Red Crayola

The music of the Red Crayola has a precise name: “free form freak-out”. Or rather, that's what it became the moment that, aided in no small part by an excessive use of drugs, it pushed past the pillars of noise, charting a course straight for Chaos. And yet it's as if Mayo Thompson paused for a moment to watch Chaos from a distance, only to then decide to release the tension born of that single, immeasurable vision into a musical brew of such visionary violence that at times it becomes almost unbearable.

At bottom, there isn't much difference between “Parable Of Arable Land” and an “Acid Test” as Ken Kesey might have staged one: there, gangs of “freaks” busy scrambling their brains with every kind of lysergic delicacy; here, a Texan band on the verge of total obscurity (read: “utter indifference to the record industry”) aided, yes indeed, by around a hundred people (mostly friends and acquaintances) with the express task of playing anything capable of producing a sound — or rather, a noise. And, just to stay on-trend, this fine bunch of “heads” was christened “Familiar Ugly”: essentially a shoddy technicolor version of Zappa's “Mothers”. Can you imagine the atmosphere in the room during these sessions? Basically a total sonic orgy, with Edgard Varèse, John Cage and Charles Ives occasionally materializing in the background, while the “Magical Mystery Tour” bus whisked the Beatles and co. safely away. Like Kesey, the Red Crayola were after madness, liberating anarchy. Except here the drugs serve only one purpose: making the demolition of rock's stylistic conventions even more radical, scrambled together at random and left to dry out under the blinding sun of the most drug-addled summer in rock history.

The whole record is steeped in an unreal atmosphere. You can recognize a few classic by-products of a lysergic trip: the sense of detachment from reality (almost as if framed within an alien, alienating “overworld”), the constant bombardment of the senses (achieved through a kind of psychedelic rarefaction of the sonic material), and the presence, here and there, of “sonic black holes” (genuine atonal upheavals capable of turning the listener into a modern-day bacchant). The key point, however, isn't so much the definitive elevation of noise to an essential component of rock music; the true greatness of the Red Crayola lies, rather, in having made that “noise” element intensely impressionistic, elevating it into an automatic writing of the human soul's most unexplored recesses. Thanks to this “psychic hyperrealism” applied to sound, the Houston band manages, in successive leaps across immense precipices, to make “forms” sprout — monstrously “floating” ones, but forms nonetheless.

Take, for instance, the devastating impact of the first “Free Form Freak-Out” (which opens the record): the sound/noise is that of a building collapsing in on itself. It's out of a sort of sonic/noise “overabundance” that suddenly that martial-marching bassline rises up, wrenching from chaos the shattered fragility of “Hurricane Fighter Plane”, whose opening seconds bring to mind a horde of barbarians pouring into the soul's boundless wastelands. Amid the metallic gusts of the following “Free Form Freak-Out” we are then assailed by new percussive tumult, asynchronous harmonica lines, flayed guitars and deformed screams. With the sudden soaring of “Transparent Radiation”, on the other hand, a desolate ridge unfurls, echoing with the harmonica's listless lament, where a sly bass toils away, its barely perceptible pulses marking imaginary boundaries behind the toxic crackle of the voice. Once again it's a collective bender that annihilates everything, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the antimilitarist invective of “War Sucks”, a terrifying tribal-cacophonic dance, infested with tiny melodic pollutants. The relentless, obsessive pulse of the instruments completely saturates the space; the music returns to its innermost root: rhythm.

The tension dissolves into a drunken glide of dissonances and synthetic bubbles (yet another “Free Form Freak-Out”), a prelude to “Pink Stainless Tail”, which invents the Chrome out of thin air through a dazzling hall-of-mirrors interplay between Thompson's guitar runs, the hammering bass, and dissolving spores that attack relentlessly from every side. Until we plunge once more along the edges of the void, submerged by subliminal voices and brain fragments, battered by a dark reverberation that, vulture-like, traces impossible trajectories over the prevailing catastrophe.

The noise-symphony of the title track unveils the mystery of forgotten zones, of landscapes where the gaze can do nothing but let itself be pitilessly turned to desert. Seemingly disjointed sounds point toward higher, more essential structures: it's as if we were faced with an exploded musical structure, its shards drifting free, never interacting with one another, like a futurist poem. In any case, even more evident here is the influence of the great Edgard Varèse, who believed that “sounds” themselves were the primary building blocks of music, relegating harmony, melody and rhythm to a decidedly secondary role. The wreckage turns into dissolution on the final “Free Form Freak-Out” (with bestial screams and instruments martyred to the point of the most convulsive, exhausting delirium): at moments, it seems to take shape Cage's dream of hearing all the world's music at once. And again: if Varèse conceived of music in rhythmic blocks, Thompson takes the road of noise-flows: in both cases, the result is staggering.

All that's missing is the resigned litany of “Former Reflections Enduring Doubt” to seal one of the most outrageous records in modern music. Not only that: the album also stands as a masterful study on the perception of sound and noise. With “Parable Of Arable Land”, the Red Crayola truly skirted (and often touched) the surface of chaos; here and there, they left just enough chinks of light for us to appreciate its terrifying shell made of endlessly mutating, abnormal forms.

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06/11/2006