Tag Archives: The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of

The Best Roundtable No One Has Ever Heard Of

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Irreplaceable

 
One of the things you discover when running a roundtable on unpopular music is that the music tends to be unpopular. While we certainly had some readers and some discussion as we talked about obscure old blues, obscure punk, obscure world music, and obscure Jpop, in general this has not been a high water mark for traffic on the site. We probably would have done better to do a roundtable on Beyoncé or even the Rolling Stones. It’s the artists with lots of fans, it turns out, who have a lot of fans. There are some people, maybe, who want to discover new things, or are intrigued by a random band name (Virgin Black! Wilmer Broadnax!) But for the most part people want to hear about something they’ve already heard about. I’m not usually one to see the critic as parasite, but it’s pretty clearly true that attention to criticism is dependent on the extent and success of the subject of the criticism’s marketing campaign.

So it’s clear why no read the roundtable. But why aren’t these bands popular to begin with? In some cases, the answer seems like it’s probably just bad luck. If you live in New Zealand, the likelihood of massive success in the States (or worldwide) is going to be substantially reduced. If you never managed to put out an album because of mismanagement or happenstance, the chances of longterm notoriety are much reduced.

At the same time, though, it’s often the case that “bad luck” can be read as “wrong genre.” In his piece on The Music Machine, Sean Michael Robinson points out that 60s psychedlia was a time of album worship. In some times and some eras (early rock, for example), putting out singles might not have marked you as marginal, but not when the Music Machine was playing. Along the same lines, Paige McGinley explained that the blues nostalgist enthusiasm for the male guitar performers is a big part of the reason why Esther Mae Scott, who blues woman in the Ma Rainey tent show tradition, has no recorded music online. Rahawa Haile argues that Eritrean music is marginalized because of an intra-African history of colonialism, where Eritrea is seen by as a kind of embarrassing footnote to the much better known tradition of Ethiopian music. Ben Saunders explains that the Cardiacs were too prog for punk and (presumably) too punk for prog; the incompatible mix of genres left them without a logical fanbase or audience.

Other performers here are simply from genres that don’t garner tons of mainstream attention: Wilmer Broadnax in quartet gospel; Jane Jensen in goth; Windahm Hell in extreme metal. And some, like Natural Snow Buildings or Sleepy John Estes seem to have deliberately oriented themselves towards a smaller audience, either by eschewing traditional marketing or by situating themselves deliberately as local rather than national or international performers. Sometimes genre consigns you to obscurity and sometimes, some artists choose (relative) obscurity as a genre.

Either way, though, I think the roundtable shows pretty conclusively that what lasts, or what is famous, or what’s in the canon, has only a tangential relationship to what is “best” — in part because issues of genre comes before what’s considered best, rather than after. When Rolling Stone makes a list of the greatest bands of all time, performers in Eritrea and New Zealand and Thailand aren’t on the radar. When people talk about the greatest blues performers, it’s men they’re thinking of often, not women. When they talk about greatest singers, gospel isn’t considered. When they talk about greatest albums, you don’t list acts that don’t have an album. Music that’s unheard is generally unheard not because it’s somehow worse than music that is heard, but because somewhere along the way, it was in that set of things that got filtered out.

The genre of things that got filtered out is never going to break blog traffic records. But, like any genre, its fans will testify to its virtues. Thanks to Ben Saunders for coming up with the idea for this and helping to organize it, and to all the contributors, readers, and commenters for joining us. It’s been a great roundtable, even if (or partially because) not many have listened to it.

The World’s Too Big For Best

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This first appeared way back in 2009 in the Chicago Reader. It seemed like a good fit for our roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of.
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It’s December, which means it’s time for me, as a dutiful blogger, critic, and self-appointed cultural arbiter, to put together my best-of lists. I need to listen to that Raekwon album again to confirm that I really do think exactly the same thing everyone else thinks. I need to check back in with that Mariah Carey album to make sure I really do think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks. I need to compare Of the Cathmawr Yards by the Horse’s Ha with Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest and Antony & the Johnsons’ The Crying Light to figure out which romantic, indie-folk-tinged work of idiosyncratic genius is the most geniuslike. I need to decide if I have to download the new Lightning Bolt album (legally, of course) and form an opinion on it, or whether it’d be safe to simply put it on my list on the assumption that it sounds like all the other Lightning Bolt albums.

At least that’s what I should be doing. Unfortunately . . . well, I’ve gotten kind of sidetracked. Some weeks ago, I was googling an artist from the Sublime Frequencies anthology Thai Pop Spectacular when I stumbled on an utterly bizarre video for a Thai song called “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” by a woman named Pamela Bowden.
 


[Pamela Bowden] – Sao Isan Raw Ruk by yinyinren

 
In the video the apparently Caucasian Bowden wiggles carefully to the beat, alternately as a blonde in a green tube top with green star-spangled pants and as a brunette in a black strapless dress. A large freestanding cylinder, like a hybrid of a gazebo and a generator, serves as a backdrop for erratically synchronized choreography featuring a handful of other dancers, all dressed in tight, cheerfully sexy red-and-black outfits. From time to time a boxy tunnel of green gridwork floats behind them, apparently on loan from Tron.

I enjoyed the campy staging, but what really hooked me was the hook. “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” weds overdriven techno-pop to what from my uneducated perspective sounded like traditional Thai rhythms and instrumentation. The result is a little like American pop’s Bollywood fusions—e.g., Amerie’s “Heard ‘Em All”—though the Bowden song has a stiffer beat and less sinuous, more percussive Eastern interpolations. The whole package feels like some sort of robotic exotica, with all the resolutely corny unhipness that implies—except that Bowden’s pure, light phrasing occasionally detaches itself and goes wandering free, a little throb of lyricism amid the frantic thumping. The song is funny, surprising, impossibly catchy, and unexpectedly affecting. If it had come out this year—the video I saw was posted in 2007, which ruled that out—I would’ve put it on my best-of list without blinking.

Finding more of Bowden’s videos wasn’t difficult. And I did manage to obtain a collection of six of her albums, sold as MP3s on a single disc called Pamela Bowden—Jumbo Hit, from the online store eThaiCD. For a non-Thai speaker like me, though, figuring out when those albums and videos were released—or indeed learning much of anything about Bowden—proved a lot trickier. But after a few weeks of moderately obsessive effort, I did manage to piece together some tentative biographical information (and, thanks to the Internet and the staff of Noodles Etc. in Hyde Park, some even more tentative English translations of titles).

Like many Thai pop stars, Bowden is mixed race; from the tidbits I’ve found scattered online, my best guess is that she’s partly Australian. (Though she’s a natural brunette, she sometimes plays up her Westernness by going blonde.) I’m reasonably sure that her first album was 1995’s Pretty P. The hit from that record is a by-the-numbers new-wavish pop-punk tune called “Sorry.” Its video features lots of neon colors and various nerdy guys who are all hyperbolically intimidated by Bowden’s tight DayGlo clothes and general hotness. The beat is overdriven and irritating, the guitar is formulaic, and Bowden sounds thin and strained trying to make herself heard over both.

Pretty P was a commercial success, if not an aesthetic one, and Bowden went on to make at least four more albums in the same vein. Then in the early aughts she switched genres to luk thung. Luk thung is often described as Thai country music, mostly because of its content. The lone blogger at Lukthung & Morlam (loogthung.blogspot.com), who asked to be referred to only as Chris, told me that the songs tend to be about “the poor country dweller who comes to the cruel city, or the hard life of a farmer.”

Traditionally luk thung has emphasized relatively slow songs, with expressive singing and lots of throbbing vibrato. Bowden did at least one album in this vein: Kaew Ta Duang Jai (“Waterfall in the Heart”). Videos for the album show Bowden in formal but still tight-fitting attire, singing midtempo luk thung standards to tasteful accompaniment.

To American ears the style is more like cabaret or torch song than country, with tinges of Memphis soul in some of the horn arrangements. Bowden is front and center in a way she tends not to be in her poppier efforts, and she sounds fantastic; her pure voice gently sways rather than swings along to the beat, and there’s just a hint of the keening bite that gives character to much Thai singing. The best track may be “Ao Kwam Kom Kuen Pai Ting Mae Kong” (“The Sadness of Leaving Mekong”), where she switches between short, careful phrases and extended quasi-yodels, the precision of the first accentuating the heartbreak in the second.
 

But albums like Kaew Ta Duang Jai are retro exercises. Luk thung has changed drastically in the past ten years, cross-breeding with pop and another rural style called morlam. According to Chris, “You can listen to 5 ‘lukthung’ songs and hear 5 totally different styles of music!”

Bowden’s other records from this decade bear that out. “Wud Jai Kun” (“Test One Another”) from 2002’s Bow Daeng Saraeng Jai (“Red Bow”) opens with what sounds like a saxophone strangling a duck and then goes into an off-kilter Latin beat interrupted by occasional big-band horns. Another song from that album, “Ruk Tai Luey” (“Love With All Your Heart”), dips into cheesy disco funk, with Bowden rhythmically talk-singing like an early rapper. “Noo Mai Dai Len” (“I Can’t Play) from 2003’s Pah Ched Nah La Jai (“Goodbye Heart”) is a three-way grudge match between a house DJ, a hopped-up brass band, and a classic-rock guitarist, with a funk bassist doing laps around the carnage. And then there’s E Nang Dance and E Nang Dance 2, which feature the remarkable blend of Thai pop and techno that was my first exposure to Bowden.
 

 
Perhaps, as Chris says, this all coalesces logically into a single genre if you can understand the lyrics. But when I watch the video for “Sao Esan Raw Ruk,” with the gazebo tube and the floating Tron bits and the spangled dancing girls, I find it hard to believe that what Bowden’s singing has anything to do with rural poverty. The title translates roughly to “Looking for Young Love,” which isn’t all that helpful.

For half a moment, I thought I was going to be able to clear this up, as well as fill in all the other gaps in my Pamela Bowden knowledge. After I’d been trying to track her down for several weeks, Chris pointed me to her Facebook page, and when I got in touch she cheerfully agreed to answer a list of questions. But . . . well, presumably catering to an American reviewer is a low priority when your music is basically unavailable stateside. The only information I was able to get from her by press time—she was charmingly apologetic but, she said, very busy—is that she plans to release a new album, Pamela Krajiewbarn, in mid-December.

Which means that, even though “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” turned out to be from 2004, I could still put Bowden on my best-of list for 2009!

Except, of course, that by the time I get a copy of Pamela Krajiewbarn shipped from eThaiCD it’ll probably be mid-January.

But that’s OK. After all, there are probably a bunch of great Thai albums from this year that I haven’t heard—not to mention Laotian albums, Indian albums, and, for that matter, American albums. As amazing a tool as the Internet can be, national boundaries, language barriers, and simple time constraints are still, as it turns out, a really big deal.

Certainly it’s fun to categorize and put things in order and make definitive pronouncements. (Ina Unt Ina’s “Teacher” is the best song of the year, dammit!) But it’s nice too to remember that it really isn’t possible to judge the totality of the world’s music, or even anything close to it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.” Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.

Addendum: Thanks to the power of the internet, I was contacted by an interested Thai speaker, who told me what the deal is with Sao Esan Raw Ruk. The name means “Esan Girl Looking for Love” and does (much to my surprise) tell the story of a simple country girl searching for love in the big city. It’s a traditional song, and Bowden apparently sings many of the lyrics with more than a touch of ironic sass; she deliberately plays up a country Esan accent as she explains that she is a simple country girl with dark skin and little knowledge of love — even though, obviously, she’s a light-skinned half-European wearing tight clothes and shaking about on the dance floor.

Not sure anyone else cares all that much, but learning this pretty much made my week.

Hey People, Come Free With Me: New Voices from 1966

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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People remember “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” when they do, as the name of a single that saw radio play sometime around 1966 and 1967. It was this Motown-fueled Tin Pan Alley jingle that brought early mainstream success to Norma Tanega, a “classically-trained multi-instrumentalist” with “Panamanian and Filipino roots,” a BA from Scripps College (1960), and an MFA from Claremont Graduate School (1962).
 

 
Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog is also the name of Tanega’s stellar debut album that includes this single. The 1966 New Voice Records release, engineered by Gordon Clark at Stea-Phillips Studios, is a revealing mid-1960s attempt to mass-market an unorthodox entertainer. These twelve tunes combining folk, blues, and roadhouse revival are all under three minutes, and half are under two and a half minutes. The record is self-evidently studio-produced gospel garage rock; left coast experimentation via New York City and the Catskills. Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, which took Tanega to London, is earnest, expansive, and simultaneously cynical.

The first track, “You’re Dead,” uses ambivalent sarcasm to cultivate double meanings about life and living within domination. Imagine suits offering Tanega’s “Be sure that you compromise” as a potentially more palatable version of the “It-is-not-he-or-she-or-them-or-it-that-you-belong-to” in Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” “You’re Dead” raises queer questions about ambition, compassion, and interconnection, beginning with its spare warning: “Don’t sing if you want to live long. They’ll have no use for your song.”
 

 
Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog is thoroughly queer, with messy senses of mind, gender, and time. The quick-hitting second track, “Treat Me Right,” is kinky pastiche. Directives include “Open up my brain with your eyes and drive me down” and “Smooth the wrinkles from my brain, burn me up, and slap me down.” Note the shout.
 

 
“Jubilation,” a free love anthem, leans toward later Rufus Wainwright epics: “Come be one two three with me you and I and us: jubilation. Jubilation! Jubilation! It’s the time to live!” The track that follows counters the piercing euphoria of Tanega’s crystal clear call for multiple partners. The affectless trepidation of “Don’t Touch” unleashes a screed reminiscent of the blitzed-out sound of the Silver Jews’ “Advice to the Graduate.”
 

 
Building on the deadpan in the Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog tracks “You’re Dead” and “Treat Me Right,” the swanky “Don’t Touch” creates a straight edge soundscape out of new frontier anxiety, like a pre-AIDS-pandemic Safe (Haynes, 1995). The rousing backing vocals so striking in this track, “Treat Me Right,” and “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” also appear in “A Street that Rhymes at 6 A.M.” and “I’m the Sky.”
 
“A Street that Rhymes at 6 A.M.” is the first track on the B-side and one of the high points in the LP’s crescendo of crowd-sourced feeling. It presents a counterpoint to the motif of cultural alienation unfolding across “Don’t Touch,” “What Are We Craving,” “No Stranger Am I” (a song Dusty Springfield also recorded), and “Hey Girl.”
 

 
This song’s surf style, tom-tom licks, and wailing harp bookend the B-side along with a less tortured precursor to Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos.” “I’m the Sky” ends the album with folk operatic chanting: “it’s love, it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s life, it’s free.”
 

 
It is with songs like these that Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog answers the question, posed in the title of its ninth track: “What Are We Craving?” The record offers people and pleasure as provisional antidotes to “goldseeking” and social norms.
 

 
Ironic and complex, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog has wowed me ever since I discovered it while browsing. I had not heard of Tanega then and no one has mentioned her or recognized the name since. I saw the cover and had to have it.
 

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On impact there was the queer promise of a song called “Hey Girl.” This track takes us back in time to Lead Belly and to other performances of this traditional folk song—also known as “In the Pines”—including to Nirvana’s 1993 rendition, released as “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” on the band’s MTV Unplugged CD. Tanega’s “Hey Girl” reframes the story of suffering through its undercurrents of non-monogamy. Within the depressed trend of the B-side, the song serves as a climax in the album’s sexual outlaw aesthetic. Scandalous, roomy, and idiosyncratic, the sound suggests a culture of collaborative experimentation evident in the cool power of Tanega’s presence.

This presence is on display in YouTube footage that seems to be from the production of a show like the BBC’s Top of the Pops; and it is the backstage downtime during recording sessions for that program that provides the setting for Tanega’s real-life “meet cute” with lover Dusty Springfield who she later penned tunes for and lived with in London. In this footage, Tanega appears to perform along to a studio replay of some cuts. These artifacts amplify the importance of marketing, engineering, and design in Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog’s accomplishments.

The LP’s Bob Crewe packaging was what initially piqued my interest in the music. (I think I bought it while traveling, perhaps in Washington, D.C.) Optical wordplay springs from Tanega’s wallpaper-printed name, offset by an intriguing back cover blurb attributed to Bil Keane. The author of The Family Circus comic strip? This brief essay, titled “The Positive Side” is signed from San Francisco. Combining reactionary moralizing and innuendo-laded slang, the sugarcoated endorsement refers to Tanega’s “gift…of positive perception.” It describes the making of the album—with co-writer Norma Kutzer and producer Herb Bernstein, who conducted and arranged the recording—as a “movement toward the positive side,” presumably away from social protest.
 

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I’ve never met anyone who knows Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog. I’ve never seen another copy of the LP in person. I’m a devoted fan, but I know only this one album out of the fourteen Norma Tanega has recorded with a range of collaborators.
 

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Even without the context of Tanega’s later work, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog offers an intuitive history lesson. The sound is distinctly of its era; ahead of its time; and steeped in the past. Candy-coated cerebral lyrics deconstruct cultural notions of massification by marrying self-extraction and engagement. This album is the hippest thing ever pressed.

The palpable irony on the cover and the fact that Tanega took up with Springfield in the ensuing years render Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog sublime as a historical object. The individual titles that compose this challenging easy listening record, which are juxtaposed on the back cover with Keane’s fantasy of a clean youth movement, flag liberatory content. The music is sublime, too, and calls for retrofitting with more recent intertexts. A concept album along the lines of the Pixies’ song “Where is My Mind?” the record has a mix of influences and moods reminiscent of Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes, the Joos’ Starlite Walker, or Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Tambourine, harmonica, choir, bells, and clapping support Rorschach lyrics of sonic queer communion suggesting that we might be better off “long gone…and out of this world.” Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog envisions—and feels into existence—queer modes of connection. The cat-to-dog provocation of the hit single is just a start.

Video for the Post-Apocalypse

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Unlike How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, and Lost, the anime series Psycho-Pass is a show that does not reach its full glory until the end. Each episode has a crossfade between the final minute of dialog (always poignant) and the opening bars of the ending theme song, “Namae No Nai Kaibutsu”. (A different band, Ling Tosite Sigure, wrote the opening theme, but I don’t like their music as much.) With the annual deluge of Xmas Pop Hits upon us, you’re going to want to hear about the angsty, operatic pop-rock band EGOIST, who wrote that beautiful song from this acclaimed anime series. After a very scientific survey of a few friends, I have determined that not enough people know about EGOIST and they are a band you’ve never heard. Whether or not they’re the best band you’ve never heard of is up to you.
 

 
If you’ve watched the show Guilty Crown, then you’re likely familiar with EGOIST. If not: in Guilty Crown there is a fictional band called Egoist, whose songs were written and performed by the two mononymous real life artists, Ryo and Chelly. After the show ended, Ryo and Chelly kept recording music together in real life and got to keep Egoist as their band name, but they stylize it as EGOIST. Their first studio album entitled Extra Terrestrial Biological Entities was released in 2012, and their third single, “Namae no Nai Kaibutsu” was the ending theme song of Psycho-Pass season one, which is how I first encountered them. Unlike everything else you’ve probably watched in the last decade, there are no romantic story lines in Psycho-Pass, and various characters quote Nietzsche and Derrida at length throughout the first season. That doesn’t directly impact the music, though it does add to the overall tension throughout the series and the music compliments that perfectly. There are many ways to do an excellent job with a soundtrack. The music integration at the end of each episode of Psycho-Pass makes the show feel like a 22 minute music video for a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
 

 
So that you can better picture EGOIST’s sound, let me illustrate for you the story their music pairs with. Psycho-Pass the show is set in 2113 Japan. A technological advancement called the psycho-pass has completely revolutionized the society. A psycho-pass is a mental health indicator and its reading is the output of a supercomputer in the heart of the city, connected to millions of surveillance devices in every home, business, street, and electronic device in the city the show is set in. There are also cute giant robots that roam the streets reading the vital statistics of passers by because it’s set in 2113 and robots can do that. The clearer your psycho-pass reading, the healthier and happier you are. All day, every day, everyone is constantly monitored for signs of their mental health and the data is analysed by a super computer that is also responsible for making and enforcing laws. Police officers have weapons but their safety mechanism only unlocks if the computer deems it necessary. If your psycho-pass is clear, you’re “free” to do as you please. If you begin to experience any kind of neurotic or psychotic mental stress or illness, you are then labeled as a latent criminal and sent for therapy to rehabilitate your mind. If you refuse therapy and your mental health continues to suffer, you are terminated by officers of the Public Safety Bureau.
 

 
The show centres around a young prodigy named Akane Tsunemori who has started a job as an Inspector with the Public Safety Bureau’s Criminal Investigation Unit. The youngest Inspector in the PSB, she is responsible for finding and terminating those who have turned from latent to actual criminals. On Tsunemori’s first day on the job, she unravels the first few threads of a very sinister secret about what’s actually behind the psycho-pass readings and what we’re not saying when we claim that we want “peace on earth for all”.

You have to derive a base level of enjoyment from electronic-dance-rock-pop in order to enjoy EGOIST but if you like Poison or Justin Timberlake, you don’t have to explore your taste profile too deeply in order to bop your head to the beat. And really, how far away is a pop rock beat from your heartbeat when you’re engrossed in a good chase scene? Their music is alternately the soundtrack of several different anime series, the soundtrack for my dramatic morning walk to the bus, and the soundtrack you’d want playing in the post-apocalyptic future as you battle mechademons for your freedom.

“Best” is a subjective term but EGOIST a) has a cool backstory and b) you’ve almost certainly not heard of them. Therefore, EGOIST needs to be the next band you explore.

You can find Extra Terrestrial Biological Entities on iTunes and Amazon.

Natural Snow Buildings

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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natural_snow_buildings-the_snowbringer_cult

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of French duo Natural Snow Buildings. In fact, a lot of people haven’t. Stylistically, their music isn’t what you’d call the most “popular”
of genres, but even for those whose musical tastes fall far from center, the band is still largely unknown, and your average modern music fan – of any genre – would likely be surprised at the lack of information available about them.

Sometimes tagged as “Experimental Psychedelic Folk,” “Psych-Drone,” “Experimental,” “Acid Folk”, etc, Natural Snow Buildings defy simple classification. I think it sounds like fire and alchemy, like the churning of bones and rocks and sinew. Many of their strongest pieces are deeply repetitive, trance–inducing, and visual in an organic, hallucinatory way. Sonically they use texture, noise, drone, and melody in an almost raga-like form, utilizing instruments like guitars, percussion, woodwinds, strings, and any number of other mysterious sound-making devices. Some pieces are largely instrumental – others use vocals front and center. Individual songs sometimes reach well past the 20–, 30–, even 40– minute mark, allowing each song to grow and expand, to gain density and substance until the apex is churning and spinning, opaque, frenzied. Other works are delicate, rippling, and infused with a childlike fragility. It’s like watching wild nature growing in slow motion, sometimes violently, sometimes so gently it seems to stretch on for an eternity.
 

 
Despite the band’s impressive creative output – almost 40 albums, EPs, limited edition cassettes, compilations, and CDs – the vastness of Natural Snow Buildings’ discography lies in stark contrast to what we know about them personally, which reveals nothing about their inner workings. Perhaps this is by design: when you can’t talk about the artist, there is only the work itself to consider. Both the story and the music of Natural Snow Buildings are quite mysterious; you are required to fill in the blanks and make it your own. While I wholeheartedly respect (and envy) their decision to keep matters private, admittedly I too would like to know more about them. As humans we are by nature curious about the things we like; we define ourselves in part by the choices we make and our understanding of how things work. In this case, the lack of information itself is intriguing and becomes the story, almost mythically so. In 2008, they made over ten albums. How can this be possible?

Of the band members, we do know a few facts: the project consists of two people, one male and one female, Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, respectively, both from France. They met in 1997 at university in Paris and began working together musically in 1998. In 2004 they relocated to Vitré (Brittany), in northwestern France, where they still live. In addition to working as a duo, both members have released solo works: Gularte’s under the name Isengrind; Mehdi’s under the moniker Twinsistermoon. The recordings are made at home, and their lo-fi nature further lends the sensation that we’re way beyond eras or earthly planes. Solange does the artwork for their releases, and her visions are as odd and gorgeous as the music itself, and a crucial part of each release. In earlier years, many of the releases were handmade and produced in very limited quantities (sometimes as few as fifteen copies), but over time the bands’ work has been reissued on established independent labels, helping bring their work to a somewhat larger audience.
 

 
2009’s triple LP “Shadow Kingdom” came out on the UK label Blackest Rainbow, and in 2013 Ba Da Bing reissued three records: the 2008 self-release, “Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches,” 2009’s “Daughter of Darkness,” and 2008’s “The Snowbringer Cult,” a 3X LP release which is in fact one solo record from each member, and one record as the duo. However, the bands’ most recent release – 2014’s “The Night Country” – is yet again a self-release.

In 2013, someone posted a large portion of the band’s music on YouTube for free (hopefully with the band’s approval). Here we can take our time exploring a large part of their catalog, as each album is provided in full with individual tracks indexed. The playlist starts with more recent releases and reaches back to 1999. Listening to it all can be a challenge, and sometimes exhausting. Some of the work is stronger than others, but that’s truly a matter of taste, as there’s a deep consistency in the music’s transformative and immersive nature.
 

 
We don’t know what makes these people tick, and why they choose to stay under the radar, but it doesn’t really matter. This is merely a personal feeling, but keeping to yourself helps your priorities remain intact, if making work on your own terms is more important than working towards a traditional, “successful” career. If an artist is released from the task of promoting their career, they have bypassed many of the distractions that damage focus, which runs the risk that the work (in quality, content, and output) may suffer. I truly don’t know if this is what’s behind the band’s ideals, but if this idea figures in at all, it’d make sense. These days, a great many independent artists spend a large part of their time on DIY efforts (via PR, social media, touring) to help expand awareness about their work, and increasingly less time on creating the music which inspired them in the first place.

Why do we want to know more and more about the people and the details when we love their work? Does it bring us closer to them, or is it a fluke, a mirage? We all face a lot of distractions in our daily lives, so let’s take pause. Sometimes, enjoying something in its purest form seems to be more than enough.

Dimmur Paganini

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Metal and classical sound like one another to me. Ok, that’s stretching the truth, but there’s a fundamental something that makes those two seemingly polar genres ring the same to my ear.

Metal’s got highly distorted and compressed music. Classical doesn’t. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a piece of music more metal than Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Throw in Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” too. Fast forward to the present and living composers, and it’s no coincidence that the work of Arvo Pärt is a favorite amongst many metal musicians. Likewise, classical’s timeless feel of grandeur gets channeled within me just as strongly with the compositions of In the Woods… or via the ubiquitous black metal minor scale harmony.

You can trace this convergence of the genres back to Yngwie Malmsteen, the famously obnoxious guitarist extraordinaire who partially modeled his egregious personality after that of Niccolo Paganini, the 19th Century Italian violinist whose extreme ability, flamboyance and eccentricities raised him to mythical status. Before Malmsteen’s incorporations of classical scales opened up massive new directions for the genres in the early ‘80s, metal was the doom and gloom pioneered by Black Sabbath, a band whose roots were in blues and who adapted that style into something heavier.

Since then, if you choose your genres right, you can hear the ghosts of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Albinoni (not always too subtly, either) in many of metal’s subcategories, but you’re most likely to find them in power metal bands, and in black metal bands, too, with names like Emperor, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Angra, and Dimmu Borgir being the most famous.

But this article is about the most underrated bands. Here are two that are criminally underrated and uphold the theme of the interchangeability of metal and classical.

Windham Hell.

Windham Hell is as indispensable a cult pick as it is a nerd’s dream. The band’s sound is something along the lines of if Yngwie Malmsteen recorded black metal albums with limited, semi-improvised means in the bedroom of a log cabin in the same woods where the owls-who-are-not-as-they-seem from “Twin Peaks” flew ominously overhead.

Windham Hell’s compositions often have a stark, menacing tone to them — the sometimes present, incoherent grave-moan vocals, the dissonant application of classical scales underpinned by aggressive, driving metal riffing and beats, and the often off-kilter song structures that brings all these jagged elements together, sometimes into a miasmal hell that would befit a Paganini-inspired legend, and sometimes into a calm, lovely musical respite… but Windham Hell was always something uniquely alien and utterly delightful in its genius — perhaps a genius that was as idiot savant as it was technically gifted — but like a cult show or movie like “Twin Peaks,” the cult appeal is owed as much to all the things that are wrong, goofy, or off-kilter about it as it does what isn’t.
 

 
The band’s ultimate and definitive formation was Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guitar genius recluses who lived in Snoqualmie, a rural, forested part of Washington state. Windham was as dedicated to mountain climbing as he was to shredding maniacal classical leads, and the theme of the cold, unforgiving, beautiful granite faces he loved so much were a major theme in his band’s music. The CDs would come with photos of Windham hanging upside down on a horizontally jutting rock face, or photos of mountain goats he would find on his excursions. Friesen was obsessed with playing guitar, and was also an accomplished drummer (while many think the drums on Windham Hell’s albums are a drum machine, they are in fact an e-kit played by Friesen) who released a couple solo albums under the name of Friesen Hell. One of these albums, Friesenburg Concertos, is Friesen’s “hail to the gods” of classical music, in which he plays various classical pieces that he learned entirely by ear, as he did not read music.
 

 
It was possibly Friesen who pushed the “Twin Peaks” worship angle in Windham Hell’s mystique. Whoever it was, the duo had a lot of parallels to play up. Snoqualmie is the real name of the place where the legendary show takes place. The third and final Windham Hell album, “Reflective Depths Imbibe,” was recorded behind Mo’s Motor, which is where Leland and Laura Palmer drive off from in the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” movie. Leland Windham shares two names with major “Twin Peaks” characters, Leland Palmer and Windom Earle. Indeed, any and all similarities Friesen could find to “Twin Peaks,” he worked, like how the violin in “Alpinia” was played by a Bob (parallel to Killer Bob), and a keyboard bit was courtesy of a Mike (yet another “Twin Peaks” character.)

The “Twin Peaks” worship was so deeply entrenched in Windham Hell’s inspiration (with songs like “Glacier Walk in Me” and “Clear Blue Plastique,” and liberal usage of sound clips from the show amassed in hidden sections at the end of the albums), that Windham Hell’s music has come to be like the alternate soundtrack to the Black Lodge for me: a creepy, gorgeous, passionate body of work that is equally menacing as it is goofy; emotional, beautiful, evocative as it is dissonant; and metal as it is classical.

PS: In case you were wondering, the name Windham Hell is a spoof of the music made under the Windham Hill Records label, who specialized in folk and new age music. The band’s last album was released in 1999, and will likely stand as its last work, as Eric Friesen passed away in 2006.

Virgin Black.

On the other end of the spectrum from Windham Hell’s cult bedroom insanity is the music of the Australian entity Virgin Black, whose career pinnacle came in 2007 with the release of the 2nd part of the band’s “Requiem” trilogy, “Requiem Mezzo Forte,” and the subsequent release of the 3rd part, “Requiem Fortissimo,” in 2008. (The first part of the trilogy, purportedly recorded with the rest of the albums, has yet to be released. The trilogy is meant to be listened to in succession, with melodic themes that run through the albums.)

Virgin Black’s sound is like Gothic doom-influenced classical music. The classical aspect here is largely tied in to singer Rowan London’s operatic singing style, and how all their records have featured classical elements, like cello and piano, given a heavy treatment, but it wasn’t until that landmark 2007 album that Virgin Black’s sound moved out of the backroom studio and the digital box, and into recording an entire record with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, making a full record that didn’t just have orchestral segues, but was mostly orchestral, punctuated by passages of heavy guitar and bass and tastefully simple, pounding drums and martial snare rolls.
 

However, some of what or what is not going on in Virgin Black’s records is a bit of a mystery, and what I think is the truth is so awesome it gives me minor chills. I know what I witnessed. I saw Virgin Black on tour at Slim’s in San Francisco in 2008. I saw a small, muscular man in a see-through black mesh shirt take the stage as Virgin Black’s frontman and keyboardist. He seemed to be wearing mascara, and he had an odd, out of place, kind of alien demeanor about him, like he was physically there but his spirit was in different places at once. I saw this man deliver the male operatic vocals from the records, and then, I saw him deliver the female operatic vocals as well. He would seamlessly switch back and forth between the two, as well as the deathgrowl parts from the material of “Requiem Fortissimo,” and the realization that when I was blown away at the sweeping, crushing beauty of the compositions and vocals of “Requiem Mezzo Forte” and its seeming choir of singers, it seemed I had in fact been hearing the work of a man who was somehow a soprano and a tenor. Like a castrato who was allowed through puberty but never lost his choir boy voice. Maybe there’s some kind of pitch shifter voice box that allows one to do something like that. Whatever it was, I was blown away.

Subsequently, I swear I’ve looked up Virgin Black on line and found a wikipedia page in which Rowan London was dubbed something not terribly flattering like “androgena.” I swear I saw this page, and I remember it having information that supported my perception that indeed, Rowan London was *every* voice on the Virgin Black records. This elevated already superb albums into the godlike in my view: that someone could possibly have that much musical ability to physically pull something like that off, and do it in the context of such beautiful music. However, any trace of those words are no longer there. Maybe they were changed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I probably did, as the soprano voice on “Requiem Mezzo Forte” is credited to Susan Johnson, but my appreciation of this band’s work was forever raised even farther when I saw them that day in San Francisco.

There’s not much information or interviews with Virgin Black out there, and the band has been on a long hiatus. Even if the final, purportedly completely choral and orchestral work is never released, “Requiem Mezzo Forte” stands as perhaps the finest example of the seamless marriage of classical and metal, featuring massive, timeless melodic themes as tremendous as the performances… whoever those performances were done by.

Punk and Pain

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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“I honestly thought we were like Joy Division, or early Pink Floyd, and if we took enough drugs and went dark enough we’d hit the pinnacle of art damage and that the world would stop.” So wrote Sean Madigan Hoen in 2006 in the liner notes for The Scar is Our Watermark, a compilation album for Thoughts of Ionesco, a Dearborn, MI-based noise/metal/whatever band he fronted from 1996 to 1999. Even for those readers who don’t immediately know what he is talking about, the arrogance of that sentence, both in style and sentiment, is practically suffocating. This was a band that started when he was barely out of high school and ended when his peers were barely out of college, a band whose notoriety was at once on a practically need-to-know basis up until very recently and often tangentially related to their actual creative output. Even Hoen himself is humbled by this. “How naïve,” he follows. And yet through it all, I can’t help but excuse him, not so much out of empathy as a creative person, but as someone who has tried anything in hopes of overcoming something worse.

That art is about struggle can seem rather meaningless when parroted as pure rhetoric or mantra, particularly by those who offer little evidence that they themselves have surffered. The artistic struggle is something that has to be presented as an example in order to be appreciated, if not understood; and audience as much as artist must be culpable in it in some way, whether as willing partners or as spiteful antagonists. This perhaps goes some way in assessing Thoughts of Ionesco and the rather unusual circumstances of their obscurity.
 

 
Rock fans often view the latter half of the 1990s to be the nadir of the genre, a cesspool even. Somewhere in between Weezer’s release of Pinkerton and Deftones’ release of White Pony, the metric of artistic quality in rock somehow got centered on The Goo Goo Dolls, or Matchbox 20. Soon enough one could hear the likes of Marilyn Manson and Billy Corgan declaring their wheelhouse all but dead. For a while it was difficult to tell which type of person was more annoying: the rich Chicken Littles or the fatalists who decided to stop worrying and love the backwards-capped bomb. In my old age, however, I should probably thank them. This idea that culture is a kind of Schrödinger’s cat, existing only when it is seen, will live as long as brute capitalism is the order of the day, and thank goodness for it, it may very well save lives.

Perhaps for a clever few, rock can be reinvented, but for most others it can at least be toyed with, leading to a free and natural flow of ideas almost flood-like in its power. This was never truer than it was in the American punk scene at the time. Whether out of sheer ambition or sheer boredom (both, I suspect), young musicians in basements and VFW halls were rekindling what was thought to have been conclusively extinguished with the advent of Bush. Subgenres that are now more or less commonplace took root in this activity; for a more detailed look at this period I recommend Jason Heller’s AV Club essay series Fear of a Punk Decade, for my purposes here I’ll be focusing on what is, for better or worse, the “metalcore” branch of the era, a melee in which Thoughts of Ionesco moved but neither thrived nor survived.

As an underground band, Thoughts of Ionesco clearly had the best possible timing to exist. Its lifespan coincided with Coalesce, Cave In, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Drowningman, Converge, Botch, Kiss It Goodbye, etc., bands that have shared venues with Thoughts of Ionesco, and bands that have gone on to become influential in their own rights, even classic. Their skills were not lacking in comparison. Though a three-piece, Thoughts of Ionesco had clear technical prowess that matched its primal power. Like Dillinger they had an ear for free jazz-influenced acrobatics, like Botch they could sustain a groove when the feeling caught them, and like Converge they had a scorched earth intensity. Their four albums were made quickly and cheaply (under $500 by Hoen’s estimation), but whereas most of their peers have one signature album regardless of longevity, Thoughts of Ionesco have two, thanks in part to their drummers: the aggressive founding member Brian Repa and the more virtuosic Derek Grant, who briefly substituted when Repa “lost his mind.” They play on For Detroit, From Addiction and A Skin Historic respectively.
 

 

1998’s A Skin Historic is an indulgent, blackly hedonistic album, born of a diet of The Birthday Party, King Crimson, Swans, Kyuss, John Coltrane, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller among others; its most apparent centerpiece is the contorted, relentless seven-minute opus “Upward, Inward, and Under.” Repa’s return brought them back to basics with 1999’s For Detroit, From Addiction, which came out of listening to Funhouse and driving “around the darkest parts of the city at night drinking Mickey’s and beating on [Repa’s] dashboard with our fists.” For Detroit does not necessarily boast any standouts compared to its predecessor, its uniformly hard-charging dynamic runs throughout the tracks basically demanding a complete listen, which is now made possible via iTunes or Grooveshark. The opening track “Learning an Enemy” is every bit as ferocious as its closing track “For an End.” “Waiting on Their War” backs off somewhat with a reflective first half before it, too, is riveted in frenzy.

Less approachable, however, are Thoughts of Ionesco’s lyrics, what Hoen describes as “very personal diatribes about self-violence.” With physical CDs of theirs hard to come by, and nothing much available online, we are left at the mercy of Hoen’s pained screams which evolved from guttural growls on A Skin Historic to the harried shrieks of For Detroit. Through that voice we are given utterances of sparing clarity, glimpses of an impulsive sort of vulnerability that we’re not supposed to know but that can’t really be helped in captivity. “I love the sickness that I am/I love the weakness that I am/The weight of your world can’t cut the skin I’ve made/I’m not alone/I am the sum of all pain,” he says on “The Scar is Our Watermark,” as far as I’m able to determine.
 

 
Then in 1999, Thoughts of Ionesco quit, just as The Dillinger Escape Plan released its game changing Calculating Infinity, and two years before Converge redrew For Detroit’s blueprint with Jane Doe and basically all their releases since. Nothing was heard of Thoughts of Ionesco for the next seven years, which seems to have been fine with the Hoen. “I spent many years disowning my involvement with that band,” Hoen told Revolver earlier this year. Hoen continued to pursue music of a more consciously mainstream kind before delving into writing. The winter of 2014 saw the publication of Songs Only You Know, a memoir detailing the tragic personal circumstances that propelled him into art as much about the art itself. What could not be said before is now coming out clearer than ever. “The band was an outlet for rage and sorrow, and there were moments of truly primal release,” he said in Revolver, “[I]f it’s only darkness you’re seeking, it will chew up your soul with unbelievable speed.” ;

“We weren’t scenesters, we weren’t punk,” the liner notes go on, “we were a small band of Detroit area rejects and depressives who meant every moment of it.” To put it with less bluster, however justified, Thoughts of Ionesco were artists, at least when compared to the artist-entrepreneurs that Dillinger, Converge, Coalesce and others became. “We didn’t want friends or lovers or regular jobs, just the music.” They showed a marked indifference to economics, choosing to work with small, local, barely solvent record labels. They toured under abject conditions with property damages as much a part of their expenses as gas or food. Pure art of Thoughts of Ionesco’s kind is expensive, as much emotionally and physically as it is financially. The specter of mental illness followed the band throughout their existence. Having not yet read Hoen’s memoir I can only irresponsibly speculate; I can say more certainly that they were one of the least inhibited bands to have existed in that era and not always to their advantage. Videos online show a band putting every bit of energy they have into exhibiting their damage, most notably Repa who became their Chuck Dukowski figure. This often led to literally causing damage, making them more of a spectacle than a performance unit. Destruction of instruments and other property is a contentious subject for musicians as a matter of vanity and practicality, yet in Thoughts of Ionesco’s case it’s an act fraught with anxiety.
 

 
Perhaps most expensive was the cost of sharing the art with others, a notion that the band approached with ambivalence at best, outright contempt at worst. In the course of its existence the band grew tired of its scene. The best known non-local bands they thank in The Scar is Our Watermark are the grindcore staple Brutal Truth and Coalesce, Thoughts of Ionesco’s more intellectual counterpart. For their later live shows they employed a saxophonist and played less frequently with hardcore bands. “Like their namesake … the band’s disconnect with the audience was a source of frustration,” wrote a reviewer for Lambgoat.com in 2006. When they finally stopped it seemed a moment of relief for everyone.

If there’s anything to be gotten out of Thoughts of Ionesco, aside from some notably wrenching music, it’s probably a lesson in costs, in art but also in authenticity. Authenticity is something that’s cherished by punk audiences—and Americans generally. The point, it seems, of each generation is to be more authentic than the last. Often these generations can or choose to do little more than to identify what is authentic and mimic it to the best of its collective abilities. We see as much thoughtful sincerity as we do righteous antagonism and blind nihilism from our heroes on stage. To a certain extent they believe, or at least they want to in a bad way. But things have a way of reining them in; commerce perhaps, or just classic good sense and propriety. Occasionally, though, if one believes deeply enough and asks repeatedly enough, one just might get what was asked for, provided the people who deliver it are the ones who pay.