Minimal Man - The Poetics of Disintegration

It's almost too easy to hold forth on San Francisco's post-punk scene, which between the late '70s and early '80s gave birth to some of the most revolutionary acts in all of new wave. Those sounds and those imaginaries have undergone a rapid process of canonization, analyzed in painstaking detail by magazines, websites and publications of every stripe. What's more, the bands that shook the scene to its core – incidentally one of the points of no return for American alternative culture – are name-dropped day in, day out by anyone who, rightly or wrongly, believes themselves the legitimate heir to that legacy. While in England post-punk experimentation found its heavy hitters in the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, the American noise avant-garde – less illuminated by the media spotlight, despite the information-scrambling stunts of the Residents – developed its syncretic languages chiefly in the Bay Area. A collaborator of Throbbing Gristle and Factrix, and artistically active in San Francisco during those years, performer Monte Cazazza embodied the liaison between these two worlds, animated by the same artsy, countercultural fascinations. In brief: proto-situationist drift, loathing of the system, cut-rate conspiracy theorizing, performance art, theories on mind control, multimedia practice, deviant communication, and, when not necrophilia, out-and-out extreme nihilism.

Favored by the dark, decadent atmosphere of certain downtown neighborhoods, San Francisco's post-punk scene could count on a good number of sharp minds operating in the right place at the right time. Venues like Café Flor, the Deaf Club, the Mabuhay and the Temple Beautiful provided an ideal setting for cultural exchange, becoming a gathering point for musicians, filmmakers, actors and performers of every stripe. Ralph and Subterranean Records captured that ferment, acting as its sounding board.

While in the other capital of American alternative music, New York, musicians moved between lofts and low-rent rock clubs, drawing at once from subcultures and high culture and thus forging that distinctive blend of codes that would become one of the Rubik's cubes of post-new-wave American rock, San Francisco's post-punk scene sailed, or rather sank, into the sludge of obscure, degraded languages, at times provocatively obscene. Freakery elevated to essence, lifestyle and music. The legacy of the psychedelic era, the proliferation of music fanzines (RE/Search, Search And Destroy, Damage), the relative permissiveness of the local administration – all were unmistakable signs of just how much artistic ferment was in the air in the city. Running alongside it, on parallel circuits only occasionally crossing paths, was the Bay Area's punk and hardcore community, likewise driven by major bands such as Dead Kennedys, Avengers, Nuns. Somewhere in between stood Crime.

In this San Francisco of another time, inhabited by a handful of misfits and art-world heretics, Patrick Miller became one of the scene's most influential and respected, if little-known, heroes. Miller was born in Glendale in 1952. An art and design student at Sonoma State University, he moved to San Francisco in the late '70s, where he found the right atmosphere to give shape to his anti-artistic visions. Named after the low-income residents of the Fillmore district, Minimal Man was initially conceived as a vehicle for producing soundtracks for Miller's amateur films.

In the city, Miller came into contact with the Subterranean crowd, with Tuxedomoon, and with the future Factrix members Bond Bergland, Cole Palme and Joseph T. Jacobs. The four played together for a while under the Minimal Man name. Miller is said to have been a difficult character, described by some as a loner driven by a deeply antagonistic spirit. Lending some credence to that account, a falling-out with Palme, Bergland and Jacobs led to the birth of Factrix on one hand, and, on the other, defined the Minimal Man project as Miller's own solitary, misanthropic creation.

Anti-music. After their early, legendary shows at the Deaf Club, one music critic labeled the hallucinatory, frigid post-punk quagmire of Minimal Man "anti-music" – a tangle of screams, synths and tar-black sounds drawn from edits of pre-recorded tape. And it's easy to believe it, given the quality of the studio recordings. Here's the thing: despite the San Francisco scene having received ample coverage, despite the reissue of some of their records and the omnipresence of the web, Minimal Man still struggle to find proper (posthumous) recognition beyond a small circle of devotees. Perhaps that's only natural, given the strongly "dark industrial" (in heavy quotation marks) bent of their sound. It wouldn't be fair, though, if this stemmed from a low opinion of Miller's work, at least on the early albums. The quiet oblivion that has shrouded his figure has, in some ways, mirrored the fate of another crucial figure of late-'70s San Francisco, Ricky Williams, founder of Sleepers and Toiling Midgets, as well as a member of the early incarnations of Crime and Flipper. Truth be told, in Williams' case, time has proven a fairer judge.

Less influential than Chrome, less brilliant than the Residents, less overwhelming and unbridled than Flipper, less extreme than Factrix, not quite as arty as Tuxedomoon, Minimal Man forged a middle-ground sound, able to fuse the experimental drive of extreme noise avant-gardism (Monte Cazazza, Factrix) with a considerable melodic appeal, one that would emerge most fully during Miller's European period.

The grueling bleakness of early Minimal Man winked at the bleak New York of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. Even more so, The Shroud Of foreshadows certain traits of the early Swans' sound, and beyond that, its fiercely tribal streak reveals kinship with one of Gira's favorite bands, Circle X.

Made up of a trio consisting of Miller, Andrew Baumer (bass, sax) and Lliam Hart (drums), plus a handful of additional musicians – among them Steven Brown of Tuxedomoon, on sax – the thirteen tracks of The Shroud Of give off the same stench of rotting corpse exuded by Factrix's Scheintot. Here, Minimal Man's post-punk stops just short of spilling over into pure noise, while still bearing clear industrial undertones in its rhythms and, above all, in its compositional processes.

The Shroud Of is Burroughs rendered as hideous montages of diseased noise, sounds that conjure disturbed images and radioactive wastelands. Miller's voice rings out muffled, as if recorded in a room padded with cotton wool. His martial, disjointed screams make the atmosphere even more alienating, while the lashes of synth – however hideously disfigured – are among the few elements able to sketch out even the faintest hint of a melodic line.

Minimal and deliberately lo-fi, the sound of The Shroud Of comes across as agonizingly repetitive, built on noise patterns replicated with obsessive regularity. In this abyss of calculated primitivist fury, at least a couple of tracks stand out for their faintly pop shading: "Now I Want It All" and the opening "Loneliness" wouldn't have been out of place in Warsaw's repertoire. The unsettling cover art was drawn by Miller himself.

For some reason doctors, pharmacologists and nurses are drawn to my music

The impenetrable fog of The Shroud Of begins to lift with the second album, preceded by the seven-inch Two Little Skeletons / Tired Death. More conventional in its production, less extreme in its noise approach, and more devoted to song form, the still-excellent Safari nonetheless shows a frightening charge of negativity and viciousness. The tracks follow one another as if forming a single military march. Still, these are songs, however raw and convoluted, with scraps of chorus and hints of melodic lines. The noise sludge of The Shroud Of becomes a mere backdrop. Miller works with a proper band now, so the drums step in decisively to mark the rhythms, the guitar riffs become intelligible, showing faint funk inflections that lend the compositions an even stronger sense of groove. Miller's tangled bark, however, remains steeped in boredom and spite.

Safari is once again a record of pure mental unease and leaden atmospheres, aggressive and heavy. In its punk-oriented tracks ("You! You!", "Shadows Pay A Visit"), Minimal Man come across as an ideal missing link between the Crisis of Douglas P. and Tony Wakeford and Swans. It's Swans again -- the ones that came after "Children Of God" -- who can be invoked where the expressionistic use of keyboards ("Show Time", "2 Little Skeletons", "Pull Back The Bolt") turns the sound into a kind of drunkenly lurching tank.

1985 is the year of change. Following the example of his fellow countrymen Tuxedomoon, Miller moves to Belgium and makes contact with the thriving local scene. A very active scene, driven by labels like Crepuscule, Crammed, Antler, KK, Play It Again Sam, which played host to both leading figures and second-tier acts of British and American post-punk. Preceded by the EP Sex Teacher, Sex With God reveals a clear shift in perspective, evidently the result of the new atmosphere he was breathing in on European soil.

Minimal Man's new outlook contemplates resignation rather than aggression and spite. The sound of Sex With God bears the mark of British-style post-punk and Belgian and Dutch coldwave. The synthetic modulations of "I Can See" and "A Better World" are in line with what Cabaret Voltaire, Minny Pops and Klinik were producing, while "To Hold You" even hints at ebm temptations, a genre much loved (and played) in Belgium at the time. Clean yet steeped in a subliminal tension and unease, the sound of Sex With God occasionally opens up into strikingly evocative atmospheric passages. In the gorgeous, searing "He/She", it's almost like listening to a slightly more deviant Minimal Compact, where Miller's emotional charge overflows from every single vocal line, despite the apparent impassiveness of the singing. "Sex Teacher" is on the same wavelength, though it reclaims the martial pace of early Minimal Man. Put simply, the album is a little gem.

Released on Play It Again Sam in 1986, Slave Lullabyes features the participation of Peter Principle and Luc Van Lieshout, of Tuxedomoon. The record continues along the paths traced by Sex With God, indeed pushing some of its traits to extremes. While the mechanical rhythms attempt to reclaim the noise-oriented approach of the early days, the vocals lose their martial edge. At times strings and overly polished synthetic sounds appear. Despite containing a few good tracks, the album proves too heterogeneous, indeed anything but cohesive. Coldwave, minimal synth, industrial noise and more generic post-punk coexist without ever finding a unifying thread. Not to mention that the gothic component dangerously takes over in a few spots ("I Wish", "War At Nite").

Miller seems unsure of which direction to take. That impression is confirmed by the following Hunger Is All She Has Ever Known. While the record as a whole drifts into the mediocrity of a stifled, aimless post-punk, the ambient openings of a few compositions pave the way for the novelties of Pure.

Released in 1988, Pure leaves more than a few open questions about Miller's career, showing how Mr. Minimal Man often found himself perfectly in tune with trends and the times, at times even getting ahead of them. Glacial and metallic-tinged, Pure is nothing less than an isolationist album, of the kind that would be codified in the '90s by Mick Harris's Lull and by Justin Broadrick's Final. Foresight? Coincidence? Influence? Hard to say, but the fact remains that the ten tracks on Pure sound so detached they'll chill you to the bone. The cold seeps into your bones and seems never to let go. Anguish and alienation give way to a feeling of isolation.

The record is more than decent, perhaps not entirely accomplished, but able to look further ahead than the time in which it was conceived. If you happen to come across it, don't let it slip away.

In the early '90s Miller returns to California. He abandons the Minimal Man project and starts working as an interior decorator. Tormented by personal demons and drug abuse, he dies in 2003 after contracting hepatitis C. In 2004 Ltm reissues The Shroud Of. Mr Neil "The Game" Strass commemorates his achievements in an article in the New York Times.

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