Review
of SHREDD, This is Your Brains on Drums
by SuZi
SHREDD This is Your Brains on Drums! Martin Murphy: Murfeus 2003
www. Murfeus.com
407-810-0525
The reaction against the mechanization of Western culture is synchronous
with that of the increasing thralldom held by technology--a post-industrial
manifestation of humanity's peccadillo for tools, to which we are all,
like it or not, in servitude. Yet, there are those who choose not to serve.
The search for atavism is nothing new. Much ado has been made over modern
primitivism; so much so that an entire commodities market exists for sects
of the neo-primitive: the Celtic knot necklace, the plastic Buddha and
the dreamcatcher. In most cases, the neo-primitive is not so much interested
in the creation of a new mythology as in retreating into the comfort of
the old.
There are those, however, for whom the creation
of a new mythology has an import beyond reaction to the pestilence of
a franchise sandwich. Sometimes the true, rather than corrupted, form
of shaman can be found a person of passion for whom the ancient things
still sing.
It is the translated forward of Joseph Campbell's
songs of the planet which seems to be the primary concern of a collective
of musicians who play under the name SHREDD. Veteran musical principals
of neo-pagan festivals, the former Saturday night band for a Middle Eastern
restaurant, and heavily influenced by Yoruban rhythm patterns and mythos,
SHREDD has recently released a ten track CD entitled This is your
brains on drums! Do not expect groovy-moody synth work behind some
warbling crooner: SHREDD is entirely percussion--a potent, deceptively
simple multi-rhythmic pulsing which does not seek to give obvious messages.
If there is any message to the tracks here, it is in the relationship
of the listener to the sound itself. The relationships between that of
the listener to music and to that of the relationship between the musician
and his instrument are elegantly documented by James Baldwin in "Sonny's
Blues." Baldwin writes:
[...]about
music is that not many people ever really hear it.
And even then,
on the rare occasions when something
opens within,
and the music enters, what we mainly hear,
or hear corroborated,
are persona; private, vanishing
evocations.
But the man who creates the music is hearing
something
else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void
and imposing
order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked
in him, then,
is of another order, more terrible because it
has no words,
and triumphant, too, for that same reason.
And his triumph,
when he triumphs, is ours.
(Lauter 2190)
It is not too much of a stretch to see this
offering of SHREDD as triumphant. Yet, do not expect brassy paeans to
marching guns. The triumph is or another order, an older and quieter triumph
more closely akin to the turning of the seasons than of humanity's scars
upon the planet. Indeed, there is an aspect of trance to this music, but
without sacrifice to that of the tribal.
Tribalism is, by its very nature, exclusionary,
but exclusivity is not what this CD is about. As the tracks play, the
clear influence of motifs associated with those of the Hindu are heard,
on other tracks, musical motifs from the African, the Asian, the AmerInd.
Multiculturalism is employed here as a means of communicating Campbell's
planetary song; the music here has no motive except that of the rapture
of its being. The brief liner notes dedicated to composition insist that
nine of the ten tracks are improvisational, and that only the rhythm base
of one song was acquired--with the rest of the track being not only improvisational,
but isolated in each part. The primary composer for SHREDD, Martin Murphy,
writes that "no one heard anyone else's improv loops or leads; all
that was arranged and mixed after," clearly deconstructing even the
mythos of a band: that all musicians play the same song together at the
same time. The new mythos, as constructed by Murphy, is that the musicians
respond individually to Baldwin's "roar rising from the void" and do so with or without the constraints of synchronicity in space-time.
The tracks on This is your brains on
drums! are not the endless, blank-minded, rave thumping of an amplified
washing machine on spin. The rhythms here are so astutely varied that
the sense of tunefulness, required in the appellation of the concept of
song, is not compromised. The one track which does contain a vocal is
not mixed with the usual vocal-out-front so painfully purveyed by most
modern music, but rather included the voice as one of the instruments;
the words spoken are not given an overbearing position and are sometimes
barely decipherable as more than mere tone.
Some note must be taken of the employed
instruments themselves. Murphy's influences, at first, appear to have
no synchronizing element beyond a banquet of primitive music, and perhaps
Murphy might not be aware--as musician ordering the roar upon the air--of
the corroboration achieved. The CD's liner notes take more care in discussion
of the instruments used than of any other aspect of the recording. True,
there are the obligatory photos of the players--tiny and in black and
white--and the insert itself has the DIY flavor of the independent music
and art made twenty years ago; however Murphy details both the instruments
used on each track, as well as instruments Murphy hand made. Of the acquired
instruments employed, each track's characteristic tonality is determined
by the voice of the instrument used: the track with the AmerInd-type sound
is the one which employs a Cherokee flute; the Asian-influenced track
is the one which employs Tibetan Singing Bowls. There is an insistence
on purity here; the voice of the instrument sings of the culture which
created it and adds that voice without perversion; the tracks with Egyptian
tabla are about the evocations of that instrument. Overarching, or holding
the bottom line, for each track are the kinds of percussion instruments
familiar to those of that discipline: djembe, conga, drum kit. Murphy
also discusses the instruments employed which he made himself: a Wuhan
Chan gong mounted on a djembe, and a motorcycle wheel metamorphized into
a frame drum.
The most significant evidence of Murphy's
forward thinking--in addition to the mixing of the CD itself--is in the
creation of the motorcycle wheel drum. The understanding of the instrument
of the drum itself as an instrument of primality is so generally understood
it is almost, if not, a cliche'. Murphy takes this artifact of post-industrial
culture (an icon of reaction to post-industrialism, if one considers the
myth of the biker who paradoxically searches for an end to servitude and
uses the machine to this end) and through the technology of welding, gets
the artifact to accept an animal skin--a symbol, if not an actuality,
of humanity's most offensive, barbaric primitivism. Creating this paradoxical
instrument is one of Murphy's "passions" and significantly differentiates
Murphy from other atavistic musicians. On too many other CDs, the listener
is subjected to birdsong and wolfwail mixed with flat synthesizer tunes;
the paradox is in the mix and is about as stimulating as Thai-flavored
franchise food. Murphy offers his paradox in the creation of the instruments,
in the combining of the instruments to create the song which is not a
song but a rhythm singing, and then carefully mixes track after track
after track so smoothly the production appears invisible.
Murphy's mythology of sound is of the avatar;
his concern one of purity to the source of all music itself, instead of
the clerical impositions, cultural formats and commodifying perversions
enslaving it through the ages. If, as Campbell suggests, the critical
mythologies of humanity were yet to come in his lifetime, then Murphy
intends to solve by employing the voice of not one tribe, but the larger
planetary tribe to sing forward from the origin.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James "Sonny's Blues," The Heath Anthology of American
Literature (Paul Lauter ed.) Houghton Mifflin 2002.
Moyers,
Bill and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth Anchor Books. Doubleday
1988.
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