**This was posted on the prior incarnation of this blog, right before it tanked. There are some other older posts which will be resurfacing in the future. A few of the bands mentioned in this article were kind enough to say “hello!” after it went up the last time, and I wish I could put their comments back up with the text! Whatever, I guess it’s progress. Thanks to everyone for being cool.
I will begin with a quote:
“Since March 2003, The Hop-Frog Kollectiv has been hosting monthly experimental art, music & poetry gathering. To celebrate HFK is hosting two nights of the best experimental music Los Angeles has to offer. From ear piercing harsh noise to noise rock to asiatic dreams and melodies, the two nights features the Kollectiv’s dearest friends and mosted respected artists from the LA area. The festival will be fully documented for the upcoming Dung Mummy DVD/CD compilation. Each night features sax wielder, Steve Mackay who played on the seminal Stooges album, Funhouse. In addition Steve had been a member of the Violent Femmes, Snake Finger and has led the international Radon Ensemble with members of Sikhara, Amps fo Christ and much more.”
Or, from http://www.hop-frog.com/dungmummyWHATSDUNGMUMMY.htm…
“Dung Mummy is an ANTI-fascist experimental arts institution hosted by the hop-frog kollectiv. It is our goal to give artists a voice and platform that would otherwise be shunned by the Los Angeles/Hollywood matrix of hell-hole politics and depressing, self-confidence bleaching antics. We are dedicated to political dissent, artistic revolution and experimental realization.”
…All of which sounds good to me. So I went to the second night of the 5-year-anniversary Dung Mummy festival, only scantily informed.
I did know a few other things going in. Most of these things stemmed from my purchase not long ago of the Post Asiatic sampler, “Lost War Dream Music.” Disc 1 is hypnotic and nearly entirely awesome. Tracks by Seattle’s eccentric guitarist Bill Horist, the brilliant percussionist-mystic Z’ev, and the deceased madman Muslimgauze are interspersed with tracks by bands with names like Amps For Christ, Refrigerator Mothers, Hop-Frog Kollectiv, and other weirdnesses. I can’t always tell one track from another, but that works to the disc’s advantage.
Disc 2 hasn’t sucked me in so much. I will give it time.
(And, btw, there’s a vinyl edition which contains ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MUSIC by some of the same bands. The sound on that one is thick and fat and chewy and wonderful, and the disc itself is INSANE to look at. If you can find it, get one.)
The CD’s notes and the online literature refer to something called “Post-Asiatic” music which basically amounts to the largely uninformed appropriation of traditional Asian musical elements and the running with said elements in a variety of directions. I can dig it - I listen to lots of Japanese rocknroll, bunches of traditional Vietnamese, Balian, Tibetan Buddhist and rural Chinese music among other things. I could probably call my own music “Post Asiatic” (though it would give my Taiwanese-American girlfriend fits if I did) but I prefer “Post World.” In any case, the results of this not-so-cohesive-as-it-sounds movement are varied in quality and sensibility and liking some of it is no guarantee of liking all of it, though it makes for a nicely information-rich cultural system when it all gets banded together.
As the reader is by now aware, the Hop Frog Kollectiv has much to do with the Dung Mummy Festival, and several of the bands from the compilation were on the bill for Saturday night. Actually, the bands I initially thought I wanted to see were mostly billed for Friday night, so I thought of going then even though I first heard of the thing on Friday afternoon.
But then I saw that Steve Mackay, saxophone player from the excellent album “Fun House” by the original Stooges, was performing on both nights and that on the second night he would be backed by Liquorball. Liquorball is associated with Grady Runyan. Grady Runyan is associated with Monoshock and with The Bad Trips, bands which have put out two of my favorite records. I listen to The Bad Trips more, and it is newer, but Monoshock has things that sound more like “songs” if you’re into that. Anyway, I dig Grady’s guitar playing and I went and took in Saturday night mainly to see him play.
There were more bands on the bill than is almost conceivable. Here is a rundown of what I was into:
Openers Metal Rouge played a kind of improvised noise for guitar, keys and voice (man on guitar, woman on keys and voice), all treated heavily with electronic effects. This music was not at all in any kind of realm of jazz or blues-derived improv. It was more akin to Japanese freeform in that it started somewhere and moved, when it moved, to somewhere else without following any clearcut precedent of any kind. This kind of thing is amazing when you hear it for the first time - I am well acquainted with the type so for me the novelty was in the personalities and the instrumentation. I liked her voice alright, I enjoyed the guitar player, some of it was bracing and some of it was enveloping and some of the squiggly high notes were very funny. I think this group probably works better live than on CD (unless recorded in just the right or just the wrong sort of way).
The third group did something similar but added a woman on drums, whose tribal pounding really made it. They took the freeform improv thang and added hypnotic groove to the equation. I boogied. This group, whose name I do not at the moment recall, included a singer-with-effects who also played bits of keys and recorder, plus a bass and a guitar if my memory serves. Noisy and fun.
Next up was howardAmb, a duo who flat out blew our minds! Instrumentation = James (electronically treated voice, Q-Chord) and Stefan (drums, electronic drums and samples, treated voice). They played polyrhythmic songs and things that might have been trancey jams. Their energy is loving and wonderful. They were giving out free copies of their pre-release CD - I’ll report back when I’ve listened to it. Go and see this band.
Hmm… I recall enjoying Amps For Christ a lot. They had a roto-koto, a spinning mechanism with strings and pegs that has to be seen to be understood though it still doesn’t come easy. They also had other strange instruments. One looked sitar-ish. Not sure. Music was free-jazzy in a traditional-Vietnamese-musical sense of the idea. Amps For Christ has a track on the Post Asiatic sampler disc 1.
There was a collaboration between Catastrophic Mermaids On Parade and Hermit The Flog. It was mellow, low-key, electronic and rhythmic and included live bass and guitar as well as samples and sound effects. I liked that one a lot, also, though Hermit’s other live set only did so much for me. His pieces on the Post-Asiatic sampler are all rite-on, though.
There was a band from San Diego called San Kazakgascar. They were the most straight-up thang we saw - guitar, bass, drums, group vocals - they’d function alright in any highbrow watering hole. But the arrangements were screwy-cool, tribally rhythmic, chanted syllabic, vaguely implicating of surf music somewhere deep back in the lineage but not in any kind of overt way. The guitarist’s strat looked WAY out of place in that room full of weirdness, but it sounded fine and they made us both dance. Props fer sher.
I should say, too, that the room was instantly inviting. The vibes were cool. Couches and chairs, crazy tapestries and art and weird stuff written all over the walls, freaks everywhere - the people running it were WAY nuttier than the “audience,” some of whom looked a bit lost or otherwise confused. The most interesting audients always turned out to be performers eventually to the point where I wondered after a while if we were the only two there who weren’t actually involved in putting on the show!
Good feeling. We walked in and it was like being back in Seattle but without some of the attendant cliquishness. I mean, I love and miss Seattle but I always felt like a leper when I walked into a new scene. These people make eye contact, and they talk to you if you smile. Although on the other hand the smallish crowd was SO mellow I was wishing for some of my wilder pals from up north to shake things up a bit.
Alright, now we come to the “finale” - Steve Mackay and Liquorball. It was close to 2am when they started and we were falling asleep. If they’d been anything but unreal good I woulda been dragged and started grumbling about leaving. But guess what? They KILLED it.
The closest analog I could think of would be Acid Mothers Temple if they’d relax a little bit. This music was fast and driving and pounding but not generally invasive. It made me want to move.
Grady played mainly wash-of-sound guitar including dalliances with a slide and an e-bow, some strange hand-techniques I didn’t recognize, some wah sweeps that reminded me of, well, me… There was a dude devoted entirely to some kind of oscillating rack, a thunderous left-handed drummer, and a thunderous bass player. There were two saxophones, Steve Mackay and another guy with shorter hair. The second horn played more in the way of spaced-out overblowing and atonalities and such - did it very well, too, I dug it, it wasn’t just chaotic noise for noise’s sake. And Steve’s devotion to the groove (he was shouting about it after the set!) was exemplary. He was psyched to have a tight band behind him that he could just groove out over - even if his idea of a tight band is a rumbling wad of space noise from a parallel wavelength! His stage energy is comparable to that of Seattle’s Joe Reno (artist), if that means anything to y’all…
They played til they blew a fuse and the power went out. Awesome.
Apparently Steve and Liquorball just played a string of shows together. I hope they do more. I hope they record. I’ll dig it all. Totally great. Psychedelic ecstasy. Thanks, guys.
