JOHN WIESE "Don't Move Your Finger" b/w "Corpse Solo" (Ecstatic Peace!)

A special brand of legitimacy is bestowed upon Noise artists who do not use pseudonyms. They get to do fancy shows funded by arts councils. (Nothing sounds less worthy of the Fine Arts gallery world than a Noise project called Feedback Twerp, or Stab Wound Crap Sack, regardless of how appropriate for the setting the music may be.) "Real name" artists don't have the burden of adhearing to one specific aesthetic the way that a project with a psuedonym must. In the case of John Wiese, I would never suggest that he is undeserving of any of his success, only that he wouldn't have had the same type of success had he called himself something goofy like almost everybody else. The issue is, how do these artists use their "real name" credibility to further their music, or the genre as a whole. Last year, Wiese toured Europe in a lineup featuring some current popular Noise artists, C. Spencer Yeh and the members of D. Yellow Swans, and some old-school English Free Improv musicians like Evan Parker and John Edwards. The shows were billed as "Free Noise" in an uninspired attempt to mashup the two genre names-- as if Noise weren't somehow "free" in the same sense as Free Jazz and Free Improv in the first place. (Or does it mean that they weren't charging a cover at the door?)

The result of this tour, for the rest of Wiese's work, seems to be a renewed excitement about improvisation and the musical aesthetic of Improv. After he returned from tour, Wiese set up the Sissy Spacek 13-tet, a truly abominable Improv performance featuring members of Mika Miko and No Age who, I'm certain if quizzed, could not name any of the original members of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, let alone grasp what Wiese was actually asking them to do in the performance. It was as if only half of the thirteen players (Mitchell Brown and Joseph Hammer specifically) were even aware that Free Improvisation was a musical practice that hundreds of brilliant people have devoted their entire careers to since the mid-1960's-- i.e.: a practice with a rich history to which a player must have some responsibility before they get up in front of a sold-out crowd and start fucking around.

Wiese has been much more successful adapting his newfound interest in old-school Improv to his solo work. The cassette, "Don't Move Your Finger b/w Corpse Solo" is the first document I've heard of a style in which Wiese has been performing occasionally throughout the last year or so. Whether or not the pieces are truly improvised is not the point-- they may be thoroughly composed. The sound borrows heavily from the moment-to moment logic of early European Free Improv (EFI) music. Both sides of the tape (appropriately recorded live in Holland and "somewhere in Europe") use minute slices of audio: Wiese shuffling around with contact mics, hitting drums / table legs, and twanging guitar strings. These sounds are placed among very short silences, and ping-ponged across the stereo spectrum. The feeling is very similar to the later days of EFI when electronics became more common but the compositional logic of the players hadn't yet adapted to their new instruments' strengths. One touchstone may be the music of Furt. This tape, like a Furt album, has a distinctly electronic sound palette, a British sense of fussiness (in a very Derek Bailey / John Stevens kind of way) and a pre-EAI (Electro-Acoustic Improvisation) idea of time and linearity. Wiese is proving here that he could have easily held his own had he appeared on the (so-called) orange CD on Charhizma, but on nothing afterward.

The real strength of this area of Wiese's music is not totally represented on this tape, however. The tape is good-- in fact, really good. But when Weise plays similar material live, it is the influence of his Noise music upbringing that makes this style into something special. He plays it loud. Really fucking loud. Which is not something that Furt do. And really, that volume is what pulls this stuff out of the realm of homage (to EFI, to Evan Parker, to whatever) and into something genuinely new. It sounds stupid to say that something so simple could, so drastically, change the nature of this music, but it is absolutely the case. The actual sounds that Wiese plays are, to my ears, undistorted. It is uncommon to hear clean audio at really high volume, and for it to be as violent and assaulting as Wises makes it. Seriously, I thought my teeth might rattle out of my head in the middle of the concert. The one aspect of EFI that Wiese has done away with entirely is it's politeness. By simply cranking the volume, he's given it quite a bit of attitude. So even though he records and perform under his real name (and not Withered By Her Stare or Autoerotic Nightstick) John Weise can still bring the noise. Even when seduced by other areas of art music (those that are substantially better funded) he choses to retain a degree of the confrontational nature inherent to Noise, learned through a decade of Noise mastery.

V/A "BTHO" (Ecstatic Peace)

Born To Hang Out, huh? Is that what all these guys go and do when they leave shows all early and shit? Heh. Just kidding. The concept of this release is that all the artists featured on this comp live within the 90028 zip code in Los Angeles, and, as the name of their posse would suggest, they all hang out together all the time. From this I presume the listener is supposed to glean some kind of sense of how cool it would be to kick it with the SoCal Noise Elite, maybe have a backyard BBQ. Among some, this tape could have the appeal of, say, A Hard Day’s Night, or Ocean’s Eleven—movies whose success is based mostly on how badly the audience wishes they too could hang out with (and be as cool as) their stars.
It is mentioned in the press release that this is the first cassette on Ecstatic Peace in well over twenty years. Apparently the label is a little rusty on how this whole thing should work. First off: by some anomalous dubbing fiasco, my copy of BTHO contains absolutely no audio in the right stereo channel. None. Totally silent. Both sides of the tape. I don’t know how much I am missing by only hearing the left channel. Maybe the tape contains sing-alongs that I’m not hearing because all the vocals are crammed into the right channel in tribute to Phil Specter’s production techniques from the late 1960’s. Secondly: the artwork is pretty janky—a pixilated picture on a flimsy piece of printer paper cut slightly too large to fit into the cassette case but crumpled up and rammed in nonetheless. And finally: the tabs aren’t popped out on the cassette itself. Do they want me to tape over this?
Side A begins with a track by The Cherry Point (AKA Phil Blankenship) named for actress Kelli Maroney. Though little connection can be drawn between the music and Maroney’s masterpieces, Night of the Comet and Chopping Mall, it is a very satisfying slab of noise. Thinner sounding than TCP’s other material, a smaller frequency range is employed without sacrificing any of the harshness. What we’re left with is a blistering mid/high range sizzle with some occasional whistling feedback.
The Sissy Spacek track “Bannanas” is a cut-up collage of a quartet lineup of the band. The source material seems to all be acoustic, as if the members of the band were banging around on whatever they could find in somebody’s kitchen. C. Spencer Yeh (who definitely does not live in the 90028 zip) joins the usual crew of John Wiese, Corydon Ronnau and Danny McClain with some frantic violin sawing. The whole thing kinda sounds like a bunch of Martians fighting about groceries—low-fi clanging and jibbering with all the fussiness of an Evan Parker/Derek Bailey duo, but with all the aggression of, well, Sissy Spacek.
Allen Pyle is the solo project of Shannon Walter, a recent émigré to LA and member of 16 Bitch Pile-Up. Her track “Total Fuckingly” is quite nice—heavy crackling with bursts of out-of-control feedback. I can’t help but imagine it’s power is severely neutered when only one channel is audible.
Tom Grimley really was born to hang out. Seeing him play is pretty much the most fun a person can have in Los Angeles. If you don’t know his deal, look him up. To describe the nature of his performances would require much more space and attention than the format of the cassette review will allow. Suffice it to say that any recording pales in comparison to the experience of witnessing it live—yet the recording still fucking rules.
Obstacle Corpse (Ronnau again) closes out side A with a track that sounds just like Obstacle Corpse—which is great for people outside of LA, because this project is sadly under-documented, but for those of us who get to hear him play live every couple of weeks, the piece is pretty unsurprising.
Damion Romero’s “Faux Vespa (For Joe Colley)” could very well be an unprocessed recording of a scooter engine—perhaps the spiritual (smaller) sister to his 3”CD Idle, on P-Tapes. John Wiese’s track is probably very nice, but ill-suited to the cassette medium whose signal to noise ratio is too high for the type of subtlety and quietude he’s attempting. Again: maybe the left channel makes the whole thing come together much better.
Seven Depressions is the duo project of Damion Romero and Shannon Walter. The multiple appearances by some artists on this comp seems a little bit cheap, but how many people can really live in the same zip code, right? (This recombination only hints at the hilarity that is Traumatic Stress, the one-sided 7” whereon every possible combination of Wiese, Blankenship and Ronnau is explored, all within five minutes.) The tape ends with a piece by GX Jupitter-Larsen of The Haters— a Morse code message which I can only imagine decodes to: “Born to hang out? WTF? Nobody has seen me at a noise show in LA in more than a year.”
And then, because the material on side B is shorter than that on side A, there is a long long silence until the tape actually stops. Grrrrrrr.
Honestly, it’s too bad this isn’t better. Several of these tracks are great, and every one of the artists on this comp is a serious heavyweight. If Ecstatic Peace decides to release any more cassettes after this, I hope the quality of the dubbing/artwork/everything matches the quality of the content with which they've been entrusted.
BTW: this reviewer is looking forward to the inevitble beefs that will arise out of the creation of noise crews such as this. Look at what happens with the Diplomats, G-Unit, D-Block, etc. Personally, I can't wait for the BTHO vs. Scum Crew mixtapes to start hitting the streets.