Some names conjure up an almost impossible ball of excitement. People who somehow managed to be active components in pivotal moments, events, and scenes in the the rich and gnarled story of avant garde music.
Here at OBLADADA we often think about how Michael Ranta somehow manged to be Harry Partch’s studio assistant in the mid 60s, then part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ensemble at the Osaka World Fair in 1970. Then made absolutely brain fizzing music with the likes of Takehisa Kosugi, and Conny Plank, and is still releasing incredible music to this day. It seems almost impossible to imagine someone being in so many right places at the right times…
Another name that cuts an equally wild trajectory through huge cultural epochs is Angus MacLise. Famed as the square peg/round hole original drummer in The Velvet Underground, part of LaMonte Young/John Cale/Tony Conrad’s centre of the universe Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble and all-round wild visionary artist and free spirit, he’s another superhero around these parts.
MacLise famously parted company with The Velvet Underground, before anything was recorded, and was notorious for turning up hours or even days after the band had finished performing. It’s undeniable The Velvet Underground are rightly featured prominently in any best 60’s group list. But, it’s often something we have daydreamed about, what would they have sounded like and recorded if MacLise had somehow hung around?
It’s hard to imagine their trajectory would have had much resemblance to what it became.
Tapes, as the title suggests, is a collection of recordings from MacLise’s archive. Having tragically passed away at only 41, in Kathmandu in 1979, these recordings have been in Columbia University Library. This collection taken from over a 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings of live improvised music, theatrical performances, and sound experiments from the 60s and 70s. It’s clear immediately, no matter where you hit play first, that MacLise continued to have a fairly fractious relationship with the performing and recording process as much here has a rough and rudimentary surface quality. Even with Jim O’Rourke’s remastering insight, the original tapes never reveal anything you’d call particularly sharp or sonically in focus.
But rather than an almost 3-hour slog through muffled and murky vagueness, Tapes has become one of our most unusual and engrossing listens this side of Roland Kayn’s god tier Infra. Tapes has looped here obsessively; it was the only thing we listened to, for literally weeks since initially hitting play…
The overall sonic characteristics, drums, flutes, harmoniums, strings, voices, and electronics that pepper the entire collection burst with a primal rawness. Nothing makes any sense; the only vague constant is MacLise bizarre, patterned sense of rhythm insistently driving the music forward. This is no Moe Tucker minimalist groove, this is a, as high as a kite, inner journey through an exotically infused form of deep space.
Reference points here are few and far between but it’s not totally unsurprising that the ghost of John Cale’s superb Summer Heat (from 1965, and on the album Sun Blindness Music) looms large in parts of Excerpt from “Gamelan #1. Elsewhere in this six-part monster, grooves that could easily have been Michael Yonkers or even John Fahey at his most twisted, just add to the awe.
The 16 minutes of Mahakala Puja throws you straight into the Buddhist ceremony that removes negative spirits and energy. It’s not even clear if MacLise is doing anything other than recording here but whole thing slides effortlessly into a zone of droning cacophonic bliss.
Organ Drone + Electronic Drone Mix spends 12 minutes floating in oily illusionistic pools. Seemingly from two almost static and unremarkable forms, the music is active in a way that huge swathes of drone-based music fail to get anywhere near.
However, the absolutely shining peak in this stunning 23 track collection is the jaw dropping 20 minutes of Epiphany – Tanberg Session. A barely audible, gently echoed recording of a near ranting voice is slowly overlaid with outbursts, clapping, hand drums and smeared in vague growling and groaning drones. A completely disorientating, deeply psychedelic mess spills out in ever wilder layers. A dark tension builds into waves of feedback and jaunty harmonica over 11 minutes in, before a wave of acid etched guitar fizzes spectacularly over everything.
At the point it can’t possibly get any better, it somehow does, and twists into an obliterated bluesy groove and vocal mantra that stretches towards the infinite…
This is the truly spiked reimagining of all the loose ends and odd sign posts – White Light/White Heat, Henry Flynt and Les Rallizes Denudes all smashed into one corrosive atom. Music so superbly fucked up, but somehow still drags you into the heart of the squall – that’s nothing other than completely beautiful.
Tapes is a release to get spectacularly lost in. Alongside another collection The Cloud Doctrine, we’d whole-heartedly recommend time spent in his magnificent and singular presence. Whilst MacLise’s story is full of ifs and buts, and a tragic and premature demise, he leaves a wildly concentrated small stack of music and writing. It’s often said but never more appropriate here – throughout his life he never compromised on his unique artistic vision.
The fact here is that somehow, so much is communicated whilst still remaining completely unique, magnetic, and incomprehensible, reveals its true and deep routed magic.
Mind blowing amazingness.
Tapes is out now on Art Into Life, available digitally and as a 3CD boxset
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