Jacques Berrocal - 'Catalogue' (Alga Marghen)

This is the third piece of the puzzle, reissued in a digipak by Alga Marghen with some bonus material. I'll spare my usual rant about digipaks and instead thank the Marghens for bringing this gem to the surface again. Where Musiq Musik is exploratory improvised deconstruction and Paralleles introduces more surrealist trope, Catalogue goes full-on collage style and presents 17 different sides of Berrocal in 17 tracks. Nothing is safe here. Electronics and tapes, for sure, put this alongside the weirdest fringes of LAFMS or other outsider camps -- yet there's also simplistic instrumental interplay that harkens back to Musiq's joy di vivré. 'friedrich trass' and 'tango' both use toy instruments to construct surrealist miniatures, and we get vocal manipulations galore. A big band sound appears too, creaking along on 'JONCTION' and 'Rideau. 'SOLO' splits the record with a strangely operatic Gregorian chant and there's some rock excursions too ('nO mORE dirTY bLa blApS' and 'signe particulier', which make me think of something Zorn would do, but not Naked City). Catalogue is a great title because this really is a compendium of maverick approaches to sound. I think the diversity of this release always made it the Berrocal record I found it hardest to interact with, but on this listen I'm totally stoked. It's almost like a desert island disc of ideas; the only frustrating factor is that the ideas are rarely given enough space to develop. If you like making weird music yourself, this is cool, because you can take these tracks inspiration and crosspollinate these ideas with your own, unless you're hellbent on being 100% original. I don't think I'd mind hearing someone else riffing on 'néon' or 'terminal'. I'd definitely put this in a special box alongside stuff like the first Anal Magic disc, because they came from some fucked up place, disappeared and 30 years later provide a treasure map of exploration for all of us young believers. The (mostly live) bonus tracks are nothing to scoff at either; they only pad the record out to 47 minutes instead of stuffing the disc, an act of restraint that I quite like.

Azusa Plane - 'Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and the Full Consciousness of Hidden Harmony' (Camera Obscura)

There was a time in the mid-to-late 90s that the city of Philadelphia rose up from a beer and sports-fueled haze and began embracing cosmic sounds, rooted no doubt in the city's antecedents (Rundgren?) and some of the under-recognised pre-current that was happening there. Or maybe not - maybe this is just some shithead narrative grafted onto Philly by some desperate music critics at the time - anyone remember the awful term 'Psychedelphia'? But there appeared to be a definite momentum, at least to me, an outsider; and of these bands, many of whom have been forgotten, the Azusa Plane were an example of the most 'pure' and commited to the ur-drone, shredding any vestigal rock and roll in favor of Terry Riley's harmonic sunpulse. I know they put out a few records in their day but this one, their first (I believe), is the only one that ever really grabbed me. Here's an hour of guitar-based psychedelic music: slow unfolding drones, delicate tension, and subtle pulses. Of the four tracks, it's the last one that distinguishes itself the most (through steady repetition and a nice warm fuzz). Liner notes give you silly Germanic cosmicspeak for each track but I don't get much from that. This beat the rush of drone that came from the American underground - beat it by about a decade, but is it distinguishable? Back in '99 music like this sounded really exciting, like it had some vision and attitude and some higher calling. (At least to me - I was a young 'un!) But now I think about Satie and LaMonte and the VU and Heldon and Ash Ra and the Azusa Plane, and I try to find a place for all of this alongside, I dunno, a zillion tapes by Emeralds-related projects? Sometimes I just can't feel, like Lou Reed after his parentally-imposed anti-homo shock treatment; when I listen to this I try to sink into it, but I can't lose myself. Distractions, distractions. The one thought that I keep returning to is how similar these guitar bleats are to the sound of Lilys' Eccsame the Photon Band, as if 'High Writer at Home' is about to come bursting out of these tracks. Same city and maybe the same personnel or studio or equipment - is this the sound of Philly I hear, an aural cheese steak (or replace with vegetarian stereotype)? I think the main guy behind this band died under sad and mysterious circumstances. Or was he the entire band? This sounds suspiciously like a dense, one-man project. Nice art though (and kudos for thanking Corpus Hermeticum for inspiring it, though the use of System 7 "Chicago" font for that inner panel kinda wrecks the medieval theme.