New Music: Gowns, Zu & Nobukazu Takemura, Wilderness Pangs

Gowns - Fake July (Cardboard 2007)

Gowns - Red State / Cardboard

Arguably the most famous quotation from Bulgakov's masterpiece "The Master and Margarita" is "manuscripts don't burn." It was a defiant mark of protest to the Soviet government and the NKVD at a time when anti-Stalinist works were being eradicated and artists were being thrown in jail, their books burned and the works in theory burned with them. But no idea burns that is in the mind of its creator, and perhaps no idea burns so intensely as the idea of burning itself, which is what Gowns have accomplished on their latest album, Red State.

The band's two members - Erika Anderson of Amps for Christ and Ezra Buchla of The Mae Shi - have crafted a 42-minute album that is the sound of fire. But it's not just a raging blaze as featured MySpace song and much blogged-about eight-minute epic "White Like Heaven" leads you to believe; in fact, that's the centerpiece of the album and clearly its longest, but it is not necessarily its best. Fire comes in all shapes and sizes: The brush fire, the house fire, the raging blaze, the pitiful flame. Red State brilliantly puts a soundtrack to all of these forms.

It starts out innocently enough, a strummed guitar introducing "Fargo" before a list of drugs takes over and the swell of white noise-feedback as an undercurrent kicks in; the hot coals of Sonic Youth's past have arrived. It's everywhere. Buchla does a decent job when he gets his chance to take the lead mic, whispering here on "Fake July" to great effect. But it really is Anderson's wonderfully smokey vocal delivery that just out-impresses with that desolate kind of voice you expect to hear smoldering at the end of a long night when it's all over and the fire marshalls have declared the blaze well and truly over with. "Clawless" illustrates this best, an a cappella performance that provides an uneasy yet poignant moment before the rumbling rush of "Mercy Springs" arrives. This is the sound of fire, that much is true. But it is also the sound of a creativity that burns in the hearts of all true artists, and that speaks as much to the legacy of Bulgakov as any Tea Party song.













Zu & Nobukazu Takemura - Everyone Gets His Own Nemesis (Atavistic 2007)

Zu & Nobukazu Takemura - Identification With the Enemy: A Key to the Underworld / Atavistic

In another take on fire, it not only burns and rages and smolders and kills, it also melts and fuses and re-shapes. That's the kind of fire burning inside the intrepid Italian trio Zu. Behind virtually all of their music is a willingness to obliterate the very notion of genres and meld together the most disparate and different aspects of rock, jazz and electronica. If you've kept up with Chicago-based Atavistic's output for these Romans, you already know that this collaboration with legendary Japanese DJ Nobukazu Takemura is not the first: Mats Gustafsson, Eugene Chadbourne, Dälek (which I had no idea of, I swear), and Ken Vandermark are just some of the high-profile names these boys have worked with in the past, and all of it has been more or less solid output with a nod at the avant-garde.

Identification With the Enemy: A Key to the Underworld is the latest full-length release (There's a 7" picture disc also out, but that's another story for another day) and it blends Zu's willingness to straddle the line between Hella and Yellow Swans with Takemura's decades-honed craft of glitchy electro that has made a comfortable niche of its own on Thrill Jockey. If it seems like a strange concoction, it's not: These guys work chaotically well together, sending what they know of electronic shards, ambient droning and math-rock freak-outs into the furnace to bring it out again a glowing piece of music that will appeal to anyone looking for an aural challenge. "Alone With the Alone" rockets off straight away as a jazz-math disaster the Coleman family would be proud of, but it's not all 666 in outer-space here either. In fact, the album's momentum is almost totally destroyed on the 12-minute ambient timewarp "Usual Conversations With Yama." Though it flitters and flickers with drill n' bass and any minute you expect to hear a Wolf Eyes-esque squall of feedback, it never comes. Just hums along, minding its own business, until you reach the other side and "Awake in the Other Room" sounds like the album that had just been taking a break.

Radio transmissions and high-level frequencies bring you back to the more "songy" sounds of the final two numbers, but the point has by now long been made: Zu have once again teamed up with an artist more than willing to heat up the idea of the genre and the results are one steaming, beautiful pile of lava. One can barely tell what it is anymore, and more often than not it's that kind of sound that really paves the way for the boiling tar and paved asphalt to follow. Sheer madness.













Wilderness Pangs - The Elephant Ghost Saga Parts 1 & 2 (Apocalypse the Apocalypse 2007)

Wilderness Pangs - The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs / Apocalypse the Apocalypse

But the worst kind of madness, I'd imagine, is the one you'd have living in hell for all eternity. Now I'm not a bettin' man, but I generally like to err on the side of caution when moral dealings are in play. Baton Rouge, Louisiana-bred Wilderness Pangs, on the other hand, have no such qualms. In fact, they've already sold their souls to Woland in exchange for having their tunes as the soundtrack to a real musician's hell. Frankly, Dream Theater could learn a thing or two from these guys: The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs is, much like Zu & Takemura, a total mess of sounds coagulating together to form some glorious, noisy, disheveled kind of album only God himself could love unconditionally.

I take that back. Color me a sinner, but I'm possessed by this album at the moment. Right from the outset of the unassuming "Magic Bullet," you're thrown into the middle of the woods as howling wolves and alien spacecraft surround you. The bayou doesn't get any friendlier after you've been abducted into "The Elephant Ghost Saga Parts 1 & 2," easily one of the noisiest and most overmodulated pieces of music I've heard this year and all the better for its lo-fi effect. If you've ever wondered what living in a Kuznetsov turbofan sounds like without any earplugs, you've got two options: My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" (which is far more akin to a Rolls Royce than a Kuznetsov, pretty and delicate in its power rather than smoking and careless of stealth) or the second song on this 14-tracker. It gets friendlier (if no less strange) in the third part, a separate song altogether. The vocals here really make a difference, and help to anchor what would otherwise be beautiful but somewhat remote. Randy Faucheux (which I sincerely hope is his actual name) can sing along with an erratic horn and make it sound like there's an anchor to it all. Indeed, a few times on here you've actually got a straightforward folk song to balance out the acid-rock hysteria ("I Shot My Favorite Horse" is the first example, but "Wolfman" is also genuinely pretty in its slow-roasted folk pastiche).

In the case of Wilderness Pangs, the manuscripts can't burn because there simply weren't any to begin with; repeating some of these performances must be difficult if not impossible, but once again it's the delivered energy that makes all the difference. Doesn't matter if they don't repeat every shaken coin jar or include every processed beat every single time; the fact that they produced it at all in the first place is a testament both to their seemingly endless supply of ideas and the creative blaze that's currently engulfing Wilderness Pangs. To think this is but their first album... Well, that is something special. Bulgakov would be proud.