Rob Jacobs and Wei Zhongle

The last in this little series of DIY artists is Rob Jacobs, whose work was a welcome surprise for me a couple of months ago. Rob's many solo albums and his Wei Zhongle project have become some of my most regular audio companions in a short while. Finding out about largely unknown artists whose body of work is already so rich and varied totally renews my faith in humanity, and hopefully drawing a little attention to this music will lead to some physical releases--the Wei Zhongle album in particular is practically begging to live on vinyl.

Jacobs is a young multi-instrumentalist and composer working in Southern Illinois. Aside from classical violin lessons, he's a self-taught fellow, which comes as quite a surprise when you hear his expressive playing and writing on a variety of woodwind and string instruments. After a childhood of violin playing, he began writing and recording his own albums at the age of 16 (a mere 7 years ago), and I'm floored by both the quantity and quality of his work in a wide range of styles. He's stacking up jazz and new music-inflected pop tunes under his own name, becoming a vocal drone improv maniac with percussionist Sam Klickner as Suffering Bastard, and playing in his own Wei Zhongle ensemble, whose music almost requires a new genre category to describe. For the purposes of this review, I'm only going to dig into a couple of his recordings in more detail, but I'd highly recommend spending some time on these BandCamp sites exploring his whole back catalog:

Wei Zhongle
Rob Jacobs
Suffering Bastard

Wei Zhongle - Wei Zhongle
As mentioned above, it's hard to describe the music of Wei Zhongle in terms of genre. There are many nods toward Chinese music, likely inspired by the ensemble's namesake, who was a multi-instrumentalist on a variety of Chinese traditional instruments and founder of the Traditional Instruments department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The somewhat Chinese attributes of the music speak through melodic approaches, unison passages, a non-"drum riff" approach to percussion, and some simple modifications to instruments: for example, Jacobs reports that the tight, short articulations one hears in the Wei Zhongle guitar parts are made possible in part by weaving a bit of plastic through the strings near the bridge. Compositionally, these pieces incorporate all kinds of creative tricks like hocketing, brief moments of rounds/canonic motion, and surprising rhythmic twists, while fostering a sense of lightness and space. Generally, the music is gentle and approachable, a vibe I really appreciate in "weird music," which taken as a whole nowadays frequently tends toward darkness and oppression.

Though this music speaks through a largely Asian-inspired vocabulary, it's not a truly faux-Chinese record in the sense that composers like Lou Harrison achieved. Instead, its language and syntax work to create some of the most creative freak folk and pop music ever made--there are moments redolent of "Uncle Meat"-era Zappa, the last few Cerberus Shoal albums, even the more pensive and quiet moments in Extra Life albums. The dual male/female vocal approach of Jacobs and Carly Lappin creates a gender-neutral atmposphere, and the lyrics point toward a kind of spiritual awakening and celebration happening throughout the album. It's one of those rare records that will inspire many folks to simply dance around, while also satisfying those who crave rich, complex music and careful, intelligent composition.

Jacobs mentions that the lyrical content is inspired by Ouspensky, and not having read much of Ouspensky or Gurdjieff before, I dug into "A New Model of the Universe" to get into the conceptual vibe of the album more deeply. Somehow I'd skipped over those folks in years of reading a variety of mystical/esoteric literature, but I'm glad I got the chance to check him out. Ouspensky attempts to show universal threads of transcendence found in many religions including the Judeo-Christian tradition, such as a Buddhist influence on the parables of Jesus. More generally, the book aspires toward an esoteric interpretation of the writings of traditions most folks in the West would generally think of as "conventional," and asserts that the ability to recognize and integrate the more esoteric teachings hidden within these traditions requires a level of discipline and attention that is likely to be found in only "the few." Fair enough, and it's a fascinating filter through which to hear Wei Zhongle--it's generally pleasant and easily approachable music on the surface, but it's also full of its own secrets and methods which are only discovered on repeated listening. It's rare to find music that can be simultaneously friendly and uncompromising, and Wei Zhongle makes it happen.

Rob Jacobs - No Beach to Walk On
Jacobs also sent along a copy of his "No Beach To Walk On," one of his solo albums from a couple of years ago. His solo work is closer to "conventional" pop music, mostly lacking the Chinese-ish vibes of Wei Zhongle, but this is also very complex and innovative work. Overall, this is a laid-back pop/world project with r&b roots (you can tell Jacobs has absorbed a lot of Dave Longstreth/Dirty Projectors), but the proceedings are interrupted by a series of surprises.  There are unexpected moments of sampled voices ("Lady in Pink"), noiser moments like the end of "A New Song," weirdly effect-laden vocal sections like the opening section of "West Wind Beckons the Tri-Self" that briefly summon the Residents, and many times I'm reminded of Canterbury/prog ensemble writing like one would expect on Henry Cow albums. The music incorporates lots of pauses and time changes punctuated by instrumental countermelodies, great sectional writing for clarinets and saxes, and melismatic vocals.

As the sole vocalist on this recording, Jacobs really steps up, with great melismatic delivery on many tracks like "The Summoning Forth," a strong held-out line toward the end of "Lady in Pink," and great harmonized layers found in tracks like "Dancing the Sigulrlya." Though his voice is gentle, he builds texture and contrast through overdubs, and he has a great falsetto that is frequently employed in background sections. For a fellow who came to music through the violin, he can totally hold his own as a frontman on vocals. Lyrically, it's worth mentioning that three tracks are settings of poetry--one track works with Rumi, and two come from Lorca. He's also a thoroughly competent guitar player, inflecting these arrangements with lots of rich jazz voicings and well-placed rhythmic stabs.

The drum programming sounds great--Jacobs obviously took the time to make sure the drum parts made sense of the myriad twists in these arrangements. Real drums would be a nice addition to many of these songs, though. As "solo demos," these are incredible, and these songs would definitely shine in a live band context. Jacobs also did a fantastic job mixing these sprawling tracks, leaving room to hear many layers of compositional detail. Props must also be given to John McCowen, for his sax, flute, and bass clarinet work on this record.

My favorite track is album closer "Gaceia of the Terrible Presence," a challenging setting of a Lorca poem of the same name. The longest track on the album, "Gaceia" splits the stylistic difference between the rest of this solo album and the later compositional tendencies on exhibit in Wei Zhongle. The first section is made of propulsive rhythms and mostly pentatonic motion, which gets contrasted with several interesting variations in the last half of the piece. But the whole album is a lot of creative fun, and I'm looking forward to many more unique albums from the Rob Jacobs camp.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Arvo Zylo - 333

Our next DIY artist is Chicago's Arvo Zylo, a genre-defying musician who is also the host of The Delirious Insomniac Freeform Radio show on WLUW, which airs from midnight to 4AM on Monday mornings (Facebook page for the show here). Zylo sent a copy of his "333" on CD (it's also been available in a cassette edition), an incredibly deep record whose creation spanned six years. I've been digging into this recording for a few months--while it makes a powerful statement on first listening, it continues to reveal new secrets every time I put it on.

The story behind this album points to discipline through adversity: "333" was started in 2003, using only an RM1x sequencer while squatting in an abandoned house, and the piece continued to evolve until being mastered in 2009. As one might expect from the circumstances of its birth, it's a dark, bleak outing, but it's not a simple release of rage. This is detailed work, rich in nuanced layers of sound whose precise deployment points toward careful working and reworking of every element. Most records I hear that gravitate toward harsh noise/power electronics have a certain immediacy or even haste evident in their production, but the nature of "333" involves time and architecture.

For a recording created with a device that functions essentially as a step sequencer, this music is incredibly varied--you never get the vibe of someone simply pushing buttons to move between simple sequences. And these pieces use a huge dynamic range, from walls of noise to pensive, early-industrial textures. There isn't a lot of pitch-driven content: sounds and textures are used rhythmically, articulated with filters and other onboard effects, which is another approach I don't often associate with sequencers. But this recording feels like it had to be made, and it transcends its limited equipment resources as though the music couldn't be stopped.

"333" is made of three long compositions. The first, "Quicksand Eggs of a Beaten Pathos," is over 30 minutes, quite a ride on its own. "Quicksand" starts with a short bass-driven introduction before leaping headfirst into walls of sound. Power electronics textures dominate until we reach the 7-minute mark, where a midrange riff begins to take over. The interplay between evolving textures and riffs continues for much of the piece, punctuated with really harsh rhythms that propel the music forward. Around 18 minutes, the piece dissolves into near-silence, eventually coalescing into a really cool synth ostinato figure, turning on itself repeatedly, and this section gets extensively reworked with sections of pads and countermelodies that shift focus momentarily toward harmonic function. Some almost drum & bass-sounding rhythms bring up the energy toward the end, followed by some stuttering rhythmic stabs and heavily filtered synth blips. From drones to harsh noise, "Quicksand" integrates a number of compositional impulses into a powerful whole.

The other two pieces, "Deadbeat Deluxe" and "Plasthma," are shorter, their combined length not quite reaching that of "Quicksand" alone. But these are complex pieces that travel across compositional approaches, too. "Deadbeat" uses some interesting, almost dub-like drops between rhythmic ideas, eventually melting into clusters of colliding note sequences driven by brutal quarter-note rhythms. "Plasthma's" first half is perhaps the most texturally-driven section of the album, eventually giving way to some of the most harmonically-dominated writing on the record in its second half, which almost sounds like an early Residents recording at times. As other reviews of the album have noted, one can certainly hear a lot of early industrial, noise, and electronic music influences in "333," but there is a certain compositional flair that combines and juxtaposes the musical sections in a more classical sense. I'm sometimes reminded of the most explosive trill/repeated-note moments in Nancarrow's player piano studies, or "Systems Emerge"-era Flying Luttenbachers. These works all share an especially personal energy that is usually only possible when a composer is also the sole performer/programmer of their work.

Listening to this album as a purely aesthetic experience is satisfying enough, but there is a larger concept behind this music that I think is worth exploring for a deeper context. As Zylo describes it, "To this day, and for at least 9 years, the artist has seen a series of numbers, "333," on clocks or other various places constantly; nearly every day, to the degree that it has become a fixation." In keeping with some of the magical resonance in the early industrial movement, the "333 current" seems to play a significant role in this recording. The Thelemic tradition associated 333 with the Crossing of the Abyss, essentially a process of confronting and (hopefully) transcending the Ego, and with the figure of Chronozon, essentially a "chaos god" of the Abyss itself, beyond good and evil (but usually pretty evil-looking!). The number gets associated with concepts like forgetfulness, lies, "breaks," redemption, and the darkness/overwhelming potential of total revelation. Later chaos magic traditions have continued to associate the 333 current/Chronozon concept with the Ego, somewhat softening the drama of the encounter to more of an acknowledgement/release process rather than confrontation/transcendence, in rituals such as Peter Carroll's "Mass of Chronozon."One doesn't need to be a believer or practitioner of such traditions to find their philosophies and archetypal implications interesting, and knowing a bit about them seems to illuminate this record nicely, with its ever-shifting shapes and conversations between melodic and textural ideas. You can find more information about "333," as well as other projects involving Arvo Zylo, at http://www.nopartofit.com.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Three from Bob Bucko Jr

The next few reviews are going to cover some artists working mostly on their own. DIY is more challenging than ever when you consider the sheer volume of releases every year, but these folks are producing work that rises to the top with its sheer brilliance.

After a weird, wild, and wonderful month+ that kept me from writing reviews, I'm firing up my keyboard again. All the while, a batch of excellent releases from Bob Bucko Jr. (bbJR) have never been far from my turntable/Walkman/CD player/iPod. bbJR submitted an LP and a CD to the Killed in Cars headquarters some time ago, and in corresponding with him about those releases, he sent a few more recordings along. For this review, I'm going to focus on three discs, but I'm sure we'll be discussing more in the future.

Let's start with an overview: mostly working DIY, bbJR recently ramped up the release schedule on his own Personal Archives label (of which 22 releases can be found on his BandCamp site), including solo work and many collaborations. He's done a few releases with label support, but on the whole, this is a fellow who spends his time organizing, mixing, mastering, and duplicating his own work by hand when he's not writing, recording, or helping to coordinate shows in the Dubuque, IA area. While it can be daunting to create and package your own work, bbJr is making some beautiful hand-produced cassettes and CDs in small batches. But the batches are truly small: editions of 20, 30, or 40 are typical. This music is incredibly high-quality, so hopefully a few reviews can bring some attention to this body of work, as it deserves to rise out of the potential obscurity of small-run duplication.

bbJR - Rest in Infinity

The most traditional/tonal of this batch of releases, "Rest in Infinity" is a record of live guitar performances from 2008. At first, I was a little leery of this recording, which bbJR described as "loop-heavy improv," because it seems like every other recording sent my way lately is another "looper's delight" of some kind. But this is exceptional. bbJR plays his ass off on these recordings, demonstrating solid guitar technique and a powerful sense of thematic development.

With loop-based guitar music, most recordings seem to stay solidly in either melodic/guitar-jock territory, or else they reside entirely in the noise/texture/soundscape arena. Having heard some of bbJR's other work before this, I suspected this record would be solidly in the noise camp. Instead I was amazed to find that this recording is not only melodic, but it's almost a pop record in its way--an impressive feat for instant-composition improvisations.

Generally, bbJR builds systems of moving chords and ostinato lines, eventually looping them into place and adding melodies. But the melodies themselves are very unusual for loop-based music. Take "Waiting On Beth," for example: in the first round of playing-over-the-loop, bbJR takes an approach that reminds me of Zappa's solo playing, with rhythmically playful punctuation, mostly scalar motion, and playing against the time established by the rhythm section below. But at the halfway point, the loops turn off. A related but new rhythmic idea is established, and it's embellished with a buildup of melodic stabs, washing into shifting chords, and finally building up into shifting three-note sequences. In other words, there is an unusual amount of development and variation in these pieces, rather than simply establishing a loop and riding it home.

bbJR's pop sensibility and some of his tonal choices, like the really scrunched overdriven tones during frenzied moments in "There Is No Other" and "Joni Mitchell," remind me a lot of Adrian Belew's work. Like Belew, bbJR uses timbre and technique to bring out often-ignored nuances of melodic potential hidden in the resonance/overtones of each note. When considered within the larger body of bbJR's work, "Rest in Infinity" also demonstrates how pop/folk/punk/alternative influences can be part of a musical approach that often seems closer to avant-classical/jazz camps. No matter how "out" bbJR's music might go, it's clear that he's found a way to integrate (and respect) his more conventional influences. This one is available in an edition of 40 on CDr, and you can also hear/buy it digitally via BandCamp.

Aural Resuscitation Unit - Dubplate Volume Three

The other bbJR-related releases in this review are both solo efforts, but I thought I'd include this album from Dubuque's Aural Resuscitation Unit for a taste of his collaborative work. The ARU is headed by Randy Carter, who also operates the Dubuque Strange Music Society. On "Dubplate Volume Three," Carter is joined by Jorge Anthony Tapia, Jay Schleidt, and bbJR. These pieces are very short--generally around a minute each--and bbJR contributes banjo and sax to three tracks.

I was especially taken with bbJR's contribution to "Patrol Call," on which he plays a very sharp-sounding banjo into a wall of effects that turn the sound into a sort of envelope-filtered chime. It almost sounds like an old casiotone xylophone patch--very cool. His sax playing is featured on "Dual Axis Access Dub" in a relatively sustained fashion, and on "The Cobra Stirred," where he plays into some delays and headphone-feedback distortion.

As a whole, this record is a sample/electronics-based affair, full of noise and aggression tempered by thoughtful arranging. A few tracks start with percussion in a foundational manner, featuring more clearly delineated samples, but more often the drum machine sounds are in hyper-tempo mode, causing them to function more texturally than rhythmically. When there are relatively conventional percussion sections, they tend toward harsh early-industrial sounds, including a favorite of mine, "Tracing Vapour Trails." The final piece, "Prepare Yourself for Europe," is longer, its eight minutes taking up a third of the album's running time, and it spends most of its duration in a sort of channel-surfing mode, with different sections emerging and replacing one another in an assortment of collages and montages. By the final few minutes, the focus is on low frequency sounds with bits of identifiable rhythm peeking through and ultimately cutting off abruptly at the end. Recommended.

BBJr - Tearjerker

I've saved my favorite of these records for last. I'm going to get right to the point with "Tearjerker": this LP was released in an edition of 100 by Captcha Records last summer, and the fact that some physical copies still seem to be available is quite surprising to me. This has quickly become one of my favorite records of the last year and is a must-hear for fans of avant/outsider music.

Described in its promotional materials as "instrumental and vocal improvisations recorded to 4-track," "Tearjerker" isn't a free improv album; rather, these are improvised song forms, a sort of overdubbed improv solitaire. And these aren't entirely improvised. The final LP track, "There is No Other," for example, appears here as an organ riff-based piece, but it's also present in a guitar rendition on "Rest in Infinity." But the versions are very different. Perhaps one can think of these pieces as emanating from a few basic riffs and ideas that already exist, but their arrangements are left open and subject to drastic change at the moment of recording or performance.

"Tearjerker" is well-sequenced, with a relatively aggressive A-side and a gentler B-side. The album opener, "Terminal Sac," is a brutal jazz/noise/skronk piece featuring drums, bass, sax, and vocals--I thought I was in for a neo-Borbetomagus act for a few minutes. The first few tracks continue in a similar direction instrumentally, while increasingly picking up a bit of an avant-rock and no-wave influence.

I'm impressed with bbJR's skills on every instrument he uses. The drums are solidly played, the bass and guitar lines positively shine, and his sax work is simple but very effective. And again, these pieces may be semi-improvised onto a 4-track, but there must be substantial preparation to make sure everything will work together. A listener would surely assume that the first five tracks were tracked in pass by a live band.

Then we arrive at my favorite section of the album: the three movements comprising "Triptych." The first section of this piece emphasizes subtle vocals and auxiliary percussion toward an early-industrial sound, haunting and building toward an unknown menace. The middle section gets much more violent, using mic feedback for a large variety of high squeals and low-frequency rumbles. The final "right panel" of "Triptych" loops several vocal parts toward a sudden dropout, after which some softer vocal sections interact with sounds that seem to go through envelope filters and some kind of bass tracking synth (having played with similar vocal textures using an old Zoom 505II made for bass, that's my guess on the effects, anyway). Various phrases commingle and fall away while gradually being overtaken by sharp synth blips. An amazing and otherworldly piece, full of great unconventional vocals. Totally grab this LP while you still can. You'll be one of the lucky ones who will have the 2010s equivalent of a first printing of early Faust, AMM or This Heat someday. It's available through bbJR's BandCamp, or from Captcha.

More projects

We'll surely be investigating more of bbJR's work in the future, but in case you're already looking for more, Captcha just released two more bbJR projects: "How to Fuck All Your Coworkers in One Sitting" is available on cassette or digitally, and "Trilogy + Addendum" is a giant 57-track digital release. There are a number of solo and split cassettes coming out on bbJR's own Personal Archives, too--keep checking the bbJR BandCamp and Personal Archives BandCamp for what seem like almost weekly updates.

--also published at Killed in Cars