The Deep Noise Alchemist (Who Walked the Earth)
"What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning./The end is where we start from."-T. S. Elliot
Hail, hail the noisemakers. The bombastic(k)ers. Those artists who challenge us with brutal sounds and who free us from the confines of our day-to-day environments, providing dental floss for the minds, providing moments of bliss to those who know how to translate the alien sounds. What better way to understand the chaos of our world than through opposing chaos; what better way to rise above the darkness than through a more hopefully intentioned anarchy. The soundtrack to LaMonte Young’s Dreamhouse in New York seems initially bombastic, but its purpose is to provide a space for peace and rest and possible enlightenment in the middle of a bustling, bursting city; sit and take in the enveloping pulsations and streams of deliberate meandering tones, lie down and bathe in it: you will be changed (and if not changed, elevated).
Donald Miller passed away last month. Miller was the guitarist for Borbetomagus, one of the most sonically brutal bands of all-time—whose sound may be closest to that of Free Jazz, but maybe even closer to some unknown genre that was played when the universe began or, closer to home, when the meteor ended the reign of the dinosaurs: Big Bang music. Along with Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter, both on saxophone, Borbetomagus roamed the earth carnivorously eviscerating any stage, any public space, any place they hunted. No concert or record was the same, but all had an unrelenting quality of giant waves hitting the surfer over and over and over again: Sauter and Dietrich locking horns to produce a unified sound not unlike a mac truck crashing into a whaling ship in abandon mode while Miller played alchemist, sometimes chainsaw strumming his guitar through a series of cranked up pedals, sometimes with a slide, sometimes placing strange objects onto the strings as his guitar sat in his lap as if he was participating in some ancient deep-forest ritual. And through all of the noise, they watched each other, played off each other, found the spaces for each of them to coexist with each other.
Dietrich and Sauter were childhood friends. They met in kindergarten and not much later found out that they both were learning saxophone, and both loved making crazed noises with the instrument. Dietrich told Pitchfork: “What was appealing about the saxophone was its ability to make sound. My interest in the instrument was as a sound-making device, not a note-making device.1” As teens they figured out that putting their saxes together, “Bells Together,” they could elevate the level of sound in ways extreme. They found Donald Miller by listening to his radio show on Columbia University’s WKCR. He hosted the Avant Garde music show while also playing guitar in the band (love the name) Sick Dick and the Volkswagens. Dietrich and Sauter connected with Miller, found out he was a guitarist as well as a DJ, and started playing with him, and never stopped. Since the late 70s Borbetomagus has toured and released records, evolving their sound within their storm. Miller moved to New Orleans in 2001, slowing down the band’s activity, finding them touring over in Europe more than the US because of the financial opportunities over there. It became rarer to spot a Borbetomagus.
But even as Borbetomagus slowed down, Miller continued to make music with other collaborators in New Orleans, and even released an incredible, unexpected (to me at least) beautiful acoustic record of his complex take on modern primitive solo guitar compositions, Transgression!!!, in 2021. Through facebook (ugh, I know) I met Miller and asked him to participate in the Free Jazz edition I was putting together for this newsletter, to give me ten of his favorite Free Jazz Records. He happily compiled one of the more unique lists of records that was included (I will reprint it below), replying to me after seeing the post and reading my introduction, “It will be my go-to whenever I must explain what I do or it (Free Jazz) is to puny mortals.”
The news of Miller’s passing last month was circulated on the socials and in the ultra-niche community listserves, but without a true obituary or other follow-up articles (except for a piece in Off-Beat magazine, which is unfortunately behind a pay wall). It seemed sudden, unexpected…jarring: much like the music he spent his life creating. His passing marks the extinction of a sound, a sound dinosaur big and brutal.
I think Donald would agree with my suggestion to all reading this to take some time and try to give extreme noise music a chance. Like poetry, like super spicy foods, like boot camp work outs (ok, I am guessing on that one), like the sounds we all heard in the womb: the noisy music of the universe is a developed taste that, if one is patient and truly open to it….truly open to it…can free the soul, can connect to a higher consciousness.
Rest in Peace and Noise Donald Miller. May your memory be a blessing….
~~
Donald Miller’s list of go-to Free Jazz records:
Live in Greenwich Village by Albert Ayler (Impulse)
Babi by Milford Graves (Babi Music)
Topography of the Lungs by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink (Incus)
Lumps by Steve Lacy (ICP)
Jazz Composers Orchestra by Cecil Taylor (JCOA Records)
Monoceros by Evan Parker (Incus)
People in Sorrow by Art Ensemble of Chicago (Nessa)
Brötzmann/Van Hove/Bennink by Peter Brötzmann, Fred Van Hove, Han Bennink (FMP)
Percival Everett and Jason De León win National Book Awards
Culled from the short list that was announced a little over 2 weeks ago, Everett wins for fiction, De León for non-fiction. I am going to jump into Everett’s book James after I finish reading The Unseen by Roy Jacobson. Looking forward.
Art Sheridan and Chance Records
The Library of Congress received the Art Sheridan and his label Chance Records archive and published a nice piece examining the holdings. Chance Records was an interesting blues/R’n’B/Jazz label out of Chicago in the 1950s: it put out some very great blues during a time of the genre’s major evolution while also putting out some pretty crap big band jazz records. But those good releases are pretty damn good…and pretty unavailable in the modern world of streaming. Check out great Chance releases like J.B. Hutto and the Hawks’ Things Are So Slow, Sister Rosa Shaw’s I’m Leaving Soon, Jimmy Reed’s Roll and Rhumba, Willie Nix’s Nervous Wreck, George Greens’ Finance Man, and Little Walter J’s That’s Alright.
Mono vs. Stereo: On alternative recordings, timeline blips, and Blonde on Blonde
I recently contributed a piece to the Why Is This Interesting newsletter around the mono and stereo mixes that were available for many record releases in the late 60s/early 70s…how they sounded different…sometimes radically different.
Deafula: The World's First Sign-only Film
I have already started watching every 1975 horror film I can get my bleeding eyes on…and I usually don’t share what I am watching until near Halloween. But how can I not talk about the first ever horror film shot entirely in sign language for the deaf. Actually, the first EVER film of this type? It took me a while to find a place online (or anywhere) to watch it (Noam, you would be proud), but I did…with narration for the hearing around the signs (and even an occasional soundtrack). After viewing, I can tell you that it is also the first ever deaf (!) defying crap b horror movie ever to be filmed in sign, with a vampire whose fake nose never ends, “dialogue” that was poorly made up on the spot (the cigarette trick scene hits a low in story telling), and even some not-too-pc-for-a-pre-Trump-world shenanigans.
Vincent van Gogh’s Brilliant Blue ‘Irises’ Were Originally Purple, New Research Reveals
“In September of 1889, art critic Félix Fénéon wrote of van Gogh’s abilities as a colorist, exemplified by the “violet patches” of the flowers in Irises…With violet in mind, Getty’s conservators examined the painting with a stereo microscope to glimpse fine details. Then, they scanned Irises with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a noninvasive tool for determining objects’ elemental composition. In Irises, the scientists discovered a red pigment called geranium lake, which was commonly used by van Gogh and other late-19th century painters. Van Gogh apparently mixed it with blues to create purple for Irises. But geranium lake is highly sensitive to light.”
This is a crazy story even got crazier with this more recent article: Thai police probe monastery for using 41 bodies in meditation. It begs to ask: is this really part of our collective reality?
Wood Working at the End of the World
By Ocean Vuong
In a field at the end of the world: a streetlamp
shining on a patch of grass.
Having just come back to life, I lay down under its warm light
& waited for a way.
That’s when the boy appeared, lying next to me.
He was wearing a red Ninja Turtles t-shirt—but from
another era, the colors faraway.
I recognized his eyes: black buttons salvaged from the coat
I used to cover my mother’s face at the end.
Why do you exist? I wanted to know.
I felt the crickets around us but couldn’t hear them.
A chapel on the last day of war.
That’s how quiet he was.
The town I had walked from was small & American.
If I stayed on my knees, it would keep all my secrets.
When we heard the woodcutters coming closer, destroying
the past to build the future, the boy started to cry.
But the voice, the voice that came out
was an old man’s.
I reached into my pocket
but the gun was gone.
I must’ve dropped it while burying my language farther
up the road.
It’s okay, the boy said at last. I forgive you.
Then he kissed me as if returning a porcelain shard
to my cheek.
Shaking, I turned to him. I turned
& found, crumpled on the grass, the faded red shirt.
I put it over my face & stayed very still—like my mother at the end.
Then it came to me, my little life. I remembered my life
the way an axe handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Nesuhi Ertegün!
Happy Birthday Gunnar Sønstevold!!!
https://pitchfork.com/features/the-out-door/9226-age-and-time/
Oh my, such a batch of strange and intriguing items you've laid out for us to ponder during the holidays! Well done, A+ for strangeness.