[Moshe]

THE THING “NOW AND FOREVER” (BOX SET)

TRACKLISTING:

The box contains:
The Thing (2000) CD
She Knows (2001) CD
Live at Oya (2005) DVD
Gluttony (2007) CD

RELEASE DATE:
2. JUNE 2008

This 4 disc box set contains The Thing`s longtime deleted and out of print first albums “The Thing” from 2000 and “She Knows (with Joe McPhee)” from 2001, both released on the now defunct Universal imprint Crazy Wisdom. We are very proud that we now can reissue these two classics again. The debut album features 4 compositions by Don Cherry and two by The Thing themselves. “She Knows” features one Cherry composition, as well as compositions by James Blood Ulmer, Frank Lowe, Joe McPhee and the great “To Bring You My Love” by PJ Harvey. Also part of the box set is a new and never released 44 minutes impro suite, titled “Gluttony”, that was recorded in 2005 at the great Atlantis Studio in Stockholm. And then there is a DVD with the concert that The Thing did at Oslo`s Oya Festival in 2005 with Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth on guitar. This is free music explosion, or as John Corbett writes in the box`s liner notes “no cover, no roof, no safety, no home”. In addition to John Corbett`s liner notes the original sleeve notes from “The Thing” by Don Cherry`s son Eagle Eye Cherry is also included. The box and the booklet are designed by Rune Mortensen.

Liner notes:
In 1913, reviewing the notorious Armory Show, an exhibition that forever shifted American art and introduced much of the European avant- garde to the U.S., an art critic for the New York Times attempted to slam Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" by saying it resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory." Just for the fun of it, let's take this critic seriously. What would that mean, an "explosion in a shingle factory"? Why that description in particular? Duchamp's now-famous painting does entail the transfer of motion into the stillness of a static work of art, the borrowing of energy from one medium for use in another. A detonation of sorts, yes, and one that functions formally and structurally – with multiple planes that vaguely resemble shingles – but also in terms of the whole passive and conventional notion of what constitutes a painting. Duchamp placed a little incendiary device – not even the biggest bomb in his arsenal, one must admit – in the sanctuary of the museum. Shingles, why them? They're orderly, first of all. They fit together in a grid, arranged as a snug system, and when they are placed atop a building, they shelter it, keep it dry and warm and pleasant. Shingles, even in a factory, are an excellent metaphor for the neat and orderly life, the life in which all planes snuggle up into a watertight lid. They are not designed to be in motion, but to lay still, indeed to resist movement in the harshest windstorm. To blow them up, to send them flying into the air, that is to radically rethink them, the question their function, perhaps their necessity. If the building blocks of classical perspective are, figuratively speaking, the shingles of traditional representational artwork in the West, then our silly critic is perhaps more correct that we – and he – might have thought. The Thing is an explosion in a shingle factory, too. Using energy to set things in motion, Gustafsson and Haker-Flaten and Nilssen-Love blow open a hole in the complacency of improvised music. To turn to idioms from another musical genre, they "tear the roof off the sucker." With the tools of free jazz and garage punk, they rip the shingles off one by one, flinging them into the air with glee, like skeet-shooters winging their clay pigeons aloft. It is a joyful disruption, making leaky- roof music in which the symmetries of obvious pattern are quickly dispensed in favor of whorls, dust-devils, micro-bursts, and full-on tornadoes. When The Thing moves full-throttle into fifth-gear, their music is a monsoon. To be a shingle factory in a monsoon, such a pity! Take the band that has best integrated these energy musics, jazz and rock, and add to them the guitarist who has consistently bridged the realms of pop and experimental. Your result is, perhaps, a violent end for shingles of all variety. No cover, no roof, no safety, no home. Open water. Where are you going to hide from the rain? No worry, don't try, accept the refreshment of a bracing drench. Face the sky, look at the tattered remains of Duchamp's roof, listen for the bright sounds of raindrops on the broken shingles.

John Corbett, Chicago, August 2007