| *NOTES
ON COWARD
I have been thinking about doing a string-heavy, overdubbed record
for over twenty years. The original inspirations for this were records
like John Abercrombie's "Characters",
Ralph Towner's "Diary",
Bill Connors' "Theme
to the Guardian", Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays' "As
Falls Wichita..", all 70s ECM recordings. Also the phenomenal
double-tracked side of John McLaughlin's "My Goal's Beyond",
Steve Tibbetts records, and certain things, mostly from this same
time period, by Fred
Frith, Hugh
Hopper, and even Robert
Wyatt. But there never seemed to be the right time... or something.
I recently decided that I had been thinking and talking about this
for long enough. As far back as the mid-80s I wanted to call the
project "Coward", but - not trying to be too coy here
- the reasons are too many and too convoluted to explain. At any
rate, I had a window of time last summer and I grabbed it, booked
time in my friends Mark and Weba's home studio in the Echo Park
area of my hometown, Los Angeles, and spent five days surrounded
by my guitars, zithers, sruti boxes, and I went for it. The odd
thing was that I had changed my ideas for this record constantly
as I progressed through my life. My interest in microtonality, Asian
music, Hindustani slide guitar, trash rock from around the world,
as well as in soundtracks by the likes of Ennio
Morricone, Jerry
Goldsmith, Elmer
Bernstein, and even John
Lurie, were reshaping my concepts for the record. When it came
right down to it, I wanted to finally just go in armed with a few
musical jottings and a laundry list of vague ideas, moods, and whatever
else would serve to make up what was ultimately going to end up
being a very personal-verging-on-obsessive, self-absorbed bunch
of sounds; sounds that would endeavor to address musical as well
as non-musical issues pertaining to my life, my psyche, and the
spirits of some of the people who have meant the most to me as a
person, not only as an artist.
After writing a lot in the studio, utilizing the power of the computer,
Mark Wheaton and I had recorded a lot of stuff, and a few weeks
later we set aside three days to mix and edit it into what you may
now experience as the Cryptogramophone CD "Coward". The
funny thing is that I actually hadn't thought about what genre of
music I was recording, or even if anyone would like it at all. I
confess that I make records for myself, even though the listener
is always being taken into consideration. "Coward" is
meant to be a journey, bookended by minimal drone pieces named after
infrequently-blooming flowers, and, in between, taking you on a
trip - sometimes a wry, whimsical, or solemn one - through this
string of references, of inside jokes, and of tributes to friends,
artists, and to pools of feeling that are at once personal and (with
any luck) universal, pertaining to love, alienation, things sublime
and perverse...
There were two tracks which dangle as outtakes from "Coward";
one a solo acoustic guitar version of "And Now, The Queen"
by Carla
Bley, in which I tried to muster a Paul
Bley-esque approach, a tribute to both Bleys. But it was just
OK, and my brother Alex,
to whom I have regularly turned in times of doubt, for song sequencing
suggestions, etc., said that it was maybe... extraneous. Very polite!
Anyway, he was right. I think that Jeff
Gauthier, one of my best pals for almost 30 years and the owner/visionary
behind Cryptogramophone, may have said the same thing. Anyway, there
was one other piece, written in the studio, as an attempt to pay
homage to the endlessly inspiring actor Cate
Blanchett, but it fell short. I can't even remember its provisional
title, but maybe we'll put it up on the Crypto website for laughs.
But it can't be dedicated to Ms. Blanchett. It's not fabulous enough!
Track one: EPIPHYLLUM -
This is a piece named after the plant that happens to grow outside
Mark and Weba's studio, Catasonic,
and the alien-looking red "paddles" were in full bloom.
Musically, this is a simple drone involving layers of Indian sruti
boxes to create a vague tension between minor and major modalities,
and electric guitars, looped and feeding back. The howling sound
is a hollow-body electric guitar a extreme volume with an low-octave
harmonizer setting that I was swinging around and scraping the studio
ceiling with. A piece like this could easily go on for 30 minutes,
but there was no time for that. Aspects of Tony
Conrad's music are purely intentional.
Track two: PRAYER WHEEL -
I remembered only one song from the time I was first thinking of
recording overdubbed guitars, and this is it. It was always called
"Prayer Wheel", and it is very directly inspired by the
aforementioned ECM recordings, and also by Steve
Reich. In retrospect, I dedicated it here to my friend and ex-wife
D.D. Faye, a wonderful person and spiritual seeker. The title seems
even more appropriate now. The instruments used are my old Martin
guitar (playing doubled parts in pairs), and two electric guitar
tracks of the usual looping, volume pedal swells, etc.
Track three: THURSTON COUNTY -
After listening to what Mark and I had recorded, I decided that
the record needed some... spark. Something with momentum, not too
silence-filled. The song was written, recorded, and mixed all the
same evening. The main riff or "verse" section is very
obviously Thurston
Moore-ish, despite the fact that it's in 7/4. Someone listened
to the "chorus" later and said it sounds like a Radiohead
song. I will take their word for it, but I prefer to think of it
as reminiscent of European folk music. The introductory section
is an improvised duet between my open-tuned Hagstrom guitar (the
same guitar/tuning used in older pieces of mine like "In Form"
and "The Ballad of Devin Hoff") and lap steel, all looped
on the fly in real time with my constant companion, the old (notice:
OLD) Electro Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. As is the case on
much of this record, I am striving for the illusion of an extemporaneous
duet, so even though I did more than one pass to get events that
I liked, there are no edits and very few attempts made, just to
keep it sounding more real to me. Playing with myself!... This same
strategy is used later in the CD on tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7. After
this introduction a bit of a lap steel feature, the 7/4 groove seeps
in. The rest is all electric and acoustic guitars, and the thumping
is me pounding the Hagstrom behind the bridge with the compressor
cranked so one can hear every little scraping. Even though this
probably sounds like it could be done by a real rock band or something
(and now my trio, The Singers, does do a version), I think it rocks
pretty hard in a way. Love to you, Thurston Moore: I have gotten
a lot from listening to you! And the rest of you of course know
of Washington State's county of the same name, the seat of the capitol
in Olympia, and so much more...
Track four: THE ANDROGYNE
This is an acoustic guitar duet between my old Martin and a Gitanes
Maccaferri-style guitar. The written material is one piece from
a suite I wrote a few years ago for a group I was leading sometimes
in Los Angeles called The Blue Mitt Ensemble. The suite was written
in a day and was sort of feverishly inspired by the story of Peter
Pan, which I have always loved ever since watching it on TV as a
boy - the Mary
Martin one. The fact that Peter Pan is usually played by women
and that Mary Martin looked kind of like me in my 20s has something
to do with the title. The provisional title of the suite was "Kid
Power", and this is movement 2. It strives for a sort of 1950s
chamber music klangfarbenmelodie approach that one could hear infect
the neo-jazz world of free improvisation, and the theme is kind
of Annette
Peacock-esque at points (60s Annette, not the 70s jazz-rock
Annette).
Track five: ROD POOLE'S GRADUAL ASCENT TO HEAVEN
One of the things I had written down in my notebook was something
like "layered micro-tonal acoustic suite". I must admit
that I had no intention of writing this solemn monument to the memory
of my friend Rod
Poole. A few hours into groping around with the fundamental
track, done on open-tuned Taylor 12-string, I realized what was
happening. The second movement is meant, with humble respect, to
draw the unsuspecting listener into the spirit of Rod's brilliant
solo guitar music, and attempts to pay homage to something I may
have internalized from listening to Rod. It breaks off into a duet
when the little open-tuned Breedlove guitar enters. The main guitar
is an old, cheap Silvertone. The piece is blatantly programmatic.
I won't go into too much detail, though. But I used a lot of instruments:
a zither-like instrument called a Harmolin, Turkish 12-string with
a canister for a body, a fretless guitar made out of a cigar box
(Daddy Mojo), and I borrowed Weba's tenor ukelele, fresh from the
repair shop (thanks, Weba!)...
But I forgot to list the Dobro and Marxophone on the CD notes. I
could go on and on, but suffice to say that as the piece neared
completion (thanks to the computer world I could move whole sections
around to make order out of chaos), I started to feel really strange.
When it was done, it was a sonic monument, unsystematically microtonal,
and it made me weep uncontrollably; for Rod's wife Lisa and for
those of us who loved and admired him and who miss him so much,
for the the condition and fragility of sentient life, and it made
me curse the subhuman who stabbed my friend. I am not ashamed to
admit that the piece seems to succeed. But it was an accident. I
entreat you to investigate his music, recently available on:
Track six: THE DIVINE HOMEGIRL -
Originally, this song appeared on an old, now out-of-print disc
by my original Trio. It's an attempt to write a rubato ballad in
a major key that refers to songs like "Jesus Maria" by
Carla Bley. This is just my old Martin acoustic and my old Jazzmaster
in dialog, and the sound is rather like that John Abercrombie record
mentioned earlier. The form was simplified to keep it shorter. It
was originally inspired by a waitress at a Mexican restaurant named
Gloria and by latina beauties in general, but this time I wanted
to dedicate it to one of my best friends and sometime colleague,
Carla Bozulich,
one of the greatest singers/artists of our time and a wonderful
human. She is, like me, from Los Angeles. My homegirl...
Track seven: X CHANGES(S) -
This one is, like so much of this record, an excuse to examine/have
fun with sounds, timbres. A trio of acoustic string instruments
trade short improvised areas with a duo of other acoustic string
instruments (some prepared with false bridges, alligator clips,
etc.). In some ways, it is like a partially premeditated version
of the Acoustic Guitar Trio, the group I formed with Rod Poole and
Jim
McAuley, but I only realized this later (with a mild degree
of embarrassment). I just love this type of sound. Maybe you do,
too.
Track eight: THE NOMAD'S HOME
I orginally titled this "The Road To You" before being
told that Pat
Metheny and somebody scary have songs with this title. Ooops!
Well, it was written in the studio and is a duet for nylon-string
guitar and squareneck Dobro. I am a total Dobro tourist, I admit.
But I have no shame. I recorded it anyway, and I want to note my
love for artists like Jerry
Douglas and so-called Hindustani slide players like Debashish
Bhattacharya. But the piece, which sounds like a "closer"
but couldn't be, is a meditation on the nomadic life of my friend
Carla Bozulich. Does it mean "the nomad's home", as in
the possessive of one's home, and if one is a nomad, what IS that
exactly? Or does it mean "the nomad is home"? As a bit
of a nomad myself, I like being home and wonder about how one can,
as I do, thrive on this itinerant life as I seem to. And I like
it when Carla is back in L.A....
Tracks nine - fourteen: ONAN (SUITE) -
This is a six-part suite of sound and song, a soundtrack of sorts
to a lifetime of oddness, obsessions, alienation, and a make-believe
melding of the Biblical
story of Onan, who allegedly angered God by casting his seed
upon the land rather than impregnate somebody or other, probably
a cousin or something. I am fascinated by how this story has become
proof to Fundamentalist types that God is against masturbation,
and I guess He (give me a break!) is also, like Fundamentalists,
against family planning, because Onan actually practiced coitus
interruptus, consequently giving the word 'onanism' both definitions.
I find this interesting for many reasons. The piece is, in some
ways, tongue-in-cheek, yet serious, biographical yet also autobiographical.
That's as much as I am going to say on THAT subject... But musically
the piece has the ingredients (as noted by me and others) of Pink
Floyd, garage rock, Sigur Ros, The Cure, Bollywood soundtrack music,
breakbeats, and David Lynch sound design, among many others. The
second-to-last movement is called "Seedcaster", the title
of which is not only an obvious reference to Onan, but also to the
inventor of the Quintronics Drum Buddy used on it, Quintron himself.
This piece is basically two performances done in real time, one
on the Drum Buddy, which includes not only that submerged-sounding
beat but also the synth bass-esque and "wobble" sounds,
and electric guitar and my usual effects/loops. Little bursts of
electric sitar and rhythm guitars ping-ponging were added to spice
things up. The last movement actually uses a drum machine of sorts:
the "percussion" part of the Korg Kaossilator, and also
the chord and bass sounds it can do. The solo is on electric 12-string,
and I left in all the sloppiness because it sounded like the right
kind of struggle, seemed to add a bit of extra excitement. This
suite also has my voice through my favorite toy megaphone, the Megamouth,
at various points, in an attempt to add creepiness, electronic/intestinal
gurglings, and androgyny. The scenario is interrupted at one point
by Onan, now imagined as a hippie guitarist, being taunted by a
nightmare involving swirling psych and garage rock "licks",
as well as the eventual addition of Metal and pure wank. I am hoping
that by now your are starting to get clued into the morass of cross-references
included in this suite, which I admit is, in a string of sonic indulgences
called my "work", arguably the most indulgent thing I
have recorded to date that I actually organized compositionally.
Track fifteen: CYMBIDIUM
The other drone piece with sruti boxes, this one also creates a
vagueness between major and minor modalities. It is very simple,
and features a rather Thurston/Lee-like repeating, open-tuned progression
that repeats a few times and is over. Played on an old Harmony,
it is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who died in December
of 2007, the day before her 92nd birthday. She had a green thumb,
which, after my father died and she got into gardening a bit, she
was surprised to discover. Her cymbidium orchids thrived on "neglect",
and would prolifically explode forth periodically. I cannot explain
here what my mother is/was to me except to say that she is/was a
real life hero, a woman of intellect, dignity, fairness, and style.Thanks
again to Jeff Gauthier and everyone else who helps me and lets me
keep doing practically anything that I can dream of. I hope that
people out there can enjoy at least parts of it. It was, in my tiny
brain, made with my obsessions/neuroses/dreams and my sweet friends
in mind, but if there is universality in that, it must be because
of that ineffable human connection that keeps everything from blowing
up, don't you think?
About the art/photography: The artists Angela
DiCristofaro (painter) and Peak
(photographer) are treasured friends and, as an admirer of their
vision and empathy, I am honored to see what they contributed to
that thing you hold in your hand, the record cover (petite version).
NOTE: I hear that quite few CD trays have immediately fallen out/off
of your CD package, the one I was just writing about just now with
the fabulous artwork. Recalls/repairs are underway, but some may
suffer. The Cryptogramophone IMPRINT is offering sympathy/discounts
and will soon provide (YouTube, are you paying attention?) a little
film about how you can repair yours, and I will show you the way!
After I figure it out myself. Apparently, it involves Krazy Glue...
- Nels
Chicago, IL (02.09.09)
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