Red Crayola - The combo of outrageous noisemakers

Around the mid-Sixties, the psychedelic era was living through its crucial moment: the spread of LSD had by now reached worrying levels, and bands influenced by the new "lysergic" aesthetic were springing up (ahem) pretty much everywhere, although it was above all California that represented the "promised land" of the new movement, thanks to acts such as Doors, Love, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, etc. Here, music ended up flowing into a much broader cultural revolution, capable, if not quite of overturning the social order, then at least of destabilizing it considerably.

But even in reactionary, traditionalist Texas, musicians emerged who were able to leave a deep mark (and for that reason a hard one to decipher) on the development of popular music. Texan bands operated in a climate of total indifference, far from any commercial temptation and bent on experimenting with sounds that often verged on the most extreme and dissolute noise-making. Red Crayola (originally Red Krayola) were the band that most successfully managed to fuse the psychedelic deviations then in vogue with the extreme experimentalism of musique concrète and aleatoric music. Mayo Thompson, in fact, besides being a free-jazz enthusiast, was also particularly drawn to the work carried out, within contemporary music, by Edgard Varèse and John Cage. He also looked with respect and admiration at the "total music" of Frank Zappa, while simultaneously absorbing the influence of Texan psychedelic garage rock, whose main exponents were the seminal 13th Floor Elevators. Red Crayola's music, then, turned out to be a fascinating yet obscure synthesis of heterogeneous materials: a sort of "avant-garde music for a rock combo".

Having played in 73 Balalaikas, a satirical folk outfit, in 1966 Thompson crossed paths with multi-instrumentalist Frederick Barthelme, with whom he put together the first nucleus of Red Crayola. With the arrival of Steve Cunningham, the duo became a combo, also surrounded by some fifty friends who played a bit of everything (from spoons to an actual motorcycle!): Thompson christened them the "Familiar Ugly", following the example of Zappa's Mothers Of Invention. Having signed with International Artists, the band began touring far and wide across Texas, playing wherever they could and often for a truly tiny audience. Shortly after, once they'd found a certain balance, the band decided to put together their first record. Recorded live in a single night, The Parable Of Arable Land (1967) is, even today, one of the most shattering records ever made. The work consists of 6 tracks, separated by instrumental bridges called "Free Form Freak-Out", totally improvised (in a wild, delirious fashion), the fruit of the high induced by an acid trip. These instrumental passages, besides having a liberating (almost Dionysian) significance, also represent a kind of anarchic, primordial counterpoint to the songs they punctuate. One almost has the impression of a titanic, dialectical clash between the spatial greed of noise and the musicians' attempt to dominate it, to channel it into pseudo-rational structures, with the intent of giving rise, at the same time, to a reflection on the meaning of sound, of silence, and of their epic confrontation across endless desert wastelands. The opening seconds of the record pour onto the listener a devastating apotheosis of sounds and noises shooting out from every direction, chasing each other in threatening spirals, creating an effect of absolute emotional impact, a completely dark and impenetrable backdrop, born of dilated visions and ancestral emotions. From the magma of this formless, atonal, ungrammatical sonic downpour, a galloping rhythm slowly emerges, marked out by the bass and by indistinct percussion, operating at a distance with a scenic, menacing effect. "Hurricane Fighter Plane" is made even murkier by a sinisterly Floydian organ. The track lives on an imploded tension, coiled within the folds of a psyche under assault by lysergic mercenaries. Another derailing improvisation (in which literally everything is played, in a furious climate of collective madness), and then up pops "Transparent Radiation", where a harmonica echoes in the background, beyond Thompson's voice, with an out-of-phase, solitary sound, overshadowed by the sleepwalking advance of the bass.

The "Free Form Freak-Out" that follows is, if anything, even more anarchic and unbridled, made up of indecipherable vocalizations, ethereal guitar dissonances (Thompson), tumultuous pianistic ascents and percussive raids. Then comes "War Sucks", a war dance against the tragedy of war, in which Thompson's declamation, steeped in an underlying agit-prop emphasis, rises above a percussive fabric that fills every corner, unfolding the temporality of its advance within a tragic, all-consuming scenario.

After a whirlwind of insidious dissonances, it's the turn of "Pink Stainless Tail", something at the crossroads between United States Of America and the song form: it is certainly the most overwhelming track on the record, which barely has time to mark out its final beat before being swept away by spectral guitars and frighteningly concrete chemical fumes: all within a climate saturated with post-atomic impressionism, whirlwinds of uncontrolled delirium that dig psychic furrows and let Thompson's screams plunge in vain into the void, swallowed by the chaos of a space-time whose language proves arcane and incomprehensible because it borders on silence. The final track is "Former Reflections Enduring Doubt", a desolate psychedelic fresco, perfect in closing the circle after so much chaotic glittering. The sonic fabric vibrating beneath this seemingly senseless chaos is wonderfully evocative. The beauty that glimmers in the distance, buried beneath layers of noise and horrifyingly transfigured flickers of melody, is born of a gaze that has dared, for a moment, to turn its attention to the bottomless abyss awaiting the completion of our time. A tragic beauty, because it is mindful of the tumultuous darkness, yet at the same time wrapped in a blazing light. Parable Of Arable Land destroys every reference to the song form, feeding on noises that swim freely and disarticulated, creating a space that, if it possesses any rationality, is certainly one unknown to us. Sound and noise become indistinguishable, each continuously blurring into the other, in a radical experiment that counts Varèse and Cage among its acknowledged masters.

The second album, Coconut Hotel, would be rejected by IA and would only be released in 1995 (the album was even more experimental than its predecessor! - but, ultimately, pretentious and inconclusive). After this rejection, the band decided to put together a less forbidding record (to put it mildly); God Bless The Red Crayola And All Who Sail With It (1968) turns out, however, to be more scattershot than Parable, and often a tad self-indulgent. The obsessive noise-making and the apocalyptic atmosphere that had defined their debut have almost entirely vanished; what remains is the attempt (often a successful one) to explore the creative possibilities of the song form, amid homages to the avant-garde of John Cage and Edgard Varèse ("The Shirt"), odd attempts at vaudeville ("Victory Garden"), crooked acid-folk ("Coconut Hotel", "Sherlock Holmes"), announcements of a forthcoming new-wave/no-wave ("Big", "Sheriff Jack", "The Jewels of Madonna"), surreal sketches for piano and strings ("Ravi Shankar: Parachutist"), blunt garage-rock ("Listen To This") and lo-fi ballads ("Tina's Gone to Have a Baby", "Save The House").

After this album, due to the poor commercial response, the band decided to split up. Thompson began his solo career. After founding a sort of multimedia laboratory in England ("Art And Language"), with which he engaged in a "meta-music" project, he arrived at his best record since Parable, namely Soldier Talk (1979), on which he is backed by none other than Pere Ubu. An austere yet dissolute work, Soldier Talk manages to condense Thompson's entire musical world within its grooves. One thus moves from free-jazz to post-punk, from blues to the most outrageous psychedelia. Centred on military-themed subjects (in the vein of the epochal "War Sucks"), the album makes use of post-modern arrangements, in a continuous sonic fragmentation. What Thompson cares about most, however, is above all harmonic disintegration, and the resulting, repeated outrage through flashes of total experimentation (see "X" in this regard). Among the members of Pere Ubu, it is above all keyboardist Allen Ravenstine who steals the show, with his synthetic, explosive impressionism.

Austere and dissolute, the "soldier's speech" aims at harmonic disintegration, opens up rifts of political provocation, bites into the senselessness of war. But the chaos is now organized, filtered through a crystal-clear militant design, crooked and sharp, like the guitar that defuses the fuse of "March no. 12", a strange, visionary day-after march complete with a panoramic trumpet.

The anaemic, off-key voice dominates and batters "On The Brink", a hypothesis of lopsided, surreal post-punk, but also absurd, as pataphysical as the little Rock In Opposition world of "Letter-Bomb". These are, very often, frenetic, hyperbolic dissertations, as dissolute as they are tendentially rational in their game of uprooted centres of gravity and indulged vanishing points ("Conspirators Oath"). Sure, there are also moments of eccentric divertissement ("March no. 14"), but these are fake oases, because what reigns supreme is the approach of collapse, the advent of negation, the delirium of survival at all costs in a world intimately torn apart and devoted to self-destruction (see the superb web of wrong notes, ghosts and wind-instrument torments of the title track, the absolute peak of the whole batch and the definitive high point of the historic Thompson/Pere Ubu convergence).

This is discipline for terminal neurotics ("Discipline"), gymnastics for contracted, ailing bodies in need of shouting and go-go revelry ("X"), sickly suites for defenceless souls running toward glory, ecstatic and raving ("An Opposition Spokesman"). Thompson too has his own "modern dance" ("Uh, Knowledge Dance"), but, after all, his is a fantasy that always gladly sinks into a "Wonderland" as ambiguous as it is intriguing.

The collaboration with Pere Ubu would lead Thompson to become a full member of the Cleveland band, with whom he would record "The Art Of Walking" (the wonderful "Horses" is his) and "Song Of The Bailing Man". Throughout the Eighties, Thompson would continue his path in the field of the most experimental rock (though perhaps it would be better to say: of music), in search of still unknown territories. But he would always do so amid general indifference.

In the Nineties, Thompson released four albums, the best of which is certainly Hazel, which came out in 1996 and was the fruit of a collaboration with David Grubbs, John McEntire, Jim O'Rourke and George Hurley. Hazel is concrete proof that Mayo still holds a place of real standing in the world rock landscape. Amid neo-psychedelic ballads that seem to evoke the ghost of Syd Barrett ("I'm So Blasé"), sonic fragmentations ("We Feel Fine"), Beefheart-like echoes ("Decaf The Plant"), concoctions of hip-hop and free-form music ("Father Abraham"), Thompson moves toward his own deeply personal musical illumination.

In 2001 the mini-album Blues Hollers And Hellos was released, more subdued and evocative in tone, the fruit of an infatuation with beatnik poetry.

In 2005 comes Introduction. Electro symphonies, marked out with an underground rigor (“L.G.F.”), bare-bones folk frameworks trembling to the sound of digital pulses (“Greasy Street”) and spells halfway between ambient and abstract psychedelia (“Elegy”) convey the sense of a historical yet timeless confluence. For the rest, it's the same magnificent world-outside-the-world (“Cruise Boat”), cradled by crepuscular ballads (the muted, melancholy crackle of accordion on “Breakout”, or the transcendent tension of the gorgeous elegy “When She Went Swimming”), often played out on the contrast between enveloping, droning electronics and a pathos that is entirely personal, truly "off-key" (“It Will Be Delivered”; “Puff”); or, again, held within a circle of aching romanticism (“Note To Selves”).

When, instead, they set about stripping the blues down with a venomously schizoid instinct, it's as if they were dropping Tom Waits's “Swordfishtrombones” into an alien universe, with elusive contours and a subliminal breath (“A Tale Of Two…”). These are moments that confirm a state of grace, an inspiration out of the ordinary, the kind that sustains the thoroughly "rational" hysteria of “Psy Ops”, post-punk in body and out-edelic in soul.

The punk charge hasn't completely faded. It remains, however, channeled within structures that, in a play of light and shadow, tone down its impact in a less explosive way, as happens for instance in “Vexations” or in the country gallop of “Swerving”. The disharmony of their world is something we know, deep down, to be more our own than we could ever imagine. That disharmony which, as in an endless half-sleep, makes the dreamlike vortex of “Bling Bling” a perfect union of reality and its transfiguration, delivering the final blow of an album that arrives as yet another revelation of an enormous genius.

And in the end Mr. Thompson returned to the "conceptual" collective Art & Language, with whom, between 1973 and 1983, he recorded three more or less interesting albums, straddling socio-political commitment and meta-music. With the help of his friend Jim O'Rourke (who, besides playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, also makes his weight felt as producer) good old Mayo and his cohorts transport us into a strange, ambiguous world made of folk refinements, psychedelic innocence and absent-minded intellectualism.

Sighs Trapped By Liars is, then, an album built on ambiguity. Hence a relatively well-defined stylistic crossover emerges, the offspring of seasons long past (certainly Rock In Opposition, for example), starting with the uninhibited yet deeply shy folk-prog mix of “Fairest Of All”, which in “Laughing At The Foot Of The Cross” reveals, just barely, a disoriented, emotionally lopsided face. The tones are subdued: here and there a splash of psychedelia (“Jumping Through the Mirror”), in docile suspension (“A Pest”, with a soft guitar abstraction) or, perhaps, still, within the bounds of a polite, tail-wagging divertissement (“Il Ne Reste Qu'A Chanter”).

But if the spheres are "lofty", the heart doesn't always leap the way it should – at most, it stretches, haughty and snobbish (“Hostage”). And if at times they spin their wheels a bit (“Jerry Fodor's Story”, “Perfection”, the title track), it must nonetheless be pointed out how capable Our Heroes are of flashes of class (the lounge-bossa of “The Big Vaction”; the eight pensive, stretched-out minutes, with dark piano spells, of “Four Stars: The Ideal Crew”; or, again, the Fairport Convention roots of “Igor Zabel's Song”).

A must-listen for anyone who loves the old wizard Mayo. For everyone else, a stylish pastime.

The collaboration between Red Krayola and the multimedia collective Art & Language continues with another conceptual work, Five American Portraits (2010), where the description, through words and music, of various figures—real or imagined—from American life immediately takes on (starting with the breezy blues-rock of “Wile E. Coyote”, indebted to Bo Diddley's “Roadrunner”) a meta-musical significance.

However, this time perhaps more than ever, it seems that the value of the music has been pushed entirely into the background. One could focus on the wordplay, on the "versification" of “President George W. Bush” and so on. But it would be utterly pointless, since, for example, the track in question leaves behind nothing but great boredom. Accompanied by a mellow choir, a female voice intones an elusive elegy, crossed by muted piano touches and distant puffs of sax. Then we move on to a rowdy, student-choir intonation, only to swerve back on track afterward…

Then there's the somnambulant, jazzy mood of “President Jimmy Carter” to reckon with, where patriotic songs suddenly push their way in. Yawns. More ambitious, “John Wayne” presents a varied stylistic spectrum and a surreal setting, amid melancholy passages, impro confusion and scattered noises… But, in the end, the most sincere moment is “Ad Reinhardt”, a piano sonata that blurs together with sax sneers and a hysterical voice.

Thompson is far from the finish line, but one can be certain that Parable Of Arable Land will forever remain his unsurpassed masterpiece, and one of the albums that made popular music great.

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