Spoon Typifies State-of-the-Art Indie-Rock; Ryoji Ikeda's Matrix; Unimpressive Early Mingus

From the vinyl phonograph record on the cover to the fact that Spoon is named after a song on my favorite Can album, Ege Bamyasi, this band wears its influences brightly. Sure enough, Germanic influences creep into a lot of the tracks here. "Believing Is Art" uses the same kind of Teutonic beats employed by actual German bands like the Notwist, but these guys are from Texas. Not that it matters anymore, because the autobahn-ready dynamic of the kraut-rockers has become one of the most fundamental applications of indie-rock, which is a genre that consists almost entirely of bands making a pastiche out of all their influences and then regurgitating them in some (hopefully) new form. In the hands of these bands, rock 'n' roll has become the ultimate abstract art form, whereby a band is only as good as its influences. And that's okay with me, because Spoon is among the most studious of practitioners of this cut-and-paste esthetic.

Take the aforementioned Germanic opus for instance: it rests on the same kind of static beat first used by Can and other arty prog-rockers like Faust, but that's only one small part of the song's makeup. Once again, the songs are all pastiches of thousands of readily applicable influences. "Me and the Bean" has Kurt Cobainesque lyrics/sentiment with the gradually flickering on/off beats of the krauts and even some nice swashes of piano. Take any three seconds of this song and play ID-the-influence and one could come up with anything from Sonic Youth to Joe Jackson. In this song vocalist Brett Daniel even steals a lyric from John Lennon. There's some Led Zeppelin in the next song, "The Fitted Shirt," along with some more Cobain in the standoffish vocals as well as in the irony-laden sentiment. This album is like listening to a mix tape made by a college student who spends his allowance on rare vinyl down at the one and only hole-in-the-wall record store that still sells records in whatever college town he calls home.

"Anything You Want" is total Faust, but with a weird Elvis Costello root as well. Daniel doesn't get the scrunched-up-face propensity of early Elvoid the way Jersey's favorite son, Tris McCall, gets it, but it's still there, and it's a nice touch. "Take a Walk" sounds like an outtake from the latest In/Out album, which means it sounds like the Germanic stuff mixed through the Fall. There are even some riplets of electric guitar that sound like the Monkees in "Last Train to Clarksville," but also that same sinister heavy vibrato sound of the first Pink Floyd album.

And speaking of Floyd, "1020 AM" is a total homage to the kind of lachrymose balladry found on that band's pre-Dark Side of the Moon albums (with or without Syd). There's even a slight Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven" vibe?pastoral Brit semi-psych from the early 70s. Next song, "Take the Fifth," starts with the intro from the Byrds' "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" before switching into more Costello/Joe Jackson territory, but it's also reminiscent of one of the songs on the new Figgs LP. An hypnotic piano riff predominates, and, oddly enough, the Can vibe that apparently excites these guys to fits is still prevalent. Same can be said for "This Book Is a Movie," an instrumental throwaway that once again draws comparisons to Floyd.

I don't know if this band is trying to say anything original or not. Maybe it's the way they put all this stuff together that's supposed to be original, and I suppose it is, because I haven't really heard anything like it in a few months. For now, Spoon typifies state-of-the-art indie-rock in the new millennium: heavily derivative, ultimately serious, but perfectly listenable nevertheless.

Joe S. Harrington

Matrix Ryoji Ikeda (Touch)

A few years ago, when I told my friend Theresa to go see La Monte Young's long-running Dream House installation on Church St., she came back and gleefully reported that she played the room with her head. Puzzled, I asked her what she meant. She told me that by simply moving her head in the space of Young's installation, she could control the pitch and frequencies of Young's droney sine waves. Young's installation is a must-see/must-experience for all, but if for some reason you can't make it down there (and there should be no reason: the show's been running for the past eight years and is scheduled to continue until June 23, 2001), you might want to pick up Ryoji Ikeda's new disc, which, when played loudly, almost replicates the Young experience.

Now I'm not technically savvy and certainly don't understand what makes these pieces do what they do (try to decipher this ditty from La Monte Young:

The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119, a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer).

Similarly, Ikeda's track listing from his new disc looks like this:

TO:44.1: 10 tracks = 60:00 matrix [for rooms] 0000000001 matrix [for rooms] 0000000010 matrix [for rooms] 0000000100 matrix [for rooms] 0000001000 matrix [for rooms] 0000010000 matrix [for rooms] 0000100000 matrix [for rooms] 0001000000 matrix [for rooms] 0010000000 matrix [for rooms] 0100000000 matrix [for rooms] 1000000000 TO:44.2: 10 tracks = 31:03 .matrix 1111111110 .matrix 1111111101 .matrix 1111111011 .matrix 1111110111 .matrix 1111101111 .matrix 1111011111 .matrix 1110111111 .matrix 1101111111 .matrix 1011111111 .matrix 0111111111 From what I understand, when you put a couple of sustained tones that are close in pitch near each other, they create a shimmery, fluttering type of sonic activity that tickles your eardrums. And when you move your head slightly, the sine waves react to your physical motion and, in turn, change their sound.

Ikeda's Matrix is in 10 parts, each roughly five minutes long and each having a slightly different set of tones, giving a slightly different set of aural impressions. Moving from rather low hums straight up into the higher registers, the results are very powerful. Like thumping sub-bass from the back of a Jeep, Ikeda's sounds actually affect not just your ears, but the core of your body; his pulses seem to be timed to bodily pulses and everything from your breathing to your blood circulation seems to fall in time with Ikeda's music.

A couple of words of caution though. This disc needs to be played on a stereo in a room. If you try to listen to it on headphones, all you'll really hear is a consistent tone; the dynamics of moving your head to "play the piece" will not be possible. Likewise, when I played it on my WFMU show, I received complaints from listeners who, due to WFMU's lousy reception, are forced to keep their radio in mono. It seems that they, too, only heard a dullish set of drones.

While La Monte Young's pieces are always better heard live than on a recording, Ikeda's are just the opposite. Reflecting his generation's infatuation with the vast possibilities of digital technology and manipulation, the recording becomes the ultimate fetishized product. In doing so, Ikeda takes installation art to a whole new level: the personal and the omnipresent. As it is with so much other digital technology these days, one needn't leave one's chair to experience what once was only kept in museums.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Charles "Baron" Mingus: West Coast, 1945-49 Charles Mingus (Uptown) These are the first-known leader dates by bassist/composer Charles Mingus, and their release is none too auspicious an occasion. Mingus, a musical genius and perfectionist, was probably later ashamed of these dates, which is why they've been kept under wraps for so long. Actually, the more likely reason was that these recordings had all but disappeared off the face of the Earth. America in the late 1940s was enjoying a postwar boom and a number of independent labels had sprung up, not only to record jazz but also the fledgling r&b music that many small ensembles were just starting to play. It was an incredibly fruitful time, and Charles Mingus was right in the center of it, and would remain there for the better part of the next quarter century. On many of these dates?which originally appeared on 78 rpm records on small West Coast labels like Excelsior and Fentone?Mingus wasn't even the formal leader, at least not in the sense that his bass playing was actually the focal point of the recording, or even that he had that much of a hand in setting the direction of the dates. According to the liner notes it was more a case of the kid being the new guy in town and having paid his dues enough to warrant his name on the label. It was partially charity on the part of the label owners as well as the other musicians, but there was a reason for that: Mingus was quickly establishing himself as one of the heroes of Central Avenue. And like a lot of greats, once they gave him the reins for even 10 seconds, there was no stopping him?by the end of this disc, one can see the young man's ambitions growing.

As a light-skinned black man, and a handsome one at that, who, like another bandleader, Duke Ellington, had a taste for the ladies (including white ones), Mingus always felt a certain ambiguity about his position in the jazz world. His way to overcome this was to strive harder, to shoot for musical goals that had heretofore seemed unreachable. The results weren't always successful, but as the last couple of dates on this disc demonstrate, they were never less than ambitious. Recorded in the spring of 1949 under the name "Charlie Mingus and His 22 Piece Bebop Band," "The Story of Love" and "Inspiration" foreshadow later Mingus Big Band experiments like The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady with their exotic melodies and intricate levels of intense soloing. Among the members present on this date were alto-ists Art Pepper and Eric Dolphy. Dolphy solos on "The Story of Love" and it's already obvious he's destined to become one of the brighter lights of the new jazz. In fact, many of the orchestration techniques Dolphy undoubtedly learned from Mingus would later be applied to the collaborations he did with Coltrane on things like Africa/Brass where Dolphy was the primary catalyst.

There's other interesting stuff here as well, but once again, on a lot of it, Mingus isn't even the main attraction, despite the fact he got the credit on the label. Like a lot of musicians in that era, Mingus found himself often playing dates to accompany vocalists; on this disc that includes recordings made with schmaltzmeisters like Everett Pettis and the more well-known Claude Trenier, as well as female vocalists like Oradell Mitchell, who does a not-bad Billie Holiday impersonation on "Lonesome Woman Blues." More interesting are the dates Mingus cut a couple years later, in 1948, under the enigmatic (and incomplete) name Baron Mingus and His Rhythm. On the aptly titled "Mingus Fingers," Mingus solos and is otherwise a heavy presence on this Monk-flavored number (which also includes a pretty good clarinet solo by West Coast "cool" guy Buddy Collette). He solos heavy again in "These Foolish Things," and it's the first time on the disc?which goes chronologically?we really hear the mastery that would one day mark him as the greatest man who ever played the instrument.

Another recording with a big band, "Story of Love" (a different version than the one featuring Dolphy), has the kind of crazy, swirling rhythms that would become a characteristic of Mingus' work in later years. And another small-band date, "Lyon's Roar," features a string-bending bass solo as well as the swinging rhythms of the other soloists?Herb Caro on baritone sax and Buzz Wheeler on piano. Mingus was still a long way from creating his great works like Blues & Roots and Pithecanthropus Erectus, but this disc provides an interesting intro to a legendary and enduring presence.

Joe S. Harrington