PainKiller: The Prophecy

This mindblowing release appears to be something of a cousin to another recent Tzadik (John Zorn's label) release, Massacre's Love Me Tender (2013).

Love Me Tender, featuring Charles Heyward on drums, Bill Laswell on bass and Fred Frith on guitar, was a pastiche of live recordings in Europe edited by Frith and which shows the improvising power trio in a wide variety of aural settings, though dominated by Frith's remarkable fret work.

Similarly, The Prophecy, which came out in 2013, as well, is also a compilation of European live performances by a power trio, with Laswell joined by drummer Yoshida Tatsuya, best known from the Japanese band Ruins, in support of Zorn's wailing, screaming and probing alto sax.  As with Frith on the other recording, Zorn is the primary figure here and for fans, he delivers all of the great playing expected of the master.

But, although he is the front man, as Frith was for Massacre, the value of rhythm section should not be understated.  Laswell is not just a phenomenal bass player who can keep the bottom held down in support of soloists as well as anyone, but he can instantly switch with an array of pedals to a fuzztone, move into heavy and deep dub playing, morph into something like an electric guitarist, and throw in the riff from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" seamlessly into the mix.

As for Tatusya, he is the third drummer to work with Zorn and Laswell as part of the PainKiller project.  Founding member Mick Harris, formerly of Napalm Death, was the (or one of the) creators of the "blast beat," and his playing was largely limited to the range of percussion he worked with in the grindcore world.  In fact, it has been said his sense of inadequacy when playing with the likes of Zorn and Laswell led him to forego drumming to move into electronics.

The great Hamid Drake, who mainly has played in the jazz realm, turned in an excellent performance in 2003's live recording for Zorn's 50th birthday celebrations.  His training gave a flexibility, variety and fluidity that notably transformed the sound.

With Tatsuya, there is something of a combination.  More or less a rock drummer, but with a wider range than Harris, if not as nimble and elastic as Drake, he turns in a very solid performance and meshes well with Laswell, while providing a solid foundation behind Zorn.  Tatsuya is given several minutes to solo and turns in a fine one.

The brief note on the OBI strip doesn't suggest this, but reviews indicate that The Prophecy might be viewed as a summary statement on the PainKiller project.  It is true that the last gig of the band was in Paris in 2008, when Harris surprisingly turned up to play drums and longtime Zorn collaborator Mike Patton contributed the screaming vocals Harris used to deliver in the early days.

Whether this album is the final word from PainKiller or not, it is another fantastic improvisational journey with Zorn and Laswell, with Tatsuya doing an excellent job.  A word has to be said about the crystalline engineering job by Oz Fritz, who has done a great deal of work with Laswell over the years, and makes the sound as good as can be obtained from a live gig.  Finally, Heung-Heung Chin's gorgeous artwork, a trademark of Zorn's Tazdik label, is worthy of noting, including the use of the photographic subjects of bones, teeth and the like, which are typically PainKiller-like.

Bill Laswell: Means of Deliverance

For some people, it's problematic enough to have to listen to a bass solo, but to endure an entire album of solo bass playing?

Well, Bill Laswell has made an amazing album, Means of Deliverance (released in 2012 on his Innerhythmic label), that uses a Warwick fretless acoustic bass instrument called the Alien to create a series of textures and tones that are familiar, yet also (yes) alien, when one things of the traditional electric or acoustic bass.

He also finds interesting ways to make the Alien a melodic instrument as well as a rhythmic one and it is his ability to make the bass sing, as well as his exemplary technique and use of atmospheric textures that gives Means of Deliverance its special qualities.

As with other solo albums, most notably the excellent 1999 release Hear No Evil (Meta Records), Laswell draws deeply from the experiences of his upbringing in Kentucky and Illinois and was once quoted about the hard impression made on his musical development by hillbilly music.

Oz Fritz, who has worked frequently as a recording engineer with Laswell, points out on his blog, "The Oz Mix," that Laswell's global travels, physically and musically, are encoded in the title of this album and in its contents.  Fritz refers to Means of Deliverance as "spacecreating," which is an excellent way of putting it.  The songs have their melodies, rhythms and other elements of structure, but there is an expansive sense of space between the notes and around the sound the Alien guitar makes.

In another interesting piece on the Sonic Scoop site, Laswell is quoted as discussing how life experience and the effects this has on the musical vocabulary, languages and improvisation lead to interesting stories that can be told through the music.  This excellent post notes that Laswell and his engineers Robert Musso and James Dellatacoma, longtime collaborators, employed a three-level recording method.  First were the rhythmic elements, the leads built off those rhythms, and finally drones from an e-bow or slide.  Up to six tracks are used on the record, even with its rather spartan feel.

On one piece, Laswell's wife Gigi Shibabaw, an Ethiopian singer with great emotive abilities who also produced the record, provides a plaintive and keening vocal.  A buzzing drone accompanies the warm tones of the Alien to make "Bagana Sub Figura X" a highlight of the recording.

It should also be noted that special consideration was given to equipping Laswell's Orange Music studio with an environment, along with the excellent work done by Musso and Dellatacoma, a gorgeous, full and clear sound, enhancing the listening experience.  Moreover, the mastering by Michael Fossenkemper at TurtleTone expertly works with the low end of the bass that Laswell is so adept at expressing.  As Fritz observes, you can almost feel Laswell's fingers hitting the strings because of the clarity and cleanness of the sound.  For a solo recording like this, there's an immediacy that is really palpable.

Fritz has another valuable observation:  Means of Deliverance has a progressive presence and that is an apt way to describe one of the most interesting of the legions of albums that Bill Laswell has produced.  It is an object lesson in creating a unique personal statement on one's chosen instrument and Laswell is to be saluted for making it and taking us with him on his journey.

PainKiller: Execution Ground

John Zorn, Bill Laswell and Mick Harris have all been profiled on this blog before, but their project called PainKiller, which existed primarily from 1991 to 1998 and featured a brief reunion in Paris five years ago, featured a form of musical expression borne largely out of Zorn's late 1980s fascination with "grindcore." 

This genre of metal consisting of extremely fast, intense, short bursts of buzz-saw guitars, guttural grunted and/or high pitched screamed vocalizing, rapid and intense "breakbeat" drumming, and imagery and lyrical content (should one find printed versions, because deciphering the vocals was all but impossible) largely pioneered by Napalm Death, for which Harris was drummer until he left in 1990.  Zorn's grindcore obsession first manifested itself in his Naked City project, launched in 1988, but which included a typical Zornian smorgasbord of sounds from country to cartoon music to lounge jazz to surf music, as well as those blasts of grindcore played by such luminaries as guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Joey Baron and the mighty Fred Frith on bass (rather than his usual guitar pyrotechnics.)

While Harris spent most of his career forsaking the drum set for projects like the so-called "darkwave" electronic music of Scorn, the glacial and involving ambient sounds of Lull, and a host of other projects including the mind-blowing collaboration of Eyeless in Gaza's Martyn Bates in the phenomenal trilogy of Murder Ballads recordings, he did resume his work with the kit in PainKiller for the golden opportunity of playing with two musical masters in Laswell's stellar bass work and the idiosyncratic alto sax playing of Zorn.

The first two records, Guts of a Virgin and Buried Secrets, both recorded in 1991 and released on the Earache label (Napalm Death's label), were short albums of roughly 25 minutes each featuring generally brief pieces of grindcore-influenced music, albeit with superior musicianship from Laswell and Zorn.  The latter recording actually did feature longer pieces, two of which topped the six-minute mark (which in the early Napalm Death days could  include a half-dozen or more pieces,) but there was only a slight derivation in overall sound.

After a hiatus, however, PainKiller reunited in June 1994 for the third album, the fascinating Execution Ground, which was released initially on the Subharmonic label which released Laswell's frenetic output at the time.  Reflecting Laswell's growing interests in dub, ambient, and world music, this album featured some of the pounding grindcore sound, but more often morphed into strange and compelling excursions into wide-open sonic spaces largely influenced by dub and ambient textures, while the titles reflected the fascination Laswell had with India.  There was an entire disc devoted to ambient reworkings of two of the three tracks on the first CD and reveal a side to the PainKiller project in which ample space proved to be no problem for the trio to revise their sound into something different but highly compelling.

Later in 1994, the trio embarked on a tour of Japan, a place that proved highly receptive to PainKiller's music.  In fact, there were eventually three live recordings generated from Japanese performances over the band's lifespan. 

When, however, Zorn sought to reunite the group for his amazing 50th birthday series of live performances and recordings in 2003, Harris declined to take part, his insecurity in his drumming having grown more prominent over the years.  Hamid Drake, an excellent percussionist, filled in and a great performance was had, though purists might balk at not having Harris present. 

As noted above, a one-time reunion show was played in Paris in 2008 and Harris reluctantly took his place behind the kit.  He seemed, from the videos available on YouTube, to have played well enough, but no recordings have been issued and it appears likely that PainKiller has ceased to exist.

This is certainly difficult music and its intensity, power, disturbing cover art, and more is probably forbidding to most.  But, for those who like adventurous music and can leaven their grindcore with dub and ambient (how many of you are actually out there?), Execution Ground is up your alley and then some.  It is truly a unique and memorable musical excursion, even if it might leave you with disturbed dreams afterward!

The album, with excellent engineering from Oz Fritz on the first disc and Robert Musso, assisted by Layng Martine on the ambient disc, was packaged in 1997 with the first two albums and a live recording in Osaka as the four-disc box set Collected Works and kudos have to be given to Tomoyo T.L. for some of the most evocative and hauntingly beautiful cover art likely to be found anywhere--a trait found with many projects released on Zorn's Tzadik label.

PainKiller:  Execution Ground (Subharmonic, 1994; Tzadik, 1997)

Disc One
1.  Parish of Tama (Ossuary Dub)  16:05
2.  Morning of Balachatudasi  14:45
3.  Pashupatinath  13:47

Disc Two
1.  Pashupatinath (Ambient)  20:00
2.  Parish of Tama (Ambient)  19:19

Massacre: Lonely Heart

In 1981, a trio of somewhat unknown musicians associated with the New York "downtown" scene created a group called Massacre and released the quirky, eclectic and intriguing album, Killing Time.

Bassist Bill Laswell had yet to produce the groundbreaking "Rockit" for Herbie Hancock, which propelled him into a visibility that gave him the notoriety and funds to produce other acts and embark on a remarkable career as a producer of the self-described "collision music," in which musicians from all over the world were brought together in live and studio settings to create sounds no one else had done before or since.

Fred Frith, guitarist and bass player, best known, if at all, for his work in the experimental group Henry Cow, was also someone who would get some attention and acclaim for a wide variety of projects and especially became known for his unusual approach to playing the guitar, including the use of chains, tools, and other devices to coax strange and wonderful sounds from the instrument.

The short-lived 80s version of the band also included the young drummer Fred Maher, who was a member with Laswell in the early lineup of Material, a band that issued some unusual and often-impressive work before the moniker was assumed by Laswell for any number of his "collision music" projects, especially the classic 1994 Hallucination Engine album covered previously in this blog.

Massacre, however, was suddenly revived in  1998 by Frith and Laswell, who recruited drummer (and occasional melodica player) Charles Hayward, whose work with This Heat was known to some more adventurous listeners of English "alternative rock."  A studio album, Funny Valentine, and two live sets, Meltdown, recorded at the festival of that name in 2001, and the staggering Lonely Heart, taped at two European festivals in 2003, have marked the releases thus far, on John Zorn's Tzadik label, from the reconstituted group.

Some observers were troubled by the fact that two-thirds of the original group could bring someone else in and revive the name, as if that has only very rarely happened before.  The reality is:  Massacre is a showcase for the incredible talent and sound of Frith, with the able assistance of whatever quality rhythm section gives him the support and assistance, as well as space, to create his mesmerizing magic.

What distinguishes Lonely Heart from the earlier Meltdown is that Frith largely eschews the use of extraneous materials to ornament his playing—and this is not to denigrate his doing this, as the results on Meltdown are pretty amazing. 

But, Frith's stripped-down approach to playing on Lonely Heart is also combined with the fact that Massacre opened for metal demigods Metallica for some of these performances and it seems as if the trio felt they had to adapt their completely improvised sounds for the type of audience they were playing in front of.  Still, it is a version of Massacre that retains its own identity, if there can be said to be one, and yet works extremely well for the conditions.

As said above and elsewhere, this is Frith's showcase and he makes the most of it throughout, especially on the mammoth opener, "Send," which extends for twenty minutes, but goes by so quickly, because Laswell and Hayward provide such a varied and supple support to Frith's staggering display of chops.  "Step" displays Laswell's longtime penchant for reggae and dub rhythms and Frith's spare playing is almost like a breather before the trio launches into "In," a 7:40 tour-de-force for the guitarist, whose quirky inventiveness appears to have no limits.  Frith is simply all over the frets with a variety of picking and strumming techniques with rapid runs, jagged tones and all manner of wild and woolly playing while the rhythm section ably gives him the space and foundational support to do whatever strikes his fancy.

Then comes another massive display of dynamics and power, "Gracias a La Vida," which is over eighteen minutes, and it starts off with almost dueling guitars, as Laswell, like no other bassist, plays chords like a rhythm guitarist and Frith plays slide guitar in an atmospheric and bluesy fashion.  Then, all bets are off in the last few minutes of the piece, as Frith shoots for the stratosphere with some incredibly fierce fireworks.

"Return" gives the appearance of an encore and it's a downtempo and almost ambient performance.  Hayward plays some of his melodica, while Frith fiddles with effects to create a yearning sound, while Laswell quietly adds his sense of elastic rhythm to the proceedings.  It's moody end to a fiery record of masterful performances by three musicians who know how to improvise without letting the freedom get the best of them.  There's order to the mayhem and discipline to the joy of being able to create whatever comes to these excellent players in the moment.

Fred Frith is one of the most exciting and creative guitarists around and Lonely Heart and the supportiveness of Laswell, who excels at this in his many other projects with great musicians (Foday Musa Suso, Tony Williams, Sonny Sharrock, Pharoah Sanders, Buckethead, Peter Brötzmann, etc.), and Hayward, whose drumming always seems to where it needs to be, no easy task in this kind of setting and these types of fellow musicians.

Beautifully and clearly recorded by Oz Fritz, this album is a preeminent example of live improvisatory music that does need labels to adhere to it--it stands on its own as a great example of what three excellent players can do in an inspired setting.