John Carter, A Suite of Early American Folk Pieces for Solo Clarinet (side A)

The title of 1979's A Suite of Early American Folk Pieces for Solo-Clarinet is misleading—all compositions on the album are by John Carter.  He does play solo clarinet here, and as with seemingly any open-ended jazz clarinet playing, Jimmy Giuffre's influence is obvious.  Carter's fluid playing tends to feel a bit less detached and cerebral than Giuffre's, even when the influence is most obvious.  He also stretches the idiom with more modern influences—the most obvious is where intertwines two melodies in a style that reminds me of Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker.  He also explores overblown harmonic timbres, which sound much more subdued on clarinet than the customary saxophone palette.  The back cover photo of Carter in a field is far more compelling than the close-up on the front.

Pere Ubu, 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo (side A)

390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo, which was released in 1981, collects Pere Ubu live recordings, plus one practice tape, dating between 1976 and 1979.  The album focuses on concerts from 1978 supporting the Modern Dance, when Ubu were an incredibly powerful live band.  The performances sometimes lack the tightness of the studio recordings, but the noise/freak-out sections often feel particularly expansive and liberated.  The core band tends to play the sections with structure close to their recorded versions, while Ravenstine's sythesizers often sound very different than the recorded versions that feel so familiar.  Three songs date from an early 1976 line-up with a bit less chaos and abandon—they reflect the transition from Rocket from the Tombs.  The 1977 practice tape of "Humor Me" is a radically different song than the one that was finally released.  The recording quality is inconsistent and often primitive—the mastering, which emphasizes high-mid frequencies, exaggerates the lo-fi quality of the original tapes, as do the blurry black and white cover image and design.

The Baseball Astrologer, Famine of the Soul (side A)

Douglas Berman, the Baseball Astrologer, narrates in a distinctive style of long-form poetry that sometimes borders on prose.  1999's Famine of the Soul alternates short solo poems, which are more narrative in nature, with duets with guitarist Steven Wray Lobdell.  Lobdell is known for his work in groups like David Redford Triad and Sufi Mind Game, and he also played guitar with a line-up of Faust in the 90s.  The poems which Lobdell accompanies have a more performative aspect, with repetition and more fragmented phrases to match the guitar lines.  Lobdell's playing here falls somewhere between the delicate tendencies of his solo album and the noiser and more chaotic wails of Davis Redford Triad.  The influence of 60s psychedelia on his work is obvious.  There is a hint of paranoia about world affairs in Berman's recitations, but the stories emphasize his distinctive persona over any clear world-view—his delivery suits this combination well, especially when he interacts with Lobdell's dark guitar playing.  The lo-fi sound quality, which seems to have been made on a cheap cassette 4-track, places the album squarely in the 90s when it was made.  The amazing packaging features an image of a painting glued to the reverse-stock black cover, with a 70s baseball card (mine is Tim Foli, 1974) glued to the back.

U.S. Saucer, My Company is Misery (side A)

U.S. Saucer's 1993 debut My Company is Misery reflects less of the group's classic country influence than their later records, and fits a bit more closely with their indie-rock peers.  The vocals are lower in the mix, and the unusual harmonies that are central to the later albums appear less frequently here.  While no percussion is used, heavily distorted guitars feel more like rock music than the consistently clean sounds that U.S. Saucer would refine.  The sound and feel of My Company is Misery has a sense that layers are buried and hidden—on later albums, the arrangements are much clearer with everything up front.  The back cover photo of the group captures their aesthetic perfectly—it combines purposeful indie fashion with a genuinely old-fashioned feel.

Bruce Gilbert / Ron West, Frequency Variation (side A)

Bruce Gilbert is of course known for his guitar playing on classic Wire albums.  Ron West was in less-well-known bands during England's punk era.  If Gilbert did not go on to achieve such massive success, his electronic art school experiments from 1974 would have been forgotten.  In 1998, they were reissued as a vinyl LP, Frequency Variation.  The music here was made with an oscillator, a tape delay, some control over panning, and a filter.  The oscillator is used to create little melodic swirls that give the music structure.  It lacks the neatly-controlled patterns of a Subotnick piece, for example—everything is a bit more chaotic and unpredictable.  It definitely gives no hint that Bruce Gilbert would be a significant figure in the punk movement.  The reissue was mastered and pressed with impressive care, with a balanced and very clean frequency distribution.  The sparse, minimal packaging fits with the era of the album's release, not the era of the music's creation.

Archie Shepp, A Sea of Faces (side A)

The centerpiece of 1975's A Sea of Faces is "Hipnosis", a 26-minute long Grachan Moncur composition that fills side A—given the groove density to fit 26 minutes, the low-end on the bass is impressive.  Most of the track is a repeating rhythm from Cameron Brown's bass and Dave Burrell's piano.  Inexplicably, the random maraca playing is louder than Beaver Harris's typically excellent drumming.  Only at the end does the piece break out of its steady state, when Burrell's playing becomes free and chaotic and moves in the direction of Shepp's loose workouts over the top.  The B-side starts with two pieces with vocals that are less crazed than Blasé and less gospel-tinged than The Cry of My People.  The album ends with a more classic jazz tune in "Lookin' for Someone to Love".  The cover painting that wraps around the gatefold ties more to the populist bent of Shepp's early-70s work than to this album, where he moves back toward a jazz idiom.

Silver Apples, Silver Apples (side A)

Most reviews of this 1968 Silver Apples album emphasize its differences from everything else at the time.  I tried instead to think of its similarities.  The overt jazz influences in the drumming resemble some of Spencer Dryden's work with the Airplane.  The thin and largely unprocessed vocals are handled a bit like Lou Reed's in the Velvet Underground.  The songwriting sometimes reminds me of the United States of America, while Fifty Foot Hose might be a reference point for the electronics (or even Lothar and the Hand People).  While Silver Apples also remind me in ways of 70s albums from Sparks to Faust to Daily Dance, their debut feels to me, in many ways, a part of the American underground of its era.  The shiny silver cover is, of course, impressive.

John Fahey, America (side A)

John Fahey's style has become something of a reproducible idiom.  Many solo guitarists now create intricate, technically adroit acoustic guitar playing with a prominent American folk/blues influence in long, abstract, and slowly-evolving compositions.  It seems surprising in retrospect that few of Fahey's albums neatly fit this idiom.  After slowly stretching the concise forms of his early works, he branched far out of his usual element for 1968's Requia—his most daring and surprising album integrates tapes and found sounds.  Only four years later, he sought more commercial success with Of Rivers and Religions.  Only the classics in between, The Yellow Princess and America, follow the style closely associated with Fahey.  He had not totally abandoned technological experiments here.  "The Waltz That Carried Us Away and Then a Mosquito Came and Ate Up My Sweetheart" features prominent tape delay.  The 1998 reissue hides this creative anomaly by burying it after 70 minutes of guitar—the now idealized idiom of Fahey's work is uninterrupted by this oddity.  The impressive packaging of America contains a comic glued inside the album.

Jackdaw with Crowbar, Monarchy Mayhem and Fi$hpaste (12" EP)

Jackdaw with Crowbar's first 12" EP features 3 driving punk songs and a dub exploration.  The punk songs vaguely resemble Gang of Four-influenced contemporaries like Bogshed, but with less conventional structures or lyrical flow.  While the dub workout "Fourth World" is less evolved in execution than the group's later efforts in this style on their album Hot Air, it illustrates that the group's far-reaching creative vision dates to their inception.  The rock songs sound lo-fi and midrange-y, but "Fourth World" includes much richer use of high frequencies.  Monarchy Mayhem and Fi$hpaste has a collage on the cover—the images are historical and seem vaguely political, but it's hard to discern their exact meaning.

Unrest Work & Play, Informs (side A)

The song titles on 1984's Informs, combined with the "forms" hint in the album title, suggest that each individual track will reference a particular style, or perhaps form, of music.  I don't hear any strong differentiation between the tracks to identify "Ethnic" or "Ballad".  Unrest Work & Play feel to me like a cross between Etron Fou's playful intricacy and some of their Gang of Four-influenced contemporaries like the Noseflutes (whose drummer Roger Turner is now active in the free improv community).  Informs is a bit heavier, with more insistent rhythms, than Andy Wake's later work with Tim Hodgkinson in Momes.  Sonically, it seems closer to the group's post-punk contemporaries than some of the sterile late-era rock-in-opposition with which it an also be associated.  The packaging of Informs is impressive, with a giant metallic-silver sticker on the front and a silk-screened back cover.

Matching Mole, Little Red Record (side A)

Matching Mole is best remembered for Robert Wyatt's involvement, and his drumming on 1972's Little Red Record is instantly recognizable.  The songs often seem to be about rock music, more than actually existing within the genre.  Sections are full of volume, energy, and propulsion, and vocal melodies sometimes come to the fore.  These ideas are always undercut by abstract sections of floating organ or group singing.  The close-mic'ed recording style definitely borrows from rock music (though the high-end sounds a bit muffled—it seems like a bad pressing).  The packaging's Communist China reference bears little relationship to the music, but the red paper inner sleeve is a nice touch.

Pearls Before Swine, One Nation Underground (side A)

When I think of 1967's One Nation Underground, my initial memory is the outsider-folk classic "Drop Out".  It's thus easy to forget the album's remarkable diversity.  Alongside the folky guitars are droning organs and pulsing bass guitars.  Drums can sometimes move to the foreground, and  parts can feel surprisingly driving, like "Uncle John".  One song can feature jarring leaps between these approaches.  Tom Rapp's vocals vary a lot in quality too, from light and airy to thicker and darker.  The instruments generally sound clean if somewhat lo-fi, and it's hard to tell if whether the mixes' eccentricities are intentional.  I'm not sure what the Bosch cover painting has to do with Pearls Before Swine's music, but I like the font used for the band name on my copy (I've also seen a version without a border or text).

Africa: Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music (side A)

1976's Africa: Drum, Chant & Instrumental Music (side A) is a diverse and impressive album.  Its recordings cover a broad geographic section spanning 3 countries in northern Africa: Niger, Mali, and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso).  The music is similarly diverse, with percussion, melodic instruments, and vocals all sharing space.  The quality that unites all of the music is its rhythmic richness—no matter the arrangement, it grooves and flows with syncopation that feels unintuitive to a Western listener.  The highlights for me are the intricately layered drums, but it's also an impressively consistent album.  The simple field recordings capture the performances nicely, though sometimes the instrument and vocal balances reflect the limitations in the recordings.  The textured paper of the original cover is quite nice too.