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Cover art by Todd Brooks
Getting Rid of the Glue is a tribute to the continuing positive influence of John Cage on free /improv /creative /& noise music. It is a compilation of New York/Chicago musicians representing a wide-ranging diversity of experimental music that is both new and relevant to a chaotic and unstable 21st century.
Getting rid of the glue is a phrase first used by Henry Cowell before introducing the music of Christian Wolff, Earl Brown, Morton Feldman, and John Cage at a New School concert in 1950’s. John Cage in his influential lecture entitled “History of Experimental Music in the United States” recounts the remarks of Henry Cowell. “…That here were ... composers getting rid of glue. That is: Where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we ... felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves.” - John Cage
This will be the first in a series of "Getting Rid of the Glue" themed LPs dedicated to improv / experimental / & noise music.
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Various Artists
Getting Rid of the Glue (2006)
Catalog# PSR-0016
Format: LP
Release date: 11/30/2006
NEARLY SOLD OUT!
Listen to the entire recording on our Pendu Sound System podcast now!
Tracklist:
Side A
1. Dirty Churches - Eat Birth
[MySpace]
2. Spin-17 - Fin Fang Foom
[site] [MySpace]
3. K.P. - Birds Fucking Outside My Window
[site] [MySpace]
4. BIG A little a - Yves St. Sean
[site] [MySpace]
5. Fessenden
5. Pt. III/II
[site] [MySpace] |
Side B
6. Eager Meek - To Accidental Crashes and Long Naps
[MySpace]
7. Mialessot w/ Daniel Carter & Old Ghost
- Hemorrhage
[site] [MySpace]
8. Maria Chavez - Untitled (live)
[site] [MySpace]
9. Talibam! - Talibam Eat a Sound Soup
[site] [MySpace]
10. Excepter - Sonja
[site] [MySpace] |
Review from Smooth Assailing
"the title of this compilation was lifted from a quote by henry cowell, right before introducing the music of john cage, morton feldman, christian wolff and earl brown; it referred to how these composers were eschewing traditional structure for looser experimentation. this brooklyn-centric 12" adheres to this, uh, unadhesiveness, and offers up ten artists and groups' musical perspectives on the matter.
dirty churches' eat birth is the most strikingly different track from the rest of the compilation as it's pretty rocking. they establish a great drum rhythm with slow, steadily driving guitar. doesn't sound much like free-improv, but listening to it, there's not much "traditional" about it. formless female vocals at first, but even when stephonik briefly starts singing, it won't sound all that normal. since there's no chorus and hardly even a verse, i began to understand its inclusion. diggin' that track. not sure if this band is still active, but two of the members' (jesse gelaznik and alex beard) current exploits are being carried out in hula.
fin fang foom (fun fact: also the name of a math rock band... and an alliteration) by duo spin-17 is more like what i was expecting; multi-layered female vocals by motoko shimizu aided by light drum, wooden and metallic percussion. shimizu's mostly in maja ratkje mode, but with a healthy pinch of maggie nicols thrown in for good measure. the multi-tracking was nice, but the best part is ed chang's unexpected blast of noise and feedback that closes out the last fifty seconds. ed's pretty active in the avant-garde community and collaborates with doug theriault as dual and ed howard in agents at midnight. there's a collaborative effort between both members of spin-17 and adam kriney (beets (with dirty churches' john dalessi), the colour sounds label, owl xounds, la otracina, blizzards, castanets) called lust ionics, as well. then there's also rust ionics, which is ed chang, kriney and theriault.
k.p.'s birds fucking outside my window is a glorious orgy of electronic chaos and noisy electronic drone with organic percussive undertones. i really enjoy the random sounds of the muffled hand drumming buried underneath the obtrusive squeals and scuffed up noise. k.p. consisted of tyler orr, matt folden (hatefuck) and max gudmunson. both matt and max are in abuse report with pendu's proprietor todd brooks, and max also gets his write on with cassette gods and the demon academy blog. it seems like k.p. is just matt and max now, not sure if orr was on this track or not.
percussion and electronics meet again on fessenden's pt. iii/ii. the results are a lot calmer though. the drumming sounds like disconnected explosions off in the horizon, while drones softly undulate. there's a wind-up sounding click that's rather hypnotic, especially with the waviness of the metallic ambiance. the sporadic and spastic percussion is a unique companion for the overall lull of pt. iii/ii, but, to my delight, it doesn't detract from the trance-like feel, and i actually found that it provided a fantastic compliment to it.
eager meek (andré joel paul, also of this sheep those sheep and you aren't my mother) begins to accidental crashes and long naps with twenty seconds or so of sparse guitar before a brief passage of loud, hollow noise leads to a bleak, but still captivating rolling drone which will repeat for most of crashes' duration. there's also some random rhythmic clicking noises, which only stick around in the first half, but the center of this track's universe is clearly the wintry drones. with a foundation as good as this is, the main concern should be not adding too much to it, and paul succeeds there, with a nice bit of restraint on his part.
hemorrhage, by mialessot, daniel carter and old ghost, who are now known as ghost moth, features waves of distorted noise and squaller. that noise is far more of a presence than i heard on their split cassette with fossils, and i'm liking it a whole lot. carter's saxophone cries are no competition to the strength of todd and robbie's tumult and are relegated to back seat status. not that that's a bad thing, it's nice to hear his frantic blurts and prolonged whines lurking just below the surface, puncturing the thick noise at the opportune times. awesome.
experimental turntablist (ex-texan and fashionista!) maria chavez hadn't been on my radar, for some inexplicable reason, but her untitled piece from an april 2006 performance at spoken word has captured my attention. expertly used audio excerpts, crackling vinyl, needle skips, squeals and minimal noise is making me very happy. what's weird is that i've heard of everyone she's collaborated with or gets mentioned with, but not her. okay, considering that this was the last thing of hers that's shown up on a tangible audio recording, it's not so weird. maria's no longer putting out releases, although she is still performing (in the nyc area). rather than record music, she's decided to just videotape the performances and then have them freely streaming on her blog... but it seems like youtube has more videos of her than the blog.
talibam's talibam eat a sound soup does a whole lot of wandering. i'm mainly drawn to kevin shea's impressive rolling polyarrhythmic drumming. the pitch-shifting organ synth sounds good, as does the brief bit of saxophone towards the end, but that's about it. there's a fifteen second period where synth and drums have a connection, and that was promising, but the bottom falls out too quickly. it's alright, just not as memorable as other tracks on getting rid of the glue, despite the fact that it does one of the better jobs here of actually getting rid of the glue.
excepter will overcompensate for talibam!'s noodling with an upbeat, whimsical and repetitious synth foundation on sonja. then, to balance out all of the structure, they'll flesh it out with reverberated, almost shoegazey cooing that drifts about more as an atmospheric addition than a focal point, there's also improvisational synthesizer playing on top of the main loop. whether intentional or not, i like how the album was bookended by the two tracks that were kinda-sorta improvisational, but i just like themes, doesn't matter if they're imagined or not.
the record's final two tracks didn't move me so much, but the rest of comp was great. i dug the broad range of sounds and styles and it was interesting to hear the different ways that everyone chose to sidestep tradition. some made wide fucking detours, others merely tip-toed around it, but, overall, it made for a rad album." - avant gardening from Smooth Assailing
Review from APPLES and HEROIN,
September 20, 2007
"Skipping over this slab took little effort. Tossing it off as just another New Weird Noise relic, I never sought it out. Bands like Spin-17 and Dirty Churches somehow never gained my attention. While Daniel Carter and Excepter produce some great glints of inspiration, the said artists never provided enough consistency for me to start following them. Man, I kicked my own ass after hearing this compilation. Though it lags a bit on the second side, the first side marks one of the most seamless compilation track sequences ever committed to wax. The Prog-and-Krautrock-accented experiments swim through vast stylistic oceans but always seem to connect to the next track. Dirty Churches begin things with a mystic swirl of bedroom psych. From the Spin-17 track on, the LP takes a turn for the unexpected. Spin 17 flirt with the wordless vocal pyrotechnics of Yoko Ono with multi-tracked little voices forming into a scraping noise meltdown. KP soundtrack Hawkwind's spaceship lift-off with electronic flittering and warped, condensed kaleidoscopic sound on "Birds Fucking Outside my Window," ending with some amazingly claustrophobic bangs and blips. With a soft-spot for Klaus Schulze, Big A Little A (dig the Crass reference) float interstellar sound orbs into a naturally percussion universe, forcing them to coexist as the melody turns tribal. All these grooves lead into Fessenden's "Pt. II/III," a swirling, crescendoing ambient texture that eventually engulfs the room. The tune takes a slithering black electronic groove, adds light, tapping percussion and utilizes negative space in its unsettling minimal soundscape. Side two opens with a similar death star groove from Eager Meek but chops the flow with a jazzadelic sound bomb from Daniel Carter and co. Things get muddy from there as Maria Chavez goes intergalactic and minimal and Talibam! goes hog wild for meltdown sonics. Excepter lends a stellar tropical dance tune to end the disc, blending shattered new wave and the icy atmospheres of early British industrial bands aligned with post-punk. Awwweeessssooommeee" - S. Kobak (APPLES AND HEROIN)
Review from Bull Tongue (Bull Tongue 27)
"The Pendu Gallery in Brooklyn has released a fantastic comp of New York area bands called Getting Rid of the Glue. The title is taken from a statement made by Henry Cowell when introducing performances by John Cage, Christian Wolf, Earl Brown and Morton Feldman at a New School concert in the 1950s. As Cage remembers it, Cowell was describing how these mavericks were dispensing of the “stuck” habits of music formality. That’s awesome, and someone had to make the fucking move and they did it and here we are all just free and open and killing any and all strictures of “rules.” This can be an anarchistic slop fest but thanks to the curatorial aesthetics of people like Pendu Gallery we can approach the madness knowing we are going to be hearing some worthwhile innovation. This comp is a good un natch, reminiscent of the Space is No Place comps from Psych-o-path Records in 2002 where we first heard Mouthus and the where-are-they-now Breast Fed Yak. Some known names here especially Excepter who are constantly in some kind of flexible flyer of rubbery bomp and slap groove and Talibam! and Maria Chavez and Big A Little A. The new kids, at least new to our old fogey country ears, are as sprightly and damaged as you ask for. Killer kutz from Dirty Churches and Fessenden and Eager Meek and a great track from free jazz pioneer Daniel Carter where he’s blowing classic outside toneskree with noise knobbers Old Ghost and something called Mialessot. Carter is amazing. He has been on the boards with his horn since the early loft days of late ‘60s into ‘70s NYC, a poet – recently published Work In Process (Pitchfork Press) – a high-minded thinker, theorist and he has a history of playing in and out of all kinds of contemporary marginalia from no wave dementia alongside The Contortions to jamming with first gen hardcore bands. His solo, duo, etc. work is consistently astounding particularly his membership in the long running 4tet Test with Sabir Mateen, Matt Heyner and Tom Bruno, considered by many the premier free jazz group of the last ten years. Daniel has been laying it down with Old Ghost and Mialessot for a little while now, they have a previous CDR What If? (Pendu Sound). And there’s what is seemingly a related cassette release by K.P./Daniel Carter/Demian Richardson on the St Cono Strada label outta Brooklyn. With the current interest in reeds in free noise, particularly the embouchure munch of Heath Moerland (Sick Llama) and John Olson (Wolf Eyes, Dead Machines) and certainly Paul Flaherty, Carter is in a welcome stream of NOW. As he has been always." -
from Arthur Magazine's Bull Tongue by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. - Ecstatic Peace / Bull Tongue
Review from Bull Tongue (Bull Tongue 26 / The Top 80 of 2006)
"Good, non-standard BKLN comp album w/ a few "known" names ( Excepter , Daniel Carter ) and a very nice handle on how to sniff between the cracks. This packs a variety of "free rock" approaches into 12 inches of space that are tasty and surprisingly coherent." - Byron Coley, Thurston Moore - Ecstatic Peace / Bull Tongue
Review from Aquarius Records
"First in a proposed series of lps, based on a phrase used by Henry Cowell and later included in a lecture by John Cage, which in a nutshell describes a musical movement of the time (Wolff, Brown, Feldman, Cage, etc.) involving getting rid of the glue and allowing sounds to be themselves, instead of sticking them together into some sort of continuous form. High concept certainly, and while it is easy to hear how the various artists on this comp did in fact get rid of the glue, loosed from the concept, it still plays like some killer outsider free rock compilation. Which it is. Some of the names you probably know, Excepter, Talibam!, BIG A little a, but most of them you probably don't. A quick track by track: Dirty Churches do a sort of droning hypnorock, with guttural female vocals and drifting psych guitars, definitely the most 'glued' of the bunch. Spin-17 are kind of like a brain damaged Deerhoof, sing songy nonsense female vocals, weird gurgly male vocals, and other strange childlike vocalizations, toy percussion, all clattery and chaotic and very weird. K.P. are a sludge-skree collective from Brooklyn and manage to kick up a serious din, massive crumbling distortion, damaged electronics, dense and dark and seriously freaked out. BIG A little a (Aa) rock a sort of spaced out psychedelic rhythmscape, thick buzzing synths, tribal drumming, almost sounding like a super lo-fi version of newer Boredoms mixed with Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh. Fessenden features at least one member from Pan-American, but sounds nothing like that, instead it's a buzzing minimal electro acoustic soundscape, lots of hiss and fuzz, drone and buzz, creaks and clatter and grinding crunch, a creepy industrial ambience, thick with mysterious muted percussion. Eager Meek is one man and a guitar, but you'd never know it. All sorts of swirly ambience, strange distant percussive rattles and scrapes, very haunting and spaced out. Up next is Mialessot, featuring NYC saxophonist Daniel Carter and analog noisemaker Old Ghost. Imagine a free jazz / Japanoise mashup and you'd have a pretty good idea of what these guys are all about. A bracing blast of damaged synths and blown out guitarnoise, a swirling roiling cloud of grind and rrrrooooaaar all piled atop a squirming and skronking tangle of free jazz sax, bleating and moaning and screeching. Pretty far out. Maria Chavez, does some super abstract turntable noise, utilizing old records and an arsenal of damaged record needles to create a spacious sound field peppered with lots of crackle and squeaks, pops and scrapes and alien squiggles, very minimal and abrasive but really awesome. would love to hear more from her. Finally a killer closing one two punch. First Talibam! who give us their fucked and furious drums vs. synth sound, this time the relentlessly spastic free jazz drum splatter is pitted against creepy atonal organ (sounding a bit like a ball park organ) and fuzzed out synth. The Excepter, fronted by an ex No Necker, doing some weird eighties faux new wave thing, with electronic percussion, cheesy synths and really loud vocals, wrapped in tons of effects, reverb especially, swooping and soaring and sounding seriously demented. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Includes a fold out poster with art by all the bands..."
- Aquarius Records
Review from Mimaroglu Music Sales
"a nice range of sounds/styles from micro-improv to noise-psych-wash to straight-up free jazz." - Mimaroglu Music Sales
Review from Dusted Magazine
Loosely assembled collection of ten tracks by a grab bag of avant-garde musicians, tinkering in rock-leaning sounds (Dirty Churches), vocal experimentalism (Spin-17), electronic lost weekends (Excepter), free improvisation (Mialessot with Daniel Carter and Old Ghost, Talibam!) and percussion workouts (Aa), among others. There’s some interesting pieces here, including a short, tense electro-acoustic scrape by Maria Chavez, and Eager Meek’s minimal noise/drone frottage, but in total this is a concept that works better on paper. Essentially, we have ten artists here who sound nothing alike, and to Morton Feldman’s school of thought, that’s exactly what they should be doing, but a solid album this philosophy cannot make. Jarring transitions leave the listener unprepared for what’s to follow, providing no basis for comparison and often leaving the audience wrapped up in what was happening earlier. As a result, nothing here sticks out, in one of the most clinical short changing acts in closet-full-of-recorddom to surface in some time. Ideas are fine, but having to make sacrifices for them in the context of a traditional record listening experience is a bit much to ask of anyone who’d otherwise be into this (to say nothing of the tossed-off, outtake quality shared here, sadly the one unifying factor between these acts). Edition of 300 with a Xerox insert. By Doug Mosurak - Dusted Magazine |
