Jeff Kaiser & Woody Aplanalp: Asphalt Buddhas

Jeff Kaiser strikes hard again in track no. 1 – “Words of Jesus in Red (no. 1)” - hitting the note with a cop radio call stating that “the communists stay with the 55 mile an hour speed limit” (at least that’s what I think I hear) followed by a responding “10-4”-acknowledgement. This puts you right in the grove, of course, and then it’s just to hold on for the ride!

Aplanalp’s distorted guitars whine and screech through the electronics of Kaiser, and the sound hits you like a pile-up on the freeway! Kaiser soon joins with his horns, which doesn’t make anything easier, I assure you – but we like this initial torture! Cop radio conversations rattle back and forth in the midst of the instrumental sounds, and it makes you feel like you’re in an American state of the art nightmare, or a drunken cop’s suicidal daydreams. Anyway, it sounds good!

That was just track 1, and track 2 with the ominous title “Enstasis” keeps them hallucinatory voices from behind the wall coming, in a more threatening wall of windy chills.

Track 3 – “Viscous Distillate” - opens as the trumpet calls up visions of street musicians of San Francisco, in a jolly melody, blended in with more glorious and plastic Miles Davis trumpet sounds, moving along and around the persistent jolly trumpet loop – ‘cause it has turned into a frantic loop now…
“Words of Jesus in Red (no. 2)” - a very short track 4 - hits you in the face with whatever you kind find in the kitchen area, but track 5 – “Recombinant Ablutions” - pulls back at once into the open reaches of Western Texas, maybe, and Woody Aplanalp pulls up alongside with an acoustical guitar. Don’t for a minute think that Jeff Kaiser will allow this idyllic picture to last too long without rupturing, though. Electronics waste the lot, or maybe that’s the wrong word – maybe they don’t waste, but nurture! Anyways, this is a brilliant combi of classical guitar and electronics, and the electronics even contain voices that are permutated into the neighborhood of wet Russian kisses and Wyatt Earp burps, only to tune into some eastern mantra type of drones. This is one of the longer pieces on the CD too, with its eight and a half minutes. At times this track – and some other in the oeuvre of Kaiser – makes me think of the sound poet François Dufrene and his munching away on the tongue; that’s how severe this is… Hehe!

Track 6 – “Bituminous Aspergillum” – is a pure electronic piece, but Kaiser has used the sounds of instruments in the brew. He is a shaman with electronics, and the good medicine he extracts out of the flow of electricity through his machines kicks you alive out of whatever depression you were in, and sends you on a low-level flight along the tops of fir tree regions and by snowy mountain sides in Lapland. I especially like the way he lets very small grains of sound of short duration rush by in a manic force, while at the same time having events of other, slower tempi, happening. This stuff is so dynamic, so sparkling with life!

“Words of Jesus in Red (no 3)” – track 7 – uses cornet, electric guitar and electronics, but the electronics use voices too, so don’t underestimate the electronic treatment here. I really do wonder if Kaiser is aware of sound poets like Henri Chopin and François Dufrene, or the Lettrists of early 20th century Europe, for there’s so much here that could have been inspired by them. At times this is a kakafoni of electronically treated instrumental sounds and blurred up throat sounds straight out of 1940’s France!

Track 8 is one of the longer pieces. It’s called “Obligation of the Faithful”, and let’s the distant, behind-the-wall voices, reappear. This renders a dreamy, hallucinatory atmosphere to this piece, and one wonders whether Kaiser is old enough to have spent any time in smoky chambers in the San Francisco 1960’s and 70’s, at poetry readings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Allen Ginsberg, or at Terry Riley’s all night concerts of repetitive, introspective organ improvisations. The feeling is the same here.

Track 9 – “Steam Driven Shiva with Reticulated Cast Bronze Arms” – is a hectic cut-up of diverse sounds, and for sure this music is a continuation and a renewal of the San Francisco renaissance, on a musical level. The titles alone tell you this! I’ve been listening to music for as long as I can remember, and these pieces from Jeff Kaiser and Woody Aplanalp strike me as some of the most inventive and forceful stuff I’ve heard. There is so much happening in this music, that there is no way to grasp it all at once. It calls for many relistenings. A lot of work has gone into this production, and yet is all sounds so fresh, so immediate, so live! Darn!

“Old Man Next Door” – track 10 – freaks you out with the luny sounds, coming from electronical treatment of a trumpet mouthpiece. This is true delight for global locos and intoxicated Walt Disney figures. I’ve always wished to see Mickey Mouse in the gutter, high on something, and here he is, flat on his back in a puddle of water with his feet stuck in the air and unintelligible sound poetry coming out of his mouth!

Final track – no 11 – “Words of Jesus in Red (no. 4)” – is a worthy and luny end to a mad trip through the fantasies of a musical poet like Jeff Kaiser, whom I hold in the highest esteem. It takes guts to make a CD like this and guts he has, Kaiser, and when he teams up with fellow-freethinkers like Woody Aplanalp the result is – I’ve said it before – true delight!