Trouser Press: If you don't think of jazz as a full-contact sport, you've obviously never spent any time in a room with the music of th durable upstate New York trio, Borbetomagus. "Punishing" doesn't even begin to describe the loud, assaultive — and often earthily beautiful — sound the members coax from guitar and two saxophones, instruments that here seldom uphold their conventional identities, thanks to innovative use of tone splitting, harmonic distortion and out-and-out brute force.
Initially formed at the tail end of the '70s — concurrent with, but not actually part of, New York's no wave scene — Borbetomagus imbued its free-squealing with a vividly blue-collar style, evident in both the members' biker-ish appearance and the sheer brawn with which Don Dietrich, Donald Miller and Jim Sauter handle their various "axes."
Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore steps into — and almost fills — Miller's shoes on Barefoot in the Head (1990). Playing with percussive force, Moore sticks to underpinning "All Doors Look Alike" (which features some remarkable high-end blowing by one of the reedmen) and leans into a leering grind on "Concerning the Sun as a Cool Solid" with such glee one can actually infer some truth behind the liner-note assertion that he was begging to be "freed from the shackles of the Peggy Lee-descended dogshit" of his day job [liner notes by Thomas Pynchon].
The sound projector (at the time of the 1996 reissue): Thurston Moore proclaimed his love of atonal free jazz by aligning himself with this project (recorded in 1988) and adding his guitar to the great wall of sax erected by Jim Sauter and Donald Dietrich. The latter two are All-American Heroes of the Honk, working for years as two-thirds of the fantastic Borbetomagus, and are creators of such closely-knit and intensive free music that they have successfully cleared my house of unwanted guests many a time.
These two mad reedmen have had no difficulty in swallowing Thurston whole or wiping his electric feedback off the face of the earth with their twinned-bell attack. Forgive an indelicate image, but sometimes their mighty saxes assume the proportion of enormous phalluses, huge and fecund, making Sauter and Dietrich into pagan fertility gods like the Cerne Abbas giant. (So much for the old guitar - penis substitute nonsense - these puffers are the real men!)
Their performances here however can be spacier than on their relentless Borbetomagus records, giving some room to breath; check out the eerie ‘On the Phrase “Ass Backwards” ‘ for a spooky high-pitched drone delirium, although if it’s all-out free blowing you need, then ‘Concerning The Sun As A Cool Solid’ is the 18-minute blastoid transcedental workout for you. This is the way free jazz ought to be, unencumbered by any nonsense like drums, pianos, tunes, or boring old common sense.
Sonic Youth are nearly superstars these days, yet continue to sport their avant-garde credentials which they pick up like old clothes from Salvation Army stores. Thurston drew up a list of Top Ten Free Jazz records for Grand Royal magazine #2 recently; his choices were impeccable and he knows the scene, but another side of it was him boasting of the impossible vinyl rarities he’s managed to snag.
Still, that’s pretty uncharitable because the guy can also play free - and not just buy his way into it. Thurston acquits himself with honour on these tunes. He propels things along with chuntering guitar on ‘All Doors Look Alike’, adds patented jangly slidey noises on ‘Tanned Moon’, drapes feedback everywhere like a black velvet shroud, and there is much humour and glee in the entire event, including witty song titles like ‘The Date-Reduced Loaf’. Add a fine Max Ernst collage cover and you’ve got a near perfect package I’d say.
Wikipedia: Barefoot in the Head (1969). Perhaps Brian Aldiss's most experimental work, this first appeared in several parts as the 'Acid Head War' series in New Worlds. Set in a Europe some years after a flare-up in the Middle East led to Europe being attacked with bombs releasing huge quantities of long-lived hallucinogenic drugs. Into an England with a population barely maintaining a grip on reality comes a young Serb, who himself starts coming under the influence of the ambient aerosols, and finds himself leading a messianic crusade. The narration and dialogue reflects the shattering of language under the influence of the drugs, in mutating phrases and puns and allusions, in a deliberate echo of Finnegans Wake.
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