United States Of America

Finding yourself wanting to travel from Los Angeles to New York in the era of late-'60s underground rock is a bit like saying you want to enter Apollo's Parnassus and its Muses in the age of Greek mythology. Joseph Byrd, cursed and misunderstood poet of the early Kentucky psych scene, did exactly that. Already an accomplished jazz player, he made his way to New York, into contact with the underground venues – the forge of rock in its golden age – with avant-garde musicians, and above all with the benevolent patronage of (of all people) Andy Warhol. The lesson he learned there was too important, too weighty, too pervasive not to be put into practice. With a band and a self-titled album, let's say.

The band is United States Of America, partly college friends and companions, partly seasoned players from the Los Angeles hinterland: Dorothy Moskowitz on vocals (with a lunar, hypnotic, enveloping voice, perhaps the ideal trade-union between Grace Slick and Nico), Rand Forbes on bass, Gordon Marron on violin (as well as ring modulator), Craig Woodson on drums (as well as percussion), and Byrd himself on keyboards (of various kinds). The album, released in 1968, immediately came across as a small but momentous detonation within psychedelic rock: its reckless, naive – yet extraordinarily fascinating – pairing of avant-garde music with LaMonte Young-style orientalism, of chamber music with musique concrète, is a genuine revolution, even though it was understood and appreciated by very few (not even by the record label, which essentially cut all promotional activity for the album's release). An epileptic, futuristic jumble of technique, composition, arrangement and refined artistic taste that would pave the way for countless experiments to come – from electro (anticipating in one fell swoop Monade, Broadcast, Stereolab, Portishead, to name the first that come to mind), to krautrock, to certain strands of experimental new wave, to dark-gothic, all the way to so-called post-rock of the '90s – and together it can genuinely be considered a point of no return for nascent psychedelia.

It opens with a musique concrète of small brass ensembles and organs layered and juxtaposed, recalling both the experiments of Frank Zappa and the chamber-symphonic maladies of Hindemith and Milhaud, over which the main melody gradually layers itself, in a subtle but inexorable crescendo of dynamics. It's a theme that seems to come almost from the dark side of stars-and-stripes America, all national pride and prosperity, popular sovereignty and patriotism. It's a sort of gloomy mist – like black clouds growing ever more threatening from an indefinite horizon – that comes to loom over the glittering, almost ostentatious serenity, an autonomous microcosm of perversion and degeneration, a dark warning within its tender melodic unfolding. Moskowitz's voice sharpens, breaking through the ultrasonic barrier, the orchestration grows ever more intense and dramatically shrieking, until it all evaporates in favour of new, unwitting little orchestras and popular brass bands.

The rhythmic drive of the following "Hard Coming Love" is worthy of the best Doors. The instrumental introduction, deliberately (and brilliantly) prolonged to heighten the sense of tension ahead of Moskowitz's entrance into the ether (though at first coy and understated), is a lysergic trip of rare beauty, complete with tireless, trance-like drumming. It's a track that seems to continually die in sudden free-form catastrophes (courtesy of Byrd's electronic genius at the controls, and the infernal reverbs of the ring modulator), only to regenerate itself more visceral than before, returning to shatter minds and consciences.

"Cloud Song" is a sweet romance. Velvet Underground-like in its setup, it arrives at wholly "other" musical results. The violin embroidery is even more atmospheric than John Cale's, the harp marks out orientalising pizzicati, while the percussion underscores it all with arcane insistence. It's a song for burning hearts – in silent prayer ("How sweet to be a cloud/ Floating in the blue") – and changeable skies, one that starts out with romantic sonorities and ends up brushing against sardonic, livid, disorienting caricature, in which even the voice seems to dematerialise into something gaseous. Proto-ambient, perhaps.

In "Garden of Earthly Delights" the fast tempo returns, in a restless, troubled atmosphere charged with untellable tension (overamplified by the nervous tribal rhythm underneath), buoyed by a prodigious, lunar-Oracle vocal. Everything then degenerates into a deafening jubilee of sound bands, vitriolic noise effects and a hallucinatory cosmic chirping. It then slides, almost without a break, into "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar". A relatively simple vaudeville with a cabaret swagger, yet still brilliant in its use of organ (which effectively replaces guitar) and sinister sounds, an ever-present shadow of unease.

There's room for a brief popular march in the distance, with bass drum and brass, which jarringly ferries us into a terrifying "Agnus Dei" (sung by Moskowitz and a Gregorian polyphonic choir), under a sinister primordial light. A timid à-la Beach Boys vocal-harmonic concertation takes hold, but disconsolate and shadowy. It's more a black mass than a carefree Wilson-esque hymn, torn open by bloodcurdling reverbs, electric roars and horrifying string runs. "Coming Down", brash and sardonic, seems to connect directly to it: it's a fast, demonic nursery rhyme, a voice-violin duet in dark hues, still steeped in reverbs arriving from the darkest unknown. Each new track seems to nullify the semantic weight of the one before, even as it's bound to it for life and death, causing a total loss of any sense of narrative, structure, or development. This album is essentially one long suite, in which the jolly fanfares act as the glue between one episode and the next.

In "Love Song for the Dead Che" the waters calm once more, the nuclear storm subsides. Accordion and violin state an ecstatic, intimate theme, of intense lyrical concentration, which, paradoxically, still remains in keeping with the restless atmospheres that came before. It's perhaps the only true semblance of song-form in the entire work, a parenthesis of memory and recollection of a recent past that is already tinged with melancholy. The arrangement thaws the chill of the vocal line (with counterpoints and melodic touches) into a mutual interpenetration: this is an album in which voice and arrangement feed off one another, living in perfect harmonic symbiosis. There is no real distinction – and this is the true innovative scope of the record – between harmony and melody, so much as between rhythm and non-rhythm, and between harmony and cacophony.

"Stranded in Time" seems to echo the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby", but this is soon contradicted by a brief jam of violin, organ and drums, dreamlike and visionary in flavour. "American Way of Love" is the closing chapter, and is also an extraordinary collage of musical episodes and sound events with a meticulous, pseudo-Zappa-esque aesthetic aftertaste. It opens with a call-and-response structure with a rocky gait, but this too is interspersed with almost demented parentheses, in which the acidified violin plays the role of undisputed protagonist (perhaps the caricatured, scornfully deformed counterpart to Byrd's singing). Further new vignettes intervene, nightmarish sound modulations and hard-edged interludes, and meanwhile delirious recollections of episodes heard throughout the album push their way in, like actors hastily called back onstage to make this thunderous, hallucinated, monstrous final saraband even more psychotic. The recap proceeds bit by bit, in continual apocalyptic shipwrecks amid waves of sound, over the coming and going of the main motif and the advance of the drum rhythm, blinded and almost erased by terrifying gusts of absolute sound, the true ringmaster of this schizophrenic parade. At last the brass bands and civic parades of brass and bass drum return, the carefree fanfares of the opening, before it all closes over dense brushstrokes of strings, from which – as if they were mysterious luciferian gases – other fleeting, confused episodes of what came before are made to exhale.

Was it all a dream? Cursed, unusual, captivating. It's an archetype of cyclical structure more than an album. A powerful, impressionistic tapestry of great sonic fascination, in which the structure tangles up and implodes on itself. A work that obliquely lays bare the contradictions of America at the time, torn - as we know - between a boom in material prosperity and brutal human slaughter on Vietnamese soil. It starts from American popular music, but arrives at results that undermine that very superstructure down to its foundations. It's a nightmare, but one with eyes wide open, where daylight shines. And the brighter the light shines, the more Mephistophelian the evil becomes. It's a smile, but a satanic one, cast upon life and the little everyday monsters of the human mind as it wanders aimlessly. There are no real artistic precedents for a work like this, perhaps only Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" (see), which the album seems to mysteriously pay homage to.

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13/11/2006