ISSUE #2          NOVEMBER, 2000
 
page 2 of 8
      

 


MAUSIM CD (HP CYCLE)
(enlarged to show texture)I dig getting this kind of shit in the mail, a CD encased in two pieces of plywood tied together neatly by decorative twine and cloth. I got the CD from Tyler Elyea of Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, but there's no name anywhere on it -- maybe inside there's a group name, or maybe it's credited to Tyler Elyea, or maybe he didn't even play on it, he just put it out...we'll find out...I haven't opened it yet because I wanted to scan the 'cover' for the representation you see just to the left here without upsetting the utter neatness of the package, and I doubt I'll be able to retie it so well. The second paragraph of this review will document me opening the CD.
         In fact, I'm gonna stop writing now, long enough to use my hands for the (grand?) opening. The time it takes will be represented by ellipsis.............okay, I haven't opened it yet, but I did try, and I wanted to write that jeez, this guy Tyler Elyea must've been an Eagle Scout, this knot is tied perfectly...hell, I'm gonna scan #2the back so you can see what I mean....................alright, see that little knot on the upper left side? That is one TIGHT knot..........
............okay it was hard but I finally undid the knot...still can't get the CD out without mak#3ing a mess of the binding.........
okay, it's out, and it's a lovely screen-printed envelope and jeez, whaddaya know, IT'S completely bound too, this time by masking tape! Better scan this one too, before I take off the tape....okay, there it is, to the left, an interesting green color with a nice black screenprint in the middle. Looks like that word on it says "MAUSIM"--maybe that's the name of the band. The tape is the same white as the background this is printed on, so you might not really be able to see what it looks like....anyway, it's perfectly sealed. Okay, now that we've gotten this far, I'm gonna tear it open and listen to the damn thing!...stay tuned, paragraph three will be about THE MUSIC......okay, all I had to do to get the disc out was just undo the top piece of tape....
         Looks like it's a fully-pressed CD, not a CDR...still no information really, just a #4little slip of paper (visible in image #4) with an e-mail address, hp_cycle@hotmail.com. The CD itself is just plain green. Tyler described it as "live, improvised music using four guitars." I am now about 5 minutes into track one. It's a 20-minute track, sounding like a pretty dense squall of loud, distorted guitars, creating a thick drone. One guitar is doing something spacey and melodic while others churn in a more slab-of-sound fashion. Comparable to Pelt, RH Band, Handful of Dust, Ashtray Navigations, MCMS, Bardo Pond without a drummer, bass player, or chord changes, somewhere in there....okay, I'm just gonna listen to this without typing about it and then after several ellipsis I'll be back for my final thoughts..............................
...............................(two days or more pass)............................................
.........okay, it's a good disc! Recommended to fans of the above, especially Ash Nav (except that it's group, not solo) and RH Band (except that it's entirely guitar-driven). It's concise, three longish tracks taking up 40 or so minutes (with a fourth track that's 30 seconds of silence), adding up to a concentrated trawl through a pretty specific set of guitar frequencies. You know the drill, it's like holding up a microscope to what seems at a distance like a flat surface and finding all kinds of bumps and textures and patterns. Isn't that basically what this kind of music is all about? As a bonus, Mausim throws in some psychedelic fun at the mixing board every now and then.
        In closing, I'll let Mr. Elyea himself give you some more info: "you are correct in assuming that the project is entitled 'mausim'. the cd consists of live improvised recordings using (mostly) four guitars. the music was actually recorded back in 1997 using two mics and a four track. over the subsequent three years the band dispersed over three continents and my brother and myself worked sporadically on sorting through hours of tapes and working on various 'mixes'. due to a number of factors, most notably the time and financial constraints, the process of getting the cd mixed, pressed and finally offically 'released' took quite a bit longer than originally planned. however, now that the four members of mausim are all living on the same continent once again (three in toronto and one in chicago) we are planning on recording another album sometime in the next couple months (tentatively planned as a double lp!) which we hope to release by the end of 2001. as for the quantity of cds, we ended up pressing three hundred. as you can imagine, it takes quite a bit of time to complete the packaging for each cd. as a result we make them as we need them. anyway, thanks again for the comments. if you know anyone that would be interested in a copy, please let me know..."

WANDERING ARCHIVE ONE (Wandering Archive Press)
Wandering Archive One
In the last ish of this here incredible (stupid) magazine Blastitude, I tried to describe Richard Meltzer's book The Aesthetics of Rock by using what seemed like several metaphors, probably all mixed and none seeming quite complete. My basic point was that it is an unreadable book when approached from beginning to end.
       However, it can be looked at randomly, with any one page yielding several lines of readable text (about the subjects at hand, rock'n'roll and an aesthetics thereof). So perhaps a more accurate way to describe it would be as a readable unreadable book, or to borrow from Brad Sonder in this very issue, an "open text." While it is ultimately unreadable, any one page is certainly readable, therefore it is both. In this sense, the book becomes like a river, the river, Heraclitus's river, the river of which He (raclitus) said "You can't step in the same river twice." (Gregory Corso made this thought even trippier when he amended it to "You can't step in the same river once.")
Other examples of books that are rivers: The Bible, Finnegan's Wake, Tropic of Cancer, Absalom Absalom, cut-up period William S. Burroughs, Visions of Cody, Webster's Dictionary, etc. When a book is a river its text is so dense with poetry instead of light with narrative that the average reader would no sooner try to FINISH the thing than he or she would FINISH (what, drink? swim the length of?) a river.
          What the average reader would be much more likely to do is visit a riverbank now and then and sort of hang out there and play in the dirt, throw rocks and sticks and stuff into the river, and MAYBE even step into it with rolled-up jeans. That's like just opening up the book somewhere, anywhere, and reading a few pages and getting something out of those few random pages before quitting/leaving the book/river. Reading nine or ten pages can be a REAL intense experience with books like these, comparable to actually stepping and wading into a river or maybe (as in the case of Daniel Carter) swimming in it or (as in the case of D. Derbyshire) floating downstream in it.
         Daniel Carter and D. Derbyshire are contributors to the 'literary journal' Wandering Archive One. Naw, it's not a 'journal,' it's a book. Despite the "one" in the title, who knows if there will be another one? And how are we ever gonna finish this one?
A text that collects several (sub)texts. Twelve (thirteen if you count the inserted photo essay by Sara Press, and of course you should count it) pieces that are each readably unreadable in their own ways. Hell, editors Jason Meagher and Adam Mortimer are kind enough to include an "Introduction" that says just that: "i wonder if it might be a worthwhile product to write a lot of stuff that's unpublishable for various reasons. this may be an interesting satellite element to put in the grand order of [apocrypha]." So they even have a 'tag' for it: apocryphal text, apocryphal writing. It's better than 'cut-ups.'
        The half-page preface by second-generation rockwriting legend Byron Coley is the most readable piece in the book, simply because it's only half a page. It's quite difficult to fathom, but sage advice is offered: "Where this anthology points is not easy to say. Having absorbed its contents slowly for a couple of months now, I am tempted to say that it lies in the cavities that mar the teeth that chatter inside the ring of the o-mind." Then comes the aforementioned introduction from the editors, and then a major readable/unreadable bomb is dropped by Mr. Carter's nine-and-a-half page "Work In Progress," a bomb in the form of one long typed stream of small-print run-on prose poetics (stream of consciousness sentence fragments rammed up against each other so hard that the punctuation just disappears). Here's how it begins: "angry rush beloved mad man that breeze fold hem thin vast signals redesign velocities (read the signs) of the air in homeopathic fashion garment inhibit and increase thus after and is IS with all its meaning and power does flower the earth for life until all cycles unwind and wind up (the) wind (itself-)echo assert not after nor break bets begs yearns to be broken thus altered altered thus in some way broken from what it appeared to be offers the clue to eternal being (the) unmentioned term its force and effect also its being yet as if it were not there but it is and is of grave consequence though often subtle so what (?!) abrupture bracketed may this be in the key of June (an) old favorite entre question about any and all marks as slight and delicate as poseable hawkword catch caught tight now gone without a discernable trace nor scratch a perfect leisure erasure of bridge preciptated the decision to enter that grimly lit womb in the House of Elision with fear and delight yet something's always on the bed other than people why don't I tell you things write away? why don't I tell myself things write away? why is deception so necessary?...." Okay, on and on like that for nine and a half pages, and that wasn't even one-third of the first page. Carter has given us a nine and a half page text that is practically as impossible to finish as the 346-page text of The Aesthetics of Rock! However, what joys can be gleaned from dipping in (the river) periodically...even just sticking a pinky-toe into Carter's text can yield such linguistic music and dance as "break bets begs yearns to be broken" in which each word can be heard as the notes of a jazz improvisation (Carter is a top-notch saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist, most notably in NYC free jazz group Test) or as the punches of a boxer during an intense workout. (Or, in a metaphor that sort of combines those two, each word can be heard as each note of a hand drum solo by Angus MacLise like the one on his Brain Damage in Oklahoma City CD.) In summation: Carter's "Work in Progress" is definitely a fucking river when it comes to writing/text/prose/poetics, and as such it contains many fine banks to set up camp at.....I've only been to a few of 'em so far....
         The next piece, "I Am No One" by someone known as The Catfish, opens like it might be finishable, evoking a sort of post-Spillane and/or Bukowski 'noir' signpost with the line: "So I stood on the corner wondering, what's next." In fact, the four-page piece is divided into twelve numbered stanzas (chapters?), and the second one begins in a "noir" kind of way also: "And so I sat down another day to lose the stress. We're all gonna die. Nobody needs a guilt trip about it. And so there's this little bird that lands on the hedge-row and I concentrate on the little bird, nothing else." (Note: the "noir" description is put in quotes because of this line from the editors' introduction, "the only solution for you...to turn these strange pages into a kind of noir reading experience.") Of course, the third chapter/stanza/part begins "Through down you, through down to the dew, where will you walk through the wood chip stew." Um, that's not really noir, but neither was this, from back in the first chapter: "Redford had it right, no rest for the wicked. I've been there that place. The zone exists just as sure as I'll drop dead and call Hornswaggled. Fuck the zone, I don't know what the hell it is but who's tuned in? Cuzz I'm driving. Next bus leaves at eleven." It could be totally sane stream-of-consciousness role-playing and it could be the mumblings of a crazy street person. It could also be the ecstatic preaching of a crazy street person or some other unknowable person on a radically different plane of reality because who's to describe the religious thought of such a person? Maybe "fuck the zone" really nails it.
       The next piece, "a black lotus: the fade letter (recd. 2/14)" by John Fell Ryan, is a xeroxed, typewritten seven-page letter defaced by copious unintelligible pen-markings. It's a quite hysterical account from a subject whose DNA has been mutated enough (by repeated doses since age thirteen from a nerve gas known as Sauron 12) that it's starting to alter his spine. On page three, the subject says "I can not
a page from "the fade letter"communicate by telephone, nor by any electronic (technological) means such as telephones, computers, television, video, or any of the arms of mass media which I fear is being used against me and the integrity of my spine and DNA." In other words, this is a tract by a paranoid schizophrenic. More crazy person stuff! I haven't even been able to read a third of it, it's too crazed, but I dig Fell Ryan's piece anyway, just because it strikes me as the old Poe/Lovecraft "I found this 40-page letter that tells a strange tale..." approach taken to a wacked new post-Kinko's extreme that really plays up the visual component.
      So what am I gonna do here, describe every piece? I've only mentioned five pieces out of thirteen, and this review is already way too long. Somehow these Wandering Archive folks have managed to condense what reads like one big cut-up between The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs, The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard, some of the more wacked-out Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom or Oxford Pigeon), poetry from the back covers of random free jazz albums, and the manifestos and memoirs of convicted serial killers. Like the Sun City Girls said about a different artifact, "There will never be a critic who will ever be qualified to critique this." This one is barely 100 pages long and it reads like about 5,000, and although I'd probably sooner be able to read all 5,000 pages of, say, The Winds of War by Herman Wouk than I would be able to 'read' everything in Wandering Archive One, I'd much rather have the latter on my shelf at home. And I put 'read' in quotes because you actually don't read Wandering Archive One at all, it's more like you just SEE it. All I can say is see for yourself. Available for $15 postpaid from W.A. Press, 638 W. 131st, NY NY 10027. Checks to Jason Meagher. (Oh yeah, I barely mentioned the D. Derbyshire piece -- a great comic strip about a man being indoctrinated in the ways of an arcane cult that has hallucinations when they imbibe a fluid secreted by the statue of their Holy Mother..."The product of the idolatrous glands proved to be a previously unknown substance reflecting the greater properties of the moon. Thus, even when taken in dilution, it bleached out the normal drab coloring, gilding his gorged eyes, and enlivening the divine grey. Taken in excess, this was repsonsible for his sudden perception of the curious pinkish light, an infra-pink normally invisible to humans, which heralded the annual migration of the vampire gulls."    A-friggin-MEN....)

LINKS:
Music from the same place
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(drone-on subscribers have just recently seen this. so have people who own the album Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella by Nurse With Wound. It's the list of 'influences' that appeared inside that album. I've never seen or heard the album, i'm just reprinting this from drone-on. i own stuff by 56 of 'em, but unfortunately nothing by Sperm or Food Brain.

achim reichel
airway
albert marcoeur
albrecht d
alcrataz
algarnas tradgard
all 7-70
alternative tv
alvaro
alvin lucier
ame son
amm music
amon duul
amon duul ii
anal magic + reverend dwight frizzel
anima
annexus quam
anthony moore
anton bruhin
aqsak maboul
arbete och fritid
arcane v
archaia
archimedes badkar
area
art bears
art zoyd iii
arzachel
ash ra tempel
association pc
banten
basil kirchin
bernard lubat
biglietto per l'inferno
birge gorge shiroc
blue sun
bomis prendin
boyd rice
brainstorm
brainticket
brast burn
brave new world
bruhwarm theatre
caberet voltaire
can
capsicum red
captain beefheart
catherine ribeiro & alpes
chamberpot
checkpoint charlie
chene noir
chillum
christian vander
chrome
claudio rocchi
cohelmec ensemble
colette magny
collegium musicum
come
companyia electrica dharma
comus
cornucopia
costin miereanu
crass
creative rock
cro magnon
cupol
dadazuzu
david cunningham
debris
decayes
dedalus
deep freeze mice
demetrio stratos
der plan
deutsch-amerikanischen freundschaft
dharma quintet
dies irae
dome
don bradshaw leather
doo dooettes
dzyan
eiliff
emtidi
eroc
etron fou leloublan
exmagma
family fodder
faust
fernando grillo
fille qui mousse
floh de clogne
flying lizards
food brain
franco battiato
frank kolges
frank zappa
franz de byl
fred frith
free agents
friedrich gulda
friendsound
fritz muller
gash
ghedalia tazartes
gila
gilbert artman
glaxo babies
god in disguise(forkland gud)
gomorrha
gong
good missionaries
grand magic circus
grobschnitt
group 1850
gunter schickert
guru guru
hairy chapter
hampton grease band
han bennink
heldon
henri chopin
henry cow
heratius
hero
horde cataltyque pour la fin
horrific child
hugh hopper
iannis xenakis
ibliss
igor wakhevitch
il balletto di bronzo
international harvester
iskra
island
jacques berrocal
jacques thollot
james white & the contortions
jan dukes de grey
jean cohen-solal
jean dubuffet
jean guerin
jef gilson
john cage
john greaves & peter blegvad
juan hidalgo
karlheinz stockhausen
king crimson
kluster
kollektiv rote rube
komintern
kraftwerk
krokidil
l.voag
la monte young
lard free
lawrence wiener
le forte four
lemon kittens
lily
limbus 3
limbus 4
l'infonie
luc ferrari
magical power mako
magma
mahjun
mahogany brain
malfatti-wittwer
mama bea tekeilski
mama dada 1919
mars
martin davorin jagodic
martin saint pierre
maschine nr.9
mate & vallancien
michael mantler
michel portal
michel waisvisz
min bul
mnemonists
modry efekt
moolah
mothers of invention
moving gelatine plates
music improvisation company
musica electronica viva
mythos
napoli centrale
negativland
neu!
new phonic art
nico
night sun
nihilist spasm band
nine days wonder
nosferatu
nu creative methods
oktober
operation rhino
opus avantra
orchid spangiafora
osamu kitijima
out of focus
ovary lodge
paolo tofani
parker & lytton
pataphonie
patrick vian
patrizio fariselli
pauvros & bizien
pekka airaksinen
pere ubu
philippe besombes
philippe doray
pierre henry
pierrot lunaire
plastic ono band
plastic people of the universe
poison girls
pole
pop group
public image ltd
ragnar grippe
ray russel
raymond boni
red crayola
red noise
reform art unit
robert ashley
robert wyatt
roberto colombo
rocky's filj
roger doyle
ron gessin
ron pates debonaires
roth, ruhm & wiener
sally smmit (& her musicians)
samla mammas manna
second hand
secret oyster
seesselberg
semool
silberbart
siloah
smegma
snatch
soft machine
sonny sharrock
sperm
sphinx tush
steve beresford
steve lacy
steve reich
stooges
supersister
taj mahal travellers
tamia
tangerine dream
technical space composers crew
terje rypdal
terry riley
the residents
thierry muller(ilitch)
third ear band
thirsty moon
this heat
thrice mice
throbbing gristle
tokyo kid brothers
tolerance
tomorrow's gift
ton steine scherben
tony oxley
trans museq
trevor wishart
twenty sixty six & then
uli trepte
univers zero
velvet underground
verto
walter franco
whitehouse
wired
wolfgang dauner
woorden
xhol
xhol caravan
ya ho wa 13
yoko ono
znr
zweistein

After posting this, I finally got hold of the CD reissue of the album, and apparently several of the artists above have been added apocryphally. Some William Bennet fan seems to have messed with it, as Come is Bennett's short-lived first group and Whitehouse his more infamous and long-running second. Bennett was a contemporary and sometime collaborator with Steven "Nurse With Wound" Stapleton, but Whitehouse didn't even exist when the original Chance Intersection LP and list was released.

Neither Heldon nor Henri Chopin appear on the original list either, though I think both are worthy additions. Whitehouse seems worthy too, as they were right there with NWW for fusing punk energy with free improvisation and 'extreme electronics,' and they did it even more infamously. I personally get tired of all the rape and hate themes though. They don't offend me because I don't take them seriously, and I won't until I hear that Bennet or one of his cohorts is actually guilty of a rape or another hate crime. It's just that the themes get tiring pretty quickly.

I also couldn't find Smegma or Snatch on the original list. Juan Hidalgo isn't on the original. Tokyo Kid Brothers sound intriguing, but aren't on the original. Neither is Tolerance or Wired, nor the Lemon Kittens, they were a band that Nurse With Wound 'discovered' and released a record by, also well after the list was published. Sheez, who added this stuff? I mean it's POSSIBLE that Stapleton himself added these bands....some friends he'd met after the list who he felt like adding....anyway the source of this list is the BRAINWASHED site, so take it up with them. Quite a bit to look at on that site, so it's worth checking out anyway.

BLASTITUDE #2
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