Disquiet

To follow up on yesterday’s fine post-dub MP3 by Raz Mesinai (“Ghost of the Gulag”), here’s a … well, what would one call it? Pre-post dub? Mid-dub? How about just dub? It’s from Mesinai’s Viagra Opus, which surfaced last year, just like Cyborg Acoustics, from which that “Gulag” track was culled. In contrast with “Gulag,” Viagra’s “Lady Dem Crazy” (MP3) bears all the hallmarks of dub, right down to the faux-patois title. It’s got the light reverb, and the percussion that makes the most of those echo patterns. It’s got the trance-like rhythmic solemnity, sounding meandering despite coming in at less than two minutes. What distinguishes it is its utterly acoustic vibe. Unlike much dub, “Lady Dem Crazy” isn’t audibly compressed; it may bear the mark of its genre, but not the varnish, not the understood low fidelity, not the skunky haze. Taut dub: now there’s a contradiction in terms. More info at razmesinai.com and at the website of the Agriculture, theagriculture.com, which released Viagra Opus in the first place.

Once upon a time, cohorts in John Zorn’s circle in the Lower Manhattan music scene spoke of a mutt classicism. Today, some two decades hence, young musicians fully conversive in written music and in popular music (the two being, in many cases, mutually exclusive) are often drawn to an artfully astringent realm of what would probably be called minimalism, if they weren’t, by definition, self-conscious about ever risking boring their audiences.

Raz Mesinai is such a musician. Though he’s best known for his trenchant modern dub, which updates the Caribbean sound with Middle Eastern elements (he was born in Jerusalem) and digital production (he did come of age in the 1980s), his skills are well beyond that. Some of his best dub, like his intense contribution to the BSI Records compilation Docking Sequence (2000), infuses the genre with piercing string playing. Later, on Cyborg Acoustics (2004), a release for Zorn’s record label, Tzadik, Mesinai ditched the dub entirely, for a driving near-orchestral feel that has the gusto of one of Glenn Branca’s old guitar symphonies, but composed (yes, there’s that word) with virtuoso musicianship in mind (musicianship that Branca’s early writing often had no use for).

On Mesinai’s homepage currently, a full track off Cyborg Acoustics has been made available, “Ghost of the Gulag (Reprise)” (MP3). It’s a tremendous piece, meaty in its playing but kept aloft by its hesitance to ever fully resolve; it just keeps churning. One resists calling it atmospheric, but it is; this just happens to be a particularly dense atmosphere, like Venus-dense. Mesinai is credited with sampler, percussion, processed piano and “objects,” and other contributors to the album (if not to this track in particular) include Mark Dresser (contra bass), Mark Feldman (violin), Okkyung Lee (cello) and Zorn (alto sax). More info at tzadik.com and razmesinai.com.

Listening to the piece “Gesine IV” (MP3) on guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi’s album Gesine (Hapna), one could be excused for hearing words in one’s head: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming / We’re finally on our own.” It’s not that his solo guitar piece, with touches of percussion, directly resembles Neil Young’s Woodstock-era hymn, but that it summons it in spirit. The lingering ghosts of rock’s past take a second form later in “Gesine IV,” when a drone of feedback brings to mind another Woodstock moment, the peak of Jimi Hendrix’s rewrite of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Add a third early rock trendsetter, Robert Fripp and his self-layering guitar landscapes, and you’ve pretty much triangulated Gesine as a whole (all six tracks), though in fact it could as easily be mistaken for an errant bit of Amsterdam free improvisation as for new weird folk. Ielasi is Italian, and he has collaborated with Dean Robers, Gino Robair, Brandon Labelle and others. Learn more at hapna.com.