avant garde

Bohemian Ripsody

Gary Lucas — Fri, 20 May 2022 22:21:15 +0000

Bohemian Ripsody Gary Lucas May 20, 2022 - 18:21

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Pst Fulgoni, GL and Richard “Faust” Mader

And here's a 'nother one, 'nother one…

this one concerning Czech rock legend Richard Mader, aka Faust.

Richard is one of the really good guys in my pantheon over 40 plus years of peripatetic wanderlust, criss-crossing the globe in search of musical frissons.

A charter member of the Czech underground scene as principal guitarist and songwriter of his band UrFaust (contemporaneous with my old friends the legendary Plastic People of the Universe), Richard was unbeknownst to me ringside at my solo stand at the Jazz Club Železná, situated in a basement in the heart of Prague's Old Town, on Feb. 10th 1996, when I pulled in there with my Dutch driver / golem Eric Don in Eric's rickety old VW van.

We'd just driven in from Halle Germany after a night playing at the Turm -- a cool 15th century tower with an underground cellar / performance space.

The Železná was packed and Faust was part of a crowd that included Plastic People founder & bassist Milan "Mejla" Hlavsa, saxophonist Vrat Brabanec, singer / poet Pavel Zajíček, and various other members of Plastic People off-shoot groups DG 307, Půlnoc, as well as the entire Czech underground arts entourage, which included the brothers David and Ondřej Němec, whose mother Dana has been one of the Charter 77 signers along with her good friend Václav Havel. This pair did jail time for their "subversive activities" under the former Russian-backed government (as had the Plastic People).

Anyway, I rocked them all but good, leaving them hollering for more.

My kind of town, Prague!

Couple months later Faust turns up in NYC with his gal-pal aide de camp lyricist Marta Paduchová, knocks on my apartment door, and proposes a collaboration involving my "ghastly guitar." (He meant "ghostly, " and there is a kind of haunted quality to a lot of my work.) I agreed then and there.

And thus was borne what became an epic album in my discography entitled The Ghosts of Prague (1996, Faust Records), lyrically based on Czech ghost stories translated into English by Marta, and featuring the golden pipes of UK vocalist Pat Fulgoni (Kava Kava), along with several notable Czech female experimental vocalists (including jazz singer Jana Kubková, and my favorite lady screamer, the late Mirka Křivánková who sadly died of cancer last year). So this album comes out to brilliant reviews in the Czech music press and Faust asks if I'm up for a series of gigs all over the CR that fall of '96.

I'm down with that!

Faust books a solo tour of at least a dozen dates all over the Czech Republic, with him driving.Concerts include the elegant be-chandeliered Síň B. Martinů (a medieval church in Trutnov named for Czech composer Bohuslav Jan Martinů), a concert in Prague's sumptuous art-deco hotspot the Roxy (formerly a 1920s Yiddish theatre, now hosting all sorts of sonic mayhem)…concluding with a concert in Litomerice, just down the road apiece from Terezin concentration camp -- the iron gates to the camp emblazoned still with the chilling legend "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Set You Free). Which still rings true.

And which brings us to what may have been my worst...well, let's say my most vivid touring experience to date...the night Faust booked me into The Cotton Club; essentially a largish country and western honky-tonk in Hradec Králové (literally "Queen's Castle") -- a charming Bohemian medieval town on the river Elbe.

In those days I was supremely happy to get bookings in such an exotic place (to me, at that point) as the Czech Republic. I just accepted these type of gigs automatically with not too many questions asked.

What an idiot!!

After selling out a few shows at the start of the tour with Faust as my driver & tour manager, I got around to asking him what these concerts were paying me exactly, certain we had gone into percentages — the usual touring deal being a flat guarantee versus 80% of the door, whichever is larger — and Richard rattled off a price in Czech crowns. Which sounded impressive until I asked him what that amount translated to in "real money;" i.e., in US dollars.

"About 300 dollars," he told me, without missing a beat.

I hit the roof.

"That's ALL??"

"Yes. But do not think of it as 300 dollars, Gary. Think of it as 300 beers!"

"Well that's swell, Richard. If only I drank beer." (I'm an inveterate teetotaler).

"300 dollars is what the average Czech family makes in a month!!" he retorted pompously, trying to guilt-trip me.

"But I'm not Czech! I live in New York City, which is quite a bit more expensive than this neck o' the woods, as you know.?"

And so it went.

As the owner, cook, and chief bottle-washer of Faust Records -- who had just released an album which for lending my playing and composing services to I'd received zero compensation to date -- Faust obviously had his eye on the bottom-line.

Thus, the idea of booking me for essentially bupkes up and down the CR in order to maximize sales had proven irresistible to him.

For me, such a tour was what they call a "career-builder" -- if not a character-builder. But hey, it was the Czech Republic. Substitute Russia, Cuba, South Korea, India, China, Brazil, Japan etc., here -- in other words, a whole bunch of far-away exotic places most US musicians will never get to play, let alone get to see, and you will understand why I put up with (at times) the economic and physical stress of my early touring years.

Every new territory I played in, I was adding another notch on my "been there, done that" belt. Also, of course, I was hoping to win over folks by playing my heart out for virtually nothing. (Check out "I Kill You For Nothing," my Marx Bros. music medley in my early repertoire). I was trying to increase the fan base, basically, one fan at a time.

So I was down (at this point) with the Faust program. Lotsa new Czech fans were being minted nightly. Not much income coming in, though, but generally it was Big Fun on the road with the sardonic and amiable Faust.

He was and remains good touring company, Big Fun, that is -- until the night we waltzed into the Cotton Club, right off the main drag of Hradec Králové.

Now said club had nothing to do with its legendary Harlem nightclub namesake. Nope, this was Cotton as in I wish I was in the Land of Cotton…with an actual Confederate flag hanging in the window. Also a poster done up by the club specially for the occasion, sporting my current publicity photo and some text in Czech:

"Gary Lucas hrál s Lou Reedem, Iggyho Popa a Joana Osborna".

(Gary Lucas has played with Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Joan Osborne.)

It was not a bad-looking club, actually, a 200-seater, with an actual balcony. Lotsa country and western kitsch up on the walls. Kind of a deluxe Wild West saloon you might say...The pièce de résistance, though, was the club-owner / promoter and his fetching wife. A mustachioed, pot-bellied, greasy-haired dude dressed in an actual Nudie's of Hollywood western suit spangled with rhinestones, and a Long Tall Texan-type cowboy hat to top it off, replete with a fat-ass, blowsy wife, dressed like the ghost of Belle Starr (Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues), or more accurately Diamond Lil' Davenport packed into a skin-tight satin outfit replete with plunging neckline, and humongous breasts a hangin' out.

These two birds and their techie factotums saw us come in with our gear, and remained stony-faced, like an oil painting, silent and unsmiling, and then I heard Faust mutter an aside under his breath:

"Next time we come with band. The drummer had a foot injury last week anyway and can't play."

News to me and a non-sequitur.

Not once had Richard ever discussed touring with any kind of ensemble.

So I basically schluffed off his remark, saying nothing.

Nope, it was always gonna be me in there solo; my eternal default mode -- kind of how I've managed to stay in the music biz for 40-plus years, by hook or by crook.

No one from the club, the promoter and his wife included, said anything. They just watched the two of us come in, unpack, set up, and soundcheck.

Come showtime, and the joint was solidly packed -- sold-out -- balcony included.

I did my usual wham-bam-thank you-ma'am 60 minutes plus, taking everyone on a musical trip up into the blue empyrean, then down to the Stygian depths, and back again...then did two encores. An hour and half's worth of music, and then I walked off stage to significant applause.

I came back out and marched over to the merch table where there were a bunch of fans lined up to buy my cds -- now including The Ghosts of Prague.

Faust and me

Suddenly, I hear Faust raising his voice loudly in Czech. I look over...and he is in a heated argument with the club owner, who is shit-faced drunk -- fucking foaming-at-the mouth piss-drunk plastered -- and he is shouting back at Faust even more loudly:

"I pay for BAND!! NOT solo! Where was LOU REEDEM?? WHERE WAS IGGYHO POPA??"

I can't believe I'm hearing this.

Faust is red in the face trying to argue back with this creep -- who is now doubling down on the bullshit:

"I pay for BAND!! There WAS NO BAND!!"

"No Hay Banda." - David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

His scarlet lady looks on disdainfully, haughtily sneering at me while her paramour makes mincemeat of Faust.

I slump down on the reinforced steel rim of one of my Calzone flight cases, covered with stickers from all over the world. Oh the places I've been… but I'd never (yet!) seen anything like this before.

As rip-offs go, it was kind of original.

Apparently, Faust had contracted with the guy for a full band….not one of course with Lou Reedem and Iggy Popa in the lineup.

Still, a band.

So Richard was technically responsible for getting us into this pickle. (I say us because, hey, it was a long way from Prague to Hradec Králové and back -- about 3 hours each way.)

Still, the club owner had seen us come in there...and had said nothing about the absence of a band.

He'd taken the tickets, sold the drinks -- in fact, he had sold the place out, and made a tidy profit on the night. And not one customer had complained about lack of band thereof. (I am a one-man band). But for whatever reason (a loophole—a mere technicality), this guy was now raking us over the coals -- ripping us off and fucking us over (do you detect a pattern here?).

Faust came over to me, supremely agitated:

"He's crazy, Gary! He's totally drunk. He's COMPLETELY CRAZY!!"

He doesn't want to pay!! He will not listen to reason!!"

I slumped on my case thoroughly sickened by this state of affairs, feeling helpless in the situation.

"Let's get the fuck out of here, Faust!!"

I mean, if I had sucked, and no one had turned up, and the promoter had lost a lot of money on the night, I might have understood...slightly.

I still would have expected to GET PAID.

As I, in my 44th year on earth had been putting my life (and my health) on the line for years to pursue the dream of my chosen profession (that of miracle worker). I mean, I had taken the risk of traveling across a goddamn ocean to Bumfuck CR in order to "play for the people".

I mean, I had fully signed up for this.

And I was not gonna stand for this.

But meanwhile -- let's get the fuck outa here...

A fan came over and said:

"Gary, you should go to the police. This guy is ripping you off!! I am so ashamed for my country!!!"

"That's so nice of you to say, my friend—thank you! I love the Czech Republic. But this guy is an ASSHOLE."

So we split. Exit, Pursued by a Villain (and his fat sow of a wife).

We packed up and drove over to the local police station to register a complaint against this promoter…got our story written down officially…and told them we intended to press charges against the guy for theft of services rendered (hey…it needed to be expressed). Then we drove the longest 3 hours of my life, my heart pounding in my chest, back to Prague.

Only to find that in our absence, that very same night, the city had completely frozen over. The temperature had dropped severely.

There were icicles hanging off the building which housed Faust Records in the lovely leafy Prague suburb of Dejvická. Where I had been sleeping on the couch in the office.

It was just then 6am. Sun coming up soon.

We dragged my three guitars, an unwieldy suitcase full of effects pedals (about 22 of them), affectionately referred to as The Flying Mary by Faust, plus his two heavy-duty Marshall amplifiers, back down the lift into the basement, where we put them to bed for the night.

Faust then saw me into his office upstairs, apologized again, swore we'd pursue this guy, then left me in the office to collapse while he drove off to go stay with his wife in their flat on the outskirts of Prague.

My clothes are filthy, I'm filthy with dried sweat from the gig. I'm knackered from the show and the after-gig drama, and the endless drive back home, and I can't wait to take a hot shower. I get into the bathroom, turn on the tap only to find that the water pipes in the flat had frozen.

No hot water. Or cold water. But also, and even worse, no heat in the flat.

And it was fucking COLD in there at 6:20 am.

So I shivered under a couple of blankets on Richard's couch for hours trying to sleep a bit; images of the faux cowboy and his chippy dancing in my brain.

Fed up, I finally leaped up off the couch, having had zero sleep. I got dressed, put on my winter coat, left the flat, walked to the luxury Hilton up the hill, clutching a bag of clean clothes and assorted toilet articles. I entered the lobby, joined the Health Club for 25 bucks and proceeded to shower, take a steam bath, shave, and finally, put on some clean clothes.

Feeling somewhat human again I walked back down the hill, stopped for some rolls and coffee, shuffled over to the Faust Records office, tried to sleep again, and then just gave up, and waited for Faust to show.

The last show of the tour was scheduled at the Roxy that night, replete with a cast of thousands...well, 4 other musicians and singers, plus a light show of ghostly images from medieval Czech woodcuts.

Around 4pm Faust arrived smiling ruefully, and apologized again.

I then said:

"Richard, to be clear, unless you pay me the fee owed me from last night now, I am not going to be able to perform the show tonight."

"Okay, Gary."

Like the big-hearted mensch that he was, Faust went downstairs where his older brother operated a retail record emporium also known as Faust Records -- a shop specializing in underground music by folks like the Plastic People (and Gary Lucas).

His brother withdrew the equivalent of 300 bucks from the cash register and handed it to Faust, who came back upstairs, and paid me in full.

"Cool. Thank you, Richard."

"You are welcome, Gary."

We went off with the gear to the Roxy shortly thereafter. I set up my stuff...and played one of the best shows of my entire career that night.

On a Czech tv interview later that week, they asked me if i had enjoyed playing in the Czech Republic:

"Absolutely. I love playing here! Except for this one club in Hradec Králové…"

Fast forward to 2022, and Faust and I are still at it as partners in musical crime / voyageurs au bout de la nuit.

"Rocking on / till the brink of dawn…" -- "P.S.K. (What Does It Mean?)" by Schoolly D

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Great read!

I loved the honesty in this piece. Can identify with SO many aspects of it! Lovely writing … and living.

Bohemian Ripsody - Gary in Prague years ago...

What a great style of writing Gary Lucas has, funny, precise, witty, wise - and always directly! There is always some kind of suspense, you can`t stop reading this flow...great!

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Listening Past the Graveyard / Ear of the Beholder

Gary Lucas — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 13:20:14 +0000

Listening Past the Graveyard / Ear of the Beholder Gary Lucas April 20, 2022 - 09:20

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avant garde

My work-horse guitar in Maastricht, a refurbished Gretsch Falcon acoustic

"If You Got Ears, You Gotta Listen!" -- Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), "Dirty Blue Gene"

When I was in the 4th grade at George Washington Elementary School in Syracuse NY (a public school -- the opposite of what a public school connotes in the UK), the school's band leader / conductor Mr. Iannotta -- a nattily dressed, horn-rimmed, button-downed kind of guy who loved music and really instilled his love of music in his band members -- came into our class one day to conduct a Musical Aptitude Test -- measuring each student's sense of Pitch, Timbre, Rhythm and Melody by playing us a pre-recorded series of blips, bleeps and thumps -- and then asking us to detect and identify the difference between one section and another in terms of the aforementioned -- the veritable spicy ingredients of Life!

This was in the service of determining who amongst us possessed the finest and most sensitive Ears in what he called "the sea of students" -- the most precocious musical flowers a'blooming there. Having achieved a perfect score on this little exercise in Ear Sensitivity, lo and behold I was assigned -- nay, coerced -- into studying the French horn -- which was well known to be the single most difficult instrument to play in the entire concert band arsenal.

My tackling the French horn (Francophile that I am) was a farcical notion at best.

Given that, besides the unerring sense of Intonation required to play this particular instrument well, to actually soar and not splutter through it, one also needed (in spades) a Mick Jagger-like pucker and pout o' the lips to produce something approaching yr classic burnished, dulcet French horn-tone. And if you clock any photo of me, you will notice that I barely have an upper lip. Yea, barely, yea…

So my playing the French horn was a Faustian bargain at best. More like a match made in Hell!

"The I", as we affectionately referred to Mr. Iannotta, started me out first on the French horn's little brother the Mellophone (good moniker)…then graduated me to Baritone horn (a fun ride frankly, there was some ballsy heft in the tone production of this thing) -- and once he thought I was a' groomed and ready, he finally brow-beat me into taking on the full monty of the French horn. That rather thin mouthpiece hurt like hell...well I was wearing orthodontic braces in my mouth during some of this ordeal, and had to wear a wax impression over them to protect my tender Inner lips (jeez this is painful to recall).

Simultaneously, I started playing the guitar -- which once I got a nylon string version was so much more fun to play than the fucking French horn. But I manfully stuck with the French horn for 8 long years, playing in the George Washington concert band (“Big Yellow Bus”), the Hurlbut W. Smith concert band ("On Wisconsin"), the Nottingham concert band ("Trittico") and the Syracuse All-City Band and All-City Orchestras (once coming down from my first acid trip) -- until Mr. I kicked me out of the high school band senior year for a) wearing sandals to a rehearsal (he was kind of a neo-con authoritarian, and was often seen carrying a copy of a book titled "How to Be a Conservative in Onondaga County") and also b) he caught me improvising on a March during a concert. I thought I was "Hey Jude"-like making it better...jazzing it up, as it were!

In any case my inner Ear got me into all sorts of fun musical situations back in the day -- playing with The Combo in elementary school (Walter Horn on trumpet, Scott Soffen on trombone, yrs truly on electric guitar played through a jack in an old FM radio, Wayne Grody on clarinet, and Robert Schlamowitz on drums, our repertoire consisting of Steve Allen's "Gravy Waltz," Henry Mancini's Theme from "Peter Gunn," Al Hirt's "Java," Bert Kaempfert's "A Swingin' Safari," and Acker Bilk's "Midnight in Moscow"), also a coupla rock bands also, and so forth.

Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) & Gary Lucas, Doc at the Radar Station sessions, Soundcastle, June 1980. Photo: Glen Kolotkin

But where my Ear really came into full effect was when I joined up with Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) in 1980 as a guitarist in the final edition of his Magic Band. I can be heard on his last two Virgin albums Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow.

A musical primitive and a stone artistic genius (I never met anyone remotely like him -- and I've worked with many of the best), Don would assign you the most impossible tasks : "Play like you dyed, man!" -- and your mission was to fulfill his imperious mandates as best as humanly possible.

Now Van Vliet could neither read nor write music. He could however physically get on various instruments (piano, drums, guitar, saxophone, and harmonica) -- and play them, sort of…(he actually could play blues harp really well) -- and he could also scat-sing and whistle like a demon, basically, and produce all sorts of titanic musical moments in real time that he either taped and or had you tape (sometimes at 3am on a long distance phone call).

Your mandate was to take this musical artifact-of-the-Moment, played by the Master once and once only (and as a primitive and a naif, unrepeatable by his good self), and then you were expected to codify it and realize it on the guitar as closely as possible to Don's original version -- hiccups, pauses, mistakes and all (although he would tell you, "There are no mistakes, man!").

"Don," I once pointed out to him, "you're using all 10 fingers playing piano" -- basically playing what are known as through-composed improvisations -- "but there are only 6 strings on the guitar!"

"You better find another 4, man!" he shot back.

So beginning around 6am every morning I would get with one of Don's piano tapes before going into work at CBS Records, where I held down a day-job as a copywriter for 13 long years (that's another story), and by listening exceedingly closely and carefully, I would pick out and voice on guitar the various parts and lines Don had generated -- about 5 seconds of music maximum each day, and memorize the piece as I went along, day after day after day.

It was a heck of alot of work, but in truth: I LOVED IT. It was like my early morning meditation exercise.

I noticed on one of the pieces he titled "Evening Bell" that he kept hitting a low D on the piano, which was more or less the tonal center of the piece -- so voila! I dropped the low E string on my '64 Strat down to a low D to be able to voice this composition correctly, and there you have it.

CLOSE LISTENING!

Here's a good example of my work transcribing by ear another of the thornier pieces in the Van Vliet oeuvre -- a piano composition entitled "Oat Hate":

Later on I was to apply the same principles to my transcriptions of select classical music compositions, such as the well-known "Largo" from Dvorak's Ninth Symphony "From the New World," a/k/a "Going Home":

Recently I connected with a young dancer based in NYC named Alison Clancy -- a total star of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Corps. Alison came to my 40th anniversary show at Le Poisson Rouge last Sept. 11th with her uncle Tom Brigham, who is a long time fan of my music.

I noticed this very cool woman shooting clips of me and my Gods and Monsters guys (Ernie Brooks, Jerry Harrison, Jason Candler, and Richard Dworkin) on her cell phone in the middle of my 40 year retrospective.

The next day she had posted a bunch of them on Facebook, so I reached out to thank her, and we became friends right away.

I had brunch with her soon after and after introducing herself, she told me about a great gig she'd recently created at the Met.

She holds the distinction of dancing the longest solo dance in Met history to Richard Wagner's "Overture to Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)" for the 2020 production of that opera, with choreography by Carolyn Choa.

I told her that I loved Wagner's music (shame about his politics and hateful anti-semitic remarks in his screed "On Judaism in Music"), and in fact had arranged several of his pieces for solo guitar, like this one:

Alison was intrigued -- and there on the spot urged me to arrange the "Overture to Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)" for solo electric guitar, in order to accompany a performance she had scheduled of her famous dance up at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, Mass on May 6th. I like a good challenge and readily agreed!

To date I've worked at least 100 hour man-hours on arranging this piece, many of them spent doing so in the fair and pleasant city of Maastricht in Southern Holland, on a refurbished Gretsch Falcon acoustic.

So again, how do I do it??

Well, I never once have referred to an actual score of this Wagner operatic war-horse. That would be too easy! Nope, I’m doing it (to death) by way of CLOSE LISTENING to many different symphonic versions of the piece via YouTube. I say many, as through the miracle of different microphone placements, various recordings reveal many hitherto unnoticed facets to the Overture which you might not pick up on utilizing one version only.

I also once again used an open tuning in arranging this piece (my secret sauce) -- as all sorts of unexpected harmonic resonances can occur across the 6 strings in an open tuning -- which often takes the arrangement out of the realm of a formal "classical guitar transcription” in standard tuning, which I find normally stultifyingly boring. It's an additive process over time, working out the various motifs, melody lines, voicings and fingerings, and memorizing the piece as you go along. As always, I keep all of my arrangements of non-Lucas music -- classical music, Chinese pop from the '30s, Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores, what have you-- in their original key. Which forever creates a resonance for a listener who knows the original work well.

When I finally do perform my arrangement accompanying Alison's dance performance at MIT, I will have played through my guitar version at least a hundred times to get the right flow going.

And that's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it!

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Cutting Up Space and Time

Leah Richards — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 17:09:02 +0000

Cutting Up Space and Time Leah Richards July 10, 2019 - 13:09

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avant garde

Photo Credit: Maria Baranova

DECODER: Ticket that Exploded

Text by WIlliam S. Burroughs

Conceived and directed by Mallory Catlett

Presented by Restless NYC at Pioneer Works, NYC

July 8, 2019

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Beat Generation artist and writer William S. Burroughs popularized the "cut-up technique," a method dating to at least the Dada movement of cutting up a text or texts and rearranging the pieces to form a new composition. Burroughs employed a "fold-in" variation (reading across two vertically folded sheets placed side by side to create a new page) for his novel The Ticket that Exploded, first published in 1962 and in a revised and expanded version in 1967. This story of mind control and intergalactic conflict also describes Burroughs's theories about language, technology, and the cut-up technique, and it forms part of The Nova Trilogy, along with The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966 and 1968) and Nova Express (1964). With DECODER: The Ticket that Exploded, creator and director Mallory Catlett, in collaboration with video designer Keith Skretch, associate video designed Simon Harding, interaction designer Ryan Holsopple, and scholar Alex Wermer-Colan, Burroughs's novel is reimagined, partly through his own techniques, as a psychedelic live enactment that assembles language, imagery, and sound into an engrossing experience somewhere between theater and performance art.

Played out in this performance on a raised stage in the cavernous interior of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, DECODER is brought to fractured life by collaborators and performers G. Lucas Crane and Jim Findlay. Crane, the "tape DJ" and sound artist, acts as the primary operator of the onstage audiovisual equipment -- and provides an excellent lemur call -- while Findlay handles the spoken portions of the production. The spoken elements use Burroughs's own words, and audience members can catch indications of his influence on in phrases such as "well, that's like hypnotizing chickens," borrowed from The Ticket That Exploded by Iggy Pop in "Lust for Life," and "heavy metal," first appearing in print in The Soft Machine. The cassette tape recorders that Crane so skillfully manipulates are referred to in pre-recorded dialogue early on in the show as an "externalized part of the human nervous system," and they are positioned in relation to "the Word," what it is and what can be done with and to it, not least the assertion that cut-up offers a means of being one's own agent. While there is, unsurprisingly, no conventional narrative, DECODER does evince a loose thematic structure, with other sections with spoken and recorded text about, for example, sexuality (at some points as "flesh addiction" and at others as a kind of literal merging of bodies), war (as, in one memorable passage, an ongoing game the only possible end to which is the atomic destruction of all the players), and questions about topics including time, self, and embodiment.

Juxtaposition represents an important aspect of the cut-up technique, creating and influencing meaning, and the various forms of "the Word" in the production are juxtaposed not only to one another but also to sound- and image-scapes throughout. The large trapezoidal screen at the back of the stage is filled with images that range from Crane's hands as he works or his face as we hear his amplified breathing to a distorted portion of Findlay's face as he declaims from beneath a welder's mask to insects, trees, tentacles, claws, and, in a visual metaphor for the "war game," the repetitive, mechanical stacking of logs. Often, when the projected images are distorted, it is along a vertical fold, much as Burroughs recommends for pages in the fold-in technique. At times, they also resolve into unexpected forms or accrue unexpected meaning, as when, through repetitive juxtaposition, a microphone held by Mike Pence becomes associated with a masturbated phallus, an oddly posed body shows up in a wooded landscape, or the bright whiteness, which juxtaposition with the dialogue leads one initially to think might represent outer space, is eventually clarified as snow through which a lone figure walks. Crane and Findlay themselves are central elements of some striking images, their bodies silhouetted, serving as canvases for flashing lights, or badly (on purpose) lip-syncing recorded questions. Crane is extremely impressive and has an engaging presence, and it would be easy to overlook how good Findlay's performance is because of the non-traditional part, but he adds energy and nuance to his role as primary conduit of the Word, as when he touches Crane during a particular speech or in the modulation that occurs when he sets aside the novel from which he has been reading directly and his delivery becomes subtly but clearly more hesitant, immediate, and, thus, seemingly authentic.

Late in DECODER is a discussion of a giant mechanical brain used by enemy forces that works through aggregating images and words and sounds like what we now call A.I. The dialogue recommends guerilla war against it, in one of a couple of times when the "you" seems to deliberately include the audience. Burroughs held that the cut-up technique can militate against the way that word and image lock us in to conventional modes and patterns of thought and perception. DECODER: Ticket that Exploded provides an intriguingly avant garde, visually arresting, and even at some points funny volley in this crusade against conventionality. And this is just the start: the full Nova Trilogy will premiere at the Chocolate Factory in Queens in 2020, to further rearrange our expectations of what theater can be. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Video of the Week: "No Reply"

Dusty Wright — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 21:14:04 +0000

Video of the Week: "No Reply" Dusty Wright June 22, 2017 - 17:14

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avant garde

Some artists transcend description, best they are not compartmentalized into a specific genre of music. Melanie De Biasio is a Belgian artist that incorporates jazz, classical, nufolk, even electronica into her musically rich vocabulary to create her truly unique and atmospheric sound; not unlike Sigur Ros or Bjork or Joni Mitchell's jazz-informed work in the late '80s. This song was released on her 2014 album No Reply, an album I just got turned on to by my dear friend Michael Naso. This video version of the song features strings and was recorded in a cathedral in Brussels. The arrangement is fantastic and it features a wonderful Gregorian contralto co-vocal by Romain Dayez. In fact, as much as I like this string-driven version of the title track, her song "The Flow" from that album may be slightly better. It's got a killer groove. Think '70s era Gil Scott-Heron. And if that wasn't enough to take in, her new effort Lilies drops on October 6th. Check out her new single "Gold Junkies" -- one of the tracks from that album -- here. Regardless, this video is stunning and Miss De Biasio's performance is epic. Take a deep breath and enjoy her wonderful music. I suspect the rest of America will be catching up with this extremely talented artist very soon.

Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83

Steve Holtje — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:26:22 +0000

Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83 Steve Holtje June 10, 2010 - 17:26

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Music Review

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avant garde

Various Artists: Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83 (Soul Jazz)

If you're looking for a history of Krautrock, look elsewhere. This two-CD compilation, by being largely true to its title across its 24 tracks, picks up four years after the birth of Krautrock, and the "rock" thrown into this set's subtitle seems designed to excuse a few crucial context-providers (notably Neu!'s "Hallo Gall"). But the concentration on electronic music is hardly regrettable; on the contrary, it provides crucial focus and coherence. Nonetheless, the track sequence immediately exhibits a certain eclecticism (or, less charitably, merely seems haphazard) as a 1979 track, Can's highly discofied "Aspectacle" from the group's last pre-reunion album, kicks off Disc 1.

And, despite the electronic focus, there is a lot of variety, and more than just the usual suspects: the exotica-prog of Between's "Devotion"; the sweet West Coast-style psychedelia of Gila's "This Morning" (one of the most glaringly non-electronic tangents, which along with the better-known Popol Vuh's "Morgengruss" shows one of the roots of the latter's more mystical and grandiose style, represented here by "Aguirre 1"); the flute-heavy and, frankly, kinda goofy Kollectiv and Ibliss; the proto-new-age of Deuter; keyboard-heavy tracks by Michael Bundt ("La Chasse Aux Microbes: is my favorite new-to-me track here) and E.M.A.K. But, of course, most of the bands one would expect to hear (with the glaring exception of the uncooperative Kraftwerk, though ex-Kraftwerk drummer Klaus Dinger is represented by La Dusseldorf's "Rheinita") are well-represented. There are two tracks each from Popol Vuh, Can (besides the aforementioned track, there's the electro-funk "I Want More"), and Amon Duul II (qualifying only on the basis of brief splashes of synthesizer). Most heavily featured, quite justly, are of Dieter Moebius and Roedelius (a solo track each) and their bands Cluster ("Heisse Lippen") and Harmonia (two tracks; "Veterano" shows the influence of Minimalism's phase music period). The robotic electronica of Conrad Schnitzler's "Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal" and Tangerine Dream's iconic "No Man's Land" are key, but the Faust selection is the oddly atypical "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl," and utterly superfluous in this context are Ash Ra Tempel's hippie recitation "Daydream."

I do think there is a critical component of this style missing here: Karlheinz Stockhausen. Perhaps including an excerpt from his electronic opera Sirius (which appeared during this set's time frame) would have been a licensing nightmare, but his influence on the scene cross-sectioned on this set was vast and oft-acknowledged; he was both teacher (to members of Can, among others) and example through his ground-breaking electronic music of the '50s and '60s.

One could also complain about the absence of Achim Reichel, a far more relevant figure than several included here. That said, though, this is a very enjoyable set, even the off-theme tracks (though after a few times through, I began skipping the two flute-heavy numbers). It includes, as usual with Soul Jazz compilations, an informative booklet.

David Lynch - The Dusty Wright Show

Dusty Wright — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 04:13:48 +0000

David Lynch - The Dusty Wright Show Dusty Wright January 13, 2007 - 23:13

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avant garde

Auteur David Lynch has challenged his fans as a director, musician, painter, and TM advocate. Watch this compelling interview with from 2007. This is Dusty's first interview with David; click here to watch their second webcast conversation taped in 2012. Music by composer Bulat Gafarov.

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