Death by Chocolate
Death by Chocolate (Jetset)

There’s a gulf of style that divides Chicks on Speed and Death by Chocolate. Chicks on Speed are techno-pomo-prop internationalists. Whether they’re sloganeering, goofing on style mags or roughing up tracks by the Normal or the B-52’s, Chicks on Speed wear their subversion like a tacky feather boa. Death by Chocolate, on the other hand, creates lushly primitive pop hearkening back to the Small Faces and the high orchestral surf music that postdated Pet Sounds. Yet there is an excellent case to be made that Death by Chocolate’s eponymous record is among the most subversive records that you’ll hear all year.

I’ve been laughing out loud since I first picked up Chicks on Speed’s The Re-Releases of the Un-Releases last month. Essentially a slash ’n’ burn take and graffiti defacement of their early 2000 LP Will Save Us All, the late-2000 rethink is more amusing by miles. German interviews, Naomi Klein-style propaganda and pure catty nonsense are spliced between and even into songs, distorting the linear flow of the record and magnifying the chaos. Yet none of this stuff is at all subversive in a serious, mind-fucking way. It’s like a cat playing a game with a rubber mouse; there’s not a bit of danger in it. The original songs that were good–the slow, sexy stomp "Kaltes Klares Wasser," the Sprockets-rock of "Mind Your Own Business," the acidic funk put-downs on "Yes I Do!"–are still good. The covers are uniformly excellent too, marrying the group’s casual abuse of two B-52’s songs ("Gimme Back My Man" and "Song for a Future Generation") with a dark, leering take on Cracker’s "Euro-Trash Girl" and a stark stutter through the Normal’s "Warm Leatherette." The latter, however, is the only moment when there’s any edge at all. The surfaces are jagged on The Re-Releases of the Un-Releases, but underneath them, there’s a sniggering familiarity. The sharpest daggers here, like the put-downs on "Yes I Do!" ("Cash flow’s gone low/To the bank to get my dough/PC/To Microsoft/Got my friend to buy me a loft") are used to slice down the already ridiculous. I’d argue that Chicks on Speed are a total scam if there weren’t substantial pleasures in being taken by them. It would be like arguing that the Beach Boys sold us a California that never existed. Yeah. So what? It sounds just fine.

Death by Chocolate’s record builds retro-psychedelia and prepubescent subli/meditations on candy, horses and poetry (enunciated in a posh Brit accent by chambermaid Angela Faye Tillett from Clacton on Sea) into Trojan horses that smuggle in some kinky and violent stuff. This eponymous record’s perverse agenda of sex and drugs and pop ’n’ roll is so cleverly disguised by its musical anachronisms and girly spoken word that you might merely glide over it or dismiss it as mere bubblegum fluff. Rip off the frosting, however, and the cake beneath is flavored with Gainsbourgian lemon (incest) and crawling with maggots of Sadean cruelty.

Death by Chocolate’s agenda is clear from the first snatch of spoken word on the album, "Mustard Yellow," where the reverie of yellow descriptions turns quickly to mustard gas. Later on the album, "Red" offers us "foxes" and "traffic lights" and "dangerous exciting jam." But you knew that death was lurking from the band’s name. The sex and drugs that shoot through this very queer (in the old school sense) album are equally potent. Dudley Moore’s goofy psychedelic timepiece "The L.S. Bumble Bee" turns up with a backing track that turns it into a near cousin of "Let’s Go Away for Awhile." (That’s killing two birds with one stone.) "My Friend Jack" obliterates the line between the horse romances of little girls and acid in the same way that Gainsbourg turned every lollipop lick into fellatio on "Les Sucettes."

And then there’s "The Land of Chocolate," which percolates and bubbles as if Willy Wonka was the cruel Marquis himself and winds up with a kind of chocolate orgasm that has Ms. Tillett gushing, "You’ve got chokkie bits all over the sofa/ and then on the back of your slacks/Oh no!/It’s everywhere!" The sheer perversity of all this makes one wish that the music on this record was a bit less derivative. At moments, it seems like Death by Chocolate samples more than Chicks on Speed do. There’s that bit of the Doors’ "Light My Fire" on "A B & C," while "The Salvidor [sic] Dali Murder Mystery" hangs its hat on the Monkees’ "I’m a Believer" as ruthlessly as any one of Puffy’s hits. Yet these blatant cops aren’t the taste that’s left in your mouth by Death by Chocolate. This record rearranges the chocolates in the box with menace and fills them with stuff that is definitely bad for you. Death by Chocolate leaves a very distinct and unsettling impression that Chicks on Speed can only dream of conveying.

Richard Byrne

FOR
Maggi, Pierce and EJ (EMP)

Maggi, Pierce and EJ are a bizarre little trio hailing from Philly that sound like they’re from the backwoods of Pennsylvania–they ply an almost hillbilly/folkie/Okie persona. Purposely obscure (they don’t reveal their last names) and decidedly down-home (they’re always being photographed out of doors), this collective is an interesting driblet of mustard on the picnic table of contemporary sounds and visions. And this album in particular is sure to garner them some credibility with the vanguard of contemporary folkies because it’s dedicated to one of its most woeful casualties, Jeff Buckley.

FOR is a damn good album. The first thing one notices about Maggi, Pierce and EJ–besides the rustic embellishments like plinking banjo –is Maggi’s voice, which soars to trilling heights of fancy on numbers like "Space." She’s not one of those trendy chanteuses who sings "bad"; she’s more the possessor of some sweet pipes in the Emmylou Harris/Joni Mitchell vein and she really hits the high notes on the excellent "J Bird," perhaps the centerpiece of the album. Scuffling along to an almost evangelical 60s-style blues pattern, it bubbles with the mildly psychedelic ethereal quality of something like It’s a Beautiful Day, centering around the verse, "I dreamed I had died and gone to heaven"–that must be a reference to the Buckler, and at the end they even team up for some chorale Grateful Dead-style harmonizing. Next song, "Open Spaces," has a lot of weird psychedelic "space" too–I think the Phish kids would like this trio as well, and in fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Maggi, Pierce and EJ have played warm-up for a lot of hippie-fests. Then, too, Buckley fell in with that crowd as well. Wasn’t he the only male allowed at Lilith?

Maggi, Pierce and EJ sound like Tim Buckley too, but the point is, tribute or no, this album is made by three individuals (and a handful of hired hands to embellish the songs with different textures) and it sounds remarkably unlike anything else I’ve heard lately. There’s a log-rolling texture to "Not Hurting" that eerily conjures up the soul-devouring tumult of the river Buckley drowned in–and Maggi, Pierce and EJ sound like they were right there to witness the grim occurrence firsthand. They shed their own river of tears on this album, and it’s one of the most heartfelt tributes I’ve ever heard. "Butterfly" is even more harrowing–just Maggi and a piano, singing "the river took your soul." Even the cartoon inside the sleeve, showing death’s sad procession in blunt, childlike strokes, is enough to make you start bawling, whether you knew the guy or not. In the end, it makes a statement about just how tragically short life really is, and how abrupt death is.

This album isn’t maudlin, however–it’s just very vivid and realistic, like a drop of somebody else’s blood that somehow gets in your mouth, and you taste it all day. There’s unreconstructed folk-psych like "12/12" (named after the date Jeff died) and even a rock-out jam in the midst of "Bare" that brings to mind the Butthole Surfers. In the end, Maggi, Pierce and EJ are a polymorphous unit with many skills and talents and a lot of heart and soul as well (as this "tribute" attests). Far from being cosmic interlopers, they are luminous pathfinders of the soul parade.

Joe S. Harrington

Atlas Eclipticalis & Winter Music/103
John Cage (Asphodel)

Cheap Imitation
John Cage (Ampere)

Rainforest II /Mureau
John Cage (New World)

Text Pieces I
John Cage (Mode)

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
John Cage (Montaigne Naïve)

I own more John Cage records than anything else: at last count I had 45 of them. But the slew of recent reissues and previously unreleased recordings that have been popping up in shops around town has pushed the number far higher. Here are some of the highlights:

Atlas Eclipticalis & Winter Music/103 is two long works stretched out over four CDs. Cage liked the idea of two different pieces being played at the same time. Atlas Eclipticalis (derived from star charts) is for a full orchestra and Winter Music is for solo piano. They have nothing to do with each other: they just happen at the same time in the same space. I saw a performance of this work right after Cage died at Carnegie Hall and there was David Tudor, surreally sitting in the middle of the stage playing Winter on piano, surrounded by a huge orchestra playing Atlas as if nothing else were going on. This recording was made shortly afterwards and features Tudor and the Orchestra of the S.E.M Ensemble. Also included is 103, written for 103 instruments. The piece was scored to be played without a conductor; Petr Kotik felt somewhat differently and went ahead and conducted it, much to the chagrin of Cagean purists. The result is a co(s)mically glacial experience that makes its hour-and-a-half duration feel like three.

Merce Cunningham loved Erik Satie’s music, so in 1969, when he wanted use Satie’s "Socrate" for a dance and was denied permission, Cunningham had Cage simply subject Satie’s piece to chance operations. The result was Cheap Imitation, a piece for solo piano. This recording, originally issued on the Italian Cramps record label, features Cage playing the piece at Mills College in 1976. Cage was never known for his virtuosity on the keyboard (which is why he worked so closely with geniuses like Tudor), but because this piece is relatively simple to play, it’s rife with a humbling passion. And a lovely analog haze washes over the production, layering it in days gone by. At Cage’s request, certain notes from different takes were spliced in, providing a curious question of authenticity years before authenticity and plunderphonics became commonplace.

Rainforest II/Mureau is another simultaneous performance, this time Tudor playing his own electronic composition Rainforest and Cage doing the solo vocal work called Mureau. Tudor’s sound is unmistakable and is derived from homemade electronics so complex that people have had trouble recreating them since his death a few years ago (he left few instructions as to how they went together). This recording was made for German radio in 1972 and features Tudor’s squeaky circuitry mixed with Cage’s droney vocal treatment of Thoreau texts. It’s far less accessible than their earlier Indeterminacy, lacking Cage’s charmingly narrative stories and Tudor’s crisp and often hilarious electronic intrusions. Instead, this is an arcane, slippery and muddily abstract affair that makes no concessions to the listener.

There’s been a movement in avant-literary circles where a lot of attention is being paid to John Cage as an innovative writer. His "writing through" of modernist classics from Joyce and Pound found a form which he called a "mesostic" (think vertical acrostic). On the double CD Text Pieces I, Cage reads from three of his works, dating from 1973 to 1988. While chopping up texts from sources like Jasper Johns and telling stories about the painter Morris Graves, Cage drifts in and out of sense. Cage, ever the gentleman, gives an introduction to an 80-minute piece where he tells the audience that there’s a good chance that they might get bored and that they should feel free to leave at any time they wish. It’s a good thing that it’s Cage reading his own works: read by anyone else, this set would be a snooze, but in Cage’s own unmistakable voice, it’s music.

The fabulously talented double bassist Joëlle Léandre takes on a gang of Cage classics on The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, from the title cut, which is Léandre singing and rapping on her bass with her knuckles, to a half-hour-long rendition of 1984’s Ryoanji, which Cage wrote for her. Built on sliding tones to a steadily dull percussive beat, this piece is typical of Cage’s spare, late works. The most fun piece on the disc is Léandre’s homage to Cage, which consists of Cage’s prepared piano samples mixed with bits of Léandre’s mouth sounds, the result sounding more like an oompah band than anything remotely Cagean.

Kenneth Goldsmith