Monday, 03 November 2008

It all started with an e-mail from Dr. A, who suggested I checked out PAK, the New York-based prog-punk outfit. Prog Punk? – waitaminute: surely some mistake? Nope, these guys name-check Gentle Giant and King Crimson alongside early Boredoms, Minutemen, Lightning Bolt, etc in a way that’s both unselfconscious and endearing. Check out the twisted pretzel-logic panic-attack of Stop, Go, Die, Now!  or their Live at The Stone jam which sounds like a cartoon cross-country car-race scored by members of Egg, The Mothers of Invention and Japanese Power-Spaz duo Ruins. PAK gleefully combine the breathless amphetamine rush of punk rock with the labyrinthine inventiveness of Fripp, Hammill, Magma and co.
   
PAK have been ripping it up for nearly a decade in various permutations, though always with bassist/multi-instrumentalist Ron Anderson sat somewhere near the steering wheel. Ron’s CV makes for interesting reading: he formed his on-off outfit The Molecules with Chris Milner back in 1990, in Oakland, California, using it as a springboard for their shared obsession with hardcore punk, art-rock and free jazz. The band had no real mission beyond the random "uglification" of assorted "high-brow" music-forms and having some fun.

Today, The Molecules sound as defiantly angular and oblique as anything in the post-punk canon, but there’s also something dementedly chaotic and childlike about some of their songs, as if they’re being performed in a play-pen by a gang of precociously talented six-year-olds. The Molecules sound like The Magic Band on their eighth pot of coffee or Pere Ubu trying to play an old Edgard Varèse score without their reading-glasses. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much of an audience for this music back then, or many other artists crazy enough to even attempt playing it. Well, not outside of Japan, anyway.

Digging a bit further back into Ron’s musical history I spotted that he relocated to NY’s Lower East Side in the very early 80s, at the arse-end of the No Wave/post-punk era when the city’s original Alt.Art 'n Roll bohemiocracy was still thriving. Inspired by the likes of Frank Zappa and Fred Frith, Ron found himself experimenting with various types of tape-composition, free noise and improv, as well as working with folks as diverse as James Chance and Daniel Carter. Actually, it’s interesting to me how much of an influence Zappa has been on outsider musicians – often acting as a conduit into “statistically dense” 20th century composers such as Varèse, Schonenberg, etc for those brave enough to make the jump.

In Zappa’s own personal mythology, modern composition and free jazz were accorded as much cultural weight as, say, garage rock, R n B, doo-wop and so forth - in fact, he sometimes even combined them all in the same song! - which made him the perfect ‘cultural straddler’, a musician who gleefully fused avant orchestration with greasy street-pop. FZ is considered unfashionable in some quarters, reviled by critics (I’m not one of them) who dismiss him as being cynical, contrived and “inauthentic”. But, credit due, Frank was one of the first rock musicians to wilfully deconstruct and derail his own compositions using Dadaist jump-cuts and Musique Concrete techniques that had previously been the province of musical academia. 

Zappa valued non-linear interjections, improv and arbitrary randomness as much as rigid composition and tight, precision-tooled playing. He was self-taught and street-smart with a ferocious work ethic and an inquiring mind, so it’s unsurprising that he’s such a touchstone for folks lurking out in the musical margins. Interestingly, his old sparring partner Captain Beefheart was one of a handful of pre-punk musicians (along with more obviously Ur-Punk acts like VU, The Stooges, etc) who were allowed on The Class of ‘76’s proscribed listening-list. Like Zappa, Don Van Vliet found his muse in old R n B 45s, but because his music is more overtly rooted in the blues it’s perceived as being grittier and more ‘authentic’. Beefheart’s best songs combine a rigid, prog-like angularity with free-form spaz-outs, making them the perfect template for contrary-minded refuseniks from both sides of the Punk vs Muso divide.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the sort of rigid orthodoxy whose ultimate end-point is: “Punk Rock Good. Prog Bad”. Music mostly evolves by combining genres and idioms - though occasionally it also surges forward by intuitive, almost eccentric leaps of faith. To exclude either punk or prog from the party seems snobbish, petty and reductionist. 

 There’s no denying the fact that punk gave a generation of non-musicians permission to get up and play, but without a willingness to grow and to embrace complexity along with chaos, music (and people) can easily stagnate. To be honest, the punk ethic was at its most potent during the explosion of ideas and experimentation that occurred in its aftermath around ’79 - ’84. But there’s no real reason why these two dogmas should be mutually exclusive anyway: intuitive software sequencers can transform even a clueless fool like myself into a cape-clad lo-fi Rick Wakeman and pretty much anyone can make Musique Concrete armed only with a pause-button – but it takes ideas, vision, persistence and practice to make good Musique Concrete. Or anything else, for that matter.

Sure, there was certainly a need to reboot the mid-70s mindset, but it’s also worth remembering that, despite all the Situationist rhetoric, Malcolm (Sex Pistols) McLaren and his old pal Bernie (The Clash) Rhodes were both managers, not revolutionaries. It was their job to talk up their bands and take care of business. And what better way to dispose of the competition than to declare them all obsolete overnight. Knocking all the established players off the chessboard with a single swipe was a bold and radical gesture that quickly paid dividends – though probably more for McLaren than for the musicians he supposedly represented. Two of the other less desirable side-effects of the UK Punk explosion were (a) that it eventually created a new rock aristocracy and (b) some curiously puritanical ideas about what actually constituted punk quickly became set in stone. To me, punk was an Idea: it was about igniting a continual revolution within yourself; it wasn’t about haircuts or creating a series of easily repeated gestures and slogans. 

On the surface, however, it seemed as if McLaren had successfully consigned prog rock to history’s trash-can for the next two decades – even Genesis was forced to become a pop band!

But Prog didn’t really die. Of course, stalwarts like Marillion or The Enid lumbered on, playing to a devoted, but slowly diminishing demographic. Punk itself was peppered with wrinklies who dyed their hair and dumbed-down their musical chops, while young, wannabe musos camouflaged their influences in increasingly cunning ways. Prog went into hiding during the 80s. It donned a variety of disguises and kept its head down, hoping no one would notice it could actually play.

The rise of rap – and, later, house – provided enough of a distraction that groups like Stump or The Cardiacs were able to occasionally infiltrate the indie charts. For a while it seemed as if you could openly indulge your proggish influences providing you wore kooky make-up and claimed you’d been to art-school, or made videos garish enough to appeal to proto-stoners and Brummies who were into Greebo. Still, these bands provided some clues as to how prog and punk might somehow eventually reconcile their differences.

Meanwhile, Ozric Tentacles became the new darlings of the Tie-Dye Underground, appealing to third gen hippies who had learned to skin up on gatefold copies of their uncles’ old Gong albums. In the States, Phish filled a similar niche for a new generation of 'Deadheads. The Ozrics morphed into the prog techno unit Eat Static, while ex-Gong guitarist Steve Hillage (check the excellent Space Shanty album he made in ’72 with a pre-Hatfield & The North Dave Stewart) cannily combined progressive beats and guitar solos in his early 90s System 7 project.

In the late 90s electronic music had its very own Prog Moment. Post-techno artists such as Richard James, Mike Paradinas, Aaron Funk, etc began creating a form of baroque mentalism that sounded increasingly complex and hypervirtuosic, while Squarepusher’s live bass-guitar interjections threatened to turn him into rave’s answer to Jaco Pastorius. In some ways, then, it was almost inevitable that Warp Records would eventually sign a full-on math-rock band like Battles, who cite Igor Stravinsky - another of Zappa’s Modernist heroes – as their biggest role-model. 

But why does pop culture have this perennial fascination with complexity, when a five-note ditty could just as easily suffice? Well, psychological studies on the appreciation of complex music seem to suggest that an individual’s preference for ‘difficult’ sequences of sonic information increases the more he is exposed to them. In a nutshell, then: our brains initially find prog irritating, but after repeated exposure it becomes extremely addictive. Which probably explains why I own so many bloody records by the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

 
These days there’s no doubting that prog is back with a vengeance: you can hear echoes of it in Chrome Hoof, MGMT, The Fiery Furnaces, Motorpsycho, The Raconteurs and even the new Fall album. Time has separated prog from the stigma of pomp and preciousness that McLaren attached to it, allowing us to reappraise it in a kinder light. The Japanese were geographically and culturally removed from prog’s public humiliation in the 1970s, so bands like Boredoms, Ruins, Melt Banana, etc never had a problem with incorporating rhythmic complexity into their musical vocabulary.

Strangely, it’s poor old punk that seems ossified and a little redundant now. Despite the efforts of bands like Fucked Up, it somehow feels stranded in history, like an old Polaroid or a blurred Xerox - a second-hand memory stripped of its magic. Over-commodification has reduced punk rock to a series of faux-rebellious gestures that can be kept in deep freeze and thawed-out by A&R men or stylists whenever it suits them. But prog’s lost weekend out in the wilderness has left it sounding edgy and eager to explore. And when it teams up with its old former enemy the pair of them make an unbeatable combination.       

 

Meanwhile, thanks to Ron Anderson for taking the time to chat with FACT over the phone. His enthusiasm for music of all shades and shapes really shone though. I recommend you dig around in his back catalogue – there’s a wealth of solo and collaborative gems waiting to be uncovered by those of you willing to roll up your sleeves and get involved.

Tell us a bit about relocating to the Lower East Side in the early 80s…

RA: “To me, it was a pretty amazing time. There was a lot going on. People were living relatively cheap. Rat At Rat R (a Philadelphia noise-band who Ron played with and who were contemporaries of Sonic Youth, Swans, Glenn Branca, etc) were still based in the building that I was living in on Suffolk Street. People used to make music in our apartment – neighbors be damned! It felt like a free-for-all, like you could get away with a lot more than you could now.”

Did it all come out of an art-based movement?

RA: “It was a bit of everything, really. My ex-wife was an artist, whereas I came from a musical background…listening first to Prog and then Punk and everything else that was around at that time. Along with a lot of other people I basically used this period to learn how to play my instrument. And all the experimentation was basically just that – “oh, wow, what can I do with this thing now…” (laughs) I was doing a lot of improvising and home-recording around then. My main goal was just to improve as a musician – both in terms of ideas and hitting the notes. And then The Knitting Factory thing started up, so there was a lot of improvisation going on. But I was still in my early twenties, so I was also going out and absorbing stuff. If I was in my twenties now, I’d probably move to Baltimore.”     

I know you first encountered Japanese underground music at a radio station sometime around ’91, but how did you actually hook up with the guys from Ruins?

RA: “Well, I heard Ruins and Boredoms one night and I was just amazed. I got the first Ruins’ CD and sent them a Molecules CD and never heard a word from them. Ruins did their first US tour and came to San Francisco…and someone asked who they wanted to play with and they said “We really want to play with The Molecules!” And this is how I met them. And then Yoshida and I really hit it off. He’s a really great friend. Whenever he comes to New York he always stays here. We’ve done a lot of touring and projects together. It’s just great to play with this guy – he’s incredible.

“When I finally got to play with Ruins, we did a tour as RonRuins - their idea, by the way, not mine (laughs) – and that was great because I learned so much musically, playing with them every night. It kicked me in the butt and got me up to another level. Basically, Yoshida said “Learn these Ruins songs” and he sent me a crummy little cassette-tape and it sounded like “Bwurrrf-burf-burff-burff-burrfssssstt-bvuuurrsh!” (laughs). I was living in Geneva at the time and every day I was sweating it out trying to find the notes to these songs. I was really scared to death. It was like - “I gotta learn this stuff or I’m going to look such an asshole on stage.” (laughs) But I did it. The first show - we walked on stage and the sound-check was our only rehearsal. Oh, fantastic. But it was fine.”