Sunday, October 24, 2010

RHYTHM PLAGUE-DRESSED FOR THE APOCALYPSE, TAPE, 1985, USA


Emerging out of an early and more discernibly jazz-oriented era of the work of high profile avant axe slinger Nels Cline (Wilco, Geraldine Fibbers, many others), the period documented here having bridged his time playing with and recording for Vinny Golia and his Nine Winds imprint and collaborations with the likes of Tim Berne and Julius Hemphill. Rhythm Plague was the unit that would initially launch him into a less idiomatically peg-able sound world and create an intersection with the C.O.M.A. (California Outside Music Association) crowd, with Rhythm Plague frequently gigging alongside the likes of The Motor Totemist Guild and PFS and appearing on the seminal A Beginners Guide To C.O.M.A. LP that I've previously shared. Pairing Cline's increasingly outwardly bound guitar playing to keyboardist, fellow Golia alumni and current Iceburn Collective producer Wayne Peet and bassist and one-time Hemphill collaborator Steubig, these three whip up a huge expanse (over 90 minutes) of interesting and occasionally fascinating open-ended atmospheric jams and dark-tinged flows of strafed abstraction underpinned (and occasionally undermined) by the exoskeleton of cheap rhythm box presets that about half of this is constructed on top of.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, brillant and fascinating, hanx

steubig said...

howdy, steuart liebig, aka steubig here.

thanks for putting up the blurb on this.

one slight quibble: if by presets you mean things that were pre-programmed by roland, that is incorrect. wayne and i did all the programming of the beats (on roland tr-303 and tr-808 machines).

there might be one tune that messes with a preset on something else (if there's a samba-like tune on this tape—we did about three, so i can't remember all the tunes).

also, are you giving free uploads on this thing? this was wayne's band, so i think you need to ask him about this. he's also digitally remastered this stuff.
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