SONIC TRANSPORTS: OUTRODUCTION

On July 1, 1987, while on tour in Linz, Austria, Snakefinger was felled by a heart attack. His death is an irreplaceable loss for all of us who love his music.

With his passing, The Residents lost more than a uniquely gifted collaborator; a dear friend is gone. Snakefinger and The Residents apparently fell together like pancakes, right from their first encounter. He seems to have understood perfectly what they were trying to do, and over the years he helped them to peaks they could never have reached alone.

Their response to the distasteful necessity of carrying on without Snakefinger was the hour-long God in Three Persons (1988), their first work expressly for CD format. “The title,” according to Homer Flynn, a spokesperson for the Cryptic Corporation, “comes from the old Protestant hymn, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy: God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity.’ And the music from “Holy, Holy, Holy” runs through it as a theme. It’s sort of a companion piece to the old Swinging Medallions number, ‘Double Shot,’ which is the other lifted musical theme that runs all the way through the disc.”[1]

God’s tale is of a faith-healing duo who are conjoined twins, bonded at the shoulder. A down and outer called Mr. X insinuates himself into their lives, and from just another lowlife to be raised up he becomes an initiate who organizes and promotes the services – and eventually their lover in nighttime games of dominance and submission. Complicating this relationship is the sexual indeterminacy of the twins: “Usually there was a he one, and there also was a she one, but somehow they came out differently.” And when the naked twins finally lose their cool and start laughing uncontrollably at Mr. X, saying, “Don’t you see, there is no ‘she’ now?” over and over, he whips out his straight razor, slashes the bond of their flesh, and fucks the fissure, tearing the pair asunder. As he loses consciousness in orgasm, he sees one of the twins “rolling over, showing me a smooth unblemished thigh that ended in a red eruption just below her belly button, but maybe it was only in my mind.”

In combining genders, the twins are permanently ambiguous; in combining pleasure and pain, they’re permanently fixed. On first meeting Mr. X, they embraced him “hard and tenderly.” Later, in a laughing wrestle with the pair, he first touches “the holy union of their bonding […] and a moment slipped into the room that was not in the air before.” When he finally climbs into their bed – the male apparently asleep – Mr. X is urged, “Hold me tight and be my master.” He mounts the female, clutching “her wrists which strangely were secure behind her,” and as they couple the other twin slips his hands around X’s throat, strangling him into a blinding orgasm. In “Pain and Pleasure,” the epilogue of God in Three Persons, Mr. X says he still sees each of the twins, only now “their bond is made of leather, not the flesh and blood it used to be,” and their healing is for “the few that seek their sort of pain and pleasure when they merge and give in to insistent urgency that lives for seconds at a time.”

Mr. X says, in fact, just about everything on the CD; we know the story only as he tells it to us. And for most of the work, the vocal line is spoken in a straightforward manner, at an 8-8-10 beat and general rhyme of AAB, CCD, EEF… It ought to be monotonous, but the weirdness of what he relates, and the subtle theatrical nuance of his voice – by turns ashamed, proud, confused, and adamant – produce the most intimate and demanding performance in The Residents’ music. And in his most stylized moments, such as the formal recitation that describes “The Service” or the frenzy of his razor-wielding rape in “Kiss of Flesh,” he’s even better.

Instrumentally and vocally, The Residents are at the peak of their powers in “The Service” and “Kiss of Flesh.” The synthesizers and Emulator that play just about everything have never sounded better than they do on the CD – in the interlude of “The Thing About Them,’ the opening of “Loss of a Loved One,” or the effects of “Fine Fat Flies,” you’re hearing some of The Residents’ most inspired moments. But where the new format really frees them up is in their treatment of scale: Clocking in at about 62 minutes, they can develop atmosphere, pace the plot, and build tension at a more cinematic tempo.

And like any good film, God in Three Persons comes with opening credits. Female voices start off the CD, nasally twanging out who’s done what, all the way down to the cover of photography. Theirs is also the parting salvo: quite naturally, “This is the end.” Loathe as ever to take themselves too seriously, The Residents introduce the brassy gals at unexpected moments, teasing expectations (“Something’s coming, but not real soon”), watering down the pathos (“This is the sad part, oh, it’s such a sad part”), or just comforting whoever’s fidgety (“Now it’s almost over”). But for all the hijinks, God in Three Persons is one of The Residents’ most extreme and intense works.

Glorious outbursts of extremity and intensity can also be found in Not Available (1974), Fingerprince (1976), Duck Stab / Buster & Glen (1978), and Commercial Album (1980) – I couldn’t cover all their albums in this book, what can I say? These LPs include most of their best work in short-song format, which is some of their best work, period.[2] I have also shortchanged them by skipping over their videos, so I’ll say it here real fast: Residential video is to video what Residential music is to music, so go see whatever tapes of theirs you can catch.[3]

And I stiffed them when it comes to their live performances. In The Mole Show and their 13th Anniversary Show, The Residents wandered through musical and theatrical arenas as disconcertingly original and provocative as anything they’ve done in the studio. It augured well for God in Three Persons, which they were planning to stage in Amsterdam as an opera. The gig fell through, alas, but that energy was redirected into a new show: “Cube-E, the history of American music in three E-Z pieces.” This exploration of cowboy tunes and Black songs of the last century, along with the music of Elvis Presley, was a triumph, a production as familiar as it was alien, and as sorrowful as it was hilarious.

Like the stage show, their CD journey through Graceland, The King & Eye (1989), alternates Residential renditions of greatest hits with a bedtime-story discussion of the tale of the Baby King. On stage, the little tykes being diverted by the singer were two ventriloquist dummies, which he also operated; on disc, the interpolary “Baby King” sections are a real dialogue between The Resident and “The Kids,” Jana Flynn and Simon Timony, who sound just as young as they’re supposed to be. “That was sad,” says little Jana, getting the point of the Baby King’s saga, and indeed sadness permeates The King & Eye. Even at its funniest – and “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender,” “A Fool Such as I,” and “Stuck on You” get way, way out there – The Residents are eyeballing the archetypal tale of an American original lost to dependency and consumerism. “King of Need” is how they see Elvis, now more firmly enthroned in death than he was in life.

All those hits on The King & Eye, with that Needing luridly inflated, are also hits – there isn’t a weak track in the bunch. The crisp, gleaming arrangements frequently fan out into complex weaves of lines and textures, most powerfully in “A Fool Such as I,” “Burning Love,” “Return to Sender,” “Stuck on You,” and “Teddy Bear.” The singing, first rate for the entire disc, is outstanding in “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender,” “Stuck on You,” and “Little Sister.” But the classic has to be “A Fool Such as I,” where the singer pile-drives his way to a martyrdom as heartfelt as the King’s own.

“Love Me Tender,” the penultimate track, re-creates a live concert of Nixonian vintage, and it’s as rancid and bloated as the myth really did become. The Sade-like qualities of The Tunes of Two Cities are grossly obvious here, and Sade is a reference point throughout the disk. Besides the kinkier aspects of Kinghood, tweaked in “Teddy Bear”’s submissiveness, the rapacious obsession of “Stuck on You,” and the Vertigo-for-jukeboxes trauma of “Little Sister,” there’s also the sheer pigging out, the cataloger’s voracity with which The Residents throw themselves into these sixteen songs.

The Sadean gusto of The King & Eye is most encouraging for the vitality of future installments in the American Composer Series – if they bring that fire and hunger to bear upon the musics of Bob Dylan and Sun Ra, there surely will be dancing in the streets. But a samba’s always visible in the shuffle, thanks to The Residents. It’s just one more side effect from their twenty years of making music that ties people’s brains into knots.

When Glenn Branca premiered his Symphony No. 6 at Cambridge’s Sanders Theater in June of 1987, it was a four-movement work scored for guitars, electric keyboards, and drums. The following year, he toured the symphony in a revised five-movement version. Instrumentation and length stayed pretty much the same, but the music itself changed drastically from his original large-scale visceral focus – one of the four movements was Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses – to a more concentrated, rock-flavored approach. That might sound like retrenching, and in a way it was; the new score is basically a demonstration of the various gestures and techniques that Branca has mastered over the years. But thanks to that mastery, he’s come up with one of his strongest pieces.

The real surprise was the quality of the recording, which captured his sound with a new accuracy and clarity (and with only minimal overdubbing). Believe it or not, the Blast First release[4] actually sounds better – richer, more hallucinatory and unearthly – than the Symphony No. 6 itself did at NYC’s Bang on a Can Festival in May of 1989. Had Branca more time to work with the acoustics of the R.A.P.P. Arts Center, the story would surely have been different. But he didn’t and it isn’t, and the Symphony No. 6 is, at long last, the Branca recording for which no excuses are necessary.

And the studio caught him at a virtuoso high in timbre painting with guitar densities. There is a special assurance in the way Branca takes the cool rock riff that opens Symphony No. 6 and gradually builds it into a sulfuric acid trip with stopovers at an animated rubber wackyland and the salt mines of Hell. The golden haze of the second movement’s low-volume opening collapses into a wind-tunnel oblivion, but Branca can illuminate that polar gale with an Aurora Borealis of welcome for Stephan Wischerth’s drums – just as he can startlingly implode it into stalled autos snarling on a freeway, or rev it up into a rocket at full throttle. In the third movement, you’re not hearing ‘guitars’ at all, except for the high-volume feedback at the beginning and ending; you’re hearing bells, the mighty bells of Symphony No. 5, shaken with a slice-&-dice frenzy for the most industrially ferocious music of Symphony No. 6. (Wischerth does some truly fine moves here.) The timbre painting flips over into pleroma painting in the fourth movement, where a spidery reinvention of the opening riff leads to waves of cadences that become a bubbling primordial swamp of sound, with peaks of light sometimes heaving up into view.

The climactic hurricane dance of that movement has the incredibly lifelike sensation of solo female voices. In the visceral midsection of the second movement, it’s more a children’s chorus that spills out at the din, while other, more radical takes on vocal effects are strewn throughout Symphony No. 6. (Alien-language conversations in the first movement; the third has something even more stylized, like sampled, steam-riddled voices.)

In the fifth movement, choirlike timbres are released with an ever-growing realism, and then hurtled beyond into a surrealistic super-vocal sound, into a zone unique even in Branca’s music, where the angels really do sing. I’ve heard angels sing for him before; devils too – after all, this score is subtitled “Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven.” But I’d never before heard him line them up and unveil them with such ease and precision, panoramas of them, each one more convulsively beautiful than the last. It’s one of the glories of all his recorded music – certain live performances of Symphony No. 6 must have been, as John Belushi is alleged to have described tying off, “like kissing God.”[5]

“The first movement of the Sixth Symphony,” according to Branca, “sounds very minimal; it doesn’t sound like there’s that much happening, but every moment of that piece is written out, every little rhythm. It almost sounds as if it’s being improvised in some cases, because it’s a pretty basic Trini Lopez kind of groove. It was actually very difficult for the group to play, though they played it well. But to me it was like kindergarten as far as the kind of stuff I want to do. Recently, I’ve written some stuff for orchestra, like having the same kind of rhythm but with 6/4 time against 4/4, and it really is something that the kind of people I’d be able to work with – most of them, anyway – would have a lot of trouble doing. And when the orchestra played it, they played it right the very first time they saw the piece of paper in front of them. For me, that’s ascending to heaven. Basically, this is the kind of problem I’ve been fighting ever since Symphony No. 2.”[6]

The rhythmic precision of orchestral musicians isn’t the only perk drawing Branca into that arena of composition. “One of the other limitations of amplified instruments is that there’s very little transparency. I can play a triad, and at a very high volume, the texture is so rich – there are so many high harmonics – what you’re actually hearing is something approximating a cluster, a very dense chord. Whereas when the orchestra plays a triad, it sounds quite consonant, and when they play a cluster, it sounds very much like a chord! When my ensemble plays a cluster, it sounds like white noise!”[7] Something that can give you rhythm and pitch – you can’t beat that. And so Branca has announced, “Symphony No. 6 is probably the last piece I write for guitar for a while. I just finished an orchestra study for No. 7. It’s not like I’m abandoning the guitar, it’s just that I have ideas of what I can do with a guitar. With No. 6, I’ve gone as far as I can for the moment with electric instruments.”[8]

Strictly speaking, that last comment isn’t really accurate. Symphony No. 6 is certainly a valedictory summation of what Branca can do with guitars. But as he confesses in the interview in this book, he’s “barely touched” the potential of the electric keyboards of his Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4. Nevertheless, I have no carps about his going on to compose for symphony orchestra. If his music for strings used in Peter Greenaway’s film The Belly of an Architect is any indication, something truly wild has been turned loose on the concert-music circuit.

Being film music, those pieces for strings are all atypically brief. But taken together, they are as much a resumé of tantalizing possibilities as Symphony No. 6 is a curtain call of achievements. “Andrea Doria” only sketches in the power Branca can get from sustained tones; and he’s certainly shown that he can take the excitement of accelerating cross-rhythms much further than he does in “Caracalla.” What really starts to cook with the string orchestra is his interest in the visceral – which comes as a surprise only if you think Branca needs all those amplifiers. The unsettling oily sensation of undulating glissandi in “Augustus” is just the beginning; the knockout is “Hadrian,” which is like hearing a raw egg ooze out of its shell. And as its music drains into lower registers, “Hadrian” also manages to touch the viscera, in a region somewhere closer to the bowels.

In the interview, Branca described his interest in working with pitch that’s in a permanent state of change, which is precisely what makes “Hadrian” and “Augustus” so memorably weird. He also discusses how strings can reveal the extreme dissonance present within unison playing, because of the microtonal discrepancies that invariably occur within the ensemble. These glissando pieces take that idea a step further: With no two players ever at exactly the same point between pitches, there emerges a bizarre, contradictory harmonic sensation, and playing that seems to be unison is actually a dissonant hornet nest. The monumentalism of “Andrea Doria” and the manic dialogue of “Caracalla” sound like Branca’s music, and frankly I found myself relieved by that – the electricity is still there in this acoustic music. “Augustus” and “Hadrian,” however, sound like a dream of Branca’s music. And that’s really exciting.

Having reached something of a plateau improvising on home-made instruments, Fred Frith has recently returned to playing for-real guitars with a minimum of left-field accessories (an E-bow, sometimes, or the occasional brush). So if you go to one of his improvised sets and he doesn’t do what I said he does, don’t be surprised. You can expect to be surprised, however, by the scope and juice and imagination of his playing – even if you’re familiar with his earlier guitar albums – because Frith’s hard labor in Home-made Land has brought him to a new vitality and concision as an improvising guitarist.

The real loss is the termination of Skeleton Crew. But the good news is the arrival of a new band, as big as Skeleton Crew was small. Keep the Dog is a sextet that takes the Crew’s precision and extended, non-stop playing to epic heights, with a repertory that covers some two decades of Frith compositions, from Henry Cow and Art Bears pieces to music from Gravity, Speechless, and his more recent The Technology of Tears and Propaganda.

The last two works, along with a third called Jigsaw, are available on the double-LP (or single CD) The Technology of Tears (1988). The Tears score, a substantial three-movement work, was commissioned from Frith by Rosalind Newman, who had previously choreographed her dance company to excerpts from Gravity and Learn to Talk. This time she had some direct input regarding the music: “The process of making The Technology of Tears, Frith says, “was a very close collaboration between Roz Newman and me. She kind of gave me an idea of the sort of direction she wanted me to start from, and we planned our structure of the piece, and then I would go and work on it and bring back my work. And she would criticize it, and we would edit it together. I would re-record bits, and it was really a lot of give and take, a lot of working together. It was a very important learning process for me because I had never worked with a non-musician in that way. Sometimes she would make a suggestion that I really wouldn’t like, but in the end, with compromise on both sides, we both ended up being pretty happy with the result.”[9]

The Technology of Tears, although it has some beautiful stuff, mines a rather narrow vein in Frith’s music; a beat-dominated, humorless, and strident vain that tends to make the score sound considerably longer than its 42 minutes. The melodic writing is unexpectedly weak, and it’s the more flabby and meandering tunes that tend to get repeated (with Part 2 the nadir at beating a dead horse). With the music fixed in a single fiery pitch of high-powered angst and deployed against an obsessive pulse, Frith’s substantial instrumental and studio chops meld into a homogeneous swirl of dissonant searing clanks and thuds, riddled with high-register outbursts and wailing voices, sung and sampled. (His bass playing late in Part 1 and a fabulous voice and drums confrontation in Part 3 should make you sit up, however.) All the more welcome, therefore, is the playing of Tears’ guest artists, Christian Marclay, Tenko, and above all John Zorn – his alto sax cooks especially hot in Part 1, soaring through high multiphonics, the most soulful of howls, and an expert imitation of a pig being slaughtered with a Swiss Army knife.

Jigsaw, also a Rosalind Newman score, shares the lugubrious spirit of The Technology of Tears. With the beat as emphatic as before, the dynamism and imagination of Frith’s weird playing and tape manipulations starts sounding more arbitrary or just clever or even redundant. Jigsaw’s 3’04” Coda, however, is superb – a memorably moody landscape refined from selected gestures of the piece.

According to Frith, Propaganda was, like his dance scores, “the kind of thing that involves a lot of collaboration. It’s not something where I just go out and do the music and hand it over. I have to go to the rehearsals, get a feeling of the structure of the whole thing, figure out where the music should be and where it shouldn’t be. The director came to the mixing sessions of the music, and it was very helpful.”[10]

The 14 musical fragments Frith created for Matthew McGuire’s play Propaganda assembled themselves into a persuasive suite. However strong and distinctive individual gestures may be, they all seem to reflect and support each other through Frith’s shifting atmospheres: barren landscapes punctuated by an ominous thudding pulse; jungle terrains where the animal cries twist into weirder, quasi-human sounds; hissing blade-like metal spinning unpleasantly close to your throat; clusters of Frith vocal harmonies, raw and strained, backing up gentle fragments of acoustic-guitar playing; funny and unexpected takes on television muzak; a wolf pack howlin’ away somewhere on Blues-Strummin’ Mountain. As he develops and recombines these evocative sounds, Frith creates a mosaic portrait of Propaganda’s strangeness and unease, its sense of loss and peril.

The inventiveness and depth of feeling in these short pieces suggests that he could do dynamite work scoring a film, and The Top of His Head (1989) delivers exactly that. These twenty tracks, composed for Peter Mettler’s film of the same name, include some of the strongest pieces Frith has ever made. He hits on startling visceral effects, chiefly through what could be thought of as timbral dissonance, superimposing radically contrasting sounds. The astounding “Driving to the Train” has an extremely low rumbling, more felt than heard, to keep your ears wide open for the vicious slashing tones and strange rustlings that come and go over it.[11] Violent contrasts of machines, animals, and voices are cut together in “Questions and Answers,” with the bending sustained tones of a lone guitar adding its haunting two cents. The twin guitars of “Gus Escapes,” one ethereally distant and the other throbbingly present, make for one of the most memorable duets of any Frith recording. Other dazzlers include the sensual kaleidoscope of vocal treatments for “Channel Change”; “Hold on Hold,” which combines an ominous telephone with beautiful, windy Billings and whooshes; and the other cool stuff in “Lucy,” “Underwater Dream,” and “Wheels Within.”[12]

Humor, held at bay in The Technology of Tears, makes some welcome appearances here, but usually there’s a double edge. It’s so fine when the challenge to “say something” moves the woman faced with the mic to helpless infectious laughter in “Gus Escapes,” yet beneath the yocks you can feel a dark undercurrent, the frustrated inarticulacy of Speechless. The exquisitely detailed work in The Top of His Head is filled with such inspired ambiguities. It’s a major work, not only for Frith as composer and musician, but also for the genre of film scoring.

Somewhere in Arizona, 1970 describes a trip to a secret U.S. Army bunker for an unauthorized glimpse of a recovered flying saucer and its dead crew. “Blue” Gene Tyranny premiered this song for voice, keyboards, and electronics at an NYC festival of electronic music in March of 1988, and it was an inevitable keeper for Imaginary Landscapes, the Nonesuch Records CD of highlights from the festival. Yet the electronic-music focus of the CD is a bit misleading because the piece is primarily a work for voice. Baritone Tom Buckner does the honors here, and beautifully. He brings a compelling nuance, an I-was-there verisimilitude, throughout the conversational and chantlike melodies of his incredible report.[13]

Of course the song has electronics a-plenty. Usually the tape evokes the unearthly side of the singer’s tail, discharging a hailstorm of bizarre hums, flivvers, and vibrations. The passage concerning that journey to the bunker, complete with the startling crunch of an Army vault door closing behind you, sealing you off with this fantastic find, is weirder still. But the electronics also contain unexpected familiarities: the rhythms and even timbres of pseudo-’primitive’ drumming; a quasi-nostalgic reminiscence of a distant train. All pertinent aural images, because “Behind the everyday, something else is going on,” as the singer says.

The piano and (modified) synthesizer organ offer more traditional support for the singer, reflecting the normalcy that had defined him prior to this unbelievable revelation. Frequently, one or the other instrument leads the voice after the fashion of church music. They even share unison passages with him: momentary for the organ, when it just naturally glides into the moving vocal melody of “Tear-shaped were their eyes”; extended for the piano, when it slips into ragtime sync with his last and most startling discovery, that “there were others from long ago / Back to 1904.”

This weird marriage of Americana and avant-garde is a gem, one of the finest short compositions by Tyranny available on disc. And right on its heels came the release of a Lovely Music CD that does equal justice to Tyranny’s artistry as an improvising pianist: Free Delivery, an hour-long collection of constant performances from the mid to late 1980s. And as you hear just what the audience heard at those gigs, it becomes apparent that electronic composition naturally accompanies Tyranny’s chops as a piano improviser.

Most composers tend to combine live instruments and electronics with all the wary concern and rigorous control of a Bush-Gorbachev summit conference. Tyranny’s vision of music sees not so much two different media as two registers of a single voice, an attitude underlying all five tracks of Free Delivery. And that includes the opening solo-piano improvisation, because for Tyranny there is no such thing as a solo-piano improvisation; his playing is simply the most obvious element in a vast complex of thought, feeling, atmosphere, and sonic phenomena, just as the sound that one might call a single pitch is in reality the fundamental for an array of pitches, all logically organized and working together to create the acoustic event that’s resounding. Tyranny’s playing is a lexicon of ways to recognize and explore, to literally hear those overtones and undertones.

Five Takes on the Nocturne with and without Memory is the most recent work on Free Delivery, a 1989 performance in NYC; also the longest (20’47”) and the only one for unaccompanied piano. All the helping hands Tyranny had with him at this gig were the first two pages of his recent composition for one or three pianos, Nocturne with and without Memory. As a springboard for harmonic, melodic, and gestural material, it resulted in just what the title says, five takes, each of which goes through an array of changes, from lush and consonant tuneful playing to manic explosive outbursts. Through tempo changes, glissandi, subtleties of attack, and some inspired harmonic footwork, he takes the piano for a real ride – Tyranny’s feeling for timbre has developed considerably since the night in Geneva when he recorded The Intermediary’s piano. The rich, shimmering opening of the second take and practically all of the fourth, especially in the high register (Tyranny finds everything up there from the opening pinwheels, birds, and bells to some spectacular crackling chimes), are inspired.

The Country Boy Country Dog Intro, an excerpt from a 1985 performance in Paris, begins not with piano but tape: the glowing sound of a Hohner accordion plus some further electronic processing, played simultaneously by Tim Buckley and Tyranny. Together, they improvise shifting harmonies of a charming hymnlike quality from the basic tonal materials of Country Boy Country Dog, a series of pieces examining sound and consciousness, which tyranny has been compiling since the mid 1960s. (A CD distillation, long delayed, is promised by Lovely for the end of 1990.) Entering with lyrical, somewhat birdlike gestures in a high register, Tyranny’s piano explores a yearning three-note phrase, an octave hop-skip-&-jump familiar from the tape. He gets an unexpected power with it, and his low register playing is even stronger: sensual rollings into momentary harmonic resolutions, reassuring reminders of terra firma, which really can give shivers. Eventually the electronic pulse kicks in, giving the piano something to strut alongside and dance giddily about, before this all-too-brief piece fades down and out.

The piano and electronic surprises of The Intermediary Following Traces of the Song just about stops Free Delivery’s show. The song this Intermediary follows traces of is Somewhere in Arizona, 1970, and the trail was still fresh, because Tyranny had just finished playing it – this was the same night of the Imaginary Landscape series discussed above. But unlike the Nonesuch CD, which uses a studio-recorded vocal rather than Buckner’s concert performance, this track documents what we all heard that night after Tyranny had stepped over to the piano and synthesizer.

The latter had a sampled piano sound and was fed into a sequencer that could play back synth phrases. But they come out at different, unanticipated speeds, because Tyranny was spontaneously entering changes into the clock time of the sequencer. “I tried to trick myself as much as possible,” he says, which is yet-another way in which this Intermediary, like Five Takes (and the Nocturne on which they take), functions with and without memory. Along with the literal yet elastic memory of the synth’s sequencer, there’s Tyranny’s piano playing, which recalls and observes the pattern of modal changes from Somewhere in Arizona, 1970 while he spins keyboard gestures of increasing length, beyond his own capacity to remember and repeat them.

The three voices of this Intermediary are distinct, yet the impression they convey is of listening to a single, surreal super-piano. Sometimes the music from the sequencer speeds up into Nancarrow-like volleys of machine-gun pianism – which in turn opens the door for some wild, simultaneous piano and synthesizer action. Yet he can also rein in his trio of keyboards and have them converge into a delicate, unexpected serenity for the ending.

If the cryptic, suspended electronic tones that open The Intermediary with a Rendition of Stardust sound at all familiar, that’s because you’re hearing a computer analysis made by Tyranny and Joel Ryan during the original Intermediary sessions, which never made it onto the record. Some of the actual piano gestures heard on that LP, however, do turn up in this brief cut; but they’re triggers for new areas of playing, as Tyranny works with and without the tape. Like the sequencer of the previous track, the tape provides interferences that can introduce what Tyranny so elegantly describes as “the grace of the discontinuous.” The different electronic reinventions of his earlier studio improvisation are separated on the tape by silences of varying lengths, selected intuitively by Tyranny – he’d just introduce the next chunk of electronics when he felt it was right. By the time of this gig, he had no recollection of how long any silence would last, which makes some of the juxtapositions you hear even more uncanny.

This track, an excerpt from a 1983 concert in Switzerland, is actually two pieces: the conclusion of a concert-version Intermediary and the start of an intergalactic “Stardust” cover. (About all the Hoagy Carmichael you get are two chords on the tape.) Yet it works beautifully as a single entity, moving from the known realms of The Intermediary into a new deep space.

And providing an excellent segue into the opening electronics of Sunrise or Sunset in Texas, an excerpt from Tyranny’s score to Philip Makanna’s as yet unproduced film The Crack of Dawn. (Although not technically a public performance, Tyranny’s studio piano playing was done in one life take – and in front of enough people to squeeze it into this conscious collection!) In this gentle work, the piano moves through clouds of electronic sound in a sense of expectation, being present at a moment of transition, a situation rich with possibility. In contrast to the electronics’ dreamy floating, the piano brings a wistfulness and sense of nostalgia; ultimately, it sings, majestically, against its tape backdrop, before returning to its opening simplicity, and bringing to a close Free Delivery’s extraordinary group of improvisations.

Writing about these artists has been frustrating – material had to be deleted, just because it couldn’t be stuffed within these two covers. In the best of all possible worlds, a book this size or larger would be written solely about the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny or Fred Frith or Glenn Branca or The Residents. But then again, the bibliography on each of them is only going to increase. Sooner than you might think, tomes far heftier than this effort will be sagging the shelves of music lovers. And it’s a safe bet that some of that ink won’t be spilled to the most interesting or constructive of ends. Besides, the best of all possible worlds is anywhere that you can hear such music as this, music that outstrips whatever you think you know, music that leaves you completely new in a completely new world.

FOOTNOTES

1. Adam Bresnick, “The Art of The Residents” in Music & Sound Output, August 1988, p. 39.

2. A brief Honor Roll of cuts you should hear and go nutz with: “Home Age Conversation,” “Tourniquet of Roses,” “You Yesyesyes,” and “You Yesyesyes Again” on Fingerprince; “Constantinople,” “The Electrocutioner,” and “Hello Skinny” on Duck Stab / Buster & Glen; “Birds in the Trees,” “End of Home,” “Fingertips,” “Japanese Watercolor,” “Moisture,” and “The Nameless Souls” on Commercial Album.

3. I especially recommend Earth Vs. Flying Saucers (1985), Hello Skinny (1980), Perfect Love (1980), and Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats? (1983).

4. LP, CD, and cassette. Neutral records, alas, is an experiment that has run its course.

5. Bob Woodward, Wired. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 83.

6. Howard Wuefling, “Paying the Visionary Dues” in Alternative Press, October 1989, p. 24.

7. Carle V.P. Groome, “Rock, Rock, Rockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in Ear, September 1989, p. 37.

8. Steve Fritz, “Glenn Branca” in Seconds, Issue #9, p. 29.

9. Bruce Newlywed, “Deep-Fried Frith” in Damp, No. 4, Winter 1989, unpaginated [p. 42].

10. Newlywed, “Deep-Fried Frith,” [p. 43].

11. Buyers’ Guide Note: This track appears on the CD, not the LP release.

12. “Lucy” is another privilege reserved for seedy players only.

13. Tyranny adapted the text from an actual eyewitness account.

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SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents