In between listening to a luscious stack of new CD's (more from which soon on these pages), I've been enjoying drifting around work and Sheffield's pavements to various mid-90's Chicago bands, a scene which I can't get enough of. Jazzy beard-stroking guitar pop, full of melodious noodling and genuine warmth, with a playfulness that belies its intellectual image. The Sea And Cake's Oui has been heavily repeated as has Tortoise's TNT, plus the most simple and most skronked-out ends of Jim O'Rourke's spectrum. And above all Camofleur (1998) by Gastr Del Sol, an outfit made up chiefly of O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but which also featured Chicago legends like John McEntire back in the day.
Camofleur is a beautiful album, well worth buying for its invaluable whole-album listening experience. (I'm aware of how Chicago jazz-rock geek that sounds, but it's true). It's a blend of delicate chamber strings and piano, squiffy O'Rourkean polyrhythms, soft electronic effects and glitches, hypnotically repetitious guitar patterns, and careful, naive singing from Grubbs. What makes it unique is the way is hovers ecstatically in the space between the stricture of pop songwriting and the loosened world of free jazz and musique concrete, the aural equivalent of the gorgeous period between dreams and lucidity.
"Each Dream Is An Example" is my current favourite, setting a very traditional piano motif against fizzing electronics and muffled horns, before emerging suddenly into a new space at 2:50, a clearer, balladeering tone taking over, with chiming backing vocals from Edith Frost. Grubbs sings about the nature of dreams while simulataneously allowing dream logic penetrate the song - its soft 45-degree turns into new musical ideas without warning are the same turns our subconscious takes as we dream, at once nonsensical and natural, as it makes its wandering path through recent history. The lyrics make these synaptic rambles as well - the lucid "compress the days' events" segues into "the loss of a spouse is spice for lice", a line that I love for its silly somnabulent word games. (If you listen closely you can hear Grubbs smile as he sings this, imperceptibly heightening the loveliness of it all). Gastr Del Sol manage to create something that truly deserves the descriptor "dreamlike", music that is blithely absurd and skipping across the face of waking life.
Gastr Del Sol - Each Dream Is An Example
Thanks to Ian for lending me this and a bunch of other Chicago-based genius. Camofleur is out of print but you can get it on this listing at eBay for not that much. Maybe I'll burn you a copy if you ask me nicely.
5 comments:
Gastr del Sol are one of my favourite bands of all time. From the first, to the last.
I would have to say I rate Upgrade & Afterlife most. As sublime a piece of accessible modern composition you will ever find.
The thing that makes GDS so amazing is the direction of Grubbs and O'Rourke. One is coming from a derivative (but excellent) punk bands, Squirrel Bait/Bastro, and getting interested in experimental music; the other coming from a compositional, academic and experimental position and becoming interested in accessible pop sounds.
They come from two different places but converge at the exact perfect point.
As a massive fan of Camoufleur, I recommend an album mostly overlooked in 'Chicago jazzy/post-rock' circle - The Gap by Joan of Arc. Stunningly put-together, beuatiful (if unconventional) vocals, shimmering guitars and all the layers of a massive Battenburg cake.
p.s. I dropped some bad grammar in that, it's to probematise the conventions of language.
Or something.
thanks for the tips! i feel like i'm just swimming around the tip of the iceberg at the moment.
'squiffy O'Rourkean polyrhythms'? i'm not sure about this.
for real polyrhythmic wankouts check out Masai by Babatunde Olatunji from the Soul Makosa album.
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