Laddio Bolocko

In the middle of a long conversation in late July, as the sun starts to lose some of its heat, Blake Fleming suddenly turns categorical and tells me: "Laddio Bolocko weren't part of any New York scene or movement. Ours was an in-between period, the age of monsters, the calm before Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lcd Soundsystem and Rapture. Back then, Laddio Bolocko were a sneaky explosion in a sea of nothing."

Let's clear up any misunderstanding right away: while the Nineties saw a renewed passion for no wave - that is, for the sounds that, starting from the late Seventies, had swept away the illusions of new wave and the falsely nihilistic spirit of punk, turning rock into a ritual of release for the most feral impulses of the human psyche, ideally aided by a healthy dose of musical illiteracy - New York's Laddio Bolocko always felt like outsiders, reluctant to share with anyone else their desire to make music as original as possible, even though, on closer inspection, there were certainly some affinities with other acts from what was also dubbed "now wave".

Be that as it may, Fleming, who was Laddio Bolocko's leader and indomitable drummer, recalls that, ultimately, his band was only interested in "pushing punk/hardcore, world music, free jazz, electronic music and improvisation toward new horizons, new directions, new combinations", well aware that rock was still a damn serious thing, despite the fact that proclamations of its demise had already been echoing for a few years.

Together with bassist Ben Armstrong and guitarist Drew St. Ivany, Fleming (who had made a name for himself in the seminal Dazzling Killmen, straddling noise-core and math-rock) had started playing in 1995 between Edwardsville and Alton, Illinois, a year before the fateful call of the Big Apple, where he arrived in the summer of the following year, not before touring with Zeni Geva as part of the "Freedom Bondage Tour".

In New York, Fleming ran into an old acquaintance, saxophonist Marcus DeGrazia, who had also occasionally played with Craw, a Cleveland band that had shared a few stages with Dazzling Killmen. Back then, the two had bonded over their shared love for John Coltrane's "Live In Seattle", an artist DeGrazia admired almost as much as his beloved Albert Ayler. The pair started meeting up often for long improvisations, armed with sax and drums.

Meanwhile, having also made their way to New York, Ben Armstrong and Drew St. Ivany had put together a band of their own, but the pull of their roots proved too strong, and so, at Fleming's invitation, they found themselves thrown into the new adventure of Laddio Bolocko, who within a matter of weeks established themselves as one of the most formidable musical forces around - despite a name that, at first glance, might have seemed downright farcical. In fact it was simply the name, deliberately mangled by Fleming himself, of a guy from Alton, a Greek immigrant restaurateur officially registered as Lotteo Balaco. "Taken out of context, that name was pretty enigmatic, and it evoked something intangible and fascinating. In music and in art, I love providing a frame in which imagination can take over."

It was in a $450-a-month rehearsal space that Laddio Bolocko set up their headquarters. To be precise, it was a rat-infested basement in an industrial building in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a Brooklyn neighborhood not unlike SoHo. There was no chance of taking a shower, but who needs to wash properly when you can play your music with no time limits and no need to worry about disturbing neighbors who weren't exactly keen on having their ears massaged by walls of noise, deranged grooves and ungainly saxophone lines? "In 1997, that part of Brooklyn was a real 'no man's land': a desolate industrial landscape with cobblestone streets and stables that looked like they'd stepped straight out of the film 'Gangs of New York'. After 5pm, once the few remaining factories closed down, we'd run naked through the streets and play frisbee, Budweiser bottles in hand, passing joints around, while Lower Manhattan loomed silently in the distance."

That slice of New York became a genuine muse for the band, crucial in binding together the various influences simmering beneath the surface of a music that grew more fascinating and explosive - and more singular - with each passing day.

"Marcus knew how to create circular, breathy sounds with his sax," Fleming recalls, "and he could also play epic melodies and anthems that stuck in your head, because he wasn't only interested in improvising according to the 'skronk' aesthetic. Among our influences, the most obvious are probably Can and This Heat, but early on we also listened a lot to the Beatles. Another constant reference for us was Brian Eno's 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy', along with Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis, Fred Frith, Massacre, Last Exit, T. Rex, plus all the African music I was listening to at the time."

By recording virtually every one of their rehearsals, Laddio Bolocko were able to go back to their tracks again and again, endlessly refining them. They played only instrumental music, and it was precisely this that led some critics to draw comparisons with Tortoise, with whom, in truth, they shared little more than a post- approach to rock material. While critics racked their brains trying to pin down their sound, Laddio Bolocko wore the indifference of record labels almost as a badge of honor, eventually releasing their debut album, "Strange Warmings Of Laddio Bolocko", on the self-run Hungarian label, paired with a cover that was "raw and iconic, a real symbol of power." Starting from Drew St. Ivany's original idea - the so-called "pussy legs" - the band developed it "working away in front of an old Mac computer."

Beyond the influences mentioned above, traces of math-rock can also be heard on this record, though on the whole its music might best be described as an unstable cross between the hypnotic circularity of kraut-rock, the anarchic visceral force of free-jazz, and the chaotic tension of the noisiest strains of rock, both in its more geometric and its more maximalist forms (think, for instance, of Glenn Branca).

"We didn't have a fixed method for writing and creating music," Fleming recalls once again. "Songs came about in various ways - some through group improvisation, while on other occasions one of us would bring in a riff or an idea for the rest of the group to improvise around until we'd carved out the core parts. But it could also happen that one of us showed up with something more fully formed, maybe with various parts already worked out. We worked on whatever we thought was 'good', regardless of how it had come about. We were the closest thing to a genuine 'collective' I've ever been part of."

Raw impact and the art of repetition are the watchwords around which "Goat Lips" blossoms, the track that opens the record, sketching out the beginnings of a sonic orgy that radicalizes the idea of a noise that's at once mathematical and hypnotic - so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if some already hear in it echoes of what, a few years later, would become the implacable, rationalist Orthrelm of "OV".

After the scant two minutes of "Call Me Jesus", a mighty, distorted post-industrial-age dance number that Shit And Shine must surely have worshipped during boredom-laden afternoons, it's time for "Nurser", one of the album's key moments. "This track," Fleming recalls, "grew out of a bass riff invented by Ben or Drew (I don't remember exactly which), which the latter ran through the first green Line 6 Delay pedal, giving him the inspiration to build the swelling layers of alien sonic apocalypse that close out the song."

This Heat's "Horizontal Hold" and motorik mechanics collide savagely in this track, where guitar and saxophone brush more than once against the skronk delirium of Borbetomagus, before giving way to a slow, relentless crescendo in which the bacchanal takes on psychedelic overtones, becoming an emblem of urban chaos.

If the jazz-noir of "The Man Who Never Was" is relatively more restrained, while still giving DeGrazia room to indulge his Ayleresque leanings, "Dangler" comes back swinging hard, delivering one of their most intense and reckless grooves. When only the bass is left pulsing in the background, barely scratched by a few electronic scrawls, the lyrical force of the uncompromising duel between horn and reed becomes even more intense.

What definitively makes Laddio Bolocko's undertaking titanic is the over thirty-four-minute-long "Y Toros", where the dronic minimalism of Tony Conrad, the Dionysian symphonism of Faust's "Krautrock" and the detached mumbling of Slint all converge. "Y Toros" was one of the most mature ideas Fleming brought to the band: "I recorded the original version on a 4-track Fostex I bought in Chinatown when I arrived in New York in the summer of 1996. The drums and the two guitar parts (which I made using an acoustic guitar and an SM57 with the gain maxed out, to get that delicious, hyper-saturated analog distortion) were instead recorded in the basement of my first apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."

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07/09/2025