Max Nordile

Preening - Gang Laughter
Digital Regress. LP/DL

Max Nordile - Got To Sleep, Fool
Digital Regress. DR29. Cassette

Dolphin - Breezebather
Cassette.

Droppings #29
Zine

Droppings #30
Zine





Out of sheer curiosity and having nothing better to do with my life for the next 90 seconds, I decided to check out what was happening in the UK Top 40 these days. It’s been a while. About twenty five years give or take a year. The singles charts are now as irrelevant to me as adverts for tampons, TV channels selling jewelry and shampoo. When singles were just that, small rounds of vinyl with a song on each side, they carried a certain weight. Now they are literally weightless. Since 2005 the Top 40 has included downloads and brought streaming under its aegis in 2014 [to qualify as a streaming single its length must not exceed 15 minutes and cost no less than 40p. So now you know].

In 1981 Laurie Anderson got to number 2 with ‘O Superman’, an eight minute single of an avant garde nature featuring electronically manipulated repetitive vocal phrasings that paid homage to Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid. At the time I was living in a pub and after consultation with the people who put the records on the jukebox it was decided that in everybody's sanity it was best left off and given to me. I still have that copy. O Superman was denied the top spot by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin with their cover of ‘It’s My Party’. Thats the same Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin who played their part in the Canterbury scene via Stewart’s band Hatfield and the North. Whats filling the top two spots now? I can hardly bring myself to defile these pages with the words but I give you Ed Bieber, Justin Sheeran with some collaborative guff that you file under ‘had to happen’, and Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X, I’ve just discovered, being famous for his crossover country rap breakout single Old Town Road. Country Rap. Maybe Mel Brookes can use it in his Blazing Saddles remake. I know that this is going to make me sound like an old curmudgeon but to be honest I'm far past caring.

So when exactly did mainstream music become so teeth grindingly dull? There’s always been dull music in the charts of course. At least up until I stopped listening. But the dull stuff was clustered around interesting stuff.

Here’s another chart from 1981:

1 - The Specials / Ghost Town

2 - Stars on 45

3 - Bad Manners / Can Can

4 - Imagination / Body Talk

5 - Whacko Jacko / One Day in my Life

6 - Motorhead / Live EP

7 - Tom Tom Club / Wordy Rappinghood


So I’ll keep 1, 6 and 7 and you can melt the rest on your three bar electric fire in bedsit land. Its still a decent return and that's just from the top seven.
 
Seeing as how most of the charts are now full of people I’m unfamiliar with I’m assuming that they’re either mediocre singer/song writers, bands with a modicum of talent stretched so thinly that you can see their genitals, female singers who think that howling like an ululating hyena will get them compared to Janis Joplin and country rap crossover stars. Its all v v v v  depressing and something I care not to linger on. So without further ado I give you Oakland California’s Max Nordile whose been invading these pages with his improv skronk for the last couple of years now.

Nordile also prints zines that are black daubs opposite hand written upper case musings:

SOMEONE WHO IS DEAD
THEIR MEDIA PROFILE
BOOMING OUT FROM UNSEEN
SHIT

Issue 30 is described as an ‘Art and Humour’ publication with the art being there for everybody to see and the humour being buried somewhere deep in Nordile’s mind.

Which is all well and good and a decent outpouring of creative activity and while the improv skronk tapes are most welcome [‘Dolphin’ is yet another Nordile improv attack vehicle while ‘Got To Sleep, Fool’ is Nordile wandering around in his own soundworld] it was the LP that blew me away this time. Last time it was via Uzi Rash and a couple of 12 inch platters that sat astride the Country Teasers horse only with more whisky and a liking for The Doors. This time its a 12 track 45rpm knock you sideways, I didn’t think people were making music this good these days, pure shot of mezcal straight in to the cerebellum, instant classic. Its like Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band made a record with some Ethiopian jazzers in a New York basement circa 1977 before they went out and blew The Ramones off stage at CBGB’s because they weren’t zeitgiesty enough. This is the music of the future coming from the past via all kind of jazzy, punky, improvisational wormholes that is like a lot of what I’ve heard before [all the best bits] baked into a cake and covered with glistening dark joyful listening cherries. It is life affirming stuff.

Preening is Alejandra Alcala, Sam Lefebvre and Max Nordile. Theirs is a stripped down sound with Alcala’s bass running wiggle worms around Lefebrve’s post-punk drums as Nordile skronks and honks in and amongst. Nordile and Alcala do vocal call and response harmonies like Don Van Vilet arguing with The Raincoats and all of it sounds like nothing I’ve heard in years. Opening track ‘Dogtown Top Ranking’ is a tumbling James Chance like rawk with the chorus nicked from Althea and Donna’s greatest hit. ‘Flotilla’ has that Egyptian vibe and its here where you get to hear Nordile’s vocals disappearing into a higher register yelp before collapsing in on itself. Put it down to too much sunshine. ‘Slabs’ is Preening paying tribute to Albert Ayler. ‘Work Policy’ is a song about dress codes. ‘Red Tape’ is an instrumental with guest laughing, people laughing like lunatics as guest cornettist ErAl does the Ornette Coleman thing. The title track is a piece of improv featuring Alcala on piano and then gamelan and the sounds of cars as heard through the open window of wherever they recorded this open heart surgery on my musical lassitude. I could do the whole dozen like this but you really need to hear it for yourself.

There was a time when you could just wait for the next musical genre to come along and give your jaded tastebuds a car battery like jump start; out with the Punk in with the Post-Punk, out with the Indie in with the Rave. Now everything in the mainstream seems like so much mush. Corporate mush at that. Unless you get digging of course. Digging is where you get to find the real gold. Preening are unlikely to ever bother the likes of the Top 40 but that means you cant dig. Dig? 


Digital Regresss



Max Nordile