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Review: Radiator Greys: Denying the Other

[This review of Denying the Other appeared in the April 2016 issue of Eleven Magazine.]

Back when—pre-2012, say—Josh Levi was a key participant in the St. Louis experimental music scene. As an Apop Records employee, music writer, show organizer, and member of kraut-surf band Bikini Acid and drone duo Worm Hands, he made a lot of things happen and brought a lot of people together, to the point that even now he’s a ghostly center of gravity who just happens to reside many hundred of miles away in Washington, D.C. In the capital, Levi’s been working hard on solo noise-drone project Radiator Greys, and his new full-length Denying the Other is garnering some much-deserved praise at home and abroad. 

While many noise projects focus on the physical possibilities of certain instruments or on pushing as far away from convention as possible, Denying the Other is a rooted strongly in evoking human feelings. The record’s five tracks don’t shy away from tonality, and many are humid with a humming synth sound and thunderous percussion that wouldn’t sound out of place in an ‘80s horror soundtrack. But while John Carpenter or David Cronenburg might be interested in inducing the terror of getting chopped up by a backcountry psychopath or consumed by a sentient videotape, Levi’s operating on a more subtle, personal scale. The best tracks on the album are full of slow builds and subtle textural changes that display the illogic of a panic attack, rushing, ebbing, flowing, cascading, and then slowly trickling to unsettling conclusions. In “Wait,” my personal favorite, a pummeling waltz beat and sheets of gleaming sound wash through the speakers, interrupted violently by curlicues of noise. In “Cocksure on the Chopping Block” (which, to be fair to the horror angle, does sound like the name of a snuff film), Levi takes a similar beat, some pummeling sub-bass, and a fair dose of tormented screaming and leads us on what sounds like a journey through the flame-toasted hellscape left over after Armageddon. In “Under the Tongue,” a long sample of a kid reading about the end of the world and humanity’s ills (from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series) gives way to a slowly shifting web of heartsick synthesizer lines before the whole composition collapses in a fit of panicked electronic scribbling. The Narnia quote is the perfect way into Denying the Other: like Lewis’s story cycle, Levi’s catastrophic compositions express a sense of loss, of change, of the steady hurt of earthly existence. Things may not always turn out alright, but there’s relief in expression.

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Review: Mount Moriah: How to Dance

[This review of How to Dance appeared in the March 2016 issue of Eleven Magazine.]

Mount Moriah has always been a strange chimera: a conservative alt-country band made up of a group of musicians with wildly divergent individual interests. Frontwoman Heather McEntire (of the post-punk band Bellafea) plays sinuous guitar parts in tandem with insanely productive black metal, drone, and avant-garde maestro Jenks Miller, who here takes on the role of sensitive sideman, coloring almost entirely within the lines of soulful gospel-country. Jazz-noise bassist Casey Toll anchors the whole mix not only to Earth but to the hills and hollers of the group’s native North Carolina. If the group’s avant tendencies show through in their third album at all, it’s in the spirit of discovery and passion that they bring to the frequently calcified formula of roots rock. While lesser bands recreate their favorite Stones records, Seeger recordings, and ‘70s Nashville country hits, How to Dance reinvigorates the form with youthful enthusiasm and supple musicianship.

The record isn’t a wild departure from the group’s previous work, but it showcases a broadening in almost every respect from their previous LP Miracle Temple. An impressive range of guests—including Angel Olsen on vocals and producer Brian Paulson, who’s worked with Beck, Wilco, and Slint—fleshes out the band’s minimalistic sound. Mount Moriah (named after the mountain where Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son in the Bible) has always had a mystical dimension in keeping with its Southern gothic grounding. Here, McEntire’s lyrics straddle the intimate and the universal, moving from a reflection on a half-clothed lover to meditations on the inevitability of loss. If How to Dance has a weak spot, it’s a subtle overproduction that pervades the album. Guitar lines are perfectly if coldly executed, and McIntire’s voice has a theatrical quality that, though it illuminates the music’s emotional extremes, sometimes sabotages the sincerity of the group by placing the listener more in the Grand Ole Opry than in an old country church.

The showiness sabotages the band most when Mount Moriah rocks its hardest (which is to say, about as hard as Fleetwood Mac and the Dixie Chicks). This band of mournful country devotees is at its best when the trio embraces the catharsis-in-slow-motion of its strongest compositions. On glacier-pace album standout “Baby Blue,” McIntire’s lyrics shine at their most affecting, buoyed along on a gracefully arcing melody: “Oh baby blue, you know nothing lasts forever, even if you want it to.” The music is nothing groundbreaking, but the feeling of yearning that McIntire captures so perfectly is as old as the hills.

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Review: Kisser: Master Controller

[This review of Master Controller appeared in the November 2014 issue of Eleven Magazine.]

Listening to Master Controller—which was recorded in Chicago by the guy from Bitchin Bajas and CAVE—I got a keen sense of claustrophobia, of dread, of a lightless world full of blind fish. Maybe if the dudes in Kisser weren’t in a band, they’d be armed with metal detectors, searching for old coins down by an underground river. It’s certainly easy to see these guys as explorers, each grasping beyond the conventional borders of power-trio rock to undiscovered regions of Mind.

The tape starts off with the rollicking and uncharacteristically tuneful “Forest,” a song that culminates in a swung section that’s metal in the way Sabbath was metal: totally cool and really big. The band can turn on a dime, and shows this ability off almost constantly, switching into rock-mode for “Weight” before going into enormous-mode for the towering and multipartite “Curses.” The many changes of direction occasionally get distracting, with riffs zooming by at top speed, never to be heard again. But the band always saves the song, uniting the various threads and clearing the listener’s head with their strongest asset: the locked groove.

Nowhere is the mind-curdling power of repetition better displayed than in the album’s centerpiece, “Throat,” a 10-minute mini-masterwork. It’s subtle and quietly amazing, a journey that starts as calm night music, turns operatic in mood, devolves into an arrhythmic drum and bass duel, and peaks in a roaring inferno of fuzz. It evokes complicated emotions, or at least it did for this wimp.

While I listened, the mystery grew. Who is the Master Controller? Is that his hi-gloss mask on the cover? The song “Master Controller” certainly doesn’t offer any clues. But by the end of the tape, I had the sense that thanks to Kisser, the subterranean world is a little better understood.

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Consumer Report: Mister Ben: the black mix

[This is an unpublished review of a CD-R by Mister Ben, a dark prince of St. Louis noise.]

Mister Ben? 

A person from St. Louis. 

A person who coordinates the concert series NOiSETTE and writes and illustrates the long-running satirical zine Freezerburn. 

A person in the noise troupe Beauty Pageant, which is centered on his braying, microtonal guitar torturing. 

the black mix? 

A collection of solo guitar noise pieces recorded between 2012 and 2016. 

What does it sound like? 

Gnomic utterances from your innermost regions (physical and spiritual). 

Sometimes, Boards of Canada. Other times, Loren Connors. Also, Alan Licht. 

Occasionally, SUNN O))). Most often, though, nothing you’ve heard eked from an amp before. 

Brooding. The two droning “Entropy” tracks waft through the speakers like radio waves from a distant star—natural, indifferent. “Video Progression” is sublime. 

Anguished. “Vocal Interlude” captures a minute of agonized yowling. Throughout, the strings keen, screech, and whine. 

Eerily traditional. Pop doppelgängers abound here, rock tropes reflected in a cracked mirror. “Progression I” is like the evil twin of a My Bloody Valentine riff. Is there a moment of jazz in “Wrong 5”? 

At times, repetitive. Listen to find out if you need all fourteen minutes of “Nightmare Trio Live.” 

 What is it for? 

Abrasion, revelation, desperation, fustigation (inducing depression, frustration, or progression), channeling aggression. Depending on the consumer, exultation.

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Khaled Hussein & the Texas Room

[This is a feature I wrote for Eleven Magazine in spring 2016.]

In a small bungalow in Tower Grove South, Louis Wall and I sit on a couch. Across a wide coffee table, Khaled Hussein and his teenage daughter confer. A huge TV showing a soccer game on mute dominates the wall closest to us; a giant fish tank with an electronic keyboard in front of it covers the opposite wall. The conversation is going a bit slower than your average music mag interview: Hussein speaks only snippets of English. His daughter is translating heroically, but she clearly has a few better things to do on a Saturday morning than answer a nosy stranger’s questions. 

“Do you like living in the United States?” I ask.

His daughter translates the question quietly into Arabic, leaning to her father’s ear. Between my utter lack of Arabic and his minimal grasp of English, Hussein and I have had a hard time communicating, but the answer to this question comes easily. He looks directly at me. “Yes,” he says, smiling.

Like the stories of so many immigrants and refugees, the tale of Hussein’s path to his present home is full of false starts and reversals. Growing up in Iraq, he dreamed of becoming a singer, inspired by international icons like George Michael as well as local singers. He got his start hustling in local restaurants and clubs, and soon had a career on his hands. By the time he was a young adult, he’d become a minor pop sensation in Baghdad. A music video still in circulation in the Arabic-language reaches of YouTube shows him in a dark suit, courting a woman in a red dress. Men decked out in full Arab thawb robes and agal headdresses dance joyously around the couple to a pounding beat. Hussein was very much the secular cool guy of 1990s Ba’athist Iraq until a changing political and religious climate hostile to secular singers (and then the American invasion of 2003) pushed Hussein and his family out of the country.

Hussein fled to the then-peaceful Syria, where he raised his young family and sought out work as a singer until the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. The Hussein family relocated to St. Louis, where they’ve lived since, out of reach of armed conflict but isolated, far away from friends and family back home.

Since Khaled left Iraq, he’s continued singing. He shows us a video on his cell phone after giving his daughter a wordless sign. (She reappears a moment later, holding a silver tray full of cookies and two glasses of Sunny D.) Onscreen, present-day Hussein stands decked out in white shirt and dinner jacket in the center of a crowd of dancers. He’s clad out in snazzy dress clothes, self-assured, gesturing to the crowd: every bit the professional.

Hussein’s American musical career might have taken place solely at Arab events if he hadn’t come into contact with Louis Wall through the St. Louis-based Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma. Wall was seeking participants for his recording project, The Texas Room, which pairs immigrant and refugee musicians with St. Louis locals to create unique conversations between disparate styles of music.

Wall, the slight, eloquent drummer of semi-defunct St. Louis rock group Jumbling Towers and present engineer at Cherokee Street’s Native Sound Recording, had been at work on the project for a couple of years. Years of conversations with friends in his indie-rock community caused him to realize that he had always been narrowly focused on American music. “I’d been playing in rock bands and jazz bands for the majority of my upbringing,” Wall says, “and the more I learned about other people’s cultures, I realized I had a pretty specific culture of my own, which excited me. But I wanted to know about other people’s stories because I was so in my own world. I wanted to know what kind of musician I could become if I worked with people way outside my social group.”

When he started the project, Wall reached out to the International Institute of St. Louis, which helps recent immigrants gain a foothold in the city. Wall got on the Institute’s message boards, and before long he had a short list of musicians he thought would make interesting collaborators. The project really took off when one of Wall’s friends got him in touch with a singer from Lagos, Nigeria. The singer needed a track recorded immediately for radio in Lagos, one of the biggest cities in the world.

Wall was the perfect guy for the job, because he happens to be an engineer at Native Sound Studio on Cherokee, the merger of his old apartment studio on Texas Avenue with David Beeman’s former studio across the street, behind The Bomb Door. The idea to make a full album out of his collaborations with refugee and immigrant musicians was gradual, though. Wall says, “I realized I could probably do a collaboration album at some point. I realized I wanted to do that before I had the materials or even people to do that. It was super sketchy even just to start.” So he started recording a song every month. Over the course of the last year Wall and his compatriots released one track each month on SoundCloud, culminating in the album Non-Fiction, out last month.

The songs are a blend of traditional material with Wall’s own riffs and beats. Some pieces were fleshed out collaboratively over the Internet; a few were created completely from scratch. Wall had a sort of house band that appeared on many of the tracks, but due to budgetary constraints Wall acted as the nerve center of the project, coordinating collaborators, coaching performances, and editing work made by a group of people that eventually ballooned to fifty collaborators from over fifteen nations. 

Wall would begin each month by deciding which of the musical ideas he was working with were either most exciting at that time or ripest to be taken to another stage. Typically, the next collaborator would be someone as far away from the original contributor as possible. “The last song we did [“Gau Sorai Uchali”] was a Nepali devotional song,” Wall relates. “I remember my friend Lisa was playing Irish flute at the time. I said, ‘Do you want to do this song? I think flute would be great on it,’ and it worked out perfectly. I think it sounds like one cohesive unit. But these people probably would have never met and these styles aren’t normally played together.”

Bringing in disparate collaborators on his own time allowed Wall time to create an artistic product to his personal standards, but it did impede the improvisational chemistry that could have come about if he had been able to get all the collaborators on a particular song in a room together. The project was funded by the New York-based organization Fractured Atlas in conjunction with the local Regional Arts Commission, but time constraints and the significant budgetary issues associated with booking time in a professional studio prevented Wall from setting up weekend-long sessions in which all of the collaborators could collectively come up with an arrangement. “These musicians are great and they can really feed off each other,” he says “My only regret is that I wasn’t able to get everyone in a room together. I was able to produce and arrange through the computer, but these are playing musicians who are way better musicians than I am, and could have worked a lot faster.”

Despite budgetary and time constraints, the sessions in which players actually did meet up and play together flowed smoothly. Many of the participants are professional musicians, and many have a conversational command of English, but Wall found that any remaining linguistic barriers melted away in the studio. “My buddy Khaled,” Wall says, “I had to communicate through his daughter. So I’d have to put up a microphone in front of him and hope for the best. Not only was it hard to communicate with him, it was hard to communicate abstract ideas like, ‘put a little more expression into this note, or put a little more feeling into this note, or watch the attack of this note, watch your timing,’ cues that would help a singer get through a session. I just couldn’t communicate any of those. His daughter isn’t a musician. She couldn’t translate these esoteric things into Arabic at all. That was a struggle, but he could tell when I was psyched when things were going well, and he’s a professional, so for the most part if we were both feeling good, then we were satisfied with it.”

The tracks on Non-Fiction are proof of the cohesion Wall found with his collaborators. “Unde Dragoste,” a clarinet-heavy tune sung by Romanian vocalist and guitarist Ben Tulin with backing vocals from Spanish-language group Adria and Her Treasures, showcases the project’s jazzy, elegant, emotive side. “Red River Valley,” dedicated to the memory of Eric Garner and performed by Natalie Huggins with The Voice of the Holy Spirit African Choir, presents an unsettling blend of soulful piano pop with chanting and vocal collage. “Tora Tora Tora” delves into hip-hop territory, with verses by 18andCounting and Smoll Mashup and a chorus by Khaled Hussein. My personal favorite, “Gau Sorai Uchali (Psalm 150)” demonstrates the project at its best, wrapping the touching, gonzo ebullience of an old Nepalese devotional song with an adrenalized drumbeat. The combinations of instruments and idioms are striking, but Wall’s careful cultivation of analog warmth and ability to swaddle the compositions in the production values of ‘60s and ‘70s pop bind the threads together into a cohesive whole. The lyrics—penned by Wall and the collaborators—work to tie the album together as well, meditating in a slew of languages on the power of collective action to overcome injustice. 

While Wall is clearly focused on empowering immigrants and publicizing the work of musicians from foreign countries, his central place in The Texas Room project does raise questions of cultural appropriation. The histories of pop and “world music” are riddled with examples of white musicians employing the music of people of color to their own advantage. Ry Cooder has caught flack throughout his career for inserting himself into the music of other cultures for a profit. Paul Simon was lambasted for incorporating the compositions of uncredited South African musicians into his mondo-hit Graceland. And it’s easy to see the early histories of rock, jazz, and the blues as instances of the powerful borrowing from the disenfranchised. Whatever your understanding of the fine line between reverent imitation and colonialist plundering, it’s clear that Wall is wrestling with the issue and taking care to work for the whole circle of collaborators, not just for himself. “I think it depends on your intention,” he says, choosing his words with care. “There are definitely a lot of people taking non-Western music and making it accessible to Western ears. If that is the intention, then I have no interest. My interest and intention lies on me interfacing with other people and other cultures, and not trying to dumb it down or water it down. Hopefully, if I’m doing my job right, I’m going to speak my truth and my culture on these songs and not try to pretend like I’m taking on someone else’s role insincerely, and let the other people speak their truth.”

Wall admits that he is at the center of The Texas Room. “I’m the biggest benefactor of this project,” he acknowledges, “I have no shame in that. I think artistically I took whatever direction I wanted to take. At the end of the day I’m still arranging everything. This is my way of opening my mind and my door a little bit to my neighbors. I just think it’s important that we listen to each other. When you listen and put a face to a name, that can really help with empathy and compassion. I just realized that empathy is not compassion. I just realized that empathy is the ability to see yourself in someone else’s shoes, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything about it. You also have to have compassion.”  

By the measure of allowing Wall to meet his neighbors and practice compassion in the St. Louis music community, The Texas Room project seems to have been a resounding success. In Khaled Hussein’s living room, the Iraqi singer interrupts our halting conversation to give a demonstration. He sits down at his keyboard (flanked by tropical fish), taking care first to point out his new mixing board to Wall, indicating the device with his characteristically bashful charm. “Nice,” Wall returns, and the two share a momentary grin. If music is the universal language, musical gear must work at an even deeper for musicians. These two men don’t need words. 

Hussein turns on his programmed drumbeat, the downbeat-heavy rhythm used in so much Middle Eastern pop, and begins singing, his voice strained with emotion from the first note. He wends his way up and down a scale abundant with twists and turns foreign to my American ears before tapping out the melody on the keyboard, daughter bored on the sofa, Wall and me rapt. As Hussein plays the last note, he looks up, radiant.