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!!
