33 rebellions per minute
"Standing on the balcony of Grand Hotel Russischer Hof"
1996
Trespassers W, FLY UP IN THE FACE OF LIFE
Although Wayside Music usually specializes in absurdly overcomplicated music--- and although I find that a key virtue of
theirs--- occasionally they also serve those who perform modest oddities from the sidelines of a field you'd need a compass,
time, and luck to find yourself. Trespassers W started out with real connections to rock, and no connections to Wayside, but
by 1996 their latest, FLY UP IN THE FACE OF LIFE, was ready for the catalog: they'd settled on a jazz/cabaret base from
which items like electric guitar were welcome, very much so, but used neither to rock nor to roll but to lunge spastically, or
to curl up and make weird noises til the neighbors rush in concernedly. But the overall ambience is expansively friendly, and
if the songs aren't exactly tuneful in the Brill Building Da Doo-Ron-Ron sense, they do send plenty of notes wandering
happily among the more gravelly, unmanicured paths of the familiar ol' chromatic scale. So the sound is distinctive and
intriguing. But the true magic comes from the lyrics, which seem written in blithe unawareness of what songs are and aren't
supposed to be about, or what syllable-to-word ratios are acceptable. The first track, "Kite In Weimar" (which sounds like a
lost piece of Carla Bley's avant-jazz opera ESCALATOR OVER THE HILL), sets the tone by earnestly presenting, and
explaining, a complex analogy between 1922 and 1992 German politics. Other songs are often celebrations: of the daring
impudence of 17th-century female painter Artemesia Gentileschi; of the photographer who filmed the Wright Brothers'
historic first flight; of a 60-foot-high statue of an angel in Northeast England; of a band member's late uncle; of how rock and
roll will never die, although "The Day When The Stones Raided Scheveningen" is the only example of that genre I've seen
reading like a Sunday feature article. Other songs tell stories or fables, or pray to Harry Houdini for generational guidance, or
do carefully shaded portraits of domestic situations that most lyricists would summarize in 2 quick judgmental verses and a
yowl. "Come Fling Down With Me" is even a boy/girl song, and a quite good one; my point is not that Trespassers W lack
normal passions, but that they supplement with mental warehouses full of abstruse passions, presented with such unabashed
giddy love as to be a gateway into an alien world, one which gets clearer and more colorful TV reception of our world than
we do. I would want to live there, but a 55-minute visit is not to be sneered at, and if we observe thoughtfully enough while
we're there, maybe we can bring back some well-chosen souvenirs.
2000
Trespassers W, LEAPING THE CHASM
I don't think Cor Gout intended LEAPING THE CHASM, a quirkily scattered requiem for the 20th century, to provoke much laughter, at least not on the early songs. But with lead song "the Lighthouse Keeper" I have decided that any song that only makes me laugh on the sixth listen is a rich experience. I'd been dismissing the song as minor, actually: a gentle extended piece sung, in Gout's Jacques Cousteau-without-the-professional-resonance accent, in the kind of extended ambitious melody that results not from inspiration but simply from the stubborn determination to not retrace one's tracks. And then I finally noticed how casually it integrated cavernous drones, harp music, Gilberto Gil samba-pop, gypsy chamber music, Fantasia-style darkly tremulous dance music with timpani, and a quick percussion break in flamenco style. "Ha! That's ridiculous! Oh, and brilliant", I realized, and resolved to pay closer attention from then on.
It had only taken one listen, mind you, for "Tears of the Dodo" to join Carter USM's I BLAME THE GOVERNMENT as the only music ever to make me cry. Oddly, this is one where giggling would be less likely to annoy the author, given the wiggly bassoon melody, typewriter solos, and odd mouth/body noises contributed like a goofier Bobby McFerrin by Hajo Doorn. At the same time, Cor's lecture-singing develops a dirgey edge as he ponders the loneliness of the last dodo: "Her last fertile egg eaten by a monkey/ her last partner beaten to death by a hungry Dutch sailor/ and no hope of finding a replacement.... All of them, species by species -- seeking safety in flight... or floating vegetation or, eventually, in the sea -- shared features with the dodo, with small but meaningful differences between the species and minor variations within them, but always dodo-ish, dodo-like, one a bit more observant than the other, one a bit more nimble than the other, one becuase of a layer of fat around the teardrop a little more durable than the other". History is written by winners, and even those uncomfortable with winning might take melodramatic pleasure in the rumbly bass sounds of booming "Dodo crying 'dodo' (a no-go!)". But someone has to "close my eyes and count to ten/ and then I open them again/ anxious to find out if all types of dodo-tears will still be here/ or if one has disappeared". If technically the dodo's death was the 17th century, so be it; one of the stories of the 20th, perhaps, is that we lose species too fast to build equally good legends around any of them.
The rest of the topics _are_ 20th-century, and their interrelations may be much clearer in Gout's mind than mine. I do interpret him as picking small scenes to stand in for larger themes. "The lighthouse keeper, with a curved spine bent by the semicircular bed, on the seventh and peg legs from the winding steps... will soon be replaced by winking banks of computers and tidy impersonal series of electronic aids... why retain him when computers don't go mad, nor get sleepy, drunk or sad -- just break down sometimes?". Yes, the human population multiplied by six in the century, the supplies of natural resources were stripped at an outstanding rate, and the story at the beginning of the 21st is still the quest to find efficiency by using more resources and fewer humans. "She's a Voice Artist, she fills space with sounds... he's a Word Artist, he fills space with thoughts, but not now, standing in her dressing room hat in hand, staring at her back, obsessed by the braid of hair in her neck, knotted circularly... she gives her chair a half turn, leans forward over an occasional table where a steel dictaphone stands, massive, cold" -- yes, the 20th century brought an extraordinary boost in chances for individuals to take formal turns at being communicators, from microphones and Powerpoint presentations to improv theatre to personal websites, and with it came the obligation to develop a Performer self. "The Waitress" has its title character serving food to men outside the home, not in it (20th century = restaurants and station buffets?), and having enough modern self-respect as a female to be that much more irritated and trapped by endless male sexual innuendos. "Singa" is built around a September 1996 media incident in Indonesian politics which pitted ruthless modern dictatorship against hope provided by ancient religious superstitions. "Holes" sees the fall of the Berlin Wall as a chance for people to develop new holes in their memory to replace the state-dictated holes they'd had before.
Mind you, I don't doubt for a second that Gout's picking these stories and moments because he likes them. A Belgian fisherman captures a mermaid, causing word to spread of a curse; Mahler's biography is detailed and his compositional motives peeked into; a giant well-loved zoo elephant escapes and becomes a local children's legend, rumored to lurk at night awaiting summoning; a brilliant soccer player becomes far more famous as a colorful drunk; the Dutch writer Sauerhoff watches a glazier at work and flashes on a metaphor he can turn into a story. 24-hour news channels may make it easy for people to slide, as Cor does, ambiguously from personal experience to overheard news items, but gossip is what language was built for, and no century, the 20th or the 3rd, would be complete without rumor fading into diary entries into metaphor into new rumor. The 20th century was busy and crowded, and that means it was fun, if you look in the right places and share.
The musical range setting these tales is as extensive as Gout's use of 18 separate bandmates might suggest. "The Lighthouse"'s carefully picked angular guitar melodies could be Pavement's WOWEE ZOWEE plus guest violin and accordian-ish organ. "De Vloek van Westerschouven" has the cadences of a sea shanty. "Dear Grandpa" is speak-sung over ukelele and banjo. "Pages From Mahler's Diary", the one I've had the easiest time isolating for use on mixtapes, picks out another determinedly winding melody whose illogic is central to the unsettling effect: it's built on a weird opera sample, church organ, tapping, alarm clock, vinyl ambience, and a euphonium used like a string section. "Space For Thoughts", a childlike show tune that ducks easy resolution in favor of breaking into a scratchy western guitar solo, is like Ween's "Dancing In The Show Tonight" played with empathy instead of mockery. "Holes In Flat Surface (1989)" is an industrial rant cheaply ingenious enough for the Tall Dwarfs. "Beckett Dies (1989)" could be Pavement or the Silver Jews reducing the kaleidoscopic circus weirdness of Kamikazee Ground Crew into faux-retro indie-rock weirdness. "Child's Saddle (1989)" folds bass clarinet and muttered instructions around how film noir soundtracks would've sounded had they prospered in the age of the clattery drum machine.
The next few songs may make you confident that you've learned the pacings, the hesitations and sudden dartings forward, that mark the essential Trespassers W-ishness of it all; so then Cor breaks out a rock band. The enthusiastic "Gazza" could be collaboration between Collective Soul, Anton Barbeau, and a friendly drunk, while the intricate 10-minute "Reflections Of The City" is rock that doesn't remind me of anyone for more than 30 seconds at a time (though surf-rock and "I Want You/ She's So Heavy" both come to mind more than once).
I think LEAPING THE CHASM, available from Organic/Land Records, is an exceptionally good record. I do not think, honestly, that Cor Gout is unusually talented, and that in the end is inspiring. He builds melodies because he wants to, and they lack Paul McCartney's or Robert Pollard's instant grace, but instead they rove new paths because those are the ones Gout can find. The arrangements may not seem remarkable for the first four listens; but they are because, well, Gout insists that they be, and works with whoever can generate the links he wants to make. His voice is professorial, but he'd be a wonderful professor in his absent-minded way because you can't adore your subject that obviously without startling some students into interest. His lyrics don't blossom often into poetry, but neither do journal articles: poetry is a bad way to tell you anything you didn't at least kind-of know. Cor Gout knows tons of things, and things are how you assemble patterns. He may be an odd duck, but it's a wonderfully modern sort of odd duck to be.
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