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The Bark Haze
Total Joke Era / lp
[Important; 2007]
Rating: 4.8 / 5.4
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If the worldwide experimental music circle had a centralized booster club, Thurston Moore, by default, would be its president. For nearly three decades, Moore has been at the threshold of cutting-edge art on multiple levels. He played on early downtown New York versions of Rhys Chatham's conception-busting
Guitar Trio while starting Sonic Youth, a band that not only brought new ambiguities to the melody-dissonance-noise continuum but also helped bust indie rock's major-label barrier. He's been a tireless advocate for all things avant, whether reviewing experimental poetry in
Arthur or, most recently, taking his 25-year-old, basement-level vanity label, Ecstatic Peace-- which has released several hundred cassettes, records, and discs-- to Universal. Since, the stream of Ecstatic releases-- from big rollers Be Your Own Pet right down to Sunburned Hand of the Man-- has multiplied with Moore's devotion to making his weird little label a legitimate voice in the major music market.
That said, it's as significant as it is strange that the first two albums from the Bark Haze-- the guitar duo of Moore and Andrew MacGregor, who records as Gown-- are being released simultaneously on Important Records. The quietly ambitious Important has released almost 150 records over the past six years, including a box set from forgotten electronic pioneer Conrad Schnitzler and two albums from new doom heroes Ocean.
Total Joke Era (the Bark Haze's first CD)and
lp (its limited-run vinylcounterpart) could have been released on most any experimental label, the larger Ecstatic Peace! (where MacGregor works, too) notwithstanding. But Moore and MacGregor chose Important, thus helping a label that's as adamant about the excavating the underground as Ecstatic Peace! is.
Alas, that's where the Bark Haze's significance mostly ends, at least for now. Over 35 minutes and two improvisations,
Total Joke Era unfolds as a pair of listless guitarscapes with the usual tricks-- low-end, sustained grumbles, distended pick scrapes, flickering harmonics, free-picking sprees, reverb micro-riffs and Moore's dissonance-flecked quasi-chords. "Punchline One" aims to undermine a consonant core with minor pitch shifts and careful feedback, but its effect is minimal. The 25-minute "Punchline Two" is a similar mood piece, and it's distant reverb washes and torpid movements are either mildly sunbaked or wintry. Still, even though the track is occasionally fascinating sonically (a stretch near the midpoint conjures a perfect tension that the duo eventually sidesteps), its drift never invokes much attention.
Indeed, both artists have worked atmosphere better: Gown's best work has been about naturalistic trance, epitomized by the plodding rhythms of "Mystical War Canoe", the hazy closing track from his
The Rich Lives of Trees debut. MacGregor took his instrument and built its sound into something bigger, a slowly moving cradle with space for everyone that understood. With Sonic Youth, Moore's constructed very different pieces with much the same effect: It's hard not to get lost in the wide, circling hallways of their best SYR action (like the damaged coruscation of 2005's
Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui) or the heated drones of the band's sinuous 25-minute edit of "The Diamond Sea". On
Total Joke Era, even when things coalesce, they're too passé and thin for devotion.
lp is more aggressive, peeling from the record in sheets of ripped tones and brittle guitar noise. But the tracks' stasis is similarly forgettable. At least until the Bark Haze take trio shape on the final track, incorporating Magik Markers drummer Pete Nolan for "What Do You See?" For the first several minutes, MacGregor and Moore brood and simmer, Nolan finding his place among the strings and pretty guitar crosstalk. As the motion builds, Nolan adds the spark the rest of the takes lack, adding an unsettling push that forces MacGregor and Moore to reach for something beyond what their guitars and hands have to offer. When both guitars begin to unravel into a grunting, grinding squall, Nolan explodes beneath, playing at punk-rock triple time and threatening to topple the whole 15-minute construct. When it fades away, you feel a dent and a lift. The same, however, does not apply for the rest of the Bark Haze's Important output.
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Grayson Currin, April 17, 2007