New Music From Revenge Technician, Nate Wooley
Revenge Technician
Problem Addict
(Head Destroyer)
This writer and hoarder of antiquated technology recently pulled out his VHS video cassette recorder to watch David Lynch’s troubling prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (after crawling past the finish line of finally completing the original Twin Peaks television series), and his immediate thought was, “Wow, VHS really looks bad.”
On some level, however, the poor picture quality made the movie even more disturbing, as picture definition was gradually lost over 25+ years on a degrading video cassette, and the loss of clarity added a rough layer of mystery, as the viewer was required to fill in the blanks.
This came to mind when listening to the new cassette Problem Addict, which includes a 12-page zine of collages, by the Johnson City, TN one-man-band Revenge Technician. The cassette is oozing with distortion and effectively uses just a few elements at a time to make an unsettling experience.
It’s a document of the disintegration of sound, and when vocals are present, they are often nearly incomprehensible. Cheap-sounding drum machine beats are severely distorted, as are synth lines, which evoke dirtied-up John Carpenter horror soundtracks with gnarled and nauseous treatments.
The rhythms tread as if partaking in a death march with broken ankle bones on the opening “Cold Slither (Bleak)”, bringing to mind early Swans but with damaged synths. Several guest vocalists make appearances, including Emm Organ who adds both soothing and whispered vocals on “Negative Cutter” for an odd contrast.
The infamous artist Bryan Lewis Saunders contributes delirious “sleep vocals” (stories told while talking in his sleep) to “Dream Submission//Nocturnal Transmissions” which gradually winds down, slowing to a crawl as if one’s system is shutting down, and Feral Freya’s spoken-word part on “Wound Licker” describes a body horror medical nightmare in disturbing detail.
At times the album offers a strange intersection of industrial music and minimalism, like on “ClosedCircuitCasketSurveillance” which uses a repeated motif that folds in on itself, making a compelling aural swamp.
“Cold Slither (BLK)” is relatively un-distorted, with sparkling tones in a cool-down sequence—a lounge with a lurking horror—while a third version of that track, “Cold Slither (skeleton)”, uses meandering tones that feel hopeless, like footage of an injured android wandering in the wilderness, looking for a place to die, captured on blurry VHS.
Nate Wooley
Columbia Icefield
(Northern Spy)
Trumpeter and composer Nate Wooley grew up in Oregon, where witnessing the Columbia River empty into the Pacific Ocean made an impression on him. Later on, when a friend told him he needed to seek the origin of the Columbia River—the Canadian network of glaciers called the Columbia Icefield—he was skeptical, but when he did, he was profoundly inspired.
As Wooley explained in an interview with Arts Knoxville, another inspiration for his new quartet Columbia Icefield was Ellen Fullman’s album The Long String Instrument, because he noticed that in addition to creating and releasing tension, the music sometimes had a third state: simply existing.
For Wooley, the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield were huge and monolithic yet in motion, slowly moving and melting away. With this in mind, the way Columbia Icefield unfurls makes sense: where musicians convey vastly different notions of movement and fluidity at various times, composed stretches give way to improvisational jaunts.
Wooley had a clear idea of the musicians he wanted for Columbia Icefield: pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, electric guitarist Mary Halvorson, and percussionist Ryan Sawyer.
In line with Wooley’s inspirations, this writer was struck by how well the album uses basic polar opposites—building and tearing down, harmony and discordance, order and chaos—but also goes beyond them.
A lot of the album resides in an in-between place, where dissonance isn’t necessarily unpleasant; this mood is contemplative while radiating energy, which is particularly felt in Wooley’s piercing, shining trumpet tones.
A sort of role-reversal is present occasionally; while traditional time-keepers are a band’s rhythm section, here, certain composed portions on the first track “Lionel Trilling” played by Alcorn and Halvorson provide structure while Sawyer seems free to follow his own varying, liquid rhythm, in violent contrast.
While this writer finds Halvorson to have high technical proficiency, he prefers her work when things don’t feel too rigid and favors the moments on Columbia Icefield where she lives and breathes the music rather than reading from sheet music.
That said, the composed sequences are necessary for Wooley’s purpose, providing times for music formed by rumination and reflection, rather than instinct. The free play excursions are refreshing, with Alcorn providing non-obvious, elegantly gliding transitions and Sawyer bristling with vigor.
In “With Condolences”, Sawyer recites “Dream Song 42” from poet John Berryman, an enigmatic poem obliquely grappling with Berryman’s father’s death, matched with equally puzzling and abstractly guided music—between thinking and feeling, there’s a third, uneasy state for the listener here.