Tuxedomoon

With "Half-Mute", Tuxedomoon pick up a board and ride down off the new wave of certain canonical acts (Pere Ubu or Television) to land somewhere mystical, assuming the authority of film directors and conducting a kind of illiterate's jazz combo.
Deranged and devoted to DIY tinkering, they stage a small theatre of the absurd that would win many converts, starting with the Residents themselves, who not only signed them to their own label (Ralph) but also referenced them repeatedly on the schizophrenic platform of "God In Three Persons" (1988), another record for scrambled minds.
We're in the San Francisco Bay, waiting for the next earthquake in a club for intellectuals.

On this occasion reduced to a trio (Blaine L. Reininger on violin, Steven Brown on sax, Peter Principle on bass), but at times aided on vocals by the conceptual Winston Tong and in "visions" by set designer Bruce Geduldig, they puncture electronics with tweezers of funk and wind instruments, keeping the hinges in place through the use of keyboards (strummed by pretty much everyone) acting as pianolas: in doing so they switch on a lightbulb in a storeroom full of history and ponder how to recycle it, inventing, in the process, a new way of wearing the halo of the pioneers.
Nothing here is close to what, with a touch of superficiality, they'd go on to show in soundtracks for ballets and films both real and imaginary; much is akin to certain ambitions of the finest Canterbury Sound, and everything can be traced back to an avant-garde model built on shrill, mournful, gothic, ferocious sax and violin.
This is new wave forged on an abandoned bench, using makeshift instruments and concepts that lend strength to the forced acceptance of reality as it is.

There are plenty of themes here, drawn from a beloved store of cinematic references, from studies of ancient civilizations, and from the alien sounds of vintage free jazz. Emblematic is the atmosphere conjured by "Nazca", a tribute to the Peruvian civilization famous for its geometric animal figures: we're in one of the most scorched and barren territories in the world, musically and otherwise. And so it falls to a sax, out of tune and weeping, to spread the scent of desolation and trace those enormous lines, especially when brooding keyboard chords seem to be calling for help. It lasts only a few minutes, but it's clear that something doesn't add up with what we usually remember.
Likewise, the leap back to the 1930s of "James Whale" seems like far more than a small tribute to the master behind the first Frankenstein, with bells and thunderstorms marking out a classic horror soundscape, without any concrete outburst of fear or menacing faces. Again just a handful of minutes, marked by a funereal tone and the absence of any stage instrumentation.

Tuxedomoon travel on pure thought, roam freely across tonalities and remain consistently original, driven by the thread of improvised arrangement. There's no getting around it: whatever seems to echo something else is disavowed the very next instant.
Indeed, if "Volo Vivace" opens on a bassline that could be lifted straight from a Joy Division record, it soon turns into a gathering, a meeting of objects and flowers, with violin pizzicato making quite a racket. The same happens in "59 To 1", which sounds like it sprang from the mind of James Chance of the Contortions, only to then settle into linear drum-machine breaks and a sax that can't simply be filed under funk. The wind player's gusts are almost always unhinged, yet remain essential to the whole cliché.

Genuinely curious, too, is the diabolical detour of "Tritone (Music Diablo)", which plays at trilling away to scare children out of their wits, and "Loneliness", built around yet another keyboard riff reminiscent of a Captain Beefheart blues, one that will resurface later, in disguise, in a passage of "...If I Die I Die" by Virgin Prunes.
These are all flashes that settle comfortably within the 240-second cage, allowing just enough breathing room under the banner of an ongoing sense of madness. The thread is held together, in loose form, by brass and strings, in turn backed by a marketplace of other instruments one would struggle to call sane.

"Half-Mute" is a record edging close to gold, sealed on every side by instinctive performances that, not by chance, present it as sharp-dressed, handsome and yet sinister all the same. The nocturnal notes, unlike so many currents that overindulge in them, are well contextualized and only turn chilling when truly needed. This isn't a work stitched together out of pure darkness, but rather a reworking of John Coltrane's free spiritualism in rock form, with all the appealing consequences that entails. Just cue up "Fifth Column" for a moment to intimidate the ear and make it resistant to the usual throwaway comparison with certain lulls in "Giant Steps", a classic among jazz classics. Steven Brown dehydrates his curved instrument, subjecting it to the stress of calling out to who knows what.

The only actual song on the list is perhaps "What Use?", not just because it's built on a deep "speak-singing" delivery, but mainly for its treacherous, technical rhythms, almost as if the second generation of King Crimson had lent a hand. It remains a one-off, though not a detrimental one, within a body of work that clearly needed just the right pause. So much so that, both in "7 Years" and in the closing, unusually long "Km/Seeding The Clouds" (which is visited by a distorted guitar), those same perfectly mosaic-like outbursts are once again sealed inside a smokestack, still under the insistence of a pseudo-electronic drumming and beneath the usual tenor's lament.

The year of grace is 1980, not far removed from kindred upheavals.
If Pere Ubu ordered their tremors to fall in line with industrial cadences, if Tom Verlaine shifted the circuitry onto the guitar control panel, Tuxedomoon carry it straight into the screening room.

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13/11/2006