Various Artists
We Just Call It Roulette, Vols. 1 & 2
Russian Recording

Russian Recording is not a record label; it is a recording studio in Bloomington, Indiana, where more than a hundred bands, from local heroes (Ghost Mice) to Zimbabwean folk singers (Sheasby Matiure) have made their albums. The Roulette compilations, released in two volumes over two years, present songs from twenty-seven of these bands—a kind of studio sampler for the business and a good dose of publicity for the musicians.

In both form and function, the Roulette comps are no different from their label-released counterparts; but knowing that each of these bands passed through the same studio makes for a very different listening experience than, say, a typical K Records sampler. Roulette creates an audio snapshot of an imaginary day at Russian Recording: we get a sense of what kinds of bands come to the studio, how good they tend to be, how different they sound from one another, and in general who’s making their music in Bloomington.

Most of the bands sound fairly similar. There’s a lot of medium-fast hard rock with dissonant riffs and angsty vocals. The songs all rock hard enough, but there’s a pervasive sterile correctness to these songs: well-executed and—crucially, for the promotional purpose of the project—well-recorded; but short overall on imagination.

Part of this may be the result of the mastering—every track on the compilations was mastered specifically for this project. The studio was going for a uniform sound across the Roulette volumes, and that’s what they got. It’s admirable to aim for a cohesive, album-like listening experience; but Russian Recording may have sold themselves short by not showcasing a greater diversity of sound here.

There are a few standout tracks that are worth checking out: “Jacob’s Hand,” by Nate Jackson, is a classic, vital bluegrass yarn about a man who shoots his family and runs into trouble with the law. Sheasby Matiure’s track throws a bright Shona folk song in the middle of a rock-dominated collection. The irrepressible Coke Dares have three lightning-fast songs on Volume 1, all brattily glorious punk gems. Defiance Ohio brings some name recognition onto Volume 2, and Prizzy Prizzy Please contributes some frenetic noisy fun near the end. Volume 2 is available for free download on soapboxpromotion.com; Volume 1 is being sold directly from the studio.

So we did it, we’re doing it, ARTNOISE has come back to life. There’s still a lot of dumb tech things to sort out. There’s still more new staff members that we need to make this shit more sustainable. There’s still more writing that needs to be written. Shit that needs to be finished. Old stuff that needs to be repaired.

But we’re still back…

And even among all the loose ends, messes, and incomplete thoughts, there’s enough space now for us to stand. There’s enough calm and quiet for us to begin to have a conversation. In many ways, this project has always been a work in progress; ARTNOISE has never been done and has always been forming. I guess that’s a part of our truth… part of the prescription we put forward about how creation actually works or how art should actually function. We’ll keep growing. We’ll keep solving problems and getting shit together, learning new things. And I’d like to think that we’re never going to be done.

Rebirth isn’t a one time fix. It’s basically just an arbitrary signifier we throw out at moments to better appreciate the constant transformation of one moment of life into the next. Life has its ebbs and flows, but it never stops, and so it never stops remaking itself. And so we never stop and we never stop remaking ourselves… our world… our creations. Today, as we celebrate the renewal of this project, I also want to celebrate that kind of cosmic force of renewal that brought us all back here. The truth is that a lot of shit had to happen between then and now to get us back here. On my end, I know I had to go through a lot to want to get back here. But it’s fucking good to be back here now.

On deck, we’ve got new staffers that will officially be coming on board, new reviews that are written or are being written, and some new commentary that’s trying to explore the bigger picture about what punk is and what it could be. We’ve also brought back the PHILLY SHOW LISTING and will work to keep it constantly updated (as always, send your show-dates to phillyshows@artnoise.net.

Also, in the time between now and way-back-then, we’ve lost touch with a lot of the labels and artists who formerly supplied us with materials for review. If you’re interested in having our staff check out/review your stuff, please drop me an email at germ@artnoise.net and I can give you updated mailing instructions (we don’t have a public mailing address at this moment). Philly bands and labels are still a major priority for us.

Thank you all for reading. Thank you all for re-joining us after this long absence.

Trust me, the best is definitely yet to come.

all love,
germ ross.

This email was sent to a number of radical Philadelphia listservs by a member of The Defenestrator, a local anarchist newspaper.

I have reposted this on ARTNOISE because, as an outlet that primarily serves the city’s “radical artistic community,” I felt that his words might be particularly relevant to the experience of much of our audience. While this might not be how I would frame all of these issues, I absolutely agree with what I understand his larger point here to be.

White West Philly radicals often pride ourselves on our political commitments and our appreciation of “the community.” Time after time, I think that we prove our politics to be hollow or that our commitment to community extends only as far as our own privileged little subcultural enclaves.

By and large, we are not working to defend our neighbors. By and large, we are not working to organize ourselves as a force that can be an ally to other local residents with more history in the neighborhoods we consider to be “ours.” Really, on a lot of fronts, we are not doing anything… except for maybe putting on our shows, socializing, being hip.

I take his letter as a firm kick in the ass. Privileged white folks of any political stripe should not move into historically black neighborhoods unless they are willing to be accountable to the life, the past, the present, and the future of those neighborhoods. And for me, that means doing work, real work. That means real work to defend our neighbors from foreclosure, real work to fight development schemes don’t give a shit about the real lives of people, real work to know and talk with our neighbors, and real work to put control over our communities into all of our hands.

That’s the real price tag on cheap rent in West Philly. And I think it’s more than time for us to pay up. – germ ross

By A Concerned Relation

I got a email invite last week for the offices of the State representative network. I stopped by and slide down to Clark park as well, here is some thoughts.

So, now that the brew pub is open at 50th and baltimore it had occured to me that maybe now was the right time to write this letter. When you go and sit around all day outside the satellite coffee shop, do you ever think about your role in gentrification? I cannot help but ask this question because sometimes I pass by and I see what to my eye looks like a white settler occupation beachhead down there across from cedar park, with an increasing number of white homeowners within a one block radius and perhaps more disturbingly, Penn students/employees buying houses up to 52nd street with school subsidies.

I remember a time not that long ago when it seemed like there was a conversation going on in West Philly about gentrification and how to organize against what was about to go down… and then people seemed to stop being engaged, maybe they got busy or something. Well, while you were having fun and going to dance parties, guess what happened? THERES A BREW PUB AT 50th and Baltimore, and a YOGA STUDIO and a COFFEE SHOP. HELLO.

Now I am not one to argue that everything is black and white and that those things plus a bunch of white folks moving into a neighborhood simply equals gentrification, but in this case its really hard to see it as anything else. I suppose partly because nobody seems to give a shit and ya’ll are going on with your hipster lifestyles. I mean christ, the brew pub is open and nobody broke the fucking windows yet. It was bad enough when trader joes got a compactor and nobody sabotaged it. IS THIS WEST PHILLY OR WHAT? Aren’t ya’ll supposed to be anarchists or something? If shit gets to a certain point don’t you need to take direct action if you failed to engage in the process that could have stopped it? A bunch of you are white homeowners, you could have been at the neighborhood meetings, you could have stopped that shit. And what’s with letting these snot-nosed hipster fucks move into the neighborhood so they can look cool? Are you really just going to accept this manifest destiny bullshit or are you going to take responsibility for where you live and for what you have helped happen. Silence equals consent remember? People fight and organize around gentrification in places like New York, Miami and San Francisco and win their battles against much fiercer odds. Penn is not an unstoppable juggernaught and neither are developers, ya’ll just gotta get down with the neighborhood and start building some people power, have concrete demands, know where to put pressure and have an alternate plan. Organizing is not rocket science, and at a certain point white guilt builds into not doing anything and playing a part in the white agenda – don’t get caught up in that shit, its just as bad as not acknowledging your privilege in the first place, in fact its worse. Are you just turning into liberals as you get older?

Maybe if ya’ll got your act together in the neighborhood we could start working on city-wide issues again, like how the cops have declared open season on black folks the past couple years, or about how they’re building prisons and condos while there’s homeless folks on the streets and people are hungry and there’s no health care and there’s no jobs. If you were a bunch of socialists you would have done something by now and there would be an organization and a program. This is a kick in the butt. Don’t get so comfortable in your urban cool lifestyles, push yourselves, get back into politics and be part of organizing and action or move out – we don’t need you if your just going to play your part in the developer agenda.

…what does the rich versus poor really mean? psychologically it means you gotta pick your team. – KRS-ONE

[This article was written for ARTNOISE by the Afropick organizing crew, with some minor editing on our part.

Normally, everything that's printed in this webzine is exclusively written by our staff members. I've decided to make an exception with this piece because I feel that Afropick embodies in practice many of the ideals that we support in our writing—challenging white supremacy in and outside of punk rock, and understanding true artistic creation as fundamentally revolutionary and opposed to dehumanizing systems of power. ARTNOISE supports Afropick and urges you and all of our neighbors in this city to do likewise. These people are doing great work. - germ ross, 5/25/07]

On Friday June 6th at 8 p.m., Afropick (myspace.com/afropickmusic) will host their sixth show at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut). This show will be hosted by former Black Panther political prisoner Ashanti Alston and it will be a fundraiser for the Human Rights Coalition, featuring performances by McRad, Imani Uzuri Rock Quartet, and Purple Rhinestone Eagle.

Afropick began as a one time show. In October 2004, Maori Karmael Holmes (independent filmmaker of the hip hop documentary Scene Not Heard and activist), Chante Brown (lead singer for the black girl metal band Roullette) and Walidah Imarisha (poet, member of the Puerto Punx band/collective Ricanstruction) planned a one time Black Rock show to be part of a series going on around Philadelphia. The idea was to show people of color doing hard alternative music with a political edge. The response was overwhelming. Almost 200 people showed up, mostly young people of color. Everyone asked when the next show would be. It was supposed to be a one time event, but as Walidah Imarisha explained “we quickly realized that there was a significant dearth of venues for people of color rock/punk/hard bands to play, especially all ages spaces. So the show was conceived to be a quarterly show, and renamed Afropick.”

Over 700 people are estimated to have come to the five Afropick shows that have occurred. They are a very large mix of folks, but are majority young people of color.

The organizers realized that the act of being people of color playing (and in the cases of black folks reclaiming) rock in all its forms, of getting loud on stage, of letting out the rage and anger and frustration in positive and creative and inspiring ways, was a political act. Recognizing the politics of identity that were manifesting, the organizers also wanted to have politics that were about a larger change in the world. So the Afropick collective decided to make the show a fundraiser for the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner family organizing group with chapters in Philadelphia, Chester and Pittsburgh (www.hrcoalition.com), as a way of linking the politics in more solidly to the show.

Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther/Black Liberation Army political prisoner and current anarchist anti-prison organizer, hosts the shows. Ashanti showed many of the people in the collective, all of whom are in their early to late twenties, that you can be dedicated to the struggle and to the cause of change, and still have fun. As he said at the Halloween Afropick, “We can get down and still be loud enough to bring down any type of walls, even prison walls.”

Each Afropick event is co-sponsored by a number of organizations and businesses who provide the support possible to provide this free fundraising show. This time Afropick is sponsored by The Rotunda, The Wooden Shoe, Books Through Bars and South Street Sounds.

Ultimately, Afropick is about building community, in as many different ways as possible. As Walidah explained “we want to create a space for people of color to be loud, to be angry, to be themselves wholly. We want to link up folks who feel fragmented and isolated, because of their politics or their identities. We want to create a space where folks can explore different styles and genres of music. We want to link politics to art, and know that we as artists can create powerful inspiring revolutionary art that can still move minds and asses. We want to make sure that prison organizations, which disproportionately affect communities of color, have the funding to go on. We want to introduce folks to issues they may not be familiar with, and highlight work being done on them that the mainstream wants to ignore. We want to honor our elders, and make sure they know they always have a place and a voice in whatever the younger generation creates. Mostly we want to fully embody the motto Afropick has adopted from the beginning: Brown, Loud and Proud!”

Mischief Brew
Songs from Under the Sink
Fistolo Records

This is the new(est) full-length album from Philadelphia sweetheart Erik Petersen. Erik’s been regaling the city with anarcho-folk-punk anthems for years, and recently (on 2005’s Smash the Windows) acquired a bass, a drum kit, and several amplifiers to back up his tunes. The full band arrangements were vibrant and airy, while still preserving the old acoustic grit, and proved Erik’s musicianship to be several notches above the average sit-and-strummer.

Songs from Under the Sink brings this fuller sound to some of Erik’s oldest tunes. The album is the result of some musical spring cleaning—songs culled from odd comps, dusty tapes, and forgotten demos. Although the result sounds like the junk drawer that it is—don’t expect the flow and tempo of a standard l.p.—the balance among these songs is carefully considered: even as Erik revamps some old favorites, a good number of the tracks here will be unfamiliar to most listeners.

And this, as it turns out, is a good thing. Even those of us who’ve faithfully collected every damn thing that Erik’s put out over the years—from the West Chester demo tapes to the Orphans discography—will find something here to illuminate the more obscure corners of Mischief Brew. We get to hear Erik’s growly hardcore roots on “Tell Me a Story” and live his high school angst in “How Did I Get Out Alive?” There’s even a nice Ledbelly reworking (“Midnight Special 2002”) to round things out at the end.

The new versions of some of the old live staples—“A Rebel’s Romance,” “Dreams of the Morning”—will sound a bit jarring here. Erik seems to have outgrown the need to write wistful ballads, so he’s lifted the spirits of these songs with a good deal of instrumental celebration. The tunes no longer brood—they rollick. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work; but more often, the arrangements play as a celebration of how far Erik—and his listeners—have come.

ARTNOISE WEBZINE NOW HAS A FUCKING MYSPACE!

As part of ARTNOISE’s ongoing efforts to make friendly inroads with the right-wing media powerhouses that represent all that is wrong about contemporary culture, we have established a fucking myspace account. In all seriousness, the purpose of this move is to facilitate further exposure of what we do and to better network this project with other legitimate projects that use myspace out of convenience.

If you also have a fucking myspace account, you should add us. We’ll definitely be light on bulletins: aside from super important events or notices, mostly we’ll just be letting y’all know about major monthly updates to the show listing.

Here’s the link: www.myspace.com/artnoiseisapunkwebzine

cheers,
germ ross.

The Microscopic Septet
History of the Micros (Volume Two): Surrealistic Swing
Cuneiform Records

Dear readers: I realize that one of the few real hallmarks of this humble internet-zine we call ARTNOISE is to prattle on almost endlessly about the releases that inspire us, eschewing both the review-factory conventions of mindlessly regurgitating promotional one-sheets and penning reams of uselessly vague paragraph-length reviews. This is one of those elements of craft that we clearly take a significant measure of pride in, and one that we hope makes our occasional lack of new content somewhat more excusable.

Unfortunately, regarding this particular review of The Microscopic Septet’s newest re-release collection History of the Micros (Volume Two): Surrealistic Swing (put out by our phenomenally supportive friends at Cuneiform), I am sadly going to be a bit rushed in my overall appraisal of it. The reason for this is that I wanted to make sure that this review went up prior to the Philadelphia date for The Microscopic Septet’s current US tour… which wouldn’t you know is later tonight, at the World Café.

All that said, The Microscopic Septet are a NYC jazz band that was previously active in the 80s, during which time they put out four proper releases—all of which are currently being re-released by Cuneiform, the last two of which are included on Surrealistic Swing. While it should be a well-understood fact that I’m not enough of a jazz-head to offer any definitive commentary about where particular jazz groups might be situated along the genre’s various stylistic axises, I can say that The Micros have a heavy orientation towards brass, wailing reeds, and swing, and that however significant their impact might have been on the broader jazz scene they do at least have the undeniable distinction of having composed the theme music to the Philly-produced NPR radio program “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” (included as the last two tracks on the second disc of this set).

Having listened through Surrealistic Swing a number of times since receiving it, I can definitely say that on the whole, this collection has got me pretty stoked on The Microscopic Septet as a whole. As I’ve hinted at in previous reviews, the jazz records that I tend to gravitate towards are definitely ones that are more closely wedded to what I would call a sense of punk or avant garde aesthetics: records that push established formal boundaries in particularly jarring—even violent—ways, records whose underlying mode of expression is firmly democratic and anti-technical, or records that just fucking explode into twisting fire. In many ways, I don’t think that the Microscopic Septet exactly fits this bill for me (at least through the latter, potentially more polished part of their career that this half of the collection covers). This isn’t Ornette Coleman jazz, Sun Ra jazz, or Flying Luttenbachers jazz: its general orientation is far simpler and more straightforward. Nonetheless, when it comes to my usual knee jerk reactions to the standard, normative sounds of relatively contemporary jazz (that despite its pretensions of “improvisation,” it regurgitates dead musical forms; that it lacks passion or a sense of abandon; that it’s overly trained or academic; that it just fails to hold my interest), I find them largely inapplicable to The Micros whose music is not particularly new to me but is still innovative and generally engaging regardless.

My favorite example of this from Surrealistic Swing occurs with the track “The Dream Detective” off of their last LP Beauty Based on Science (The Visit) (also included on the second disc), a low-key ballad of brass/reed washes with a piercing emotionality that perpetually wavers between the haunting and sentimental, and the smutty and pornographic. The track “In The Mission” off of the band’s Off Beat Glory LP (included on the first disc) also has a similar air of contradicted poignancy to it, oscillating as it does between the solemnity of its core musical themes and a few minor eruptions into hedonistic rumbas and swing-inflected interludes. With triumphs such as these under their belt, it would have been hard for me not to come to appreciate The Microscopic Septet.

If you make it out to the show tonight, please don’t be a stranger!

Emilyn Brodsky
9 songs on enjoying the process.
self-released

Approximately forever ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Emilyn Brodsky do an opening set at an Erik Petersen show at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. Her performance—which tripped and sputtered in a few fits of half-remembered lyrics and such—was nonetheless charming and absolutely captivating, so much so that I requested one of her demo CDs for review on ARTNOISE. Like so many things that I’ve received during times when I’m otherwise occupied with life, politics, or wage labor, the demo unfortunately sat on my shelf unreviewed until now—despite being one of most the promisingly beautiful home-recorded singer-songwriter demos that I’d heard in a good while.

One of my major regrets with this webzine is the fact that from time to time I find myself unable to give every worthwhile piece of music that comes my way the proper recognition it deserves. While we’ve always reserved the right to only write about releases that we’re passionate about, it’s a dumb thing to not write about good music and to the extent to that I drop the ball on such things I am deeply sorry. Fortunately though, I do have a reasonably good memory for the things that I’ve left outstanding and when something inspires me or stirs my sense of responsibility towards the artists that support this website—such as, in this case, the circumstance of Emilyn Brodsky playing a show at the Fire this upcoming Thursday, November 17th—I’m always willing to step back into gear and belatedly dust off some of the outstanding materials that have been left with me for review.

But at any rate, that is all just a question of my own situation as someone attempting to be a creative person and is tangential to my purpose right now. Brodsky’s demo relates to this story only so far as it is the story behind this delayed review and only so far as such a personal narrative might be an apt beginning to a review of demo that in its own right is bubbling over with personal narrative and inflection.

In many ways, the simplest thing I could say about 9 songs on enjoying the process is that if you enjoy home-recorded music or the confident vulnerability inherent in naked singer-songwriting then you will almost certainly love this recording. Without a doubt, there are certain conventions inherent in this form—a certain lack of polish, a certain directness between the performer and the listener, a certain fragility in sounds that are at once distant and intimately close—and there is no question that this demo more than lives up to what might be expected of it such terms. On the whole, Brodsky’s arrangements are lilting, bare bones constructions—primarily consisting of only her ukulele and the strength/softness of her voice. Her subject matter is somewhat typical yet evocative—commentaries about love, about being, about performance, and about the New York City scene that she inhabits.

Paradoxically though, what really makes this demo CD remarkable to me, might have less to do with its obvious strengths but rather in the few spots where Brodsky’s melodies go off or fail to become fully actualized. The clearest example of this happens on the song “four letters (for molly)” which crams together conflicting melodies and refrains in a crude stream of consciousness. The song is beautiful and contains a great beauty, but at its core it is overabundant: in terms of its structure, it is a mess. This is a criticism to be sure, but behind it there is also a significant compliment.

Beyond any politics or pronouncements about their higher purpose as an oppositional cultural product, home recordings and DIY releases in general offer listeners a direct experience of the creative process that is unlike anything that occurs in more polished or fully-realized artistic works. Even still, as much as I love and respect these mediums of communication and expression, there are also very sharp limitations to what can occur within them. Flaws, missteps, imperfections—though ever present in all things born by human hands—lie fully exposed, occasionally clouding or obscuring the full potential of what an artist might be able to express if, for example, one removed the background hiss from a track or consciously reworked a melody or a refrain. For many artists, this potential for creative expression beyond the limits of what DIY recording can offer might just not exist. For others—such as Brodsky—one can hear the glimmers of a musical voice that might be absolutely transcendent if it were more crafted or labored over more painstakingly. Such potential is a rare gift, and detecting it is the best possible flaw to hear within the grain of a simple DIY recording.

Nonetheless, 9 songs on enjoying the process is exactly what it claims to be: a document of process and not necessarily a realized conclusion. Whether Emilyn Brodsky continues on to create something more definitive and more expressive of the musical abilities she clearly possesses is an open question that remains to be answered. In the meantime though, she has achieved something quite remarkable on this demo as it is without a doubt a poignant snapshot of an artist and her art—containing as much richness and vibrant humanity as such a text can bear.

Circles
When The Big River Floods
Well Below Records

I think it’s fair to say that barring some great 90s Sub Pop-esque cataclysm in this city’s music scene, Philadelphia rock music is never exactly going to make sense. In the fifteen-twenty block radius that constitutes the “hipper”/whiter parts of West Philadelphia, there might be over a hundred fledgling punk and experimental rock bands forming and playing out of various basements and rehearsal spaces. I would suspect that three-quarters of these bands make music out of boredom or as a joke, half of them will probably never play a show, and only a handful of them will actually get to the point of seriously playing and putting out releases. Nonetheless, out of all the artists that have actually had their shit together enough to eek their way onto my (or anyone else’s) radar, there’s one thing that I think is sometimes really, really striking about our local fare: almost nothing is ever the same.

It’s not exactly fair to say that Philadelphia has no “sound” exactly—the fact that this city has produced two somewhat known, somewhat similar bands like Need New Body and Man Man might hint at a certain local flavor in the work of some of our city’s hipster art-weirdos, and the countless sloppy punk bands here might all sound the same by definition. But beyond a few, almost coincidental points of convergence within the punk/experimental scene here and there, for the most part we are a city of iconoclasts—a single space that somehow contains the slap-stick calliope punk of The Low Budgets, the jolting/daydreaming experimental rock of Make A Rising, and the metal-inflected dance-party of Pony Pants. Rather than a single, clearly defined line, Philadelphia’s music scene is and may forever be a tangled knot of loose threads.

This fact was driven home to me when I was listening to the copy of Circles’ When The Big River Floods that was passed on to me by their singer/guitarist Nick Mellevoi. Circles is yet another interesting twist in Philadelphia rock music that basically takes traditional rock and roll/indie rock singer-songwriting and punctuates it with the looseness and technical proficiency of this city’s homegrown experimental free jazz. As an album When The Big River Floods has a lot going for it, the musical ideas at work in it are generally well-conceived and impeccably executed, Nick’s song-writing consistently holds its own, and the songs are full of instrumental richness and gloriously ecstatic rock moments. Particularly successful in all of these regards is the album’s opening track “Away with the tide”—a song about an apocalyptic flood set against a beautiful mess of down-tempo guitar riffing, drum crashes, and trombones.

In the sheer terms of their ability to place high-concept, heavily-trained music techniques within a totally non-pretentious stylistic frame—one that’s neither afraid to rock or jam the fuck out—what Circles does more than earns my respect. Through their occasional roughness and their honesty of purpose, Circles has born into this world yet another paradoxical archetype of Philadelphia rock music: a band playing riffed-out bar rock for kids that listen to Ornette Coleman. However they’ve managed arrived at this point and however amazing the music they can make is, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be able follow them.

The Cutest Puppy In The World
Finfolk
SocketsCDR

While much of my experience of music can be characterized by the bawdy joys and cheap thrills of an unthinking, visceral engagement with noise and energy, on a conceptual level the question of what music is or should be is something that I’ve come to take pretty seriously as of late. For me, all music—indeed, all meaningful artistic creation—should ideally strive towards the expansion of the total content and quality of what it means to be human. Beyond simply representing existing extremes of our collective personalities and psyches, our experience of music and our participation in music should in turn render such extremes more vivid and profound. Rather than simply depicting feelings, music should make us feel more. Rather than simply depicting dreams, music should enable us to dream more and to provide all dreams with a substance and a physicality that throbs, shakes, and rattles our bodies to the fucking floor.

That contemporary pop music falls short of these prerogatives should be relatively obvious given that the total range of allowable human substance it presents is rarely less mediocre than the worst trade-paper romance novels or more evocative than the most straight-forward corner store pornography. None of this should be surprising, of course. Pop music is simply another commodity produced by an industry; its trajectory and boundaries are determined by profit, shifts in stock prices, and any manner of coldly calculated business decisions.

By contrast, the extent to which experimental music falls short of these prerogatives is far more heart-breaking. As a medium that is generally insulated from the even the risk of profitability by virtue of being a comparatively “difficult” kind of music, experimental possesses a unique capacity to carry out music-making without much real concern for the dictates of the marketplace. With the exception of odd groups like Sonic Youth, Boredoms, or Lightning Bolt—groups who have somehow taken their music far enough into public consumption that they are now generally be able to live off the noise they make—experimental artists can largely expect little in terms of recognition and even less in terms of wages. As much as this situation may not benefit the physical survival of artists living under a capitalist economy, the one positive effect of this mess is that it more or less limits the considerations involved in producing art limited to the artistic product itself.

And yet, however great the promise of this situation for an underground music scene whose primary goal is the further realization of humanity itself, the reality has been sadly very different. Experimental art has all too often rejected humanity and organized itself not as a project rooted in the general development of human consciousness on a total scale, but as the joyless playplace of intellectual and fashion elites. Sentimentality, sadness, romance, love, and passion—human things—are all too absent from this art. Rather than looking upon something that represents who we are or who we could be—with all of our hope and our tangles—this art reveals little to us beyond coldly woven structures built in a language of pure specialists, feelingless architects, and fascists. Atonality, dissonance, and all the glorious things that happen when instruments are played incorrectly become in turn manifestations of “sophisticated technique” and “expertise.” All participation and parity between the performer and audience are removed; The Artist alone possesses the talent of meaningful creation, and is thus free to exercise this genius in exchange for appreciation, aggrandizement, and social and cultural status.

As I see it, “high art” is the general plague of experimental music and I can’t help but wonder if anyone who intentionally produces experimental work in such a vein has ever understood artistic creation or ever appreciated the full possibilities that are contained within it. That this mindset is so predominant, that this scene is so overtaken with such devils of self-importance and carefully-maintained elitisms, that so much of the content of experimental music is the denial of such human things as feeling, frailty, and whimsy, constitutes the true failure of this music today. What is fortunate for us is that this failure is by no means total and the groups and artists capable of joining the wide-open stylistic language of experimental music with a human roughness and simplicity—punks, in other words—are without a doubt some of the brightest lights in today’s avant garde.

Now, having never met either of the two individuals that make up the band The Cutest Puppy In The World, I can’t particularly make any real claims about what they see as the meaning behind their music and its relationship to human consciousness, but even still, if their recent CDR release Finfolk is any indication, these kids are exactly the type of punk experimentalists that are capable of combining the coarse, broken sounds of their oeuvre with the warmth and rich simplicity of living, breathing dreams and emotion. Recorded live in Washington DC during the year 2005, the pieces featured on Finfolk are a gloriously unkempt patchwork of repetitions, brutal deconstructions, looping notes, dark grumbles, and carefully orchestrated musical phrases.

Through the twists and turns of their meandering improvisations, The Cutest Puppy conjure forth a musical language that is somehow able to borrow equally from the gritty amp-hum claustrophobia of Labradford-inflected drone, the chaotic ecstasy of pure noise rock, and the mangled, soulful kinetics of free jazz. From this strange vantage point in the nexus of these disparate traditions and vocabularies, The Cutest Puppy manifest pieces of music whose range and depth is nearly as varied and limitless as the imagination itself. On “Sordomutics”—the album’s opener—the band’s musical process leads through a haze of gnarling instrumental whines and pings into a slow-rising lament of bass clarinet and piano; on “OlOld Orcadian” this process leads straight into a frenzy discord and fire; on “Nangen Cuts The Cat In Two” this process brings about sentiment, gentle harmony, and occasional, clattering celebrations.

What fundamentally seems to set The Cutest Puppy so far apart from the larger portion of the experimental scene is that for all their variations and stylistic diversity, they still seem very much concerned with the making of music, with all its robustly humanistic implications. While all the pieces on Finfolk contain their challenging and boldly innovative aspects, the experimentalism that underlies them is a decidedly permissive one in that rather than seeking to gestate some new completed vision of patently artificial or purely conceived sound, The Cutest Puppy allows their pieces to flow together organically, taking in melody and discord in whatever quantities that might instinctually seem to be right. This aspect of the tracks featured on Finfolk is without a doubt one of their most honest characteristics, and combined with the album’s decidedly DIY packaging and the innate realness of its live recording, it produces an air of genuine intimacy between those encountering these tracks and the artists responsible for their creation.

Without knowing more about this band or their intentions, I would wager that Finfolk isn’t particularly intended as any manner of serious insurrection against the establishment of today’s experimental music. Even still, through their unpretentious, wildly humanistic ministrations on this release, The Cutest Puppy In The World does succeed in underscoring some of the impressive potential that experimental music regularly fails to live up to. This record demonstrates in brilliantly unassuming terms that experimental music can not only exist without all its intellectual poses, but can also beat and shake with all the delicate passion and warmth of a heart and a soul.