CHORD's "CHORD III"

A few days before the package containing CHORD III arrived, my wife and I were watching our way through Jim Jarmusch's filmography. While we agreed that 2009's The Limits of Control is probably his weakest film (NB: we haven't seen The Dead Don't Die yet), both of us dug the way the director used the Japanese doom metal band Boris' music (including snippets from the albums Feedbacker, Rainbow, Smile, and Pink) to set the mood for his cryptic tale of an assassin, and the way the music's reverberating harmonics rubbed up against the movie's gleaming surfaces.

In recent days, I've been reading, studying, and thinking a lot about the reasons why people respond as they (we) do to music, inspired by convos with an old ally who, like CHORD co-creator Nick Didkovsky, lives in Brooklyn and programs generative music software.

One of my buddy's gurus is David Huron, who has written extensively on the neuroscience of music cognition. In his 2016 tome Voice Leading: The Science Behind A Musical Art, Huron writes about the importance of continuity in the perception of an auditory stream: "Compared with most natural sound-producing objects, musical instruments are constructed so as to maximize the period of sustain....In the case of the guitar, solid-body construction and controlled electronic feedback became popular methods of increasing the sustain of plucked strings." Huron also highlights the difference between the different types of expectations listeners hold, which are based on knowledge of the specific piece of music (veridical expectations) or knowledge of a style of music or music in general (schematic expectations). He also distinguishes between analytic (detail-oriented) and synthetic (totality-oriented) listening.

Since the first, eponymous CHORD EP appeared late in the summer of 2018, Didkovsky and his collaborator Tom Marsan have been asking the musical question, "What happens when you remove loud, distorted electric guitars from any formal context where the listener might have expectations?" One result of this extreme closeup exercise is that every detail and nuance in the two instruments' interplay is thrown into brilliant relief. If the debut was a bold, bracing "proof of concept," CHORD II, released at the beginning of 2019, displayed a more expansive dynamic and expressive range. Now, CHORD III represents Something Entahrly Other.

About a third of the way into the album's 15-minute opener "martyrs," my wife looked up from her computer and asked, "What's this?" -- a sure sign that something noteworthy is occurring. Starting slowly, the guitarists weave webs of dissonance, a flat 2nd trill like the one that opened Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies" briefly raising its head, the metallic clangor of industrial machines blending with the blare of sirens, foghorns, alarms, and tolling bells, Godzilla shrieks like the glisses that were my favorite part of the first MC5 album, acidic midrange tones spraying partials across information-dense layers of sound, raking behind-the-nut harmonics, finally achieving a singularity of sound like every Hendrix plane crash and the Graves At Sea show circa 2004 that made my body feel like it was turning inside out, ending the only way it possibly could -- with a trailing wisp of feedback. Didkovsky confirms that "martyrs" established itself as the cornerstone early in the album's germination.

While it's whack to ascribe programmatic intent to instrumental music (tell it to poor old Dmitri Shostakovich), it's hard not to hear the album's longest track, the 17-minute "draw near," as a soundtrack for the pandemic, its slow build evocative in the same way as Boris' Jarmusch soundtrack of the "Deserted Cities of the Heart" Cream once conjured. Ten minutes or so into the piece, a pulse appears, gradually morphing into a feedback waltz of unexpected grace and brutal beauty. The gentle chiming of "it was" provides a brief respite before the anguished soul cry of "help her" that closes the album. For those with adventurous ears, CHORD III could be just the catharsis you've been seeking, at a historical moment when such is at a premium.

Things we like: Humanization 4tet, Patty Waters

Two months into quarantine, with our state government giving the go-ahead (unwisely, I think) for businesses to reopen before our infection rate is under control, a package in the mail from Clean Feed Records in Lisbon brought some surprising wonderment from close to home, reminding me of some days and shows gone by.

It's hard to believe that it's been almost two years since Portuguese guitarist Luis Lopes' Humanization 4tet played shows in Dallas and Fort Worth that I attended, in the company of good friends after spending some time off the set. The Dallas show -- the group's first together in seven years -- was a tad shaky, but things were sounding more cohesive by the time they rolled into Fort Worth, with three more shows under their belts, and by the time they entered NOLA's Marigny Studios a week later, they were firing on all cylinders. Believe, Believe, the document of their interaction, reminds me of nothing so much as the duet performance by Nels Cline and Julian Lage that I witnessed at the Kessler in Oak Cliff back in 2015. It was the last night of their tour, and from the opening notes of their set, the two guitarists sounded like they were resuming a conversation that had been interrupted moments before. That's the vibe on this recording, too.

All four musicians in Humanization 4tet -- besides the leader, that'd be Lisbon-based saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and a pair of estimable brothers from Oak Cliff, Aaron Gonzalez on bass and Stefan Gonzalez on drums -- are agile improvisers capable of playing with great intensity, which is in ample evidence here. Just listen to Amado's composition "Replicate I," where Stefan's snare splatters beats to match Lopes' shooting sparks of Sharrockian skronk -- but there are some surprises, as when they open the proceedings with the bluesy strains of "Eddie Harris" (a tune by bassist Bill Lee -- father of film director Spike Lee -- that former Mingus tenor man Clifford Jordan cut for Strata East in 1973) before exploding into Stefan's "Tranquilidad Alborotadora" (which the Gonzalez brothers previously recorded with both Yells At Eels and Unconscious Collective). Perhaps the best moment here is Lopes' "She," an Ornette-like dirge that finds all four men in a more ruminative frame of mind.

A couple hundred miles further south from here, Houston's Nameless Sound provides an invaluable function, bringing world-class creative artists to H-Town to perform and teach in public schools, community centers, and homeless shelters. (Austin's Epistrophy Arts has a similar charge.) Founding director David Dove is a gifted improviser in his own right, whom I once saw point the bell of his trombone at the floor of Fort Worth's Firehouse Gallery to use the building's pier-and-beam foundation as a resonating chamber -- making a speaker, as it were, of the house. Back in April 2018, Nameless Sound brought pioneering avant-jazz vocalist Patty Waters to town, fronting a trio led by her 1960s ESP-Disk label mate Burton Greene, with drummer Barry Altschul and bassist Mario Pavone. An Evening in Houston captures their performance.

It's been over five decades (!) since Waters astonished listeners with her primal scream rendition of "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair," taking the song places even Nina Simone never imagined and blazing a trail for vocal daredevils like Linda Sharrock and Yoko Ono to follow. These days she eschews such stratospheric explorations, but her voice retains its expressive quality in the same way as Billie Holiday's did when all she had left was her phrasing (which was all she needed, at the end of the day), or Joni Mitchell's did after years of cigarettes obliterated her high range. Her Houston set list pays tribute to Holiday with versions of "Strange Fruit" and "Loverman," and revisits a couple of items from Waters' 1966 College Tour album ("Hush Little Baby with Ba Ha Bad" and "Wild is the Wind") that demonstrate her capacity to convey anguish is undiminished. Throughout, the intimacy of her delivery is a great strength.