great Henry Cow/Slapp Happy album, In Praise of Learning. The superb Bob Drake, from the 5uu’s, plays bass and violin on several tracks.

Like Arto Lindsay—and the best of neo-prog, for that matter—Tom Ze is also updating a previously established language, in this case in the form of a wacked-out Tropicalia refracted through Funkadelic and a No Wave sensibility. Walking On, the collaboration between Ananda Shankar and the State of Bengal, might seem like a gimmick at first look: classical Indian music, especially sitar, meets heavy-beat dance electronica. In England—and in Asia, of course—such combinations are becoming more common, thanks to the blowback from colonialism. In this case it works quite well, thanks to the sensitivity of the musicians.

The Olivia Tremor Control is one of a group of bands from Athens, Georgia, that are referred to as “Elephant 6.” (Another of the better-known groups is Neutral Milk Hotel.) Magnet magazine has been keen on these groups, and especially on Black Foliage. which is being set up as something like the Sgt. Pepper’s of current indie rock. Well, there are indeed some similarities: strong, McCartneyesque melodies, psychedelic scaffoldings and even the occasional freakout, and then moments of alienating, John/Yoko collage. If the White Album had had greater continuity, like Sgt. Pepper’s, with bits and pieces from everything that has happened in the meantime, then the result would be something like Black Foliage. It sounds like a great idea, and the realization is mostly great—though, like the White Album, and at seventy minutes in length, there are moments where the project goes a bit off course. And yet, as with the Beatles’ epic, the journey is very much worth taking.

While we are on the subject of the Beatles and their lasting influence, two other albums are worthy of note. Os Mutantes actually started out on TV, in the Brazilian show, The Small World of Ronnie Von. This was in the late 1960s, during the period of military rule in Brazil, and musicians associated with the Tropicalia movement (the best known in the United States being Gilberto Gil) were often suspected of engaging in subversive communications in their songs. Os Mutantes combined Tropicalia with influence from the Beatles, John Cage, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention—and they anticipated Devo by some years as well. The band broke up in 1971 (having previously left the TV/Rio scene to form a commune in the hills), though a couple of the solo albums that came from members of the group in subsequent years are essentially Mutantes efforts. David Byrne has had a longstanding interest in Brazilian music, and he compiled Everything is Possible! for his Luaka Bop label. Some have questioned both the choices and the pacing on this 2-CD album, but it is a good introduction to the group, and all of the Mutantes albums have now been reissued.

From Beatles and Tropicalia to Beatles and hip-hop/electronica—actually, Cibo Matto is more Yoko Ono than the Fab Four, and there are elements of funk, bossa nova, and even country music here as well. The core of the group is singer Miho Hatori and sampler, sequencer, and keyboard player Yuka Honda. They are obsessed with food to the point that the name of their group is Italian for “food madness.” Actually, their earlier effort, 1996’s Viva! La Woman, was more food-saturated, with every one of the ten songs dedicated to that subject. Viva! is a lot of fun, but Stereo Type A is a significant advance—and still a lot of fun. This is an album that stays in my car stereo for weeks at a time (although I don’t drive the car every day or even most days), not the place where I am as likely to listen to Cecil Taylor or John Cage. The other members of Cibo Matto are Timo Ellis and Sean Lennon—son of Yoko and John, playing drums, bass guitar, various guitars, and contributing vocals. The lyrics are often very funny, with a beat slant. Like many of the albums and even groups discussed in this book, the question arises once again regarding what is really “avant.” Much of the originality in creative rock music is in the particular mix of eclectic elements that are combined. There are sounds in the music that we have all heard before, but it seems to me that the overall sound is striking and original, and the fact that it is fun, funny, and often good for dancing, makes it even better.

      Björk, O’Rourke, and beyond

A song on the 1984 album by Prefab Sprout contains the chorus:

       When Bobby Fischer’s plane—plane, plane—

       Touches the ground—plane, plane—

       He’ll take those Russian boys and play them out of town,

       Playing for blood,

       As grandmasters should . . .

—“Cue Fanfare,” from Swoon

Two years later, in 1986, Reykjavik, Iceland, would be known as the site of a failed summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. As Graham Burgess reports in his Chess Highlights of the 20^th Century, news coverage of the summit mentions “the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972 as the last event of global importance in Reykjavik” (p. 177). Unless you are over forty years of age at the time of this publication, or unless you are a chess enthusiast, this last bit may not mean very much to you. Reykjavik, a town on the margins of the Earth, also has the world’s longest functioning parliament, established by Vikings a thousand years ago. Iceland has one hundred percent literacy, and all Icelanders learn two other languages in addition to their own. Reykjavik is a sophisticated place, a crossroads of world culture where a young girl could hear Stockhausen and Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. Reagan and Gorbachev met there to continue the Cold War; ten years earlier Britain and Iceland settled a dispute over fishing rights, a dispute that included a brief episode of actual gunfire, which came to be known as the Cod War.

The population of Iceland is about a quarter of a million. In 1972, the New York Times published a book under the title, Fischer/Spassky, and they opened the book with a short essay on Iceland by Katherine Scherman. Her opening paragraph reads as follows:

The World Championship match has been held on an obscure island of which, before Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky put its name on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, perhaps only four facts were generally known: some priests there a long time ago wrote some sagas, there are a lot of volcanoes, there is no darkness in summer and it rains all the time. Now for the first time in its thousand-year history Iceland is exciting curiosity beyond its own rocky shores. A look at the backdrop against which the champions played shows a land quite as extraordinary as the dramatic match just finished. (New York: Bantam Books, 1972; p. 1)

If you were born before 1960, and if your memory still functions serviceably, you probably associate Reykjavik with Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. If you were born after 1970, you are more likely to associate Reykjavik with Björk Gudmundsdottir, more commonly known as Björk, citizen of the world.

Björk was born in 1967. There are various “first-name only” pop stars out there, Madonna, Cher, Prince, and so on. Björk has many of the surface qualities of a pop star, perhaps—she is both lovely and interesting to look at, she has a provocative personality, she is often reinventing herself. The association that springs to mind, even before Madonna, is someone I referred to as a “psychedelic opportunist” in my book on progressive rock, namely Donovan. Now I am not sure if such a charge is really fair, or, even if fair, such a bad thing. Donovan had a nice song about an enlightened island, “Atlantis.” Meanwhile, Katherine Scherman says of Iceland that “[t]he extraordinary clarity of the air is the first impression a newcomer has” (p. 5). Following the chain of references in Scherman’s portrait leads to a significant claim:

Even on a foggy day Reykjavik’s many-colored houses shine as clear and bright as the flowers of the fields. Everything looks new. It is as if the city, and indeed the whole country, had come up out of the sea, clean-washed and fully formed, only this morning.

The reason for the remarkable absence of smog and grime is that Iceland has no heavy industry. A nation of farmers since its founding, the end of the last century saw Iceland change to a nation of fishermen. The country has no resources of minerals, chemicals, timber, any of the raw products on which an industrial economy must be based. So the industrial revolution passed her by. Having no industry, Iceland has no overconcentration of population, no slums, no unemployment, no mine-blighted areas, no crime (there is less than one murder a year) and—this is the pleasantist—no classes. (pp. 5–6)

It is as if Atlantis had resurfaced, at least in this rosy portrait.

I cannot help but comment that, even if Ms. Scherman’s claim about “no classes” might be a bit overdone, it is still a very pleasant thing to read the words of someone who at least thinks that it would be the “pleasantist” thing of all for a society to not have classes. (Perhaps there are at least two basic classes in the Icelandic economy: humans and fishes.)

What kind of band was the Sugarcubes? Outside of Reykjavik, at least, it was through this band that the larger world caught its first sight of Björk. The band seemed to have something to do with punk, even if a bit on the new wave side—the music was raw and energetic. The Rough Guide to rock calls them “odd, spiky, avant-garde pop” (p. 856). Listeners in Europe and North America became aware of the group in 1987, when they released the single, “Birthday,” which was followed in 1988 by the album, Life’s Too Good. Björk stood out, of course, especially in the concert video performance of the single, which was shown on MTV. There was a feral quality projected not only from her appearance or her movements, but seemingly from her very being, a quality that remains today. Alongside Björk in the band was a whole other spectacle, Einar Orn. He’s the fellow whom I imagine many Sugarcubes fans, or perhaps people who would otherwise be fans, found quite annoying. Orn plays the pocket trumpet—an instrument previously most associated with jazz musician Don Cherry—and raps a kind of beat poetry in the background of Björk’s vocals, sometimes joining in with full voice for the chorus. Although I have not devoted myself to Sugarcube-ology, I still go back and forth on the issue of whether Orn’s contribution was an ornamentation that was sometimes welcome and sometimes not, or in some sense integral to the structure. For sure, he was the one adding a good deal of the “odd, spiky” to the aforementioned characterization. Even so, Björk was clearly more than just the “singer” for a neo-punk band, and a good deal of what is special about her instrument—that is, a voice infused with a powerful sensibility—already comes through in the Sugarcubes’ albums.

If this music was meant to have some relationship to punk, however, at least in its rawness, it was a generally happy, trippy, and even utopian punk. Punk in the early years, around 1977 to 1980 (and, at least in the United States, for a few more years into the eighties), tended to be very “anti-hippie.” (In the United States, the anti-hippie orientation of some punks made them, in a way that was both amusing and annoying, the counterparts of the Alex Keaton character on the TV show, Family Ties—in other words, cocky little twirps from privileged backgrounds.) Björk came along at a time when she could be in punk but not exactly of it. She was raised by hippies (her parents), and with grandparents who were immersed in classical music and jazz. Born in 1966, by age eleven she had already recorded an album of Icelandic folk songs, and then proceeded to participate in a number of anarcho-punk collectives: Exodus, Tappi Tikarass, and Kukl. From the last of these Björk and Einar Orn emerged to form the Sugarcubes. By 1987, when the remarkable “Birthday” was released, punk was already ten years old and possibly more than five years gone. Björk got an early start, and in her way she was part of the early wave of punk; but she was not someone who eschewed musical sophistication, and, even better, along with the energy she brought to the Sugarcubes, Björk also brought a quality generally missing from punk—exuberance. The Sugarcubes albums are sweet and fun—with titles like “Life’s Too Good” and “Stick Around for Joy,” their spirit is worlds away from Never Mind the Bollocks or Plastic Surgery Disasters (Dead Kennedys), though comparison with the B-52s might stand up. But then, that’s not “punk,” per se, and neither are the Cubes, really. Maybe it comes from growing up in a classless society? Just kidding, sort of, but as much as I like the Sugarcubes, there is the fact that this is post-punk music with very little of the political edge of the first wave. What Louise Gray calls the “Icelandic occult anarchopunk syndicalism” of Björk and her band is mainly manifest in the communal artistic endeavor that is manifest in the Cubes. The members of the band were writers and poets as much as musicians, and the art collective they formed, Bad Taste, continues its work today.

Significantly, Gray titled her Wire (November 1998) profile of Björk, “The Idea of North.” That’s a bit of serendipity, recalling as it does the title of one of Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio documentaries. Like Gould, Björk is a self-avowed hermit; unlike Gould, Björk has quite another side, what might be called the “shy exhibitionist” (a term inspired by Molly Shannon’s hilarious “Mary Katherine Gallagher” character on Saturday Night Live). One of the interviews Björk did upon the release of her 2001 album, Vespertine, was with fashion designer Donna Karan (of DKNY fame). Responding to Karan’s query regarding what the album is “about,” Björk speaks to this side of her artistry, as well as a number of other issues:

This album is slightly nostalgic in the sense that it’s basically about being an introvert. It’s sort of about hibernation and being in a cocoon. I call it a winter album, because in winter you cocoon yourself and prepare for next spring. On a lot of levels, the sounds are kind of frozen. It’s also like a love affair with a laptop. I wanted to make modern chamber music. And it’s a love affair with two things: the home and laptops, basically saying that a hundred years ago the most ideal music situation was in the home, where people would play harps for each other, or tell each other stories. And in the middle of the century it became the opposite, the most ideal music situation was something like Woodstock, with many hundreds of thousands of people hearing the same song in the same mud pit, having the same euphoric experience, and the target, sonically, was to make a stack of amplifiers that could reach China. I think we’ve come full circle and the most ideal music situation now, through Napster and through the Internet and downloading and DVD, is back to the home. (Interview, Sept. 2001, pp. 191, 195)

That’s some history and theory! Björk often has her interviewers on a bit. Still, to put the laptop computer (the program of choice for most musicians, including Björk, is Pro Tools) together with more intimate settings, where the point is to actually listen to the music, certainly expresses a nostalgia for Glenn Gould. To facilitate isolation through forms of technology that require an extensive, social infrastructure—that’s Gould to a T. It is also a nice connection to Jim O’Rourke, also a shy fellow who makes much use of the laptop (more on that in a moment).

This winter album finally came out of its cocoon in the heat of summer (I will have more to say about Vespertine in the final chapter), reminding us that this supposed homebody is not averse to morphing in all kinds of ways. There is an erotic quality to Björk’s music and performance—which is more than obvious—but it is an eros that runs from a sexuality that can suddenly seem strange, indeed alien, to the larger sense of embracing the world, even the cosmos. And yet, a fundamental fragility also comes through, expressed especially in the chances that Björk takes with what might be called her overall “presentation.” Her person is in her music, and she is an interesting person—but does that necessarily make the music interesting? Does the music become interesting because Björk uses her persona to get us back into the old nature/culture debate again? She even seems to foreclose the debate, since it is difficult not to experience her as some sort of raw force of nature. But that is both the trick and the charm: Björk knows very well what she is doing.

The Sugarcubes made some plenty good music, especially on their first and third (and final) albums. Stick Around for Joy ends on a delightfully feral note, with the song “Chihuahua.” Although the format of a rock band with the standard guitars and drums is a constraint on the possibilities that Björk has pursued since the disbanding of the Cubes, the group had a very good sense of syncopation; although the guitars were occasionally hard or jangling, most often there was a lot of space and interweaving single-note lines, and the drummer concentrates on the toms, for that jungle feel. At the very least, you can make a great 90-minute tape from the three Cubes albums—although that may sound a bit backhanded, I mean it as a compliment. The videos are good, too (a collection is available), especially for earlier songs such as “Motorcrash” and “Delicious Demon.” The victim in “Motorcrash” finally makes it home, only to have her jerk husband yell, “where have you been all this time?” Björk’s singing here is a prime example of the primal quality that she can infuse into a line.

For the most part, there was a definite Sugarcubes sound that came across on all of their records (the comparison to the B-52s is again apt). Björk’s solo albums, on the other hand, are close to being just the opposite. Although there are now a zillion remixes and alternative versions of Björk’s songs and pieces, for any given one of them, the sound and approach is close to unique. Louise Gray has a better term for what Björk is doing than mere eclecticism: “Her compositional method is more a connective activity than crossover fusion” (p. 46, my emphasis). In one interview after another, Björk describes herself as a total music fan, a “trainspotter,” and, thankfully, someone dedicated to music to the point where a lucrative film career does not interest her. She has maintained her interest in composers such as Stockhausen and Messiaen—“experimentalists with soul,” and meanwhile she also collaborates with some of the most innovative people in electronica today: Graham Massey, Mark Bell, Howie B., and Talvin Singh, among others. Björk has her own “cyborg manifesto” going:

I’m really interested in blending together electronic music with everyday life to prove that’s actually how we’re living . . . . I guess my attempt is to take just the life we’re leading every day and make magic out of that. Just to be honest, those are the sounds [of life]; it’s what we hear all the time

. . . I like extremes, I guess: very raw acoustic things and then very pure electronic beats. To me, electricity comes from nature. Like acupuncture—something several thousand years old triggers the electricity that’s inside us within our nerve system. (Tamara Palmer, “A different sort of bird,” Urb, September 2001, p. 125.)

Indeed, Björk’s explorations have led her to a highly refined and idiosyncratic electroacoustic chamber rock, perhaps taken to their furthest point on 1997’s Homogenic, where several tracks featured the combination of electronic beats and string octet. The effect of this combination is both raw and sophisticated at the same time.

And yet, for all of the electronica in Björk’s solo music, all of the advanced beat science and digital synth textures, I don’t think the music is dependent on these things at all. The proof is found in a wonderful video that I would recommend to all sentient beings, the MTV Europe Unplugged concert from 1994. The concert features nine songs from Debut, and the instrumentation ranges from harpsichord (“Human Behaviour”) to percussion orchestra plus tuba (“One Day” and others), to saxophone trio (“The Anchor Song”). Among the excellent percussionists in the orchestra are Talvin Singh and Evelyn Glennie. This is really chamber rock at its finest, and the instrumentation allows the craft of Björk’s songwriting to shine through. What comes through is that Björk is really a songwriter in the European Lieder (“art song”) tradition. Her albums represent orchestrated song cycles, not so far removed from Schoenberg’s Pierre Lunaire—a work that, according to Louise Gray, Björk has performed. It can also be argued that Björk, for all that she came of age in the time of punk, owes something to the time of progressive rock—clearly she has an epic approach to her albums, even if she is not given to pieces that last fifteen or twenty minutes. In the end, of course, Björk is a paradigm avant-rocker, because she transmutes music from everywhere, and then she adds to this her very distinctive voice—by which I do not mean only her vocal chords, but, let’s face it, her vocal chords are not to be denied.

While on the subject of concert videos, I would also highly recommend another offering from 1994, Vessel. This is a concert from London, with a band that also features Talvin Singh (the entire line-up is two keyboardists, two percussionists, a bass guitarist, and a fellow playing saxophones and flute—there is very little guitar to be found in Björk’s solo music). There is such a lovely feeling to the concert, it gives me hope that London might just make it as a multicultural metropolis. Perhaps my affection for that city and its seeming vibrancy and comfort with its many colors and cultures is the same sort of naivete that would lead one to think that Iceland is a classless society—but perhaps we have to have a few dreams to get by on. Björk made London her home for a number of years, and indeed her English leans toward the Cockney, but she soured on the city after a racist lunatic from Florida attempted to send her a mail bomb there. That is hardly London’s fault, of course, but the episode led Björk to retreat once again to her beloved and sacred Iceland. In the most recent period, Björk has been living in Manhattan. A very sweet moment in the Vessel concert is a song titled, “Atlantic,” a song that does not appear on the solo albums. “Atlantic” is not sung in English and, as best I can tell, it is not in Icelandic, either. It is not in any language that I recognize, but in any case understanding the words (or sounds) does not detract from the sense of having received a communication.

The paradox of Björk is that she has all of her communes, all of the collaborative work that she does, and she opens her mouth wider than one might think humanly possible in order to project a sound, and yet she truly does have that hermit side to her as well. She often comments that engineers have a difficult time capturing her voice, because she tends to move about as she sings—music seizes her. Even when she is relatively still, she looks a little possessed. Her range is not only difficult for engineers to capture, but she is also possessed of a wide assortment of squeals, gasps, even hiccups, and other vocal tricks that remind me of what Pharaoh Sanders has developed on the tenor saxophone. “I learnt to sing . . . acoustically,” Björk told Louise Gray (p. 47)—by which she means she learned to sing by screaming and wailing in the woods, a five-minute walk from Reykjavik.

At either end of this discussion of experimental trends in rock music stand two “strange” women, at least as far as mainstream tastes are concerned. And yet Björk has a large audience among music listeners whose other tastes may not necessarily run toward the avant-garde. This is a key element of avant rock, that it is not so absolutely set off from “mainstream” rock—as, say, John Cage is set off from Leonard Bernstein, or Cecil Taylor is from Wynton Marsalis. Whether these divisions are completely necessary in classical music and jazz is another question. The onus there is on the “mainstream.” It is not as important that another symphony be written in the language of the classical or romantic traditions as that there be a forward edge to the music, so that it doesn’t become simply a museum culture. Part of the significance of avant rock is that it is also capable of reconstituting the other traditions in such a way that we can have Beethoven and Bernstein and Berio—because rock is open to all of it. The Beatles started that! By the same token, avant rock is not committed to thinking that everything that is closer to the mainstream is necessarily bad. Perhaps this ought to be called the “Springsteen principle”—if the core of the work of someone like Björk is still song-writing craft, albeit overlaid with far out, difficult, complex textures and rhythms, and so on, then we had better recognize that someone like Bruce Springsteen is a fine practitioner of that craft as well. Avant rock, then, for all that it may be the re-creation, in a post-sixties way, of the “underground”—with appropriate political consequences drawn from the fact that it is a re-creation and it is post-sixties—does not disdain (except in the case of the sorts of culture snobs who are more likely to be critics, writers, or fans, rather than actual musicians) the idea of poking its head above ground here and there, perhaps most anywhere. As Tamara Palmer points out in her profile in Urb, Björk is a paradigm here:

Björk is so unequivocally underground, she knew the discography of some of electronic music’s most innovative producers before you even dropped the needle on one of their records. She’s so incredibly above ground that immigrant cab drivers, dentists, construction workers and Joan Rivers all have an opinion of her looks and style. (p. 125)

I don’t know what Joan Rivers had to say about Björk’s looks and style, but we can all probably guess. Ono and Björk, these two strange women at either end of this discussion, have had to make it in spheres that are overwhelmingly populated by, and largely dominated by, men. When a woman raises her head in such spheres, she will generally be called every name in the book, and almost as often by other women as by men—this has certainly been the case with Yoko Ono and Björk.

Tamara Palmer raises this issue in her profile of Björk; in so doing, she mentions something that I was delighted to learn:

Speaking of odd ducks, the fact of the marketplace is that Björk is a minority as a female involved in the creation and arrangement of electronic music. As a tomboy who was not only good at math in school, but on the chess team as well, it’s clear she never let stereotypes of gender limit her field of interest. (p. 130, my emphasis)

Right on! Iceland has a strong chess tradition, and its place in chess history is secure because of the Fischer/Spassky match. Chess has been even more male-dominated than music—and yet, improbably, a narrative of avant rock has unfolded that involves as pivotal moments the work of two chess-playing women from Tokyo and Reykjavik. Jim O’Rourke’s 1999 album, Eureka, begins with the chant, repeated over and over, “Women of the world take over, ’cause if you don’t the world will come to an end, and it won’t take long.” Perhaps we are heading for a convergence of Ono, Björk, and Judit Polgar. The latter is the brilliant Hungarian chessplayer who, in 1991 and at age fifteen, surpassed Bobby Fischer’s record and became the youngest grandmaster to that date. There is such an energy in these associations, there has got to be a lot more music here as well.

Is avant rock the revenge of the nerds? Despite all her glamour, Björk describes herself that way, and now we turn to a precocious musician who is even younger—barely over thirty at the time of this publication. It’s a much longer walk to the woods from the working-class neighborhood in northwest Chicago where Jim O’Rourke grew up, so I doubt that he came by his music “acoustically,” at least in Björk’s sense of the term. There are some nice parallels between Björk and Yoko Ono, and also between Brian Eno and Jim O’Rourke. Eno initiates what might be called “bedroom music,” by which is meant not anything too racy, but instead the young person who spends his or her teen years sitting in their bedroom, listening to music, learning to play the guitar or sampler (!), “making stuff up”—songs or little pieces or grand ideas for some new kind of opera—and now (more and more, thanks to Eno) setting up a studio there, which may mean a four-track cassette machine, a personal computer, or a disk or digital tape recorder. More and more young people are doing these things, and Jim O’Rourke is one of those who emerged from the bedroom to have perhaps as great an impact on experimental rock music as anyone has had.

Unlike Björk, however, O’Rourke does not have much of an “above ground” presence, nor does he seem to care about such a thing—bless his heart. In 1998, I attended a day-long new music festival in Sheffield, England that featured electronica artists such as Autechre and Boards of Canada, as well as members of Tortoise, Stereolab, and the High Lamas. O’Rourke performed a strange duet with Tortoise drummer John McIntyre, which began with both musicians on combo organs (playing at an excruciating volume, I might add), after which McIntyre switched to drums and O’Rourke added some samples to the mix. But otherwise O’Rourke was very much behind the scenes, by which I mean not just as someone who has produced groups such as Stereolab and Sonic Youth, but rather as someone who was helping to move equipment. For someone who is a major part of a scene that has its share of pretentious people, O’Rourke is a humble servant to the music. The term I would use is “ubiquitous anonymity,” or perhaps it should be “anonymous ubiquity.”

One place of contact between O’Rourke and Björk is that, while the latter very much likes for her music to be remixed (for example, there is a CD that features four different mixes of one of her finest songs, “Isobel,” and the Telegraph album is basically an alternative, remixed version of Post), the former has said that remixing is his “absolutely favorite thing to do.”

Everything I like doing is in one thing: I get material that’s already culturally loaded, so I can deal with it in that regard; I get to do [musique] concrete stuff, which I love to do; it’s always something different, so I have to really reconceptualise it every single time; I get to sit in my studio for two weeks working on a remix. I love it. (p. 40)

This quotation is from a fine article on O’Rourke by philosopher and music theorist Christoph Cox (“Studies in Frustration,” The Wire, Nov. 1997), from which I will draw liberally. The solo and group albums (with Brice Glace and Gastr del Sol) listed in the discography are really only a very small part of O’Rourke’s resume; to take full account of his impact, one must look to the remixes and the production credits. Like Eno, O’Rourke is a person with ideas, and he is a person who excels just as much in collaborations and “treatments” (to use Eno’s word) as in his own solo compositions. In either case, as Cox argues, for O’Rourke, “every sound brings into question the meaning of life.”

Jim O’Rourke is a sonic semiotician, a musical materialist, a digital deconstructionist. He describes his work as a series of “research reports” that investigate the socially fixed, yet ultimately arbitrary, nature of musical meaning, interrogating established relationships between sounds and their social value in order to produce new relationships and allow these sounds to be heard again differently. “The whole basis of almost everything I’m interested in,” O’Rourke explains, “is to point out things that are taken for granted. (p. 37)

Cox mentions that O’Rourke’s discography already had 120 entries in late 1997; the number is probably at least double that now. Among his remix projects are those for Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, and Merzbow. In recent years he has especially been associated with Sonic Youth, with whom he is now a full-time member, contributing not only production but also bass guitar, guitar, synthesizer, percussion, and the instrument with which he is increasingly associated, laptop computer. This is another Björk connection, but whereas she carries her laptop all over the world in order to compose and mix on it, O’Rourke plays the thing, he jams and improvises with it.

O’Rourke’s associations go beyond the world of avant rock—such going beyond being an integral part of experimentation in rock music—to organizations such as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Kronos Quartet. In fact, O’Rourke has a master’s degree in music composition from DePaul University. There he studied with George Flynn, composer and performer of the extraordinarily complex and dense work, Trinity. Flynn, who has also recorded piano works by Charles Ives, Oliver Messiaen, and John Cage, and also composed works for chamber ensembles and orchestras, doesn’t pay much attention to rock music—though, amusingly, he was once asked to audition for the keyboard chair in Yes. O’Rourke, on the other hand, found the path toward contemporary classical music through reading the liner notes of King Crimson and Frank Zappa records that he checked out from the public library. There he learned about Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. In his own way he came to experiment with preparations to the guitar, even before encountering John Cage’s music for prepared piano.

While we are on the subject of Chicago, let me mention that it is one of the cities where the avant-rock trend, as well as important new developments in jazz and the classical avant-garde, are strong. There is a tiny discography at the end of this section that includes just a very few of the more recent avant-rock albums—a complete discography of experimental rock in Chicago would run to hundreds of records.

O’Rourke is quite a good guitarist, it ought to be said, and there is evidence of this on some of the solo albums, as well as on the Gastr del Sol albums (especially Crookt, Crackt, or Fly). But like many associated with experimental rock, O’Rourke is at least ambivalent about the guitar, and perhaps even has a love/hate relationship with it. (I would even include so fine a practitioner of the instrument as Robert Fripp in this category; he has as much technique as anyone who ever played the guitar, but as often as not his sound is modified to come across as something else.) For O’Rourke this has to do with the musical value of abandoning those contexts where one is comfortable, and where one has already done what can be done with a given approach. I have said this before in different ways, but here is another formulation of the “guitar problem.” The electric guitar has dominated rock music to the point where the “that ain’t rock and roll”-crowd feels it necessary every few years to reassert the primacy of “guitar rock.” Rejecting this primacy, experimentalists have tended to bifurcate into two camps: either to transcend the guitar through the guitar itself (King Crimson and Sonic Youth would be prime examples), or to just leave the instrument out of the mix altogether (Björk is a good example here, though there are many others). As with other areas of his work, and as befitting a musical deconstructionist, O’Rourke has struggled with the problem from both sides, recording albums such as Remove the Need, which consists in solo prepared guitar improvisations, and Eureka, which features some very sweet finger-picking, to “Cede” (an extended composition from Terminal Pharmacy) and Happy Days, which have no guitar at all.

If all of O’Rourke’s work were assembled into one marathon listening experience—a difficult project, not only in terms of what is out there already, but even more so because the oeuvre expands daily—we would most likely hear some significant continuities, but the discontinuities might stand out even more. (Part of the dynamic here, certainly, is the fact that grappling with fragmentation is one of the most significant aspects of all experimental music since Schoenberg and Coltrane.) One of the major discontinuities in O’Rourke’s work is between his “pop” albums, and his more straightforwardly avant-garde experiments. The pop albums are a deconstruction of the genre, in part because they will never be all that popular, and even more because they represent what the Situationists called a detournement of everyday materials—which is to say that the music on these albums is warped and twisted, though often in a very subtle way. There are pretty tunes on bad timing, Eureka, and Halfway to a Threeway, indeed a lot of hummable stuff. It isn’t that, all of sudden, these nice tunes turn on you and become ugly or harsh. On the contrary, in some cases they become sweeter and sweeter. After you’ve heard “Women of the world,” you’ll feel like you’ve been indoctrinated, you won’t be able to get the song’s only line out of your head. What’s really going on here? After all, these songs are not going to climb the Billboard charts, no matter what. Part of the issue here is that it was never all that easy to write a good “pop” song, and that is something every musician, no matter how “serious” he takes himself to be, ought to at least give a little attention to. But I think the deeper effect of what O’Rourke is doing with his “pop” albums is comparable to those electronically enhanced images of conventionally good-looking people, where their most attractive features are pushed to the point just this side of absurdity—which creates an even much more uncomfortable feeling than from the other side. It is a very subtle form of subversion—the application of oblique strategies, to borrow again from Eno.

On the other side of the present dichotomy are O’Rourke’s more “conventionally” avant-garde albums, especially Terminal Pharmacy and Happy Days. These albums have very little, if anything, to do with “rock” music, except perhaps in their sensibility—but that counts for a good deal. The aforementioned piece, “Cede,” is a forty-minute long, tape-manipulated “power trio,” of clarinet, bass trombone, and drums. Allow me to quote Cox and O’Rourke at length on this piece:

On one level the piece exhibits characteristic O’Rourke features: slow and deliberate instrumental passages woven with bouts of silence or nearly inaudible sound and complex layers of samples and electronic noise. But “Cede” is intended to explore a particular theoretical issue: whether or not it’s possible to recontextualise a set of sounds by continuously deploying them over a single, extended work. With characteristic humor and insight, O’Rourke recounts how the idea for the piece came from his amazed reaction on hearing Foghat’s raunchy blues rock classic, “Slow Ride.” “The thing I like about that song is that at the beginning ‘slow ride’ is this thinly veiled reference to some sex act,” he says. “But through the continuous use of this in the song, and because the song is the scale it is—it wouldn’t have worked it if were shorter—by the end of the song ‘slow ride’ is referring to the song itself during its actual existence; they’re singing about the song. And so in “Cede” there are these obvious concrete gestures in it, and I keep hammering these into the ground over and over, so that by the end of it, the final section is about everything that came beforehand and is just this big funeral for it.

“That’s what I wanted to get,” he continues, but I don’t think it was completely successful. It couldn’t be. That’s one of the things I learned, of course, while doing it—you can’t make people think something. The only way I’ve found that you can completely create your own gesture is by killing somebody else’s gesture. Murder is really the only gesture you can make. (p. 39)

There is plenty more to discuss, but it makes sense to stop right here—these two paragraphs are by themselves a textbook for experimental music and avant rock.

Everything else is icing. Gastr del Soul is somewhere in-between the “pop” and the “classical” avant albums, and features another important musician, David Grubbs. (See Christoph Cox’s profile of Grubbs in The Wire, January 2001.) Their music veers toward King Crimson at some moments, John Cage at others. Stereolab’s Sound-Dust features production and playing by O’Rourke and John McIntyre. Given Louise Gray’s wonderful expression, music as “connective activity,” one hopes for a “Stereo Youth” album in the not-too-distant future. Speaking of listening to the future, however, we might conclude that it is not so much a question of Björk and Jim O’Rourke as the future of rock—though I have all faith that they will be a major part of it—but, even more, they are beacons who light up the possibilities for rock to have a future.

      Björk

       Björk and Tappi Tikarrass, Miranda (no label CD, n.d.).

       Björk Godmundsdottir and Trio Godmundar, Gling-Glo (Smekkleysa CD, 1990).

       The Sugarcubes, Life’s Too Good (Elektra/Asylum CD, 1988).

       ———, here today, tomorrow, next week (Elektra CD, 1989).

       ———, Stick Around for Joy (Elektra CD, 1992).

       Björk, Debut (Elektra CD, 1993).

       ———, Venus as a Boy (Elektra CD/EP, 1993).

       ———, MTV Europe Unplugged (Video, 1994).

       ———, Vessel (Elektra Video, 1994).

       ———, Post (Elektra CD, 1995).

       ———, Telegram (Elektra CD, 1996; remixes).

       ———, Homogenic (Elektra CD, 1997).

       ———, Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC (Video [Bootleg?], 1998).

       ———, Volumen (Björk Overseas Limited Video, 1998).

      Jim O’Rourke

       Jim O’Rourke, Remove the Need (Extreme CD, 1993).

       ———, Terminal Pharmacy (Tzadik CD, 1995).

       ———, Happy Days (Revenant CD, 1997).

       ———, bad timing (Drag City CD, 1997).

       ———, Eureka (Drag City CD, 1999).

       ———, halfway to a threeway (Drag City CD EP, 1999).

       Brise Glace, When in Vanitas . . . (Skin Graft CD, 1994).

       Gastr del Sol, Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (Drag City CD, 1993).

       ———, Upgrade and Afterlife (Drag City CD, 1996).

       ———, Camoufleur (Drag City CD, 1998).

      Chicago: City on the make

       The Sea and Cake, The Sea and Cake (Thrill Jockey CD, 1993?).

       Tortoise, millions now living will never die (Thrill Jockey CD, 1996).

       ———, TNT (Thrill Jockey CD, 1998).

       Isotope 217, The Unstable Molecule (Thrill Jockey CD, n.d.—1998?).

       Sam Prekop, Sam Prekop (Thrill Jockey CD, 1999).

      1999

       Zeena Parkins, Pan-Acousticon (Tzadik CD).

       Iggy Pop, Avenue B (Virgin CD).

       Porcupine Tree, Stupid Dream (K Scope CD).

       Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles (Epic CD).

       Solex, Pick Up (Matador CD).

       Tom Waits, Mule Variations (Epitaph CD).