Here’s some amazing video of Miles Davis live in Oslo on November 9, 1971. This is a band that was never documented in the recording studio—Gary Bartz on soprano and alto sax; Keith Jarrett on keyboards; Michael Henderson on bass; Don Alias and Mtume on congas and percussion; and Ndugu Leon Chancler on drums. But their European tour (nearly two dozen concerts between October and November) has been well documented on bootlegs, which gives me hope that some of the best shows will wind up in the third volume of Sony’s The Bootleg Series, which has brought brilliant live performances to light on two 3CD/1DVD sets to date.
It’s temping to judge the merits of music produced in the developing world through the tinted lens of cultural sensitivity: to let certain matters slide, whether shoddy production or naivety in songwriting, because it’s all so new to them, or they don’t know any better, or some such patronising nonsense. And it’s especially so when musicians from the ‘Global South’ operate in genres that seem diametrically opposed to the prevailing culture, at least to myopic Western minds.
So it’s easy to imagine someone coming to Era of Tribulation—the 14-track compilation gathering the recorded output of Indian death-doom outfit Dying Embrace—and thinking it’s so cool that amid all the Bollywood dancers and slumdog millionaires and sitar-playing Ravi Shankars, there’s a gang of dudes in gory T-shirts with loud guitars and Cookie Monster growls ripping up conventions and blowing minds asunder. But the reality is that the band are a mainstay of a vibrant underground scene in their hometown of Bangalore, which, like all the major urban centres in India for that matter, is a 21st Century metropolis replete with skyscrapers and shopping malls and all the trappings of the west. As such, Dying Embrace stand out in their homeland about as much as, say, Cannibal Corpse do in America, which in 2013 is not much at all.
The only way to be fair to Dying Embrace is to evaluate their music in the context of the genres they move in, and by that standard their efforts are hit and miss. “Blood Rites” kicks things off, the first of two tracks from the 2002 Misanthrope 7″, and it’s meat-and-potatoes stuff, marrying a doom-laden groove with deathly guitar tones and Mortician-style vocal gurgles, and rendered even more amateurish by the crappy-demo production job. “Cromlech of Hate” is more adventurous in structure as it shifts gears between tempos, but the playing is as sloppy as the sound mix. It’s not a good start.
Next up are three tracks from 1998′s Grotesque EP, which at least showcase much stronger songwriting in the acid doom vein of the Rise Above roster. “The Passing Away” and “Grotesque Entity” are dripping with filthy grooves, while the intricately arranged “Oremus Diabolum” radiates with Cathedral-esque swagger. The players—guitarist Jimmy Palkhivala, bassist Jai Kumar and drummer Daniel Marc David—are also tighter here, and only really let down by the awful recording quality, as if someone bootlegged their studio session with a dictaphone.
“As Eternity Fades” leads off the six tracks of the Serenades of Depravity mini-album, also from 1998 and another weak and murky production which shifts the sound back to death-doom, with Vikram Bhat‘s reverb-heavy death grunts contrasting with the classic Black Sabbath groove. “Spawn of the Depths” places a heavier emphasis on the death metal side, with a distinctly Swedish influence as the tempo picks up. “Dagda—His Time Has Come” comes and goes unmemorably in its allotted three minutes, and “D.T’s” is a jammed-out instrumental that doesn’t go anywhere, like the short outro “Elegy for the Damned.” But “Degeneration” stands out with its heady mix of Bolt Thrower‘s percussive blast and weird guitar harmonics with a turbocharged polka groove (strange as that sounds, it works).
The compilation closes with demo versions of the Grotesque tracks that are virtually identical in recording quality, lacking only the official release’s layer of psychedelic guitar swirl, and are pretty much redundant to all except the diehards. And I’m sure there are some who will leap to the defence of the poorly produced studio efforts collected here as some kind of “cult” hidden gems, like the low-fidelity output of the Norwegian black metal scene 20 years ago. But there’s a line between deliberately poor and just plain inept, and sonically speaking, much of Era of Tribulation falls on the wrong side of it.
Here’s some video of a reunited Dying Embrace performing “As Eternity Fades” at the 2011 Undergrind Fest in Bangalore:
Reto Mäder is a Swiss electronic/electro-acoustic musician who records under several names and in several groups, including Ural Umbo (sometimes Vral Vmbo), Sum of R, and RM74. A lot of his work has come out on the Utech label, and the music’s ominous beauty is matched by its dark, enigmatic artwork and deluxe packaging. His latest release, RM74’s Two Angles of a Triangle, is a two-CD set containing 73 minutes of music, so clearly it’s divided into two sections for aesthetic reasons, not because it would have overshot a single disc’s running time.
The music is difficult to categorize. It contains conventional instruments (piano, bass) played, recorded and mixed in unconventional ways: ultra-close miking and various methods of computer-based processing after the fact are used to warp and layer the sounds until they become abstract and atmospheric. The finished pieces sometimes recall Robert Hampson’s work with Main, other times feel kin to 20th and 21st Century avant-garde composition, and at still other times lean in the direction of the dark ambient music that has soundtracked many modern horror films and horror-themed video games.
Mäder was interviewed by email in February/March 2013. A longer version of this interview will appear in Burning Ambulance #6, which will be available soon.
Here’s something obscure and awesome: an hour-long TV special by The Blasters, recorded live in Chicago back in 1982, with guest appearances by Carl Perkins and Willie Dixon.
The Blasters were one of the best bands of the ’80s. They came out of the same scene as X, Los Lobos, and even Dwight Yoakam, but never quite broke big. They got tagged as rockabilly revivalists, which brothers Phil (vocals) and Dave Alvin (guitars) certainly had the slick haircuts to be, but their music had so much more going on than that. On their self-titled album (not their debut, though few have heard their actual first release, American Music), they blazed through ’50s rock ‘n’ roll, country, R&B, the blues, and stomping tunes that blended all those styles and more. Their rhythm section—pianist Gene Taylor, bassist John Bazz, and drummer Bill Bateman—swung as hard as they rocked, and saxophonists Steve Berlin (who also worked with Los Lobos and the Plugz) and Lee Allen (the man behind the R&B hit “Walkin’ With Mr. Lee,” which the band covered live) gave the arrangements punch. Over the course of three studio albums and a blazing live EP, the band made a serious attempt at keeping the heart of American music—what Dave Alvin summed up as “the Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues/We got country swing and rockabilly, too/We got jazz, country western, and Chicago blues/It’s the greatest music that you ever knew” in the song of the same name—alive in the mid ’80s. This broadcast shows just how great they were; if you haven’t heard them before now, the two-CD set Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings will be a revelation.
will be a revelation.
