Joe Morris on banjouke (that's a ukulele crossbred with a banjo), the late Lowell Davidson on drums and aluminum acoustic bass, violinist Malcolm Goldstein and Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris with cornet in hand dance like caged feral animals during the first 37 minutes of this set. With his strings muted, Morris plucks a flurry of non-harmonically centered tones bound in agitation; Davidson, with myriad percussion laid out on the floor, similarly approaches with pointillism in his booms / blaps and a nervous tick in his cymbal hand (amidst the melee, it would seem that a third arm is at play, intermittently bowing his bass); Goldstein oscillates between the technical brilliance of a Paganini disciple, John Cale's simple hypnotism and the sweetness of a down-home fiddler. Known now primarily as a conductor, L.D.B. Morris is the shadow of the mix, as his occasional squawk and piece-halting long notes remind one of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew aesthetic of standing back while the fires blaze (around thirteen minutes in, a police siren makes its way into the recording, threatening a shut-down). All this realizes like a brainstorming session where all proposals are amazing, happen simultaneously and need a scribe to read everything back to manage and sort — aurally, that makes for a wonderful, tangled discombobulation.
Part II is equally dense, though the quartet initially moves at a more languid pace (absent are the drums, and Morris moves to electric guitar). The sphere rotates with dipping glissandi, morphing tendrils, deep moans, Morris's rumbles via bass-heavy amp settings and a genre-crossing patchwork of short "solo" lyrical flares. The crew socializes more, particularly when creating forceful swells and trading melodic bits in a Hauptstimme fashion. Tension builds and peels back completely at times, allowing interesting moments of intimacy such as the duet of Morris and Morris in breathy hiccups and plectrum knocking against guitar pickups; the buried room ambience adds character as instruments are tapped, feet shuffle, coughs are audible.
Some attention-grabbing ways to use color are the expressive smear and the bold use of an unusual shade. Two of the artists Morris cites as influences during the creation of this 1985 performance, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Olivier Messiaen, based much of their aesthetic on color as a dictating force: Basquiat employed primary and secondary chroma in bursts to encircle and intersect fuzzy figures and slogans; Messiaen formed new harmonies and distorted the shape of the orchestra with a mixture of East, West and a fascination of avian calls. Both artists are also known for huge forms (Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie and La ville d'en-haut could be chalked up to ornamental power chords) with the balance of focus wavering between the sum and the consistency of The Gesture.
If we can draw a connection from these ideas and Graffiti In Two Parts it would be Morris and company's hyper-obsession with the opposite of shapes and arrangement, using tweezers to pick at the frays and squiggled outlines of implied objects; it's not akin to the Banksy generation of immaculate perfection but, as Morris explains in the liner notes, a "cryptic scrawl".
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