Storm & Stress
Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light
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Storm & Stress
Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light
Touch & Go, 2000
RiYL: Don Caballero, insanity |
The "songs" (which bear funny and verbose titles such as "Meet Me In The Space They Stare At Leaving Their Seat During A Show,") rely on a subtle interplay among the instruments, which at once conveys both the atmosphere of the composition and the preciousness of each player, the same way improvised free-jazz relies on the whole to fully express the individuals.
Williams' ideology of "intentional forgetting" (the song one is playing) permeates all of these tracks, and the lack of a gravitational center makes for austere settings. At times, harmony is so loose that it appears to be random. The math-rock of Don Caballero is submitted to a sort of vivisection, whereby vital organs are extracted while the body's clockwork keeps ticking, albeit in a disorganized, irrational, inorganic manner.
This aesthetic is well summarized by "The Sky's The Ground.." a continuous bickering of guitar tones, heavily syncopated drumming and loud peaks of bass noises. The song is made of vague echoes of music, rather than the real thing. The longer, instrumental "Meet Me In The Place" could be defined as a chamber work in restive quasi-tribal rhythm.
Comparisons to Storm & Stress' sound have been made with quantum mechanics, because of the lapses of time between one sonic gesture and the next. The "flow" of sounds is not what one expects from "music," as it is reduced to a digitized, sampled stream of musical information which can skip in any direction. A good example of this technique can be found in "It Takes A Million Years..," where manic reverb, mono-syllabic singing and metallic noises disassemble spacetime and refuse to reconstruct it.
Contrary to what one might imagine, these musicians do have a sense of humor. It's on display all over the place, but it is reserved to attuned ears. In "An Address That Was To Skip Ahead..," method and madness become one. First Williams sings like a madman, then the guitar sprinkles a palette of pointillistic tones in the void. "The 1st Our Lady Of Burning Thorns" (the first part of an instrumental triptych) is wildly schizophrenic, first indulging in some Dadaistic percussive sounds and then thumbing its nose at country music's frantic finger-picking.
While "And Third And Youngest Unnamed" is relatively straightforward, albeit tumultuous, free-jazz improvisation, "The 2nd Perpetuate And Beautiful" boasts frantic swings of mood, from an emotional crescendo to a minimalist coda. Overall, the tryptich manages to compose an affectionate portrait. One is reminded of Leo Kottke's humorous country vignettes, once injected, of course, with Williams' favorite atonal sounds.
At least in jazz, musicians "rewrite" a song. True to their manifesto, Storm & Stress do not write a song and do not rewrite a song. They forget a song as they are playing it.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.