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Red76 Art Collective Show
Viscount Ballroom
Wednesday, Nov. 8
Hochenkeit
omu4h 4aholab/400 Boys
Roadcone Records
www.
roadcone.com
Excellent
biographical
material and simultaneously direct and oblique philosophical
ruminations from the original American Primitive are yours
at www.
johnfahey.
com.
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The witching hour very nearly spent, Hochenkeit assembled
on the stage in the corner of the Viscount Ballroom. The Red76
Art Collective's 11-hour festival of music, photography,
painting and sundry cooking displays and miniature parachute
races crept toward its end, and only a few dozen people remained,
scattered around the old dance palace's sprawl.
Earlier in the evening, while the somber-faced End Times
orchestra Jackie-O Motherfucker set loose marching
armies of sonic tinker-troops, the place thrummed with energy.
Art of varying but provocative quality beggared judgment,
beer demanded drinking and some of Portland's most intriguing
musicians were due on stage. Jackie-O's sinister emanations
gave way to John Fahey--or "John Fucking Fahey,"
as I heard one enthusiastic, if not particularly eloquent,
fan describe the fully legendary, blood-true experimentalist.
By the time Hochenkeit stepped forward for the coup de
grâce, though, the encroaching morning sent much
of the crowd home for their weeknight bedtimes.
And so the band responsible for one of the year's most
beguiling and maddening albums droned and wailed to a few
knots of sleepy people. Since Hochenkeit is a band that
should either own the house gig at the worst bar in Bishkek
or play bat mitzvahs in orbit--preferably both--the surreality
of the setting fit perfectly.
If, in 20 years, anyone pauses to remember the State of
Portland Music, ca. 2000-01, it may well be because of Hochenkeit
and the city's other "experimental" bands, a loose constellation
of defiant oddity in a particularly boring pop era. These
groups earn the supremely vague e-word by mixing and matching
instruments as though forced to patch together camp bands
in the wake of a sweeping apocalypse, gleefully raiding
jazz, folk, punk, electronic and ethnic music for whichever
spare parts fit the moment's call.
Hockenkeit, Jackie-O and Rollerball have all released
brilliantly touched albums on the Portland-based label Road
Cone Records in the last year; bands like The Swords
Project, Bering Sea and Cosmos Group have dropped
hints (or are they threats?) of musical cold fusion with
the raw force of rock and the frenzy of avant-garde jazz.
To shoehorn these bands and all the other groups, solo artists
and makeshift improv ensembles into some sort of externally
defined "scene" is crude at best, but there's no doubt that
something is under way.
If that's the case, Hochenkeit's new omu4h 4aholab/400
Boys marks a particularly rich turn in the massive
mutations taking shape. The band's previous album, I
Love You (also on Road Cone), came wrapped in a
frost imparted by analog electronics and an emotional palette
that seemed modeled on the moon's reverse side. 400 Boys,
while still alien-strange, relies on traditional instruments
to a greater degree. A guitar echoes through a warped blues
vamp, a violin scrapes mournfully, a muscular bass rumbles.
On the whole, this is a warmer and more intimate album than
I Love You--even considering song titles like "Give
Them to the Ants" and "Please Turn Out the Sun."
Two members of Hochenkeit, Jeff Fuccillo and John
Vassallo, have written about Asian music for this newspaper,
and their devotion to the continent shows in this album's
evocation of a phantasmic Near East. Music always suggests
places to me, but nothing lately has called up imagined
locales quite as fearsome as those prompted by 400 Boys.
These instrumentals proceed with obsessive pace from trance-inducing
opening themes into progressively more complex quiet storms
of chaos. I imagine finding Hochenkeit set up on the reception
stage of some desert warlord's third wedding, churning out
agitated dirges while the guests wonder who'll be shot first;
that, or stretching out their songs from a flatbed car hooked
to a slow train rolling through heat-blasted lands still
ominously alive with nomads.
Ah. It's that kind of album--you listen to it and you start
getting ahead of yourself. It's elusive and mischievous;
you think you have 400 Boys figured, and then you
find yourself queueing it up again for another try.
Let it suffice to say that this is a particularly bold solution
of sound and vision, a worthy summation of a brave year
in Portland music. If you decide to buy it, I'm not responsible
for what happens next.
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