EAGLE TWIN NOTES DAY 10

DAY 10






SHOW REVIEW: DE KALB, IL

What is the link between the improvisational capability of Eagle Twin and the long phrase of Sunn O)))'s Slow Music?

Action. Improvisation is a rational and gestural act, differential in nature, rolling forward from point to point to point never freezing, eye to eye with it's inevitable end, resigned to this end's possibility, but at the same time receptive for opportunities to build and sustain its passage in time. The improviser must communicate, must subjugate the ego in order to allow for the dual nature of the improvisational act- too much self, and the improvisation collapses into masturbatory wang-noodlry. But also the improviser must assert her or his self, must seize the momentary points in the music's current, and again the dual nature of improvisation manifests itself in this aspect of the act: the improviser must at once listen and react, flickering between the two, transient and finite in time at once. Improvisation is not consumption, it does not destroy the line of music in the current of time. And so is determined the long phrase of Sunn O))). Sunn O)))'s human-plectrums are the improvisers, finite in articulation, but transient in their wash of wave forms.

In both cases, the long phrase of Sunn O))) and the improvisation of Eagle Twin, the multiple contingencies of language slough away, so deterring the naturalization process of the unhealthy signs that infest our daily symbolic geography. Improvisation and the long phrase of slow music exist in the indicative mode, at unity gain of meaning. In nature, improvisation and the long phrase share the characteristic of a rational and gestural dialog, a dialog which roots both in the indicative, factual mode, and in so doing fortifies each against the crippling myth-making/marketing processes that terribly shimmer out in all directions of our daily lives. This is not to say that the performances of Sunn O))) and Eagle Twin cannot be recorded, reproduced, and distributed, exactly that has happened, and with the fierce-some marketing force of Southern Lord Records brought full to bear in both ensembles' histories. But live, on a stage in a town in Illinois, plaster and paint flaking off the walls, under an electric storm in full panorama, in every direction flashes and ground strikes, a fire fly tracing loops over the back of your hand, they are unrobbable by the naturalizing, parasitic processes of 2nd significations.



www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 9

How many Ampeg 8x10 cabinets are weighing down vans or trailers attached to vans, all hurtling down the monumentally overbuilt motorways of our obese and over-entitled nation right this second? Too fucking many. How many shows feature acts that play essentially the same equipment but for relatively slight cosmetic differences? hey can you hurry up getting you Marshall 4x12 slant front speaker cabinet and Gibson SG and Marshall 50 watt head off of the stage so that I can place my Marshall 4x12 straight front speaker cabinet and Marshall JMP head and my Gibson Les Paul on the stage, without all of which I'd never be able to dial in the absolutely critical sonic signature of my tonal avatar?) Obviously considerations for the material differences of instruments must be allowed, however decisions as to practical necessity must be made with a more stern scimitar than that which is now being swung.

And the costs incurred by these and the 538 other bottomless habits of operation sewn into the touring culture of North American Independent Music are foisted upon consumers. Higher ticket costs, higher costs for touring culture's artifacts (which exist as the naturalization of the 'memory myth' of western event-consumption culture, which is a whole other big fucking mess), higher costs for the Coors Light that you just dropped $5 for at the bar (read as time spent laboring, say if you make $12 / hour answering customer service calls from some God-absent corner of some terrifying nest of cubicles at Discover Card's corporate head quarters, then that'd be 25 minutes of your life leashed to a phone bank in one of the most contemptible ditches of such a cruel glass and aluminum hell). Unethical, self-defeating, and at times practically malicious cost dumpings along the entire reach of the ethical spectrum are systemic in the touring process. Growth-focused commerce has no claim to any actual piece of standing ground in the metaphysical stuff of Live Music- about which is North American Touring Culture.

Multiple ideology-reinforcing myths exist within North American Independent Music's touring methodology, a methodology which actualizes a modus operandi determined by misuse of resources, a methodology the successes of which are determined by the displacement of operational expenses upon the consumer, and which assumes an unfounded right to geographic access. Dozens, if not dozens of dozens of further critiques could be set out against this methodology, but I am tired from a day off of lounging by the pool, watching cable television, enjoying the air conditioning of the 5th floor of the hotel in which I will upon a double bed sleep tonight having nuzzled up to a massive plate of Mexican food surrounded by middle-class people nuzzled up to other plates of Mexican food but the line of differentiation is that I paid for my meal with money set aside in the catering budget of the show that Eagle Twin (not I) played last night for which St. Louisians of many stripes paid $15.00 to see.

Most of the anecdotal references made here withstand major distortion in their transposition to the other market segments of Western Music such as hip hop, country, pop (all of which tend towards even greater maluse and profligacy.

The Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is one of our culture's most insidiously absurd significations. As travel industry handouts are retracted by the current trans-Atlantic politics of budget balancing, the Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is a skirmish line shaping up to become a surreal manifestation of class divisions that will will leave the middle class holding their plastic luggages, but without tickets or car keys or mortgages in hand.

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 8

DAY 8


Gentry tells a tour story that goes something like this:

We're driving and it is somewhere in Georgia on the way to Florida or something and we are in a rental van because we're on like the 3rd van that we've ruined on the tour so it is me and Cache is driving and there is Doug and Chad and I am in the back and the cabinets and the gear are just in the van in the back there are no seats- we are just on the floor of the van and Chad is behind me and there's a bass and some heads and we are going along like at 80 or 90 miles an hour and Cache is driving and then there is kgggaawhap and then the crazy part is then we fish tail back and forth a couple of times and we are just then he hits something and we are off to the side of the road and then I am just in the air but I look behind me over my shoulder and there is all the gear in the air and there is this bass head in the air coming towards me floating and coming towards me and I sort of while I am in the air move it aside and away from my head and then next I know I'm upside down on top of Doug and Chad is in the air his seat just hanging there clipped in and I am up on my shoulders and Cash turns around and just says he says How's my bitches?!


*****


Kgggaawhapfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - What the fuck was - frumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - that? - frumpkrangfrumpgunkfrumkkrangngngngngngngngnfrumpfrump - I don't know - frumpfrumpfrumpthwackgngngngngfrumpfrumpfrump - a chunk of tire just shot out from - frimpfrimpfrimprrrrrrrrgrrrgrrrngngngngnnnnnnnngfrumpfromp - under the back - frompfrompfrompfrompppmmffffrrroommmppppppffrooommmpppfffroommmpp -What the fuck - fffrroooommpppffffrrooommppppppffrrrooommppppffffrooommmmppppppnnkkknnnnppppphphhhththth.

The van is off on the side of the interstate and it is hot and very muggy and all of the cars are whipping past.

Man you want to not drive?

Yeah man, that sounds good- I say.


******


ggggrrrunnkkkkkkddd

Tyler!

Fuck the fucking jack just broke!

I am around the front of the van and I come around to the driver's side and there is Tyler out to the side of the rusty old van on his knees in the parking lot pushing as hard as he can on the tire which is at a weird angle and then I can see that there is one lugnut on but the jack is crumpled underneath...


www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 7

DAY 7


Attila is from Hungary.

'Man, what are you going to have for breakfast?'

'Pancakes, I'm going to have some mother fucking pancakes.'

'Banana nut.'

Attila is looking out the window.

At the hotel yesterday morning everyone is inside getting coffee, but Attila is standing on the edge of the parkway in the center of the hotel's half-circle driveway. He is smoking and his spine is curved as would be a knife fighter's tossed from the window of a 3rd story dance hall to the muddy banks of the trash creek below. His rolled cigarette is between the tips of his first and second fingers and his thumbs, and he's looking up towards the tops of the buildings across the street with a half grimace.

'... So basically you are paying a buck fifty for the hash browns.'

'Man, I don't know.'

A tour has a funny way of colluding the inconspicuous and mundane elements of the daily routines of its participants in very pleasant and surreal ways. Same goes for this trip, here we are, the vanguard of Slow Music, the present's manifestation of New Music, card carrying members of one of Metal's most revered and radical party's, around a 3 tables pushed together by a very large woman with a leech-shaped hickey on her thick neck in a Village Inn on a Tuesday morning in Omaha, oversized plastic menus glaring up at our drooping faces the photos of Skillets designed by the Skillet Experts.

Attila is at the head of the table: 'Cool- I am Grandfather!' He nudges me with his elbow, and pegs a finger at one of the laminated omelette photos, 'You see the heart? That is for me.'

3 or 4 or 2 years ago began a striking and continuing trend in Western Independent Music: the exploitation (to great and to poor effects dually) of organ-timbres- Arcade Fire, Beirut, Ratatat a frozen fencepost full of others to which I am not hip. Parallely, dense, polyphonic voicings surfaced (and then engulfed in a synthesized firestorm keyboard hooks) the Industrial Pop Music Complex.

Overtone singing, also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances (or formats) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.

Throat singing is both a generic and a specific term. Generally, the term is applied to any singing style which entails the application of a harsh voice or some other constriction. Specifically, the term refers to a type of Central Asian and Siberian overtone singing

­So sayeth the interweb.

Attila, at the crowd-point of the Sunn O))) parallelogram, at the dark yawn of his cloak hood a bullet-form raven's mic in both hands, by means of overtone singing and the harsh voice, delivers the most rich, most full polyphonic organ-timbre in the business, hands fucking down. He actualizes his two, three, and at times four dimensional tree-groan with the exact pathos required of Sunn O)))'s nightly Great Musical Leap. His stage presence and execution call into question the capability of any other member of the human race to do any of this any better than himself.

'I will have this Award Winner.'

'Award winner?'

'Yes, this Award Winner.'

'The pie?'

'Yes, the pie.'

'You want that warm or with ice cream, hon?'

Attila pauses, looking at the menu. Then he looks up to her where she leers large and puffed over his shoulder, 'Warm.'

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 6

DAY 6


This tour is of present Western Music's most important, relevant, innovative, and prescient happenings.









www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 5

DAY 5


SHOW REPORT: MINNEAPOLIS


Recent Metal consistently toes a line laid out by its histories' and genres' significations. Closed systems of significations, most usually, or nearly closed with only cracks at its kick plates and jambs through which may (or may not) flicker the efforts of the music's innovators, in cohorts or as individuals.

A creative act is not the singular fulcrum for upturning a closed system; ideology has never been disrupted solely through painting a bowl of fruit. Or by puking out noise/melody on a Moog or through a Big Muff or with Pro Tools or out of an electrified mouth harp or by the deployment of any of the countless other material means available to the individual in this info-democratic period, including literary / theoretical / cultural devices such as repetition, time expansion, metaphor, knock knock jokes, etc. Instruments and devices are complimentary to an action, they may to different degrees be useful in the carrying out of a certain intention, even critical, nevertheless instruments are supportive components to any particular act. On July 5, 2009 at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, the primary instruments are mostly, well, instruments, plus improvisation.

Eagle Twin can improvise. Improvisation is not determined simply by making shit up while one is on a stage. Improvisation requires that its participants' relations in the live setting bare the traits of communicative interchange, without which improvisation does not exist in its fullest, most substantive forms. Negotiation between the players is possible and necessary, happens frequently and in a sustained and building fashion, and this mirrors the negotiations of individuals one with another, one with each other, one with one's self, one with the natural world, one with the caddisflies smacking the street lamps of Dinkytown on a Sunday night, and so on.

Eagle Twin, on July 5, 2009, at the Varstiy Theater in Minneapolis seized upon the core of such dialectic negotiations- one with another; together with the sign systems of Metal, other Musics, Language et al., and on out into the night in all directions at once. This fertile position between the negotiative poles of improvisation mirrors the malleable mid-belly of our negotiations (one with another, one with each other, one with one's self, one with ruling ideology, one with the world, one with the plume of smoke billowing up from the mini-van in flames at the side of the highway, and so on), and was summarily contracted, embellished, inverted, pummeled, polished by Eagle Twin last night by means of the primary device of improvisation. The negotiations on stage began, were built, were resolved, and then at the shouts and calls of the present hundreds of listener / receivers, were struck up again, built further, and laid out to be examined by all those present, manifested in the hearty dude-embrace by Gentry Densley of Tyler Smith to close the set.

Sunn O))) sees all of this. Sunn O))) takes to the stage, and in doing so takes up the still warm material instruments and devices of the Eagle Twin set- speaker magnets, vacuum tubes, the charged air, the invigorated symbol-fields of Metal- branding irons still hot in the fire of Eagle Twin's four song forge. Sunn O)))'s set is animated, tense, live, and outros with Greg Anderson and shortly thereafter Stephen O'Malley hanging their respective instruments by headstock from the twin art-deco chandeliers strung from the high ceilings of the Varsity Theater's expansive show hall.

Back to the second paragraph- a creative act is not the singular fulcrum for upturning a closed system. Improvisation is not some sort of saving act. A past question rephrased: if Metal is a spectacle of excess composed of closed or essentially closed systems of significations, a multiple systemed spectacle of excess which can be (and was on July 5, 2009 by Eagle Twin, and then Sunn O))) ) manipulated through the primary instrument of improvisation, then what is the moral concept that such improvisers set out, consciously or unconsciously, to purvey?

Admittedly, I've got my fingers crossed for total ideological restructuring.

www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES THE POSTER

trent call and sri whipple did it:

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 4

DAY 4

Another day off. The 4th of July. We've set up camp on a heavily wooded island in Wisconsin.

Back in the trees, Tyler has a log over his shoulder, and is walking purposefully towards a swamp. Gentry has two maple limbs up behind his neck like horns, and is running low down and on the balls of his feet through the under brush.


*****


Across the fire, a raccoon is squatting back on its haunches. We all stop speaking and look towards the animal. The animal cocks its head a few degrees to the side. In the firelight, the dark patches around his eyes are even darker, and the fine details of his black fingers are very clearly visible.

I look to Tyler and Tyler looks to me. Gentry keeps his eyes forward, with his arms resting on the edge of the table.

In its fingers, the animal raises something up in front of its muzzle, holds it there at its eye in the firelight as one would with a gem. It is a tick. The tick's legs are kicking. The animal squeezes hard, and the tick is crushed. The animal whips around quick, and we watch its banded tale loop off into the darkness beyond the firelight.


*****


Out of the coals Tyler drags the bottle, and lays it on the leaves below the table end. He stumbles off into the van for the night. The leaves smolder, and a thin curve of smoke works its way up from below the scorching bottle.

www.cityweekly.net

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 3

DAY 3


Days off generally are no good. Oftentimes they are dull, with too much money being spent.

*****

'...And I had so many stalkers there, it was just so fucking annoying.'

I am seated at the end of the table. Tyler was on my left, but he's had enough and has left the dining room.

'... So I went outside, and I told that fucking ice cream truck driver, I told him, 'You should turn that shitty music off, all the kids know when you are here, I am trying to take a fucking nap.'

On my right is a woman that is short and is wearing velor sweat pants with a large, laminate peace sign on one thigh. Later Gentry says that he is pretty sure that she has done porn.

'...And I am in the museum-'

Last night she stormed through the show with Nordstrom's bags on each arm. She asked to leave her bags behind the merch table, but I told her that there was no room.

'- And everyone is fucking crying! I just don't get that, I just don't do that with that kind of stuff.'

I don't have enough money to order anything at the restaurant in which we are all seated around a long table a where I am sitting next to this woman. When I first sat down, she had a camera in her hands, and she straightaway took to explaining its photos, including a washed out in-the-club shot of her friends breasts.

'... I mean, who does that? Who goes into the Holocaust Museum and just starts fucking cryig? How fucking annoying!'


*****


'What the fuck was that?'

'Shit, I don't know.'

All day on the streets have filed by toe-headed men in pale pink and blue shirts, either in same sex pairs or trios, or accompanied by females in very short white shorts or very short technicolor cocktail dresses. The only break in the pattern has been a tall, dark-skinned transvestite with breaths that looked as big and as round and as hard as squashes.

A man, now, right outside the passenger side of the van, is wiping at his forearms and looking up at the sky.

'Oh shit-'

Later tonight are scheduled fireworks at the lake shore. Most of those on the streets seem to be headed in that direction.

'You backed over that piss bottle!'