Moon-Drenched- Moon-Drenched

 

As a dues paying member of the night owl union to begin with, I definitely am the sort who stays up way too late when I'm unemployed. Thus the last few months I've been acutely aware of the passing of the hours during late nights, as my wife sleeps in the other room, but also of the phases and positions of the moon in the night sky. I know a lot of people consider themselves stargazers, or at the very least will notice the beauty of painterly colors often seen during sunrise and sunset. I currently live in very flat, very rural Northwest Ohio so it's very, very hard to miss these views. All of this said, I think there's a particular sort who actively engage in moon watching, as it were. Weirdos and night owls and insomniacs and addicts, to name a few. While I can't say for sure, I've just never imagined John Dwyer as the kind of guy who wakes up bright and early to go for a jog and is in bed, asleep, by 11 P.M. Listening to things like the first Damaged Bug album and reading the descriptions he gives to his music using phrases like “...the familiar liminal twilight of skittering hues of black-blue...in pursuit of lunar prism beams heretofore unseen...”, I get the sense he's nightkin, too, y'know?

At the very least I'm sure he's had some acid comedown late nights, smoking a joint to ease the long journey into morning as the trip has long since ended yet the brain cells keep pinging off your skull, demanding something by turns eerie and primal and unreal to feast upon. Back in the day, proper non-musical fodder would be called 'midnight movies.' Nowadays I get the sense 'cult movie' is the more common term, though I personally think there's important distinctions between the two as much as the similarities might filter them into the same bubbling brew. I won't spend time here going into these differences, that's for another article. However this does make me think about one film that's always toed the line between 'midnight' and 'cult', The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Perhaps it's all the time I've spent unemployed and drenched in the moon but I've been thinking a lot about this movie recently as I've been trying to find a way to enter the orbit of Moon-Drenched and return with my astronautical findings. Which—and I'm not making this up—has turned out to be pretty serendipitous because the title of today's improv sideproject likely comes from the only released song (in the form of a demo), 'The Moon Drenched Shores Of Transylvania', from the scrapped sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, under the working title Revenge Of The Old Queen.

Maybe I'm wrong and it's just the poverty and insomnia getting the best of my senses. But I'd like to think I'm not. Anyway! To the music, already...

Moon-Drenched was released May 28^th, 2021. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this album might as well be credited to the group Bent Arcana, since it's all the same people (plus one), and some of the songs from this would eventually be performed live under that name. But I'll still consider this its own deal and not the sophomore album by Bent Arcana. Frustratingly, you'll see this album's title with or without the hyphen, though the album's back cover art and stickers/spine clearly have the hyphen, so I'll continue spelling it that way.

Sure sure, I know, I'm the only one who cares, let's move on! Here's the lineup:

John Dwyer- guitar/etc.

Ryan Sawyer- drums

Peter Kerlin- bass

Tomas Dolas- keyboards/synthesizers

Kyp Malone- synthesizer

Ben Boye- Wurlitzer/electric piano

Brad Caulkins- saxophones

Marcos Rodriguez- guitar

Lanea “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita- violin

Andres Renteria- misc. percussion

Joce Soubiran- saxophones

Ben Boye is the new addition to the already established Bent Arcana crew. He's probably best known for playing keyboards with Sun Kil Moon/Mark Kozelek and in Ty Segall's Freedom Band. While I'm not familiar with his work prior to this record, Boye is credited as playing Wurlitzer, and so his contributions are more melodic and lead orientated as compared to the synth abstractions of Tomas Dolas and Kyp Malone.

If Bent Arcana felt a bit tentative and varied in its approach, Moon-Drenched throws down the gauntlet. Despite its lunar title, the record as a whole tends more toward a high energy, high octane approach punctuated by shorter, more abstract tracks. As I alluded to earlier, Moon-Drenched is the perfect soundtrack for that point of a late, late night following an acid trip where you aren't actively tripping anymore but it's rapidly approaching 4 A.M. and your brain is equal parts fried and fully awake. Perhaps you find yourself fixated on existential questions, like, “when, exactly, does the transition from night to morning happen?” or “how late is too early in the morning to eat some ice cream?” You may never find an answer but this record will keep the journey going as it gives you music that is by turns funky and Earth-y, spacey and free-floating, intense and energetic, relaxed and somnambulant.

Overall Moon-Drenched feels like the musicians are playing and interacting in a much more coherent and ever evolving way than on Bent Arcana. I still feel like I can never really hear the violin, making me wish Dwyer had used Myers-Ionita in a different improv group with less players, but otherwise I don't think there's a weak link. The rhythm section has really locked-in together, providing the perfect launchpad for everyone else to play off what they're doing. On 'Der Todesfall' and 'Spoofing', Kerlin's bass finds an interesting phrase and the other players seem to lock in on it and fill in the musculature upon his skeletal ideas. As always when he's involved, though, I think it's Sawyer who steals the show. His subtle, jazzy contributions to 'Get Thee To The Rookery' are the perfect choice to compliment the ghostly void of sounds. 'The War Clock' has to be one of his best performances, ever, a constantly shifting groove that, by itself, justifies the song's almost 13 minute length. With all due respect to the current two drummer lineup of Osees, I'd love to see what the band would sound like with Sawyer taking the rhythmic reins for an album and/or tour.

Perhaps the slimmest moonbeam of a complaint I have is that I think this album is a bit more obvious (perhaps earnest is a better word) about its influences. 'Psychic Liberation' features an edit/transition from an opening spacey section to a band in full-flight set to middle-velocity mode; a minimalist bassline and exploding guitars punctuate the full-group interplay, all in a way that feels right out of Miles Davis's On The Corner playbook. Everyone rightfully picks up on the krautrock influences on these improv records but 'Terra Incognito' absolutely feels like it could've come from the more experimental and abstract edges of Tago Mago or Yeti. Moon-Drenched feels more guitar/jam focused than Bent Arcana and certainly Witch Egg, as a result openly echoing the more jammy end of krautrock, such as heard in Agitation Free and Guru Guru.

How much of an actual issue this is for you will vary. Personally I can't get enough of this stuff, but I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention that there's definitely a precedent for this music; you'll clock it instantly if you're familiar with the chemical compounds and alloys being synthesized and welded together. To be fair, though, this is like docking A Foul Form by Osees because it's a love letter to the punk and hardcore music the band grew up on. Moon-Drenched is inarguably a worthy addition to the jazz-fusion/krautrock/jam pantheon. There's plenty of people out there who will have their first taste of post-acid brain cell ping ponging with this platter, and perhaps seek out the old masters who can further feed your new hunger for this type of aural sustenance. Everything old is new again; the 1970s wave and the current era waves back as we all stare into the night sky, together, across time via the wormhole passageways of mind-bending trips, musical and otherwise.

Witch Egg- Witch Egg

 

There are times where a band name can be both illuminating and obfuscating at the same time. I find this to especially be the case when it comes to psychedelic and experimental music. The Grateful Dead is very evocative and lets you know there's going to be something otherworldly about their music, yet if you listen to Workingman's Dead you'll find the moniker confusing—shouldn't this have been made by a band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions? Similarly, groups like sunn O))) and Nurse With Wound signpost it's not going to be something especially digestible, but if you had no knowledge of what kind of music they make, you might assume they're an ambient and a hardcore punk band, respectively. While the ever-changing moniker of John Dwyer's main band, Osees, has nothing to do with the sound of the band over the decades, his side project names are squarely in the illuminating/obfuscating category. So it is with Witch Egg. Of course, a cursory Google search will reveal two possible origins of the name. Witch's Egg is the nickname for the Stinkhorn mushroom, in particular its immature egg-shaped fruiting body. The Witch's Egg, by contrast, is a children's book from 1974, summarized by user AbigailAdams26 on LibraryThing.com as the following:

“Agatha was a nasty old witch who lived alone in an abandoned eagle's nest on the top of Lost Mountain...[O]ne day a cuckoo's egg was left in her nest, and the cantankerous witch decided she would hatch it, in defiance of the mother birds who offered to take it off her hand...[R]aising Witchbird, Agatha learned to enjoyed [sic] the company of another being, and for the first time she was happy. Then in the fall Witchbird left for the south, and Agatha went back to her solitary life. Was it the end of their friendship, or would Witchbird return...?”

For all I know, though, Dwyer arrived at this name independently of these two sources. So let's put an end to this preamble and get to the good stuff. Witch Egg was released January 22, 2021 as the highly anticipated second entry in the improv side projects. Much to my surprise I found I had missed that Witch Egg had more than one release, so maybe I should ignore what I said in the Bent Arcana review about these not really being band names and moreso album names. I will be maintaining the use of italicization to indicate the album and not the band during this review. But I digress. Witch Egg's second release was a live album, simply titled Live, put out only on cassette on October 21, 2022. It captures a short four song set from August 6, 2022 featuring the full album lineup. (They opened for Flipper, which is sure a weird contrast!) There are no current plans to further release it on streaming services or other physical formats. While I couldn't find an upload of the cassette there is thankfully a HD recording of the entire show on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T2Lbm0OFcz4

Let's get back to Witch Egg, which has a smaller, different lineup than Bent Arcana:

John Dwyer- guitars & much more

Nick Murray- drums

Greg Coates- acoustic bass

Tomas Dolas- keyboards/synths

Brad Caulkins- saxophones

Nick Murray, of course, was a member of Osees for the post-Drop tour and the Mutilator Defeated At Last album, as well as the OCS 'reunion' record Memory Of A Cut Off Head. Greg Coates seems to be one of those under the radar musicians who plays a lot of random local shows where he lives, including a somewhat recent Soundgarden/Chris Cornell tribute show according to his Instagram.

On first listen, Witch Egg isn't too different from Bent Arcana. I feel that with more revisits, however, there's a real day/night, sativa/indica, Ocarina Of Time/Majora's Mask divide going on between the two records. You may have noticed that the lineup has an entirely different rhythm section, and this is the Rosetta Stone to beginning to understand where the differences come in. Nick Murray is more of a light handed drummer than Ryan Sawyer or the Osees duo of Paul Quattrone and Dan Rincon. His playing features a snare-forward, skittering, drum-rolls-and-cymbal-crashes sound that is founded more in traditional psychedelic rock and jazz-fusion. Greg Coates, meanwhile, exclusively plays acoustic bass on this record, while, interestingly, Dwyer contributes the electric bass parts, such as on 'City Maggot' (you can tell; his playing is tentative and a bit flat by comparison). Coates lacks the slippery elasticity of Peter Kerlin's playing style though his acoustic bass (and use of a bow at times) give Witch Egg part of its unique jazzy texture. I've always liked acoustic bass with an otherwise electric/amplified/woodwinds improv-heavy band, such as heard in early Medeski Martin & Wood.

The best way I can more tangibly explain the sound change from Bent Arcana is that Witch Egg as a whole has more of a jazz-forward, spacey/cosmic focus, de-emphasizing the rock, krautrock, and psychedelic/experimental elements. Outside of the rhythm section personnel turnover, the other huge change is that John Dwyer's guitar is either absent for most of the album or used as more of a background texture. Seriously, go back and pay close attention to this record and I don't think he plays a single solo or lead line! More intangibly, meanwhile, I would say Witch Egg has a hazy, late night, and eerie vibe going on, though you wouldn't know it at first.

Opener 'Greener Pools' jumps to life with a bellowing bassline and cacophony of saxophone/keyboard/guitar before quieting down into a spacey, drumless ending that segues immediately into 'City Maggot' led by Brad Caulkins' screeches and honks. 'Your Hatless Friend' maintains a low-gear chilly groove that isn't funky but makes you want to tap on the steering wheel or desk, with saxophones breathing in and out at the edges of the music, the full-band pulse gradually increasing while keyboards/synths quietly stir up the background fireflies. Suddenly all is dispelled by a chunky guitar strum that is a bit abrupt and awkward, if I'm being honest.

Side two turns down the lights even further. 'Baphomet', aptly named after an occult deity with a goat's head, has a deep, frightening synthesizer line that howls echoingly at you like a creature opening its multiple maws to begin the song that announces the end of the world. The free-floating 'Sekhu' feels like you're in the long dark of the Mines Of Moria, trying to spy apparitions in the foggy darkness, ending with a comfortingly traditional jazz bass solo. Finally, 'Arse' and 'On Your Way Now' cap off the mostly-mellow-yet-sometimes-menacing record. The former has an oddly catchy ascending saxophone line and a gibbering wordless vocal that reverberates in the backdrop, as if you're turning a corner and coming upon a ceremony being performed before it's all washed away by a staticky synthesizer. 'On Your Way Now' starts with a cycling keyboard line and a bass-heavy groan nodding back to 'Baphomet' before a dusty dusk shuffle kicks in led by airy saxophone leads and slow motion drumming. I always picture incense trails or maybe smoke from freshly blown out candles wafting in the air when I hear this song. Faint arcane babbling and Nick Murray's echoing snare hits see us out the door.

If I listen to Witch Egg more than Bent Arcana, it's only because I love how much it simultaneously narrows/focuses the sonic palette while also having a unique vibe and sound all of its own. Aside from Damaged Bug, it's rare to hear Dwyer play so little guitar, and the spacey, late night jazz atmosphere of the record really implants itself into your subconscious. Listen to it a few times in the right mood and setting and it'll infuse into your goosebumps and the hair on the back of your neck. For those who prefer In A Silent Way and Can's 'Future Days' and 'Quantum Physics' to Bitches Brew and Tago Mago, you may find Witch Egg to be one of your new favorite albums. Hell, even setting aside these pedantic preference discussions, it can become so. I know it did for me.

Bent Arcana- Bent Arcana

 

Despite notable attempts by Television and The Wipers, punk and garage rock bands have traditionally shunned long songs. To open that forbidden door is to venture beyond the sacred ground of simplicity, to betray everything they were reactions against, namely the excesses of prog rock and fusion bands. Can these warring factions ever be united? Well, ask a man like John Dwyer and he'll just laugh it off and go back to making whatever the hell he wants. After telegraphing the future with Warm Slime's title track, Osees truly opened the gates with Face Stabber's 'Scutum & Scorpius' and 'Henchlock', the latter of which is a side-long jam session that brings to mind Can's Tago Mago and Miles Davis's On The Corner and their ten-plus minute throwdowns. Were you to merely continue following Osees' studio output, however, you'd see a band who seem to have walked it back from the edge, with the transitory Protean Threat and (as of this writing) most recently the sub-half hour punk/hardcore love letter A Foul Form. It's in the extracurricular activities—live albums, The 12” Synth, Metamorphosed, Weirdo Hairdo, and Panther Rotate—the threads of Face Stabber were followed, whether long songs or otherwise. Sail even further over the edge of the known map of the Osees world upon the good ship S.S. Dwyer, and you'll land in the New World of Damaged Bug and improv-based side projects.

Bent Arcana would bookend this series of side project improv sidequests with a self-titled studio album and a live album. Today we're only concerned with said studio album, released in the depths of the covid pandemic on August 21, 2020. The sessions that would give birth to Bent Arcana took place over five days in December 2019, and featured the following players:

John Dwyer (guitars and a bunch more)

Ryan Sawyer (drums)

Peter Kerlin (bass)

Tomas Dolas (synths/keyboards)

Kyp Malone (synth)

Brad Caulkins (saxophones)

Marcos Rodriguez (guitar)

Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita (violin)

Andres Renteria (misc. percussion)

Joce Soubiran (tenor saxophone)

Most of you will probably recognize Kyp Malone from the amazing TV On The Radio, while Brad Caulkins will be familiar to Face Stabber fans as the man on the saxophones. I won't pretend I know any of the other players prior to this record, but I do want to point out Joce Soubiran is one of the co-owners of the Zebulon venue, at which Bent Arcana will record their eventual live album.

Before we get to the album, a short side discussion. It can get a little weird talking about these side projects because other than Bent Arcana, the other releases are only really given an album title and not a group name. I will continue to use Bent Arcana as the band, since they do have two different releases billed to their name. Where it gets confusing is that the Moon Drenched album features all of the same players on Bent Arcana plus one, and the live Bent Arcana album has fewer members and has two songs off the Moon Drenched album. Nonetheless I will discuss them as separate bands/music projects for an attempt at simplicity. In addition, I'll italicize the album name if I'm talking about it specifically and not the band of the same name.

Anyway! Setting aside Sword & Sandals and Endless Garbage, the improv side projects led by John Dwyer are concentrated on varying combinations of jazz fusion, psych, and krautrock. Some tracks do seem like pure improvisations created on the fly through group interplay ('Outré Sorcellerie', 'Mimi') while others have a more linear progression suggesting a predetermined chord structure and framework, possibly multiple takes with different soloists leading while the others react and interact ('The Gate', 'Oblivion Sigil').

Something I keep thinking about when I listen to these albums is that, while Miles Davis was absolutely and rightly celebrated for his skill on the trumpet and his drive to innovate music, his most underrated asset was his ability to seek out other musicians who could not only help him realize his and stalwart producer Teo Marcero's vision, but to push him in new directions. (One could also credit some of his love interests with introducing him to new music). After all, the first and last songs on Bitches Brew weren't written by Davis, and the various players on that album are as quintessential to its depth of sounds, motifs, and ideas as he was. I would, of course, say the same about John Dwyer. There's no denying the talent of the current five-man Osees lineup, as well as previous members of earlier incarnations of the band. The people he got together for the improv side projects, despite not being “names” to me outside of Kyp Malone, gel with Dwyer and each other so well you'd think they'd played together for years. I will say that I don't really hear violinist Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita much on Bent Arcana, and it's tough to tell if it's Dwyer or Marcos Rodriguez playing guitar. Anyway, he really knew exactly what he wanted to explore musically and had the ear to recruit people who were as skilled as him, if not moreso, and who could contribute equally. There's a reason he never names his bands something like “John Dwyer Band” or “John Dwyer's Bent Arcana” or something.

Bent Arcana is a beast of modern improv adjacent musicians collectively playing their asses off without ever letting their ego get in the way or dominating the conversation. You'll walk away with Ryan Sawyer as your new favorite drummer, a genuinely gifted player who can do loose, ever evolving funky krautrock/jazz grooves just as well as he does the kind of free-rhythm shock and awe that lives in the edges and the foundations of tracks like 'Outré Sorcellerie' and Gong Splat's 'Another Dust.' Were I tasked with choosing a MVP of Bent Arcana, though, I'd have to give it to Peter Kerlin. Whether on electric bass on 'Misanthrope Gets Lunch' or acoustic on the closing 'Sprites', his playing has a way of bringing everything into sharper focus while propelling everyone around him. The bassists of Phish and The Grateful Dead also have this style, part rhythm and part lead, that I tend to prefer in improv-heavy music, though the deadset bass repetitions of Can and Fela Kuti are obvious exceptions to the rule. Anyway, before I get to my closing thoughts I have to praise 'Mimi', a truly beautiful mid-album duet between the saxophonists that feels like stepping outside for fresh air in the midst of hotboxing a jam session. Perhaps a strange comparison, but it actually kind of reminds me of the (mostly) solo improvisations that Keith Jarrett plays on the Miles Davis boxset of live performances from late 1970, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970.

Given the ten member lineup, Bent Arcana is something of a fully-realized prelude to the coming side projects, containing bits of all the styles that would be more narrowly focused later on. This could result in the album feeling somewhat overstuffed with ideas and instruments, depending on your taste. Yet every time I give it another listen, especially on headphones, I seem to pick out things I missed before—the vocal groans and possible cuìca on 'Outré Sorcellerie', sonar-like pings and pongs from synthesizers throughout the album, what sounds like Out To Lunch-esque vibraphone on 'Oblivion Sigil'—and my appreciation for this record further deepens. Outside of Endless Garbage I sometimes think of these side projects as interchangeable. The devil is in the details, as always, and Bent Arcana is an unholy, otherworldly fine start to some of the best modern arcane musical rituals led by psych shaman/D&D dungeonmaster John Dwyer. And it only stays great from here.

Oh Sees Retrospective #32: Weirdo Hairdo

 

“In order to have that incredible groove that makes you dream, you have to think not of the groove, but of the dream.” -Mike Gordon

“I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.” -Miles Davis

“I'm not crazy about country-western music. But the lyrics are good.” -Alice Cooper

During various points of my life, I was either actively learning/playing trumpet or making music using the limited instrumental inventory and software available to me. Sadly, I've never had the experience of collaborating with other people, let alone improvising music in the solo or collective sense. I am fascinated by artists who specialize in playing jazz, jam band, or improv/free music, because it's something I envy and would love to try my hand at. It feels like speaking a different kind of language with other people; being lost in this constantly evolving interplay and development must be like nothing else on Earth. Although I don't know John Dwyer personally, I can safely assume he feels the same, given his increasing appreciation and participation in jamming and improvisations. Sure, evidence of his affinity goes back to at least 2010's forgotten Sword & Sandals release, but it was only with Mutilator Defeated At Last that studio albums started to reflect his love for setting the controls for the heart of the sun, or hitchiking on a krautrock convoy, lost in the reverie of a serene velocity down the Autobahn. Once we were through listening to Smote Reverser for the first time, we had confirmation that the next few years would continue to provide some tasty jams. And so, during their Red Rocks performance in 2021, when he announced before 'Scutum & Scorius', “...this one's for all the Heads out there, smoke 'em if ya got 'em”, it felt like the first time that we (Dwyer and the audience) were no longer just winking at each other for liking this kind of lengthy spectacle and drug-friendly-but-not-required music. It was open season.

If there's one release in their discography that has come to define “this one's for all the [Osees] Heads out there” for me, it's Weirdo Hairdo, a three song (!), 41 minute long (!!) not-quite-album, not-quite-EP, that is longer than most previous Osees albums, including Protean Threat. Ah, but I digress. Weirdo Hairdo was released on December 17^th, 2020, available physically only as a limited edition 'Pilsner' vinyl pressing. The Castleface site describes it as a limited edition 12”, and refers to there being four songs, which is both confusing and incorrect. The one thing I couldn't find any information on is when these three tracks were recorded. I'm guessing it must be from the Protean Threat sessions or some random recording session that didn't produce a new studio album. I think we can definitively say it wasn't leftovers from the Face Stabber sessions, since that's what Metamorphosed (partially) was composed of.

The title track starts us off, sounding like a hangover from Panther Rotate. It's almost as if they know their fans might be listening to everything in a chronological playlist and this makes a smooth transition from that to Weirdo Hairdo. Actually to me it kinda sounds like when you get a vinyl pressing with some defects and the needle will pop/skip in exactly the same part of a song every time you play it. Lucky things don't continue on like this, and 'Weirdo Hairdo' turns into another patented Osees 20 minute banger, a “kitchen sink” drive down to the deep jam goal line. Stuttered, echoing Dwyer vocals bounce around your brain, sort of like if 'Aumgn' by Can was on a sativa instead of an indica high. Tomas Dolas does a great job of squeezing all sorts of delightful blorbs, burbles, and bleats out of his synths throughout the 20 minute endurance race. Tim Hellman and the drummer duo do that perfect thing that rhythm sections ideally strive for during these sort of tracks where, if you don't pay close attention, they seem to merely be holding the reins of the groove, keeping the carriage steady, that sort of thing. But give a closer listen and there's all sort of interesting accents and divergences going on. What else to say? I love how druggy and hypnotic and looped out the ending sequence is; reminds me of an Animal Collective segue about to hit.

'Don't Blow Your Mind' was performed during the Protean Threat rehearsal posted on YouTube. This studio run-through has a lengthy jam section after the song portion ends and never returns to the chorus again. It's credited to Alice Cooper & The Spiders, but it's actually from the pre-Alice Cooper incarnation of that band, formerly known as The Spiders. Technicality or no, it's an amazing performance and a great cover. Alice Cooper may be overdue for a critical reevaluation and canonization like we've now afforded the Grateful Dead and ABBA. But I digress yet again. 'Don't Blow Your Mind' has some of the more nuanced and interplay-focused improv Osees have put forth. The forward momentum and ever shifting instrumental bedrock remind me, in spirit but not in results, of a particularly focused and energetic Tortoise track like 'Seneca' or 'The Suspension Bridge At Iguazu Falls.' Something about the chords Dwyer starts playing at the end as the jam peters out makes me imagine this segueing into the descending guitar line in the opening of 'Carrion Crawler.' Closing song 'Tear Ducks' is a cloudy meander, with a languid bassline and some particularly acid-peak sounding vocals from Dwyer. If I'm being honest it sounds more than a little like 'Crawl Out From The Fallout', but I can forgive that because of the subtle use of acoustic guitar late in the track, as well as how cool the whole thing sounds. To paraphrase I Heart Huckabees, is it a crime to like cool sounds?

I don't have too much more to say on Weirdo Hairdo. My only complaint is that it is what it feels like it is: a gathering of three different songs that are pretty different from each other. It doesn't hang together like a true album, with finessed sequencing and flow, in the way The White Album or the better Radiohead albums do. And there's nothing wrong with that! I won't dock points just because a release is patched together; it isn't trying to pass itself off as “the next studio album from Osees!” I could even see this being a top ten favorite for true Heads. For those who have slept on it, like I did, it's time to wake up and smell the bong smoke wafting out of the van windows.

Next time: Osees at Big Sur! Another live one!

Oh Sees Retrospective #31: Panther Rotate

 

In 2021, during a bumper-crop year for live albums and collaborations, John Dwyer released an album called Endless Garbage. Though seemingly of-a-kind with the Bent Arcana and Moon-Drenched improv records, it's actually quite a different beast. As explained by the man himself, “...one day, I hear a frenetic, free drummer playing in his garage a few blocks from me. And I think “interesting”. I stand outside his garage staring at the wall, like a fool, for a minute, then decide to leave a note on the car parked there. This is how I ended up meeting and working with Ted Byrnes. He wasn’t creeped out, and he ended up sending me a pile of truly spontaneous drums recordings from the carport to work with. I decided to have every musician come in one at at time and just take a wild pass at their track over the drums. None of these people had ever met or played together. I was the connecting thread.” So, rather than a group playing together in a room, Dwyer presented each participant with the different drum tracks and had them freely improvise over it. He also added some of his own playing, and mixed/edited the whole project into something a bit more consistently interesting and intelligible.

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

In 1998, Bill Laswell released Panthalassa: The Music Of Miles Davis 1969-1974. Though it is ostensibly billed as a remix album, Laswell did far more than just add some beats here or there or elongate the music to danceable lengths. As Allmusic.com put it, he “...occasionally deleted the rhythm sections, brought up obscured instruments, added Indian and electronic droning sounds from elsewhere on the tapes, constructed moody transitions, and premiered previously unreleased passages from Davis' sessions.” This is interesting because in some sense this makes Panthalassa a remix of a remix. Much like what Can was doing contemporaneously in Germany, Miles Davis and resolute collaborator/producer Teo Marcero would edit down tapes of lengthy jams, sometimes repeating vamps/run throughs of different song sections, other times cross-editing different takes of songs together. A great example is found on the seminal Bitches Brew album. The song 'John McLaughlin' (which features no trumpet or playing from Miles Davis at all) is actually an edited excerpt of an especially great solo from McLaughlin during a take of the album's title track.

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

Panther Rotate was released on December 11^th, 2020. As near as I can tell it was entirely done by John Dwyer, as no liner notes or info I found indicated that any of the other members of the band worked on it—well, other than obviously providing the original source material. It's billed as a remix album, and was made concurrently during the Protean Threat sessions. Before listening, I always had the impression it was just the standard modern-style remix album; the truth isn't quite so simple. The official description goes like this: “A companion LP of remixes, field recordings, and sonic experiments using all sounds generated by the hum and crackle of the desert farm.” Meanwhile, the blurb accompanying the original limited edition 3D lenticular vinyl edition of the release goes as follows: “Remixed, Reimagined, Respooled takes from the Protean Threat tapes. Served Up Piping Hot On Half And Half Colored Vinyl And Featuring A Special Lenticular Cover.” So perhaps the best way to think of Panther Rotate is as a companion piece, though in my mind it can also fairly be considered as its own thing. Even though the track titles directly reference the song names on Protean Threat, this certainly isn't as simple as 'Scramble Experiment' is just 'Scramble Suit II With Beats And A Rapper.'

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

Late in his career, Miles Davis became hugely interested in the popular R&B and hip hop of the day. Though finished after his death, Doo-Bop became an early example of mainstream jazz acknowledging the links to newer genres like hip hop and electronic music. Though far from his best album, Doo-Bop gives us a glimpse of what Miles might have continued to make. Inadvertently, it does give us a preview of the future. Album producer Easy Mo Bee took unfinished trumpet takes by Miles and built songs around them to finish the album, even adding samples and rappers in a pseudo-remix technique. It does beg the question though: if Miles Davis didn't finish/approve of the record himself, is it really his album? Is it even an album at all if some of the tracks are effectively remixes of unfinished songs?

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

Let's talk for a bit about what this album is before I get to my thoughts on it. Panther Rotate, along with the Damaged Bug side project and the recent improv collaborations he's been doing, is a clear indicator that John Dwyer is a restless spirit who wants to bring the truly experimental bent back to this creations. And mind you, I'm using the word experimental in the true sense of the word, not the lazy shorthand for “it's a weird and/or noisy album.” Hell, most of the tracks on Panther Rotate are titled with the word experiment in them! Listening to this release, I can't help but imagine Dwyer wanted to amuse himself between sessions with the full band. Maybe this started as something he was only doing to challenge himself and only later decided to release it. Who knows.

If anything, I would say there's two immediate touchstones for this album: early OCS records and Alien Soundtracks by Chrome. Now, anyone familiar with the latter may assume I'm thinking of it because Osees did covers of songs from it for the Levitation Sessions II performance. However! I had actually heard of/heard this record before their covers, and the abstract, fragmentary nature of the music on Alien Soundtracks is mirrored in the structure and feel of Panther Rotate. It's not quite a 1:1 comparison of course, and that's where the early OCS output comes into play. I'm going all the way back to the very first OCS release, the double album known variously as 1, OCS, and 34 Reasons Life Goes On Without You/18 Reasons To Love Your Hater To Death. Oh wait, on the OCS Bandcamp it's now 35 Reasons. Whatever! I digress. The point is, it's not the early folky aspects of the OCS sound but the experimental stuff that Panther Rotate calls to mind. True it's not as noisy and droney and atonal as OCS 1 can be, but the spirit and similar “throw it all at the wall and see what sticks” vibe pervades both. I mean hell, 'Untitled 3' from OCS 1 is a found sound recording of someone walking in gravel and doing something with water(?), while 'Poem 2' on Panther Rotate sets a whimsical, bizarre Dwyer poem to vintage crowd sounds and a distant brass ensemble. I don't remember any of that on Protean Threat, do you?

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

Madlib, early in his career, began to learn instruments and perform jazz under the Yesterday's New Quintet name. These records, which began releasing in 2001, were not actually a real quintet. Instead it was just Madlib playing all the instruments and doing the production. In 2003, Madlib released Shades Of Blue. Though early in his career, legendary jazz label Blue Note Records invited (soon to be legendary) jazz-head hip hop producer Madlib to take a journey through their archives and see what he could come up with. As with the equally influential work of his friend and collaborator J. Dilla, Shades Of Blue would cast a long shadow, influencing a new generation of music makers, crate diggers, producers, and beat makers, in particular the then-nascent lo-fi hip hop scene. Anyway, Shades Of Blue is a hard release to pin down, not a typical remix album at all, seeming to bring the past, present, and future together by being equally jazz and instrumental hip hop at the same time.

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

All of this leads us to....well, I'm still not entirely sure. I've been struggling with Panther Rotate, in a good way. It's a difficult record to wrap your head around, not in terms of “getting it” but in terms of “getting it and deciding if you like it.” I suspect this was and will continue to be a very divisive release in the ol' Osees discography, much like OCS 1. The simple fact is that experimental music just isn't everyone's cup of tea, and though Panther Rotate ain't exactly Metal Machine Music (which still holds up today, and just keeps getting funnier every time I listen to it) I can for sure see some fans tilting their heads, puzzled at what the hell this is supposed to be. As for myself, my reaction thus far has been similar to other experiments by bands I love, like Metal Machine Music or (No Pussyfooting) insofar as Panther Rotate is also:

1. Interesting but inessential listening

2. Not especially compelling to listen to on repeat

3. Best enjoyed on as many drugs as you can get your hands on

Like a lot of experimental releases, there won't be certain songs you gravitate toward. Rather, this is very much a collection of ideas and moments. Some are but brief flashes of chaos, like the electronic beeps and whooshes of the breakdown during the end of 'If I Had An Experiment', which sounds like a drunken, lurching, inside out version of its parent song. Others will go for extended grooves that fade in and out, or stop and start, like the opening 'Scramble Experiment', interrupted at 1:13 by a glitch escaping from an Autechre song before it continues on until 3:00 when we apparently enter a swamp or marsh with buzzing flies and mosquitoes. For my money the most thrilling parts of Panther Rotate come when no familiar terrafirma is below us and we're in the dark realms of Dwyer's restless urges. 'Terminal Experiment' presents us with a slow motion bassline that feels like it's being played by someone actively fighting falling asleep, over and over, as all sorts of flotsam and jetsam goes by in the background. It reminds me a bit (a bit!) of some of the more free floating and spacey moments from really out there Grateful Dead jams from the late 60s to mid 70s, part free jazz skronk and part psychedelic fireworks and daisies being sprayed across the sky.

When is a remix album not really a remix album?

Released in two parts initially in 1994 and 1995, John Oswald's two-CD set called Grayfolded is one of the more interesting cult items of a cult band. The title is a pun on the Grateful Dead, and as this “plunderphonics” project was officially commissioned by bassist Phil Lesh, Oswald was given full access to their vault, choosing to focus on two album length suites edited together from over a hundred different performances of 'Dark Star' from 1968 to 1993. Nowadays you can find innumerable mixes on YouTube of jam band performances, themed around certain ideas: Phish Ambient Mix, Grateful Dead Space Mix, Phish's 'Tweezer' megamix, and the like. But in his time, Oswald's project was unique, a for-fun-only release still beloved by fans who remember/know of its existence.

Kinda like what we'll tackle next time, Weirdo Hairdo.

30 For 30: Bitches Brew by Miles Davis

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 16, we rap about double albums and use the word 'awesome' a lot.

The double album is a rare beast in today's music. The last modern double album I can remember was The Flaming Lips's Embryonic. However, that one is cheating a bit, since it's only 70 minutes of music spread across two “albums.” In the 90s, because of the way the CD format changed how albums were paced and flowed, it was not uncommon for a band's album to be as long as Embryonic despite being counted as a single album. For example, Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is 69 minutes long and Adore by the Smashing Pumpkins is actually longer at 73 minutes long (Billy Corgan was never known for being succinct). Of course, two of the first double albums, Frank Zappa's Freak Out! and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, were only 60 and 72 minutes, respectively, so as the years have gone by the idea of what really constitutes a double album has become a bit muddled. Is it defined by the length of the music or by the whims of the artist?



There is no such gray area with Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Even without the bonus track often appended to new copies of the album on CD, it runs a sturdy 94 minutes. Bitches Brew is a double album through and through, and anyone who owns it on vinyl knows what I mean by that. Truly only a gatefold sleeve does justice to the cover art, which wraps from the front to the back; truly only a rambling, poetic essay by Ralph J. Gleason and an oddly framed picture of a shirtless Miles Davis could work inside a gatefold sleeve. There is something satisfying about the heft of a double record, especially one that would even take two CDs to contain it. I have a few double albums on vinyl and they put you in a different mindset when listening to them. It feels like something you do on a long weekend afternoon: burn some incense and relax next to the record player while staring at the covers and liner notes and such.

The full cover, albeit a scan of a CD booklet version of it

You need to have patience and focus to sit through double albums, something our increasingly short attention spans have made difficult. It's a different listening experience and a valuable one; compared to how we normally listen to music—in the car, on an iPod at work or while exercising, on a computer with the songs on random shuffle—it feels like meditation. To simply sit by a record player and listen to an album while not doing anything else feels quaint and outdated by today's standards, like something you'd expect Henry David Thoreau to write about in Walden. Even I don't do it as often as I used to but I suppose it makes it more of a special experience when I do. For instance, I had today off of work thanks to a snowstorm, and spent my morning half-awake drinking coffee and listening to Bitches Brew. Somehow it fit the visibility limiting wall of wind and snow outside my window. The experience of giving it a listen first thing in the morning with my full attention has also set the tone for the rest of my day. If you've ever woken up early on the weekend and watched a movie first thing, you might know what I mean by that. But I digress.

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'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down'

“Awesome” was my response to hearing Bitches Brew for the first time. I was in high school and had finally made friends with someone who also loved music. As usually happens, you end up borrowing a bunch of music from each other and sitting around trading off on albums saying things like “wait'll you hear this one...” Every time I listen to Bitches Brew it takes me back to that mindset, when I was first discovering all that music had to offer beyond the forgettable modern rock and pop music that had been my only musical world since middle school. After Bitches Brew I finally went and listened to some of the records my parents had from their youth. After Bitches Brew I started to listen to jazz in all its forms, and to give other genres of music a chance. And so on.



If I'm ever making a list of my favorite albums of all time, Bitches Brew has to be on it. There are some Miles Davis albums from this same era that I think are more interesting (On The Corner) and some I think do a better job of being a jazz/rock fusion (A Tribute To Jack Johnson), but none of them can match Bitches Brew overall. It has everything in it. Despite being an instrumental album, every human emotion is in there at some point. What's more, it feels like it has every instrument in it, too. While I think most people listen to this record loud on a stereo, it works just as well on headphones since you pick up how much detail is in the production. How Davis and producer Teo Marcero managed to wrangle this many musicians at a time, and to edit the various parts of the numerous performances into the final versions on the album, is beyond me. Again, I implore you to give this a spin with some good headphones if you never have before. It's almost dizzying how many sounds are going on at some points, while at other calmer points the space and separation between instruments reveals how masterful all the musicians were for these recording sessions. If you follow a single instrument through each song, you see points where they step up to let loose and other times where they recede into the background while still contributing to the rhythms, textures, or melodies. There's collective improvisation, and then there's a group that has become a singular unit without an ego steering it. Bitches Brew is ego-less: Miles Davis, whose album this ostensibly is, doesn't even appear on the song 'John McLaughlin.'

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'John McLaughlin'

But let us return to that initial “awesome” reaction. You see, I had never really listened to a double album before, and certainly not one with long songs on it. Keep in mind, there is only one song on Bitches Brew that is less than 10 minutes long. You can imagine how much of a 'brave new world' this felt like as I heard it for the first time in my friend's bedroom on a warm Saturday afternoon in Spring. 'Pharaoh's Dance' slowly worked itself up as I was looking through the CD booklet, trying to get some kind of context for the music I was hearing. I had something of an idea of what Bitches Brew might be like, since Radiohead had mentioned Miles Davis's electric fusion era as an influence on OK Computer, but imagining what music will sound like based on written descriptions is not the same as hearing the actual product. Anyway, I recall feeling lost inside 'Pharaoh's Dance', and I had to ask several times if it was still the same song.


Then the title track started and it sounded completely alien to me. I know now it's a trumpet fed through a delay/echo pedal, but at the time, I didn't know much of anything about recording techniques. Despite being a trumpet player for several years in school, I had no idea what I was hearing. And it was awesome. It was weird. It was...indescribable. It was the kind of experience that I repeat whenever I hear music that takes me completely by surprise and warps my expectations of what I thought sound and music could be like. Time and again I find myself muttering “awesome” and loving the challenge of figuring out something novel, making sense of something alien.

Bitches Brew is the album I would take with me to a desert island. It is the album I could listen to all day, talk about for half the day and write about for the other half of the day. Hearing it for the first time around age 17 made me say “awesome” and hearing it for the umpteenth time at age 30 made me feel awesome. So why is Bitches Brew on my list of 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years? Nothing complicated this time: it's because it's awesome.

Miles Davis- Agharta & Pangaea

I've gotten in the habit of listening to CDs through my TV via my Playstation 3, largely because I have a pretty decent 2.1 speaker set-up. As a result I've come to enjoy the visualizer with the changing, spinning shots of Earth in Space. It feels like the perfect way to listen to Miles Davis's 1975 end-of-an-era double live albums, Agharta and Pangaea because:

1. they're named after a legendary city said to dwell inside the Earth's core and a theoretical supercontinent of the Earth in pre-historic times,
2. they're equally spacey and Earth-y, like most of Miles's fusion era,
3. along with the visualizer, they share a sense of things constantly shifting and changing yet also often seeming to stand still

As far as I know, it's still hard to track down copies of these albums. The early 90s CDs I have of each are plagued by muddy, poorly mixed sound, especially on Pangaea. I don't know if it's something endemic to the original live tapes or what. However, as with a bootleg tape of a particularly crackling show by the Grateful Dead, even poor sound quality can't hold back the essence of the music. And words like “essence” definitely spring to mind, since the stuff Miles Davis was doing live on stage in 1974 and 1975 was some spooky, voodoo, psychedelic, acid/funk/rock jazzy shit. There are moments of deep improvisation that recall other contemporary stuff that was being done by bands as disparate as the Grateful Dead, Fela Kuti, Frank Zappa, and King Crimson.

Miles was truly doing his own thing with his band, though. There are minutes at a time where you would never guess it's a Miles Davis album, since his trademark trumpet is only sparingly employed. And even when it is, it's usually run through a wah-wah pedal, making it more akin to guitar with the way he uses it to slash and yelp across the soundscape. This, along with the more often employed (and more divisive) screeching stabs he hammers out on the organ, seem to be as much about Miles contributing to the grooves as it is about directing the energy and movement of the band. Keep in mind, too, that this is Miles without a true keyboard player and with two guitarists and an electric bassist.

Thus by the recording of Agharta and Pangaea on February 1, 1975, most traditional jazz fans and critics had turned their backs on Miles. It's true he didn't have the trumpet chops he used to but there's no denying his vision and the totality of it. Some credit always has to go to producer Teo Marcero for his extensive edits and work on Miles's fusion-era studio albums, but presumably he had little say on the material on these live albums other than to record or mix them. So in a sense this is the purest music of this era for Miles, and certainly the closest he got to fully purging all the European influences from his band and, to paraphrase the man himself, getting down into 'some deep African things.' The band moves effortlessly between the textures and varying energy of Bitches Brew, A Tribute To Jack Johnson, and On The Corner while only a few times actually playing any of the songs or basic themes from those records.

I'm not sure I would say this makes Agharta and Pangaea better than the well known studio stuff. There's no denying the genius of Miles Davis and producer Teo Marcero in constructing the finished products mentioned above; side one of Jack Johnson and the title track of Bitches Brew are all the evidence you need. Interesting, then, that most of Miles's fusion-era records were pieced together from long studio improvisations and jams. The most direct route, for those interested in this sort of thing, comes in comparing Live/Evil (which mixes in studio material and isn't strictly live) to the excellent The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 boxset, from which the live stuff was culled.

Agharta and Pangaea, however, are in a league of their own. This is alchemical music: the flaws and moments that don't work are constantly overshadowed by the sense of exploring the unknown corners where the borders between genres meet. I'd be interested to hear what Teo and Miles would have done if they had chopped these live recordings up into a studio album or something like Live/Evil. This means they aren't as consistently good as they could be with some studio edits, though the trade-off is that they feel more...authentic. Raw, perhaps, is a better word. They're like Miles's version of a Fela Kuti album: these songs are so long and morphing that it's nearly impossible to discuss the music itself. In that regard, you'll usually just get totally lost in the grooves and atmospheres, which is something I wish I could say more often.

Great Album Covers: Bitches Brew

I really did mean to post a review today, but I still haven't given Grouper's double album, A I A: Alien Observer/Dream Loss, enough time or listens to formulate a coherent opinion about.

Still, I recently let a friend borrow a Miles Davis boxset I own (The Cellar Door Sessions one) and it in turn forced me to finally listen to some electric Miles again. And hot damn!

Some of the by turns peaceful/stormy, Earthy/otherworldly music of Bitches Brew is previewed by this cover, so before you even hear the music you already, somehow, intuitively have a good idea of what it's going to sound like judging by the cover.

Extra points go for this being one of those awesome "the album art wraps around onto the back" covers, using the sweating woman as a sort of hinge between the two.

See? One could say it is truly bitchin'. If one were so inclined.

Bob Dylan- Time Out Of Mind

Seven Or So Thoughts On Bob Dylan & Time Out Of Mind

1) Bob Dylan is up there with Miles Davis in the pantheon of greatest musicians who ever lived. Both men were constant searchers and innovators who went through many different phases and personas during their careers, variously making masterpieces, let downs, and comebacks. Dylan in particular has been said to have made comebacks at least once a decade since the end of the 60s, so it seems only fitting my comeback review (after a month or so absence) would be of one of his comeback albums, 1997's Time Out Of Mind.

2) For all the fun you can have with Dylan's mid-60s electric/surreal music, there's a distinct lack of emotional resonance to much of it. As his discography is close to definitive in its moods and forms of expression, you can spend a lifetime discovering him and latching unto certain releases. In my younger days I used to bristle when others would posit Blood On The Tracks as their favorite Dylan album, since Highway 61 Revisited rang much truer to me even though I had no idea what most of it it meant. That was part of my enjoyment, however: the puzzle of it all, the need for interpretation, and Dylan's pervasive wit and urban cool. Now, I embrace his more human and openly emotional albums. Having been through the ringer of (to borrow a phrase) love and theft myself, Time Out Of Mind strikes me as up there with Blood On The Tracks in terms of its humanity and resonance. And excellence.

3) When a friend introduced me to Blood On The Tracks in college, it never occurred to me to wonder about its authenticity. I had no reason to suspect it wasn't taken straight from Dylan's heart until reading his Chronicles book, in which he reflects that an unspecified album (almost certainly Blood On The Tracks) wasn't autobiographical at all, but based on plays by Chekov. This upset me for awhile until I had been through a couple relationships and re-discovered the album, which finally resonated. You see, with Dylan, the point is never authenticity. The point is resonance. 'Simple Twist Of Fate' and 'Shelter From The Storm' give me goosebumps when I even glance at their titles because they resonate so perfectly with things I've thought or felt. Oddly, there has never been much debate as to the theme of Time Out Of Mind, even though it's every bit a relationship album as it is the death/mortality album everyone has always claimed it was. Listen again to 'Love Sick' or 'Cold Irons Bound.' These are not death or disease songs; they recall the uncertainty ofBlonde On Blonde, a record which, like Time Out Of Mind, encompasses a combination of new-love-devotionals and lost-love-laments.

4) Daniel Lanois's production on Time Out Of Mind doesn't sound quite like anything else I've heard. Dylan's voice is wisely kept front and center, with Lanois's subtle reverb/echo treatment lending it a spectral feel, as if Dylan has come back like a ghost a la Obi Wan Kenobi to dispense wisdom. However, there's an odd remove and cool-ness to the instruments that means this record isn't quite as intense as Blood On The Tracks or as alive as Love & Theft. Even the tracks that point to the modern roadhouse R&B/rock sound Dylan has adopted since 2001, most obviously 'Dirt Road Blues', sound a bit muffled and distant, as if someone is retroactively sanding off the distorted edges of the guitars and organs. It doesn't help that there were as many as ten people playing on some of the songs. As a result, 'Cold Irons Bound' paradoxically sounds muffled/distant and suffocating, as if it were recorded in someone's large-but-not-large-enough walk-in closet.

4a) A listen to 'Highlands' on headphones is revelatory. With an organ and electric guitar paired in each stereo channel, on top of the other instruments, this approach, and the track's length, recalls Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. But whereas Teo Marcero and Davis were able to wrangle all of these elements, Lanois and Dylan sound in over their heads. Since Brew was instrumental, it worked; since Time Out Of Mind is ostensibly a vocal focused album, the production and number of musicians can be distracting. Perhaps this explains why the instruments are so muffled and distant sounding, since the mixing of this record and the balancing of all these sounds must've been a nightmare. Also, did 'Highlands' really need to be 16 minutes long? No, but it's an indulgence that works. The flaws of Time Out Of Mind are the sort of flaws that serve to give a record character instead of rendering it less enjoyable. Mind you, 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' and 'Desolation Row' didn't need to be as long as they were, either, but of course, they wouldn't have had nearly the impact they did if they were trimmed.

5) If New Morning is his almost-blindly-optimistic-about-a-new-love and charismatically off-the-cuff album (see 'If Dogs Run Free' and 'One More Weekend' for some of the funnest deep cuts in Dylan history)....if Blood On The Tracks is his newly-pessimistic-about-love and still-witty-but-bitter album ('You're A Big Girl Now' and especially 'Idiot Wind' are, respectively, as defeated and as pissed off as Dylan has ever sounded)....then Time Out Of Mind is like some unexpected sequel to both, written years later about the same characters (now older and changed) by the same person (also older and changed). There's a resignation and passivity to 'Can't Wait' that I find devastating because it hits close to home for me right now. It helps that the lyrics play like a sequel to both 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' (in terms of 'waiting at someone's gate') and 'Tangled Up In Blue' (in the sense of a couple meeting and falling in love over and over).

2a) I suspect that most of the critics and people who read death and mortality in the lyrics of this album do so because it's what is most on their minds. As Dylan's discography encompasses almost the entirety of human experience, from love to loss to absurdity to apathy to nonsense to hope to lust to hatred to belief to fear to etc., it seems to me that his greatest and most lasting works encompass as many of these qualities as possible, and we, as listeners, determine what it all means. To put it another way, Dylan resonates with us because he gives us so much to work with. He openly resists interpretation and wishes the Dylanologists wouldn't waste their lives studying him, but he says these things because he wants people to discover what these songs mean to them, and not to solve the puzzle of what they meant to him when he wrote them. Is 'Not Dark Yet' about his death? I don't know, because to me, it's about my infrequent bouts with depression, pessimism, and apathy.

6) Time Out Of Mind sounds like how I always feel on Sunday nights, especially if I'm drunk and/or have recently broken up with someone.

7) Musically, Love & Theft and Modern Times are better albums. They sound muscular and confident even when they're displaying some vulnerability or sadness. Yet none of Dylan's recent albums ('recent' being a relative term) are as complete as Time Out Of Mind. The former albums are fun and enjoyable listens, but they won't grow on you and grow with you the way an album like this does.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Eric Dolphy- Out To Lunch

As something of a dilettante to the world of jazz, I hope it still holds some weight that the first time I heard Out To Lunch I didn't know what to make of it. I had a pretty good idea of what avant-garde and free-jazz were about but foreknowledge often can't quite prepare you for what's to come. Even now when I listen to Out To Lunch it sounds like such a refreshingly bizarre album, operating under its own internal logic. The bass on 'Hat and Beard' drones and groans in a way I would call non-jazzy, and the use of bass clarinet and vibraphones on the album seems more in the wheelhouse of a finicky, eccentric singer-songwriter than a jazz band. What I'm getting at is, this record clearly originates from jazz yet sounds very little like what most people think of when you say the word “jazz.”

It's impossible to calculate the influence of Eric Dolphy on future generations of musicians, but I think it's most telling that some of those musicians weren't jazz players. Frank Zappa titled a track on his Weasels Ripped My Flesh album after Dolphy, and I have to speculate that Zappa pal Captain Beefheart was also a fan. Take the most avant-garde, 'out' moments from Trout Mask Replica and they have the sound of free jazz as played by a 60s rock band. Out To Lunch, like that underground masterpiece, is the kind of music that sounds simultaneously freely improvised and out of control while also being structured and tightly played. I can't explain how, but eventually one learns to tell the difference between random nonsense and expressive/freeform music; Out To Lunch is inarguably the latter.

'Gazzelloni' is a kind of Rosetta's Stone to understanding what is going on in this album. Ostensibly the record's most structured and traditional track, the solos on flute, trumpet, and vibes are undercut, accented, challenged, and cheered on by the other instruments. I almost hesitate to call them solos in the strict sense because of the full group improvisatory feel of this music. An impossibly young Tony Williams on drums is the keystone to it all, snapping off militaristic snare lines on many of the songs and dueling, via cymbals, with bassist Richard Davis near the end of 'Gazzelloni.' Still, it's the final two tracks where Dolphy returns to the more traditionally jazz oriented alto sax that things really get cooking. The towering title track has always ironically sounded more to me like the frantic rush of a person doing physical labor rather than the relaxed afternoon eating of someone on a lunch break. Regardless, Freddie Hubbard plays a patient, burning solo while the rhythm section goes absolutely insane around the 4:27 mark, at once atonal and arrhythmic yet melodic and swinging in its own way, like a machine stamping metal parts in a factory.

I find it a little sad and a little prescient that Miles Davis didn't like Eric Dolphy's music. Sad, because I think if Dolphy had lived longer, he and Davis could have learned a lot from each other's music. Prescient, because I think Davis was one of the few musicians who saw that avant-garde and free-jazz weren't so much a portal to getting some place else as they were an end in and of themselves; there was nowhere to really go 'from' this kind of music. Davis ended up fusing rock, funk, blues, and, arguably, electronic music into his form of jazz, which proved to be of more lasting influence and popularity. Yet I think there is still much to learn from the other direction jazz took in the 60s, and Out To Lunch is one of the essential texts to not merely study, but also to enjoy.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5