Musically, the duo’s rendition of “Sandwitches” — a track from Tyler’s new solo album, Goblin – was about as climactic as two teenagers shouting at constant high volume over a flabby-sounding synth sample could be. The verses were almost entirely buried in speaker blare, the refrain nothing more than a shout-out to themselves (Wolf! Gang! Wolf! Gang!). It was the way the ski-masked rappers moved that saved the spot from the annals of competent but dull major network breakthroughs. Tyler and Hodgy seemed to be summoning the collective might of every last mitochondrion in their bodies to show the world that they were a force that was impossible to contain. How could we not be exhilarated, even touched, by the site of Tyler to bounding in acrobatic circles around Hodgy, yelling straight into the seated Fallon’s face, clearing the entire stage in a single, daredevil leap, and storming off to his dressing room, as though he’d suddenly decided he was through with the audience? Fallon, returning to the front of the stage, gestured toward the ambient smoke like it was a cloud of dust.

Tyler, de facto leader of OFWGKTA, or Odd Future, is as unstoppable as that kid in your 7th grade English class who used to crack fart jokes every two minutes while landing nothing but As — and leaving the entire school, teachers included, at a loss for a comeback. The video for his new single “Yonkers” — directed by Tyler himself, and posted to the gang’s Tumblr a few days after the Fallon appearance — opens with a shot of Tyler in profile, posing like The Thinker in his signature, flat-billed baseball cap (courtesy Supreme, a streetwear brand that appears in pretty much every OFWGKTA production). “I’m a fucking walking paradox, no I’m not,” he opens, lurching his head to face the viewer as a menacing bass note establishes the key of the song.

Tyler produces a large water bug with his left hand; he bites the insect in half, vomits for about ten seconds, and returns to his stool without losing his flow. His arms move with the focused intensity of a kabuki actor as the black-and-white photography wavers in and out of focus, timed to the beat. “Yonkers” is full of the kind of minute attention to detail that the 20-year-old film school drop-out, had he stuck it out for the unit on Godard, would have probably picked up a word for: “authorial.” But it’s also so puerile, so gratuitously disgusting, that you can’t help feeling like a rubbernecker from the moment you click play — especially at the end, when Tyler ties noose around his neck, jumps off the stool, and shows us 25-second close-up of his legs, which toss with the final throes of a vitality that previously seemed incorruptible. Tyler’s is an art of cartoonish extremes — disturbing ones, childish ones, but necessarily engrossing ones.

“While it is impossible to excuse their lazy violence and homophobia, it’s also hard to ignore that they sound more alive than most socially acceptable rappers,” wrote a puzzled Sasha Frere-Jones in the November 22nd edition of The New Yorker, following OFWGKTA’s sold-out New York debut at Webster Hall, with Das Rascist. OFWGKTA don’t just rap about taking drugs, raping women, and murdering people they don’t like; they rap about these things as if these were activities they would like to partake in, and their rhymes are far too graphic to be printed in the majority of the establishment press reviews they receive. On “Sandwitches,” Hodgy announces his intention to “push this pregnant woman into a hydrant stuck in the ground/ I step through the stomach, replace the baby with some fucking pounds.” It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting female singing along to lyrics like this — or ethical human being, for that matter — but it happens. In “Why You Should Listen to Odd Future, Even Though It’s Hard,” a 2,000-word article on NPR’s music blog, The Record, Frannie Kelly describes Tyler as “vividly charismatic,” adding that “it seems clear that people have not been able to stop him from saying things they don’t want to hear for quite some time.”

She’s right. Most of Odd Future’s fans probably don’t want to hear about the cold-blooded murder of an unoffending woman with a baby on the way. It’s not just the repulsion of the image; it’s because the thought of even wanting to hear about such a thing, let alone perpetrate such an act in real life, makes us feel a bit uncomfortable with ourselves. Still, the general consensus among writers at our country’s most influential press outlets — NPR and The New Yorker, The LA Times and New York Times, Pitchfork, Fader, The Village Voice, and just about everybody else — seems to be that OFWGKTA are “undeniable.” Between their unstoppable wit, their dynamite energy, and their delightfully warped, homegrown beats, they exercise a kind of magnetic pull over our senses. We love Odd Future without being able to say exactly why, and the reality is that we’re a little afraid to.

“As a social force, charm should not be underestimated,” writes clinical psychologist Martha Stout in her 2005 study of anti-social personality disorder, The Sociopath Next Door.  Among the most common traits of sociopathy, which she describes as the pathological condition of “not having a conscience,” Stout points to irresponsibility and impulsivity, aggression and lawlessness, a reckless disregard for the psychic and emotional well-being of others and the inability to experience guilt — or love — of any kind. More disturbingly, she describes “a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the normal people around him. He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or somehow more ‘complex,’ or sexier, or more entertaining, than everybody else.” The paradox of sociopathy is that people without a conscience — be they outwardly rule-abiding bank tellers, the people we elect as our leaders, or the Charles Mansons of this world — are also people who captivate. They just seem so much more uninhibited, or fearless, or “alive” than the rest of us.

The leap between OFWGKTA and the psychology of sociopathy would seem like a dangerous one to make if Tyler hadn’t already taken it himself — not only off a 25-foot scaffold into a crowd of screaming adolescents at Austin’s SXSW festival last month, but in person, with journalists, during serious  discussions of his writing process. “It’s the first shit that comes to our heads,” Tyler, The Creator told Pitchfork’s Sean Fennessey, around the time of the Webster Hall show. “I’m interested in serial killers’ minds and shit, so I rap about it at the moment.” “Next week,” he added, “I can be rapping about oatmeal if that’s what I’m into.” He wasn’t saying that he was a serial killer himself, or a even would-be one; he seemed to be telling us that he’s just as fascinated with them as we seem to be with him, when he starts acting like one.

It’s like Cannibal Ox, Insane Clown Posse, and early Eminem all over again. As long as we know that Tyler does not himself perpetrate the violent acts he describes, we can feel comfortable with this art, as listeners — even embrace the possibility that there something kind of invigorating about exploring the sinister recesses of an unchecked Id. “The French call it nostalgie de la boue, or “yearning for the mud,” writes Cord Jefferson in a March 2011 essay for The Root, where he equates the critical community’s endorsement of OFWGKTA with a fetishization of black male rage. “It’s a great phrase,” he writes, “for describing what these white writers mean when they say they like the way Odd Future’s music makes them ‘feel weird and awful.’”

The Village Voice’s Zach Baron, who used these exact words in a November critique of the media blitz surrounding the group, admits to a possible fantasy identification with the sociopathic speaker: “With art like this you never identify with the victim, the proverbial ‘you’; you identify with the person speaking, and that person is a bad motherfucker, and thus so is the listener. Through this type of identification, art allows us to explore the weird frisson between reality and fantasy, the gulf between who we are and who we’d like to be.” It’s not that OFWGKTA fans would like to become the fictitious villains they encounter on tracks like “Yonkers” and “Sandwitches”; it’s that it can be liberating, even empowering, to imagine living without the internal censor that prevents us from always doing “the first shit that comes into our heads.” No wonder there are American businessmen and executives who will listen Jay-Z rap about shootings and crack deals as they ready themselves for important meetings and interviews, explains Baron, speaking of a passage in the rapper’s poetic memoir, Decoded. In business — and in show business, too –  success is often a question of how willing we are to ignore the repercussions that our actions will have on other people. And there is certainly something alluring — even culturally desirable, in capitalist society — about learning to think like a winner.

But there is a lot more to OFWGKTA than the tourettic stage demeanor and the psychic projections of rapists and murderers. On “Bastard,” the title track of his debut LP from last year, Tyler provides something resembling a mission statement for his rag-tag crew of friends and collaborators, which includes, in addition to Hodgy, rappers Earl Sweatshirt, Domo Genesis, and Mike G; singer Frank Ocean; producers Syd Tha Kid, Left Brain, and The Super 3; and Jasper the Dolphin and Taco Bennett, who don’t seem to do much of anything. “I roll with skaters and musicians with an intuition,” he proclaims.  “I created O. F. ‘cause I feel we’re more talented/ Than 40-year-old rappers ‘talking ‘bout Gucci.” Until it was revealed that Tyler would be releasing Goblin on the British record label XL, a major indie — and that both of their managers, even as far back as the November show, happen to be affiliated with Interscope  — Odd Future seemed the perfect incarnation of an internet-fueled, Do-It-Yourself ethos that saw some of its earliest success stories in bedroom MC/producers like Berkeley’s Lil B, Atlanta’s Soulja Boy, and Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T.

In many ways, they still do. “Greatness, to me, is when I land that fucking fakey cab hill on my skateboard or some shit,” Tyler told The Drone in a recent video interview, at SXSW. “Greatness is the fucking song I recorded last week. [...] And that’s all that matters — what the fuck I think, in my head. [...] Greatness, to me, is finally getting my video up on MTV. [...] Some people might think that’s selling out or whatever. But I don’t give a fuck.”  At Webster Hall, after a good deal of crowd-surfing, press-bashing, and chant-instigating (“KILL PEOPLE! BURN SHIT! FUCK SCHOOL!”), Tyler stood up at the front of the stage and proclaimed to a room of screaming fans, journalists, label people, and publicists, “You can be anything you want to.”

Not counting Goblin, the members of OFWKTA have released ten studio albums, two official mixtapes, and countless singles and EPs since the group’s inception in 2007 — all for free, on their Tumblr, which is constantly updated with YouTube videos, photos, concert posters, and Internet memes. Every single member of the gang keeps a personal Twitter account, updated by the minute with OFWGKTA shout-outs, cultural commentary, expletive-filled @replies, and pretty much anything its owner is doing, seeing, feeling, or eating. Odd Future record the majority of their material at the Wolf Lair, a guest house in Los Angeles’ Washington-Crenshaw district owned by the parents of Sydney Bennett — Odd Future’s only female member, and also their chief producer and engineer. Their sound, which recalls indie micro-genres like chill wave or witch house more than anything coming out of commercial hip-hop today, is full of scatty vocal samples, squelching beats, sensual lurches, and synth leads that degrade like they’re being played back over an old VHS tape. For the most part, Bastard sets crisp, in-your-ear vocals over a kind of woozy, episodic lounge score. And like the most conscientious adherents of the home recording aesthetic, OFWGKTA seem to adopt low fidelity as a textural tool — not an artistic cop-out.

Keeping up with the gang’s unending stream of media feels like falling into a mythic micro-universe, with its own recurring images and themes. Odd Future like skateboards, blunts, Supreme, group camaraderie, and the word “swag” (which means, roughly, “cool”)  but they despise  “jerkin’” (the latest hip-hop dance to come out of LA), middle America, religion, and the rap blogs Nah Right and 2dopeboyz. We can count on Tyler to be wearing his signature hat, shorts, Vans, and white knee socks whenever he enters a room where camera people will be lurking. His natural feel for iconography extends from the bright, almost Bustor Keaton-like floodlights of his eyes (widened at select moments, for effect) to his habit of capitalizing the first letter of every word he posts to his Twitter. One of Odd Future’s favorite mantras is “FUCK STEVE HARVEY”; another is “FREE EARL,” a plea for the release, or return, of Earl Sweatshirt, who has been missing — or in jail, or in boarding school, or bootcamp — since OFWGKTA started burning their way through the music blogosphere. Recently, some Internet-based “investigative reporting” by Complex Magazine’s Ernest Baker resulted in the revelation that Earl had been found, at a “therapeutic center” in Samoa called the Coral Reef Academy. On his Twitter, Hodgy Beats helped fuel this missing-family-member conceit, which adds dramatic suspense to the unfolding play of Odd Future’s rise to fame: “If you faggots find Earl or not, it doesn’t change the fact that he is not with us.”

“Twenty or thirty people who I really respect adore Odd Future and so do I,” wrote a troubled Zach Baron in his November essay. “How do we square how evil their stuff can be with the mainstream exposure we are all even now organizing to provide them?” Following a flurry of  rhapsodic responses to the Webster Hall Show, his was one of the first essays to acknowledge that writing about Odd Future is complicated business. Baron had published his own glowing review of Odd Future a few days before, and was now lamenting a kind of willful split-consciousness on the part of the critic who endorses those artists whose lyrics disturb. In other words, he and his contemporaries had been separating the aspects of  Odd Future that were unimpeachable to them, as critics — the beats, the vitality, the iconography, the verbal prowess — from the aspects of Odd Future that they couldn’t really get behind, as people. “If you asked me why I liked Odd Future,” Baron explains, “I’d tell you it was for Tyler the Creator, whose charisma is undeniable, and for the way the group seems like a genuinely chaotic, energetic new movement–half Bad Brains, half Wu-Tang Clan. I would not tell you I enjoy listening to Tyler rap about raping a woman in an old folks’ home, as he does on “Splatter,” because I don’t.”

Music critic Jon Caramanica, in a 2005 review of Cam’ron’s Purple Haze, for the Voice, famously excused the New York rapper’s misogynistic subject matter with the statement that “the avant-garde need not be moral.” It was, historically speaking, an argument that was hard to refute; the Sex Pistols’ 1976 single, “Anarchy in the UK,” would have lost a good deal of what made it feel so new, and so shocking, and so deliriously unhinged at the time if John Lydon hadn’t blasted us with the trilled proclamation, “I am an antichrist! / I am an anarchist!” in the first fifteen seconds. Caramanica’s statement, Baron admits, was “pretty influential in sorting out how [he] and [his] friends process music with reprehensible content”; but it didn’t really explain the difference between morally offensive lyrics that actually say something about our world, or what we do not want our world to be, and morally offensive lyrics that are about as thought-provoking as a game of Grand Theft Auto (played for fun, as it was designed to be played). Art need not be moral to be good, it’s true, but that should never be justification for side-stepping the question of Odd Future’s lyrics completely.

Curiously, nowhere is this tendency to “dissociate” Odd Future from their words more apparent than in discussions of the lyrics themselves. One way of bypassing the insensible violence of tracks like “Sandwiches” and “Splatter,” it would seem, is by choosing to focus on their formal attributes. In the NPR piece, Frannie Kelly spends about five paragraphs quoting The Wire writer Andrew Nosnitsk on the “tightness” of their rap writing, the “elasticity” of their word play, the “thematic unity” of their stories, and the ways they use violent or bizarre imagery to “[render] ideas and feelings more complex than the group is given credit for.” As for the fact that these complex “ideas” and “feelings” resemble those of a text-book sociopath, Kelly adopts a posture of indifference: “‘How evil their stuff can be,’ is far and away, to me, the least interesting aspect of Odd Future. I am fascinated by their aggression, their flamboyant freedom and the raw potential in their ideas, words and sounds.”

Another popular way of side-stepping the morality/amorality question seems to be privileging the themes in OFWGKTA’s music that are clean enough to print. Critics who insist on separating Tyler, The Person from Tyler, The Persona (as though the fact that the real-life Tyler would probably never kill a man somehow makes his rhymes more wholesome, or “just a joke”) are usually the first to point to one of the more unfortunate details in his biography in a discussion of his work. Tyler — like Hodgy and the majority of Odd Future’s members — grew up without a father. The “bastard” theme surfaces time and time again in the OFWGKTA catalogue (most notably, on Bastard), and lends narrative causality to the collective’s identity as a family of lost boys, or pack of wolf cubs. As a counterpoint to their projected sociopathy, it’s probably what most people are talking about when they say that the Odd Future characters are “complex.”

In his review of the November show, we can almost feel Sasha-Frere Jones vaulting straight over the misogyny issue in order to land safely in the OFWGKTA story’s most humanizing element. “The disorientation [of the production],” he writes, “extends to the lyrics — two popular topics are taking drugs and raping women. But on the title track of the album “Bastard” the rapper known as Tyler, The Creator, just eighteen, goes into an emotional purge, hurling vitriol at his absent father. ‘I hope the majors heard this. Fuck a deal — I just want my father’s email, just so I could tell him how much I fucking hate him in detail.’” Jon Caramanica’s first profile of the group, in the November 12th edition of The New York Times, doesn’t explicitly mention these “popular topics” at all — though it does pay lip service to the fatherless teenager theme, and enumerate the only two items on OFWGKTA’s rider: eggrolls and milk.

Listening to Bastard, it’s almost like Tyler, The Persona is toying with our need to humanize him, to believe in the fatherless teenager in him more than the killer and womanizer.  The title track, rapped over minor-key piano chords, seats the rapper on a school psychologist’s couch, telling his shrink about how his “mother raised [him as] a single parent,” how he “used to be bullied for honors classes,” how he “cut[s] his wrists and play[s] piano ‘cause [he’s] so depressed.” Following this autobiographical outpouring, the psychologist (Tyler, with his voice pitched down) asks our MC to describe what he would say to his father now. The album jumps to the second track, slides the tonic key a step-or-two downward, and sees Tyler launching into a blustering tirade about skating, nazis, and the indecent things he does to white women (His opener: “I’d tell [my father] to eat a dick quicker than Mexicans sprint over borders…”). The effect, once again, is one of falling vertiginously downward — this time, deeper into Tyler’s own psyche, which proves to be much darker and more disturbing than the sensitive, troubled-but-“artistic” teenager of “Bastard.” (Though we will encounter him again, on “Pigs Fly,” in what is probably the album’s most painful psychological insight: “My self esteem is like me, tall and full of flaws.”)

Tyler, The Character, is gaslighting us; he’s telling us that he’s a drug dealer, a serial killer, a rapist, then asking us to feel sorry for him in the next breath. And we will, if we have a heart; we’ll forgive Tyler, The Persona, because growing up without a dad must have surely done a number on him. Because his aggression is a product of his environment — not a product of who he is — and because good people always forgive. We’ll forgive Tyler, The Character, until he does it again, and again, and we finally begin to lose faith in our own judgment (have we not just been chanting “Kill People!” for the past thirty seconds?). “The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness,” writes Martha Stout in The Sociopath Next Door. “It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”

Tyler, The Creator is a master of this psychological back-and-forth; and if he wasn’t completely aware of what he’s doing, he probably wouldn’t do it so well. “People are [like], ‘All he talks about is rape,’” he complained to The Drone. “It’s fucking art! [...] I’m not just talking about raping a bitch; there’s a storyline. I’m writing this song from the mind of some fucking serial killer from 30 years ago who was a white male. [...] That’s what irks me. When people make such a big deal over shit like that, when there’s a fucking war going on across the country that they don’t want to say shit about, but when I make a silly-ass fucking song about socking some girl in her uterus, it’s such a big deal.”

Maybe Tyler, The Creator and the Odd Future fam are onto something here. Maybe, when they sing about their hatred for middle America, and how we should all “buy guns, and kill those kids with dads and mom, / With nice lawns, 401k’s, and nice-ass lawns” (“Sandwiches”), they are being punk rock in the best, most political sense: critically disobedient, not just recklessly disobedient. In the NPR piece, Frannie Kelly suggests that Tyler, The Person “is preoccupied by his frustration — enough that he’s not really painting a clear picture of what’s going on in his head; enough that he can’t quite figure out the best way to point out hypocrisy and lazy thinking. So he says a lot bad words and paints a lot of hideous pictures.” Perhaps, like Camus, in The Stranger, Tyler is using the vantage point of sociopathy to test the strength of our own ethical and political convictions — to make us distinguish between the normative beliefs and behaviors that are actually important to us, and those that are solely a question of conforming (or of failing to think).

Still, that doesn’t really solve the problem of the murderer and the hydrant and the woman and the baby. OFWGKTA may be trying to shake us out of the psychic torpor that prevents us from moving forward, as a people, but there will never be anything progressive, or eye-opening, or edifying about glorifying murder and rape. And when we start making excuses for the stories Odd Future tell us, when we praise the dexterity of their word play, when we comb their lyrics for deeper, political intent, we are still acting, in some way, against our better judgement. Odd Future’s greatest artistic achievement, thus far, is to have ensnared us in a situation in which we can only really like Odd Future in spite of ourselves. If we worry that our fascination with Odd Future stems in part from a noxious racial stereotype, as Cord Jefferson has argued, then we are probably right. (And Odd Future, I think, play into this). If we get the feeling that we are obliged to dissociate, or side-step, or lie to ourselves in order to chant along, then we’re getting a little closer to understanding their art. No wonder, months before OFWGKTA blew up, Tyler felt confident enough in his Creation to stand in front of a crowd of industry heads and say, seemingly to his own detriment, “Fuck every label and magazine in here.” He could subject us to any manner of psychological abuse, or manipulation, and we would still come back for more.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

This piece was originally published on The Girl Can’t Help It, which is a Tumblr where I post my (generally 3rd Wave and Sex Positive) feminist writings. I have recently been troubled by the underlying misogyny that I’ve noticed in recent criticisms of the band Puro Instinct, so I decided to discuss it here…

So after several months away, I’ve decided to get back into the action with this here weblog. I was partially inspired by my girl Molly Lambert over at This Recording, and partially inspired by this strange, wonderful, but often troubling word that we live in.

Puro Instinct, who are one of my favorite bands currently doing it, recently put out their debut LP, Headbangers in Ecstasy. Although we’re just under 2 months into the year, I can already say that this one will be high on my list. From top to bottom it is a moody sonic experience that is equal parts cotton candy pink and melancholy gray. It moves effortlessly from dream pop, to an intriguingly intangible fuzz of vintage, FM radio near hits. In short, it was an output that was beyond impressive from a band that had already been wowing me.

When Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen reviewed the record, he had a different take on it.

Now I’m not saying its a sin to dislike something that I love. I can certainly see an angle from which someone might not be feeling this record, and on top of that we’d collectively die of boredom if we all vibed on the same stash. My issue with Cohen’s near slam of the record was his use of off base references, and (more topically to this web space) his thinly veiled use of gender in the overall critique of the record, and the band.

In case you didn’t know, the two main members of Puro Instinct are Piper and Skylar Kaplan who, as many male music writers have pointed out, are young (blond) sisters. Cohen opens his review by pointing out this oft repeated bit of biographical information. As he continues, his review spends just as much time editorializing about Los Angeles culture as it does on the actual sound of the actual record.  He wraps it all up by describing the record as a “sonic embodiment” of the album’s cover, i.e “pretty, vacant.”

This is the album cover

Let’s talk about this cover for a second, shall we?

I have to say that my initial reaction to this image was not entirely positive. I mean, I’m far from a prude, but my gut reaction was that this was not a smart move. My logic was that with the press already so focused on their gender and attractiveness, why not go for something a little bit less sexy? As third (or even ninth) wave as I usually am, I wasn’t feeling the lying down in lingerie motif. I guess it struck me as being a bit passive.

However, as time passed, and I started to peel away the layers of social conditioning and general lameness, I realized that there might be more to the “picture”. I guess my image of sexy, strong and both feminine and feminist looked more like the cover of the album Cut by The Slits.

In that case there was a more obvious attempt to challenge the male gaze. By comparison the Headbangers cover is much more traditionally sexy. However, the one thing that both covers have in common is that the female musicians in question had a great deal of control over the image. They came up with concepts on their own, and weren’t at the hands of some Kim Fowley-esque overlord. Although the covers have considerably different effects, the process behind them aren’t so dissimilar. At first glance the comparison comes down to powerless (Puro) vs. powerful (Slits). While standing up, covered in mud might seem more powerful than laying on your back in lingerie, how much water does this actually hold?

Obviously, I consider myself a feminist, and a central part of my ideology is that women should be allowed to have choices, and to express themselves in a number of ways without risking their right to be seen as human. If I want to wear a low cut dress every once in awhile, because I have positive feelings about my body and don’t want to hide it, I should be able to do that without risking intellectual credibility. If anyone, male or female, can’t treat me like a human because of this, that’s their own patriarchal conundrum to sort out. If a woman wants to dress in a way that de-emphasizes her natural shape, she should be allowed to do that, but that should be a choice, rather than a requirement. No matter how a woman dresses, it shouldn’t be assumed that she is doing it for male validation.

As far as sex goes, many of us are more often on our backs in something skimpy than we are upright and covered in mud like warrior women. If you are more often than not an upright warrior woman, then I salute you! However, if you are on your back this does not mean the complete sacrifice of power or agency. This is especially true if you’ve built up your thigh muscles. I kid. But in all seriousness, there are a multitude of ways to be sexy and powerful, and things aren’t always what they seem at first glance.

I think one of the main problems with Mr. Cohen’s review of Headbangers is that so much of it seems to be a knee jerk reaction to the cover. While I think it is important to think about what could be read in the image you put out there, I find it highly unlikely that an album by a male artist would ever be treated so dismissively. After all, there is still no effective way to slut shame a man, and however we personally choose to present ourselves we shouldn’t ask the ladies of Puro Instinct to conform to a Puritanical double standard.

Words: Samantha Cornwell

Expo 70

In my previous column, I discussed the challenges of discussing “the year in music” when I spent a good part of that time listening to a narrow strain of drone and experimental music. This time I’ll discuss two groups so prolific and talented that it wouldn’t be hard to spend an entire year focused on them alone.

Two groups in particular defined my experience this year, through their primary outlets and various side and solo projects. The first of these is Kansas City’s Expo 70. Expo 70 is the nom d’artiste of one Justin Wright, who also designs the vast majority of the artwork for Expo 70’s releases. Since the 2005 emergence of the Surfaces CD-R on Kill Shaman, Wright has issued more than thirty different releases under the Expo 70 name, ranging from limited-run tapes and mini-CD-Rs to thick slabs of vinyl with drone epics etched onto their surfaces. Early work was confined to Wright, but lately he has been joined by Matt Hill on bass and electronics.

The dominant sound of Expo 70 is a spacey, atmospheric drone, a formula revisited with each release. Sometimes flirting with pure noise, but never committing and impossibly patient, Wright’s music earnestly embodies the spirit of imagined ’70s drone and space rock. Wright riffs on the slow, meditative aesthetic that runs from Tony Conrad, La Monte Young and John Cale’s early minimalist experiments to the slow-burn lurch of doom godfathers Sleep. What separates Wright from other contemporary practitioners is the immediate impression that Wright has absorbed this material and not merely name-checked it. Expo 70’s sound is the product of someone who has taken the time to fully absorb the impenetrable churn of  Table of the Elements‘ landmark New York In the 1960s box set, rather than the uninspired din of yet another disheveled basement-dweller disinterestedly plucking at a detuned guitar while tapping on a delay pedal.

Such value judgments are unavoidable in a music scene full to bursting with every manner of limited vinyl, hand-made tape and labored-over CD-R — all designed to tickle the pleasure centers of scummy record collectors, discogs lurkers, and eBay flippers the world over. “Quality control” isn’t a phrase you hear often in the musical circles around which Expo 70 orbit, so it’s heartening to discover an artist whose output is not only copious, but uniformly excellent. Expo 70’s big statement this year was their Where Does Your Mind Go? 2xLP on Chicago’s Immune Records. Over four long sides, with total album length pushing the seventy-minute mark, Where Does Your Mind Go? is an immersive, rewarding Komische music experience. The presence of Hill’s analog drum machine lends the music a strong internal momentum, differentiating it from Wright’s previous solo releases under the Expo 70 name. Wright’s occasional excursions into unadorned blurt on his solo releases have been erased, replaced by an intoxicating blend of processed guitar and synthesizer. The shocker comes when you open the exquisite gatefold sleeve and see printed in the liner notes, the words “All music improvised with no overdubs.” The apparent compositional sophistication of the music contained within betrays the improvised approache. Hill and Wright are in perfect, psychic lockstep, and this connection makes Where Does Your Mind Go? one of the highlights of the year in any genre.

Hill’s galvanizing effect on Wright’s approach is strong enough to warrant a closer look at the bassist, who has a few limited releases under his given name, but is more popularly known by the pseudonym Umberto. From The Grave on Chicago’s Permanent Records was the first missive from this project, released late in 2009. I stumbled upon that record with no idea of the Expo 70 connection and was instantly taken. Umberto constructs propulsive new wave tunes that are explicitly informed by the ’70s Italian horror/Giallo aesthetic and the band Goblin, who provided the seminal film music for Dario Argento’s incomparable Suspiria and Profondo Rosso. In 2010, Hill released Prophecy of the Black Widow on Los Angeles’ closely watched Not Not Fun, a further refinement of the Umberto aesthetic into irresistible instrumental synth-pop snippets. Once Expo 70 have succeeded in transporting you to deep space with their current duo recordings — or perhaps after Wright has erased your subjective outlook with one of his guitar dronescapes — Umberto will bring you right back to Earth, maybe even right back to the dance floor. That is to say, Expo 70 have enough talent between them to keep your ears occupied indefinitely if you’re so inclined, and take it from me: you ought to get inclined.

Emeralds

Expo 70 output in the last year is no doubt impressive. But their contribution is considerably modest when compared to what the three members of Emeralds unleashed on listeners in 2010. The group proper released their most conspicuous full-length to date on Editions Mego which, along with releasing solo records from Emeralds’ guitarist Mark McGuire and brother-in-synth Oneohtrix Point Never, established the legendary Austrian label as arbiter for the “you-have-arrived” moment among current electronic revivalists. Does It Look Like I’m Here? is the precise coming out party you’d hope for the Cleveland gang, a double LP that is as sprawling and finely tuned as any great pop record, and a relatively pithy summation of the various preoccupations they have explored on the forty-plus records, tapes and CD-Rs that have emerged under the Emeralds banner since 2006.

In addition to Does It Look Like I’m Here?, Emeralds issued a series of 7” singles containing album tracks on the A-side and unreleased tracks from the album sessions on the flip. These limited, hand-numbered snippets of the Emeralds world, hopelessly difficult to find and admittedly pricey for a 45, are emblematic of a larger trend in the way underground groups navigate the download wasteland of your average music consumer. Selling releases directly, whether through their own boutique labels or on tour, has become a critical strategy for disseminating music for many artists. Limited releases, in particular, are a must, and the manufacture of collectibles a legitimate response to a scenario in which a few brief Google searches can yield pretty much the entire Emeralds discography, from the most rarefied and obscure tape to FLAC files of perfect fidelity, providing a digital replica of their more widely available releases.

For my part, I spent a good part of the year tracking down these various Emeralds releases, and also keeping on top of the solo and side project releases from the group’s various members. An equipment theft in Brooklyn last year (which also affected Emeralds compatriot Raglani), kept Steve Hauschildt out of the solo project spotlight and sidelined planned releases on Root Strata, among other labels. A disappointment after the superb Critique of the Beautiful, released on Hauschlidt’s own Gneiss Things in 2009, whet my appetite for more material from the most mercurial of the three Emeralds personalities.

John Elliott

Perhaps band mate John Elliott sought to pick up some of Hauschlidt’s slack with his absurdly busy release schedule in 2010. Including reissues and collaborations, Elliot stamped his name on over twenty different releases this year. One of his most productive monikers was Outer Space, which dropped its beguiling full-length vinyl debut on Arbor, complete with a mastering job and implicit approval from synthesizer revival supremo Keith Fullerton Whitman. Whitman pioneered a similarly cerebral electronic music practice in the mid-aughts, but the uncompromisingly sophisticated and minimal aesthetic displayed by Whitman on classics like Playthroughs and Multiples (Kranky) never caught on with the hipsterati who now pack Bushwick lofts to hear Elliott and his ilk. Elliott’s work as Outer Space deploys the expected arsenal of Arps, Korgs, and Moogs in the service of aggressive soundscapes that sound like a much leaner version of Emeralds. The depth of sound that characterizes Emeralds is absent, but in its place is a noisier and more antic aesthetic. The run-out groove of the Outer Space LP reads, “The more chaotic I am, the more complete I am” — a perfect description of the live Outer Space set I caught this year. Elliott didn’t attack his instrument, he approached it on a tactile, child-like level, spinning the various inputs and toggling switches on and off. In opposition to the image of the detached operator hunched over his imposing equipment executing a few button pushes, Elliot stands face to face with his cabinet, a smile occasionally flashing across his face. In 1996, Richard D. James and Mike Paradinas released Expert Knob Twiddlers, the album’s title a rejoinder to the joyless, clinical IDM that was currently fashionable. They probably didn’t have anything like Outer Space in mind, and although Elliott is undoubtedly an expert knob twiddler, he’s also having a lot of fun.

Mark McGuire

If Elliott is the super-prolific, stylistically schizophrenic, pseudonym-generating spitfire of Emeralds (check out the debut LP from his collaborative “pop” music project Colored Mushroom and the Medicine Rocks on Wagon), then McGuire is his foil. Preferring to release his solo material under his given name, McGuire’s work apart from Emeralds is focused on unabashed beauty and transcendence. His processed guitar work anchors long-form detours into waves of splendid distortion, an auditory experience akin to floating in the open sea, drifting among the swells. McGuire took the feelings of longing and nostalgia that had long permeated his work and put them front and center for his overground debut, Living With Yourself. The album’s artwork is a collage of family photos, and the LP liberally samples audio recordings made by McGuire’s father to create snapshots of his childhood — subsequently layered over thick with some of McGuire’s most commanding guitar work yet. The result is a record that, for some listeners, will eclipse Does It Look Like I’m Here?. McGuire also released a slew of cassettes cataloging recordings he made in Ohio last winter immediately following the sessions that produced Living With Yourself. These releases, with titles like Between Family and Misunderstandings are slightly darker and more brooding, providing further pieces of the puzzle hinted at in the thematic elements of Living.

Like Expo 70 and the other members of Emeralds, McGuire has willed into existence a sonic universe all his own, imbued with a force of personality and a unique, alluring aesthetic. Musicians of such profligacy, ambition, and high-minded dedication are more than deserving of the oft-disputed label Artist.

Next: “Give us this day our Foxy Digitalis Vinyl”

Umberto: “Someone Chasing Someone Through A House”

Mark McGuire: “Brain Storm (For Erin)”

Words: Max Burke
Three more releases from the Emeralds/Expo 70 galaxy for your listening pleasure:

Mark McGuire: Off In The Distance (Cylindrical Habitat Modules)
Vinyl reissue of a 2008 cassette (originally on Chondritic Sound) remastered by James Plotkin. A superb composition that anticipates many of McGuire’s maneuvers over the next two years.

Mist: Glowing Net (Amethyst Sunset)
New EP From John Elliott’s duo with Sam Goldberg, a disarmingly accessible project providing yet another outlet for Elliott’s restless creativity.

Expo 70: Tarot Reading 7″ (Eat Sleep Repeat)
This 7” finds the usually expansive group confined to two sides of a single. The result is an economy of songwriting that touches on all the hallmarks of the Expo 70 sound without lingering too long; a perfect introduction.

The other thing about “Ginger Ale Music” was that it combined everything I heard at the Pizza place into one, uninterrupted musical idea. Unlike hip-hop and R&B, it was a form without authors (none whom I could personally identify, anyway), and was composed of a continuous stream of half-remembered fragments, fading in and out of earshot like competing radio signals on the road. Later on, when I began seeking out my first cassette tapes, I learned to pick out a few tunes that had climbed their way onto this endless soundtrack, which seemed to linger under my breath at all times: Mariah Carey’s “Dream Lover” (1993), Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” (1992), Boys II Men’s “River Runs Dry” (1994). For the most part, however, “Ginger Ale” music was a product of my own imagination — a collage of refrains and melodramatic flourishes that had once originated in something outside of me, but that I had digested into something entirely my own.

In late 2009, an American philosophy student by the name of Tom Krell, working as a research fellow in Cologne, published a mysterious declaration on his personal blogspot, which he maintained under the pseudonym “How To Dress Well”: “I started remembering in 1989”. The post was accompanied by a photo of the black-American vocalist Bobby Brown, who had produced four hit singles in the indicated year, and followed by a free MP3 download of Krell’s first EP, The Eternal Love. Like the 6 EPs that followed quickly thereafter, all distributed in the same way, The Eternal Love was a gauzy little collection of reprocessed R & B and hip-hop memories, built entirely from overdubs of Krell’s own falsetto, a few deftly disguised samples (which can range, apparently, from Debussy to Blackstreet), and occasional buried traces of synthesizer and drum programming. In keeping with the fashion that made 2009 the year of the lo-fi rock band, How To Dress Well’s recordings sounded blown-out and compressed, sharpening, every once in a while, into points of abrasive buzzing.

Elaborating on his 1989 remark in an interview with Pitchfork (which coronated his debut LP, Love Remains, with its much-coveted “Best New Music” award), Krell remarks that “the first time I remember hearing the concept of a “year” was when I was five in 1989 [...] My music is inspired by that time, driving around in my parents’ car listening to the radio. Another thing is I was a little bit of a late bloomer so my voice didn’t change until later; I kept singing along with girl R&B songs for longer than most dudes.” 2009 indie earmark number 2: Tom Krell is completely memory-obsessed. Like the sound-collages of Ducktails and The Skaters, his music mimics the glutted cultural environment of the Internet, where old Bobby Brown videos are always just a YouTube link away; at the same time, it belabors the irretrievability of the past, drowning its archival sources in ambiguity and fuzz.

His much blogged-about single “Ready For The World,” Krell told the Village Voice this past February, “came from this idea where we were talking about what it would be like to be a little boy, and to have this downstairs neighbor who’d just gotten broken up with by his boyfriend. [...] You can hear him crying though the floor, and you can hear R&B music coming through the floor.” In interviews, which he has been getting a lot of since becoming something of an instant cult phenomenon in the indie blogosphere this year, Krell often refers to HTDW as a “we”. It’s as though he thought of the project as an imaginary conversation between his favorite late ‘80s/early ‘90s slow jam purveyors (Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat, Jodeci, et al.); more likely, it is a non-imaginary dialogue with himself — a white, heterosexual, graduate student who is partly the sum of his early cultural experiences — which included black popular music, in addition to “white” forms like rock. Still, Krell’s easy association of blackness with gayness — not only in the quote above, but in the sound of the music itself– gives us pause. Krell is neither black nor gay; is he fetishizing, even fondly parodying, what he is not, or simply telling us something about what he is?

At their most hyperbolic, HTDW’s heavenly dreamscapes sound as though they have been flooded by a host of flying eunuchs. Though we can hear occasional hints of deep-hitting bass and hip-hop rhythmics, Krell’s nostalgia-tinged personalization of his childhood Top 40 bears a strong resemblance to the “Ginger Ale Music” of my youth; it borrows the vocal stylings and the high-blown sentimentality, and abstracts what remains into something as sexless and raceless and Michael Jackson’s crafted persona (especially, coincidentally, during the “We Are The World” campaign that followed his near-fatal Pepsi endorsement). We are touched by his emotional candor, yet we never have the foggiest idea what he’s singing about.

I am reminded of Sasha Frere-Jones’ notorious “A Paler Shade of White” essay, in the October 22, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, where he laments indie rock’s increasing detachment from “black” idioms like soul and blues, which had laid the foundations of rock n roll in the first place. As the doctrine of political correctness took seed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and black entertainers like Jackson and Dr. Dre began enjoying a degree of commercial success that rivaled that of their white contemporaries, white performers — especially those in the business of indie rock — began drifting away from the beat-driven lower-registers of African-American music, now considered the cultural property of black America. Steve Malkmus’ pretentiously nonsensical lyrics in the ‘90s, and the increasing popularity of vocal effects like reverb and delay in the ‘00s, were symptoms of a discomfort with the up-close-and-personal vocal stylings that had become synonymous with hip-hop R&B. As Frere-Jones recalls from his own experiences playing in a funk and dub-inflected rock group (all white), “Playing black music never felt odd, but singing it — a more intimate gesture–seemed insulting.”

How To Dress Well’s surprising rise to indie superstardom — along with a number of other white male crooners who have gone viral of late, including Toronto’s D’EON and Brooklyn’s Autre Ne Veut — may be a sign that hipsters of the millennial generation are finally ready to step up to the mic, outwardly recognizing Black American music to be as fundamental a part their own pop-cultural heritage as it was for that of their parents. On albums like Love Remains, they seem confident enough with themselves to pay lip-service to the hip-hop and R&B hits they overheard in the car, or in their neighborhood pizza parlor, when their memory “began” in 1989. For now, however, the new blue-eyed soul seems to begin and end with the histrionic abstractions of “Ginger Ale music”. It is a conflicted type of homage — one still so uncomfortable with its own influences, that it can only listen to them through the wall.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Words: Samantha Cornwell

Escapades is available for download on White Rainbow’s Band Camp Page

Ask any 20-something indie rock lover in New York what they’re doing this weekend, and they’re bound to rattle off names of North Brooklyn concert venues that aren’t technically supposed to exist: Monster Island Basement, Secret Project Robot, Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, Party Expo. Check the show recommendations in The Village Voice, The Times, and even The New Yorker, and you will discover these cartoonish monikers sprinkled alongside trusty Manhattan standbys like Bowery Ballroom and Webster Hall.

Semi-legal concert spaces in Williamsburg and Bushwick are evolving from niche attractions to popular above-ground destinations. And yet they seem to have everything working against them, aside from their underground cachét: no budget, no liquor licenses, NOISE, far-flung geographical locations, and the passionate belief that quality live music should be accessible to everyone — even those too young to drink. So how are New York’s DIY venues staying open, despite all the economic and legal obstacles?

Truth be told, not all of these venues do stay open. Market Hotel, a dilapidated old bank building in Bushwick that once attracted up to 600 concert-goers at a time, closed its doors to the public last April after being raided by cops two nights in a row. Over on the Williamsburg waterfront, Paris London West Nile shut down this summer when its landlords increased the rent; neighboring venue Glasslands, meanwhile, became so popular that its owners decided to purchase a liquor license, weed out minors at the door, and go legit.

The fate of any individual underground venue hinges on a variety of geographical and budgetary incidentals, but the ones that do survive hold a surprising number of these incidentals in common. Some might even call it a DIY “business model” deriving from a set of practices established by longtime independent music promoter Todd P, founder of Market Hotel and many other semi-legal establishments that have come and gone over the years.

Location is paramount to a venue’s success, and but within extraordinarily specific parameters. All of the spots that remain open for more than a year are located either in extremely low-density areas (along the waterfront, in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park) or along high-traffic commercial thoroughfares that boast a great deal of noise pollution to begin with (by the above-ground JMZ line in Bushwick, Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens). Venues must nevertheless be within convenient walking distance of the subway, and have a capacity similar to that of competing commercial nightclubs. They must also be in neighborhoods were the rent is still cheap.

But unlike their legal competitors, no single existing DIY venue relies exclusively on door and bar sales to pay the bills. In fact, the majority of them double up as live/work spaces. Ranging from two to eight per space, residents pay low rent in exchange for studio space and opportunities to subsidize their income by working in-house events. Some venues, like Shea Stadium, generate additional income as recording studios; Monster Island Basement and Secret Project Robot are part of a collectively run commercial complex that includes no fewer than two art galleries, a surf shop, a dojo, a screen-printing studio, a recording studio, art studio rentals, and rehearsal spaces.

Keeping costs low enables DIY spaces to compete with professional venues by paying larger acts more money. It also allows promoters to take more creative risks, nurturing artists that are too challenging to have obvious commercial appeal and scouting marketable young talent before other professional venues take notice. When popular indie bands like Woods and Real Estate swing through town, they return to the venues that supported them from the get-go– and thank them by playing sold-out shows.

As private homes and work spaces, DIY venues exist within a precarious legal loophole that enables them to operate under the auspices of the private party. Though they collect money at the door and sell alcohol at the bar, these costs are typically presented as “donations”. Naturally, even minors have the right to attend “private parties” where alcohol is being consumed — as long as the minors do not drink, which is why every DIY venue enlists a worker or volunteer to check IDs and mark off the hands of spectators under 21. As long as the crowds do not get to large for their own good, and evenings progress without noise complaints, the NYPD have no pretext for interrupting the fun. As for whether the neighborhood cops are aware of what is truly going on inside these musty basements and leaky warehouses, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” generally prevails over curiosity.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Special thanks to Todd P, Ric Leichtung of Market Hotel and International Tapes, Etienne Pierre Duguay of Market Hotel and Vibes Management, & Adam Reich of Shea Stadium

Rego is a product of the northwest underground community, growing up in Santa Rosa, the largest city in the wine country of California’s Sonoma County, about an hour north of San Francisco. In its earliest incarnation, Alaskas was a studio project inspired by K records bedroom pop. After that, Rego retired the name and did time in local post-punk and screamo-inspired bands. Circumstances intervened when Rego and a friend both found themselves out of work and yearning to escape the supportive but insular Santa Rosa scene. San Francisco never held much appeal to Rego — he says he appreciates the city now, but as an underage kid commuting in for shows, fighting traffic and searching out sketchy venues the city held little appeal. Instead, Rego and his companion headed north to Seattle. There, he found a place to live and a supportive community of fellow musicians; “We went to Seattle, called up a couple people on a whim that we’d stayed with before, and ended up being there in this one house for a week and making fifty friends. I was like, ‘this is my new spot.’”

Rego remained in Seattle for three years and ingratiated himself with the local scene, finding a job at the deli counter of a co-op that afforded him time off to tour the Alaskas project and expand its sound, resulting in an eclectic aesthetic ranging from abrasive noise to naive pop gestures. A tour this past June had Rego acting as front man and self-described “diva,” backed by two percussionists who, on their own, constitute the noise rock duo Haunted Horses. Much as the move to Seattle three years prior was the product of fortuitous circumstance, Rego’s recent relocation to Brooklyn was partly a chance happening. Heading out last summer with the intention to play a solo tour on the east coast, he ended up mostly taking a month-long vacation in Brooklyn. The few shows he did play, including a relatively lucrative gig at Death By Audio, helped convince him that a permanent re-location to Brooklyn was a good idea. “I feel like I’ve done my Seattle time, anyone that’s gonna see me or like me out there has seen me and liked me out there.” Like many before, he fell under the spell of the youthful Brooklyn underground scene, but he’s refreshingly realistic about moving out east to push his career forward in an overt way. “I know what I’m doing is pretty out there in its own way. I also feel like it doesn’t matter what music you make, it’s more who’s gonna promote you and put you out there. I don’t feel like investing in that but if someone’s gonna throw that at me, that’s good. I hope that’s a part of it, aside from I just wanna live in that city.”
Finding out that he wouldn’t be welcome back at his job if he continued to take so much time off for touring, as well as general disillusionment after three years in the Seattle underground also provided an impetus for the move. “Times get tough and shitty people start showing up to your shows, once they think it’s a party. Then you cut the drinking out of the equation at your place and no one shows up or the place shuts down if you continue to let that happen. So it’s just a cycle that keeps going and right now we’re in kind of a drought.”

A year ago, Rego was visiting New York during CMJ and witnessed firsthand the blog-fueled ascendancy of groups like Small Black and Surfer Blood. Twelve months later, he’s firmly resettled in Brooklyn, drumming occasionally for Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing his own shows and collaborating with an old friend, Mackswell, a primary in the Brooklyn-based boutique fashion label Ruffeo Hearts Lil Snotty. Despite these forays into the Brooklyn artistic community, Rego retains a non-committal attitude toward promoting his own work, embodies DIY virtues in the most literal sense – all fifty copies of a recent cassette-only release were dubbed one-by-one. Most importantly, Alaskas is to remain Rego’s project alone, even if he sometimes invites collaborators into the fold, “I feel like I rush things too much depending on other people, that’s why I started a solo project. I want something that lasts forever and that’s on my own terms.” The proliferation of side projects and pseudonyms in the world of noise and DIY music borders on self-parody at times, and although he sometimes wishes he could tour and record under his given name, his commitment to the Alaskas moniker remains. “I’m at the point right now where I can keep the name and the little bit of credibility I have. If I drop it right now, no one’s gonna be like ‘Oh, former Alaskas.’ That doesn’t mean anything to anyone. I guess either just drop it a year ago when I didn’t have any credibility or drop it two years from now when I have a whole lot of credibility.” Rego considers this for a second, then adds “I’m just gonna keep it going, I’ve got it tattooed on my forearm.”

Alaskas, “The Truths of Tomorrow”

Words: Max Burke

“The Truths of Tomorrow” is from Alaskas upcoming drone/soundscape record D.I.V.A.

I Love Life EP is now available here from High Fives & Handshakes Records.

Alaskas is on Facebook, MySpace, and has a blog.

Alaskas live in New York:
10/07 at Party Expo
10/20 at Shea Stadium with Adult Themes, Yvette, Zulus and Happy New Year
10/23 at Don Pedro

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Chronicart, September 2009.

The following is the complete, (almost) unedited transcript of an interview that I conducted with Chatham in March 2009 for a feature article on Drastic Classicism that I wrote for Tiny Mix Tapes. In addition to providing a little biographical back-story to lean on, I thought it might be inspiring to get a sense of the aesthetic questions that made Chatham tick when he–like us, and many of our readers–was still in his ’20s, scraping his way though an economic crisis, and trying to find his own voice amidst the DIY explosion that we can count on this city to produce whenever the going gets rough.

Emilie Friedlander: Can you tell me the story behind the original Drastic Classicism? When and how did you and Karole decide to collaborate together?

I saw a work that Karole did at the Kitchen in 1979 called Do We Could, and liked it very much. Visual artist Michael Zwack introduced me to Karole and we became friends. One evening, Karole asked for a meeting, so we got together at a restaurant on Thompson Street in Soho and she asked if I would be interested in collaborating with her. I liked the piece I saw, so I said, Yes.

I have a long history of working with dancers, in fact, the way I got my job as music director of the Kitchen was through choreographer Daniel Nagrin at the start of the 70s. He gave dance classes on Saturday afternoons in Soho, which I played music for. Daniel was very interested in improvisation, so after the classes he would have 3-hour jam sessions with his dance company. I was there to provide music and other musicians came to join us from time to time. One Saturday, we had Woody and Steina Vasulka come to play. In fact they were video artists, but also played music; anyway, I met them through Daniel and they later founded the Kitchen when it was on Mercer Street and asked me to program music there – the rest is history.

When I was a teenager I had seriously considered becoming a dancer after seeing performances of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk. But then I took some dance classes and decided that I had a LOT more talent as a musician. Nevertheless I retained my love for dance and worked with dance as a musician whenever I could. After working with Daniel, I collaborated with a number of choreographers; Kenneth King was the best known of them. I even ended up in Meredith Monk’s dance company for a time, albeit as a musician, not as a dancer.

All to say that I had a long history with dance by the time I met Karole.

Our first piece was a duet called Vertige where I played a version of Guitar Trio for one guitar and Karole danced. I would like to put our working together a little bit in context, as this work with Karole wasn’t just a story of me doing music for yet another choreographer, this was something really special.

First of all, our collaboration was happening in the midst of the punk explosion in New York, just during the time when it was reaching out to a larger audience and receiving a large amount of attention in the local media. It was generating a lot of excitement, and the Soho art community was affected as well.

When this punk explosion happened, I was essentially a composer who was a hard-core minimalist, who had heard the Ramones play at CBGB’s in 1976, and decided that I had a LOT in common with this music, so I picked up an electric guitar myself. It took a year of developing my own voice on the instrument, but finally I arrived at a piece that drew upon everything I was as a composer and a musician, but also worked in a rock context. The piece was, of course, Guitar Trio.

It was very important to me then that any rock-influenced piece I did not be merely appropriation, or a sampling of a conservatory-trained composer’s distorted view of what rock music was. I wanted it to work in a rock context as well, which is why we played the piece straight away in clubs like CBGBs and Max’s. However, even though I played the piece in rock clubs, I did not consider myself a rock musician, in the sense that I had too much respect for the form. I considered myself a minimalist composer, i.e. someone conservatory-trained who had played already in an art context in both La Monte Young’s as well as Tony Conrad’s ensembles, which is about as hard-core minimalist as one can get!

By the time Karole and I started working together, I had been playing G3 out in the clubs as well as art spaces for two years. On Karole’s side, she had already used rock music in her first piece, Ne, by The The. So she was used to working with loud volume.

On the other hand, working with a minimalist composer who was playing electric guitar in a rock context, whose entire performance on the guitar consisted of playing literally one chord for hours at a time, listening to the overtones and considering them to be the entire melody, was something that had not been done by anyone, certainly not a choreographer, and was, at the time, unique to our collaboration, although others were soon keen to follow.

There was another aspect of our collaboration that was unusual. Usually, the way things work is that a choreographer decides to hire a composer to do music for them. The piece is done in a dance space, and it is strictly the choreographer’s show, with the musicians accompanying the dancers. I had worked this way many times before with other choreographers.

Karole and I decided that in our case, our collaboration would be equal, and that we would perform the work in rock clubs, integrating the musicians in as much as possible visually with the dancers.

Our first performance of Vertige was, suitably enough, in a really cool rock club called Tier 3, which was in Tribeca. We did a 3-night run and it caused quite a sensation. We went on to tour Vertige in France, Switzerland and the UK.

Encouraged by our success with Vertige, we attempted a larger work.

A bit more background: In the early seventies, I earned my living as a harpsichord tuner. I had studied with William Dowd, who was the Steinway of harpsichord builders in the USA. So naturally my interest in tuning and my work with La Monte and Tony, both of whom were working within the framework of just intonation; had the effect of inspiring me to use alternate tunings for the electric guitar straight away. The original version of G3 had two of the guitars in just intonation, and I had the idea to have one of the guitars tuned to all low E strings, in order to reinforce the overtones.

With Drastic Classicism, I took a different approach and put my guitar in a highly dissonant tuning, and went even further by tuning the other four guitars in minor second intervals with respect to each other.

We tried out this tuning at a rehearsal studio, and the result was amazing. Far from being an opaque wall of sound, it sounded like a tornado of voices, all of them singing at the same time. This is what I was working on when Karole and I decided to do Drastic, and it became the main section of the piece.

What do you remember about your experience performing Drastic in the original 1981 choreographic production? In what ways was performing your music in the context of a dance performance different from performing it in a rock club or concert hall? Would you say that there was already a strong performative/choreographic element in your work at the time, and in the No Wave music scene in general?

We couldn’t mount Drastic Classicism in a rock club because there were too many dancers involved, and in general rock clubs do not have suitable floors for dancers to work with. In terms of lighting setup, having a decent floor and needing dressing rooms for changing costumes and makeup, it was just easier to do it in a dance space.

So Karole and I mounted Drastic Classicism at Dance Theater Workshop ( DTW) in 1981. We played Drastic there every Monday for a month. Because it was at DTW, the audience was primarily a dance audience, and it was a complete shock to everyone. There were a number of reasons for this.

On a musical level, in an art context (e.g. the Kitchen or Artist’s Space), people heard Drastic as a new, uncompromising form of minimalism. When I played it in a rock context, people heard it as a wall of noise, and I can say with considerable pride that Drastic was one of the pieces that started the noise rock movement.

When we played it in a dance context, there a number of things to keep in mind: First of all, Karole was still a Cunningham dancer, i.e. currently in his company, and two of the other dancers were also star dancers in Cunningham’s company, which is to say she had truly fabulous, technically superb dancers working with her. Secondly, no other choreographer ever had the courage before Karole to work with the intensity of sound that I was using. It wasn’t just a matter of a dance company working with rock music, or even no wave music, for that had been done before. She was working with a crazy minimalist composer who had scored a piece that wasn’t so much rock as pure unadulterated noise; or depending on your background, a viscous, gelatinous sphere of screaming overtones being played in a relatively small room! It really took the dance audience completely by surprise as they were used to music taking a more supportive role in the context of the modern dance world.

Now, in dance spaces, musicians usually play in the orchestra pit or off to the side. However, since the way Karole and I planned it was as equal collaborators, Karole had the musicians right on stage with the dancers. Karole, bless her, even had her dancers manhandle (or womanhandle, as the case may be) us, kicking and jumping on us from time to time. And of course, we musicians were dancing, too, in our own way, each according to his or her ability.

Anyway, the piece caused a sensation in the press. And articles kept coming out during the entire month we were performing.

What made you and Karole a good match, artistically speaking? Do you think there were any parallels between what you were doing in music at the time and what Karole was doing with dance?

Oh dear, this is a difficult question. Surprisingly, no one has ever asked me this before.

Both of us were very much a part of the no wave scene back then, Karole as a spectator and me playing in the clubs. She had a kind of punk look and even got in a bit of hot water while working with the Cunningham company for looking too extreme. I suppose we both had a similar mind set of taking things to their limit and being as extreme as possible in our art, our look and general comportment. She had her own technical issues, of course. Cunningham technique really leaves a mark on those dancers who were immersed in it. I believe what Karole was doing with those early pieces was finding her own voice as a choreographer, separate from that of Cunningham, which she certainly had done by the time she finished Drastic, if not with Vertige.

For members of the millennium generation, the idea of a collaboration between a rock composer from the East Village and a choreographer who danced with the likes of George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham is almost unimaginable…

Hmmm… actually, I lived on MacDougal Street in Soho during this period… and, as I mentioned earlier, I did not consider myself a rock composer, but that is splitting hairs. This distinction was important to me back then, it isn’t now, as at this point I have probably played more often in rock clubs than concert halls, and I certainly prefer rock clubs these days.

Were cross-disciplinary collaborations of this kind common fare in New York in the 1980s?

No, they weren’t. Not of this kind.

One other formative thing I could mention: I studied composition with Morton Subotnick in the late sixties. Morton, back then, was “Mr Collaborate-with-other-media-people” and was composer-in-residence at the NYU Intermedia department, which was focused on his collaboration with visual artist Tony Martin, who had done the light show at the Electric Circus in the East Village.

So whenever Morton performed, he would have Tony do a light show. I was at all these performances, of course, often assisting in them. While I was at NYU, I collaborated with many other students there. We were in the film building, so kids would come down to the electronic music studio we had there and listen in and ask if we composers could do music for them. I gained a lot of experience this way. Later we moved into the dance building, which was on 2nd Avenue in the East Village, and I met and worked with many student dancers and choreographers while I was there. That’s were I got my training to work with artists of other media, at any rate.

While I had worked with many choreographers and filmmakers, I had never worked with visual artists, that didn’t come until the 80’s, when I collaborated with Robert Longo. After Karole and I did Vertige and Drastic, I noticed that there were a number of other choreographer/no wave scene musician collaborations that began to happen. I think Karole gave other choreographers the courage to ask these musicians to work with them.

Where does Drastic, musically speaking, fit into your evolution as a composer? You wrote the piece four years after penning Guitar Trio, when you first began combining your study of minimalism with rock instrumentation à la CBGBs. What were some of the musical and aesthetic questions you were grappling with in 1981? How does Drastic differ musically from a piece like Guitar Trio?

Keeping in mind the things I said earlier, with Drastic I wanted to work with an alternate tuning that was quite complex. While the original G3 was tuned in just intonation, the intervals involved were very pure and relatively simple. I wanted to try something more complex in terms of tuning and compositional structure with Drastic.

And now, I’ll tell you something, which I think very few people know:

In 1971, I had written a piece called Two Gongs. It was a 63-minue piece with beautiful overtones, truly recalling at times choirs and choirs of singers. With Drastic, I wanted to try to emulate the sound of these two gongs with 4 electric guitars and a backbeat driving them.

You mentioned earlier in an email that it was especially interesting for you to revive Part 1 of Drastic using Kevin Shea on drums, rather than the original drummer, David Linton. The guitar part of Drastic clearly has a slight improvisational element, with the guitarists free to choose which frets to strum on—and, at points, which rhythms to play. Is there an improvisational component to the drum part? How much does it change depending on who’s playing?

In my rock influenced non-notated pieces like G3 or Drastic, if I work with a drummer it is because I like the way the drummer plays. Some drummers hit the drums hard, some play more poetically.

John Coltrane always liked to play with a drummer who hit the drums hard, which is why he worked quite a bit with Elvin Jones. G3 and Drastic also need strong drummers. David Linton was the first drummer to play Drastic, and he was a monster, as can be heard from the recording. Later, we had Jonathan Kane, who was a co-founder of Swans. If the guitars were the fire, Jonathan was truly the wind that powered the fire.

No matter which drummer is playing Drastic, he needs to hit the drums in such a way as to give the guitarists energy. I like to hear lots and lots of fills in G3 and Drastic, and lots and lots of crash and ride cymbals. With drums, my formula is the noisier and the more driving rhythms and fills there are the better, as far as I’m concerned.

By contrast, there are some compositions where the drum parts absolutely have to be notated. In another composition I did for Karole, Massacre, on MacDougal Street, Anton Fier (of Feelies and later Lounge Lizard fame) did a 120-bar solo that sounded a bit like martial music. So at a live concert on another piece, I had him and James Lo (of Live Skull) try to improvise martial music. It was a total flop due to the precision needed when one has more than one drummer playing flams, tap 5s and tap 7s and the like at the same time. I ended up having to write out all the parts in a piece that eventually became Waterloo, No 2.

But for G3 and Drastic, the drummers I use work within the structure of the piece, and bring their own style to it. I wouldn’t call it completely improvisation, what the drummer does, even though the drummer’s part is not fully notated. Because of the fixed and pre-determined structure of Drastic, a drummer will tend to play the same way each time, e.g; a straight backbeat during this section, lots of fills during that section, although admittedly, some performances are more inspired than others, depending on what side of the bed they got up on the day in question.

Kevin Shea has a radically different style than most of the other drummers I have worked with. I hesitate to say that it is coming out of jazz, in that Kevin’s style is unique even within a jazz context. I suppose we could say that Kevin can hit the drums hard when he needs to and play a backbeat and all that, but even when he is playing a hard, driving backbeat, he embellishes the basic beat with oddly placed drum rolls and accents which perhaps owe more to jazz than to rock.

I had played with Kevin in the context of his noise duo with Matt Mottel, Talibam! We got together one time while I was in New York and we jammed with me on electric trumpet, so that is how I became familiar with Kevin’s way of playing. And I liked it, a lot.

Shortly after this, Kevin found himself in Paris, so we got together to play and made a recording of the first section of Drastic for Karole to work with. He played in his unique style and I thought it worked quite well, although it was very different from the way David played it. I was a bit worried that Karole would freak out when she heard the tape, but I should have known better, for Karole is made of stronger stuff than that! She quite adventurous in her musical tastes and she loved the recording when she heard it.

What is the significance to you of recreating the piece using personalities from what might be called the new “downtown” scene (now relocated to Brooklyn, of course), instead of the original players? I know that it was Karole’s idea to restage the piece with performers who are around the same age as you were at the time of the original production, but I believe you were the one who selected the actual musicians. What made you choose Sarah, Steve, Paul, Tom, Kevin and Matthew? Do you feel like there is a special resonance between what these six musicians are doing now and what you and your collaborators were doing back in the 1980’s?

When Karole first approached me with the idea of reviving Drastic, I immediately thought of using the original guitarists who played in it, i.e. myself, Nina Canal, Scott Johnson and Ned Sublette, all of whom are still around and kickin’.

However, Karole had the idea that it would be interesting for the revival to use musicians and dancers who were the same age as Karole and me when we made the piece, which is to say mid 20s to early 30s.

At first I wasn’t sure about this idea, but then when Karole assured me that she wouldn’t be dancing in it herself, I felt better. Karole was and is a brilliant dancer and could pull off dancing in Drastic today just as easily as I could play guitar in it. So rather than feel slighted, I came around to her idea and really got into it. What Karole wanted was not a reunion concert, but rather a recreation of the original concert.

The problem with reunion concerts is that one often ends up comparing how the people look now as opposed to how they looked then… Asking people to participate who are the same age that Karole and I were when we made Drastic avoids this pitfall.

How did you select the musicians?

Kevin and Matt I knew of course from playing with them as a guest in Talibam!.

When we were choosing the guitarists, it was the week after the rained-out Crimson Grail 200 electric guitar performance at Lincoln Center Outdoors (August 2008), so I was already in touch with a lot of local musicians. I got together with John King, who was conducting one of the sub-orchestras in Crimson Grail, and we decided to select for the most part from people who had played in Crimson, as well as other people that I knew who were on the NY scene.

The guitarists we chose didn’t know each other prior to playing in Drastic, but what they have in common is that they are roughly the same age and that they all live in Brooklyn, and they all are movers and shakers in their respective fields. However, it must be said that our primary criteria in choosing the guitarists wasn’t that they were scene people (even though it happened to work out that way…but that they were technically capable and that they already had experience playing my work.

Sarah and Paul had played G3 with me already in other contexts and so I knew they were familiar with my sound and into doing it. Steve I knew by reputation. I figured that since he had played in Crimson he knew my sound, and I knew from listening to his music that he wouldn’t have a problem technically. Also, we are about the same height and on a physical level I thought he might be good to play the part that I originally played, as he looks vaguely the way I did when I was in my twenties, in terms of his aura, at least.

Looks were a factor in our selection because Karole wanted to make the look as close as possible to the original performance on a visual level, her being a theater director these days and all.

Paul is very tall, so we gave him the part that Ned Sublette played, since Ned is from Texas, thin as a reed and tall and so is Paul. Paul is not from Texas, sadly, but he is from the south, so we figured that was good enough!

Sarah got Nina Canal’s (of Ut fame) part. And Tom got the part originally played by Scott Johnson.

How would you describe your musical relationship with John King? Why was he such a great choice for the role of musical director?

I’ve known John since the late seventies and we have worked together in many contexts. We even both studied under the same composer, Morton Subotnick.

I live in Paris, and Karole needed someone good to be the musical director of all the pieces for her performance, not only mine, but also David Linton’s music and another composer (I forgot the person’s name).

I thought of John to fill this bill immediately because he is a fantastically talented composer and musician who has also worked extensively with such choreographers and Merce Cunningham and Robert Kovich. Karole ran the idea of working with John by David Linton, who also knows John quite well, and David was pleased with this choice, so that was that. John is very busy, so we were lucky that he was available.

Another reason I was relieved that John would be the music director is that John is a guitarist; he’s played many times in my performances and knows my music quite well. He also has had vast experience as a professional guitar teacher and works really well with people.

In your 1990 essay, “My Own Musical Adventure of the Eighties: A Ten Year Project in the Field,” you describe the original “Guitar Trio” and “Drastic” ensembles as a “representation” of a rock band, rather than an actual rock band–much in the way that your collaborator Robert Longo might describe his work as a “representation” of electronic media. Would you still qualify your work in this way?

I just want to mention, that, today, I, too have my doubts about this! ?

At this point in my life, I have probably played more in rock clubs than I have concert halls. Rock clubs are certainly my preferred place to play. Today my feeling about G3 and Drastic would be, of course they are rock! They are music coming out of minimalism also, of course, but for a long time now I have not worried about the distinction, and neither do most other people.

However, back in the late 70s and early 80s, the distinction was highly important to me. I thought of myself as a minimalist composer working in a rock context, and the work I was doing as being a “representation” of a rock band. I picked up this language from my visual art friend Longo and Cindy Sherman in order to have, I suppose, a link between their work and mine. Thinking of myself as not a rocker also had the happy effect of allowing me not to overly worry if whether what I was doing was really rock or not. As long as people liked it at CBGBs, that’s all I cared about.

After 1990, I stopped worrying about these distinctions.