OM/Six Organs of Admittance

Holy Mountain

2006

OM's sound is set in stone.  You know going in just exactly what you're going to get.  Rock Solid.  You could set your watch to it.  But it is a sound that is well honed rather than narrow in scope.  A lesser band wouldn't be able to pull it off for long.  OM though belongs to a rare breed- think AC/DC or Dead Moon- who are able to achieve constancy without (for the most part) sliding into redundancy.

For a band whose music almost seems constrained by the limits of an LP side, it's surprising that these guys even mess with doing 7"s.  I suppose the fade out suggests that this could (and maybe did) carry on ad infinitum.

Ben Chasny weighs in with a wordless incantation set to some fuzzed out, reverb drenched guitar action that recalls the earliest Six Organs output or perhaps the first Badgerlore record.  Probably a relatively inconsequential track in a discography that seems to be approaching canonization in some circles, but a nice slab of psych guitar noise nonetheless.  

OM/Six Organs of Admittance

Various- Bottom of the World

Fisheye/Fourth Dimension

1998

Nice late 90's comp highlighting some of the leading lights of the noise/drone/improv scene at that time.  Features tracks from Omit, RST, Sandoz Lab Technicians, & Surface of the Earth.

Bottom of the World

Roy Montgomery- Zabriskie Point

Gyttja

1995

Zabriskie Point

Matthew Shipp/Loren Mazzacane Connors Split

Halana

1996

This record came with issue #1 of Halana magaizine.  In addition to the Shipp and Connors cuts, the record features 5 lock grooves from sculptor and furniture designer Harry Bertoia's Sonambient LPs.  Bertoia created huge sound sculptures in a barn in rural Pennsylvania and self-released a series of 10 beautiful LPs in the '70's that with their homemade sounds and stark black & white cover art fall somewhere between Partch's Gate 5 and Jandek's Corwood Industries.  Overall, a beautiful reminder that by the end of the 20th century, American folk/sound art was still very much alive and well.  

Matthew Shipp/Loren Connors

Gastr Del Sol/Tony Conrad

Table of the Elements

1995

Two titans of the modern Avant-Garde.  This record coincided with a 1995 series of concerts put on by Table of the Elements.  

Gastr del Sol wasn't the first or only band to employ methods and techniques taken from the world of modern avant-garde composition, but few other bands sought so explicitly, at their core, to create music based in that tradition.  While O'Rourke claims to cringe at the more abstract for abstracts sake aspect of those records, the fact is that they remain as some of the most singularly unique records not only of that particular time, but of the whole history of Experimental/Art rock.  I was always a particular fan of David Grubbs' piano playing.  His voicings and use of space at times recall the proto-minimalism of Satie or the later, sparer works of Feldman.  Here we have a fragment of song that floats in and out of a haze of subtle electronics and tape manipulation that perfectly exemplifies the Gastr del Sol modus operandi.

Tony Conrad does what Tony Conrad does.  Qualitative judgements can be hard to make with this sort of stuff, but perhaps this is at least an easier to digest portion for folks who find an albums worth (or a 4 cd boxsets worth) daunting.  Over the years Conrad's searing violin drone has rubbed shoulders with folks like La Monte Young, the Velvet Underground, and Faust.  But it's been in the last decade or so that his reputation has been rescued from obscurity and he's returned to somewhat regular performance.

The first 500 copies of this record also included a second record with an excerpted performance of a Conrad composition, Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plane,  performed with Grubbs and O'Rourke.

The Japanese Room at La Pagode