Distant Trains – Underwater Ghost Choir by centipedefarmer

I’ve been revisiting my old Flight Attendants approach of sound-collage-based music lately, including going so far as to use remnants of old Flight Attendants tapes as part of the collage itself. Metacollage if you will. I came up with this piece the other day and I’m pretty happy with it. To be included on some future Distant Trains release, I’m sure.

A few weeks ago in an article related to the Joe Jack Talcum/Samuel Locke Ward/The Bassturd/Coolzey tour, I referred to Samuel Locke-Ward as a “troubadour of the troubling.” Something bugged me about that phrase the moment I typed it. Later I realized that I was cribbing it from an old show poster I’d seen on the wall in Sam’s house, where the wording was “Iowa City’s troubling troubador” — but referring not to Sam, but to Ed Gray. Yep, Ed Gray is the original “troubling troubadour” of our fair state.

A veteran of the avant-folk end of the lo-fi home-taping scene, predating the notion of “new weird America,” Ed Gray built a reputation through sparse cassette recordings interspersing poetic folky tunes with tape manipulation and noise, and live performances in which he would be equally likely, depending on his mood or his perception of the crowd’s response, to assault you with several minutes of feedback, or to lull you with one of his gentle though dark ballads (and equally capable of both by means of playing a nylon-string acoustic guitar with a pickup through an amplifier with a fuzz pedal in between).

The first time I heard a Richard Buckner record I thought I was hearing some new Ed Gray joint that I hadn’t known about. The two men have a similar tone and depth to their voices and some similar melodic mannerisms to their writing. Ed, however, reaches into his upper range more often, and brings along an extra element of mayhem, straying willfully off-key when it suits the expression of the song; and then of course there’s his aforementioned love of the noise. In the height of the ’00s alt-country craze Ed began showing signs of letting his songwriting step out from behind the tape hiss, fleshing out his sound with fuller instrumentation and production on the gorgeous Fresh Coat On The Powder Keg 7″ EP in 2005 and an excellent full-length called The Late Gray Ed Great that followed in short order, of which Kent Williams wrote quite appropriately in Little Village, “It’s a joy to hear folk make such a racket.” The Americana feel of both is unmistakable but Ed worked in enough dissonance on the full-length to stand out from the pack. At points the noisy elements felt grafted-on, not yet fully integrated in Ed’s sound, but the poetry of the tear-jerker songs wins you over.

Whether The Old Bending River represents the completion of that sought-for integration of song and noise I’m not sure. There simply seems to be less noise on it, limited to just enough fuzzed-up electric guitar to keep things appreciably raw, but on the song end this album shines. It sounds as if Ed may have arrived at a fully realized sound that feels right and comfortable to him, and he comes off both more relaxed and livelier than on the tense downtrip of Late Gray. The songs are less tear-jerker and more impressionist, haunted, even raucous at points, with his superb lyrics always a clear highlight. For all the dark imagery, Ed sounds like he’s having a good time making this record.

A couple of tunes — the waltz-stomp “Samson” and the finale “Cold Cold Man” — will remind you a bit of Tom Waits — right down to the hushed spoken vocal over spooky organ that the latter opens with and its wailing sax solo courtesy of Pete Balistrieri. The picked electric bass used throughout the album initially felt out of place on those songs that pull from old-time roots, but I got over it in realizing that it serves to remind that these are modern songs, not merely retreads of well-worn tropes, and thus using a stand-up bass instead would be a bit too obvious, almost hokey, for an Ed Gray record. That point is made even more strongly with “The Old Saw Blade,” which, while pure folk in its structure and melody, derives an important aspect of its atmosphere from distorted power chords and pick scrapes. “Chafe” and “Away” stand up (or sway) with the best of the kind of alt-country ballads they sound like drinking buddies with. While it’s probably unintentional that the title of “Egg Timer Man” seems to reference Mike Watt’s newest work, it’s curious how Watt-like Ed’s vocal sounds on it, and it wouldn’t seem out-of-place if found nestled among the mellower moments of Contemplating The Engine Room. “Bone”, the album’s epic, works a dark, gnarly blues-scale riff for a good long time before building it into the kind of multi-part three-chord ramble that I love Magnolia Electric Company for. But for all the references I can make, on The Old Bending River, Ed Gray just sounds like Ed Gray, except even better than I was accustomed to.

Possibly his best, and likely his most accessible work so far (but there are still a couple of his old cassette releases I’ve never heard), The Old Bending River asserts Ed Gray’s rightful place, overdue perhaps, among Iowa’s finest musical craftsmen. Ed is experienced and at the top of his game here, and backed up by an ensemble that sounds like it’s made up of people who are just as much loyal longtime fans as collaborators. As good as it is, I wouldn’t put it past him to keep on and surpass it yet. But I’m mighty glad not to have missed it.

The only other E H I thing I have in my collection apart from one track each on the Shroud comp and the Three Bean Salad comp and his section of a three-way split CD Brian Noring sent me a short time ago is one side of this cassette.

E H I’s half of this is “noisier” than Under The Rails, involving more effects and tape manipulation applied to Casio sounds, and it’s a good listen.

As for Aphasia, probably the most interesting thing about it is the crazy personal history of Adam Gadahn in the years after this, what with joining Al Qaida and all. His side of this split is more musically interesting than his earlier work Delirium: 7 Hallucinatory Interludes (the contents of which now comprise Music Of A Terrorist, downloadable here) but that’s still not saying much. I personally find Aphasia’s material to be illustrative of a problematic element of the noise tape scene where you could get away with taking pretty much any sound, however artless, and just running it through a mess of distortion. Gadahn’s chief instrument here appears to be either a distortion pedal or tape saturation, in conjunction with general tedium. Where you can identify instruments, they’re employed clumsily; other parts sound like random mouth noises made into a microphone. It’s worth considering, however, that he was probably all of 16 when he made this stuff. Plus, it’s of historical interest.

I’ve written a bit here about the renewed interest I’ve been experiencing of late in the people and sounds of the 1990s home-tape/lo-fi/music/noise(core) scene and as it turns out I’m not alone. Social media has brought me back into contact with many of its key people and bunches of them are still making interesting music or noise to this day. Brian Noring himself seems to mostly stay out of that stuff, but a Facebook group called The F.D.R. Recordings and Brian Noring Tribute Page, set up to disseminate and exchange information, discussion, and reminiscences on the music of Brian Noring, has lately shown signs of sprouting a resurgence of mail-based trading in the homemade experimental musical arts. In that sprit, even though I have a lot of my own output (and some merely related to me by friendship) available online (such as on my bandcamp page and the Ragman Records Archive) I am strongly considering re-issuing certain items on CD-R for mail-order/trade.

So here’s a file of mp3s from an old tape that I actually have gotten permission, for a change, to share here at the Farm, since I had already whipped up the 256Kbps files for my own personal use: a classic 1995 cassette release by some-say-legendary Des Moines home-recording/lo-fi/noise artist Brian Noring, one of many he created and released under the name E H I on his F.D.R. Recordings tape label. Brian, via a 1993 issue of a zine he did called Friends Of The Draft Resistance are primarily responsible for my adventures into the tape scene and noisecore everything related to that.

The music itself is some of the best lo-fi postindustrial music to come about in ye olde tape scene, ranging from harsh distortion noise to a kind of Casio take on industrial electronica. Check it out.

Just out, this compilation that I have a track on that kinda marks my return to the 4-track. I haven’t got around to listening to any of it yet myself but am looking forward to doing just that. Please to be checking it out.

So this supposed metal band from Canada came down, on the latest of several DIY tours, promoting their fourth proper album. And they come to Des Moines, spend the whole show dicking around on their laptops and ignoring people, intro their set with “let’s get this shit over with” then put out a video on their tour blog wherein they slag on Iowa, insult the opening bands and bitch about the paltry size of crowd they had to play for and how they sold no merch and made next to no money. OK, these guys were jerks, but their complaining did get me thinking, because the real surprise to me was that after how many years playing music and touring, they weren’t already so used to having bum shows that they wouldn’t just let it roll off their backs and move on, and instead made a bitchy video about it. Because playing for 6 people and making no money is, let’s be completely honest, not at all an unusual thing to have happen when you’re an indie-level band. Most bands find this out pretty quick and learn to take it in stride and develop a little perspective; after all, if you’re playing your cards right, there should eventually be enough good shows to make it all worthwhile.

Still, I wonder if there’s something we can do to help this situation. I don’t want to see things get to a point where only the independently affluent or lucky are able to get by as musicians. Already we’ve hit a point where it seems like one can be serious about one’s music, or have a family, but not both. So many talented people are driven to write songs and record them and play them in front of people but see themselves as stuck just playing hometown gigs at the same venue over and over until they die. But that’s the macro-level view of the problem. At a smaller level where we might be able to do something, we have to ask: how can we make gigs work out better for the musicians?

Often times we’re so used to the way we do something being just “the way to do it” that it doesn’t occur to us that the formula might be out of whack for our situation. And the formula I’m talking about in this case is: schedule some bands to play on a given night; charge people some money to get into the venue; use that money to pay the sound man, the door man who you hired to collect said money, and then maybe, if there’s anything left, the bands. Never mind that the door man and sound man are working for you part-time, and live just around the way where there’s food waiting for them in their refrigerator — whereas the bands have hundreds of miles to drive by tomorrow, have just lugged hundreds of pounds of equipment into and out of your establishment and probably haven’t eaten all day. Yeah, shit, where did we go wrong with this plan?

I think this formula was developed under a set of assumptions that don’t hold up under scrutiny. Those assumptions are: any band you book is already well known enough that people in your town are chomping at the bit to see them; and they have money pouring in from records being sold at stores all over the country. This comes from the layman’s view of the music business, where as soon as you see guitars, you immediately free-associate to all the trappings of the rock-star mythos. This thinking probably works if you’re booking a big venue in a big city that brings in big bands. It’s a fallacy that I’ve seen happen in other kinds of businesses as well: the idea that because your small business aspires to be a big business, then the proper way for you to conduct business is to imitate what the big boys do that seems to be working for them.

Here’s some numbers I’m completely pulling out of my ass but that I suspect are not far from the truth: 99.9% of people have not heard of 99.9% of bands. And given a random person A and person B, of the .01% of musical acts currently in action that A has heard of, there is no telling how little the .01% that B has heard of overlaps A’s. Now take that set and find its intersection with the set of bands sending press kits to your little venue and you’re extremely lucky if have more than zero. So relying on people coming to your venue because they want to see the bands is pretty stupid unless you’re booking big-time acts. There just aren’t going to be that many people in it for most bands. And trying to increase turnout by cramming more bands onto the bill doesn’t help; it just hurts the overall quality of the show.

I’m going to propose something radical here: let’s get rid of the cover charge. You ask me, “then how am I going to pay the bands?” Newsflash, genius: you’re not paying them now. I’ve seen so many people turn away at the door of a venue simply because there’s a cover. People don’t want to part with $7 just for the privilege of walking into a place to hang out and have a beer just because some joe shmoe they never heard of is on the stage. It’s not because they’re lame-asses, they’re just acting rationally: they have no idea if they’ll like the music or not, and if they don’t, they’ll have wasted money that could have gone toward a couple more beers, and there’s another bar next door that they don’t have to pay to get into where they know that even if they don’t like what’s playing on the jukebox, they can ignore it easily because it won’t be as loud. On the other hand, if you could get them into your venue, you can be pretty sure that they’re going to buy drinks, and there’s at least an outside chance they’ll enjoy the band enough to buy merch from them (provided it’s reasonably priced; if the band’s trying to get $20 for a 7″ and no one’s biting, that’s their own idiocy hurting them).

What I’m saying is, it doesn’t make sense to expect all your potential patrons to be showing up because of the bands. You’ll still get those people showing up, but that’s a small group of people who are already pretty plugged-in to the indie music scene. How many of those people there are in your city is up to you to figure out because if music is part of your business plan you should probably be paying attention to that kind of thing. What makes more sense to me in most cases is to bet on people’s curiosity: “oh this place has live music tonight? Wonder if it’s any good.” Save the cover/ticket charge for the acts that warrant it — which acts those are, again, depends on your community; I think the rest of the time it would pay off better for everyone if you just let people come in and check it out.

Any thoughts on this out there? Am I missing something big here? Am I crazy?