Ecstatic SUnshine - Way

What if an album isn't an album? What if it falls into absurdity while no one is listening? Does it make a series of obnoxious sounds? I'm probably coming off like some Bacharach-rocking philistine, but I really really like songs. Failing that, riffs. Failing that, music. The album Way by Ecstatic Sunshine fills somewhere between zero and three of those categories. It consists of half an hour of largely interchangeable guitar loops. You know: the kind of stuff where what they did doesn't matter so much as the fact that they did it (and did it first). Unfortunately for Ecstatic Sunshine, no one cares about Who, Why, and When. What happened to What? Right, right. Minimalism. Deconstruction. Post. Meta. Liberal arts. The centerless, horizonless sphere where significance used to reside. Delay pedals and marijuana. I’m over over it. FUCKING MOVE ME. And who knows, right? Maybe these guys are some sort of sophisticated sex-robots. Maybe the title of this album demonstrates a calm, Lao Tzu-like vision of the universe that I cannot grasp. Or maybe it’s more like this: Q: Isn’t this album infuriating? A: Way. Or whatever. My infuriation is completely my own, because this band has absolved themselves of all responsibility. They’re just out there floating like so many beer cans in a stream. In fact, the idea of a twisted version of organic beauty seems pretty appropriate here. To justify this kind of music, you would have to argue for a beauty that comes before what we can write. Something that falls quite naturally out of calmly repeated sound. Like what you find in a waterfall, say. Or in the polyrhythms of walking feet. Occasionally, Ecstatic Sunshine actually produce this effect, which is a fucking feat. At least as often, we’re confronted with what may as well be a battalion of distant car alarms. The idea of a man-made natural beauty also crops up on Way’s cover art. The more I glare at this picture, the more I like it and believe it’s a key to the album. It’s a natural scene, complete with trees and waterfall, turned upside-down and decorated with plastic eyeballs. Accidental beauty, but ironic, self-denigrating. Clearly composed, caricaturing human creativity (see the guitar lines that burble through the three long songs) but sounding, intentionally-unintentionally, like bird-song. The second track is called “Herrons” Fine: this album is pretty like birds are fucking annoying, and it’s annoying like birds are sort of cute at five in the frigid morning. Maybe even musical like falling down is humorous. With sufficiently odd albums, I like to play a game. I imagine what the ideal fan does while blasting the record. There are always a few funny answers to this question, but on Way, the answer is this: anything at all. Christ, something. I can’t imagine listening to this without doing something else. It would be a disservice to myself and to the music. This album is referential without a referent, wide without depth, and cheap while sounding expensive, like every debased imitation of nature. And yet. Fuck! I was really getting some good self-righteousness going. At the end of the third and final track, as if in spite of their intentions, Ecstatic Sunshine lay down a very good series of guitar tracks. Coming after a bunch of loopy synth and guitar, it almost feels kind of like an imitation of what could once have been “Baba O'Reilly.” It is simple and direct and it is rock and roll. Should I view the whole album as prelude to this thirty-second success? No. That wouldn’t be fair to the band. So let's remember that these guys are capable of something else, and that they choose to bob in the murky po-mo tide. Why?

The Ear the Eye the Arm - Paths

Remember when music had regional traits? You know—Chicago Blues, East Coast Swing, Seattle Grunge? Yeah, me neither. No one reading internet music criticism does. But you can imagine, yes? It’s kind of cute. Exciting, for the sort of person who loves over-precise analysis of pop-culture artifacts. Which I totally am not. In any case, I’ve got some good news for you. There is now a recognizable regional trend underway. We’ll call it Los Angeles Complain.

LA Complain has a lot of exciting peccadilloes, but my favorite is that it’s imitation-proof. It can’t be consumed like Brits absorbed the blues or hat-wearing dorks embraced swing. The secret is... no one wants in on this one. We are talking about a completed and unified aesthetic of whining.

Now this band. The Ear the Eye and the Arm, they’re called. They love complaing. That’s the impression, in any case, their album Paths gives. But I think we can dig a little deeper into the world of LA Comp. Because, really, only their lead singer bitches. Their guitarist, Darin Green, is some kind of finger-mutant on brain drugs. But fuck, man. That singing. It’s like halfway between Hot Hot Heat and Linkin Park, only less self-aware. It’s like the lightest little hint of lounge singer, which indicates a secret desire to be English, which indicates a not-so-secret desire to die, which indicates being from Los Angeles.

                I burned most other examples of LA Comp out of my memory with clean air, sunlight, and exercise. But I think we can safely include every pop-emo hit you’ll ever hear (produced, if not born, in LA) and some embarrassing but decent stuff up to and including Beck. The last genuine contributions LA made to music are called hair metal and Tupac. The difference between those two and The Ear the Eye and the Arm is that those self-obsessed bastards distilled LA’s LAness down to its absurd oil-slick soul. Shit, Steely Dan did that too. But if this is what LA is composed of now, I guess we can give up on another GNR or NWA. Or maybe it’s just the dudes who move down there, as opposed to the ones who relocate to Austin, Portland, New York? Hard to tell, harder to worry about.

                All this is bumming me out, though, because the guitar-work on this album is alternately heavy and weird and I dig the crap out of it. This Darin Green doesn’t nail every opportunity (far from it—when he plays rhythm there’s way to much opportunity to listen to the singing) but when he plays lead, either intricately or head-bangingly, it’s well worth a listen. And to his credit, Green even manages to murdalize on the mid-tempo songs. To be clear, mid-tempo songs blow. If you’re going to rage, scorch earth. And if you’re going to emote, balladeer away, bro. But this gently insistent, carefully arr....I can’t even make myself write about this stuff. What in the world is the point of these songs? But here I am, kind of digging the lower-key moments on this album. Actually, the mid-speed tunes are far and away the most successful. I am thinking in particular of "Paths", "Playing the Martyr" and "Dialect of an Angry Man", which do not suck. Especially guitar-wise, of course. But the complaining also works at that speed. At the end of Dialect, the lead singer even screams. Lets it rip. Crazy, I know. But they put echo on it like they’re embarrassed of it and then the moment is over.

                These guys aren’t even from LA—they’re new recruits. But they’ve absorbed the sound (and, one assumes, the sky-poison) of their adopted abyss. I have this irrational, over-generous desire to score this album as a resume for the guitarist. And based on the first 20 seconds of the first song, it’d be an 8.6. Killer riff, followed by some edge-of-fun weirdness, followed by chiming mellow chords. But then in come the drums and the singer and it’s the grand entrance of shame-faced, oblivious Los Angeles.

                The drumming by JD Knotts is solid, but I’m told he’s just filling in, so let’s hope they can find a replacement with a persuasive singing voice. Calling Don Henley.

Reflections on a Sitar Concert in the South of France

This weekend I made an unexpected appearance at a lecture and performance of the Northern Indian music. The event took place at an old Bergerie -once a house for sheep, translated into a rustically modern home with heating and light and windows- not very far from where I live. Candles and a few small lights illuminated the main room whose floor was covered by large pillows. At one end sat the kitchen. At the other end there lay a series of Indian drums, a lute and a sitar, all on top of a bright red and blue Persian carpet. The room was filled with maybe thirty middle-aged men and women from nearby villages. We were the youngest in the room by twenty years or more, but the crowd was strikingly familiar to me; despite their being French, all of the people could have easily been parents of friends of mine from California. The sitar player sat down and began to explain, in French, some of the differences between Western music and Eastern music. I drew my head as close as possible and stretched my thoughts as far out as I could; something about Western music emphasizing harmony and Eastern music melody; the absence of a tonic and dominant in Indian music; wood and ivory. Suddenly I was reminded of E.E. Cummings,

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because thy are too near

As I am admiring her demonstration of the Indian drums I feel a tickle in my throat and the inescapable need to cough, which is augmented by the awkwardly forced austerity created by Westerners listening to Eastern music. I start to cough. The room is silent except for the beating of the drums and my head is at the point of erupting. I jump up and hobble through the crowd to the kitchen, covering my mouth with watering eyes. I cannot remove the tickle sensation, and someone has taken my seat so I must stay in the kitchen watching the crowd and the musician at once. She picks up the sitar and explains some of the materials and the sounds and without warning begins to play.

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

What did she say about harmony and melody? She plays one low note over and over and over all the while interrupting it by a higher note, the same note, but bent, bent every time at different lengths of time and on different lengths of the instrument. Are they even in the same octave? She mentioned the octaves, something about their not being as constrictive; maybe it was that there were not any octaves at all. What is the French word for constrictive? Her playing is the only thing to focus on to keep me from coughing.

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

By this time the thirty or so people in the room and the fire have melded into one massive and slow moving, breathing creature whose voice is the crackling cataract of notes struck and bent in rapidly altering melodies. One on top of the other; one next to the other. It is almost like John Coltrane’s sound, the sheets of sound descending upon and alongside each other, a line of individual notes that together suggest a augmented seventh or diminished fifth, followed by a series of subtle tangents and perpendiculars to the original theme

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

hard and fast. Back and forth. In my dreams there are shapes that resemble you. It grows and grows and grows but never explodes. There is no tonic, no dominant. At this point she her hand is twittering like a hummingbird, her thumb wildly clanging out the lower notes and her fingers plucking and flicking the rest, in some swelling order that grabs the sonata form by its collar and stares into its eyes with a sweating brow and fluctuating pupils and presses one pair of lips against another, unwilling and afraid and aroused

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

There were samosas and fresh chai tea after the concert. I was sitting or maybe standing and I had a plate in one hand and a glass in the other. It was warm and I was naked, just like it is and I am after I read Cummings. Defenseless, tired. How heavy was the pen with which he wrote? How bright was the light that illuminated his sheets? Are there any emotions that we share? All of the people around me quietly eating and drinking too-that was nice, their eyes say, thank you, to her with her long hair and deep green Indian robes. You’re welcome.