Arcane Candy

Time: The mid-1970s. Place: The Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. On the downside, it was a scum and grit-encrusted, crime-splattered no-man’s land full of bums, drug dealers, petty thieves, pimps, prostitutes, thugs and other assorted, felonious flotsam. On the upside, huge, empty lofts were up for rent at bargain basement prices, pizza was 50 cents a slice and musicians and artists from all over were flocking to this murky mecca to participate in a myriad of spontaneous performance art and contemporary art shows, music concerts, underground film and video screenings and other assorted happenings.

By this time, the idealism of the 1960s had been brutally battered, as it quickly licked its wounds and floated off into a grey haze. Although a reactionary movement, punk rock, was on the rise, the public at large was unaware of a parallel, even more visceral, vital movement that, at its genesis, had no name. In short order, it was bitch-slapped with the moniker no wave. The most well-known no wave bands— James Chance and the Contortions, DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks—got corralled by Brian Eno into a studio to record their shrill, slashing, grating, anti-rock for a genre-defining compilation called No New York.

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Sir Richard Bishop & His Freak of Araby Ensemble.

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Los Angeles, California
May 29, 2009

Harry Partch (1901-1974) merely succeeded in realizing the most perfectly constructed, personal musical universe of the 20th Century. Shunning 12-tone equal temperament—which has dominated Western music for well over 100 years—he formed his own 43 tone scale realized through an antiquated pure tuning system known as Just Intonation. Harry then built his own strange, sculptural instruments to realize his exotic scores. Over several decades, he meshed this otherworldly-sounding music with dance and drama into what he called “corporeal” presentations, in which these three elements are fully integrated into a powerful, transporting whole. None of them were omitted or relegated to the background, as in traditional stage plays, classical concerts, etc.

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Since 1979, Sir Richard Bishop has proven himself to be one of the hardest-working, multi-talented entertainers since Sammy Davis Jr. From 1981 to 2007, he tickled the public’s fancy with his guitar playing and singing for the Sun City Girls, an outfit that could veer from rock to jazz to free improv to hillbilly to avant-garde to performance art at the drop of a wooden nickel. Over the years, in addition to working as a seller of esoteric books, Rick has been helping his brother Alan, who played bass and sang in SCG, record and film myriad raw music performances from around the world for CD, LP and DVD releases on their Sublime Frequencies label, which was founded in 2003. Since 2005, Rick has also been touring far and wide to take his masterful solo acoustic guitar playing to the masses.

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The Velvet Underground: Under Review is a 2006 documentary about the legendary 1960s rock band. As most living organisms know, the Velvets were one of the primary sperms to spawn punk, noise rock, goth and indie–but not, as some believe, Velveeta processed cheese. After they formed in 1965, the Velvets wasted no time bringing pure innovation to the table, as they seamlessly laminated the clever rock ‘n’ roll songs of singer / guitarist Lou Reed, the La Monte Young-inspired avant-garde drones of violist John Cale, the stern and foreboding vocals of Nico, the second guitar foundation of Sterling Morrison, and the caveman-like cymbal-less backbeat of drummer Moe Tucker into a beautiful, exotic, scintillating whole.

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Voice Crack was a Swiss noise duo consisting of musicians Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang. They formed in 1972 as a free jazz outfit, but abandoned that format in the early ’80s to experiment with what they called “cracked everyday electronics,” which consisted of small, cracked open appliances rigged up with amps. This set-up produced sounds that could turn on a dime from a sparse clatter to an all-out noise tsunami. Although Kick That Habit hails from the 1980s, it looks like it could have been filmed decades earlier in some grey Eastern bloc country, what with its blurry, bleak backdrops and stark, grainy atmosphere.

The movie, which contains no talking or singing, jumps back and forth between snowy outdoor scenes in the Alps, indoor live performances, random objects like electric fans and dripping faucets, and people trudging around out in public. We join the members of Voice Crack during a game of putt-putt golf. The clanking of the golf balls against the resonant metal contraptions on the course is striking. Then comes an abrupt cut to a roomful of their cracked everyday electronics–complete with the vivid image of transistor radios squealing on twirling turntables–that form an impenetrable sonic stew.

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Space is the Place is easily one of the most amazing songs, albums, and movies of the 1970s. Lensed in ‘72 and released a couple of years later, the film version tells the story of a transcendent spaceman and master musician named Sun Ra, whose life’s mission is to be the savior of the black race. The opening footage introduces the music-powered Ra Ship–which looks for all the world like a couple of conjoined twin flame-tipped sperms–as it gently cruises through space toward a planet Sun Ra has recently discovered. There, in a surrealistic Garden of Eden, Sun Ra reveals his plans to re-locate the black race far from the oppression and chaos of planet Earth to live together in harmony on this new sphere.

Flash back to 1943, when Sun Ra’s discordant piano playing causes a massive riot at a nightclub, which results in two men left sitting: Sun Ra and a pimp, hustler and con man known as The Overseer (a black man who secretly works for the establishment). In numerous scenes peppered throughout the rest of the film, these two characters engage in a game of cards to determine the fate of the black race: freedom or oppression under the thumb of the powers that be. Flash forward to the early ’70s, when Sun Ra lands his spaceship in spectacular fashion in front of an army of media–complete with a bizarre display of otherworldly pageantry. To attract a wider audience to his cause, he then tries to recruit a group of black youth at a rec room, opens an Outer Space Employment Agency and releases albums of his music.

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Harry Smith (1923-1991) was primarily an artist, filmmaker, musicologist, archivist and record collector who was best known for compiling the Anthology of American Folk Music for Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, which was a huge influence on the folk music revival of the ’60s. Harry also gained fame in underground film circles (and squares) for creating a series of colorful, abstract, animated shorts starting back in the 1940s. The movies on this tape span from 1941 to 1957, and predated another major ’60s explosion: psychedelia.

These films, which were originally paired with the jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, and later, pop like the Beatles, completely cry out for the viewer to silence the sparse, dank, improvised Teiji Ito Shaman soundtrack on this volume and crank up whatever music he or she thinks will most appropriately accompany the visuals. I imagine Merzbow would mesh quite well with the first three films. No. 1 is all gritty, organic, watercolor-like, and fast-paced; full of ever-changing, amorphous shapes that unfurl themselves across ultra-detailed backgrounds. Likewise, circles dance across myriad corroded backdrops in No. 2, while diamonds and squares take up residence in No. 3.

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In Between the Notes is a 28-minute documentary film on the life and times of North Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996). Lensed on video tape in 1986, it captures a few moments of the elder singer near the last decade of his life. Interspersed with interviews, performances, and scenic shots of his native India, the brief biopic spans Pran Nath’s 60-plus year pursuit of purity in sound.

Pandit Pran Nath began singing at age 13. Since his parents did not approve of this life path for their son, he was forced to leave home. After wandering around for a spell, Pran Nath eventually became a personal assistant to Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, who was the early 20th century master of the Kirana vocal style, which had been passed down from one generation to the next since the 13th century. Pran Nath served Khan for a nearly a decade, savoring the occasional music lesson morsel from his master, then spent five years with his body covered in ash singing to God in a cave near a temple in Tapkeshwar. Pran Nath may have stayed in that cave forever, had his guru not ordered him to take the Kirana style of music out into the wider world to keep it alive.

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Ciao! Manhattan is a scripted art film based on the life story of an early super model named Edie Sedgwick, who fell in with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in 1965, starred in some of his underground films, and got hooked on hard drugs, only to enter a slowly decaying orbit. After staggering through a series of mental hospitals, electro-shock therapy sessions and endless amounts of drugs and alcohol, her ravaged organs gave up the ghost in Santa Barbara, California in 1971.

Holed up at a California mansion in an empty swimming pool covered by a makeshift tent and filled with gigantic photos of herself and friends from her glory days in New York, Susan Superstar (who is really just Edie playing herself), filmed in full color in 1970, tells her life story to a young, naive Texas drifter named Butch through a series of black and white flashbacks filmed in 1967. After years of severe substance abuse, Edie is a sloppy mess with a quivering voice who stumbles around and can barely stand up, let alone walk. Although Edie was 27 years old at the time of filming, she comes across almost child-like.

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