Endless Garbage- Endless Garbage

 

Though his self titled debut is rightly considered a classic of 1980s jazz, Jaco Pastorius wanted to surprise people with his second solo album, Word Of Mouth. As such he really fought to make the song 'Crisis' the opening track. Though I haven't been able to find a verifiable written source, it's said that he recorded the song by keeping each musician in somewhat isolation from the others, fading in and out the ever-evolving track so that no musician was truly playing along with all of the others at any given time. Jaco was not particularly thought of as being part of the avant garde or free sides of jazz, so 'Crisis' was forefronted to demonstrate that artists are rarely just one thing. Personally I always took its spotlight placement on Word Of Mouth as a statement of purpose, to show fans and critics that he wasn't just the smooth sounding fusion guy who was a lynchpin of Weather Report and some of Joni Mitchell's best jazz-leaning music. What, then, do I make of the title of John Dwyer's Endless Garbage sideproject and its placement smack dab in the middle of the improv album run? Well, as we'll see in a bit, he himself explains the moniker pretty poetically, so I won't bother. As for the placement, hmmmm...It honestly isn't as important as what the album itself is telling us about his music world: All along, I was never as basic as all those garage rock albums made you think.

Released March 19th, 2021, Endless Garbage was recorded under very different circumstances than the rest of the slate of improv albums. It's inarguably the most pure improv record of them all, by which I mean the songs were completely played with no guiding principles, and other than Dwyer (who edited it together) all they could hear was the drummer, who himself wasn't involved at all beyond providing the initial spark and percussive bedrock. Since I really enjoy his writing, perhaps I should just let Dwyer himself explain. According to the press blurb for the release, it came about like this:

“...[O]ne 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. I scratched the surface...but soon realized I would need heavy hitters to make this place habitable...After I spent a bit of time mixing and editing this down to a palatable offering I couldn’t help but think about human consumption. Our limitless need for material possession, for emotional acknowledgment, for as much information to be thrown in our faces in our very short time here on this mortal coil...We leave behind us a wake of destruction. Of course, there are moments of great beauty, ingenuity and compassion along the way. You just have to know where to look. Thus, “Endless Garbage” seemed a fitting title. A cacophonous and glorious sketch of ourselves.”

Anyway, here's the lineup:

John Dwyer- guitar and a bunch more

Ted Byrnes- drums/misc. percussion

Greg Coates- bass

Tomas Dolas- keyboards/synthesizers

Brad Caulkins- saxophones

The only person we haven't seen yet in a previous sideproject is the crucial element, Ted Byrnes. A prolific solo artist and musical collaborator, his website and social media are pretty interesting and some video clips show him experimenting with non traditional instruments. In one performance he is literally playing in and on a stairwell. This makes a lot of sense given that I would describe his style on Endless Garbage as sounding like a free jazz drummer hopped up on caffeine determined to hit every single drum and surface in his house every few seconds, over and over, in a rollicking, continuous clatter. It's the sort of thing you're either going to dig and find intriguing or absolutely hate, and you better get used to it because it's most of what's going on here. Suffice it to say, though, that he isn't going too out there with the textures, so unlike the aforementioned videos you won't be listening to a man play a metal staircase handrail, broken pieces of glass, random metal dishware and, um, a pinecone and an incense holder. I feel like I've either done too many drugs or not enough to 'get' his more junkyard-derived playing, if I'm being honest, but it sure is...something.

More than any other record in his discography outside of the very first OCS release and the Sword & Sandals sideproject, Endless Garbage—like Jaco's 'Crisis'—shows John Dwyer's affinity for the experimental and free/out avenues of music. In its chaos and push-pull between melody-less instrumental texture, its rhythm-less drumming/percussion, its edited layers of sound sculpted to an extent by him, it shows that the improv sideprojects and the Panther Rotate remix album helmed by Dwyer aren't the outliers they initially appeared to be. That said, even more than Sword & Sandals, Endless Garbage is a genre-less exercise in pure sound and experimentation. One can relate something like Sword & Sandals to classic 1960s/70s free jazz/avant garde, but comparing Endless Garbage to even the most 'out' moments of a jazz group like Art Ensemble Of Chicago or live improvisations by Henry Cow and King Crimson doesn't quite cover all the gene sequences, so to speak.

I think we're getting there, though.

Let's further consider 'extreme' music I've explored in the past, unique albums that only partly conform to any strictures or genre conventions, like John Zorn's Spy Vs. Spy: The Music Of Ornette Coleman (free jazz/hardcore punk), Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (noise/drone), and Autechre's glitchy, enigmatic Confield (IDM/experimental). Ah, but still not quite on the nose enough to fully explain what Endless Garbage is without hearing it for yourself. And maybe that's just it...If anything this record reminds me more of pure free-improv and pure-experimental music, completely untethered to any particular genre, the stuff that writing alone can't come close to capturing. Kissing cousin records that I also find exceedingly difficult to readily define (as I do Endless Garbage) would be things like AMM's AMMMusic, Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, some of Nels Cline's work outside of Wilco but especially Destroy All Nels Cline, the two albums by Don Caballero offshoot Storm & Stress, and, of course, Singable Songs For The Very Young by Raffi.

Maybe rather than try to define what Endless Garbage is, precisely, let's just take a swim in it. 'Vertical Infinity' starts things off, immediately setting the table with Ted Byrnes's clattering everything-and-the-kitchen-sink free drumming. Dwyer pokes around the margins with noodling guitar lines, all while Greg Coates tries to offer any kind of foundational rhythm or melody. A very overt deep breath opens 'No Flutter', which pours on the saxophones and has more of a breathing, droney feel to it before suddenly bursting into 'Goose.' This track sees Byrnes taking the forefront with an especially chaotic solo performance before blurting keyboards increasingly penetrate the dense layer of percussive clutter, giving way to a peaceful drone around the 1:30 mark. The accurately named 'Four' follows, all players seemingly blowing their brains out, including some fluttering flute in the background and a wah-wah pedal coated sax. Side B comes roaring in with 'Lucky You', sounding much like how Side A began, though Coates's booming bass repetitions create a much welcomed pulse to power the circulatory system of the eerie chaos going on, including indistinct vocals/spoken word.

'Pro-Death' never gels into anything memorably different from the rest; it could use something to set it apart on an already short and also-short-on-ideas album. This really undermines how the process used to make this record never creates chance moments of serendipitous synchronization, instead resulting in music that sounds like what it was: completely disconnected musicians improvising freely to already-recorded drumming, with no awareness of each other's playing (other than the glue that is John Dwyer holding/editing it all together). Even he can't seem to make much sense, or interesting nonsense, out of 'Pro-Death.' Things get a bit back on track with 'A Grotesque Display' thanks to the vaguely psychedelic effects processing on some of the instruments. Endless Garbage lets off the gas with the five minute closer 'No Goodbyes', fed by pretty keyboard lines, which is a bit more relaxed in its chaos. Coates attempts to stir up some excitement on bass with a energetic melody around the 3:30 mark but since only Dwyer could hear this, only he can respond with a short lived guitar interjection before we go back to the usual playbook—in other words, formless folderol.

Maybe that should've been the title.

If I am sounding a bit critical and unimpressed, I don't intend to. I'm not so sure Endless Garbage is the sort of record you can really rate or recommend anyway. What I mean is, like the aforementioned records I also find indescribable, I feel like I seek out these extreme fringes of music when I need something to really shake my world up, to give me something new and beyond the usual parameters. It's the same reason people watch weird ass movies like The Holy Mountain. You don't watch it to decide if you enjoy it or don't enjoy it, but to think about and react to something in a pure way that eludes the standard, established vocabulary used to discuss the artform. I remember once showing various clips of that movie to a longtime friend and I think it freaked him out. Likewise I am sure Endless Garbage would lead him to declare “yeah that album title sure is accurate” in a definite, dismissive way. This isn't some elitist art snob slam on him, or anyone who doesn't like what they're experiencing. I guess what I am ultimately trying to say is, you probably already know if something like Endless Garbage or The Holy Mountain is for you. Like me, you may also occasionally want to seek out things you can't easily digest, let alone explain. You may not listen to this album too often, but it'll always be there to re-open the seams of your musical mind palace and allow you to pierce the veil of the mirror held up to you and your established knowledge. There's that famous and famously overused Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss and it gazing back...but I don't think Endless Garbage is at all about that negation or annihilation, that evil corruption of the self by an outside/other. Rather it is, to quote Dwyer, there for you to “experience a cacophonous and glorious sketch of ourselves.”

Sword & Sandals- Good & Plenty

 

When the Bent Arcana album was announced in June 2020, John Dwyer's accompanying press blurb gave us this explanation: “[t]his is the first interstellar transmission from five days of electrified & improvised sessions recorded at Stu-Stu-Studio, edited down to 40 minutes for your earballs.” It didn't come as much of a shock, given that the most recent Osees album at this time was Face Stabber, a monolithic beast that ends with a 21 minute psych-jazz jam. The band had also for some years used soloing and group improvisation during live shows. So, yeah, what could be a more natural progression than Dwyer calling up a few musician friends and having a good old jam session? This was something that rock-associated musicians had been doing since at least Al Kooper's legendary 1968 Super Session, a record that saw the assembled players stretching out on blues and jazz jams interspersed with more traditional vocal-led songs. Culled from two days of jamming, Super Session is believed to not only have helped coin the term supergroup but it also called to mind already existing supergroups like Cream and John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. It's not too much of a stretch to say subsequent supergroups like Blind Faith, The New Yardbirds (soon known as Led Zeppelin), and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were inspired by it to push pure musicianship above pop songforms.

Anyway, no one has claimed Bent Arcana and subsequent improv releases were supergroups, so let's reel it back in. That's not the incongruity here regardless. The real problem with the press blurb above? It wasn't techincally Dwyer's first crack at an improvisation heavy sideproject. That would be Sword & Sandals, a free-jazz band that dates to circa 2006, which you can see in a rare live video from when they were a duo consisting only of John Dwyer on drums and Randy Lee Sutherland on saxophone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaI6w0H4VJw&ab_channel=KevinBrown

It wouldn't be until 2010 that Sword & Sandals were fully formed and released a studio album, Good & Plenty. Recorded and released during the same time period that gave us Warm Slime, which was not improvised but was recorded live-to-tape, this record of seven untitled songs featured a trio of John Dwyer (drums, flute, and bass), Randy Lee Sutherland (drums, bass clarinet, and alto saxophone), and Shaun O'Dell (tenor/alto saxophones and piano/keyboards); Anthony Petrovic contributes synth on the first track. It's worth noting for Sees-storians that O'Dell did all or some of the artwork for the first OCS album as well as for Good & Plenty. He maintains a personal website to this day and seems to be focused on visual art as well as being a college lecturer/professor. (Aside from Dwyer the other members have remained below the radar)

There are a few bootleg live performances floating around and CD-r/live releases from Sword & Sandals, but it's really hard to pin these down given their obscurity/rarity and the fact that the group's name is also a subgenre of films, thus making them kind of un-Google-able. There's also apparently some even more obscure Irish(?) band going by the name Sword And Sandals to confuse you further. Only the Rate Your Music website lists anything by Dwyer's Sword & Sandals other than the Good & Plenty studio album so tread carefully, hardcore collectors. As a result, it's all I'll be tackling.

Free-jazz is always a tough subject to write about, largely because it's so hard to define. Some people use it interchangeably with the terms free-improv and/or avant-garde jazz, so that even after reading a well written essay like Dom Minasi's Free Jazz Versus Free Improvisation (https://www.allaboutjazz.com/free-jazz-versus-free-improvisation-dom-minasi-by-dom-minasi), I'm still not sure I have a full grasp of the differences. Certainly as a jazz fan I've delved into the waters of landmarks like Out To Lunch (which I absolutely adore, and I believe is considered more avant-garde jazz with free elements) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (which I still find just as baffling as the jazz magazine DownBeat, which after its initial release rated it five stars and no stars in two dueling reviews). All I will say with my dubious-authority on the subject is that I find it a bit elitist when people seem to believe it's only genuine free-jazz if it's performed by musicians who come from a traditional knowledge pool of their instrument and 'classic' jazz/blues forms/modes/scales/chord changes, and also because it still has some “form” and still, occasionally, “swings”...whereas free-improv pretenders do not possess this knowledge and don't have a true feel for “swinging.” Since we know with certainty John Dwyer does not come from a traditional jazz background, make of all this what you will. But I digress.

To these ears, what Sword & Sandals are doing draws more from the John Coltrane school of free-jazz, focusing more on the interaction between 'melodic' instruments freely improvising with a drummer pounding out scattershot rhythms. Though released after his death and therefore not part of his true canon, Interstellar Space, featuring Coltrane playing in a duo with Rashied Ali on drums, is a close touchstone for Good & Plenty. I've always been entranced by Interstellar Space; it's such an oddly beguiling and spectral album, exploring the chaos of the cosmos yet keeping one foot firmly planted in the terra-firma language of mid-to-late 60s jazz. The way each song begins with Coltrane shaking what sounds like sleighbells before Ali begins the space ritual is so distinct yet so simple. While it's obvious Dwyer, O'Dell, and Sutherland are not on the same level as Coltrane—shit, I mean, who is?—there's still a lot of ragtag fun to be had here, skilled amateurs getting in the ring to try to see how many rounds they can bleat, blare, and carom around before collapsing.

Good & Plenty was clearly something done as a vacation for Dwyer, allowing him to take a breather from leading one of the greatest garage-rock bands at the peak of the late 00s/early 2010s garage/psych revival. The obvious point of interest for Osees fans is his turns as drummer, something he's only done on Castlemania and Putrifiers II, but I also want to take the time to call attention to his flute playing, as subtle as it can be in something like the mix in the intro of 'Track 6.' Anyway, since the liner notes don't say which songs he's drumming on, we can't know for sure which bits are his, but I have to say he's actually doing a great job at mimicking what he's aiming for, even if it is a bit more stiff and bass-drum heavy than your usual 'true' jazz drummer. Also worth praising is guest Petrovic's synth during the first track, which is less like free-jazz and much more like the propulsive menace of doomed keyboards on Suicide's first album, in particular 'Ghost Rider.' This is all very interesting given that about ten years later Dwyer would get the itch to again revisit jazz/improv-heavy music, and these kind of instrumental textures would no longer feel quite as out-of-the-blue as they must have to then-Thee Oh Sees fans of Help and Warm Slime. In fact I'd wager that beyond the generally saxophone-dominant sound of Good & Plenty, you could easily put something like the last few minutes of 'Track 2', with its breakdown into smoky atmospherics of keyboard, piano, and bass around the five minute mark, onto side two of the Witch Egg or Gong Splat releases and nobody would notice. Of course then there's freakouts like the short 'Track 4', which is actually quite more familial to the free-jazz leaning moments of a certain replica of the trout mask variety. 'Track 6' is probably my personal favorite, starting out with droning, interwoven saxophone lines and cymbal washes with occasional bass drum pulsebeats before drum rolls begin to churn the ocean around you.

Assuming you come to this record from a jazz/free-jazz knowledge base, I would assume Good & Plenty will strike you as a bit amateur if inoffensive. As for Dwyerologists, unless Endless Garbage is your free-jazz-cup-of-tea, it isn't going to be some hidden gem revelation. Yet even those of you who can't enjoy this racket will find in it a crucial part of Dwyer's musical DNA, an artifact from an earlier time when Thee Oh Sees had only been around about as long as the earlier OCS incarnation had been. It's perhaps more useful to you, then, as a source to cite for the lead-up to the modern jam/improv sideprojects. For those of us who, to use a Grateful Dead metaphor, like our 'Eyes Of The World' as much as we do our 'Drums' and 'Space', Good & Plenty is an intriguing mid-period outlet for Dwyer's more out (in the jazz sense of the word) and outre musical excursions. It's a tantalizing “what if?” to imagine how Sword & Sandals might've developed if he had kept it going concurrently to his main band.