Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Daniel Drew

Author:Daniel, Drew [Daniel, Drew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2008-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Exotica

That which is hard is never hard without also being soft.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

By namedropping a Martin Denny album and an entire school of quasi-Polynesian mood music, Throbbing Gristle add further support to the accusation that 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a series of genre exercises. But those expecting bird calls and cod-Latin percussion will be disappointed. Instead of campy theatrics, “Exotica” leaks a kind of subtly poisonous incense across the stereo field. High oscillator trails with a very fast LFO setting create will-o-wisp flickerings in the upper registers, while low and heavily phased Gizmo guitar tones form a kind of distant jet plane chorale. From out of this miasmic bog, the vibraphone fades into audibility, tinkling in an “Asian” interval that flags the genre for which the song is named. The phased guitar scuttlings are occasionally joined in the thickening background with sour arcs of feedback-like ringing tones, but they are mixed so low that they purr more than they pierce. Two minutes and fifteen seconds in, a distinctly jarring, banging noise violates the relaxation imperative completely, constituting a kind of sonic jerk of tongue into cheek, and after this percussive climax the entire enterprise dissolves into the ether. An improvisatory water-color executed with a bare minimum of gestures, there’s very little there, and yet everything within the evanescent form of “Exotica” earns its place.

Drew: Did you introduce the music of Martin Denny to the group? Had you heard this music as a kid?

Gen: Yeah, of course. In cinemas. But it was Scott Armstrong in Los Angeles that actually introduced me to Martin Denny specifically on my first trip to California. Which would be . . . October 1976. Scott Armstrong had been one of my mail art friends; he said to me, “I have come across this amazing musician, you’re going to love it, they’re these really weird kitsch obscure albums.” He played me one that he’d found in a thrift store and the moment I heard the first track I just knew that it was the missing link somehow. Because it had this incredible anti-intellectual, almost chaotic element to it, even though it was done in full seriousness. It had this strange, staggering aesthetic. That’s the only way that I can put it. There was a kind of idiot-savant feeling. I started collecting the albums; I’ve still got twenty-nine albums downstairs by Martin Denny and some by Arthur Lyman. I’ve actually got one Martin Denny album signed by Martin Denny to me: “To Genesis from Martin Denny with love.” Boyd Rice went to see him play live in Hawaii and went up to him afterward and got him to sign a copy of the one that we based Entertainment Through Pain on. I’ve still got it, framed, in my office. For inspiration.

Drew: So did you write vibe parts or were they improvised?

Gen: Well, we never wrote anything down. Sleazy, unbeknownst to any of us, took to the vibes like a duck to water. And now Sleazy plays keyboard parts.

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