[noisereductions]

Anyone hear it yet? Came out today. I'm dying to hear it. f'ing solo action!

[atsonicpark]

does he use that "thing"?

[noisereductions]

haha, I'm not sure on this one.

[afterthefact]

I love that "thing." And if you think you are taking a sarcastic stab at me by calling a "thing," you are wrong, because it is still a "thing" to me.

[themawt71]

mystery solved.

"This suite(on coward) also has my voice through my favorite toy megaphone, the MEGAMOUTH, at various points, in an attempt to add creepiness, electronic/intestinal gurglings, and androgyny."

[noisereductions]

I picked the album up yesterday. Haven't had a chance to hear it yet, though.

[zombiewoof]

check out the myspace...it has 'Thurston County' on it and it RULES. A must for SY fans!

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=116 04174

[noisereductions]

Listened to the record last night and this morning. Good stuff. Very subdued. I hate to say I hear the time spent with Wilco, but it's there. I swear. But it is good to hear Nels by himself (I swear there's overdubs, though... so wouldnt that be less Nels solo and more Nels & Nels duet?)

[StevOK]

Wow. Just listened to Thruston County on myspace. I'ma have ta find this somewhere.

[noisereductions]

it's good, yo.

[themawt71]

oh yeah. tons of overdubs.

*NOTES ON COWARD from nelscline.com

I have been thinking about doing a string-heavy, overdubbed record for over twenty years. The original inspirations for this were records like John Abercrombie's "Characters", Ralph Towner's "Diary", Bill Connors' "Theme to the Guardian", Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays' "As Falls Wichita..", all 70s ECM recordings. Also the phenomenal double-tracked side of John McLaughlin's "My Goal's Beyond", Steve Tibbetts records, and certain things, mostly from this same time period, by Fred Frith, Hugh Hopper, and even Robert Wyatt. But there never seemed to be the right time... or something.

I recently decided that I had been thinking and talking about this for long enough. As far back as the mid-80s I wanted to call the project "Coward", but - not trying to be too coy here - the reasons are too many and too convoluted to explain. At any rate, I had a window of time last summer and I grabbed it, booked time in my friends Mark and Weba's home studio in the Echo Park area of my hometown, Los Angeles, and spent five days surrounded by my guitars, zithers, sruti boxes, and I went for it. The odd thing was that I had changed my ideas for this record constantly as I progressed through my life. My interest in microtonality, Asian music, Hindustani slide guitar, trash rock from around the world, as well as in soundtracks by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and even John Lurie, were reshaping my concepts for the record. When it came right down to it, I wanted to finally just go in armed with a few musical jottings and a laundry list of vague ideas, moods, and whatever else would serve to make up what was ultimately going to end up being a very personal-verging-on-obsessive, self-absorbed bunch of sounds; sounds that would endeavor to address musical as well as non-musical issues pertaining to my life, my psyche, and the spirits of some of the people who have meant the most to me as a person, not only as an artist.

After writing a lot in the studio, utilizing the power of the computer, Mark Wheaton and I had recorded a lot of stuff, and a few weeks later we set aside three days to mix and edit it into what you may now experience as the Cryptogramophone CD "Coward". The funny thing is that I actually hadn't thought about what genre of music I was recording, or even if anyone would like it at all. I confess that I make records for myself, even though the listener is always being taken into consideration. "Coward" is meant to be a journey, bookended by minimal drone pieces named after infrequently-blooming flowers, and, in between, taking you on a trip - sometimes a wry, whimsical, or solemn one - through this string of references, of inside jokes, and of tributes to friends, artists, and to pools of feeling that are at once personal and (with any luck) universal, pertaining to love, alienation, things sublime and perverse...

There were two tracks which dangle as outtakes from "Coward"; one a solo acoustic guitar version of "And Now, The Queen" by Carla Bley, in which I tried to muster a Paul Bley-esque approach, a tribute to both Bleys. But it was just OK, and my brother Alex, to whom I have regularly turned in times of doubt, for song sequencing suggestions, etc., said that it was maybe... extraneous. Very polite! Anyway, he was right. I think that Jeff Gauthier, one of my best pals for almost 30 years and the owner/visionary behind Cryptogramophone, may have said the same thing. Anyway, there was one other piece, written in the studio, as an attempt to pay homage to the endlessly inspiring actor Cate Blanchett, but it fell short. I can't even remember its provisional title, but maybe we'll put it up on the Crypto website for laughs. But it can't be dedicated to Ms. Blanchett. It's not fabulous enough!

Track one: EPIPHYLLUM -
This is a piece named after the plant that happens to grow outside Mark and Weba's studio, Catasonic, and the alien-looking red "paddles" were in full bloom. Musically, this is a simple drone involving layers of Indian sruti boxes to create a vague tension between minor and major modalities, and electric guitars, looped and feeding back. The howling sound is a hollow-body electric guitar a extreme volume with an low-octave harmonizer setting that I was swinging around and scraping the studio ceiling with. A piece like this could easily go on for 30 minutes, but there was no time for that. Aspects of Tony Conrad's music are purely intentional.

Track two: PRAYER WHEEL -
I remembered only one song from the time I was first thinking of recording overdubbed guitars, and this is it. It was always called "Prayer Wheel", and it is very directly inspired by the aforementioned ECM recordings, and also by Steve Reich. In retrospect, I dedicated it here to my friend and ex-wife D.D. Faye, a wonderful person and spiritual seeker. The title seems even more appropriate now. The instruments used are my old Martin guitar (playing doubled parts in pairs), and two electric guitar tracks of the usual looping, volume pedal swells, etc.

Track three: THURSTON COUNTY -
After listening to what Mark and I had recorded, I decided that the record needed some... spark. Something with momentum, not too silence-filled. The song was written, recorded, and mixed all the same evening. The main riff or "verse" section is very obviously Thurston Moore-ish, despite the fact that it's in 7/4. Someone listened to the "chorus" later and said it sounds like a Radiohead song. I will take their word for it, but I prefer to think of it as reminiscent of European folk music. The introductory section is an improvised duet between my open-tuned Hagstrom guitar (the same guitar/tuning used in older pieces of mine like "In Form" and "The Ballad of Devin Hoff") and lap steel, all looped on the fly in real time with my constant companion, the old (notice: OLD) Electro Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. As is the case on much of this record, I am striving for the illusion of an extemporaneous duet, so even though I did more than one pass to get events that I liked, there are no edits and very few attempts made, just to keep it sounding more real to me. Playing with myself!... This same strategy is used later in the CD on tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7. After this introduction a bit of a lap steel feature, the 7/4 groove seeps in. The rest is all electric and acoustic guitars, and the thumping is me pounding the Hagstrom behind the bridge with the compressor cranked so one can hear every little scraping. Even though this probably sounds like it could be done by a real rock band or something (and now my trio, The Singers, does do a version), I think it rocks pretty hard in a way. Love to you, Thurston Moore: I have gotten a lot from listening to you! And the rest of you of course know of Washington State's county of the same name, the seat of the capitol in Olympia, and so much more...

Track four: THE ANDROGYNE
This is an acoustic guitar duet between my old Martin and a Gitanes Maccaferri-style guitar. The written material is one piece from a suite I wrote a few years ago for a group I was leading sometimes in Los Angeles called The Blue Mitt Ensemble. The suite was written in a day and was sort of feverishly inspired by the story of Peter Pan, which I have always loved ever since watching it on TV as a boy - the Mary Martin one. The fact that Peter Pan is usually played by women and that Mary Martin looked kind of like me in my 20s has something to do with the title. The provisional title of the suite was "Kid Power", and this is movement 2. It strives for a sort of 1950s chamber music klangfarbenmelodie approach that one could hear infect the neo-jazz world of free improvisation, and the theme is kind of Annette Peacock-esque at points (60s Annette, not the 70s jazz-rock Annette).

[themawt71]

Track five: ROD POOLE'S GRADUAL ASCENT TO HEAVEN
One of the things I had written down in my notebook was something like "layered micro-tonal acoustic suite". I must admit that I had no intention of writing this solemn monument to the memory of my friend Rod Poole. A few hours into groping around with the fundamental track, done on open-tuned Taylor 12-string, I realized what was happening. The second movement is meant, with humble respect, to draw the unsuspecting listener into the spirit of Rod's brilliant solo guitar music, and attempts to pay homage to something I may have internalized from listening to Rod. It breaks off into a duet when the little open-tuned Breedlove guitar enters. The main guitar is an old, cheap Silvertone. The piece is blatantly programmatic. I won't go into too much detail, though. But I used a lot of instruments: a zither-like instrument called a Harmolin, Turkish 12-string with a canister for a body, a fretless guitar made out of a cigar box (Daddy Mojo), and I borrowed Weba's tenor ukelele, fresh from the repair shop (thanks, Weba!)... But I forgot to list the Dobro and Marxophone on the CD notes. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that as the piece neared completion (thanks to the computer world I could move whole sections around to make order out of chaos), I started to feel really strange. When it was done, it was a sonic monument, unsystematically microtonal, and it made me weep uncontrollably; for Rod's wife Lisa and for those of us who loved and admired him and who miss him so much, for the the condition and fragility of sentient life, and it made me curse the subhuman who stabbed my friend. I am not ashamed to admit that the piece seems to succeed. But it was an accident. I entreat you to investigate his music, recently available on:



Track six: THE DIVINE HOMEGIRL -
Originally, this song appeared on an old, now out-of-print disc by my original Trio. It's an attempt to write a rubato ballad in a major key that refers to songs like "Jesus Maria" by Carla Bley. This is just my old Martin acoustic and my old Jazzmaster in dialog, and the sound is rather like that John Abercrombie record mentioned earlier. The form was simplified to keep it shorter. It was originally inspired by a waitress at a Mexican restaurant named Gloria and by latina beauties in general, but this time I wanted to dedicate it to one of my best friends and sometime colleague, Carla Bozulich, one of the greatest singers/artists of our time and a wonderful human. She is, like me, from Los Angeles. My homegirl...

Track seven: X CHANGES(S) -
This one is, like so much of this record, an excuse to examine/have fun with sounds, timbres. A trio of acoustic string instruments trade short improvised areas with a duo of other acoustic string instruments (some prepared with false bridges, alligator clips, etc.). In some ways, it is like a partially premeditated version of the Acoustic Guitar Trio, the group I formed with Rod Poole and Jim McAuley, but I only realized this later (with a mild degree of embarrassment). I just love this type of sound. Maybe you do, too.

Track eight: THE NOMAD'S HOME
I orginally titled this "The Road To You" before being told that Pat Metheny and somebody scary have songs with this title. Ooops! Well, it was written in the studio and is a duet for nylon-string guitar and squareneck Dobro. I am a total Dobro tourist, I admit. But I have no shame. I recorded it anyway, and I want to note my love for artists like Jerry Douglas and so-called Hindustani slide players like Debashish Bhattacharya. But the piece, which sounds like a "closer" but couldn't be, is a meditation on the nomadic life of my friend Carla Bozulich. Does it mean "the nomad's home", as in the possessive of one's home, and if one is a nomad, what IS that exactly? Or does it mean "the nomad is home"? As a bit of a nomad myself, I like being home and wonder about how one can, as I do, thrive on this itinerant life as I seem to. And I like it when Carla is back in L.A....

Tracks nine - fourteen: ONAN (SUITE) -
This is a six-part suite of sound and song, a soundtrack of sorts to a lifetime of oddness, obsessions, alienation, and a make-believe melding of the Biblical story of Onan, who allegedly angered God by casting his seed upon the land rather than impregnate somebody or other, probably a cousin or something. I am fascinated by how this story has become proof to Fundamentalist types that God is against masturbation, and I guess He (give me a break!) is also, like Fundamentalists, against family planning, because Onan actually practiced coitus interruptus, consequently giving the word 'onanism' both definitions. I find this interesting for many reasons. The piece is, in some ways, tongue-in-cheek, yet serious, biographical yet also autobiographical. That's as much as I am going to say on THAT subject... But musically the piece has the ingredients (as noted by me and others) of Pink Floyd, garage rock, Sigur Ros, The Cure, Bollywood soundtrack music, breakbeats, and David Lynch sound design, among many others. The second-to-last movement is called "Seedcaster", the title of which is not only an obvious reference to Onan, but also to the inventor of the Quintronics Drum Buddy used on it, Quintron himself. This piece is basically two performances done in real time, one on the Drum Buddy, which includes not only that submerged-sounding beat but also the synth bass-esque and "wobble" sounds, and electric guitar and my usual effects/loops. Little bursts of electric sitar and rhythm guitars ping-ponging were added to spice things up. The last movement actually uses a drum machine of sorts: the "percussion" part of the Korg Kaossilator, and also the chord and bass sounds it can do. The solo is on electric 12-string, and I left in all the sloppiness because it sounded like the right kind of struggle, seemed to add a bit of extra excitement. This suite also has my voice through my favorite toy megaphone, the Megamouth, at various points, in an attempt to add creepiness, electronic/intestinal gurglings, and androgyny. The scenario is interrupted at one point by Onan, now imagined as a hippie guitarist, being taunted by a nightmare involving swirling psych and garage rock "licks", as well as the eventual addition of Metal and pure wank. I am hoping that by now your are starting to get clued into the morass of cross-references included in this suite, which I admit is, in a string of sonic indulgences called my "work", arguably the most indulgent thing I have recorded to date that I actually organized compositionally.

Track fifteen: CYMBIDIUM
The other drone piece with sruti boxes, this one also creates a vagueness between major and minor modalities. It is very simple, and features a rather Thurston/Lee-like repeating, open-tuned progression that repeats a few times and is over. Played on an old Harmony, it is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who died in December of 2007, the day before her 92nd birthday. She had a green thumb, which, after my father died and she got into gardening a bit, she was surprised to discover. Her cymbidium orchids thrived on "neglect", and would prolifically explode forth periodically. I cannot explain here what my mother is/was to me except to say that she is/was a real life hero, a woman of intellect, dignity, fairness, and style.Thanks again to Jeff Gauthier and everyone else who helps me and lets me keep doing practically anything that I can dream of. I hope that people out there can enjoy at least parts of it. It was, in my tiny brain, made with my obsessions/neuroses/dreams and my sweet friends in mind, but if there is universality in that, it must be because of that ineffable human connection that keeps everything from blowing up, don't you think?

About the art/photography: The artists Angela DiCristofaro (painter) and Peak (photographer) are treasured friends and, as an admirer of their vision and empathy, I am honored to see what they contributed to that thing you hold in your hand, the record cover (petite version).

NOTE: I hear that quite few CD trays have immediately fallen out/off of your CD package, the one I was just writing about just now with the fabulous artwork. Recalls/repairs are underway, but some may suffer. The Cryptogramophone IMPRINT is offering sympathy/discounts and will soon provide (YouTube, are you paying attention?) a little film about how you can repair yours, and I will show you the way! After I figure it out myself. Apparently, it involves Krazy Glue...

- Nels
Chicago, IL (02.09.09)

[noisereductions]

man. Nels' site is always a great read.

[afterthefact]

Originally Posted by themawt71

mystery solved.

"This suite(on coward) also has my voice through my favorite toy megaphone, the MEGAMOUTH, at various points, in an attempt to add creepiness, electronic/intestinal gurglings, and androgyny."

Awesome, and yes, it does just that.

[afterthefact]

I think I've said it before, but Nels is one of the most humble musicians out there, especially since he is of the rare breed that really doesn't have to be humble.

[noisereductions]

totally agree. "Humble" is the exact word I'd use to describe Nels.

[themawt71]

yeah he's very humble. i met him in 97 when he was playing with watt. he invited my friends and i backstage and we hung out for awhile and he let me play his 59 jazzmaster. super sweet guy.

after the show i apologized for taking so many pics with a flash and he said something like dont worry about it im not that precious.

[noisereductions]

he let you play his jazzmaster? That's amazing.

[themawt71]

yeah when we first got backstage(a small dive club backstage) i saw a case and asked if that was the jazzmaster. he said yeah and i think he asked if i wanted to play it. so i did.

it was kind of awkward but he was good with us stupid fanboys.

[noisereductions]

haha. You didn't play "Louie Louie" did you?