It seems funny now, when considering the kind of stature they enjoy today amongst the indie community, how uncompromising the Animal Collective used to be. "Native Belle", a direct continuation of the spirit of Danse Manatee (their masterpiece), was an even more abstract tribal chant amidst a jungle ambience. "Hey Light" went further beyond, basically a flat-out free-form acid-trip, and ditto for the 12-minute "Two Sails On A Sound".
In "Infant Dressing Table", the musique concrète sampling turned to a mechanical chant. In "Panic", it was the reverse, it was the tribal chanting that formed a musique concrète ballet. After such excruciating dadaist environments, the hyperactive pop oddity "Slippi" came as some sort of relief, and felt like a cover of The Trashmen' "Surfin' Bird", paving the way for the fluid defunct chirping of "Too Soon". Get it here.
Tuxedomoon had another partial reunion in 1998 (Brown and Principle) with the release of Joeboy in Mexico, and to their credit, this sounds closer to the post-rock generation than to new-wave revival. The industrial/ jazz/ ethnic collages "Door", "Viaje En La Sierra Madre", "Les Six", "Bitter Bark", "Hindi Loop" etc have something of the expanded noise jams of Jackie-O Motherfucker, or the disjointed elements of some Legendary Pink Dots works. It's rare that jam-based music can be successful, but this makes the grade, despite a few tracks ("Zombie Paradise 1") being overlong and slightly unfocused. Get it here.
Having exorcised himself from the tension of the Swans, Michael Gira reinvented himself as a folk-shaman that turned to mysticism and religion for inspiration, as evidenced by "Palisades", a mystical folk/gospel that went back to Buffy Sainte Marie's Illuminations as a point of reference. The obsessive, almost delirious boogie/ hymn "All Souls' Rising", viewed the other side of the same shape, whereupon Gira recaptured some of the Swans' frenzy, but the gentle psychedelic raga serenade "Kosinski" retreated back to a delicate emotional balance.
The solemn folk lullaby "The Family God" grew more vibrant, eventually radiating a spiritual choral grandeur, but "Rose Of Los Angeles" freaked out, in what was essentially a devilish folk-dance ceremony. Clearly Gira was not freed from all his demons yet. His mystical folk acquired it's most spiritual guise yet in "Sunset Park", a folk chant which rotated like a nebulae until it ascended to a heaven-like trance. "Wedding" was the dizzy aftermath of this vision, but still acknowledging the existence of the mystical forces that exist around us. "What Will Come" was a much more somber aftermath, a mournful stream of metaphysical ambience that had no other way to go but to keep recycling itself in cul-de-sac tension. Get it here.
In the post-rock atlas, though labeled as freak-folk, Jackie-O Motherfucker more so assumed the mantle of the Fahey-ian troupe recollecting their traveling experiences, but whereas Fahey was the wise troubadour singing about his travels in the civilization, Jackie-O Motherfucker were intellectual freaks that sung about their experiences in the primeval jungle, as evident in the translucent, shaman abstract blues "Everyday". Then "Sun Ray Harvester" dispensed with the blues and was left with an abstract current of ritualistic ambience, and Doors-ian psychodrama a la "The End". It was a sound infused with jazz and ethnic flavours in "777", and then turned full circle in the electrifying jazz/ ethnic/ blues "Bus Stop".
"Feast Οf Τhe Mau Mau" was their most jazz moment yet, but it was a primitive, ritualistic, atavistic jazz. In contrast, the essence of their music transubstantiated in a higher trance in "Fantasy Hay Co-Op", the tribal shamanism had apparently reached the spirit world. By "Breakdown", it wasn't as if the previous trance was revealed to be a temporary mirage, but more like the spiritual directions were being channeled in a more psychological direction, almost pathological, and ending in a fragile impressionist jam, the whole experience this fading away, being only a dream, a hypnosis. Get it here.
With Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound fame) producing and participating, Malachai was a bit of an anomaly in the Dots' discography, no other album of theirs sounded like it, which proves how extensive Stapleton's contribution was.
"Joey The Canary" was a vibrant acid ballad, borrowing from an American Indian tribal ritual, and featuring a psychedelic screeching guitar solo. In contrast, "Kingdom Of The Flies" dived into the void of a catatonic psychedelic ballad, solemn, ethereal and graceful, with a mysterious and sinister epilogue. The Stapleton factor fired on all cylinders in "Encore Une Fois", a disjointed electronic lullaby, that felt like a magnet that dragged metallic musique-concrete arrangements, and moved them around at will. "Wildlife Estate" was just as weird, a freak soul-funk with expansive arrangements, as if a fusion collaboration between Frank Zappa and Syd Barrett.
Instead, "Pavane" was almost ambient jazz, abstract and cosmic, and with impressionist brush-strokes; it was an environment. Then "Window On The World", after a sinister and climactic noir-jazz first part (as if the soundtrack to a psychological thriller), it veered in a disorganized electronic jazz-ethnic march, bringing to mind both the anarchic spirit of Half Japanese and the junk culture of Faust, while the coda added further dysfunction, with a radio frequency going all wobbly and out of sync.
This dadaist mayhem also reminded of the collaboration between Ron Geesin & Roger Waters in Music From The Body. This was also echoed in the 19-minute "We Bring The Day", arguably the most ambitious piece, that assumed the forms of the fantasia, the requiem, the sonata, the folklore lullaby, the abstract symphony, the psychological ambient environment, and so forth. The lush jazz symphonic tapestry of "Paris 4 AM" was a fitting epilogue, as if the whole experience was a dream that faded away in the horizon. Get it here.
Meredith Monk and her vocal troupe cut a line between experimental theatre and music, marking a passage through the Ancient Greek tragedy, the opera, world-music, the archaic ritual and the mystical chant. It started with "Gotham Lullaby", presenting a contralto over a desolate and stark piano sonata. Then "Travelling" set a feverish gypsy dance, a wild ritual stirring the primeval forces at play. The sonata returned in "The Tale", as the backbone to an offbeat pantomime/ theatrical performance. The album got progressively more ambitious, with "Biography" combining the operatic wail, what seemed like twisted reflections of some tragic torch song, and an experimental Ancient Greek tragedy. Yet the masterpiece was "Dolmen Music", an archaic ritual, a mystical chant that reached from the depths of time to the far reaches of the universe, a menacing polyphonic counterpoint between the male and female choir, like a cosmic beam resonating through the edges of the universe, and leaving behind a streaming echo of mass-subconscious particles.Get it here.
It'd be wrong to say that Dream Theory In Malaya was jazz/ ethnic. It was much more than that. Jon Hassell was a musician researcher delving into the realms of Jung-ian psychology. Dream Theory In Malaya was expressionist, futuristic, impressionistic, surrealist. It was folklore set in a sub-chamber in a void. It was a subconscious dream.
"Chor Moire" was a futuristic camouflage for a world-ethnic music, vivisected and rearranged, miraged from a shapeless reality. "Courage" was an ectoplasmic ethnic-ritual stream, floating over a jungle landscape, formulating the turmoil of the spiritual-dance "Dream Theory". The end of the journey was the ghostly landscape of "Datu Bintung at Jelong".
The focus had shifted from the jungle to the sky, it was a subliminal landscape, reflections made out of aether.
It reflected both towards the future and towards an unimaginable past. "Malay" was an impressionistic sketch, it was the memory of hundreds of small streams running in the jungle to connect with a bigger whole. By "These Times", all that was left was a whisper, an inaudible gust of wind. By "Gift of Fire" the spiritual forces had gathered again, ready for yet another day of dance, condemned to be repeated in eternity, like seashell resonance. Get it here.
