:Episode Two Hundred: 9.4.2020

* Not on Spotify:
OZO - Hydra
Special Cases - It's So Easy

Description

Among this week's highlights:

As their lineup is sax/bass/drums, the obvious and at least somewhat apt comparison to OZO is Morphine. But, like, Morphine on acid. In fact, "Morphine On Acid" would actually make for a better name than OZO, I dare say. Nothing wrong with OZO, but it just makes me think... "so what happened with Matli? Things go south?" But maybe "Morphine On Acid" is just a little too clever, since you'd always have to be explaining "well, it's a play on the lazy music critic construction of 'band' on 'some drug' as a description. And there's another level to it, in that morphine is itself a drug..." I used to be in a band named after a Ride song (not my idea) and even having to go over the rather simple reasoning behind that decision got tiresome really fast.

There's a moment in the song Cosmic Allison, by Portland indie darlings Hazel (from their 1993 album Toreador of Love, which I had on cassette - not dubbed, but actually purchased new (yeah, they still sold albums on cassette that far into the CD era) - in high school) in which singer Pete Krebs mentions, as a very "meta" aside, "I've always hated that word, 'cosmic'". That's to what a degree hippies and new agers had ruined the word "cosmic": indie rockers, who retained a lot of the anti-hippie sentiment of their punk forebears, felt the need to add disclaimers to its use in a song. It's why I suspect "kosmische" music never became "cosmic" music when it reached English-speaking countries (well, that and almost everything sounds more badass in German: what's scarier, a "poltergeist" or a "playful ghost"? What's more menacing, a "blitzkrieg" or a "lightning war". You get the idea.) Anyhow, Portals: A Kosmische Journey through Outer Worlds and Inner Space - from which I play three tracks, by Polypores, Steve Roach, and Nigel Mullaney - gives you just what its wordy title describes.

Maybe someday I'll figure out how to appreciate the spaces between the notes or whatever it is that's necessary to "get" regular old, non-freaky jazz. But until then, I'll stick with listening to free jazz weirdos like François Tusques, whose La Chasse Au Snark (or "The Hunting of the Snark", a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll that gave us the overused 00s-era word "snark" (it was the "gaslight" of its day)) was recently reissued by Finders Keepers. The track I play, Sa Triste Histoire Il S'Offrit à Dire ("His Sad Story He Offers To Tell") should appeal to fans of the raw, minimalist, extremely early version of Steve Reich's Drumming which was unearthed by Superior Viaduct a few years back.

Plus, the psychedelicized late-80s industrial sound of Deafkids & Petbrick; the goofily named (though since they're from a non-English-speaking country I give them a pass) Sex Blender, with a motorik epic; Spanish 4th World pioneer Suso Saiz collaborates with Dutch producer Suzanne Kraft; and Zoviet France co-founder Robin Storey's solo ethno-ambient project Rapoon has one of its best albums reissued.