New Music From The Great Krell Machine, Lonnie Holley
Various Artists
The Great Krell Machine, Volume One
(Flag Day)
One of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” was “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”
That’s similar to a plot twist in the 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, about an extinct, technologically advanced race called the Krell that created an enormous, powerful machine that could create things just by scanning people’s thoughts.
The Krell were pacifists who were blind-sided by “Monsters from the Id”—creatures made from the Krell machine drawing from subconscious base desires—that wiped them out.
The compilation The Great Krell Machine, Volume One consists of new music that brings to mind pioneering mid-20th century electronic pieces, such as those made by Morton Subotnick, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
While people talk about “the good old days” and “simpler times,” they sometimes have a selective memory, forgetting the deep undercurrent of anxiety from the cold war and nuclear proliferation. The view of the future, from the mid-20th century, was both scary and exciting.
So perhaps, either intentionally or unintentionally, the compilation taps into a certain spirit, with both wide-eyed wonder and apprehension—a contemporary view of what it might have felt like to be forward-thinking, a half-century ago.
Such a vague and loose sonic theme allows for variation, with certain tracks using calm and patient ambient tones and drones, while others sport seemingly random whooshes, beeps and boops, evoking playfulness among disorder.
The compilation begins with Francisco Meirino’s “He Knows It Is Your Other Self,” which immediately suggests (well, to this writer) some kind of medical scanning, carving and probing procedures upon a spaceship with sinister high-frequency electronics.
The effervescent “Soap” from Cloning percolates and stimulates with its own particular pulse, and the album’s most distinctive track is “Krell Sketches” by Walker Farrell, which adds piano musings and occasional squeals of delight from an infant to its electronic explorations—a distillation of the compilation’s duality of innocence and future shock.
Lonnie Holley
MITH
(Jagjaguwar)
The title of self-taught artist Lonnie Holley’s third album, MITH, shares its name with one of Holley’s found-object sculptures; it’s a cross made with a concrete beam and a piece of a granite headstone that once read “SMITH” before the “S” broke off.
It offers various paths for interpretation—the Christian symbology, the word “myth” and its implications, the craftsman etymology of the name “Smith” and the juxtaposition (hey, it’s not art criticism unless you use the word “juxtaposition”) of an expensive material (granite) next to a more common one (concrete).
Like the sculpture, the double-album MITH has plenty of fodder for thought; best heard without interruptions or distractions, one wanders in Holley’s sprawling, often troubled realm that reflects his anxiety regarding the current state of the union.
Starting with merely a title as an inspirational seed, Holley improvises on vocals and keyboards, and his voice is unpolished—sometimes jarring but unmistakable, with an occasional throaty rattle and Southern inflections from the Birmingham, Ala.-born artist.
Although a visual artist for around four decades, Holley’s musical output had long been limited to improvised concerts until the release of two albums on Dust-to-Digital in 2012 and 2013, and in just a few years, Holley had performed with members of Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Bon Iver and Dirty Projectors, among many others.
On MITH, collaborators include the mystical, ambient musician Laraaji, Appalachian folk duo Anna & Elizabeth, Courtney Harman (from Della Mae) and Pakistani-American multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.
The most prominent collaboration, however, is with the duo Nelson Patton, featuring Dave Nelson on trombone and Marlon Patton on drums and Moog bass pedals, which contributes expansive jazz motifs to tracks including the bubbling “There Was Always Water” and “How Far Is Spaced-Out?”
While ambient strolls and loose jazz dominate the musical approaches, the lyrical content is more perturbing, especially on the album’s centerpieces, the 18-minute “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” and “I Woke up in a F--ked-Up America.”
The former, which shares the title of Holley’s 2017 exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, sustains its distress with Holley’s stream of consciousness accompanied by chilling piano parts, and the terrible irony of the track is that the narrator exits one slave ship only to sneak on another slave ship.
The latter is particularly tense, with crashing cymbals and bleating trombone parts, and Holley’s lyrics favor the visceral rather than the eloquent. Surprisingly, the album ends with the spirited and jaunty “Sometimes I Wanna Dance,” upbeat and in a major key, with a hint of gospel; although it feels like it could derail at any moment, it perhaps shows that joy can sprout despite prevailing fear, uncertainty and doubt.