Martial industrial

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(2014)

So I was reading a press release that’d come my way. Well, skimming it, really, as I’m being flooded with them again, a couple dozen this morning alone, of all varieties. Most are jazz. Some rock. Some world whatever. And one martial industrial.

What the hell is martial industrial?

Wikipedia, of course, had an entry. It explained it all thoroughly. Alas, having not majored in semantics, I could barely understand it:

Evolution/hallmarks

Laibach were one of the first bands to incorporate military marches in their industrial music and display politically provocative aesthetics. Boyd Rice and Douglas P., the noise and neofolk pioneers, respectively, adopted such attitude at several occasions to its extreme. Allerseelen, either through ritual hymns or alchemical folklore followed in the same vein. Similarly militant but less provocative and more esoteric were the heroic choral outputs of ACTUS. Les Joyaux de la Princesse developed the genre further, offering a particularly mesmerizing style of dark ambient intermingled with historical samples, speeches and interbellum chansons. The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud / Der Blutharsch enriched this tradition, adding darkwave medieval melodies to the mix. Finally, In Slaughter Natives and Puissance expanded the genre towards orchestral and neoclassical paths, respectively. Nowadays, the Wagnerian style of Triarii serves as point of reference for most martial industrial acts.

That was clear enough, almost. I remember Laibach, actually. And I know what industrial music is, of course. Don’t quite get how it and neofolk has to do with one another. Industrial music was loud and atonal and mechanical, neofolk is drippy and irritating and all over Silver Lake. They don’t even dress alike. Industrial music fans tend towards all black, while neofolkies look like the cover of a Flying Burrito Brothers album. Not sure what alchemical folklore is. Maybe turning noise into gold. Interbellum chansons I assume is Marlene Dietrich singing La Vie en Rose. And the last time I tried a heroic choral output I hurt myself.

Terminology

The term ‘Martial’ does not necessarily refer only to military drumming but in general to ominous/dramatic atmospheres and a particular thematology, style, aesthetics and Weltanschauung. Similarly, the term ‘industrial’ does not denote only old-school industrial music, but rather the broad spectrum of post-industrial scene (from neofolk acoustics to harsh noise). Thus, sonically diverse bands like Genocide Organ (power electronics), Oda Relicta (sacral), Stahlwerk 9 (industrial), N.K.V.D (industrial black metal), Die Weisse Rose (darkwave), Axon Neuron/Vagwa (dark ambient), Feindflug (EBM), Gáe Bolg and the Church of Fand (medieval), H.E.R.R. (neoclassical) and Scivias (neofolk) can all be grouped under the umbrella of ‘martial industrial’.

I knew I was in trouble when I had no idea what a thematology is.

Geography

Martial industrial bands all around the world, from Venezuela to China have emerged. However, the scene is particularly strong and qualitative in Germany, Hungary, France, Poland and Russia.

Europe, where else. They sure know how to have fun in the old country. And qualitative? That means good, I think. Social science speak. Why you never sit next to a sociologist at a party.

Thematology

Martial industrial deals not only with history and politics, but meta-history and meta-politics as well. Thus, besides WWI/WWII, Goebbels/De Gaulle speeches, Runic symbols and Iron Guard marches, philosophical themes like Nietzsche’s overman, Spenglerian vision of history, Eliade’s symbolism, Guenonian evaluation of the West and Evolian apoliteia are also the main sources of inspiration. Ain Soph were the first to introduce this esoteric dimension to their heroic/ritual music. Notably, Hungarian scene in particular (ACTUS, Kriegsfall-U, Scivias) is fond of such issues.

Wow. Who knew? So many big words. It certainly sounds entertaining. Especially that apoliteia, a word I had not even the vaguest idea existed. I even briefly considered looking it up, but was scared I might use it sometime. I already caught myself using Weltanschauung. Just once, though. The bartender asked me who won the goddam war anyway and then cut me off.

Essence

The apotheosis of Doric elements in Man and Society.

Oh…..now it makes sense. Like West Side Story, or Elvis, or Neil Diamond. I am I said. Cognito ergo sum. Sein oder nicht sein. She wore an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polkapoliteia.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this was somebody’s term paper. Four years of college and all Daddy got for his money was a Wikipedia entry.

Late nite TV

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Wow, Morgan Fairchild is selling me a burial plot of Get TV. I mean I haven’t even started using the catheters yet. I’m not actually sure what they’re for. It’s fallen and I can’t get it up? Or is it a prostate thing? Maybe I should change the subject. Or change the channel. Seems like all the channels I watch anymore are full of AARP and catheters and doom. I’d watch a younger television network but all I ever see on there is Kim Kardashian’s ass, and he just can’t seem to shut up.

.

MacArthur Park

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This is just a Facebook post from 6/27/15,nd while not exactly Pulitzer worthy, for completeness sake I’m posting it here….

Jose Rizo’s Jazz on the Latin Side All Stars and fireworks last nite at the Levitt Pavilion in MacArthur Park…what a perfect Saturday night. Damn those guys are good…Justo Almario going nuts on tenor. Andy Langham getting some room to move on the piano. Smitty Smith his usual bonkers self on the drums. Wonderful band, every time I’ve seen ’em…which is dozens of time by now going waaaaaaaay back. And then the fireworks. Fyl and I loved it. The band are at Hollywood & Highland this Tuesday June 30 from 7-9. That one is free too.

That was our second trip to MacArthur Park in three days since we saw Mexico 68 there on the same stage on Thursday and that was incredible…what a monster grooving band, playing AfroBeat for real. They could have played for hours. Mix of Fela and originals. They have a terrific four saxophone section. Very tight horn arrangements and a lock groove rhythm section, drummer doing the Tony Allen thing. Seung Park took a great tenor sax solo on that last tune, the cat can play. Certainly one of the very best bands in LA. Opening act was a surprise–all the shows we go to and a stoney cumbia band like Buye Pongo are somehow new to me. Dug them a lot too.

And I was tripping on MacArthur Park, man…there was a time when you wouldn’t have been able to have such a splendid scene down there, all was craziness. Killings, gangs, drugs. I knew guys who went down there to die. There was even a police riot. And now it’s one of my favorite venues. Oh yeah, summer in the city, baby. LA has so much free music all summer long it’s heaven.

And I guess the god of fools (well, goddess of fools, if I get a choice) was looking after me tonite. Left the house in Silver Lake at 8:05 and hit a streak of green lights from Temple to Wilshire. Every one a beautiful emerald green. Luck of the Irish. Turned right onto Wilshire and there was a parking space. Looked at the clock. 8:15. We got from Silver Lake to MacArthur Park on a Friday night in ten minutes. It was pleasantly surreal. Or a time portal. Beam me up.

Cobraside

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(sometime in 2016)

Began yesterday at the hippest place in town, known only to the cognoscenti, anti-hipsters (or maybe they just have issues) and beautiful European women with no names and security details.  Cobraside Records in on that new Melrose, San Fernando Blvd, where LA becomes Glendale and the street signs change color. It’s a wholesale distributor packed full of vinyl and CD, and occasionally live bands out back, and it’s free, and a party, and I sit at my brother’s desk–he’s shipping manager–and move everything around. The Rubber Snake Charmers opened, a jam band with Mario Lalli and whoever else has an ax, and Mario–aka Boomer–began this grooving kraut rock bass line that the drummer line up behind and Vince Meghrouni began a beautifully searching solo on the tenor. This went on for maybe an hour, too briefly, Vince switching to alto, to flute, back to tenor, and the whole thing was never less than  what musicologists call groovy when they are really stoned. Remarkable even. Jam bands can fall flat on their faces, or stumble about, or just bore everybody, but these cats were beyond all that and made something that would get airplay on hip underground stations worldwide had it been recorded. Which it was not.

Fluidmaster

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So I replaced the 242 seal in the Fluidmaster 400A and it works fine except that it started whistling then squealing and finally shrieking a high pitched shriek like the monolith on the moon in 2001. Weird. Maybe that’s where Kubrick got the idea. Or was it Arthur C. Clarke. Or maybe HAL, though I can’t imagine a HAL9000 ever using a Fluidmaster. In fact, I don’t even know if they had Fluidmaster in the 1960’s. It’s all very Space Age. They put a man on the moon and a Fluidmaster in the bathroom.

And while the toilet shrieks impressively, it never gets into the Ligeti. That would be too much to ask for.

Desert

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(2009)

So you’re coming east on the 14 via Tehachapi and you want some sites? OK. You wanna see a beat up town try Mojave…. Tweeker heaven. Then down the 395 a tad in Rosamond you meet people–well, we met people–who own their own MIGs for fun and are building rocket ships and planning missions to Mars. It also has the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound, which is basically a zoo full of wild cats (tigers on down) kept unfriendly. They’re keeping the gene pool going and reintroducing to the wild. Not for petting. At night the panthers stare at you, growling and thinking of meat.

Another cool ride is the 138. Take it west of the 14 and we know where to find the best poppies without having to wait in line to get into the preserve. Spectacular, like a vast Impressionist canvas you can walk through. Keep an ear out for the Mojave Green (the most venomous rattler, potentially very nasty). Head east on the 138 and you’re on the Pearblossom Highway. Keep going past Little Rock (we always stop for date shakes at Charlie Brown Farms) and you can stump around the sad, spooky ruins of Llano, the old socialist commune. You can see them from the road, you could bounce a beer car off what’s left of the walls as you pass. Llano de Rio, they called it, though there was no river within a hundred miles. Amazingly historic and yet not officially a historic monument. No one in the desert wanted to memorialize collectivism, a shame. It deserves better. Head north several miles to Avenue M (all the east west streets are lettered in the Antelope Valley, it’s dull but practical) and there’s the Antelope Valley Indian Museum, built into the rock. Rocks–huge things, boulders and outcroppings–replace walls, floors, and make oddly shaped doorways. Very cool. Head straight up the 14 another 45 minutes and Red Rock Canyon looms up ahead, an enormous and crazily eroded mass of brilliant red sandstone. You’ve seen it in a million movies, from The Big Country to Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Take the Red Rock-Randsburg Road east-northeast ten miles to the old mining towns, Randsburg and Johannesburg. They call them ghost towns though they are still alive, just with a lot less people, and no one ever tore anything down. You can see how thousands of people once lived there. And died there. The cemetery in Jo’burg–no one actually calls it Johannesburg–still hangs with me, stark and unkempt and desolate. Many of the hundred year old headstones are wood, cracked and weathered and worn smooth by windblown sand, and the bones beneath them completely anonymous. It’s hard to be more forgotten.

Llano del Rio.

Llano del Rio.

Your salad is merely a pile of leafy corpses.

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Bad news for vegetarians! said the Daily Mail. Plants can ‘hear’ themselves being eaten – and become defensive when attacked. Egad.

Most people don’t give a second thought when tucking into a plate of salad. But perhaps we should be a bit more considerate when chomping on lettuce, as scientists have found that plants actually respond defensively to the sounds of themselves being eaten.

I don’t think this is actually anything that vegetarians have to worry about, though, since the plants we eat are dead already, having been slaughtered long before they reach the plate, harvested by scythe or by brute force plucking savagery. Your salad is merely a pile of leafy corpses, and the Silver Lake farmers market an abattoir of vegetables and fruits and lifeless greens, of tubers and carrots wrenched from the ground like beating hearts torn from sacrificial victims, or of herbs, still alive amid all that death, waiting to be murdered on the cutting board, diced with silent screams or pounded into a chlorophyl mush and sprinkled over the corpses of kale. And don’t even think about the pressed olive oil, oh god. And that fresh baked bread? Soylent green is people, or wheat, anyway, same thing.

I sliced open a blood orange once and the juice splattered everywhere, over me, my face, my clothes, like some gory film. The orange lay before me, quartered, dead, and I devoured it with bloodstained hands, feeling oddly cannibalistic. I cut open another the next morning, again there was citrus blood everywhere, but this time it was communion, and I drank of the blood and ate of the body and became one again and filled with the Holy spirit, until some monophysite came in and told me I was making a mess.

Kevin Kanner

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(2013)

Ran into Kevin Kanner last nite. Apparently he’s in town for a brief spell. We reminisced and bitched and told stories you don’t repeat. That guy is such a great jazz drummer. And I mean jazz drummer. You could drop him into a Blue Note session two generations ago and he would swing those mothers like mad. He’s just got that thing, that blues thing, deep down, that goes back all the way to the beginning. He could play with Louis Armstrong in Chicago, I think, or with Lester Young in Kansas City. He could fill in for Jimmy Cobb or Tootie Heath or Art Taylor–especially Art Taylor–in a hard bop New York City. He wouldn’t play like them, he wouldn’t copy them–that’s not what jazz is about, mimicry–but he sure the hell could sit in when they had to sit out for some jazz player’s reason or another, better left unsaid. He could sit in and swing, really swing, and the cats would turn around and nod, just nod, and he’d know he was in the groove, in the pocket, solid. That’s Kevin Kanner. He’s back in New York City now, where his playing always fits in somewhere, uptown, downtown, Brooklyn, wherever the music is cooking. He’s doing well, since he plays more like a New York drummer, and less like one of our own. The players swing back there and experiment out here. Well they experiment back there too, obviously (that’s where it started!), but they also swing hard, way hard, which seems passé among the new jazz generation in L.A. The state of the art here in downtown is just that, art, which is kind of ironic since swinging Kevin Kanner pretty much kickstarted the whole scene when he brought his weekly jam session east from the Mint. It grew and grew into something world class out here, that Blue Whale scene, daring and innovative and full of everything but the old school. Everything but the blues. What would Ray Brown say? Kanner asked once, and apparently Ray Brown would have said go to New York. Which he did. Other drummers, like Zach Harmon and Dan Schnelle and Tina Raymond, filled in nicely and were more attuned to the new vibe. They can be wild or textured or subtle or ethnic and in Harmon’s case especially, absolutely brilliant. They can switch time like you or I switch socks. Which wasn’t Kevin’s thing. Not at all.

I miss him out here, not just because he’s such a swell cat but because when he was behind the kit you’d have no worries at all that this shit was gonna lag, gonna stumble, gonna transform into crazy meters and advanced music theory. No, it’ll just be jazz. That’s all. Just jazz. That’s Kevin Kanner. Just jazz.

5-9-2013

Chuck Manning at Vibrato

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(2013)

Last night the wife sez let’s go to Vibrato. It’s way the hell up in Bel Air, where you spend money not even spending money, and there are rich people all around you, balding and important and trophy-wived. Chuck Manning was there with bass and drums, a sax trio, pure jazz, one of those set ups where it’s noisy no matter what you do. It brought out all the Joe Henderson in him, and he wailed nicely, crazy torrents of notes that sailed over the heads of the rich people and bounced off their wine glasses till even they noticed and applauded. The jazzers in the crowd dug it. Loose limbed straight ahead is a hard find in this town anymore. We sat at the bar and talked to the bartender who plays weirdo punk rock on his own time, unbeknownst to the rich people, and pretty waitresses walked by with platters of food that cost more than one of my car payments. It was sticky with humidity even inside, where the vast space between the diners and the ceiling renders air conditioning moot on these Jersey-like summer nights. We sat still and drank and listened. A “Listen Hear” got the crowd moving, swaying balding heads, trophy wives jiggling and jingling. I wish I could remember the title of the next tune but the house bassist Pat Senatore and drummer Kendall Kay locked into a groove that got people really excited. They cooked right through to the end, with a hard bop finish. You think saxophone trios and it always comes down to Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard, blowing Caravan for half an hour. This had those moments. It being a restaurant, you can only go so far, Sonny circa 1957 would scare the nice people now. Those were crazy times–crazy places, crazy people, crazy music. Now we take what we can get. And if Chuck Manning can get away with some intense blowing at Vibrato–even though to him it was a cake walk, nothing special–then we’ll take it. Jazz is a special thing, harder and harder to find. And when I find some like this–off the cuff, unplanned, going with the flow–I dig it. Totally.

We’ll be on the Westside again today, though this time it’s a pig roast full of heavy metal guys and intellectuals. Ya never know in this town.

Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

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(2013)

It’s 2013 and the Republicans have closed down the Federal government again. Closed it down tight. Damn. And there’s a cat commenting on the shutdown on The Atlantic‘s website with the most happening alias ever. He calls himself ArtPepperMeetsTheRhythmSection. Now that’s a great user name. No pun intended. I don’t know if I’d trust him around the silverware, but damn, that is one cool freaking appellation.

So of course I dig out the album. Got it playing now. Listen to Miles’ rhythm section happening, seriously happening. Red Garland, Paul Chambers, the awesome Philly Joe Jones. Damn, man. They just showed up and bashed out these tunes. Each track is a gem. Jazz players were so on top of their shit back then. Their lives might be a mess, they might be ditching wives and the Man and contracts, but they were complete masters of their chosen instruments. Perfection, or damn close to it.

And that must have been some post-session hang…. Oh yeah.

Ya know, you listen to Art Pepper blowing his crazy floating unbop bopping shit now, in the summer of 2013, you’ll forget all about our fucked up politics and everything else. Fuck reality, I’ll take the Straight Life. He didn’t, but he sure could blow that thang.

Listen:

“Straight LIfe”
from Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (1957)

Art Pepper (taking his turn with Stan Kenton, Balboa, CA. 1950) I wish I knew who took this perfect jazz photo.

Art Pepper (taking his turn with Stan Kenton, Balboa, CA. 1950)
I wish I knew who took this perfect jazz photo.