Amy Denio’s Playful Noise
Music review, 5/19/99
AMY DENIO Greatest Hits
(Spoot Music/Unit Circle)
SUE ANN HARKEY Fulcrum
(Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures)
WELLWATER CONSPIRACY Brotherhood of Electric
(Time Bomb/BMG)
While, or perhaps because, few outsiders were paying attention, Seattle’s quietly become a major center for theTentacle zine calls “adventuresome” or “creative” music. One might also call it post-jazz (even though not all of its practitioners improvise), or “ambient” (even though not all of its practitioners play softly).
Amy Denio simply calls it “Spoot,” referring to one particular effect in her repertoire of sounds.
Of course, this music’s uncategorizability has been one asset in keeping it from becoming corporatized. Another is its supposed highbrow inaccessibility.
But that’s exaggerated. A lot of this avant tuneage, particularly Denio’s, is very easy to get into. It’s a playful noise, full of the fun of just playing around (albeit executed by someone who knows damn well just how to play around).
And play she does. Guitars, bass, drums, “found” percussion, drum machines, accordion, sax, vocals, and assorted programming shticks. As often as not, her vocals are treated as just another instrument. Some of the songs have lyrics in assorted foreign languages; many of the ones in English don’t tell stories so much as they collect syllables and words that fit the melodies.
While Denio’s never had any industry-official “hits,” she’s been recording since 1987 for assorted indie labels on two continents, under a vast assortment of band names. Among the ensembles represented on this disc alone:Tone Dogs, Curlew, (EC) Nudes, Pale Nudes, FloMoFlo, and perhaps her best-known creation, the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet (which continues to gig after she’s left it).
Despite the vast array of instrumentations, dates, and personnel (some tracks are Denio multi-track solos, on one she’s only a backup vocalist), the whole thing fits together beautifully. It’s because Denio maintains a consistant aesthetic to all her works.
She employs alterate tunings and scales, unfamiliar (and shifting) time measures, and many of the other avant-composer tricks music students have learned from Harry Partch, Schoenberg, Varese, and the Knitting Factory clique. But her goal is never to be exclusionary, nor to merely impress us with her learning or her virtuosity.
She’s an artiste, but she’s an entertainer first. She engages her listeners, luring them whimsically into her alluring soundscapes, then sending them into new ways of hearing (and therefore seeing) the world around them.
Sue Ann Harkey’s been exploring similar musical-art-entertainment territories (in Seattle, New York, Arizona, and Britain) even longer than Denio. Now approaching her 20th year in the genre, she’s just put out a CD calledFulcrum on her own label, Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures. As the company name implies, Harkey’s a little further along the cosmic-ambient side of the soundscaping game than Denio. She’s also closer to post-jazz improvving, at least in this particular recording (which features local avant-music all-stars Lori Goldston, Fred Chalenor, and Tucker Martine).
But, like Denio, Harkey entices and embraces listeners in a fully-realized alternate aural universe. Some of it’s hypnotic; some of it’s ritualistic; some of it even sounds a tiny bit like early Kraftwerk. But it’s all enveloping and seductive and more life-affirming than any pedestrian new-age stuff could ever be.
Elsewhere in post-prog land, Wellwater Conspiracy (ex-Monster Magnet member John McBain and the former Soundgarden rhythm section) has delivered a new batch of neo-acid power pop. It’s bright and bouncy, it’s upbeat and depressing, it’s contrived and free-flowing, it’s spacy and down-to-earth, it’s tons of fun.
It’s even got a song titled “Hal McBlain,” McBain’s self-comparison to the ubiquitous L.A. studio drummer Hal Blaine. (The song “Born With A Tail,” by the way, is no relation to the Supersuckers’ track of the same name.)
