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Leap Second Neutral

by Machine and the Synergetic Nuts
2005
CD-ROM, Rune 210, $13.00

Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind

by Fast n' Bulbous
2005
CD-ROM, Rune 205, $13.00

Emissaries

by Radio Massacre International
2005
CD-ROM (2-set), Rune 211/212, $15.00

Cuneiform Records, Silver Spring, MD
Distributor’s website: http://cuneiformrecords.com/index.shtml.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Vade Retro Satanas! Get thee behind the times in thy musical inspirations, and therefore get ahead of the rest of pack on the cutting edge. In all three of these recent releases, something old is re-examined under fresh light, reframed, remade/remodeled, made new again. This has long been a creative musical strategy, and three CDs on the Cuneiform label affirm its efficacy. These CDs also all have their comic moments, a certain comedic intensity, the sweep and scope of the best graphic novels. Passages have bright musical colors, quirkiness and exaggerated sound comparable to the best comic books or comic strips, whether the Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan of a century ago, or today's Japanese manga intended for businessmen, whose characters eyes cross and noses expel rivers of snot.

Leap Second Neutral by Machine and the Synergetic Nuts is the second release by a Japanese quartet whose playing is as driven, savvy in its quotations, intense and brightly colored as a Quentin Tarantino movie. The director should consider hiring them for soundtrack work. These Nuts are dynamic jazz players. The opening cut "M-B" is fun spy movie jazz layering a Hammond B3, Fender Rhodes piano and saxophone to a clamorous finale, then a delicate piano coda. "Neutral" has layers of piano seriality, interesting time signatures and honking sax, as one is reminded of "Headhunters"-era Herbie Hancock club jazz. Some cuts have the feel of 1970s big band arrangements by Gil Evans, others evoke smaller combos more caffeinated than Medeski, Martin and Wood. "Trout" is quizzical seventies movie or TV music, ending in a peep.

Sometimes the Synergetic Nuts are solidly in the rock camp. Evocative of John Bonham's drumming, "Solid Box" hurls two-chord stomping about like Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" as danced by the thunder lizard Gojiro (Godzilla to the West). Soon the track is whirling, then ultimately low and sexy. "Texas" is workout reminiscent of Prince as he proved himself an erstwhile student of James Brown, with short four-note funk figures and stop time. "Normal" begins with dreamy piano evocative of the 1970s Japanese rock band the Sadistics (released in the US as Sadistic Mika Band). "Oz" is horn-propelled yet self-contradictory, as its preamp-saturated fuzz guitar cuts through the expectations it has set up.

A California music teacher once boasted to this reviewer of his band students marching to his arrangement of Sun Ra's "Space is the Place". Equally eccentric, Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind is by Fast n' Bulbous, the Captain Beefheart's Magic Band tribute project led by New Yorkers Gary Lucas and saxist Phillip Johnston. Captain Beefheart was the musical persona of the painter Don Van Vliet, and Lucas was guitarist for the Magic Band a quarter-century ago, in its final years.

David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone that Fast n' Bulbous prove "Beefheart's songs deserve to be played in his absence and are, for all their knotty logic, quite playable". Fast n' Bulbous use the horn section to take the place of the Captain's unmistakably gruff and poetic vocals. Without the Captain's vocals––a growl as memorable as Howlin' Wolf or Tom Waits, delivering quirky poetry––one appreciates the songs as band workouts. Sometimes they sound like a particularly spirited high school marching band, and there is a sense of fun that propels "Veteran's Day Poppy" and "Candy Corn". Some of the soloists soar inventively, while others seem as tired and quotidian as a Florida hotel band chewing through their identical set every night.

Finally, this reviewer truly expected Radio Massacre International to inspire his art students to create expansive, space-age works. Inspired by the "Emissaries" comic by Matt Howarth (included in PDF form), the music is instrumental space-rock in the tradition of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Alan Parsons Project and Tonto's Expanding Headband. There are the aural vacancies of space and the whoosh of craft traversing its distances. There are the noodling synthesizers of "The Exorcist" theme from Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" of 33 years ago. There is a dash of chinoiserie like the orientalism of some of the robes and royal chambers in "Star Wars" too. I enjoy the rippling programmed synthesizer riffs, and give-and-take improvisational passages, though some guitar solos seem a bit hackneyed. Yet when I put when I put Emissaries on the studio classroom's CD player while art students worked on their projects, as soon as I left the room they removed it. To them, raised on heavily-conceptualized, focus-group-tested three-minute pop, it probably seemed as absurd as Spinal Tap's stage prop Stonehenge.

 

 




Updated 1st June 2005


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