Innerhythmic 014
ROIR 9500
Innerhythmic 016
Bill Laswell has done damn near everything. He is wildly prolific both as
player and producer and possesses the kind of back catalog that prohibits
simplification. He has worked with Herbie Hancock, Brian Eno, Fela Kuti,
William S. Burroughs, Pharaoh Sanders, David Byrne, etc., etc., ad
infinitum. Recent months bring a re-release of a collaboration with His
Funkiness Bootsy
Collins, a dub retrospective, and a new dub-inspired disc from Shine. What
follows then is a tiny glimpse into the career of a man who could easily
have his name attached to a half-dozen other projects by year's end.
Lord of the Harvest manifests the alter ego of Bootsy Collins. He
has donned the sparkling cape and crown fo the omnipotent Zillatron, "the
great Overlord of Cyberfunk" and enlisted the other-worldly assistance of
Buckethead, reputed fret board freak, and the keymaster, Bernie Worrell.
Bootsy supplies the bass and beats, which leaves Laswell to bring the noise,
weaving ambient sounds and clips throughout while lacing in spoken word
snippets and found sounds. The results are scattered both intentionally and
unintentionally. The heavily decorated funk of "Bugg Lite" and "Fuzz Face"
are attributed to Bootsy alone and effect the galactic funkiness and whimsy
many have come to expect of him. Slap-poppin' bass lines and break downs
are the order of the day, spliced with Laswell's collage and Zillatron's
non-sequitur interjections. Buckethead cuts an edge,bringing some heavy
metallitude to the proceedings, and the result sounds almost exactly like
you would hope cyberfunk would sound.
As Buckethead and Laswell begin to
collaborate as writers though, the scope of the album expands and the focus
blurs. Many of the elements persevere, but despite references to Roswell
and "political partyin' goin' on," much of the exuberance of the early
tracks is absent, subsumed in the mechanized, hard-edged contributions of
Laswell and Buckethead. "Exterminate" is a foray into gritty, machine gun
techno beats that feels misplaced, while "Count Zero" dips into ambience
with the accurate, recurring clip, "This stuff is very comforting," over a
funky drum beat. The menacing stomp of "Bootsy and the Beast" pits the
low-end against Buckethead's alternately exhilarating and indulgent flights,
but by the time the album reaches the penultimate "No Fly Zone," the tricks
are out of the bag, and the the game is losing its charm. The ideas and
syntheses here are engaging and well worth exploring, but the songs on
Lord
of the Harvest are flimsy structures to prop up ideas rather than ideas
themselves. Once you've heard the ideas, the songs aren't enough to keep
you around.
While it is virtually impossible to summarize or classify Laswell's career,
it is easier to get a handle on portions, most especially now his work in
dub thanks to ROIR's chronological retrospective of his four album Sacred
System/ Dub Chamber series. 1996's "Dread Internal" finds Laswell
securely
in dub-land, locking down the low-end with e fiercely repetitive though not
looped bass line and a static drum beat to match. The reggae vibe, fleshed
out with echoing keys, is pervasive and thick as the track drives the
listener into a head-bobbing trance. "Thunupa" begins to stretch the
boundaries by adding Arabian and Indian influences via Karsh Kale's hypnotic
tabla work. Graham Haynes takes the melodic lead on cornet, stretching the
music into jazzier territories as well, but it's all still decidedly dub.
The final cut, "Ethiopia/ The Lower Ground," feels initially like a leap
forward. Laswell enlists Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shibabaw's mesmerizing voice in
the front end and alters the instrumentation while maintaining the spirit of
dub. Here, acoustic guitar, tambourine, and accordion-influenced keys lock
down the refrain beautifully. It works so well, applies the hypnotic
element of dub so refreshingly, that the latter half of the track feels like
a betrayal, despite the decorative tablas and keys which make it some of the
best work on the comp.
Finally, 2004's Heaven and Hell, under the Shine moniker, finds
Laswell
paired with long-time collaborator and suspected mutant Buckethead. The
album, divided into seven movements, functions as combinations of a few
parts. Shin Terai has crafted a high-tech junkyard beat with a rimshot that
courses throughout. Less regular is a chugging, hard-edged rhythm riff from
Buckethead. Two bass lines shift in and out of the mix. One is
predominately rhythmic while the other, the album's theme, is a gorgeously
simple melodic line, which Buckethead mimics with his own slippery,
washed-out rhythm line. It is all a long way from "Dread Internal" in
sound, but the driving idea is essentially the same. Entrancing, static
low-end grooves press the listener into a near-meditative state. It seems
counter-intuitive to speak of innovation in a medium where hypnotizing
stasis is the goal, but Laswell presses forward nonetheless. Shine exhibits
very little of the reggae so crucial to early dub. Thanks in large part to
Buckethead (also a suspected alien), the vibe here is more cosmic than
islandic, and while dub admittedly has its spacey element, the angle here is
different. Buckethead plays often elongated lines rife with envelope and
echo effects that reach across distances, and one suspects it is this
reaching, this struggle to elevate, that inspires the album's title. The
resulting album, like last year's "Charged Live," swims in small circles,
treading all the while in familiar waters. But where it crippled "Charges
Live," rendering a flat and uninspired album, the opposite is true here.
The exploration yields more intriguing discoveries, and the brilliant theme
finds the band and the listener diving deeper rather than paddling away.
The examples here confirm for any doubters that Laswell's place in the dub
universe is well-deserved. A relentless innovator, he seeks new ways to
apply dub ideas through varied instrumentation and cultural hybrid. he
traces the roots of repetitive, low-end music back thousands of years and
believes the influence of dub is only beginning to be felt, but it's hard to
see it. To untrained ears, it all sounds the same, and many listeners are
too impatient to wade through ten minutes of a lock-step rhythm to find
gold, enlightenment, or synaptic release. Those who don't give in to the
hypnosis will simply miss out.
No Comments comments associated with this post