Tom Carter needs little introduction to most Volcanic Tongue regulars. As a member of Charalambides and a collaborator with players like Marcia Bassett, Bardo Pond, Ben Chasny and The MV&EE Medicine Show, he has loosed countless skulls with huge fields of heavy E-Bow gravity and an approach to the mechanics of wood and wire that is as flesh-based as spam. His approach to free improvisation has established whole new vectors for intuitive musical thought that have yet to be fully mapped. The guy is also a fucking gent. Writing exclusively for Volcanic Tongue, Tom introduces us to Venison Whirled and Jessica Rylan aka Can’t.
Genres, definitions, all boxes. Humans seek to define & in their zeal reduce the object to irrelevancy. We degrade music by codifying it and reducing it to the familiar. For example: ‘folk’ music started as a term broad enough to connote anything made outside the halls of academia (hence useless for pushing product). Our pal David X gave us free folk, a righteous attempt to reclaim the long-genrefied saw of Folk (capital F, definition frozen into button-down acoustic mediocrity by sixties ad-men) as a signpost to point to Mr. Corsano as well as to Valentine/ Elder. This seeps through the pages of The Wire and down to syndicated weekly purgatory and is now bastardized as ‘freak folk’, a transparent attempt to gift wrap smiling young faces for fans who think they want the ‘new soundz’ when they’re really looking to fill the empty slots in their iTunes playlists. As for the musicians, new artistes pick up their freshly minted shackles and their gtrs and rebirth themselves ad nauseum as fingerpicking (or song scribbling) avatars. (Ms. Foster, Mr. Chasny, Rose, Castro, Lawler, etc. can exempt themselves from this tirade. Y’all rule. You’re welcome). I saw a solo acoustic set recently by a guy who was passing off as ‘original’ a piece that copped an ENTIRE PHRASE from ‘Sligo River Blues’. Repeatedly, so it wasn’t an accident. Give me a fucking break. Anyway- Many have smelled a rat. Many more have kept on slogging away, bringing humanity & therefore folk spirit (if not form) to all kinds of human and inhuman music. I suppose you could call the releases below ‘electronic’ but can we just call it Music? Thank you.
Venison Whirled Venison World Sister Skull Records SSK-1 CD-R Venison Whirled (aka Venison World, named after some godawful storefront deer ‘processing’ shack) is the solo concern of Lisa Cameron, current ST37/ 3 Day Stubble trap beater and ex of Glass Eye, Brave Combo, and many other Texas bands not likely to come to mind while listening to this. Given all the stuff I hear with its intensity diluted by excessive gear-shifting and pink noise digiverb, this is a blast of pure white light. There are three tracks, all improvised to tape with minimal instrumentation. First on deck is “Invocation”, an unassuming beginning of Tibetan bowl/ bass/ bell slithering hum akin to some of the inward moan of contemporary sun gazers like Pelt or Skaters. Nice, but merely a foreshadowing of the telescopic majesty of “Crossroads”, a 16 minute ray of power electronics produced by a contact mic stuck to a busted drum. Sort of like a slow motion psychedelic earthquake on planet snare. The focus of this is simply brutal and you're just about guaranteed to be mopping drool from the corners of your mouth by minute 12. Last is “Yum”, a heaping pile of single bass feedback that is what I thought Sunn o))) was going to sound like before I'd actually heard them. Amazingly enough I saw Lisa do a bunch of this stuff live 4-5 years ago and can happily report that it was fully formed even then. Just goes to show the health benefits of being embedded in the central TX cultural vacuum (and I oughta know, drifting from there to the land of rarefied hepcats)...
Can’t New Secret RRR No Cat Pic Disc LP Jessica Rylan (aka Can't) brings us New Secret, a great LP on RRR that boasts some of the most unassumingly attractive picture disk art I’ve ever seen- while most of these ventures shoot for the well trodden Op/ visual overload route, this one opts instead for a pleasantly grey Twombly-ish scrawl on side one, and random snaps from Jessica’s family album (with captions!) on side two. Like the sounds, the whole thing is as warm and direct as an autumn campfire, and comes down the line friendly and without pretence. I’m too much of an electronic dunce to identify what exactly is going on soundwise here, but most of it seems to be vox processed through a home-built synth oscillator filter thing, and comes out sounding like lullabies sung through a disintegrating electric fan. There's a great vibe here that reminds me of nothing so much as watching TV at my grandmother’s house 25 (or so) years ago, trying to filter words from the grey blasts of static mystery coming over the black & white from faraway stations. The difference here is that Jessica has gone a long way towards making this so completely UN-mysterious (though there's undecipherable depth and darkness lurking here too) ... while most of her noise/ electronic peers lean towards the aggro/ harsh/ confrontational (which when you think about it, is about the most obvious hill to roll the noise cart down), Jessica has instead gone for unaffected and earthy sweetness. An amazingly personal and inviting statement that will almost make you forget the harsh sounds it’s all wrapped in. (Lest you think I've forgotten the folk music riffage of my opening paragraph, I should say that there's a incongruously unprocessed tenor recorder track on side two... and what's more folk than that)?