Houston Blog

Michigan experimental duo Windy Weber & Carl Hultgren, on their first tour in quite some time, stop into DiverseWorks tonight. Their 2008 album Songs for the Broken Hearted was quite well-received, but to me, the work that's key to their career is the 1998 LP Depths.

Windy & Carl had put out three LPs before Depths, including Antarctica, for the Bliss Out! series by Darla Records (which is most well-known as a distributor), an appropriately icy, lonely and continent-size record that features the duo's first really epic composition in the 22-minute title track. Depths was their first album for then up-and-coming indie label Kranky, and, it appears, the first to get a really wide release. According to their discography, their previous records were mostly released in limited editions of 1,000 copies or fewer. Depths is also the earliest major Windy & Carl release that's still in print, although it seems that second album Portal (originally released on cassette) can still be had without much trouble.

This noisy, caustic band with the smartass name was founded in Bristol, England, in 1978. The group broke up 1981, and members went on to other notable yet now-obscure projects. During that period of less than four years, the Pop Group produced two albums and another album's worth of singles and one-offs. Of those, only the first LP, Y, is in print. I found out about these guys because legendary punk bassist Mike Watt has recently made a habit of covering their song "We Are Time."

It's easy to see why Watt would cover this band. First, though the Pop Group has a reputation for radical politics, vocalist Mark Stewart treats them obliquely, in a clear antecedent to the Minutemen's similarly indirect or impressionistic approach. Though Allmusic dings the band for being "unabashedly and stridently radical to the point of being hectoring," this is only true of the band's later work, such as tellingly entitled second LP For How Long Do We Tolerate Mass Murder.

On Y, the band is nowhere near as directly political as some of their contemporaries, in particular Gang of Four and The Ex; even Wire and Joy Division have more "strident" moments. Second, the band's basic sound, which pits simple, clever finger-style bass riffs against scratchy guitars with zero low end, likewise recalls the Minutemen's "ideological" sonic separation between bass and guitar.

Peter Brotzmann

German saxophonist and clarinetist Peter Brotzmann, who has been active for more than four decades, is among the most important and revered figures in the history of European free jazz. He toured Texas last year in intense duo performances with Han Bennink, a Dutch contemporary whose drumming virtually defines the word "idiosyncratic." This time, Brotzmann's companions are younger and more traditional, but no less unique or exciting.

Nasheed Waits is a second-generation jazz drummer - his father was bop drummer Freddie Waits - and he has an almost instinctual way of pushing the boundaries of meter without quite breaking out of time. Revealing one of his primary influences, Max Roach, Waits plays with an emphasis on melody, even in free improvisations, and Brotzmann seems mellower with him, accordingly. Warning: in-camera sound ahead!

Continue reading " Tonight: Nameless Sound Presents Peter"...

The Silver Apples' career has been defined by accidents, difficulties and deferrals. Formed when Simeon Coxe III of the Overland Electric Stage Band decided to bring an electronic oscillator to a show, causing the band's guitarists to quit in protest, leaving him and drummer Danny Taylor alone on stage, the Silver Apples were originally active from 1967 to 1969.

During this time the band released two albums, The Silver Apples and Contact, and played mostly in New York and the Midwest. When their record label, Kapp - which Coxe claims never paid any royalties at all - was absorbed by MCA, Coxe and Taylor simply called it a day, canning their nearly-completed third album and going their separate ways.

The band might never have performed again if German label TRC had not released an unlicensed CD version of both albums in 1994. So much interest was generated that MCA decided to release both albums on CD, and Coxe, who had mostly done visual art and graphic design in the '80s, went on tour, tapping mostly younger musicians (notably Xian Hawkins, who now performs as Sybarite) as sidemen, since Taylor couldn't be found.

My last two entries have been about records that are considered "classics" in some sense or other of the word, but this week, Eat Your Vegetables take a turn for the contemporary. Portland improv/folk/psych/rock/etc. group Jackie-O Motherfucker is one of those acts that's really better described as a "collective" than a band.

Despite the importance that various members have had - currently Kranky records artist Honey Owens, previously vocalist Eve Salens, saxophonist Nester Bucket, etc.- the group's center of creative gravity and sole permanent member is guitarist Tom Greenwood, who draws musicians into his orbit and then sends them spinning off into the distance.

This band is a fixture of the subsection of experimental music that lies between post-rock and creative improvised music. I know that sounds like academic hair-splitting, but it really means something - start investigating this band and you're headed down a rabbit hole of not-very-well-known bands that play a particular type of music that isn't jazz, isn't noise, is too tonal to be true creative improv but too formless to be true post-rock. Ever heard of Inca Ore? Eternal Tapestry? The Spiral Joy Band? If so, then you're probably either a long-term KTRU DJ or a Sound Exchange employee, or you have too much free time and should probably be writing this column instead of me.

Jawwaad Taylor

Local creative-music organization Nameless Sound has announced the lineup for the Houston installation of the 2009 No Idea Festival, to be held Sunday, March 1 at Art League of Houston (1006 Willard): Mario de Vega (Mexico, electronics); Jawwaad Taylor (New York City, electronics, voice/MC, trumpet); Annette Krebs (Berlin, guitar, electronics); Jason Kahn (Zurich, percussion, electronics); Bonnie Jones (Baltimore, electronics); David Dove (Houston, trombone); and Chris Cogburn (Austin, percussion)

Adopted Austinite Cogburn organized the first No Idea in 2003 as a celebration of the free improv communities in Austin and Houston, and since then, the festival has expanded its reach, with each year comprising a dozen (give or take) members of the international cutting edge of creative improvised music. The festival has also branched out to include performances in other Texas locales; Nameless Sound's collaboration brings the festival to Houston this year, for the first time since 2004.

Annette Krebs

2009 also marks the growing festival's first performances in Fort Worth and New Orleans. According to last year's feature in the Austin Chronicle, Cogburn intentionally selects unusual venues for No Idea, and this Houston show is no exception - Art League of Houston claims to have been the first alternative art space in all of Texas when it was founded way back in 1948. This is a rare chance to see a thought-provoking performance at a venerable landmark of Houston's art scene.

The 2008 release The Chemistry of Common Life, by the shadowy experimental punk band Fucked Up, took the indie rock world by storm, prompting some critics to call it a breath of fresh air from the moribund depths of hardcore. This Friday, Super Unison brings Fucked Up to Houston, and in celebration of the sure-to-be-mind-expanding show, we offer the following listening program for the hardcore fan who wants to use their head for something besides banging. Not that there's anything wrong with that.*

D.R.I.- Dealing With It (Metal Blade, 1985)
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, originally from Houston, was a pioneer of the combination of hardcore punk and thrash metal that came to be known as crossover, after the 1987 D.R.I. album by that name. Dealing With It, the last record the band made in Texas before their permanent relocation to California, began to incorporate their metal influences while still relying heavily on double-time hardcore. The compromise produced music that was cynical and serious, yet energetic and fun at the same time. Kurt Brecht's trenchant lyrics are the definitive punk-rock catalog of Bad Things That Exist, from war, taxes and religious hypocrisy to nursing homes, soup kitchens and bad marriages. Bonus: wrist-slashin' cover art by Sound Exchange's Kevin Bakos.

Bad Brains- I Against I (SST, 1986)
This legendary band's third LP is often said to be its first to contain no reggae, but this is only true on the surface. I Against I draws heavy syncopation and melody from reggae and uses them to corral a ferocious hardcore/thrash hybrid into fearsome and timeless riffs, in a kind of earthfallen roots-gospel suggested by the record's title. Guitarist Dr. Know solos like a leashed tiger, lashing out with a fury that is impossibly finessed and completely unpredictable; H.R.'s awe-inspiringly spiritual vocal performances are unparalleled in punk rock. A perfect album that transcends hardcore in its very mastery of the form.

Consisting of nothing more than one hour of two overlaid tracks of guitar feedback, Metal Machine Music ranks near the top of music history's shit list in terms of total amount of critical bile received. Houston's own Ramon Medina summed up the album's status succinctly on the NonAlignment Pact blog:

"There are two general reactions to Metal Machine Music. The first is that is utter unlistenable crap. The second is that Lou Reed was playing an elaborate prank on RCA's classical label and enjoying it should be done while basking in irony."

From reading about MMM on the Webernet, it really seems like those are the dominant and even canonical responses to the album. Lester Bangs, who supposedly had a more positive opinion than most, said, "As rock 'n' roll, it's interesting garage electronic rock 'n' roll. As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity - a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless."

I'm not sure what "garage electronic rock 'n' roll" is, and I see his point at the end there, but it doesn't really sound like Bangs liked it much, deep down. Hey, at least he tried.

[Eat Your Vegetables is a new Rocks Off column exploring experimental, improvised and other generally odd music.]

Express disinterest in Frank Zappa to one of his fans, and they're likely to insist you hear Hot Rats - or at least, so I read somewhere once; Zappa devotees becoming steadily less numerous as his career recedes into the past, opportunities to interact with them these days are few. Why Hot Rats, Zappa's first solo album, would be the selection of choice for initiating newcomers is easy to understand for about three and a half minutes

That's the length of the first track, "Peaches En Regalia," a rigorous neo-classical rock composition, complete with theme, variations, secondary theme, tertiary theme, counterpoint and modulation, that one might describe as Mozartian if one were given to ridiculous hyperbole. In my admittedly ignorant judgment, "Peaches En Regalia" is one of the best songs Zappa ever wrote: an elegant, concise and fascinating work.

As for the rest of Hot Rats... well, maybe you haven't heard, but Ol' Uncle Frank enjoys a good guitar solo from time to time. Don Van Vliet's turn on "Willie the Pimp" is fun, of course, but it's the only vocal on the entire album. The discouragingly dense balance - 40-plus minutes - is given over to instrumental jazz-rock, much of which consists of guitar solos.