Before the majestic metaphysical tides of later works, the impromptu avant-garde rock project of Michael Krassner traced the tumultuous and craggy corners of Dutch Harbor, a small fishing village feeling the pangs of progress.
The group, consisting of Krassner, Ken Vandermark, Jim O'Rourke, David Grubbs, and some other such Chicago affiliates, adopts a sort of triangle formation that enables peripheral hearing and mess with conventional channels communication. What results is a series of disjointed, individual voices very loosely hanging together as a whole. Importantly, though, the group's brand of improvisation often amounts to something more than simply falling short of shape or melody. In many ways the group manages to speak in new tongues; and in some places, such as "Ebb's Folly" with Will Oldham on vocals, or "Captain's Bay Hood", a solo guitar piece, they even reveal a willingness to work within those already established.
So far as mood is concerned, it's pretty pallid stuff, veering on gauche. Rourke seems to play a sizable part in establishing the sawn-off austere brutality on many pieces. The twig-snapping brittleness of his guitar detuning is paired against low trumpet drones or controlled squalls of guitar feedback, whilst string sections introduce taut provocations, to which loosely strung snare drum swats are well-heard responses. Vandermark's reeds also aid the album in carrying it into somewhat more atmospheric and abstract arenas. His robust tone and emphatic phrasing appears in significantly different lights, and moves in and out of focus according to the other preferences at work. During the dense textures of "Ship Supply", for instance, thickened by tape loops and effects, they are clankingly astringent.
Certain works do mime the haggard rhythm and atmosphere of the prototypical seaside shanty, but the documentary aspect of the recording never fully overshadows the complex and commanding sonic scarring that goes on here.
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