September 2001

From the Inside Out
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By Chris M. Slawecki

In the amusement park of popular music, Bill Laswell owns and operates the spook house.

Composer, bassist, producer and sound sculptor Bill Laswell has always operated on the fringes of the musical fringes: His trademark bass sound detonates a sonic boom that combines the raw street energy of punk with the deep, dark bottomless whomp! of funk. Laswell has led various loosely-based aggregates with John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Henry Threadgill, and Fred Frith; considered in their entirety, these bands, which include Praxis, Material and Last Exit, have explored nearly every imaginable type of underground and mainstream music from pop to dub to techno to alternative rock to trance to hip-hop to art-rock to Jazz. Praxis’ Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis), recorded with Bootsy Collins and Bermie Worrell, was released in 1992 and STILL sounds ahead of its time; Laswell also produced Herbie Hancock’s techno-jazz breakthrough Rockit and won a Grammy for his work on Hancock’s follow-up, Sound System.

Two more recent releases also bear Laswell’s unmistakable fingerprints. In the pattern of Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis, where Laswell smudged the line between music, musician and producer by reconstructing music from and across several different prime-period Davis funk albums, Carlos Santana: Divine Light (Columbia Legacy) is subtitled a “Reconstruction & Mix Translation” of two of the Latin guitarists more spiritualized albums, both duets: Illuminations with Alice Coltrane from1974 and Love Devotion Surrender with guitarist John McLaughlin (at the time of its 1973 release, both guitarists shared spiritual advisor Sri Chinmoy).

However, Divine Light is not the trippy excursion into blackest space that Panthalassa was. Laswell once more digs into the source material, but this time goes more deeply into its religious internal spirit instead of farther out. The surprising result is a glorious shout-out and meditation upon the Coltrane family Jazz prayer book, with an intense and driven “A Love Supreme” and a blissful, beautiful “Naima” from John’s songbook plus two versions of the static “Bliss: The Eternal Now” by Alice. “Angel of Air” and “Angel of Sunlight,” Santana’s two compositions with pianist Tom Coster for Illuminations, and McLaughlin’s “The Life Divine,” round out the set. These electric guitar gods throw down the hammer in “A Love Supreme” and “The Life Divine,” yet Laswell presents their pyrotechnics as jewels in, but not quite the centerpiece to, the crown, often giving just as much space to their acoustic reflections and to Alice’s twinkling, winking harp. Laswell may not have chosen to reconstruct “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” from Illuminations for Divine Light, but its spirit is present throughout.

Laswell the bassist is heard profoundly stomping out two cuts on the deep, dark dub compilation Below The Radar: Best of WordSound Dub from ROIR-USA. ROIR was formed about twenty years ago by Neil Cooper as a cassette-only label and though it has only recently abandoned that charter to release CDs, it has remained true to its purpose of slicing the sometimes painful cutting edge of industrial, punk, psychedelic, hardcore, and dub music. (Landmarks in their genre such as Flipper’s Blow’n Chunks, the Germs’ Germicide: Live At the Whiskey, the New York Dolls’ Lipstick Killers and the Dub Syndicate’s One Way System were first available only as ROIR cassettes.) Below The Radar mixes bone-chilling space-age terror together with ancient Rasta trance mysticism like an electronic yet rootsy salad compilation tossed from the fifty electronic/dub albums produced for the label by Skiz Fernando over the past seven years, plus one previously unreleased track.

You’re not sure exactly what “dub” is? That’s okay – you’ve probably heard at least one reggae song, right? Cue up that reggae song in the mixing board of your imagination. To make dub, first strip everything off of the top of the mix – all the keyboards, all the guitars, all the vocals, everything. Leave only the bass and drum track (keep the percussion, too). Cut the treble all the way back. Crank the bass up loud. Now crank it up louder. Does it seem too loud and bass heavy? Good – turn the bass up even more. Now slow the rhythm down, way down to half speed, then past half speed. Does it seem too slow and trance-like? Good – slow it down even more. And turn up the bass. Randomly divebomb warped vocals and other sound effects – thunder, gongs, moans, looped and echoed chords – into that space where the guitars, keyboards and vocals used to be. Now dunk the whole thing in steamy echo like a donut in hot chocolate. Voila! You’ve made hot, fudgy, sticky, dub!

For most Jazz fans, Below the Radar will be one step beyond if not even farther out. Laswell bootstomps with the aptly named Dubadelic through "Operation Duppy Conquerer 2001" and pays tribute to his twisted musical roots with “Crooklyn Dub Syndicate,” bass- and drum-heavy rocksteady in tandem with drummer Style Scott. “Dungeon of Dub” (from WordSound I-Powa) and “Crooklyn Dub Syndicate” sound at least peripherally attached to reggae standards; in other cases, the music doesn’t flow to you in notes or lines or waves so much as it comes crashing down in huge concrete slabs like you’re standing in the middle of an aflame, collapsing building. Such musique concrete includes two tracks by Slotek (“Born God,” a menacing arrhythmic track clouded with static and the groans of an unseen monstrous beast dying, slowly and loudly, in the distance, plus “One,” which suggests a tent revival baptism held in the midst of a nightmare). Mick Harris’ “Closed Door” and “Fall of the Towers of Convention” by Scarab brandish edgy, industrial rhythms and whirlpools of crackling sound.

Below the Radar ends with the previously unreleased track “Stolen Moments” by The Eye – most assuredly not the nimble John Coltrane classic – in an echoing chamber that resounds with ancient sounding African chants and percussion, heavy and heady bass, and futuristic electronic sounds and shrieks.