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Mudboy, "Mort Aux Vaches"
In 2006, the rather enigmatic and aberrant Mudboy recorded a live session for the Dutch radio station VPRO, but it took three years for it to finally see release. Upon hearing this odd and uneven set, that delay seems quite justified- there are certainly some moments of sublime beauty and weirdness captured here, but they are few and far between. This probably should have stayed in the vault.
Mudboy is an organist and installation artist based in Providence, RI. As there are not many working organists in the experimental music underground, he pretty much had his own niche claimed the moment that he started releasing music roughly a decade ago. However, the uniqueness of Mudboy’s aesthetic goes far beyond his anachronistic choice of instruments and permeates absolutely everything he is involved in: his performances, his installations, his general vision, his sounds, and his cover art are all pretty uniformly bizarre and unique. In this case, he uncharacteristically did not seem to have had a hand in the album art, but Staalplaat’s three-panel wooden case is quite nice in an elegantly minimal way regardless.
There are five distinct songs collected here, lasting for roughly half an hour. I do not have a comprehensive command of Mudboy’s complete oeuvre of limited edition vinyl, cassettes, and CD-Rs, but it seems almost certain that the session was totally improvised on the spot with a minimum amount of both preparation and gear. That is the only logical explanation for the opener “Ntro,” which completely falls flat and goes nowhere for over four minutes (it basically approximates a muttering goblin repeatedly sounding a tuning fork). The following piece (“B.O.G.”) initially yields similar dire promise, as it sounds like that same rasping, gibbering goblin has now begun fiddling with the presets on a cheap Casio.
Unexpectedly, however, “B.O.G.” quickly evolves into the session’s clear highlight, as Mudboy plunges into an utterly mesmerizing organ solo atop the cheesy, carnivalesque vamp. I don’t know quite what he did to his organ to get it to sound like it does (he is an avid circuit-bender and instrument modifier), but I have never heard anything quite like it. The notes seem to be almost solid, like they are hanging in the air and slowly dripping to the ground. Sadly, that snatch of heaven is all too ephemeral and the remaining three pieces (while not bad) fail to recapture much magic.
The best of the remainder is probably “Beebbub,” a buzzing and throbbing noise piece built upon treated field recordings of bees. The aural apiary is gradually populated by a barrage of deranged and incomprehensible speech snippets that echo and bounce all over the place, evoking the feeling of a disturbingly psychedelic funhouse. The other two songs are fairly one-dimensional and unmemorable: “Osandways” is essentially a prog-rock organ solo without a surrounding song, while the accordian-esque “Shantysea” resembles one of Terry Riley’s more annoying and dated-sounding excursions.
The central problem with this session is that each piece seems to consist of one idea that is flogged away at until Mudboy loses interest in it. Some of the ideas are good and some aren’t, but there is very little in the way of progression in either case. Essentially he creates a loop, makes some sounds over it for a few minutes, then stops. While I realize that may be a somewhat inherent problem with one-man live improv, it doesn't make for a compelling listen when divorced from the performance itself. Obviously, there is a lot to like here from a pure sound perspective, but those sounds get dull quickly when there is little structure and movement surrounding them. This is definitely not Mudboy’s finest moment, but thankfully it is also not a particularly representative one.
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