Lumbar Trio - Tape Drive (1995)

The Resonance Handbook by Lumbar Trio

Upon his return from Japan, Brent Gutzeit re-teamed with Thomas Deater and Todd Carter for their improvisational noise project Lumbar Trio. They released their only tape Tape Drive in 1995 through Deater's label Gentle Giant Records. Their excerpt "The Resonance Handbook" is Track 15 on The Miracle of Levitation. (This blog post would not be possible without, once again, the generosity of Brent Gutzeit who still puts out unbelievable and challenging musical experiments on the regular!)

I usually listen to music for the blog while walking the dog; Tape Drive required a very long walk for it's one very long and winding track of improvisation. Between guitars, bass, turntables and tapes, the players overlap all their musical ideas in an unceasing, interweaving forward motion. The ideas can build, contradict, accentuate, underly, complement, transition or interrupt each other. The guitars are the foundation for the first half of the tape. They start with creating an ambient atmosphere before leading to lengthy rhythmic distortions. None of the subsequent play is as easily defined but the feel of a punk-ish post-rock remains. All the while, the tapes are a library of lost ephemera: ads, music, field recordings, conversations, standup routines, instructional videos, sermons and children's television just to name most of them. By the second half of the tape, the recordings dominate. They layer over each other more and become increasingly distorted while the instruments maintain a flowing mood. Through the tapes, the undulating collaborations maintain touches of the humane and personal.

It's on late night walks when the music truly expands. In daylight, the music feels intellectual—as if you are simply following a series of inevitable decisions. But in the dark, especially in the living shadows of a tunnel or a grove of trees, does the music engage more of the imagination and creates a space for itself within the darkness. It's probably because the music is similarly dark. Even on a new moon however, as it was tonight, the music reflects itself just as easily in points of light: lampposts, porch lights and the stars.

Note: Before getting access to Tape Drive, I had written instead an entry for Lumbar Trio's contemporary recording (but only lately released) The Resonance Handbook, and it sounds completely different from Tape Drive. Per Brent Gutzeit, it's their version of "harsh noise" (see Xome.) The entry sits below.

The Resonance Handbook sounds like just that: a compendium of all the ways you can build noise through static and feedback. For an hour, the recording relentlessly runs through all the kinds of static, its forms and textures, by delicately controlling density, timbre and rhythm. But as the static becomes familiar, noise becomes imagery. The first images are industrial, rhythmic machinery. They pound with a percussive force and numb with constant sonic effusion. But the barrage of noise isn't meant to be simple visual replication and, in its malleability, can turn just as suddenly into something more animalistic—chimerical roars or the deafening winds of soaring flight. Further yet, the static can unveil places in the mind both primordial and post-apocalyptic.

Deater and Gutzeit produce most of the noise through their tech but under it all are tapes, and those tapes bring the necessary human touch. Under the layers of feedback, humanity can peek through as if the musical experiment was just a failed transmission from a distant place, another time. It's still mostly just static but even just a sonic glimpse allows an old torch song, news readings or field recordings to become a respite from the unnatural. And depending on how clear the signal, a conversation can turn hellish while a jingle can seem a revelation.

Here is Lumbar Trio's discography:

Tape Drive

The Resonance Handbook (1995 compilation track from The Miracle of Levitation)

"Untitled" (1995 track from RRR 500 (Various 500 Lock-Grooves by 500 Artists))

The Resonance Handbook (2018 album recorded circa April 1995)

Split Cassingle (1995 split single "Untiled")

'" "' (1996 split track from Swallowed by Eternity)

Pass the Headphones!!

Jim O'Rourke - Some Kind of Pagan (1989)

Some Kind of Pagan by Jim O'Rourke

Jim O'Rourke recorded "Milena Dravic." track 10 on The Miracle of Levitation. By 1995, O'Rourke was already well established as a leading figure of improvised noise in Chicago. He first began releasing tapes with Elvis Messiahs in the late eighties. He released his debut solo tape Some Kind of Pagan in 1989 on the Sound of Pig label.

While listening to Some Kind of Pagan, you have to occasionally look at the cassette art to remind yourself that everything you hear is "solo guitar." The second track "Bound Up with Memory" is the rawest version of this, just Jim delicately manipulating the feedback interplay between his guitar and amp. The amplitudes of this feedback is further textured with the amplified sounds of prominent plucks, fingers leaving frets and sliding along strings. "Solving Problems Until They All Disappear" is similarly unadorned though with more layering and some effects, juxtaposing harmonics with deeper tones. The emanating sounds only just retain the strains of the guitar but also begin to fool you into thinking they couldn't possibly come from a guitar: instead, perhaps, it's the inner workings of a clock...or at least multiple instruments approximating the inner workings of a clock.

The remaining songs further build on the experimentation through more layering and with more tape and digital manipulation. It's still guitar but it becomes much harder to discern the sounds as such. "Hold These Goddamn Chickens" contrasts tiny, almost atomic, flowing bits with the gargantuan toll of "bells." Across the whole tape, the strings, when they're still recognizable, can sound rapid and miniature or enlarged, thickened, stretched out as if across a warehouse, capturing both the sound of the instrument and the reverberation within the room even if the room is only simulated.

All of these explorations lead up to the final track "Heaven Is No Longer Paved in Gold." Everything tried before is tried again: every effect and idea. The guitar is itself and everything else. It's close and far away, amplified and pure, incredibly small and incredibly large. At the dawn of his musical career, Jim O'Rourke is already working out his own kind of string theory.

Here is the discography surrounding Jim O'Rourke's debut tape:

EE (1988 tape as Elvis Messiahs)

Dead (1989 tape as The Messiahs)

Some Kind of Pagan

Pass the Headphones!!

Old Lady Drivers - Old Lady Drivers (1988)

"Wisdom Lost" by Old Lady Drivers

James Plotkin's "Event Horizon" is track 7 on The Miracle of Levitation. By 1995, Plotkin had established himself as an ambient/experimental musician, but he started recording as a member of the parodic grindcore band Regurgitation that then became Old Lady Drivers. Old Lady Drivers released their debut album Old Lady Drivers in 1988 on Earache Records. (It seems like these underground noise outfits found better audiences via international record labels—the UK in this case.)

Old Lady Drivers sound as the name implies. Perhaps Alan Dubin's harsh vocals had been compared to raging elderly motorists so often that the concept of writing songs from that perspective was too good a fit to pass up. Early on, Dubin and Plotnick seemed to rely on the perspective of characters to craft songs. Their signature song as Regurgitation "Bathrooms Rule"—which also made it onto the O.L.D. debut—comes from a ridiculous high schooler describing the disgusting opportunities a bathroom can entertain. "Supermarket Monstrosity" takes the perspective of a child at the grocery store horrified by another customer in the frozen food aisle. The pitched-up vocals and syncopation feel like a proto-South Park gag. "Wisdom Lost" is the most notable song from the point of view of an old lady (driver.) The song is darkly funny and unsettling in its portrayal of senile citizens. It's just as much a caricature of the antiquated and helpless as a fear of what future they portend.

Having a whole album, let alone a band, dedicated to this one concept of performance wears thin after a few songs even for the band members themselves. Although the characters might have provided lyrical fodder and humor to lampoon their chosen musical genre, the band members seem to find a more rewarding creative outlet in experimenting with song structures and the mixing of other eighties sounds into the hardcore palette (a turn that has come into style lately.) The result is a jarring combination that pokes fun at efforts of pretension and indulges crudity in a fashion where form meets function.

Here is the discography surrounding Old Lady Drivers's debut album:

Organic Backwash (1986 demo as Regurgitation)

Bathrooms Rule (1987 demo as Regurgitation)

Total Hag Demo (1988 demo)

Old Lady Drivers

Bathrooms Rule! (2000 compilation as Regurgitation)

Complete Recordings 1986/1987 (2016 compilation as Regurgitation)

"Supermarket Monstrosity" by Old Lady Drivers

"Bathrooms Rule" by Old Lady Drivers

Pass the Headphones!!

Phünhögg - Five Foot Moustache (1993)

"Summer Breeze" by Phünhögg

Track 6 of The Miracle of Levitation was performed by 7000 Dying Rats. Four of those 7000 Dying Rats were previously in the short-lived Detroit band Phünhögg. They released Five Foot Moustache in 1993 on 44 Caliber Records.

If you go by just this record, Phünhögg sounds like a gluey collage of all the successful Alternative bands of the era. They play with a foundation of metal chord progressions, guttural screams and the hoarse vocals familiar to grunge. There's also verses of rap rock on "Fumunduh," speedy speak-singing on the floor thumping "Meat," and a parodic southern drawl on "Manrammer." Each song fluctuates somewhere on the metal spectrum leaning ultimately towards grunge. Despite its members-only lyrical content, none of the songs really fit together. Each one sounds like a coffee-stained cock and balls margin drawing of a napkin draft reject from a different Alternative hitmaker. Even aided with the chugging propulsion of their chosen genre, Phünhögg is only cohesive in each songs' sluggishness, mired in a sound that is not their own. Outside of Five Foot Moustache, Phünhögg knows itself as a harsh metal band and sound a lot livelier and more fun as a result.

Here is Phünhögg's discography:

100% Polyester (1987 demo by The Herb Tarlick's)

Hummingbird (1988 EP by The Herb Tarlick's)

Fishbowl (1990 single by Green Wall)

Fishbowl (1990 single by Sound Corporation)

Utica (1991 single)

Phünhögg (1992 tape)

Five Foot Moustache

Note: There are certainly more underground releases from the various band members that led up to Phünhögg. There are probably even more Phünhögg recordings, but that's a deep dive for another blogger.

"Ecorse" by Phünhögg

Pass the Headphones!!

Xome - Blind Frenchies and Pork (1995)

Blind Frenchies and Pork by Xome

On The Miracle of Levitation, Xome's "Children Recognizing Meat as a Main Dish" is Track 4. Although he had recorded his own music (not the right word) for years already, his first live performances and releases came while he lived in Japan (contemporaneous to Brent Gutzeit and Michael Hartman's short stays there.) Xome released his debut album Blind Frenchies and Pork in 1995 on his own label Negatron Heavy Industries.

Xome, aka Bob Scott, is a harsh noise project. From my understanding of the history of Xome's gigs via his website, his harsh noise is an act of daring overexposure, of smashing taboos and even tips into misdemeanor lawbreaking. A great gig leaves audiences with a night of memorable audio/visual trauma. Unlike the live instrumentation and junk sounds of other improvisational noise genres, harsh noise forgoes them for digital equipment made to layer static, distortion and feedback. The genre hasn't much use for rhythm, tempo or other traditional musical qualities in favor of...well, mostly just texture. The result is a heavy dose of abrasive static and ear-piercing tones. Like on a TV, the static is random and patternless and painful and damaging if you spend too much time with it. But it's still possible to get lost in it and hear things from the other side: from Bob Scott to, say, Carol Anne's ears.

So what can you hear? Depends on the recording. "Calcutta" starts with squealing tones that waver in amplitude and seem to change their texture as they ascend or descend in pitch travelling through the various machines. All the while, Xome layers in a contrasting ambient recording of bells, strung together and shattering in an otherworldly way. A consistent quality of these walls of static and feedback tones and distorted recordings that leave your ears ringing and send your dog to the other room is that they sound small, as if Xome were taking the most sensitive microphone in the world and holding it, not to his equipment, but to their wires to record the miniature traffic of atoms and electrons. It's the sound of the electrical blown up to a level of disturbing power.

Specificities, though, seem almost beyond the point. Xome prefers the live setting. For harsh noise, in all its will to disturb listeners and push boundaries, is a troll's genre. The improvisation is as much a reaction to the audience as what noise is being made. The performances, like the reactions, are physical, and there might not be anything more satisfying to the harsh noise maker than the physical reaction of the audience walking out the door.

Here is the discography surrounding Xome's debut album:

face 23 (1994 tape)

split (1995 split tape with Stimbox)

Clip Off (1995 compilation song on The Sound of Samsara)

Blind Frenchies and Pork

Children Recognizing Meat a Main Dish (1995 compilation song on The Miracle of Levitation)

Xome Live at Gear in Koenji, Tokyo

Pass the Headphones!!

Diaper - The Brown Suit (1994)

"Art Rock Takes a Holiday" by The Mercury Players

The other band to precursor U.S. Maple (Track 3 from The Miracle of Levitation) is the indie band Diaper. Diaper released their only album The Brown Suit in 1994 on Weed Records.

Diaper is a throwaway band name. The band itself was probably intended to be just that: a little project pulled together by friends and a will to just "make a record" in your early 20s. Drummer Pat Samson and guitarist Todd Rittman had already played together with The Mercury Players and would later form U.S. Maple. Rittman recruited high school friend and cellist Kera Schaley (previously of dOUBT) to round out the trio. The recording was rushed, the release push nearly non-existent and the "album-release tour" a couple of concerts in Chicago and Athens. As presaged by their name, the album fell into obscurity.

Despite this, the three together sound cohesive and well-practiced. They embrace the minimal spareness of their band's makeup and recording space: a barn, mostly. They create a very direct record, as a result, without much semblance of production. The guitar is simultaneously ominous and glittering; the cello welcoming and fragile. The songs, like a lot of early 90s indie songs, find themselves in love with dissonance and minor chords and sound more like variations on a musical theme. Even with the band members' respective musicianship, their songs can turn plodding in these variations and the cello lilts towards the lullaby. It's only when Schaley or Rittman embrace the noisier potential of their instruments, like the concluding breakdown on the instrumental "Off" or the quite funny opening strums on "J Mascis Is God," that Diaper keeps the album from becoming comatose. The lyrics match the sonic mood, sung alternatively by Schaley and Rittman. They're dark, brooding and sarcastic; or so I've read. I couldn't make out half the lines as the vocals are much too low in the mix. In the end, there's not enough ambition or inspiration to elevate the album beyond a local curio, but the band never really intended it to be anything but that—and it's certainly more valuable than just a diaper.

All information here about Diaper comes from Kera Schaley's point of view through a (much needed) interview conducted in 2010 by Evan LeVine writing for his blog Swan Fungus. In his article, he's uploaded a couple songs if you want an idea of what the band sounds like.

Here is the discography for Diaper:

Box of Headaches (compilation album of unreleased recordings by dOUBT)

Hollywood or Bust (1992 single by The Mercury Players)

Don't Run, It's Your Dreamgirl (1992 EP by The Mercury Players)

Wrong (1994 single by Double Boar)

The Brown Suit

"Judas's Payment" by dOUBT

"Bliss" by Martyr & Pistol

Pass the Headphones!!

Shorty - Thumb Days (1993)

"Presto" by Shorty

The Miracle of Levitation brought together assorted noise outfits from both the Midwest and Tokyo. The next sequence of Tour stops will hit as many of the bands and artists (or related groups) featured on the compilation as possible. Starting stateside, track 3: U.S. Maple...but not actually. U.S. Maple was a convergence of two separate bands. The first, and the first we'll be covering, is Shorty—an early 90s, Chicago-area noise rock band. Shorty released their only LP Thumb Days in 1993 on the German label Gasoline Boost Records.

Al Johnson sings out of the side of his face. Not "sings" really, he screams. He contorts his mouth in a Two-Face fashioned and screams sidelong. He holds the microphone not up to his lip distortion but further askew pushed against his cheek and pushing harder when the notes shift slightly deeper. Johnson's screams come out of the greatest possible vocal restriction, full throated but strangled. This unique delivery mutes Johnson's lyrics and limits his range as he rends each song with snarls and indistinguishable provocations. He's Shorty's frontman and showman but also the final touch to a calibrated sound. At the foundation of this calibration are Luke Frantom on bass and Todd Lamparelli on drums. Frantom in particular plays a near-metronomic (and very baggy) bass that fastidiously loops his lines. He and Lamparelli deftly control the time-signature changes that adorn the compositions on Thumb Days. The two of them create a breakneck but calculated drive with a level of darkness that matches the metal roots of the nascent Alternative sound.

Mark Shippy, however, makes Shorty a noise rock band and a very good one. Shippy's style mixes traditional chord progressions with abrasive textures and a deft control of feedback. Within his style, he can line up both a song's central hook as well its frenetic solo. He can both groove with the drum and bass and also match Al Johnson rip for rip. On an album where each song outputs the same speed and energy, Mark Shippy separates each one with his guitar just as, with his guitar, he ties the band together.

Here is Shorty's discography:

We Bopped Your Mama (1990 demo tape)

Mungo (1990 single as Snailboy)

We Bopped Your Mama (1990 tape as Snailboy)

Spoo Heaven (1991 single as Snailboy)

Last One in My Mouth Is a Jerk (1992 single)

Dynamite Lover (1992 single)

Kaput! (1993 single)

Thumb Days

Fresh Breath (1994 EP)

1979 / Really Pointy? (1995 compilation song)

"Coopie and Me" by Shorty

Shorty Live at McGregor's, Elmhurst, IL

"Kept Turd" by Snailboy

Pass the Headphones!!