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Not prog but I find it hard to pass up opportunities to seriously rep for an album that is very important to me that no one else in the world seems to rate at all... Skip this post unless you feel like reading something pitched at the speed of uncontrollable enthusiasm.
When I was just out of high school about 14 years ago I particularly liked the percussion work found in the album Lark's Tongues in Aspic , so much that I decided to purchase a Jamie Muir album. My reaction to that album was like -- who is this guy and why do I like this so much!? I had a very limited musical education up to that point. Jamie Muir kind of kicked off an obsession with music that sounds unique and has it's own sonic language. Inimitable things!
The Music Improvisation Company albums weren't in print or I couldn't find them or something and I ended up ordering the Jamie Muir & Derek Bailey Dart Drug album... in short, as I said this is not prog at all, it's a free improv percussion album, the most extreme and isolated and inaccessible genre niche in the entire vast jazz world as far as I can tell. The music (some might say "music") found therein consists of a lot of zen-like negative space emptiness punctuated by waves of sensitive and colorful and mostly pitch-less (or at least harmony-less) percussion work accompanied by less colorful but no less-tuneless electric guitar-generated percussives. Caveat Emptor!!!
Every portable percussive sound imaginable, just about, is heard over the course of 4 carefully modulated & extremely dynamic improvised arrhythmic performances. Jamie Muir seems to have had an impressive arsenal of instruments indeed, consisting of what I'm sure is no less than every single possible sound he could collect and/or invent. For all the sounds heard in Lark's Tongues like rattling chains and bags of leaves and such, there are maybe 3x as many unique timbres and colors to be discovered here. This album was recorded in 1981, I think, as opposed to the former's 1973. A lot of metallic sounds, sometimes bowed, sometimes struck and things like that. There are train whistles and every variety of duck/bird call. Whirring wind sounds. Creaks and drum stick clatter. Pitter patter punctuated by one or two high voltage piercing guitar stabs. The busiest part of the albums consists of a regular parade of unexpected sounds passing across and through time, an unchained-rhythm cornucopia of strange sounds and familiar sounds and WTF? sounds.
Incidentally, time seems to almost not exist in this sound world, so disembodied is it all. Still it hangs together and reads like a narrative. The most marvelous thing is perhaps that this particular album which should be boring never does actually bore me, the players are so very in the moment and if you can discipline yourself to listen closely the album sometimes even reveals itself to be unusually fun & even funny music! Not always, though. There is a lot of harshness and grit, too, the full frequency spectrum is represented in some capacity, including some mysterious deep bass resonances (didgeridoo? detuned guitar string?)
Muir is the foundation and driving force of Dart Drug, his performance is very energetic and dexterous at the times when the duo reach their occasional climaxes, and tastefully moderate and sporadic in the contrasting sections. It seems to me spiritually cast from the same mold as his KC work, only isolated and given free reign without any kind of restrictions or obligations. Sometimes sparse, sometimes manically and often magically busy. My favorite sound of the album must be this kind of whirligig thing that he spins and it makes all sorts of crazy clanging bell sounds and creates a sort of beautiful rude clangor, and whilest spinning this he's scattering other percussive effects all over the soundscape very generously with his free limbs (or maybe Bailey puts down the guitar sometimes and joins in on the allsorts? Hard to say!)
And then aside from Muir's more prominent role in the duo, we have Derek Baily, who as mentioned above provides equally obtuse and inventive and often challenging percussive guitar attacks. I know him only by reputation mostly, he seems to be the acknowledged bloody-minded high priest of what Bill Bruford calls "squeak-bump" music in his autobio. I never did decide how I felt about Bailey as an artist, he's a character if nothing else and I wouldn't want to live in a world where there wasn't at some point an ex-jazz guy dedicated to this kind of thing! He fits in with Muir very, very well. They were both in the Music Improvisation Group together, pre-KC I think, and they are clearly on the same page. Overall Bailey is in a subdued supporting role, offering up a running sortakinda Greek chorus commentary on Muir's whirlwind clacking and rustling and skittering and clanging and clipslopping. His guitar tone is very good, sharp and trebley and responsive to nuance. He has a few moments of prominence but mostly he seems to be very much content to get out of Muirs way!!! Which is probably wise, less is more with this kind of thing, no?
Shortly afterwards I ended up absorbing and moving on from most prog, including KC and Lark's Tongues is no longer of much interest, despite the fact I rate it highly still, but Dart Drug totally blew my fucking mind and it still transports me back to that state of being where there is no horizon and anything can and probably will happen. That there aren't just a few ways to make good music, there are infinite ways.
The album probably can't possibly have the same effect on most listeners who aren't 19 and hungry for radical aesthetic experiences and, fingers crossed, revelations; it was just that this was my first exposure to reallllllly-way-out-there music lacking like musical things like melodies and back-beats and the damn thing single-handedly and memorably gave me a certain special hunger for new sounds after a lifetime of pop music and so on and so forth. I'll always have time for it.
So, worth a close listen if one rates Lark's Tongues in Aspic and the few very hazy live albums from that era!!! There are riches in Dart Drug even though it's as chaotic and self-indulgent and relentlessly unmusical (but still somehow paradoxically beautiful) as any music I have ever heard, and I've spent a lot of time looking for similarly colorful and unique albums since! Never did hear any other Jamie Muir stuff but someday I'll get there. Was always content with this one album which seems to be a very mature statement, an album that is for people who just plain love sounds of all kinds.
Sorry if anyone read all this, I kind of just felt like writing this morning and this is a favorite subject! The topic of KC alumnae is good and worth digging into!
― liam fennell, Tuesday, 14 June 2016 13:46 (seven years ago) link
Yep, agreed. Plus, Dart Drug is awesome.
Your post also makes me think about how Muir is an incredibly important figure in Crimson history. One of the things that I've noticed as I've explored the 2000s era of KC (and read about) is that there is this interesting master/pupil thing that happens with the Crimson drum chair -- beginning with the 1972-74 band, they have a drummer proper (in this case, Bruford, coming off his Yes experience) and a percussionist (Muir) whose role it to push the limits of experimentation (as heard on the Larks' Tongues box). After a period, the percussionist then leaves the group (to become a monk, supposedly, in Muir's case) and the "drummer" (Bruford), having absorbed the lessons of the master and folds them into his own playing, (which can be heard on the massive Starless box.
That's a great story in and of itself ... but it's precisely what happens when the band reforms in 1994, when Bruford served as the percussion master with his metric modulations and Simmons drum pads while Mastelotto, the loud tubthumper from his days playing stadiums, held down the beat. Then, when Bruford leaves the double trio, Mastelotto becomes this insane electronic percussionist -- something that was truly new in the band history. Mastelotto is involved in a ton of these projects mentioned upthread -- and brings that same exploratory spirit to those.
It's really cool -- and frankly, it all started with Muir and his fur-wearing, blood capsule-spitting, thumb piano playing insanity.
― Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 14 June 2016 14:22 (seven years ago) link