Dallas, 4.12.2025

It's been a busy month here in the imaginary neighborhood, and I have a backlog of CDs to review that I'll get to...maybe later in the week. When every day's news brings yet another insult or 12 as the Trump-Musk regime continues dismantling our social and environmental safety net, flouting the rule of law, and using tariffs to play the stock market like a pinball machine, it behooves the thoughtful person to get off the couch and do whatever they can to push back. So we have. But tonight, my buddy Mike and I headed to Full City Rooster, one of our favorite listening spots, to take in an evening of dark and mysterious sounds from Habu Habu and Austin's Ak'Chamel. 

Habu Habu is, at any given time, whatever guitarist extraordinaire Gregg Prickett wants it to be. On this particular occasion, it was solo electric guitar through what can only be described as a rock rig: 100W Bad Cat head (formerly owned by the late polymath Nevada Hill), two Emperor cabinets -- 4x12 with 100W Black Beauties and 2x12 with 30W Celestions -- running through a volume pedal, Echoplex, and Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes overdrive. Gregg had told me in advance that he was drawing on Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan for inspiration, so my wife and I viewed it the other night. Kwaidan is an anthology of Japanese obake (ghost) stories, like the ones my mother used to tell my sister and me to scare the crap out of us when we were little, and Gregg's costuming and stage persona for the performance fit with this theme. 

Gregg's handwritten program note referenced the sea battle of Dan-no-ura in regard to the first piece he performed. I could hear echoes of the sea's turbulence during the battle in the music's rhythmic ebb and flow, accentuated by the Echoplex, and the hard percussive attack the young blind musician Hoichi used on his biwa (a short-necked wooden lute) while singing the battle narrative "The Tale of the Heike" in the biwa-influenced minor pentatonic lines Gregg played, using a clean but highly present tone that emphasized the physicality of fingers on strings. 

The second piece, "Shige Hiratsuka Toshige Kazuko" was inspired by an account from the book Hibakusha of a mother who survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima but had to abandon her six-year-old daughter, who was trapped under rubble in the burning remains of their house. Gregg used feedback and dissonance to conjure the destructive force of the bomb, and the horrible suffering that came in its wake. This piece was particularly resonant for me, as my father served in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan after the surrender, and interviewed survivors of the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki -- an experience that marked him indelibly. 

The title of the final piece, "TUSLOG Det 3-1," refers to the U.S. Air Force unit Gregg's father was assigned to in Turkey in the mid-'60s, at the height of the Cold War. In his program note, Gregg wrote, "As it was a tiny listening station on the Soviet border with no defenses of possibility of withdrawal it was stressful to say the least!" This reminded of my Air Force experience in Korea in the early '80s, when the sergeant who briefed us in country told us, "You are here as a tripwire. What that means is if the bad guys come south again, enough of you will buy it for the folks back home to be OK with going to war in Korea again." And all I wanted was medical insurance. Gregg evoked the tension of his father's experience with his trademark cascading lines. All in all, a riveting and thoroughly satisfying performance.

(By coincidence, one of the other audience members overheard me talking to Gregg and identified himself as another Air Force/Strategic Air Command veteran of roughly the same vintage as me. We thought we won the Cold War. Never figured an American president would shit on all our post-WW2 alliances and bend his knee to Russia. But here we are.)

The first time we saw Ak'Chamel, at The Wild Detectives last March, they were a duo who donned their homespun Native American/West African style ceremonial costumes onstage in front of the audience (although the magic of the mask still transformed them). On this occasion, they were a trio, and in terms of lighting and staging, Full City Rooster was a much better fit for their primordial tribal music. One had the impression that they were sitting around a fire, burning sage, growling guttural chants, striking bones, blowing flutes and horns. 

A tuned percussion instrument I couldn't identify (I was sitting against the wall in the back, so the view was obscured by the folks in front) added a simple melodic element, and the musicians wove a spellbinding groove. Drums, cymbals, and small instruments came into play, and voices declaiming in an unknown language, with a keening sound like Native American songs from the Northern plains. The final piece employed stringed instruments in "guitar" and "bass" roles, but unlike any rock music ever heard on Earth. When they finished, it seemed like their set had been over in an instant, but I felt cleansed and purified by their ritual's dark catharsis. They had some vinyl available, and their music is available digitally via their Bandcamp page, but I would miss the total experience of seeing them live. If you ever get a chance, you owe it to yourself.