Pencilneck - Ohranger (1994)

"Pillow Talk" by Pencilneck

The band names might change but the lineups become familiar across the early releases by Gentle Giant. From Liminal, the adjacent rock band Pencilneck held over members Thomas Deater, Brent Gutzeit and Todd Carter while adding Rob Stimpson from the Kalamazoo hard rock band Fatsack and local studio engineer Mike Schuur. Pencilneck released their tape Ohranger in 1994 on Gentle Giant Records.

Despite the familiar lineup, Pencilneck conceives an entirely different mode of noise than Liminal's. Brent Gutzeit's "sound environments" make way for an only slightly more traditional handmade 18-string bass. Becky Cooper and her flute make only a single track's guest appearance. Those two elements are the foundation of Temple Music's meditative ambience, so a new band name reflects the sonic change. Without the tumbling cacophonies from Gutzeit's creations and Cooper's ethereal flute, gone also is the improvisational structure that held Liminal's compositions together. Now with Pencilneck, the noise seems less arbitrary and the fellow players feel less like adornment. Pencilneck, instead, explores their collaborative potential via a sort of free jazz fusion.

On the tape's opener "Suberbole," Pencilneck sets up a traditional structure where the guitars and bass and saxophone (Mike Shuur) explore the textural walls of sound their instruments can create. That is then all held together rhythmically by the funk-style drumming. The song plays like a playful riff on the alternative rock sounds of the era, and if the rest of the album stayed the same, would've made for a clever contemporary music commentary. But 23 other songs on Ohranger, go in 23 other directions. Punk, sludge, metal, grunge and even anti-folk all become occasional ingredients and thus fodder for Pencilneck, but it's all byproduct to what the band is actually doing: playing a game.

According to Brent Gutzeit, Pencilneck "was a rock band...that played game structured improvised pieces, similar to John Zorn's Cobra game. We would use hand gestures to signal changes in the song as we played." Besides the musicians, nothing stays the same from song to song. Each composition is effectively a randomized creation through a recombination of players, time signatures, or any other musical element. The results are myriad: "wannabe" has the closest structure to an avant-garde jazz number; "clothed city" traffics multiple time signatures and rhythms for some sonic congestion; "sock" is a devolving rock song that miraculous reforms through the stabilizing force of the drums and bass; and "pillow talk" hews closest, with its metronomic melody, to a piece Liminal might produce.

The album as a whole is a trove of musical potential: what music traditionally doesn't play but could and does here. It challenges traditional musical aesthetics and expectations and keeps the mind reeling trying to keep up with all you've never heard before...even if at an hour and twenty minutes, it becomes exhausting.

Special thanks again to Brent Gutzeit for sharing a copy of Ohranger and for answering my questions about Pencilneck.

Here is the discography surrounding Pencilneck's tape:

Ohranger

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