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dustedmagazine · 4 months ago

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Listed: Chris Corsano

Chris Corsano is a New York-based drummer who has been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late 1990's. He's been the rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of "jazz" (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen, Zoh Amba) and "rock" (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O'Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee). Jennifer Kelly reviewed his latest album, The Key, observing, “All of which is a long way of saying that The Key has some monster improvised drumming on it, but it is also extremely musical. If you’ve been holding off on this one because, you know, solo drumming, you should reconsider. It is that and a lot more.” The new record has a fair amount of guitar on it, so Corsano dedicates this Listed to the guitar music he loves.

So, since I’d already done a Listed a while ago, the suggestion was floated to do a Listed of just guitar-influence records since the solo album I just did has a bunch of guitar on it. So here goes:

Teenage Jesus And The Jerks — s/t EP [aka the pink EP] (1979)

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Lydia Lunch’s slide playing and grinding bursts of noise are some of the most incredible uses of a guitar my ears have ever come across. Perfectly matched to the emotion of the songs, and instantly affecting — I can’t hear it and not feel something. Impossible. Added bonus that one of my favorite guitar players happens to be responsible for this quote: “The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist.”

Sonny Sharrock — Black Woman (1969)

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Sonny Sharrock’s playing throughout this whole entire album is an unbelievably perfect balance of both the gorgeous and the ferocious. An all-time favorite record, for sure.

John Lee Hooker — Sittin’ Here Thinkin’

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I bought this record when I was about 18. I was in a record store, overhearing the owner and another “old” dude talk about how the one blues guitarist they just could not get into was John Lee Hooker. Just as they were saying that I came across this record priced at $4 and I took it as a sign to buy it. Now I’m 48... probably the same age as those two guys were at the time, and this is still one of my favorites by Hooker, even if usually I prefer solo recordings by him. But there’s a looseness and togetherness to this band that I love.

E Gayathri — Veena

Not a guitar record but a veena record. This is one of my favorite records by any stringed instrument, so it definitely has had an effect on my sense of melody and timing on guitar. I found a cassette of this record in a bin of tapes lying on the floor of a clothing & furniture store in Manchester, UK in 2005. I bought a handful of the tapes and went back a little while later to try to pick up more, but all the tapes had disappeared. Who knows what else I missed?!?

Susan Alcorn — And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar (2006)

Another record that’s technically not a guitar (per se) record, but what a record it is! Stunning. As in stunningly beautiful sound and pacing. And also stunning, as in knock you on your ass, jaw on the floor, seriously fuck you up it’s so good.

Scissor Girls — New Tactical Outline I & II 7"s (1995)

These were collected on the Here Is The “Is-Not” CD. I saw them live around the time these 7"s came out. Kelly Kuvo’s angular guitar lines interacting with Azita Youssefi’s bass lit up the same parts of my brain hit by DNA’s A Taste of DNA and Capt. Beefheart & The Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica.

Metalux — Victim of Space (2005)

I’m not sure I could tell you all the parts of this record that are guitar-generated vs. synth vs. who-knows-what utopian future technology from outer-galaxy reaches. It’s not for mere mortals to say. But this is a great record full of all the kinds of weirdness I like. And as far as guitar influences go, I love the tones Jenny Graf Sheppard gets, and how she and MV Carbon create universes.

Magik Markers — Isolated from Exterior Time: 2020

I listened to “Machine” a whole hell of a lot in 2020. Partly because I was working on the solo record and wanted to reference the mix against things I thought sounded great. And more to the point, because it’s such a great song. Elisa Ambrogio rips on this as she does on all Markers records.

Ascension — Broadcast (1996)

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This record in particular of Ascension’s kind of lit up intertwined pathways for me — Stefan Jaworzyn (guitar) and Tony Irving (drums) brilliantly firing simultaneously in directions of high-energy free improvisation and heavy guitar dissonance. This was the record that really convinced me of free improvisation’s ability to avoid historical/genre dead-endings. Anytime people express themselves like this at the outer limits, you can trust that’ll remain vital and forever present-tense.

Body/Head — Coming Apart (2013) & s/t (2013)

The liminal nature of Body/Head always knocked my socks clear off. Improvised and freer than free, but always with a song form just about to take shape as it’s also just about to dissolve. That they could sustain this for one record, let alone multiple releases, is a lightning-in-a-bottle level miracle capture. But seeing them remain in this state for a whole entire live set was transfixing beyond belief.

Comets on Fire — Field Recordings From the Sun (2000)

Twin guitar overload from Ethan Miller and Ben Chasny. Again, seeing them live really is the thing that blew my mind straight out of my skull, but cranking this record at regular intervals brings me back to seeing them at The Hemlock in San Francisco in 2003. It felt like the walls were breathing. heavy.

I left off tons of other guitar influences (Lou Reed — Metal Machine Music, Stooges, Hendrix, Sightings, Charalambides, Howlin’ Wolf, Blind Willie McTell, Jack Rose, Elizabeth Cotten, Sun City Girls, Myriam Gendron, Bo Diddley, Michael Flower, and on and on), but it’s 5:30am which means it’s either much too late or much too early to be working on a list about guitars anymore.

Oh, damnit. OK one more:

Germs — M.I.A. Anthology

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Specifically, the three tracks on it from the Lexicon Devil 7" on Slash. Pat Smear human-being-lawnmowers through “Lexicon Devil,” “Circle One” and “No God” (with the opening quote of “Roundabout” which I didn’t know was a Yes song until probably a lot more recently than you’d think). Pat Smear is amazing. The whole band is on fire and Darby sounds like he’s about to crawl out of his own skin. And if you listen to it loud enough, you just might too.

#dusted magazine #listed #chris corsano #teenage jesus and the jerks #sonny sharrock #john lee hooker #e gayathri #susan alcorn #scissor girls #metalux #magik markers #ascension #body/head #comets on fire #germs

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sinceileftyoublog · 8 months ago

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Six Organs of Admittance Interview: More Than a Couple Chairs

Photo by Kami Chasny

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When Ben Chasny dives into something, he usually dives deep. Upon answering the phone in February, when I called him to talk about his new Six Organs of Admittance album Time Is Glass (out today on Drag City), he seemed a bit scattered. Despite mentally preparing himself all day for the interview, he got distracted by a "What are you digging lately?" Bandcamper compilation Drag City asked him to put together to advertise his record release. (A music fan with a voracious appetite, Chasny was rediscovering music he had purchased a couple years prior and forgot about.) Six Organs records often occupy the same dedicated headspace, Chasny setting aside blocks of time to think about nothing else. That is, until Time Is Glass. On his latest, Chasny blurs the lines between his outside-of-music life and the music itself, the album a batch of songs that reflects on the magical minutiae that sprout during a period of needed stasis.

The last time I spoke to Chasny, he and his partner [Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers] were still settling in from their move to Humboldt County in Northern California. "When Elisa and I first moved here, we didn't have any friends," Chasny said. "But there's a group of us that live in Humboldt now. A bunch of my friends moved up since the last time I talked to you." That includes fellow Comets on Fire bandmate Ethan Miller and his partner, fellow New Bums musical partner Donovan Quinn, and folk singer Meg Baird and her partner. "Every New Year's Day, if it's not pouring rain, we take a walk on the beach," said Chasny. One such photoshoot on January 1, 2023 yielded the album cover for Time Is Glass: That's Miller and his poodle, along with Baird's Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. This unintentional artistic collective meets up often, whether for coffee or as Winter Band, a rotating cast of area musicians who form to open up for musician friends when they come through town, like Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls. As such, according to Chasny, Time Is Glass is a celebration of community.

Perhaps the supportive strength of his artistic family gave Chasny the willpower to incorporate elements of his daily life into Time Is Glass, something he couldn't avoid. He didn't share with me exactly what in his personal life made it impossible to separate the two, though he mentioned his dog, a difficult-to-train puppy that was a mix of three traditionally stubborn breeds. Said dog inspired "My Familiar", a song that uses occult language to inhabit the mind of his obstinate canine companion. "And we'll burn this whole town / No one says there's good," Chasny sings, alternating between his quintessential hushed delivery and falsetto, his layered vocals atop circular picking exuding a sense of sparseness. Indeed, you wouldn't expect a Six Organs record about home life to sound totally blissful; Time Is Glass is at once gentle and menacing. The devotional "Spinning In A River" portrays the titular carefree act as lightly as the prickle of Chasny's guitar or as doomily as the song's distortion. "Hephaestus" and "Theophany Song" imagine their respective mythological characters as gruff and voyeuristic. "Summer's Last Rays" indeed captures a sense of finality, Chasny's processed guitar and warbling harmonium providing the instantly hazy nostalgia before the fade-out. The album is bookended by songs more straightforwardly hopeful, the opener "The Mission" a dedication to friends falling in love with their new place of residence, the closer "New Year's Song" a twangy ode to dreaming. But it's the moments in between that Chasny was forced to capture on Time Is Glass. And thankfully, what was born out of necessity yielded, for him, new ways to interpret the same old, same old.

Read my conversation with Chasny below, edited for length and clarity. He speaks on domesticity, mythology, playing live, and Arthur Russell.

SILY: You've lived in Humboldt County for a bit. Is Time Is Glass the first Six Organs record in a while you made while situated in one place?

Ben Chasny: I did do a couple records here before. The first one, I was in the process of moving here, so I wasn't really settled. The second was at the beginning of lockdown. This is the first one I felt like was recorded at a home. Everything was settled, I have a schedule. When I was doing the first one, I didn't even have furniture in the house. I had a couple chairs. [laughs]

SILY: Do you think the feeling of being recorded at a home manifests in any specific way on the album?

BC: I started to incorporate daily domestic routines into the record, more often. A lot of the melodies were written while taking the dog for a walk, which I've never done before. There was always stuff to do as I moved in. The times weren't as separate. Before, it was, "Now I'm recording, now I'm doing life stuff." There was a merging of everything here. I would listen to it on my earbuds while taking walks and constantly work on it for six months.

SILY: It definitely has that homeward bound feel in terms of the lyrics and the sound, like you've been somewhere forever. There are a lot of lyrics about the absence of time, and there's a circular nature to the rhythms and the guitars. Does the title of the album refer to this phenomenon?

BC: A little bit. Time does seem, in general, post-lockdowns and COVID, different. The lyrics on the record have a bit more domesticity. It always seems like there was something that had to be done, that would normally keep me from doing music, that I tried to incorporate here. Maybe I'm just getting older, too. I'm getting more sensitive towards time. I'm running out. [laughs]

SILY: Was there anything specific about your domestic life that made you want to include it in your music?

BC: Just that I had to include it in order to do anything. It was no longer separate. The way life ended up working out, I could no longer separate my artistic life from other life. I had to put the artistic aspect into it in order to work. Instead of getting frustrated, I brought [music] more into the house.

SILY: Did working on the record give you a new perspective on domesticity?

BC: I don't know. A little bit. I was just trying to come to terms with basic life things. Let me look at the record, I forgot what songs are on it. [laughs] The song "My Familiar" is about my dog. I got this book called Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, which was sort of taken from transcriptions of witch trials from Scotland in the 1500's. A lot of dealing with things like witches' familiars and demon familiars. I found a very strong similarity between that and my dog, which seemed like it was maybe a demon. She's a Husky-German Shepherd-Australian Shepherd mix, so as a puppy, she needed a lot of work. So that became a song. That's a more humorous way everyday life made its way into the music.

[With regard to] the last song, "New Years Song", Elisa and I have a contest on New Year's Eve when we're hanging out where we go in separate rooms and have one hour to write a song. We come out at 11 or 11:30 and play the song for each other. We've done it for a few years now. This was the song I wrote for New Year's Eve going into 2022.

SILY: You talk about God on Time Is Glass and delve a little bit into mythology. Was that something you were thinking about on a day to day basis when writing?

BC: The “Hephaestus” song was just a character. That was a rare song for me in that I was trying to make sounds that particularly evoked a mythological figure. I've made nods to mythology in the past, but the titles were almost an afterthought. This particular song, I was trying to make the sounds of that character in their workshop with the fire and anvils. I was trying to evoke that feeling. That was kind of a new one for me.

SILY: Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but you also seem to talk a bit about your state of mind on "Slip Away".

BC: It's funny you caught onto that, because I wasn't really expecting to bring it up during interviews. I wouldn't say that I came close at times in the past couple years to schizophrenia, but I could see way off in the distance and horizon what that would be like. I...was trying to write about that. At the same time, the lyrics that have to do with two minds and the splitting of the mind are also somewhat of a reference to the idea of a celestial twin or Valentinian gnosis, how you have a celestial counterpart. That idea [is behind the concept of] someone's guardian angel.

SILY: On a couple songs, you sing to someone or something else. "The Mission" you've mentioned is for a friend and their new partner. What about on "Spinning in a River"?

BC: Maybe it was more of a general idea. It wasn't so much to a person as to a general concept of Amory.

SILY: What were all the instruments used on the record?

BC: I had some guitar, I was singing, and there's some harmonium on it, which I did a lot of processing on, lowering it octaves. I've got some really basic Korg synths. Electronic-wise, there's a program called Reactor I like to use a lot. I do it a little bit more subtly than electronic artists. I use it more for background.

SILY: I picked up the harmonium on "Summer's Last Rays"! I feel like you never truly know when you're hearing a harmonium unless it's in the album credits. Sometimes, that sound is just effects.

BC: There are two different harmoniums. When the bass comes in, that's also a harmonium, but I knocked it down a couple octaves and put it through some phaser. It has a grinding bass tone to it. This is actually one of the few Six Organs records with bass guitar on it. Unless it's an electric record with a band, there's never really been bass guitar. I was really inspired by Naomi Yang's bass playing in Galaxie 500 and how it's more melodic. I told her that, too.

SILY: On "Theophany Song", are you playing piano?

BC: Yeah, that's at my friend's house. I just wanted to play a little melody.

SILY: Was this your first time using JJ Golden for mastering?

BC: I've worked with JJ before. He did Ascent and a few others. I particularly wanted to work with him this time because I had just gotten that Masayuki Takayanagi box set on Black Editions and saw he had done that. I have the original CDs, and I thought he did such an amazing job that I wanted to work with him again.

SILY: Is that common for you, that you think of people to work with and you dig a record they just worked on and it clicks for you?

BC: That's the first time I had just heard something and thought, "Oh, I gotta work with this person." I usually have a few mastering engineers I work with and think, "What would be good for them?" or, "What does this sound like?" I usually like to send the more rock-oriented stuff to JJ, but I was just feeling it this time.

SILY: Have you played these songs live?

BC: The instrumental "Pilar" I have been playing since 2019. That's the oldest song on the record. I did do one show last September where I played a couple of these songs live. I have some ideas on how to work it out. It will be a solo acoustic show, but I [hope] to make some new sounds so it's not so straightforward. One thing about this record is I tried to write songs in the same tuning. On previous records, I used a lot of tunings, and it was a real pain to try to play the songs live. I did write this record with the idea that most of these songs would be able to be done live.

SILY: What have you been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

BC: I just got the Emily Robb-Bill Nace split LP. I just saw her live a couple nights ago. The latest one on Freedom To Spend from Danielle Boutet, which is awesome. Freedom To Spend is a go-to label for me. Also, this split with Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis.

I've been reading Buddhist Bubblegum by Matt Marble, about Arthur Russell and the systems he developed, which I knew nothing about. His compositional systems have almost a Fluxus influence. The subtitle is Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell, so it's also about his Buddhism as well. When I first heard about the book, I didn't know if I needed to get it, but I heard an interview with Matt about the detailed systems Arthur Russell came up with. It gives me a whole new level of appreciation for him. It's so good.

SILY: Did you listen to Picture of Bunny Rabbit?

BC: It's so good, especially the title track. It seems like when he has us plugged into some kind of effects or delay, he's switching the different sounds on it, but it makes the instrument go in so many different areas. To me, the title track is worth the price of the entire record, even though the whole thing is good.

SILY: What else is next for you? Are you constantly writing?

BC: This is gonna be a very busy year release-wise. I have a couple more things coming out. It's hard to write stuff because I always think it'll take so long for it to come out. I'm halfway working on something, but I have no idea when it will come out.

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