Doom & Gloom Dispatch #20: Making Time Into Space
Emergency Group, Pink Floyd, Cecil Taylor, Rosali, Jim Dickinson
Emergency Group - Inspection of Cruelty
A massive slab of Electric Miles-inspired jams from this new NYC band. A talented bunch: Emergency Group features Jonathan Byerley from Plates of Cake, the great WFMU DJ Dave Mandl, Robert Boston on keening keyboards and Andreas Brade driving things along in the drum seat. Together, they offer us Kraut-y rhythms, seething guitar/keyboard duels, rock-solid bass — the good stuff, spread out over the course of two epic-length tracks. Sometimes blown-out and blasted, other times moody and meditative, Inspection of Cruelty is a very bitchin brew.
Pink Floyd - BBC Sessions 1967-1971 [A Prof. Stoned Comp]
Dark Side of the Moon hit its 50th anniversary this month — but like any good rock snob, when I want to listen to the Floyd, I usually go back to the pre-Dark Side stuff (don’t get me wrong, DSOTM still rules). Which is why I was excited to see this recent collection of the band’s BBC sessions via the mighty Prof. Stoned.
Now, most of these recordings were officially released on the Early Years box a few years back. But as the good professor notes, the compilers often used inferior sources. Here, thanks to some de-mixing wizardry, everything sounds better than it ever has, from those early acid-rock Barrett blowouts to the lumbering Meddle epics. Totally righteous stuff from start to finish — and there are even some things that haven’t been released anywhere else, as far as I know. A treasure trove. Thank you, professor!
John Peel says: At one moment, they are laying surfaces of sound one upon another in symphonic thunder; at another isolated, incredibly melancholy sounds which cross one another sounding like cries of dying galaxies lost in sheer corridors of time & space.
I love listening to Cecil Taylor play piano — but I might love watching Cecil Taylor play piano even more. The guy was a true force of nature, poetry in motion, an acrobat on the 88s, superhuman. Whatever cliche you want to throw his way, he transcended it. This late 1960s documentary, made by avant-garde musician Luc Ferrari and his collaborator Gérard Patris, gives us a very up-close-and-personal look at Cecil and his band rehearsing … in some kind of abandoned Parisian mansion? Not sure of the location, exactly.
But wherever they are, it’s an intimate/evocative portrait of Taylor with his band: Jimmy Lyons on alto sax, Alan Silva on bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums. In between the music, Taylor expounds upon his singular concepts, as cool as can be. I love his response when he’s asked what he thinks of Stockhausen, Cage and Bach: “They are not of my community.”
Rosali - Cafe 9, Sheffield, England, September 3, 2022
With the Crazy Horse-esque David Nance Group behind her, Rosali’s No Medium LP was one of 2021’s best no-frills rock records (and plenty more). But Rosali’s songs sound just as good in a stripped-down solo setting — as this excellent tape from last year shows. Recorded by Mark Armstrong and shared by Bobby Lee (hey, he’s got a new one coming out soon), this is a hushed-but-powerful performance, just the singer and her electric guitar serenading an attentive crowd.
Rosali says: I’ll use the trope of a love song to talk about bigger, universal themes of human nature. There’s double meanings, sometimes, triple meanings (laughs). There’s a little bit of poetry and a veiling of things, but also it makes it broader in a way so the listener can feel their own self or their own experience in it. And also, I think feelings and emotions aren’t just one thing, and when you’re experiencing a moment that’s maybe really intense, and you might feel one way, but then reflecting on it you might remember some random detail that might have felt mundane at the time, but now later on holds some significance and potency.
Jim Dickinson – The Early Years '63-'84
One of the (many) great things about Dylan's recent Time Out Of Mind sessions set is getting a little extra Jim Dickinson in the mix; Jim's wasted "Wild Horses"-ish piano on the 1/18 take of "Not Dark Yet" matches the song's world-weary vibe perfectly. It feels like Dickinson needs some kind of career-spanning collection — a lot of his stuff is a bit hard to come by. But we've got this nice unofficial Mississippi Records mixtape from a while back to tide us over, collecting some of the singer / songwriter / producer / session guy / wild man's earliest and weirdest work. This is Memphis music at its most deranged, capturing the raw (often deliriously funny) spirit of rock n roll with every twisted note. Like flies on sherbert, baby!
Jim says: The thing about movement… it’s like Thomas Wolfe talking about the back of the train. You stand on the back of the train, you see everything focusing at the horizon away from you. That’s the desire to recapture. What recording really does, though it’s not as true when you’re using computers of course, but if you think about tape recording, you’re literally making time into space. I think people understand that, intuitively, when they record, especially primitive people. There’s something that they grasp instantly that’s appealing about it. Of course, the artistic concept is to seize the moment and repeat it but the producer manipulates the moment and it makes it almost diabolical. And it’s why you need one.
From The Doom & Gloom Archives
The Soft Boys - Maxwell’s, Hoboken, New Jersey, September 6, 1980
The Soft Boys! Sometimes I think there is no better sound than Kimberley Rew and Robyn Hitchcock’s interlocking psychedelic guitars. And this recording, from the band’s brief east coast Underwater Moonlight tour in 1980, is full of that sound. The audio here isn’t perfect, but it’s very listenable, capturing the supremely tight Soft Boys in front of a very enthusiastic Maxwell’s crowd in Hoboken, NJ. 21 years later, I caught the reunited band at this very same venue. As nice as that show was, I think I’d’ve rather seen this one. There’s a selection of tunes from the two proper Soft Boys records, along with a handful of rarities, including two Barrett-era Floyd covers, Maureen & the Meatpackers’ “Zip Zip” and “Out of the Picture,” which would emerge on Hitchcock’s excellent solo debut, Black Snake Diamond Role. Enjoy this show, it’s one of my favorites.
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