Doom & Gloom Dispatch #37: Dark Star Crashing
Blue Lake, The Grateful Dead, PJ Harvey, The Pixies, Sonic Youth
Copenhagen-based Jason Dungan makes fully transportive music as Blue Lake. Sun Arcs is an absolutely perfect folk/ambient/new age/neo-classical hybrid, with the musician blending a 48-string zither, acoustic guitars, a Roland 606 drum machine, clarinet and more into these beauteous and buzzing instrumental compositions. “Bloom” sounds like a dreamy Pentangle / Laraaji collab, while “Fur” finds a happy middle ground between John Fahey and Steve Reich. Cool stuff, to say the least, and a very sweet summer soundtrack.
The Grateful Dead - Space 1995
A couple weeks ago, I stumbled out of a heady Anne Waldman / Thurston Moore poetry reading at Boulder’s Naropa University just in time to hear the distant wisps of Dead & Co. up at Folsom Field. Was that John Mayer passionately butchering some classic Garcia/Hunter tune? No, ladies and gentlemen, D&C were floating through “Space.” What a thing! Even as this latter-day Dead simulacrum seems more popular than ever, they’re still obliged to embark on an avant-improv stadium rock adventure once a night. I love it.
Right on time, John’s Save Your Face blog recently delivered a journey into perhaps one of the most dangerous Dead zones — “Space” in 1995! The final frontier?! Yeah, maybe. But like everything John puts together, it is very much worth your time, a wild/wooly/weird trip, expertly compiled with style and taste. “The Grateful Dead remained an experimental band to the end,” he writes. And after hearing his almost-two-hour mix, his point is inarguable.
The band certainly wasn’t at its 1990s peak in ‘95, but the music here suggests that when “Space” rolled around, they could still sometimes locate that spirit of curiosity, joy and downright oddness that informed their best work. Strange, spontaneous new age noodles, conjured up for the masses, a dark star crashing one last time.
PJ Harvey - McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, California, September 25, 1993
A new PJ Harvey record? Always a good thing. Like most of her work from the past decade-and-a-half, I Inside the Old Year Dying is far from easy listening, a bit of a sealed-off world. But you should definitely visit that world. This seemingly spare LP seems to reveal more layers each time I spin it. Its mysterious pleasures might not be immediate, but they’re in there if you give it your attention.
More pleasures can be found in this 30-year-old audience tape — a rare solo performance at the venerable McCabe’s on Pico Blvd. A short set, but every moment is white-hot and intense (though Polly Jean does crack herself up on an outrageous cover of “Satisfaction”). She could have stuck with this sound for the rest of her career, but obviously she was already plotting her next move, refusing to be stuck in one place.
More? Here’s PJ alone on the Tonight Show at right about the same time as this McCabe’s show. An incredible thing to see on network television. What did Jay think?!
The Pixies - Sala Universal, Madrid, Spain, September 17, 1990
Keeping it totally 1990s this week. The Pixies! My brother and I were just discussing what a huge impact this band had on us as teens. We discovered them posthumously, right around the time that the Breeders and Frank Black were getting going. Up until then, my taste had leaned toward classic rock, but hearing Surfer Rosa and Doolittle in ninth grade opened up a whole new world of weirdo sounds.
Back then, I thought of Bossanova as the weak link in the Pixies discography — but today I can’t imagine why I thought that! It’s terrific, tons of great songs and fairly ambitious production. This Spanish gig took place just about a month after it came out and as such it features a bunch of the LP. Some of it is a little shaky — they may not have figured out how to play “Dig For Fire” just yet. But when it works it works — I especially love the Kim Deal / Black Francis duet on “The Happening.” As the above article suggests, those two were not exactly getting along by this point, but they sure could make some beautiful noises together.
Kim Says: This album is more like Spielberg than David Lynch. More like E.T., Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark than Eraserhead or Blue Velvet.
Sonic Youth - Toad’s Place, New Haven, Connecticut, August 7, 1990
Look out, lamestains! The #SonicSummer has hit the 1990s. Grunge, Geffen, GOO! Yes, it would be a wild decade for Sonic Youth — and where else to kick it off than in New Haven, Connecticut. This fabulous tape comes to us from the voluminous Alex Butterfield Archives (you can check out many more of his recordings right here).
“We signed to a major label and got all professional — what can we say?” Lee Ranaldo announces at some point during the band’s Toad’s Place performance, which took place just a month or two after Goo dropped. Lee is kidding. Sonic Youth are fairly ramshackle and shambolic for a lot of the set — at least in between songs. Long tuning breaks, spontaneous hardcore breakdowns, bouncer baiting (“It’s kind of a game, you against them!” Lee encourages the mosh pitters). Hilariously, Thurston keeps asking if his brother has arrived from Danbury yet. “Fuck my brother?!” he asks, dismayed, when someone in the crowd voices their displeasure. “Of course I’ve fucked my brother, I’m from Connecticut!”
In between all the tomfoolery, SY manage to rock the fuck out, don’t worry. The new Goo stuff, which dominates the set, sounds incredible, whether it's a truly vicious “Kool Thing” or an explosive “Cinderella’s Big Score” or a snotty “Mary Christ.” Best of all is Ranaldo’s teetering-on-the-brink “Mote.” A new decade had dawned and Sonic Youth was ready to stare straight into the rising sun.
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From the Doom & Gloom Archives
John Fahey - The Record Plant, Sausalito, California, September 9, 1973
John Fahey often talked about his solo guitar pieces in symphonic terms – in other words, being a lone instrumentalist but still making a big, ambitiously layered sound. By the mid-70s he’d been honing his craft for more than a decade and a half, creating a body of work that puts Fahey safely within the ranks of great 20th century American composers, regardless of genre. Many may disagree, but for me, the guitarist’s symphonic vision was best achieved on his 1973 Fare Forward Voyagers LP, a kaleidoscopic journey through folk, blues and raga song forms. It’s a motherfucker of an album, its depths are positively limitless. Fahey was also peaking as a live performer during this period, as evidenced by the 1973 recording, made in front of a live studio audience at the Record Plant in Sausalito, CA. Playing long medleys of tunes (the first lasts almost a half-hour), Fahey combines composed bits with (what seem to me to be) improvised flights of fancy, showing off both his impressive powers of concentration and his willingness to depart from the script, to see where his fingers will take him. It’s breathtaking stuff, all preserved perfectly on an FM broadcast.
Currently Reading: Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon