“THE HIGHWAY THAT’S LEADING ME”: JONI MITCHELL’S ‘HEJIRA’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

“I’m not an evasive writer. You don’t have to dig under the words for the meaning… When someone asks what a song is about, I want to say, ‘Well, did you listen to the words?’”
- Joni Mitchell

”A Decade Full of Dreams”

We are here to talk about the 1976 Joni Mitchell album ’Hejira’. But if we take our time in getting to it, wind our way round some serpentine curves, wouldn’t that be the most *’Hejira’* way of going about things?

The NME Book of Rock, the first music book I ever read, described Mitchell as a “singer/songwriter with a pure voice, specialising in highly-wrought emotional ballads… notorious for various romantic attachments”. A widespread notion which reaches its nadir in the notion that her music’s ‘confessional’, like an emotional version of striptease. (Notably, its a term she always disliked.)

And some still see her through that frame, the epitome of a hippy-dippy Sixties artist, going gooey over clouds, getting wide-eyed about Woodstock and falling in love with passers-by every few minutes. But they mistake the overture for the act. It’s the early-to-mid Seventies where she came into her own.

It's the first two albums which most match that popular image, and while they do contain some great tracks there’s also times where she sounds like Phoebe from ’Friends.’ Mitchell herself later conceded “to me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.” It was the third try, ’Ladies of the Canyon,’ which first brought in the changes. Released in 1970, it meant that for Mitchell the Sixties ended right on cue.

A few numbers, such as the title track, could have come from the earlier albums. But mostly it pointed forwards. Which also meant wider. While the earlier albums had featured occasional bass, extra instruments came to be used more expansively. But perhaps most significant of all was the guitar-sporting folkie making greater use of piano.

It was followed by ’Blue’ (1971), which capitalised on all of this and is regarded by some as her best album. And where the title track made it clear which element she was channelling - “Blue/ Songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before”. Then on ’River’ she imagines the titular body of water as something she could “skate away on”. (Yes, skate. She was Canadian.) And her piano-based music came to flow like a river. Which went with something else…

Leonard Cohen, particularly on his earlier albums, set his songs in a heightened realm, full of slightly mystic characters doing richly symbolic things. It is something of a wrench to hear that famous lines in ’Suzanne’ may have been inspired by someone called Suzanne making him a cup of tea and putting bits of orange in it.

While other songwriters use a more straightforward, conversational style, directly addressing the listener in a way which feels immediate and involving. (Think of how many songs are sung second-person, to “you”.) As John Lennon put it: “say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.” Sinead O’Connor’s ’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ would be an example, with its payoff line “you asked for the truth and I told you.” If you were ever to find out that the song wasn’t a faithful description of her life at the point you couldn’t help but feel it was lessened.

And these are diverging approaches, branching off from each other. You need to pick one.

Well, maybe me or you would. And most people seem convinced Joni Mitchell picked the second. But she didn’t. Instead, she straight out refused to pick. And she seems able to slip between the two irreconcilable opposites within a single line. At times she’d deliberately juxtapose them for effect…

“She speaks in sorry sentences
“Miraculous repentances
“I don't believe her.”

…the punchy immediacy of the last line added like a pin to a balloon.

And this created a kind of double virtue. You feel like something significant is being imparted while, at the very same time, that she’s talking straight to you. ’Song For Sharon’ (which we’ll get to, promise) is written as if a letter to a long-time friend, casually mentioning Dora and Betsy as if we know them.

And the flowing piano enhanced this, enabled her lyrics to be more free-flowing and semi-stream-of-consciousness. Her tracks can have the buzz of meeting up with an old friend, where the torrent of conversation seems both effortless and endless, something to ride. It gives it a compulsive quality, the exhilarating feeling of being absolutely in the moment. (Yeah okay, she’s the only one doing the talking. It still feels that way.) And the immediacy of music, the sense that it’s all happening now, is always a positive feature.

And these go on to work as part of a triple whammy, with her Seventies shift in subject matter. ’California’ starts:

“Sitting in a park in Paris, France
“Reading the news, it sure looks bad
“They won't give peace a chance
“That was just a dream some of us had”

…and this just one year after she’d written the hippie anthem ’Woodstock’! John Lennon, the one who’d coined ‘give peace a chance’, later sang “the dream is over.” Yet where he was rueful she was phlegmatic. Her tone is “remember when we thought that peace stuff? Boy, what had we been smoking?” From that point on the song moves on to other subjects, like waking and shrugging off a strange dream.

Mitchell has said she saw her generation as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the stultifying, conformist Fifties. “Out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it. [But] I was not a part of that.”

Except of course the writer of ’Woodstock’ was. Giving up on social change after finding out you won’t be given it seems pretty on-brand for that description. With Mitchell, as with many others, the dominant subject of her music became herself. On the afore-mentioned ’Song For Sharon’ she sang, out loud and upfront:

“Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
“And lovely landscapes to discover
“But all I really want right now
“Is... find another lover”

And its the self-importance of singer-songwriters which so often grates. The genre often feels like First Word problems recited over some strummed guitar. Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck once called it the “privileging of individual angst”, while Mclusky recorded an album acidly titled ’My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours’.

All true. Except there’s a crucial difference between Mitchell recording ’Hejira’ and Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker. An artist’s first responsibility is to find what they’re good at and do that. There’s not a lot to be gained in demanding they write a song calling for the military-industrial complex be dissolved if their talents lie elsewhere. Mitchell was made to sing about the bittersweet richness of life, in all its complexities and self-contradictions. If it took her a little while to get round to that, she still got there. And anyway, personal relations, aren’t they part of life too? Or should we be stamping down Jericho full time?

As she said herself: “A lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on ’Hejira’ could only have come from me.” Or as she sang herself…

“People will tell you where they got
“They’ll tell you where to go
“But till you’ve got there yourself
“You never really know”

Besides, in her case that free-flowing, semi-conversational style mitigates against self-absorption. (Or at least too much of it.) She sings less like she’s shining a spotlight on her personal dramas and more like she’s catching up with us.

And also, for someone supposedly so self-obsessive, Mitchell could be acutely observational, pinning people with a phrase…

“Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure its stricken from your uniform
But you can’t get it our of your eyes”

And once more, there’s a companion musical shift. As said, post-’Blue’ she started the move to a fuller band. The music grew more intricate, bringing in brass and strings. This grew slowly, but was unmistakable by 1975’s ’The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, which even incorporated the jazz standard ’Centrepiece’.

’Ladies of the Canyon’ had, clearly enough, been her Laurel Canyon album, the backpackers and freewheeling hippies who passed through it drawn from her own crowd. Songs are like quick snapshots of life happening around her, friends caught in character poses. While ’Summer Lawns’ is definitely her take on LA – “the city of the fallen angels”. Its like a film, with a cast list full of larger-than-life figures. Which means the most inventive, the most musically rich Mitchell album is the one most concerned with artificiality. (“Beauty parlour blondes with credit card eyes/ Looking for the chic and the fancy/ To buy.”)

But then there’s a bend in the road.

By this point the ‘studio album’, rich with effects and overlays, had become a thing you did - cemented in the popular mind with ’Sergeant Pepper’. And, as with that example, there wasn’t much to do once you’d gone there but reverse back out again - go back to what you were doing before. And at least in part ’Hejira’ does this, goes back to the simpler and more direct songs of ’Blue’. Precisely one track has more than four players, most have three.

But at the same time the sound became more jazzy. Mitchell had always been as much a Jazz as a Folk fan and, feeling Rock musicians lacked finesse, she started to work with Jazz players. Perhaps starting off with LA Express playing on her 1974 album ’Court and Spark’. Which ended with the Jazz cover… yes cover, ‘Twisted’. But ’Hejira’ was the first of her albums to incorporate the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius, and involved her singing evocatively about “strains of Benny Goodman”. So the album which went back simultaneously went forwards. 'Summer Lawns’ had worn its sophistication on its sleeve, while ’Hejira’ held it closer to the heart.

Now Jazz to me is like chilli or garlic. You wouldn’t want to taste it on its own too much, but it can serve well when added to other things. And when added to Folk it creates a kind of sweet ’n’ sour. (Just think Pentangle.) This fretless playing just went with her lyrics, free-form music to give wing to her free-form narrative. (Not unlike Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.)

”Porous With Travel Fever”

Also, if the element running through ’Blue’ had been water, and the instrument piano, this changes too. This album featured not a note of piano. On ’Amelia’, she sees the vapour trails of six planes in the sky, and likens them to guitar strings. A track named, of course, after the aviation pioneer. Elsewhere she paid tribute to those “who’ll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline.” The music doesn’t seem even as bank-bound as ’Blue’, but passing in jets and flurries like air streams.

As is often, the immediate reason for the switch was simple and practical. It was largely written on a road trip across America, from LA to Maine, and a guitar had simply gone in the van easier. At one point she describes coming across a piano mid-journey, and falling on it like an ex-lover. But that necessity was fortuitous. When she picked up a guitar again, it was as if it was a new instrument. The result was, if not in the standard sense, a classic air guitar album.

And, yes, travel… The observant reader might want to point out she had written about travel before. Often, in fact. ’Blue’ had opened with the line “I am on a lonely road and I’m travelling”. But those travel songs tended to focus on place. ’California’ was sung to California, as if to a person. Here the travel itself was the thing, the road runs through the whole album. One track is titled *’The Refuge of the Roads’* and the highway appears on the cover superimposed over her figure, as if it’s what she has inside - a space where you’d expect a presence. She said herself: 

“I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”

The title track opens with “I’m travelling in some vehicle/ I’m sitting in some cafe”, and its the “some” which sticks out. It’s the smooth transience of the road which soothes you, like rubbing a succession of freshly laundered hotel towels across your cheek. Freedom is the absence of snags and ties, passing through places the way a ghost walks through walls. On ’Coyote’ the road offers odd-couple romances and one-night-stands, inoculated against entanglements. Because all the time you’re in some place you’re just some person, unencumbered by the associations and expectations of those who ‘know’ you.

She sang “Your life becomes a travelogue/ Of picture postcard charms.” And the songs are like travelogues, flitting from one incident to the next, passing a farmhouse on fire or a couple sitting out on a rock.

The result’s an album that’s literally as free as air. Not in the sports commentator sense of “I literally don’t know what literally means”, but literally as free as air. Drums, which usually play a grounding role in music, are so sedate you pretty much need to check the track listing to know when they’re there. (They appear on four tracks, percussion on three, while two feature neither, seeing as you asked.)

But then there’s a curve in the road.

Like a yin/yang sign, pursue one course for long enough and it’ll bend and turn and become its opposite. And with that in mind it would be tempting to take songs as antonyms, set the floaty, gossamer-light title track and ’Amelia’, the world seen from “clouds at icy altitudes”, against ’Song For Sharon’, with it’s more distinct pulse, and self-confessed hankering for human attachment. But, as is often the way with Mitchell, nothing is so clear-cut…

Faulkner wrote the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. He probably wasn’t thinking about Joni Mitchell, but he might as well have been. She writes not like she’s providing some summation of her life, where it all led to this, but mapping the beats of her heart. And ’Hejira’ frequently returns to her conflict between this wanderlust and a desire for the most tied of all knots. Described by her as ”the strongest poison and medicine of all.” Brought on not by a love affair, a one night stand or even a crush, but by spying “the long white dress of love” in a Staten Island window.

“In our possessive coupling
“So much could not be expressed
“So now I am returning to myself
“These things that you and I suppressed” 

But later in the same song she adds:

“I’m porous with travel fever
“But you know I’m so glad to be on my own
“Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
“Can set up a trembling in my bones”

And this is (as promised earlier) ’Song For Sharon’, sung as a letter to a home-town friend. Notably, Sharon’s possessions are material, Mitchell’s metaphysical…

“Sharon you've got a husband
“And a family and a farm
“I've got the apple of temptation
“And a diamond snake around my arm”

The concluding track is ’Refuge of the Roads’ as if Mitchell never really returned from that trip. But ’Song For Sharon’, the longest number, feels like the album’s centrepiece. Ultimately she doesn’t resolve any of this, or even try to. She just tells us it like it was.

To sum up… Heading for another drudgeful and demanding day of work one Monday morning with ’Hejira’ playing in my head, I figured that whatever transpired after I arrived, in that moment I was in free transit. An album that even makes Monday mornings more bearable. Who could ask for more?

'SILENCE'/ GNOD/ THE NECKS (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

‘SILENCE’
Black Rock, Brighton, Fri 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…

This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.

The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.

But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.

But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.

It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.



GNOD
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May

Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.

The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.

There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.

Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.

Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.

They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.

Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…



Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...

THE NECKS
St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May

If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.

The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.

Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.

Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.

And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’
There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.

A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…



… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…

Coming soon! Blog hols...

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE FESTIVAL

Various venues, Brighton, 26th-28th April

Just when you thought it was safe to take off those noise cancelling headphones… and two and a half years since the last outbreak of international experimental sound shenanigans in central Brighton… Colour Out Of Space is back! Now for the eighth time!

As said over the previous outing, the three days run the full range “from acts you willed to be over to those you never wanted to end.” And, having willed more than a few things to end this year (some played up quite highly in the programme), I won’t be reliving the memory here. With thirty-five acts in total (excluding talks, workshops, installations and a film show), covering the whole thing is hardly possible anyway. Mostly it’ll be stuff worth mentioning in dispatches which gets mentioned in dispatches.

Well, mostly…

Perhaps a minor gripe, but at times I confess I find this scene’s blanket audience approval a little indulgent. When so much that’s being created is highly experimental or entirely spontaneous, or highly experimental and entirely spontaneous, I can see a need for a supportive audience - one willing for things to work rather than fail. But default approval isn’t the same thing as blanket approval. Trying is good, but succeeding better.

Mostly this music doesn’t feature words, even when it involves vocals. And looking at a couple of misses might explain why that might be. The “I’m alienated me” vocals were the worst part of Wild Rani’s set, to the point you really wished she’d let the music do the talking. While Natalia Beylis’ vocals… well, more of a voiceover… felt kind of normalising, with their all-too-obvious swipes at the self-help-self-actualisation industry. Perhaps vocalisation risks banalisation, when we’re actually dealing with things too basic to be said. There’s a reason, after all, why Munch didn’t paint ‘The Speech’.

While conversely, with the Charles Mitchener duo (above), for one long section the vocals consisted of forcing a simple phrase from a reluctant throat, where the inability to articulate became not a barrier to overcome but the point of the thing. The result was a free jazz set which I actually liked! (If that sounds an odd title for a duo, it’s a team-up of Neil Charles and Elaine Mitchener.)

Then again, Glands of Eternal Secretion’s set didn’t get into gear until the second section. Where he gave up scraping tins with kitchen knives (an action which proved to have diminishing returns), to tell an absurdist narrative, no more reducible to sense than the music it accompanied.

Olivier Brisson didn’t just collage together sounds from a range of sources, including tapes, samples and live sounds. His set seemed to combine different ways of listening, from composite sounds to close listening to - like a movie ranging from cinemascope to microscopic view.

Whereas, though equally composed of samples, Red Brut seemed to smooth them together, blending them into something which always seemed to make some sort of sense. (If one you could never actually describe.) In the distinction between Dadaist collage (rough, juxtapositional, abrasive) and Surrealist (presenting the strangest of things as if somehow credible), she was definitely in the second group. Though apparently she also drums in a No Wave band, this set couldn’t have been any more sublime.

Laptop artists can sit so still on stage you find yourself believing they’re transmitting music by the power of thought alone. Then there’s others who, without touching anything as mainstream as an instrument, couldn’t be any more hands on. The show had the smarts to place Jérôme Noetinger’s (above) tape manipulations in the middle of the auditorium, and I got to sit fairly close.

I always get these details wrong but it appeared to me he was live-recording direct onto tape, while also manipulating its sound with magnets, found objects and so on. (I also watched him set up and, archetypically Gallic, his first action was to uncork, scrutinise the label and sip from a bottle of red before touching the first bit of equipment.)

Though where you’d place Af Ursin in that range I’m not sure. He played bowed strings against metal plates. At least as far as you could tell, as he stood behind the plates, blocking off any view of him above some very rock’n’roll-looking ankles. One hand many have been playing bass and the other treble, but that was about the only concession to standard musicality. The result was spectral if anything ever deserved the word. You’d tune in to the point where relatively small shifts seemed magnified. If was one of those sets which convinces you consensus reality was only ever a hoax, and is now breaking down all around you. At least for their duration.

As a gag, for their booklet photo, the Elks superimposed their heads over a group shot of Metallica (above). Knowing little of Metallica, and generally being happier that way, I knew not of this. (I also believe everything I read on social media.) So, spying slouched figures in ripped jeans, I assumed a noise band.

In fact they hovered at the limits of perceptibility as much as Af Ursin. Two wind players barely breathed down their instruments, accompanied by two electronic know twiddlers. The music happened not by outright statement but by the barest hints and whispers. My over-poetic analogy would be coming across an ancient tablet, the script upon it sand-blown and the strange characters barely discernible, but all the more compellingly mysterious for that.

The show had the smarts to programme two complementary opposite acts for the Saturday night finale. White Death’s set was almost as if broadcast by sonar - warm, fuzzy and resonant. It was the musical equivalent of being read a bedtime story, simultaneously comforting and bracingly adventurous. The performer was notably pregnant, which led to musing how that might have affected her set.

…shortly followed by Bill Nace and Twig Harper (above). Nace produced wave after wave or bowed, treated guitar, while Harper spoke in tongues over the top. Not music which immersed you in it but which struck you powerfully. If White Death took you below the waterline, they were all stormy surface.

As said after the third outing, it shouldn’t be assumed a festival such as this covers the ’edge’ of music, as if inhabiting a narrow margin where only one thing is on offer. It’s the very reverse, demonstrating how closed-up our conception of ‘music’ normally is. You generalise at your peril. But it was noticeable how many sets felt mediumistic, in one way or another. Inaudible voices were in regular supply, often in foreign languages. (Perhaps not to the performers. But we’re going with my subjective reaction here.)

Of course those who hear messages in short wave radio static from their dead Auntie Mable are being hubristic, assuming the universe must be full of decodable messages meant directly for them. But we can apply the principle more generally, where the purpose of tuning into the ether is not to receive some specific thing. but make us more reflective. I believe Huxley’s phrase about cleansing the doors of perception may have already been claimed by some band. But if it hadn’t, it would fit in well around here.

The three days finished with Tomutontto (back from the fourth outing), playing what could only be described as dance music for the faerie folk. To which people responded with yer actual dancing, not always a COOS staple! Yet in another way it was a fitting finale…

For COOS has a somewhat Brigadoon-like existence; vanishing from sight until you believe it will never visit our Earthly shores again, and you probably just imagined the whole thing anyway, then reappearing unexpectedly to circumvent all our common laws and customs. Will there be a ninth? It’s probably like one of those movies ending with the hushed line “will we ever see the like of this again?”

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS/ JULIA WOLFE’S ‘ANTHRACITE FIELDS’ (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS
The Dome, Brighton, Tues 15th Jan

One facet of Bang on a Can, the All-Stars describe themselves as: “freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories.”

Last time I saw the All-Stars themselves (rather than extended family members), the programme was built around a concept - samples and field recordings. Hewing consistently to the concept led to a night which was intriguing but inconsistent musically. This time the programme was bound to no theme, and no piece was less than fully involving.

Two numbers might get classed under the general tag ‘ambient’ - Philip Glass’s ’Opening’ (from ’Glassworks’) and Brian Eno’s ’Music For Airports 1’. As a big Glass fan, and someone who mostly finds Eno’s ambient works only formally interesting, I expected to find myself favouring the first option. Added to which Eno’s work wasn’t written to be performed but constructed from tape loops. Had I been asked beforehand about the wisdom of transposing it to live musicians, I’d doubtless have said no.

Which is another reason to be glad that no-one listens to me. However much I enjoyed the Glass, the Eno most won me over. It gave off a sense of slo-mo dynamics, of suggesting it was slowly but surely building to a climax which never came. The sense of ceaseless anticipation made the piece compelling.

But, beholden to no other task, the set maxed out on variety. The closer was the invigorating’Horses of Instruction’, by British composer Steve Martland. It somehow found the perfect balance of contemporary composition with the rambunctious involving feeling of beat music, Blake’s smart horses and blazing tigers combined into one creature. The jazzy syncopated funk workout, complete with honking sax, transformed the body language of the players. As they swung and swayed along, an ensemble became a band before your eyes.

Some local stalwarts refer to ‘Old Brighton’, a bohemian spirit the town had before it was overrun with hipsters and everything became monetised. Formed in ’92, Bang On a Can seem similarly ‘old New York’, before the “Disneyland for the rich” thing, when a wide variety of people were crammed together into a few islands. The music of your neighbours would inevitably seep into your apartment, and so the natural thing to do was mix it all up.

They carry with them the all-important understanding that great music doesn’t stem from the brows of lone geniuses, in ivory tower isolation, but from collaboration and cultural cross-fertilisation. They’re not just good, they’re exemplary.

From the sublime (‘Music For Airports’ performed in an airport, with announcements added ambience…



… to the spirited! ’Horses of Instruction’, also not from Brighton…



JULIA WOLFE’S ‘ANTHRACITE FIELDS’
Bang On a Can with the BBC Singers
Kings Place, London, Sat 19th Jan

Though this new composition was by Bang On a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe and cited the All-Stars first, it’s based around the chorus. (The programme explains it was commissioned by an American choral group.) The All-Stars do nothing, or contribute quite minimally, for long periods. Not previously realising I had any preconceptions, I soon found I had to switch them off.

Like Wolfe’s earlier ‘Steel Hammer’, the work has to do with American labour history. However unlike either ‘Steel Hammer’ or ‘Cruel Sister’, it wasn’t based on folk songs but something more buried. In both senses of the word.

Anthracite was best-quality coal. Which didn’t necessarily translate into best working conditions for the guys who dug it. In the programme Wolfe explains she grew up in Pennsylvania near the mines. Yet the family car almost always turned in the opposite direction to them. Neither modern composers nor their central London audiences tend to be ex-miners, which is part of the point.

For example, the movement ’Breaker Boys’ is based on recollections ex-miner Shorty Slick gave to a documentary. My initial response was concern that transposing his words onto a choir might run a little close to speaking for someone. Why not just do the Steve Reich thing, I thought, and just run a recording of the voice? Especially when Wolfe often uses Reich’s trick of using the cadences of speech for rhythms.

But in fact, just as Slicks’s job was to sort rock from coal, the reciting chorus sorts out his feelings and leaves us with the brute facts. For example how soon you’d lose your fingernails to the work. And much of the texts used are just that - texts. Dry information, often provided in a list format. The opening movement, ’Foundation’, recites names from an index of mining accident. As Wolfe notes in the programme, “the list is sadly long”. But supplying that sadness falls to you.

And you can see how this works all the better from the time the piece does the opposite. ’Speech’ comes, as you might expect, from a speech. Given by a Miner’s Union president, on paper its involving and effective. (“If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine that we call modern America…” is its start.) 

But as performed the words are sung not by the choir but solo, in an emotive rock/folk style, which serves to rob them of their effect through over-enunciation. When an artist merely lays an idea before you, leaving you to pick it up, you’ll feel it more solidly in your hand.

Overall the work’s eclectic, inventive and compelling, ranging between ominous drone, scatting jazz and polyphonic choral music, It’s so densely packed it feels longer than its hour duration. (In, you know, a good way.) But the upside is simultaneously the downside, and it feels more uneven than ’Steel Hammer’. Mostly because of ’Speech’, but also in parts of the final movement ’Appliances’.

A short documentary on its creation…

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...

CHRIS WATSON/ A CERTAIN RATIO/ SUN RA ARKESTRA (GIG GOING ADVENTURES)

CHRIS WATSON’S ‘NO MAN’S LAND’
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Falmer, Brighton, Thurs 29th March



Onetime member of acerbic electronica post-punks Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson has embarked on a solo career you could never have predicted but still seems entirely fitting. He captures the sounds for David Attenborough and other nature docs, while releasing his field recordings in his own right. (If anyone from Kajagoogoo is now doing something so cool, I wait to be told about it.) He’s now providing a “spatialised audio journey of the imagination”, where you hear one of his sound art creations in sensurround. (And still on until Sunday the 8th!)

Sight seems very much the dominants sense in our culture, we casually use phrases such as “I see what you mean”. Sound is very often reduced to signifiers – car horns, alarms, you’ve got mail – the merely incidental or even the intrusive. The sound of the town gets treated as just noise pollution, which means we conceive of nature as effective silence, the “peace and quiet” of the countryside.

But consign sound to the edge and it becomes associated with that edge, with the liminal and uncanny. Soundtracks become more significant for horror or science fiction flicks than any other kind of film, more necessary for the atmosphere they’re evoking. Cabaret Voltaire, I’m afraid, are another subject I know little of. But what I’ve heard doesn't depart from post-punk’s Dadaism, a wrench thrown in the mechanism of music. Whereas his field recordings are more similar to Surrealism, which treated art as a springboard for a voyage of personal discovery. Surrealists were always collecting found objects, such as strangely shaped pebbles, for that reason.

The event’s title effectively references all that. As we sat or lay in the centre of a near-dark room surrounded by speakers, it became almost like that scene in jungle films, where the white expeditionary force sit around the campfire, hearing the strange cries all around them.

Smartly, Watson starts his sound journey on Brighton beach, where it’s easy enough to attach images to the sounds (I can never feel too far from home if I can hear a seagull.) But he soon dispenses with those handy tags and departs for shores unknown. The blurb explains the journey “takes the listener from the edge of Brighton’s beach and out with the ebbing tide… on a trackless voyage around the planet from the ocean floor.” Which I’d read but happily then forgotten, so discovered in real time that this trip would be taking us beneath the waves.

Someone watching our reaction, with most people sprawled out on the floor, might have thought this was no more than a bliss-out exercise, a sonic massage. But it actuality illustrated the distinction between atmospheric and evocative. Even though I knew Watson’s only contribution to the sounds was to edit them, it was impossible not to hear what happened as a composition. While, much as you listen to music more closely when the words are taken away, there in the dark you listened to the strange sounds quite intently indeed. (And in their own right. A sign on the wall chronologically listed the sources, but I think most attendees didn’t consult it until afterwards.)

I’d watched a section of a filmed conversation between Watson and Attenborough before the show, and by chance they’d talked about the effect of sound on the pre-born. And aquatic sounds similarly seem to trigger some buried memory of womb states, with the sounds you hear simultaneously entirely unfamiliar and comforting.

Music… sound art, whichever you prefer to call it… always seems at its most effective when it doesn’t just change the way you hear music but they way you hear the world around you. And waiting before the bus home by the busy A23, I realised I was hearing the whirr of each passing car as a phased note in some industrial symphony. Once you’re tuned in, it takes a lot longer to tune out...

Watson interviewed by the irrepressible Graham Duff on Totally Radio here.

From an earlier, different version of ’No Man’s Land’...



A CERTAIN RATIO
The Haunt, Brighton, Sun 25th March

Alas, fate may have pinned A Certain Ratio to the mast of a misjudged but brief fashion statement. In the (unashamedly mythologised) history of the Factory records scene, ’24 Hour Party People’, their only appearance is in order for them to sport some khaki shorts on stage. Notably, they’re not in such attire today.

Let’s jump to the first encore track. A slow, sparse keyboard motif launched the number, which was then not replaced by but combined with a frenetic, pummelling groove. Notably, the main singer has the same dry, intonatory tones of New Order’s Bernie Sumner. While the second main singer (well, she’s more than a backing vocalist) emits rich, soulful tones. And when the band are working is when they manage to make those two things interlock.

Which may sound like a euphemistic way of saying we’re dealing with a mixed-race band. Something which surely shouldn’t be worthy of comment in this day and age. But there is more to it than that. Formed back in ‘77, ACR are generally thought of as part of the post-punk scene. A feature of which was white folks being influenced by contemporary black music in ways which wasn’t merely imitative, after seeing earlier imitations which had ended up as watered down and second rate.

Hence we have a white-boy, suit-and-tie take on funk, dubbed “funk noir” by Simon Reynolds. It’s restrained to the point of being clipped. The band’s name even comes from a Brian Eno lyric. The clarinetist, for example, plays not at all for much of the time. And when he does play he doesn’t play much, the briefest snatches, like he’s constantly thinking where and when to make his mark. But this white-boy funk, soon as invented, is recombined with the get-down world of black funk, cool colliding with cold. If it was a foodstuff it would be a sweet’n’sour.

But often the two don’t align so much as merge, and then they get along together too well. Which ends up as... well, a funk band. A very good funk band, admittedly, but one which hints at so much more. There’s no let up in quality to speak of, but there is one in originality.

It might seem a peculiarity of music history that ACR were one of the most prescient of post-punk bands, yet not one of the best remembered. (The Haunt’s packed out, but confined to us oldsters.) They were channelling a black American influence before New Order, despite both being Factory acts. They were serving up dance music via a band format some way before the Happy Mondays. Yet while I’ve quoted Simon Reynolds’ post-punk account ’Rip It Up And Start Again’ up above, he only really mentions them in passing.

But the answer may lie less in the ill-judged shorts than in a rephrasing of the question. The point of post-punk was to be awkward, to resist categorisation, to repel pigeon-holing, to become nail that couldn’t be hammered flat into the face of musical history. There remains to this day something inscrutable about the Fall and Joy Division, which makes them endlessly fascinating. Whereas ACR worked too well, too neatly.

Or perhaps the problem’s time. I’m woefully ignorant of the band’s history, but the thought occurs they may have sorted themselves into more of a regular funk band as time went on, their edge progressively blunted. Perhaps significantly, their first release, ’The Graveyard and the Ballroom’ was divided into ’Graveyard’ and ’Ballroom’ sides, yin opposing yang yet becoming it. Those more knowledgeable than me are welcome to comment...

Not from Brighton, despite the date YouTube gives it…


SUN RA ARKESTRA
Con Club, Lewes, Sun 1st April



Almost a year after last landing in Lewes, the longstanding space jazz ensemble return, still honouring the memory of their now departed main main.

“If we came from nowhere here, why can’t go somewhere there?” runs one of their manta-like lyrics. And over the course of a nigh-on two-and-a-half hour set, they take in nowhere here (somewhat standard loungey jazz), somewhere there (places you’d neither been nor knew existed), all points between and – perhaps most bizarrely – both at once. It frequently felt like attending a cocktail party on Mars.

Not only that, but the whole gig seems programmed on shuffle, leaving you with no idea what would happen next, or where you’d find it on the scale between banal and sublime. There were sections I essentially took as the intermission between the features. But at other points I even found myself adapting to relay soloing, something I normally find anathema.

It’s actually less maddening than that description might make it seem, not least because of the ensemble’s cheery assurance that there’s a method somewhere in all their madness. As said last time “it's not chin-stroking music to chew on, it's joyous, exuberant and energising. If it doesn't quite teleport you to Saturn you can almost feel your feet lifting from the ground.” Band leader Marshall Allan, despite now being in his Nineties, really does lead, directing the ensemble and joining in himself. In their brightly coloured costumes, they even come across like some cosmic form of showbiz. Ensemble members leap into the audience from time to time, still playing, encouraging us to sing along.

In fact so strangely random was the set that with the two stand-out tracks, each came not as an opener or finale but at the mid-point in each of the two sets. One sung of angels and demons, and I would be hard pressed to describe it now. While the other was their anthem, ’Space Is the Place’. Except entirely different. 

In today’s bids for pseuds’ corner, imagine the recorded version as like being in the midst of sub-atomic particles, fragments ceaselessly turning and orbiting one another, according to some system clearly operating yet whose workings were inscrutable to you. While this version was based on a pulse. Over which the brass would at times line up and blast in unison, like birds along a telephone wire, and at others fly off in flurries.

Coming soon! Gig-going adventures will come again...

MIKE WATT + IL SOGNO DEL MARINAIO (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Sun 1st Oct

When the pre-set PA emitted a steady supply of jazz, it was a sign that Mike Watt might not necessarily be returning to his hardcore punk roots that particular evening.

Il Sogno del Marinaio (aka The Sailor’s Dream) are Watt plus a duo from Bologna. The music’s a form of jazz fusion, combining the power chords of hard rock with the fast-fingered restlessness of jazz. There were few vocal numbers, and even when they appear vocals are brief and passing. Rather than aligning with the drums, at the back of the sound, Watt’s bass moves alongside the guitar. Like duo guitarists, except where one was a bass. (If you follow.)

It didn’t do the thing you might fear most. In combining the cool of jazz with the heatedness of rock, you could easily lose the unique qualities of either and end up merely lukewarm. Whereas these waters were too unstill for that. But there were points where the endless turns and tangents lost me. And when freneticism becomes an end in itself it goes nowhere. It was like biting into a stacked sandwich, but unable to combine the tastes in your mouth. Getting only mustard, then only lettuce, then only cheese, then back to the only mustard again.

It’s true, of course, that jazz was an element in Watt’s original band, the legendary Minutemen. But there it was only ever an element, like a secret ingredient slipped in to spice the taste rather than make up the taste itself. A little jazz can go a long way, while a lot can just accumulate. 

And it’s true, of course, that Watt’s previous visit to our shores with the Missingmen, performing ‘Hyphenated_Man’ had quickfire changes apleanty. But that felt like a series of musical miniatures compressed within one frame. It was driven by concision, not aptitude.

Yet if it only worked at times, in those times it did work. Highlights for me included an idiosyncratic take on ‘Fun House’ as an encore, reminding us Watt served time in the reconstituted Stooges. And a number whose vocals merely took the form of a war cry, like words were just obstacles to expression.

Not from Brighton (again)…

SUNN 0)))/ SUN RA ARKESTRA/ YAMATO DRUMMERS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SUNN 0)))

Barbican, London, Tues 21st March

Waiting near me outside the auditorium, two vikings in black hoodies babbled away to one another in German. Every so often one would say “Throbbing Gristle”, they'd then drop back into German. Then, a minute or so later, one would say “Throbbing Gristle” again. While a sign on the door above them warned of impending “high level sound levels and dense haze”.

I figured I was in the right place.

This marked my second chance to see legendary drone metal band Sunn 0))), and while they inevitably don't have quite the same impact when not filling a small seafront club with their sonic force, so powerful as to be physical, they remain an unmissable live experience.

Vocalist Attila Csuhar opened the gig with some liturgical chanting, which he'd then mix in with more guttural tones - part-way to throat singing. This section did, if truth be told, go on a bit. In fact a fairly sizeable segment of the audience didn't show up until it was ending, presumably forewarned and forearmed.

But as that was the gig's only weak point, let's focus on another aspect. Despite the band's signature uniform of monk habits and customary banks of dry ice, I don't think the intent here is really sacrilegious – like the sonic equivalent of an inverted crucifix. In fact it's nearer to... well religious, those mixed-chant vocals more intended to compare than contrast. 

Despite the band having arisen from the black metal scene, despite their almost fearsome reputation as the heaviest of them all, their sound isn't really oppressive. Like a lot of religious music, it's actually elevating. Rather than relying on any kind of shock effect, it's involving and even contemplative. To the point where even us non-religious types find it takes us out of ourselves. It induces a kind of aum state without any of the dippy New Age shit.

For one thing, they don't let that heavy tag hold them down and are quite happy to break with expectation. In a lengthy mid-section the wall-of-noise guitars walk right offstage and a quite plaintive trombone starts up. And if sludge metal has already been made a genre, I suppose there's no reason why we can't also have sludge jazz.

Also, and more importantly, there's a solidity – a kind of one-ness - to their sound. It's pretty much pitched at the point where black metal becomes drone. It's difficult and at times impossible to pick out individual instruments. Even the keyboards, which are sometimes prominent, play neither above or along to the guitars – they more play along to the resonances between them.

While heavy rock tends to be blues music with added volume Sun 0))) seem unrooted in rock tradition. In fact in the programme they complain of how once-normal listening practices have been undermined in the past forty years, like a near-half century is just a bump in the road. Most noticeable by it's absence, with neither bass nor drums there's none of the release of rock music, none of the sense that music's a means to let it all out.

In fact, despite their strong overlaps with noise music, they demonstrate how rockist the noise scene can be. They don't just dress like monks, they're as disciplined as them. Though the singer stands to the front, neither he nor the others gives off any impression of individual personality. Even when they sup a beer on stage, a single bottle is passed between the lot of them like a sacrament.

Founder member Stephen O’Malley has described their sound as “more raga than … rock. And despite the fact that the walls were literally shaking from volume, it was actually quite a blissed out, psychedelic session.” (Though speaking of a particular album.) While in the programme Csihar compares it to “the music of the plants, and that's why it's so slow and enormous”. Which seems reminiscent of Andrew Marvell's old poem “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow”.

Let's jump from Marvell to Elvis Costello, who once sang “The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark/ It scares you witless, then in time you see things clear and stark”. He could have been thinking of Sunn 0))). There's a kind of double trajectory afoot. What might originally hit the listener as a sonic onslaught slowly transforms itself into something serene, pummelling fists morphing into massaging hands. 

Moreover, from what I know of the earlier albums, that also fits the history of the band - they were more abrasive and discordant at the beginning. Which also fits the history of Earth, enough of an influence for Sunn 0))) to name themselves in a kind of paralleling tribute. Or the way the doom metal of Sleep transformed into the trance of Om. To get to the light, it seems you need to go through the dark tunnel.

And that half-transfer, half-dichotomy is something you often see in art evoking the sublime. What first appears to you as an overwhelming, pulverising force soon comes to feel like rejoining where you really belong. Perhaps, were Turner alive today, he'd have ditched his oils and joined a drone metal band.

SUN RA ARKESTRA

Con Club, Lewes, Wed 29th March

”They say history repeats itself. But that's his story. My story doesn't repeat itself. Why should it? My story is endless”

Last time I was at this venue, to see Jah Wobble, I was committing myself to print in saying I am no fan of jazz. So what do I do but head back for what's unambiguously a jazz gig?

But then of course this is no regular gig. It's not a matter of public record how Herman Poole Blount's parents reacted when he told them he'd teleported to Saturn to commune with the spirits there, and been told to devote himself to music as a means to solve the problems of the Earth. They most probably thought it was an elaborate excuse to drop out of college, which was the first thing he was insisting on doing. But he went through with it, changing his name to Sun Ra in the process, and throughout his life stuck to that story and to his guns. (His discography is this big.) He was more or less to jazz what Lee Perry was to reggae, where there's no point trying to separate what was genius from what was lunacy.

And if Sun Ra himself ceased having even a tangential connection to this Earth back in '93, the Arkestra continues under the direction of Marshall Allan. (Who is himself 92, having played with the Arkestra for 57 years.) After two successive sell-outs, they ended up playing a three-night residency, of which I caught the middle event. Living up to their “my story is endless” promise they played for over two and a half hours, a completely different set from the first night, and cheerily announced at the end the third night would be something different again.

Those freak free impro days now seem done and dusted, with band members even sporting music stands. The set most matched Wikipedia's' Philadelphia period, a kind of cosmic jazz to match the cosmic soul of the times. (The era the classic 'Space is the Place' album came from.)

And in fact the downside of the gig wasn't it falling into indigestible squonk but becoming tasteful enough to have safely ported onto an episode of Jools Holland. There were, I confess, points where it lost my interest.

But the highlights were... well, befitting Sun Ra's cosmic aspirations I'd have to say higher than sky high. Despite their daunting reputation, the Arkestra have a strong melodic sense and the ability to form into a powerful rhythm section. For a jazz band, they sure are funky! The brass in particular seemed able to play along with the line, then each instrument find a way to veer off into it's own thing while still holding that line aloft. (And to think I once found Led Zeppelin tight but loose!)

The best tracks, for me at least, started off with a vocal – somewhere between a repeated spoken phrase and a chant. These were often cosmic aphorisms which would probably seem platitudinously New Agey out of context, but in context were like a foot sliding into a slipper. (And besides, the one quoted up top does have it's appeal.) The ensemble would then work around them, in a manner not entirely unlike Steve Reich's penchant for finding music phrases in the cadences of the spoken word.

Perhaps the main thing is convey is that it's not chin-stroking music to chew on, it's joyous, exuberant and energising. If it doesn't quite teleport you to Saturn you can almost feel your feet lifting from the ground. Space really is the place.

This was from the first night...

And after seeing Sunn 0))) and Sun Ra, of course I then went to see Sun Kil Moon again. No, actually it was...

YAMATO: THE DRUMMERS OF JAPAN

Brighton Dome, Thurs 30th March

After seeing the Kodo drummers some three years ago, I am it seems becoming something of a regular for Japanese drum ensembles at the Dome. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were many similarities between the two, above all the same combination of absolute discipline and unleashed frenzy. And it demonstrates what a timbral range can exist just from different varieties of drum.

But Kodo's art had been very much a martial one. You could imagine them arising as one at six AM on their South Pacific island, and starting their morning practice by twenty past. They were intent on what they were doing, single-minded to the point of being cult-like.

Yamato are much more showbizzy, sporting bright costumes over uniform black vests. There's stage antics, visual gags, acrobatic playing, ample audience participation and even individual personalities emerging from the players. At times it did become so circusy I half expected a guy with a moustache to come on, and hold a chair up to a mangy old lion.

But we're probably best taking that as description rather than criticism. Being structured unashamedly like a show gives things an ever-relentless dynamic. They barely stopped even for applause. Perhaps they had less musicality than Kodo, but they so successfully keep you watching you don't particularly notice at the time.

My favourite moment was when the drummers were joined by the Japanese banjo. (Which probably has some special name, which probably isn't “the Japanese banjo”.) It was an unusual pairing, which they were really able to make work.

This TV appearance is from some while back, but gives a good flavour for what they do...