Blog Archives
Edmund Welles
Ever since Kronos Quartet tackled Hendrix back in the ’80s, classically trained musicians have been trying to prove that their cellos and oboes are more than just museum pieces, good for wheezing out dusty old “Concertos in B Flat Minor” and not much else. So they trot out string quartet versions of Radiohead, or even Lady Gaga medleys for bassoon, and…well, okay, the Lady Gaga bassoon ensemble, the Breaking Winds, is actually kinda cool. But they’re the exception. Most of this stuff just sounds like a slightly classed-up version of Muzak.
So when a friend and reader named Josh (sup, Josh?) suggested that we check out his buddy’s “heavy chamber music” quartet, we have to admit, we were skeptical. Classical musicians doing heavy metal covers? Apocalyptica covered that territory 15 years ago. Moving on.
Then we actually heard Edmund Welles–which is a band, not a person (the name is a Monty Python reference…I mean, not that I would know that without having to look it up…okay, maybe I would)–and, well, let’s just put it this way: The bass clarinet is an inherently weird instrument. Put four of them together in one group, and it sounds like a chorus of demon cats in heat fighting over a chicken bone. A demon chorus whose eerie caterwaulings just happen to occasionally assemble themselves into passages from Pixies and Nirvana songs.
Edmund Welles is the brainchild of one Cornelius Boots (his given name? if so, his parents rule), who first conceived of the idea of an all-bass clarinet ensemble back in 1996, the same year Apocalyptica was giving Metallica the all-cello treatment. Boots liked heavy metal, too, but he also liked alternative rock, jazz, traditional American folk music, and even good old fashioned baroque classical music, the stuff the bass clarinet was invented to play in the first place. And he was determined to combine all his affections into a single, pulsating mass of bass clarinet awesomeness. This was such a uniquely weird concept that Boots worked on his Edmund Welles project in solitude for several years before finally assembling enough fellow bass clarinetists to begin staging public performances.
In 2004, the group released its first album, Agrippa’s 3 Books, which Boots himself has described as “Muzak for conspiracy theorists,” “inspired by occult philosophy and heavy metal music.” In addition to an original multi-part movement with titles like “Asmodeus: The Destroyer, King of the Demons,” the album also featured covers of songs by Black Sabbath, Sepultura and (no, really) Spinal Tap. They’ve since released a second album of original material called Tooth & Claw, which has cover art that would’ve made the late great Ronnie James Dio smile. Is the bass clarinet the Woodwind of the Beast? Well, now that you mention it, that’s kinda what it sounds like.
Inevitably, Edmund Welles have gotten the most attention for their covers, especially a very solemn reading of Radiohead’s “Creep.” Their original stuff is weirder and ultimately much more interesting, but we’ll give you their version of “Creep” here in the hopes that it serves as a gateway to some of the harder stuff. Sort of the way your local Philharmonic does “The Nutcracker” every Christmas in the hopes that you’ll buy season tickets and come back for some Bartok and Stravinsky.
P.S. Did we mention that Cornelius Boots has also released an album of “sound, not music” called Sabbaticus Rex, featuring “spontaneous, sustained sound structuring” with Japanese flutes, gongs and Tuvan throat singing? Well, he has. Just thought we’d throw that in there.
Links:
- Edmund Welles official site
- Edmund Welles on MySpace
- Cornelius Boots clarinet instruction (yes, he gives lessons)
Arrington de Dionyso Malaikat dan Singa
Hi, kids! How was your summer? Ours was pretty darn rad, I gotta say. We found lots of weird music, made some new friends (hi, Emotron!), launched our online store, and spent just enough of it drunk to take the edge off this whole recession thing. Also, Weirdest Band in the World celebrated its one-year anniversary…did you get us anything? No? That’s okay…your presence is our present. (Don’t you hate when people say that?)
Anyway, Jake and I are tan, rested, and ready to bring you another year of really weird bands. First up: a new project from a lunatic named Arrington de Dionyso. Arrington’s main gig is serving as lead singer of Pacific Northwest noise-punks Old Time Relijun. We’ve known about OTR for awhile, and although they’re kinda weird, we never really considered them TWBITW-worthy. They throw in the occasional touches of free-jazz skronk, but still–our minds weren’t blown.
But this Malaikat dan Singa project is pretty off-the-charts, for a number of reasons. First, de Dionyso sings all the band’s songs in Indonesian. Why? Well, according to one official bio, “the Indonesian language allows de Dionyso to communicate on levels more deeply subliminal than those accessible in his native English.” Not sure we buy that, but yes, it does give the songs an added layer of weirdness.
Second, de Dionyso occasionally incorporates Tuvan throat singing into his vocals, which gives the songs an added element of Far Eastern mystical juju and–because he puts his own punk-rock spin on throat singing’s eerie, inhuman tones–a vibe that could probably best be described as acid-rock for zombies. Seriously, it’s ugly, creepy, but occasionally trance-inducing stuff. In fact, de Dionyso apparently calls it “trance-punk.” Which is as good a description as any.
Oh, and some of the lyrics are apparently Indonesian translations of William Blake poems. Hey, why not?
Malaikat dan Singa’s self-titled debut is out now on K Records, and you can stream the whole thing on their website. Check it out and tell us de Dionyso isn’t the loopiest rock vocalist this side of Mike Patton. (He also seems to share Patton’s restless spirit–besides Old Time Relijun and Malaikat dan Singa, he also fronts a free-jazz group called The Naked Future and paints a lot.)
Malaikat’s live shows don’t seem to translate real well to video–de Dionyso is always a compelling figure, but the rest of the band is pretty much just up there chopping wood and giving him a steady groove to freak out on top of. But this animated video, done by a guy named Ben Wolfinsohn for his My Odd Days project, captures the band’s unhinged spirit pretty well. We especially like that he chose to make de Dionyso look like a guy who just wandered in from an office Christmas party.
UPDATE: Shortly after we posted this, we were contacted by Arrington himself (we’re not worthy!) who pointed us to a cool feature on him on this art ‘n culture site called The Black Harbor. We especially recommend checking out the second of the three videos on that page, where he demonstrates how he uses an antique record lathe and plastic picnic plates to make homemade records that he then sometimes incorporates into his shows. Very nifty stuff.
Links:
- Arrington de Dionyso on MySpace
- Malaikat dan Singa page on K Records (full album stream)
- Arrington de Dionyso Malaikat dan Singa page on Panache Booking
- Old Time Relijun on MySpace
- The Naked Future official site
Negativland
Not many bands can claim to have invented an entire genre of music, but Negativland actually goes one better than that: They invented an entire art form, a technique called culture jamming, that is now such an accepted part of consumerist, mass media culture that it’s hard to imagine anyone having to invent it. From Adbusters to Banksy to self-aware Sprite commercials to fake BP Twitter accounts, the basic concepts of culture jamming are part of our everyday vernacular at this point. But yep, Negativland coined the term back 1984. Before that, it was hard to know what to call the band’s mix of intercepted CB-radio conversations, sampled radio announcers and commercial jingles, krautrock, processed guitars, and ambient noise. Except really, really weird.
Negativland was started all the way back in 1979 by Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons, who were then still going to high school in the East Bay. Early on, they recruited a reclusive cable TV repairman named David “The Weatherman” Wills to join the group; his homemade devices, like cellphone scanners and a sampler/oscillator called The Booper, really helped the group perfect their sound collage approach to making music.
The group’s 1987 album Escape From Noise got them a little attention, but what really put Negativland on the map was their 1991 U2 EP, which most famously featured a spoof of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” accompanied by a profanity-laced, anti-U2 rant by Top 40 radio DJ Casey Kasem. The track earned Negativland its first lawsuit, from U2′s label, Island Records. After a four-year legal battle, chronicled in a book called Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, the two parties settled–Island dropped their suit, and Negativland stopped distributing the U2 EP (although they later reissued it as a “bootleg” under the fairly awesome title–quoted from part of Kasem’s anti-U2 rant–These Guys Are From England and Who Gives a Shit).
Thirty years later, Negativland are still at it: They’ve got a new project called It’s All in Your Head FM v2.0 due out later this year, along with a handful of reissues, and band member Don Joyce continues to host a public radio “audio collage” show called Over the Edge on Berkeley’s KPFA. And hey, kids–you can book one of two totally different Negativland shows in your local planetarium, art gallery, or high school auditorium! Take your choice between either a “two-hour-long, action-packed look at monotheism” or “a wordless wall of electronic sound.” Either way, you’re bound to impress all your snooty art friends and vastly increase your chances of scoring with girls whose panties drop at words like “semiotics” and “Noam Chomsky.”
We’ll leave you with a classic Negativland video from their 1989 opus No Other Possibility. The cigarettes are probably a metaphor for something, but we prefer not to dig too deep on this one and just appreciate it for its delightfully Pythonesque silliness.
Links:
- Negativland official site
- Negativland on MySpace
- “The Letter U and the Number2″ (great article from Wired magazine about the Negativland vs. Island Records lawsuits)
Cromagnon
Okay, we really went into the vaults for this one, kids. Cromagnon was a project formed in the late ’60s for the influential ESP-Disk label, which put out some of the wildest, most freeform music of the era, including albums by the Fugs, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and even the godfather of the psychedelic era, Timothy Leary. The official story behind the band is that it was started by a pair of successful pop songwriters named Brian Elliot and Austin Grasmere who wanted to do an experimental album. When they approached ESP-Disk founder Bernard Stollman about the project, he allegedly asked what their theme would be, and when they replied, “Everything is one,” he gave them the go-ahead.
At this point, the story gets a little murky. Supposedly, Elliot and Grasmere decamped to some kind of hippie commune to record with a group of musicians known only as the “Connecticut Tribe” that may or may not have included future members of The Residents and Negativland. Whoever they were, the Tribe helped Elliot and Grasmere record a single album under the Cromagnon name. Originally released in 1969 as Orgasm and later reissued as Cave Rock, it’s an absolute mind-fuck of a record, a dadaist/tribal freakout combining primitive percussion and musique concrète; creepy non-verbal groans, grunts, chants and shrieks; bagpipes; Hendrix-esque blasts of psych-rock guitar; Brian Wilson harmonies; sampled radio broadcasts; and a whole host of other sounds whose origins are impossible to discern. At the time of its release, it must’ve been enough to send even most the tripped-out “Revolution No. 9″ enthusiasts scurrying back to their parents’ Johnny Mathis records.
The mystery of the Connecticut Tribe’s identity, and the complete lack of any further Cromagnon releases, has helped fuel the myths and rumors surrounding the group. Even the identities of Elliot and Grasmere have remained somewhat enigmatic. Who were these alleged bubblegum hitmakers turned hippie/freakout psychonauts? And why have we heard nothing further from them since 1969?
Well, we can’t answer that last question, but thanks to the crack team of researchers here at TWBITW, we can shed some light on the true story behind Cromagnon. Turns out the “Connecticut Tribe” wasn’t a hippie commune at all, but a bunch of dudes from a ’60s pop-rock group called The Boss Blues (plus various friends, guest musicians, and even people who just happened to be passing by the studio when they needed an extra pair of hands to bang on stuff). Elliot was the band’s producer and Grasmere was their lead guitarist; you can see a picture of the band’s full lineup, including the late Grasmere, on this guy’s page (you’ll have to scroll down a bit, but it’s there). In 2002, the three surviving members of The Boss Blues–Sal Salgado, Peter Bennett and Vinnie Howley–gave an interview with Connecticut radio station WXCI where they talked at length about Cromagnon and the recording process for Orgasm (which was in fact not recorded on a hippie commune, but mainly in a makeshift studio in New York City). In 2009, some kind soul transcribed the interview for the ESP-Disk website, so the band’s history is now laid out for all to see. (Sorry, everyone who was really, really sure The Residents were actually behind the whole thing.) The interview is long but well worth reading for anyone who’s at all interested in the band; it also features MP3s of most of the tracks from Orgasm, so you can hear for yourself just how off-the-deep-end these guys got.
Sadly, both Grasmere and Elliot–the latter of whom, the other guys admit, was the principal architect of the Cromagnon sound–have passed away, so despite the occasional reunion-tour rumors, we’ve probably heard all we’ll ever hear out of this strange little footnote from the psychedelic era.
As far as we can tell, this video for Cromagnon’s best-known track, “Caledonia,” is not an official one, but it’s pretty awesome nonetheless. Trippiest use of bagpipes ever? We’re gonna say “aye.”
P.S. Special thanks to WTFmusic.org and their deliriously exhaustive catalog of weird music for turning us on to these guys.
Links:
- Cromagnon on ESP-Disk’s official site
- Cromagnon fan group of Facebook
- Cromagnon on Last.fm
- Interview with members of Cromagnon on ESP-Disk site
Laibach
Sorry things have been a little quiet here at TWBITW–it took us longer to sleep off our South by Southwest hangovers than we had anticipated. Also, our ears are still ringing from seeing GWAR. If you’ve never been sonically assaulted by Oderus and co. before in person, seriously–we can’t recommend it highly enough. Just plan on taking a few vacation days after the show–you’ll need them.
Anyway, today’s weird band is another oldie but goodie, and comes to us all the way from the former Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia. Formed in 1980, when Yugoslavia was still under Communist rule, Laibach was a sort of proto-industrial rock band-slash-performance art project that managed to simultaneously celebrate and mock the trappings of totalitarianism in all its forms. They’ve described their own music and iconography as “radically ambiguous” and, judging from the range of responses they’ve gotten, they seem to have succeeded: Detractors and critics (not to mention the censorship-happy Communist regime in Yugoslavia, which frequently banned the group’s performances) have accused them of being fascists, Stalinists, Nazi sympathizers and/or radical Slovenian nationalists, while their fan base seems to include everyone from arty types who treat the band’s militaristic costumes and Wagnerian martial-industrial music as sly satire of fascist/skinhead culture to…well, actual skinheads.
Is all of this starting to sound a little too much like a post-modernist graduate thesis project? Well, not to worry, because here’s the most brilliant thing about Laibach: Much of their music is actually highly accessible, and frequently takes the form of Teutonic/industrial-style covers of familiar pop music. Laibach have tackled everything from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” to the Beatles’ “Let It Be” to Europe’s “Final Countdown.” They even did “Jesus Christ Superstar” and an album of national anthems called Volk. If you thought Jimi Hendrix did weird things to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” wait till you hear Laibach’s version of it.
As great as Laibach’s covers can be, their most memorable musical moments tend to come on their original compositions, when the jackboots hit the dance floor and all “Heil!” breaks loose. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.) Although the “Fear the Kittens” video for this song (courtesy of Rathergood.com) is pretty awesome, it still can’t top the original.
(Bonus factoid: Laibach may be the only industrial band to have a winery named after them. Suck on that, Rammstein!)
Links:
- Laibach official site
- Laibach on MySpace
- Laibach merch (also where you can buy a passport for NSK, their “state”)
- Official NSK website
Little Women
(photo credit: Alexander Perrelli)
For some bands, being weird has nothing to do with high-concept gimmicks or wacky outfits. They just show up, plug in their instruments, and the weirdness smacks you in the face with the force of a two-by-four. Such a band is Brooklyn’s Little Women.
According to Little Women’s press release, this quartet “creates music whose aim is transcendence via brutally precise sonic assault and ascendant melodies.” For those of you who don’t speak Music Press Release, that translates to four guys with two saxophones, a guitar and a drum kit wailing away to create a wall of revved-up noise so hard to listen to, you’d be forgiven for assuming they must all be schizophrenic.
To be clear, it’s not that Little Women is the only band in history to make a living by pummeling their audiences with atonal, free-jazz skronk played with the savagery of speed metal and the whiplash tempos of math rock. Ever since Ornette Coleman decided that the best way to play a saxophone was to pretend you were strangling it, plenty of artists have been testing the outer reaches of music with stuff that most people would dismiss as noise. But there’s something about the way Little Women do it that is, in the words of one critic, “terrifying.” This would be very, very bad music to listen to while under the influence of psychedelic substances…especially this part:
(Bonus fun fact: New York is also home to an all-female pop/alt-country quartet called The Little Women Band. Wonder how many of their fans have clicked on the wrong MySpace page and been totally traumatized.)
Links:
Fantomas
Happy friggin New Year! We hope you’re looking forward to our first full year of weird bands as much as we are. We’re gonna next level this shit!
To get 2010 off to a rip-roaring start, we here at TWBITW decided it was time to own up to our big gay man-crush on Mike Patton. Most of you unwashed infidels probably know Patton mainly as the lead vocalist of Faith No More, but really, that was kind of just his pay-the-bills side gig to support the other, really out-there shit he was more into all along. That includes everything from his other best-known gig, a metal/jazz/Zappa/prog/ska/funk/spazz/whatthefuckisthisshit band called Mr. Bungle, to a collaboration with avant-jazz skronk king John Zorn called Hemophiliac, to a more recent “pop” (read: funky electro-rap-metal with semi-decipherable lyrics) project called Peeping Tom whose biggest claim to fame was probably getting Norah Jones to sing “motherfucker.”
Any one of those projects is probably worthy of TWBITW status, but the one that really does it for us is an experimental metal band called Fantomas. Started in the late ’90s, the band features Patton, Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne and Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn–and yes, the noise they make is every bit as weird as the sum of its parts. We saw them at Coachella a few years back and they seriously emptied out an entire tent in about 15 minutes. Even the hardcore Patton fans couldn’t hang with some of the shit these guys do.
So here’s a little Fantomas clip to usher in the New Year. Good reminder of our top resolution of 2010: always wear ear plugs to the show. (Give it until about the one minute mark…trust us, it’s totally worth it. Well, we think it is.)
[TWBITW fun fact: Patton is so famous for his demented vocals that he was hired to do the voices of the post-apocalyptic monsters in the movie "I Am Legend." We're guessing the sound effects guys tweaked his vocals a little in the final cut, but probably not by much.]
[TWBITW bonus video: Another of Patton's zillion projects, Moonchild, is another collaboration with John Zorn that mainly features Patton's vocal acrobatics. We found this video of a Moonchild live gig that was too awesome not to share for several reasons: 1.) the fantastic title, courtesy of the Patton hater who posted it; 2.) the fact that yes, Patton is reading his part from a score (Zorn composed the whole piece) and 3.) seriously, can any other human make all those sounds? Love him or hate him, the dude is a virtuoso.]
Links:
- Fantomas official site on Ipecac Recordings (Patton’s label)
- Fantomas on MySpace
- Mike Patton on MySpace
Scanner
Recording artists have been using found sounds and ambient noise in their works for decades, but few have done it in ways more innovative or controversial than Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner. Beginning in the early ’90s, Rimbaud, who is based in London, has used cellphone scanners, police radios and other devices to record electronically transmitted conversations and turn them into musical compositions. His work tests not only people’s notions about what constitutes music, but also people’s notions of privacy. It’s a little disconcerting to think that your cellphone chat with your girlfriend might wind up as raw material for an avant-garde electronic composer.
These days, Rimbaud’s become known as a “conceptual artist” who composes film scores, sound installations and various more high-brow projects in the art world. He also records with a experimental band called Githead. But he’s still trolling the ether with his cellphone scanner, too. On his latest Scanner album, “Rockets, Unto the Edges of Edges” (released earlier this year), he even sings a little–but the snippets of ghostly, disembodied, electronically transmitted voices are still in there. If every word in the dictionary had its own soundtrack, Scanner’s music is what you’d hear when you looked up “alienation.”
Here’s a video for a track from “Rockets.” Creepy stuff, huh?
Links:
Magma
How is it possible that we have yet to write about a prog-rock band on TWBITW? Clearly, we’ve been slacking! Let’s fix that right now.
Like any weird band worth their salt, France’s Magma don’t really fit neatly into any one genre; they just get called prog-rock because they share a lot of prog bands’ fondness for long, meandering instrumental passages, weird time signatures and sci-fi imagery. But musically, they probably owe more to Sun Ra and Carl Orff and David Axelrod than they do to, say, King Crimson. Led by drummer, singer and all-around freakazoid Christian Vander, the band has been around in one form or another, off and on, since 1970, and continues to tour and release new material to this day, although most of their more recent output has been in the form of live albums and DVDs.
What really pushes the band into full-blown Weirdland, however, is the incredibly elaborate mythology Vander has built up around the group. All of Magma’s music tells various stories of the planet Kobaïa, which is settled by refugees from Earth in some distant future. And most of it is sung in a made-up language called Kobaïan, which fans of Magma have actually learned to decipher and speak to one another the way Trekkies speak Klingon. Magma’s music and Vander’s Kobaïan language have even inspired their own sub-genre of music, called “Zeuhl,” which is Kobaïan for “celestial.” Next time you hear a bunch of French dudes chanting nonsense lyrics over music that sounds sort of like Pat Metheny on acid, you’re probably listening to a Zeuhl band.
Here’s some great video of Magma performing in their heyday back in 1977, when this stuff probably didn’t sound quite so weird. It was the decade of Yes and Jethro Tull, after all. That’s Vander behind the drum kit–all kidding aside, you can see why a lot of other drummers worship the guy. Oh, and don’t skip the user comments, in which the Magma faithful offer up their translations of the lyrics. Apparently, it’s all secretly religious music.
Links:
- Magma on MySpace
- Seventh Records (Christian Vander’s record label)
- Christian Vander Jazz (Vander’s jazz quartet official site)
- Kobaian-English dictionary (fan site)
Boredoms
For our next TWBITW candidate, we have to go all the way to Japan, which has certainly produced its fair share of weird music over the years: Merzbow, Boris, Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Honestly, though, we even think Puffi AmiYumi is kinda weird…but we’re probably just racist.) But the Boredoms operate on a whole ‘nother plane of weird that even most Japanese bands never quite get to.
Started in the mid-’80s as a punk/no-wave band, the Boredoms featured a frontman named Yamantaka Eye, whose previous band, an industrial group called Hanatarash, had broken up mainly because they were banned from playing nearly every music venue in Japan (Hanatarash’s live shows featured highly dangerous use of power tools and, on at least one occasion, a backhoe). Although their music was considered highly abrasive even in noise-rock and no wave circles, they got the attention of other artists like John Zorn and Sonic Youth and, by the late ’80s, had developed a sizable U.S. following.
In the ’90s, the Boredoms began incorporating more electronic elements into their sound and experimenting with Krautrock, drone and, increasingly, tribal percussion. After an four-year hiatus, the band resurfaced in 2003 under the new name V∞redoms and with a new lineup featuring three drummers. The band’s fascination with percussion culminated in a series of recent concerts called 77 Boadrum and 88 Boadrum. 77 Boadrum took place on July 7, 2007 in New York and featured 77 drummers. 88 Boadrum took place simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles on August 8, 2008 and featured 88 drummer performing an 88-minute composition. (They also did an NYC concert on 9/9/09, but it featured only nine drummers.)
So what does the world’s most drum obsessed Japanese noise-rock band sound like? Here’s a taste from 77 Boadrum.
Drum-tastic, no?
Links:
