Material - Seven Souls Remixes

[GA Russell]

AS PART OF THE DIGITAL INCUNABULA SERIES   M.O.D. TECHNOLOGIES Releases       MATERIAL SEVEN SOULS REMIXES   AVAILABLE ONLINE AND THROUGH WWW.MOD-TECHNOLOGIES.COM ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2016. PRE-ORDERS SEPTEMBER 2.

New York, August 30, 2016 - Three remixes from the classic Seven Souls. Material with William S. Burroughs, reading from The Western Lands. Number three, in his epic trilogy that began with "Cities Of The Red Night" and "A Place Of Dead Roads". Featured here - three mutations from the original form. "The Western Lands" by Bill Laswell featuring bass icon Jah Wobble, the original illbient mutant - DJ Spooky, renown Japanese ambient artist - Tetsu Inoue and others. "Seven Souls" by Bomb The Bass founder Tim Simenon. And "Soul Killer" by electronic experimentalist Terre Thaemlitz. The Road To The Western Land is by definition the most dangerous road in the world. for it is a journey beyond death, beyond the basic god standard of fear and danger.   TRACKS    1. The Western Lands (A Dangerous Road Mix)  8:35 Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Tetsu Inoue 2. Seven Souls (Tim Simenon Mix) 7:10 3. Soul Killer (Remote Control Mix)  8:17 Terre Thaemlitz written by: 1. Laswell, Skopelitis, Burroughs 2. Laswell, Burroughs 3. Laswell, Burroughs total: 24:02   MUSIC EXCERPTS HERE: https://soundcloud.com/modtechnologies

[l p]

laswell is a hack.

[robertoart]

3 hours ago, l p said:

laswell is a hack.

Why?

[ep1str0phy]

Yes, please elaborate. Laswell the bassist? Laswell the producer? The curator? etc. etc. 

Your mileage will vary based on what project or approach you're addressing, but there's such a wide breadth to the music he's traded in that I find blanket condemnations kind of curious. The bass contributions to Last Exit are contentious, and that I kind of get--he's playing this sort of mannered anchor to three of the most incendiary soloists of their epoch, and I don't think even he would argue that the's in the same weight class. He's the one who really edges that band into a metal/pseudo-dub territory, with all of the positives and negatives that that entails. I like it, but only because it means that that band was/is a conceptual monster rather than "just another" raging free jazz ensemble.

If you're talking about curation--he is (again) punching at a lower weight class as an instrumentalist or composer than many of the people drawn into Material's orbit, but I don't think that this diminishes the importance or power of something like Memory Serves (which had the foresight to bridge a lot of the gaps between various Downtown NY factions of the 1980's--and the self-awareness to get out of the way when colliding players of the caliber of Sharrock, Fred Frith, George Lewis, Threadgill, Billy Bang, etc.) 

Killing Time was collaborative, although I know for a fact that a lot of the conceptual underpinning for that was Frith--either way, that part of his oeuvre is fucking unimpeachable and I will rep for that music until the end of my days. That is paradigmatic Downtown/post-no wave/industrial improv. That is absolutely genre defining and the best of its kind, regardless of how you feel about the very different, sort of This Heat-inflected later stuff with Charles Hayward in place of Fred Maher. 

Add to that stuff like Baselines, The Golden Palominos, Painkiller, the Arcanas (both the bizarre trio album with Derek Bailey and Tony Williams and the more traditional post-Lifetime shredfest), etc. Regardless of how you feel about this music, and especially the later stuff (which subsumes the free improv/Downtown textures and elevates the dub inflection), it is in its own way as definitive as a lot of the much more aggressive and iconoclastic Zorn records of the same era.

And lest we lapse into "geniuses are geniuses regardless"-type talking, you can't understate the value of both resurrecting Sharrock's career and editorializing his later music. Listen to Dance With Me Montana and then listen to Guitar. Listen to the live bootlegs of the Ask the Ages Band (with Pheeroan akLaff in place of Elvin) and compare Sharrock's tone and attack with that on the record. We're talking a different caliber of production/curation/shepherding--like 60's post-bop with Van Gelder/Lion and without. Without Laswell, no Last Exit, no Guitar, no Ask the Ages. 

Lastly, the production stuff is, of course, highly contentious and this I hugely get. Panthalassa is cool but unessential. There's a signature sound that suffuses the Sharrocks, the Materials, Album, Herbie's 80's records, and miscellaneous music by the likes of Ginger Baker, Akira Sakata, James "Blood" Ulmer, etc. that some may find sterile and synthetic (and which, by virtue of it's dominance in a certain era, does actually sound kind of dated now).

But I challenge anyone to listen to the unreleased (circulating) remix of Tony Williams's Turn It Over or the John McLaughlin/Santana stuff and tell me that Laswell doesn't understand that early fusion/jazz-rock music on a deep and fundamentally creative level. To this degree (at least), Laswell is lightyears ahead of many of his peers--able to listen past the facile divisions between genres and confront the music on its own (deeply historical, when necessary) terms. The Turn It Over remix is one of my favorite records, period--and it's because Laswell picks up on so many things that others have kind of glossed over in the process of evaluating that music--namely, he subsumes the soloistic stuff (with certain important exceptions) in favor of the broader textural extremes (Young's atonal keyboards, the proto-prog/metal intensity of the rhythm section). He understood, like few people have, that that music was both deeply conservative (groove-based, like an organ trio) and wildly futuristic (percussion and texture-heavy, like Sun Ra rather than, like, Grand Funk or something). For me, that's a tremendous caliber of insight. 

[JSngry]

Yeah, I don't know that the full enormity of his catalog justifies all of itself, but that's the way it happened, and there's enough there to perk up the ears, so....say la vee, as the phoenteticists write it.

[danasgoodstuff]

I need to get that Turn It Over remix...but if resurrecting SS was all he'd done, really for Ask the Ages alone, then god bless him.  And this is from someone who finds much of Laswell's other work (as a producer and as a player) just annoying.