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

ugEX Blast From The Past #3: Miss High Heel - Hanson Cassette 1996

Here is ZIP file featuring a rip of the incredibly rare 1996 Miss High Heel cassette released on Hanson Records. Pressing unknown. Featuring similar personnel to "The Family's Hot Daughter" CD (Blossoming Noise, 2008). Enjoy!

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ugEX Blast From The Past #2
ugEX Blast From The Past #1

The Rise and Self-Euthanasia of Miss High Heel

From the liner notes to the 2008 Blossoming Noise CD "The Family's Hot Daughter" by Miss High Heel:

"Miss High Heel was an irrational response to extraordinary stimuli. She was conceived in late 1995 by Windy City visitor Tom Smith, Lake Of Dracula singer James "Marlon" Magas, and me. I don't recall the exact circumstances of the band's genesis, but Tom had recently arrived from Miami and was crashing in a loft with Marlon, sound engineer Elliot Dicks, and future piano-jazz homunculus Azita Youseffi. (I'd been so inspired by The Galen, Duotron, Couch, The Many Moods of Marlon Magas, The Scissor Girls, and The Flying Luttenbachers, all of whom either supported or collided with To Live and Shave in L.A. during our "Helen Butte" tour of the American Midwest, that I endeavored to fuse with them, or at least create ungovernable music with them.) The group's name was borrowed by Tom from a tawdry 50s pulp novel "Miss High Heels" - that he'd purchased for 45 cents at N. Milwaukee Avenue's Myopic Books. (Consult Wigmaker's "The 'Rose' the Vehicle of Miss High Heels" for further analysis.) We used that pluralized moniker before deciding that our lovely heroine might be even more alluring with just the one leg . . . I do remember some discussion with Tom about wanting the band to have a harmolodic, organic undercurrent, so we cadged the double bass guitar team of Chuck Falzone and William Pisarri from the ten-current Luttenbachers line-up and added Azita and Jim O'Rourke on dual synthesizers to flank my blast-beat drum torrents. Les the animal enter the ark à l'écart, the sonic conterparts for my percussion onslaughts were Tom's violently fragmented tape edit backing tracks made from random brutal death metal CDs. These barking, stuttering collages created a meta-structure for the group to improvise upon and we would start and stop religiously in conjunction with them. At the front line, Tom and Marlon issued lyrical assaults with a very intuitive sense of partnership, oscillating rapidly between unison, call-and-response and pure collision. (We thought of ourselves as a thoroughly ersatz Sam and Dave, nonpareil gulag crooners with chlorpromazine to spare.) Truth told, Miss High Heel only performed live twice - once on New Years' Eve 1995/96 at the Magnatroid (with the entire ensemble, save for compere and Boat Of veteran Mike Green, in their skivvies) and less than a week later at Northeastern University's WZRD radio (sans O'Rourke, "immortalized" on the "Split Wax Cylinder Inscribed: Beast 661" CD of yore). Tom was on a roll in early '96, cranking out a slew of albums and sundry recordings from Elliot's Arschloft studio (The Scissor Girls' "S-T-A-T-I-C-L-A-N-D", Duotron's dub-inflected cri de coeur, "Duotron vs. Tom Smith", the solo debut from Die Electric Eels' Brian McMahon, "17 Volts", and the initial demos from drug-grind duo Aborted Christ Childe). By the time we embarked on the MHH studio sessions, most of the work was done in strictly overdub form, with people coming in one-by-on (or by -twos) to lay down frothing improvised mania over the macabre prerecorded blast tracks. (The bloody control room was too small to accommodate more than four mutants per sitting; ensemble tracking was impossible.) Nandor Nevai and Jodie Mecanic were soon drawn into the fold, and their acidic wit and remarkable brio were crucial to undergirding the demonic narrative. Tom was becoming totally obsessed with his own pre dub style of mixing, and this explains the odd sparseness and drunken attack of the production, contrasting with the frantic density of the live unit.

As Miss High Heel said what she needed to say, we never convened again."

- Weasel Walter (and Tom Smith), September 24, 2007.

==============================================================

Tom and I both agreed upon the above notes more than a decade after the fact, so either that's the gosh-durn truth, or, at least, what we want to remember about it. Ha ha ha.

I do remember the New Years' Eve gig at Jeff Day and Emily O'Hara's long-defunct venue/home The Magnatroid. The venue consisted of this huge, decrepit stone building with a gigantic boiler in it and lots of nooks, cubbyholes and caverns. It was extremely raw, dirty and borderline hazardous, but it was a great place to have a show. Jeff and Emily (the erstwhile rhythm section of Monitor Radio as well as frequent period cohorts of the Bobby Conn band) were riding the wave of energy still surging through our scene at that time in Chicago and they were very gracious to run the space and help everybody out. Jeff was an active taper at the time, so many of the shows are probably well-documented on cassette someplace. We definitely played in our underwears. As noted in the liners, our tacit modus operandi was to make as much dense noise as we could, starting and stopping with the backing tape. Tom and Jim had serious text they preached over the din and they basically had to scream their living guts out to be heard. The other main band on the gig was Xerobot, the quirky math-punk unit hailing from Madison, Wisconsin which later fragmented into Numbers, Trin-Tran and My Name Is Rar-Rar.

The WZRD session was amusing. I remember that we were all in different rooms, so it seemed like most of us had no eye contact with more than one other person at a time. I believe I remember having my drums set up in some secluded corner, and I was listening to the backing track on the headphones at excruciating volume while frantically cueing Bill or Chuck to start or stop. He would cue somebody else and the telephone game would continue as such on down the line resulting in a hilarious, continual train wreck. The spontaneity and energy of the event is definitely evident on the 1998 "Split Wax Cylinder" CD. There are no cuts: the performance unveils in real time, warts and all. There's plenty of snappy repartee between numbers (this group was full of smart-asses, myself included certainly) and a level of cocksure bombast that could only be generated by people who are young and completely full of their own shit. The "producer" of the album (who shall remain nameless) insisted on the completely retarded, flatulent mastering style heard on the disc. He seemed to think that it was HIS release(?) and was adamant about trying to put his funny little stamp all over the CD any way he could. The pocketbook was nestled in his stinky pants and we wanted this thing to come out, so we all just shrugged our shoulders and let him have his fun. That said, I'm not unhappy with this release at all!

At some point in 1996, Aaron Dilloway released a cassette of rough mixes from the studio sessions on his prolific Hanson imprint. I would doubt many know this item exists. I haven't listened to this tape since the mid-to-late '90s but I have to say that I'm enjoying it very much right now. Unlike the stark, porous, dub-influenced mixes on "The Family's Hot Daughter", the versions on this rare tape veer towards a relentlessly full-bore approach. Not every musician or instrument is evident on every track, and there aren't many vocals at all, but the sound is face-rippingly dense and dominated by the saturated distortion of Tom's outré "in the red" mixing style. This is an artificial sound of maximum compression and overdrive - strata upon strata of white noise rising and falling with violent rapidity, blurring the concept of recording fidelity itself. The whole thing is extremely random and out of control, volume levels and stereo panning lurching from side to side, forward and back. I'm glad it exists.

As far as those studio sessions laid down at the loft, I recall being locked in the small drum room (where the early Lake Of Dracula practices took place), and just trying to beat the fuck out of the drums as fast as I could while trying keep the headphones on and anticipating the abrupt starts and stops of the tape. I did a bass clarinet overdub at one point and it involved every single "extended" technique I could muster: rubbing the body of the horn with the bell, playing it with no mouthpiece, blowing through it with no neck, squealing on the mouthpiece alone, yelling into the bell, battering the keys for percussive sounds, ad nauseam. Jodie Mecanic and Nondor Nevai both executed completely unhinged vocal takes, with Jodie affecting some kind of mongoloid/demon/sex-kitten glossolalia and Nondor screaming and grunting his guts out. I don't recall much more than that. As Tom noted, it was absolutely impossible for all of us to be in the studio at the same time.


I recall that Tom mixed those tapes for a long, long time. I can only imagine how many different takes are in his archives. Part of me wishes I could seize the multitrack masters and do a big, clean, evenly-balanced mix, just to see what the hell is actually hidden on those reels. The other part of me realizes that would be completely against the ethos of the entire short-lived project.

Finally, we come to the hoary gates of the imposing 77-minute sonic gargoyle known as "The Family's Hot Daughter" - the ultimate net result of all those hours of Tom's endless, possessed audio engineering. I will admit I have never sat through the whole thing, but I will attempt to do so right now and comment upon the experience.

What is so unctious to me about FHD is the near-constant, overmodulated stucco coating of ugly digital distortion permeating it. This brutish aliasing has a certain hideous, burlap-like abrasion which is extremely unpleasant on a visceral level. It's not like some forgiving analog square-wave fuzz; its nature is much more amorphous and unsettling, like an aural cancer which is difficult to catagorize. It is the sound of true chaos, not the well-worn tubesock of nice "noise" most people have come to love and accept in extreme music. It doesn't color the music as much as it vandalizes it. Despite being sonically oppressive, this quality becomes a significant leitmotif for the psychodrama which is Miss High Heel.

Almost 13 minutes pass before any coherent vocals appear, and when they do, it's a bit of a relief. The opening salvo is so harsh and alienating, I find myself begging for a sign of humanity, and it finally appears in the form of "Bad By Proust 'A'". Suddenly individual elements become more obvious: the drums, the basses, the bass clarinet. For a few moments one is lulled into complacency, believing this may have become just another avant-skronk record. The most fascinating aspect of this music is the vocal approach. Tom, Jim, Nondor and Jodie are really stretching here. Sometimes Tom and Jim meld into each other, slipping into a languid, tortured unison drawl. It's very unguarded and cathartic in a way that might be impossible to achieve within more rigidly codified and structured formats. Essentially, Miss High Heel was performing high-energy free music with a set of rich metatextual information, vis a vis the backing tracks and the very specific syntactical canvas of words.

The triptych of "The Fucked 'Aunt' Moment", "'Ahhhhhh-Her' Series The The Arched" and "Shoving It Travelling" are Jodie Mecanic's showcase pieces. On "Fucked", she evokes the confusion of an abduction victim lapsing erotically into a bout of the Stockholm Syndrome. It is frightening and comedic simultaneously. Bill's clarinet emerges from the mix to taunt her before a morbidly spacious conclusion. "Series" is a continuation of the theme, with vocals and clarinet almost completely unobstructed and a peppering of Tom's voice towards the end. By the middle of the CD, it seems as if the arc of the program has pushed beyond mere frenzy and has reached a different state of being. Perhaps this distinctly feminine geist has a calming effect on the fracas?

"Rose Aw Suck" might be the climax of the album. It is the longest and most complex track, glancing 10 full minutes. It seems to deliberately introduce most of the cast one by one, as if they are each taking a final curtain call before diving mindlessly into the burning chasm of Hades. This piece is obviously the swan-song of Miss High Heel. It is a chilling portrait of group mental disturbance and randomness. There is a long segment of abstract solo bass clarinet by myself near the end of the piece. It is lonely, bordering on destitute. Just as it winds down, a screeching vignette of Jodie and Nondor keeps the mania intact.

Two live tracks from the New Year's show act as a sort of coda. The fidelity is shockingly detailed for a lo-fi recording and all of the ensemble members are audible. In particular, O'Rourke and Azita's fleet synthesizer wrangling is the main event on these cuts. There is some actual rhythm section interplay between myself and the two bass players evident here. We seemed to silently understand that starting and stopping together during the pieces would aid the overall momentum. As a subset of MHH, Chuck, Bill and I were used to throwing each other tons of cues in The Flying Luttenbachers, so we were able to enact this strategy successfully.

"It Reports I Practiced Ignorance" wraps up in a lovingly fastidious, succinct manner at 1:28 duration. The opening segment is a hilarous feedback and reverb-drenched snippet of Nondor and Jodie improvising together. They are understanding each other completely despite the fact that they are using total nonsense as raw material. The final third arrives with a soft surge of digital feedback which reveals a short loop of electronic synth detritus with Mike Green talking on top. It morphs into a frament of backing tape music before dissipating into a wisp of echo.

There's something oddly poignant about actually finishing this cd for once. It seems to begin as a blatant aesthetic affront, and then gradually transforms itself into a scorched-earth requiem mass. I hadn't noticed this long line before. I recommend giving "The Family's Hot Daughter" serious attention if you bother to check it out because it is a complex work and there is much more to it than immediately appears.