Jeph Jerman – The Bray Harp
By coincidence, this arrived in the mail exactly the same day as Rough Music: The Hands To Library. "Rough" is the first word to mind as fingertips linger lustfully on artfully sandpapered sleeve, and it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest Rough Music as the first point of departure for the characters involved. There are more of them than might be expected. Characters involved, I mean. Ben Brucato (metals, wood), Eric La Casa (tape) and Oskar Burmmel (tape). Tape... what a wonderful instrument... so suggestive of anything, everything, nothing. So that's three gents, a whole heap of possibilities (or not!), plus title character to whom all "generous assistance" is lent. Expectations are, if nothing, piqued. Rough music...
As a long litany of metallic clunks, plunks, clanks and clonks clatter into range, one may hesitate to call it rough. At least in texture. Precise, dynamic, piercing, an artful arrangement lovingly drawn pinched prodded by practiced hands to the task. The squeaky wheel turns in a protest of rusted skronk, nimble fingers worm their way through a field of loaded spring-traps, nuts 'n bolts drop from shoulder height into empty steel buckets. Come hither... the mind's ear, deep into conflicted contrary images... of pachinko parlors, mechanical adding machines, bowling alleys... up close and personal, closer still, closer... a slow-mo survey of smacker-ing pachinko balls, clacker-ing adding machines, clattering bowling pins. Get yer head in there my lad. That's it, right in there m'boyo. The hazards of the job become apparent as scene two announces itself: sixteen pounds of solid steel strike the skull, pitching the field into kaleidoscopic spin, little metal balls bouncing everywhere, getting lodged in the gears, bending and snapping under the pressure, clatter-trap whirl-a-gig whirlwind, chunky hailstorms of clonk plunk clonk clank, I swear it's bonking cats and dogs in there, and what's with all the freaking pink elephants on unicycles molesting the furry harmonica? A shake of the head, mad barefoot dash across rough n tumble fields of broken glass and razor wire, hazardously strewn spring-traps slamming shut, appendages wincing in pain. The acoustic cacophony is unrelenting. A cantankerous collage of continuous cascading collapse is no place to lay them weary bones. And then Professor Jerman pulls out his warped and abraded bray harp and just starts flailing away. Enter final scene, open-eared dread. Proportions are all wrong. A dark cloud, no, a... cratered bowling ball... larger than life... blotting out the sky, rumbling heavily over drift and sway, leveling everything in its path, kicking up dense clouds of shredded earth, lathering the surface with coarse grains of thunderous crunch, wide-eyed unfortunates dragged face-first through mangled dry-heave. Here, at last, descriptors like Harsh, Dense and Raw force themselves into the frame, textures flattened, scuffed, deeply abraded, as though the needle were worming its way through groove of solid sandpaper.... Just a- ohshitohshit... quick rush to turntable. Phew. Well, there actually is a dab of sandpaper glued to the record label, and... well, anyway.
Side B resembles Side A in the way it unfolds. Or disassembles. The opening scene equal in unassuming measure to the leisurely unfurling, or dismantling, first posited- if trading in metallic clunks, plunks, clanks, clonks for more... woody assemblage. Splintered bits of brittle timber crackling underfoot, pastoral stroll down old industrial quarter, front-ended clacks and splacks nourished by vaguely dirge-like machine non-rhythms. As the ear is drawn in for a bit of aural concentrate... considered cycles of crinkling and crackling are sabotaged- suddenly- by fat chunks of collapsing steel. Collapsing CLUNK. Collapsed collapsing ka-BLUNK. Unlike the first side, the heftier grain of meaty THUNK is rather more sporadically dropped, leaving the wide-open field to fill, by increment, with quite the cantankerous range of clunk, plunk, clank, clonk, jazzed up with a good amount of THUD, SKLERK, smash and ker-SKLUNK. Industrial-grade textures to be sure, less the precise focused lens on tripped-out pachinko-parlor-cum-hailstorm, more the scrapped bloodied mess of rough and rugged abrasion. And yet, and perhaps of importance, there is no sense of striving, nor of aggression. Nothing is being forced into the aural cavities. Sound events, they happen, and if one happens to like it rough, well, great. Er, allow me to self-correct. THIS IS ka-BLUMPING GREAT. (Thank you.)
Closing scene and it is strangely subdued and gamelan-esque. Metal sources un-dampened, to indulge their extended resonance of bonk cling and clang, tinkling liberally upon the ivories, temple gongs swaying in concert. An austere and welcome coda to all that industrial-strength abrasion, distant sounds of highway, or seashore, wafting in through the periphery.
edit
just thought the above commentary needed a bit of retardening up
