Desert Marauders

I will readily, yet reluctantly, confess, I didn't come up with that name. But, well, ain't it just the coolest? "Desert Marauders"? Even cooler, the group who decided their record should be called this (although I don't know who decided what, nor even what decision was made, only that there is this thing named "Desert Marauders", and this thing named this is a thing of music, the sound of music, the object that contains the sound, the object that is a record, the record that records what happened, once, many times) is Art Lande and Rubisa Patrol. I mean, they sound like a bunch of guys in a sandblasted space jeep who roam the edges of the desert and ensure that that which must be safe is safe, that attack that which must be attacked. I imagine bearded faces plastered with black sand, with white earth, with space between them and the edge of the world, the only thing behind them the blinding horizon.

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Like any good group that knows you can never overname something perfectly named (for example, Night Ranger and, also, Iron Maiden, amongst others), the first track from "Desert Marauders" is perfectly named "Rubisa Patrol", because the group that Marauds also Patrols, the desert is also somewhere we are not and will only have tried to have been.  When Ozzy Osbourne sings "Please God Help Me!!!" on "Black Sabbath", from Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", he's also enacting the remaining name, the public and the political, that lies outside the personal out of which he sings. The name that is the sign, the sign that makes the name of the world. Desert Marauders maps a world that the musicians patrol, inhabit, dominate, deploy, duplicate in sound from word. There is nothing left to say, nothing less to say, than what they wordlessly leave behind them.

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All good music seems to be plagued by the failure of description. It exceeds all description, but, also, the description of the music exceeds the effort made to know it in words. Yet, there's never a reason not to try; as James Brown crooned, "Nothing beats a try but a fail". The try here is the excellence of the raucous midnight that is the 16 minute opening track, where the piano plants a staccato palm tree in the midst of a sea of sand, and what arises are the cool pool of southpaw trumpet, bass bouncing and then bobbing along the imaginary waves on an imaginary sea, the drums the thunderhead in the distance, the war planes and dreamtime drama of the new day. All of this is the failure to describe itself, only to mimic and homage Miles Davis' best years, from 1967-1975 all in a brief whisper of progressive distancing, de-stancing..

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You can't really find "Desert Marauders" on cd, I don't think. If you buy a turntable and hunt down some used records, you can pick it up on album, which is kind of cool, although probably more obscure than is necessary, because you join yourself to the legion that are their own desert marauders. those fast flipping fingered men who mine the faded cardboarded past of smudged black plastic. But then, this is necessary, so the obscurity is worth everything, even if it means you become someone you thought you'd never mean to be. The record starts, also, in a kind of obscurity, the sound of a banging piano on a simple chord, rhythmic and near, immediate and suggestive of some infinite distance beyond it. A drum trots out, silently rolling in like wind to kick up sand in the face of the blazing sky, the piano standing firm with its mechanical rhythm, one chord, full and round and stern and stoic. A horn whines, it's a trumpet but you might not know it, it might not matter what the horn whining is, it may only mean that what matters is that it whines and whimpers and breathes and burns into space. Of course, this happens for a little bit, there's a drama to building what is to come, cities are not the result of one or many days, but of every day that it takes to take what is empty and forge walls and caves and what links these two forms in the beyond of the world, above ground, reaching all arms up towards the sky.

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The thing, then, that happens, is that the piano changes and swells and advances into a rhythmic romp, a riff open to the new world -- dah-dah-dahhhhh-da-da da-da-dah-dah-dahhhhhhhh -- in a strange time signature and signalling a strange time of the world just then. Just then because of the immediacy of the change and the intensity of the tone and the open ended nature of everything that comes forth, the drums skipping down the side of the mountain and jumping into the sea, the trumpet jabbing out into space as if to knock down the danger at the edge of the desert with its pointed fists and knife-edged knuckles, the bass burrowing deep into the sand and hiding amongst the beetles and worms that sleep in the cool earth. The quiet night of the earth that arises with the cacophonic polyphony that rolls out of the record, of the circle, of the system that is theirs, that is there for us to hear.

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There's more to this record than just the opening track -- and all of it is to be known, to be heard, to feed the mind with the sound that lies inside the mind. But all of it comes after the announcement that the landscape of the moon is the empty desert the patrol will ride and protect. Protect yourself, I say, from what is out there, by venturing into the white empty distance, the black open evening. Everything is there for us all, even when we close our eyes and our eyes become the ears through which we see the dark sky, the open book of the dark sky.

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Interesting, then, that the second track on side one is called "Livre (Near The Sky)" -- a book that lies in proximity, then, to the open air that yawns over us. But what an odd juxtaposition, an impossible imposition that -- that anything is ever "near" the sky -- the sky is up there, always over us, and the only thing anything can be is "in" it. But then, when you mine the desert -- when you ride along the edge of the cursed earth, the crest of the morning and the deep crusted sand that curdles against the sea -- perhaps what you are is only where you are: near the sky, pages upturned towards the yawning night, the wordless dawn of man and of the battle for the end of time.

Who is Stephan Micus, and is He like Us?

I'm not even sure that I can ask the question. I mean, you could start here, with his bio, from the ECM records site, which is quite nicely written and dainty and which gives a clarified butter-sense of his lost, wandering-journey-world-rover-spirit, his singular vision(ary), his smiling-beggar-exile, his smiling man. And good ol' west(ern) Wikipedia lets you briefly linger over him and know that he is, eternally, "new age". And this, here, is a great discography. I'm being quite informative sure, thank you, you're welcome, but you know nothing more except a few static pages. And you have heard nothing. Let's start with hearing, then.

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There, you could keep looping this stuff endlessly. Which is kind of what Stephan Micus does, except for that he loops nothing, he makes everything, and everything he makes he makes anew with the deep intent to make everything anew. Now, intent, as we all know -- or all ought to know, at this late point in the very early history of the world we do know -- is tricky to assume and even more conniving to dodge. We can assume nothing of it, and less than nothing from it, but we also cannot not know it as it comes towards us. And what Stephan Micus comes towards us with -- and he is coming towards an "us", totally solitary, not necessarily alone, as his recordings are layered affairs where nothing is alone and everything is the work of the solo traveler who arrives in solitude to express the fate of the world he comes upon to express the fate of that same very world he carries within him -- is something that can never be found, regardless of the clearwater wholesome and shining window effort of s/he who searches for the truth that lies behind all things, in that musical space named "new age" (which I will champion, despite the furious fists of rebellious freedom reigning down on us all, because, simply, I, too, need to relax my shoulders and meditate on an emptied river) -- Stephan Micus is, um, sincere about what he does, he means it, meaning that he means the it that it is and can forever be once it has been stated as being, and will always be, it.

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Right. As though what I wrote was to be understood. And yet, of course it was, because if not-understanding was the point, I would shriek to the heavens and tear my eyes out, I would exile myself to the darkness that is the darkest hour of man. I would lament in a language that no man would understand, which would mean my lament would be the lament of a man without any other man, a man with no other but himself beneath the sun that burns him, the night that abandons him, the mountain whose avalanche traps him, the bloodline whose ancestry he escapes. I mean that he spaces himself out, he is only always a distance from everything, from this thing, from things, from this.

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With Stephan Micus, though, something is very unique, almost too much so, and its uniqueness lies both within and without the music. First off, he's a craftsman in the purest sense, in the ancient sense, because he learns how to play the instruments that are out there, the cosmos of the world is the locality of his touch. He learns them, he is the teacher and the taught, the chanter and the enchanted. You almost start to dream, yourself, of going anywhere, everywhere (Steve Tibbetts' "Going Somewhere" comes to mind here), becoming anything, fantasizing that the distant mountain is your home, the eternal village of strangers is your people. But, furthermore, and yet, simultaneously, there is something inside the sounds that is bursting out, but almost beneath the music, too, a whisper beneath the whisper, a shadow of a shadow, an expression that is of the face and beyond the face, the symbol of a fading face on an ancient stone. It's hard, because all description of Stephan Micus' music seems to lead to the top of a mountain with a bearded white figure in a mysterious cloak on bended knee, the heavens all around him, the earth always eternally below. It's hard, because this description is what the music is and is everything the music avoids and becomes all that there is of the world that is all there is of a lone figure with a pile of instruments beside him, testing each in the empty air, bringing his breath and his hands and his fingers and his chest to bear upon strings, upon reeds, upon skin and earth and bone. The body of music is the body of all humanity.

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1994's "Athos - A Journey to the Holy Mountain" -- which is just that, a pilgrimage to the Greek Island home to 20 monasteries, a land only accessible by sea -- and 1986's "The Music of Stones" -- which is just that, a series composed around a series of large resonating stone blocks that sound, when struck, like the resonance at the bottom of a bottomless well -- each reveal the larger structure at work in Micus' world of music, music that is of a world that is ours and that is of a world that we could have only forgotten. Every thing is ancient, from a limit that lies outside time, that lies only at the very end and the very beginning of time. There are scrolls with words on which we write more words, there is the air that is ours, that is air we breathe, the air in which sages declare their silence and breathe out that same silence, the air in which the sounds of stones resonate around us and rumble beneath us.

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It's fitting to end with a tai chi performance -- and Micus is nowhere to be seen here, only slightly heard, with nothing but air around and inside him -- to the distant stones that encapsulate the resounding air, although there are no stones in this sound, because they have vanished, they are finished, their smooth surface is outside of us and what we touch with the movement, the performance, of our bodies. The performance is like the air filled with a sound of something that is only the breath of the world. The performance is like the body that moves with the light of the air, with the breath of the spirit. Of course, Stephan Micus has gone past all that, and there is only the life within us to mourn the life that has passed behind us, that passes us in the understanding that the world we are is the world at the top of the mountain, the beard of the oldest man, the cell of the unborn child. The oldest man and the unborn child, of course, are each like us, what we once were, what we will be, what we close our eyes to see. Is he like us? He is more than "like", he is what is, which is us.

Turning the Tables

I just bought a turntable, a week ago Thursday, tragic to say that it took me this long to visit the land I come from, the land of plasticized, double-sided dreams. It took me buying a record -- which turned into 5 records, because the inexpensiveness of records and the randomized element of their eternally earth scattered endangered species selection makes buying just one not only impossible, but predetermined -- for my buddy Joe for his birthday (because he has a turntable, he loves it, and he seems to have something to love in this world that having it gives him to love) -- to realize that I was partly buying the record for myself and my own disowned dreams. Only disowned, though, because I decided I wasn't going to have a turntable, which means that records are, for me, to be held, touched, gazed at, but never HEARD. Now, perhaps the smartest thing I did in this whole confused jumble of ambivalent cinched up inaction was have Joe as a friend, because Joe saw all this and said "You should get a turntable, man, mine was $125, go here...(more details, etc)." Now, what do you do when your buddy looks you in the eye and says "You ain't me, man, you is you?" You be you, that's what...

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A similar, yet longer term memory -- years ago, in the same life that is also the other life that was mine and that is the "you be you" of any past for any wo/man -- my buddy Brian had a turntable, and with it, he was able to expunge himself in all the used record shops of Boston, he was able to take that city and make it come across the country with him to California because that city was the shops where the circular shapes of tender, imprinted grooves held their secret lives in dazzling silence. I carried on a secret war with him, I carried myself across time and space by refusing to join him, I pulled a "u-ee" and went in the other direction, towards CDs (which, at that time, were the new best next thing on earth, since they would LAST FOREVER). What's sad (and another kind of memory, that of the past sadness of something that is passed over in time) is that those records he bought were records that CDs would never become, because records are to be forgotten, while CD's, which LAST FOREVER, become a reason for Bryan Adams, for example, to give us 75 minutes of unbroken stardom to gaze into and become dulled from. But Brian would show me a record he found in his wanderings across town -- always something that he was proud to show me, and always something I would have wanted to own but had decided I never could -- and I would REMEMBER IT. Always. Even now. Even later, when I'm too old to remember the name of that girl I copied out Black Sabbath lyrics for as a token of my gnarled heart.

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But, today is today, which means turntables don't fall from the sky and into our preamps, even though the sky is more wounded than ever and less things stay there than ever. I can't easily walk down the street and trip over an inexpensive record player without finding myself in a part of town where the record player would matter much less than my making my way home, NOW. So, I amazon'ed this Audio Technica for $79 and sat on the edge of the couch and waited and stared out the window into the street where the UPS van would come and lift me back up into the falling sky. Because I don't care about anything else than the record when I have the player. Because the player is the record, and the record is the thing I'll play and the turntable will fade into the sky, too, like a bird whose flight is more than the bird itself, is only the arc of the air on which it has flown.

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For the record -- pun intended -- CD's don't LAST FOREVER. At least one I have owned needed a complete clutch overhaul. I had a 1980 Honda Civic with a broken carburetor that lasted longer. Actually, if I remember correctly, the thing about CD's was not that they LASTED FOREVER so much as that THEY WOULDN'T WEAR OUT. What's funny to think of in response to that marketing fact is that wearing out a record was like proving your deep love of it, like Velveteen Rabbit-ing it into its own alternate reality, such that the crackle and hiss of the sunken, collapsed grooves meant that the music on that record had melded with your mind and become that very thing that walked around with you and thought two steps behind you. You wanted to wear out a record, but you wanted to do so simply by living with it, by playing it whenever there was time and space to have the sound of the world be the sound of that record. I don't actually think anyone anywhere ever bought a record and thought that it was a too-difficult-fact of the world that they may have had to one day replace this record because it might wear out if they loved it too much. In fact, no one has ever known how much they might really come to love a record until they bought it, brought it home, removed the tenuous plastic coating, and gently placed it on the rotating wheel, so how could anyone have ever worried that they might love it too much and kill it? A record isn't a person, so what could you ever worry about? Spilling bongwater? A CD is no improvement there, el capitan....

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The thing that Brian had, which is what Joe has, which I now have, with a turntable, is ACCESS. This access is to two basic and totally essential things in musical life -- one, to the fullest sound there has been of what has become recorded. While I declare that I think records "sound better" than CD's, I'm not very interested in that argument. I am happy to inform the world that what they sound, doubtless, scientific, is FULL. Like the sky with clouds, the sea with water, an ancient tiger with stripes, a contemporary novel with tropes. There is a totality to music on record that no other recorded medium provides. This is not the fascist view of the natural world, where you must do something specific in order to be anything at all; it is a totality of the sound that you then are finally in a position to interpret, let come to you, succumb to in the name of your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your hands, fill the ceiling with something you can't see but will try to see. The second bit of access is to the actual recordings themselves. There are the ones that you can find also on CD, the recordings that you can find in their native state, that nativity that is the reality of technological form informing the thing that has been mutated to ever meet that form's requirements. When records were "being made" -- and each era of recorded music, as well as the genre and styles that existed within each era in relation to each other and in relation to the eras themselves -- the recordings themselves were made with the record as the God of the form the music was to take, in terms of the TIME of of the music (how long is this going to go on for, anyway?) and the BREAKS in the music (when does one thing end and another begin? When's the intermission? When can I go outside and have a smoke and come back and have missed nothing?) All of this is built in to the music, just like turning the page is built in to the writing when you read a book, which means the writing of the book means the page must always be turned until there are no more pages for you to turn, which means there is no more writing, which means there is no more book, because a book is the writing that writes it, right? The access to the recordings also means access to the records that are now only scattered amongst the endless debris of the world, the debriefings of those documents in time when these things were made, reproduced, and abandoned, and which will never come in from the cold unless we gather them up in our solidarity to the remembrance of records past. It is access to the endangered species that are the beaten, battered, weathered cardboard squares with images and photos and illustrations and titles and informatives, all older than everyone who doesn't know them, all handled by multiple parties, all fingered and which put the finger of ownership right on you, right now, when you realize that if you don't take them, they will disappear and be melted into uncut ozone.

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As a perfect example, and essential epilogue to my turned table, where what was once on it is on the floor, and what was once under it is now the only thing I can attend to when I sit at it, I give you Alphonso Johnson's Spellbound. I'm sure you could find it on CD, but this is one of those recordings that is an ALBUM, from the cover of Alphonso with a Chapman Stick, to the wicked double tremoloed guitar kraut of Pat Thrall, to the vocals that seem both strained and restrained, stranded and standing tall. The whole thing could only have been made as an album where there are such things as rock and jazz and fusion and cars and sensitivity and industry and ambition and thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness piled into pure plastic form.

There is funk everywhere, but politely, with old timey moog synths that make you think of the old west, like a gunslinger with a gun just a little weirder than everyone else's. Now, the record, here, in MP3-post-CD-newspace, sounds super thin, fusion goof earnest world road trip innocent sunscreen. But on record, this whole thing is ALL BOTTOM, the only thing that goes out are your geeky lights because you realize that what's dark about this stuff is that there is actually muddy soul at the bottom of it, which the record lets hang in the air, lets distort and then fly off into dream drama realspace.

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I could always upload all my records, through my turntable, onto my laptop using its USB. When the martians come for me, I will make sure that I keep Alphonso Johnson in my space disaster kit and take everything with me to the moon. I'll find myself an old couch and have all my records eternally ready to be played into the purest crackle.