ugEXPLODE Artists #2: Cellular Chaos

above: Cellular Chaos at Death By Audio, Brooklyn on December 6, 2011

Cellular Chaos began on the West Coast in late 2006. Around that time, I was just beginning to refocus my energies on the craft of free improvisation after a long layoff, and I had begun to meet some really interesting characters through the graces of bass player Damon Smith. I was itching to play some savage, wild guitar and needed to put a group together to showcase it. The band name came from the opening track of the lysergically apocalyptic Flying Luttenbachers album "Systems Emerge From Complete Disorder". I believe it is a legitmate medical term in its own right, but it originally sprung purely from my subconscious. It's a phrase which simply evokes to me the blind, fractal madness of the universe. 

At a gig earlier that year with Damon, saxophonist Josh Allen (who would appear on my out-of-print "Revolt Music" CD) and guitarist Henry Kaiser, I met the notorious William Winant. William came up to me after the set and said he liked my drumming. I said, "Well, then let's play sometime!" and eventually we did. I first caught wind of his prowess in the early '90s on a fucking insane live demo tape by the Glenn Spearman Double Trio, where the band raged for 90 minutes straight at a pace which made Coltrane's "Ascension" sound like Kenny G. William might be best known for his work with John Zorn on various classical tinged projects as well as a stint as auxiliary percussionist with Mr. Bungle. Needless to say, he is a voracious, bloodyminded technician and performer who is more than ready to go off at a moment's notice. When you need some really ridiculously complex shit played on drums, you call him. He gets thrown on a plane and flown to Switzerland to play Stockhausen and Xenakis and then comes right back home and gleefully stirs up a ton of racket with a sleazy scumbag like yours truly. Mr. Winant is an adherent of the highest and lowest brows possible. He can also play precisely in two different tempi at the same time, and I have it on pretty good authority that his favorite movie is "Jackass 2".

Later on, Damon called me and said, "Hey, remember that guy Mark Miller? He's playing a gig with Fred Frith and Larry Ochs." Yes, I did remember Mark Miller. He was one of the great drummers on the classic, early John Zorn and Elliott Sharp records. In fact, years earlier, I ran into Elliott in New York at a record store and asked him, "Whatever happened to Mark Miller?" He did tell me Mark was on the West Coast, but it didn't concern me much, considering I was still living in Chicago at that point. Mark was a bit of an enigma but we quickly made friends with him and he was clearly relieved that there were some local people interested in what he did. We got along well because we all craved unhinged outbursts of cacophony and artistic violence. You see, Mark had a bit of a reputation for being a crazed wild card of a player back in the old days. He was notorious for (literally) playing with fire on stage and even went as far as lighting off a quarter stick of dynamite at a legendary gig at the Kitchen in the early '80s. Mark's avant-rockist sensibilities helped him cross over into the early New/No Wave and he had played with many of the key luminaries in the New York scene. I eventually wound up compiling the extant recordings of Mark's old NYC improv/no-wave/what-the-fuck band Toy Killers.

The first Cellular Chaos gig was an unrehearsed affair which took place at 21 Grand in Oakland, California on November 17, 2006. We just cranked everything up and went for it. The two drummers bashed away against the bleak, disjointed modernist scrapings of the bass and I raged on top of the whole mess, fingers flying recklessly. It may not have been a great success musically, but rather a basic statement of intent: a salvo of blind, weird rage delivered at claustrophobic volume and density.

This quartet would play four more gigs over the course of 2007 before falling by the wayside. I tried to incorporate a bit of structure and conduction into the fracas, but it seemed that this pack of wild animals was beyond any notion of "rehearsal", tightness or order. We made a lot of noise, but it seemed like the thing had run its course. It didn't seem like anyone really considered it to be a particularly good band, but we did it for the fuck of it and left it at that. As such, Cellular Chaos laid dormant for a while. Mark, Damon and I would do some similarly incendiary gigs in 2008 under the Toy Killers tag . . .

An excerpt from the final performance of Cellular Chaos Mark One in San Francisco, CA on September 25, 2007.

I relocated to New York City in the Winter of 2009, thoroughly bored with the waning West Coast music scene and looking for new challenges. Somehow, somebody asked me if I wanted to do something on a gig with modern black metal band Liturgy, Providence grungesters White Mice and local cult heroes Little Women and I immediately said yes, despite the fact that I didn't really have a band yet. I figured a week was enough time to do so! I had sat in with the nutzo jazz-spazzes Talibam! a few times after my New York arrival and figured their rubber-limbed drummer Kevin Shea had what it would take to bolster my guitar outbursts, so I asked him to sign on. I needed a bass player - quick. I racked my brain trying to think of somebody interesting or out of the ordinary, when I remembered that a friend from my early Bay Area days had been living in NYC for a while. I called Ceci Moss and said, "Ceci, you own a bass, don't you?" She replied, "Yes, but . . . ". I said, "Don't worry about it! Just bring it and I'll tell you what to do!". Ha ha ha. She hadn't touched the thing in years, but I knew she was smart, had good taste and would get the point. I was right.

The three of us got together and I managed to spontaneously spit out eight loose, cue-based structures for us to jam constructively on. I think we had one more brief rehearsal before the big gig. It was moving fast, but we were making the decisions and moving, with no trepidation. On January 15, 2010, Cellular Chaos Mark Two hit the stage at Death By Audio in Brooklyn with a new manifesto. The end result was raw and underdeveloped, but got the point across. Were initially mining some kind of explosive fusion of no-wave deconstruction and free-jazz energy spew . . . this approach would become much more defined later on.



I was hankering to get to work and start developing a real set, so after the debut I asked Kevin when we'd be able to practice next. He quipped, "Um, let's see . . . May!" Yes, dear reader: four months later. I love Kevin and his scrappy, bizarre sticksmithy, but I knew he would be way too busy to commit to the kind of research and development I knew could make this concept bear out, so I started trying to think of a replacement. Andrya Ambro from Talk Normal was suggested to me by somebody for the slot. She was interested and had the right sensibility, but she was similarly preoccupied with tour duties so it didn't work out. I then realized the answer was right in front of me. I needed somebody who could deal with tight structure as well as rabid freedom. Somebody who would show up at least once a week and put in the time. Somebody who wanted to kick ass. I had been playing with Marc Edwards for years in the idiom of free jazz, but would he play in a "rock band"? It turned out he thought it was a good idea, so the three of us began to formulate the next step.

We re-emerged on April 8, 2010 at Silent Barn in Queens, louder and more vitriolic than before. Initially, Ceci really wanted to push the volume level, so we cranked it up beyond comprehension creating a serious wall of white noise. At certain points during the show I became so manic that I actually lost my mind briefly and began the tradition of our invading the audience, gleefully obliterating the line between performer and onlooker. We were still very raw musically, but once again, we issued our manifesto without fear. I knew part of our role in the scene would be to do the shit nobody else was doing. We needed to be crazier, more confrontational and more in the moment than the rest. We had to offer sounds and structures nobody else would touch. We were going to push beyond mere "competence" into a riskier, less defined realm. What we were going to attempt was messier, bloodier and more uncertain than what the competition was offering and we knew it. We were going to dare to fall flat on our faces in an attempt to break some barriers.



During the summer and fall of 2010, we stepped up our performance schedule, annihilating various dumps like Shea Stadium, Matchless, The Charleston., Death By Audio, Coco 66 . . . basically any shithole that would let us play, taking absolutely anything we were offered. We went up to Easthampton to open for the newly reunited Arab On Radar and opened a bill with Thurston Moore and Bill Orcutt in Brooklyn. Ceci and I both started making vocal noises at this point, her, muttering feline gibberish and me, grunting and groaning like a caveman. We started tightening up our early material and trying to hit all the marks with more clarity. I struggled to work out various issues with my equipment - The amp I used early on really wasn't cutting it tonally or volume-wise, so I disasterously burned through a few others before settling on the ballsy, crude rig I use now.

Almost a year after our New York debut, we played another gig with Liturgy topping the bill and all the hard work of the previous year began to seriously come to a head. We had played a lot of shit gigs to nobody and we mercilessly ground through our songs over and over force to them to grow. Finally we were beginning to emerge as a serious contender. Still, something was missing: we needed a lead singer. I felt like neither me or Ceci could really commit to being a dedicated front person - we needed to really focus on our playing. We wanted somebody to focus all this power and energy and hurl it into the audience with all their might. This search would turn out to be a much more difficult task than I ever dreamed of. There was only going to be one right person and finding her proved to be neither quick or easy.



During the first half of 2011, our sound began to morph away from epic guitar-solo-ridden freakouts to more succinctly structured post-punk-type song forms. It just felt right, so we did it. I was starting to envision Cellular Chaos as a kind of pop trojan horse: what if a glam rock band came from an LSD universe where all the notes were wrong and the effect was more nightmare than dream? Sounds like a plan to me! The Sweet as managed by Jodorowsky! ABBA on DMT! What could possibly go wrong with this?

The more we progressed, the more I craved a lead singer for the group. I had put the word out, but I knew exactly what I didn't want: male "extreme" vocals. You know, angry white guys yelling at the top of their lungs. I'm OVER IT. Of course, I've been in bands with some of the best angry yelling white guys in the business, but these times demand something a bit different. How about some actual singing? How about decipherable words? It's what I need and want badly to hear right now. Many angry white guys offered to yell in front of our band, but they were all kindly declined. The search continued. We asked a few random women to try out, but they were all either too busy to bother or too disinterested in our volatile aesthetics.



In May 2011, German filmmaker Nicole Wegner contacted me to appear in her documentary "Parallel Planes" as a subject. She wanted to interview me, but also desired to make footage of one of my current projects in action. I arranged for a live recording session at Colin Marston's Menegroth studio in Queens on May 12, 2011 and her crew shot us raging through a short set of our best compositions. I took four tracks of those tracks and released them as the demo which streams above. This reflects the apex of our pre-singer live sound rather well. We simply tore up the place like a gig and I'm sure the upcoming film footage will confirm this.

I had been looking even more actively for our leadperson, even resorting to that traditional cesspool of kooks and losers known as CRAIGSLIST. Originally, I tried to tell just it like it is, something to the effect of 'No Wave band looking for appropriate female singer. You are smart and think the music scene sucks and want to do something different'. Nobody bit but a few guys who obviously knew what I was talking about, but didn't fit the bill for obvious reasons (dna-related). I dumbed down the ad description even further and the floodgates of cluelessness flew open. I don't know why, but the majority or people responding were either: 1) more guys, 2) egregiously tasteless soul-mama-acoustic-guitar-coffeehouse hippies or 3) completely talentless people who neither had any ability to convince me they even could be in a band if they wanted to or any evidence that they should be taken seriously. Essentially, I humored most of the candidates and said, "Go ahead and listen to the demo and get back to me if you're interested." Nobody did. Ha ha ha. Good! I'm glad they didn't. I fantasize that some of these people become famous some day so I can say, "Oh yeah, Lady Gaga? She answered my ad for a Cellular Chaos singer."

We slogged on during the fall of 2011, rehearsing, writing new material and playing some rowdy, devastating gigs locally. At one point I was added to a Facebook group called "Ladies of Experimental Music NYC".  Being a non-lady, I was curious why I was added and emailed group leader Thermos Unigarde to ask. She responded saying she knew I was in the scene and that if I could pass along an invite to anybody I knew who would be interested, that would be great. Of course I would oblige. Suddenly I realized, "Wait . . . I'm looking for an experimental NYC lady to be in my band, so I posted a weary solicitation for a singer there. A week went by and my post was met with radio silence. I bumped the thread with one simple word: "crickets . . ." Within minutes, somebody named Admiral Grey brazenly retorted "Let's jam, hippy." A challenge! It turns out that Admiral and Thermos used to play together in the chilling synth-punk group Glass Lamborghini. I was immediately intrigued. Not only did Admiral get the aesthetic, but she had a real voice and musical talent to boot.

Needless to say, after some minor delays, Admiral Grey finally got together with the three of us and we set about revamping our musical agenda. Her debut leading the band took place a few nights ago (video at the top of the page) and we are looking forward to more mayhem in the near future including a show at Cake Shop in Manhattan on December 16 with Child Abuse, Controlled Bleeding and Little Women. We will soon record an ep which will be released next year. Watch out, because Cellular Chaos is going to get you.

- Weasel Walter 12.08.11

ugEXPLODE Artists #1: Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group

The Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group formed in early 2007 and has executed 18 actions of molten aural eruption since. In 2006, Marc Edwards somehow found my Myspace page and wrote me a note saying he liked what he heard. I was familiar with Marc's music - particularly the torrid 1976 Cecil Taylor album "Dark To Themselves" - as well as his reputation as a steadfastly incendiary torchbearer of high-energy free music. I told him I was coming to New York to play and asked him if he would want to make a group. He said, "Most drummers are scared to play with me! Okay, great!" I saw this as an opportunity. If Marc kicked my ass all over the stage, well, it would have been an ass-whipping by one of the best.  I stood to learn something, no matter what.

I have constantly looked to great musicians from past generations for inspiration and comradery.  The originators of form tend to possess valuable information most new generation players have no clue about. The new musicians tend to draw their inspiration from fully codified and formalized sources, whereas the creators of the actual source material had to invent their language from nebulous origins, outside of accepted categories. There is a certain quality of experience in older improvisers which I'm not hearing in most younger players. Since many of the elder players came to free music from other forms - whether it was straight-ahead jazz, classical, etc. - they have a broader foundation on which to build upon, whereas new improvisers tend to be primarily influenced by . . . improvised music. There's often a lack of guts in contemporary improvisation. I don't hear much struggle. I don't hear much pain. I don't hear the desperation of someone who needs to speak as if their life depended on it. That's what I want to hear from music. Marc Edwards plays the drums like his life depends on it. 

Our first meeting took place at the defunct New York City club, Tonic, on February 12, 2007.  The personnel consisted of myself and Marc on drums, Damon Smith and Lisle Ellis on basses, Marco Eneidi on alto saxophone and Elliott Levin on tenor saxophone and flute. Essentially we shook hands and played. Extracts of the concert appear on the 2007 ugEXPLODE release "Firestorm".  The music was extremely dense, well-articulated and completely full-on for the entire duration. There's a certain sort of mass that Marc and I achieve when we play together: Marc is coming from a more rudiment-oriented marching band style of playing, whereas I tend to deal in a lot of fast single strokes as an extension of blast-beat and punk drumming. We are both concerned with clear execution at extremely fast tempos, so I believe there's remains a transparent quality to our cumulative efforts, despite the fact that together we tend to be louder than a nuclear bomb. Luckily we had an extremely strong group of players to kick off the proceedings.


The two following performances took place in New York at Lit Lounge on May 5, 2008 and The Delancey on September 22, 2008. I was still living in Oakland, California, but had begun travelling more frequently to the East Coast in search of new playing situations. Excerpts from both shows appeared on our out-of-print 2009 CD-R release "Mysteries Beneath The Planet".  The Lit Lounge show was originally conceived to be a combo with three drummers and three saxophonists. Unfortunately Charles Gayle couldn't make the gig, so the line-up consisted of myself, Marc and Andrew Barker on drums and Ras Moshe and Mario Rechtern on reeds. We maintained a flesh-melting intensity for the duration of the set.  The Delancey show featured another all-new lineup with myself and Marc on drums, Peter Evans on trumpet, Paul Flaherty on tenor saxophone, Darius Jones on alto saxophone and Tom Blancarte on bass.  The music took on a more orchestral form at this performance with a lot of timbral variation, while still maintaining the volcanic energy we always aim to conjure.


We did another gig at Otto's Shrunken Head in New York on April 28, 2009 with Elliott Levin, Darius Jones, bassist Adam Lane and trumpeter Forbes Graham. Something really seemed to stick with this particular formation, so we recorded this sextet in the studio on November 14, 2009, resulting in the 2010 ugEXPLODE Release "Blood of the Earth".  The CD consists of two half-hour tracks which rage with fury and eloquence, thanks to the great soloists. I tried to keep this line-up together, but it was proving to be very tough, considering the lack of gigs and money as well as the fact that Elliott and Forbes were travelling from out of town to do the shows. After I moved to New York in December 2009, we tried to reconvene the group but couldn't nail down consistent personnel. The January 31, 2010 gig at Knitting Factory featured Adam Lane, Elliott Levin and Forbes Graham, but substituted Aaron Burnett on tenor saxophone for Darius Jones. The February 25, 2010 Paris London West Nile performance had Levin, Burnett and Tom Blancarte on bass.


It was beginning to seem like a logistical and financial nightmare to do the larger, twin-drum groups and I was looking to develop a group language with a consistent group of musicians, so Marc and I decided to scale back the unit for the time being. Most New York venues cannot handle the extreme energy and volume of the big group, so Marc remained on drums, while I switched to bass (my first instrument). We re-emerged on June 18, 2010 at the Bowery Electric as a trio with soprano saxophonist Marcus Cummins. This has remained the core group since. Marcus is a very linear, logical player and he is talented at unravelling endless, winding streams of melody which I tend to complement with shifting, broad harmonic pedal tones. A lot of the time, I am rapidly tremolo-picking to maintain the group momentum, as well as to create a constant tonal density for Marcus to work with. We have never really discussed any specific approach towards the actual music, preferring to let it manifest itself spontaneously without critique or analysis. Since then we have made nine performances with this formation (one gig substituted Matt Nelson on tenor saxophone for Marcus, and another added Mario Rechtern to the group for a quartet).

I have been searching for another permanent lead voice for the band for a while and we may have found it in tenor saxophonist Jeremy Viner.  I saw Jeremy performing with drummer Danny Sher a few months ago and was impressed by his phrasing and technique. The first time Jeremy performed with us was last night, November 13, 2011, at Freddy's Bar in Brooklyn. I think he worked really well with the group as I think the recording below will prove.


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Weasel: What are you trying to do with this music?

Marc: That's a good question. I was heavily influenced by the sci fi thriller, "Forbidden Planet". I believe playing this music will help raise consciousness on this planet, gradually, as mankind evolves to higher states.

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This is what the Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group does: create massive fields of intensity in the hope of jarring listeners into action and feeling. This is the sound of revolt.

-Weasel Walter, 11.14.11

What I Did On My Summer Vacation (Play With Donald Miller, Bhob Rainey, Damon Smith, et al.)

Last week I was in New Orleans. I have been there many times on tour and my main contacts remain the legendary entertainer Mr. Quintron and puppeteer extraordinaire Ms. Pussycat. I have known Quintron since 1993, when we were both part of the embryonic "Chicago No Wave" scene (you can blame that one on me) centered around pre-Yuppie-infestation Wicker Park in Chicago. Since then we have stayed in touch to the extent that when I show up at his shows on tour, he usually has me come on stage at some point and do something stupid while all the people in the audience wonder who the hell I am and where did I come from. I have also marched in his red and white uniformed 9th Ward Marching Band during Mardi Gras - one particular highlight was playing saxophone in a brass arrangement of Heart's eternal "Barracuda", marching down the street in the middle of the night before finally running into master trombonist and Flying Luttenbacher alumni Jeb Bishop at a bar around six in the morning. In the '90s, Quintron's neighborhood was pretty rough, but recently it has become a hipster haven, overrun with drunk-ass party people on the weekend. Ten years ago, said boozers would have wound up with slit throats and stolen wallets . . . ah, how the cities have changed.

The main reason I came down was to participate in an art installation called "The Music Box". Essentially, a group of artists from New Orleans and abroad built a system of small housing structures containing sound generating devices in an empty lot next to another house. The instruments in this shanty-town included: an apparatus to filter keyboard sounds through percolating water pipes; a primitive eight-pad sampler built into a wall; a swinging chair fitted with electrified cables; a metal staircase leading to nowhere with steps that trigger organ pipes; an automated gamelan; amplifed, creaking floorboards and more. I was slotted to play a percussion kit made from various remnants of the original building torn down to make the lot. It featured a number of large frame drums with clingwrap heads and a series of soft metal pipes. This makeshift junkyard drum kit was problematic ergonomically, but after some minor repairs and adjustment of technique, I was able to deal with it. The two performances held during the evening of October 22 were conducted by Mr. Quintron and they were made at chamber music volume, with very little amplification in front of a large crowd seated in bleachers in the courtyard. The music was not particularly about the individuals involved, but rather the inventions themselves; we were just operating them to highlight their sonic potentials.

The night before this performance, I made a duo with veteran noisenik Rat Bastard at the Mudlark Theatre. The Mudlark is known primarily for being a hotbed of puppetry, but apparently they are more than friendly to various weirdo musicians in town as well. The duo of Donald Miller (guitar, of Borbetomagus infamy) and Witchbeam (synthesizer, of Telecult Powers) played a loud, drone-based electronic piece before us, at one point incorporating a random guy who walked in off the street. The two musicians didn't flinch when the dude walked up and started twisting some synth controller knobs. After a few minutes, he lost interest, took a bow and walked out the door. I clapped for him because he had a lot of moxy. Sometimes I think improvised music is improved by audience participation - not that these two needed it, but this welcome element of chaos helped make their set even more memorable. Rat and I came vitually unprepared - not in the sense that we were improvising, but we actually had no instruments with us. Essentially we figured out what to do once we entered the room and saw what was there. Rat did have two transistor radios with, so he played those, but spent most of the time braying and howling about the dangers of overextended credit card balances in this downward-heading economy. Over the blistering white noise of the twin radios, it just sounded like a lot of crazy yelling. I was set up on the stage and I wound up doing a sort of live dub mix with the p.a. head while amplifying a few cymbals and a metal stool with a live microphone. It was a pretty great set and actually contained moments of very coherent structuralism. Enough talk . . . listen to the full set, if you dare . . .

RAT BASTARD-WEASEL WALTER - LIVE NEW ORLEANS 10.21.11

Three days later I returned to the Mudlark Theatre again to play in a duo setting with soprano saxophonist Bhob Rainey. Bhob and I last played together in 1999. That particular quartet, presented only once ever as part of the weekly Myopic Books Improvised Music Workshop series, also featured trumpeter Greg Kelley (who can be heard on several of my solo releases) and late, lamented Flying Luttenbachers William Pisarri on bass guitar and clarinet. At the time, my crude, loud approach - shared with Bill - was the exact opposite of the epicurean, detailed improvisational style Bhob and Greg were cultivating (under the band name Nmperign), so many in attendence seemed to consider this performance a disaster. I never felt at odds with quieter and sparser improvising, and in the meantime I have explored methods to play high-energy percussion at every volume level from pinprick to holocaust. I was definitely looking forward to this rematch with Bhob and it turned out to be quite fruitful. We began with an almost Noh Music-like strategy of dry sounds and abruptly occuring spaces of long duration. We communicated within the architecture of well-placed silence alternated with very pointed or complex isolated events. Of course the playing eventually moved into other densities and volumes, but mainly the dialogue had a lot to do with the tacit understanding of NOT PLAYING as an asset. I believe one of the personal goals for myself within a context like this is to maximize the effect of fewer sounds with the same impact and velocity I might normally reserve for more multilayered and continual playing. Bhob's command of extended techniques on the curved soprano is stunning. His control of split-tones and multiphonics is absolutely startling. He coaxes incredibly alien timbres from his horn and pays very specific attention to the attack and decay envelopes of his sounds. It's somewhat tough for most drummers to operate in such an abstract, non-idiomatic setting without resorting to well-worn cliche (emulating innovators like Eddie Prévost, Sean Meehan, etc.) but I still see a lot of potential in drum set as a structural scaffolding for this kind of music while utilizing traditional techniques. I was very happy with the dynamics of this performance and the lively counterpoint we were able to create. There was no pretense here and we wound up joking around with the audience before and after the set.

The following night, a frequent West Coast cohort of mine, bassist Damon Smith, joined myself and Donald Miller in a stripped-down trio formation. We wound up having to follow an overly long and meandering set by a trio of electronically-augmented percussionists, so by the time we could finally play, we were in particularly surly form both personally and musically. With our simple tools and hot blood, we burst through the gates roaring, each one of us vomiting forth molten lava with sickening violence. We maintained this cruel momentum for the duration of the entire 30 minute piece without faltering. The ghost of Takayanagi was definitely in the upstairs room of The Blue Nile that night and we fought his hauntings with all our mortal might. I was there to kick ass and did so with maniacal impunity, spitting like a lizard and showering everybody in my sweat. I don't really get many opportunities these days to play such balls-out, take-no-prisoners improv, so I relished this chance to raise holy hell and stomp on everybody's skulls with my gore-caked jackboots. Damon wrenched every hellish groan possible from his trusty contrabass and Donald coaxed endlessly spiraling eddies of pestulence from his axe. Everybody who had the balls to stay and take the punishment loved it, while various soft-eared wimps slinked away to crawl back into the soft, fuzzy musical blankies they came out of.

The next night, our murderous cabal was pushed straight over the edge of insanity into oblivion with the addition of extra guitar wrangler Rob Cambre at the Allways Lounge. Rob was singularly instrumental in arranging the four improvised music gigs I got to play on this trip, so I am very grateful for his efforts and support. An unflagging promoter of new music in New Orleans, he's no slouch on his instrument either! His approach is extremely sympathetic to Donald's on many levels, but he also inserts fragments of angular melodicism as well as a completely different set of electronic treatments and preparations, eliciting an even wider array of textures for the ensemble. We were slated to follow an often unintentionally hilarious program of "erotic" spoken word (often executed by not-very-attractive people) which ran overtime, so once again, we were a bit anxious to get the show on the road, as they say in show-biz speak. It's funny that all these "erotic" folks spend so much goddamn time talking about orgasms orgasms orgasms, but when a real fucking MUSICAL ORGASM actually takes place (such as our own catastrophically cathartic display of wanton sonic libertinage), they scatter frantically like cockroaches after the kitchen lights are flipped on in the middle of the night. It always seems like S/M adherents generally have shitty, wimpy discofied taste in music too, so I guess this disconnect translates across many avenues . . . they wring their mitts with fiendish glee to Passolini's Salò, but then retire to the boudoir to relax to the dulcet sounds of  Kenny G. or bad gothic rock. I don't get it, but then again, there's plenty about this retarded world I don't understand. Regardless, our quartet tirade easily topped the previous night in terms of variation and manic intensity. In these kinds of relentless settings, I'm less interested in proving that I can mindlessly play the whole time, but rather, I like to utilize the full possibilitity of the drum kit for its diverse orchestral potential. I might stop on a dime at any given point: not because I'm exhausted, but because I believe that if you have a bunch of great players not everybody has to play all the time. It's a classic, elegant tactic, really. If you're already on the borderline of becoming a dull-roar, why not play with the concept of levels and degrees of obnoxiousness instead of one stale flavor? I believe this has long since been one of my fortes! Sure, I enjoy playing fast and loud, but there's also quiet and loud, quiet and fast, medium volume and fast, loud and sparse, medium and sparse, fast silence, medium silence, etcetera and so on. I can say exactly what I want in the company of a lot of different players without resorting to one-dimensional schtick and I'm pretty proud of that. After all, if I just wanted to play drum solos, I could just stay at home and do that all day. To me, the discursive possibilities of improvisation are paramount, even when performed at the peak of clusterfuck annihilation. To make a lot of crappy noise is no victory. To make a great piece of music out of a lot of crappy noise is godliness!!!!

I ate a lot of 'Po Boy sandwiches on this trip. I'm glad to be home again.

Weasel Walter, 11.1.11