STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)
By:
November 16, 2023
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn. Also check out our proto-punk playlist (a work in progress) at Spotify.
PAULINE OLIVEROS | “III” | 1966
Punk wasn’t just about making rock music rock harder. Nor was it just about cancelling notions of skill. Punk was, also, a big teardown, a Year Zero, to wring the neck of rhetoric (same poet, sorry), to open up new ways to think about what counts as music, and to shock, empower, disturb and bowl over listeners with the answers certain punks gave. Think of the Raincoats: all that scraping and hoping, imagining new worlds not run by men. Think of Mark Perry from Alternative TV. Then think of Suicide: primitive electronics over Alan Vega’s none-dare-call-it-singing, turning their concerts into recorded riots, using not much more than oscilloscopes and feedback loops.
Pauline Oliveros got there first. Having come up through the almost all-male world of tape-based and early electronic music on the West Coast, she would go on to discover Deep Listening, an aural and philosophical practice of opening up, calming down. When she passed away in 2016, Deep Listening led the obituaries. The Pauline Oliveros of the 1960s, though, was punk if punk means anything worth hearing. Her tape loop compositions will clean out your ears, and your car, and your midbrain; her treated electronics retain the power, decades on, to warp space and time.
Take “III” (available on Reverbations: Tape and Electronic Works 1961-1970). A low drone fades in, then replaces itself with a high one: a vacuum cleaner calling its faraway mother in orbit. Four to five minutes in, the squealing starts: a horde of destructive fireflies? A shower of sparks in the atmosphere? Oscilloscopes gone wild? That’s a portamento all the way up a scale around 5:42, that is: an airplane hangar turning itself inside out. (“Heavy metal,” perhaps, taken literally.) By ten minutes on, treble bleeps and treble bloops reach up through a net of static to catch the servomechanical alarums and toss them back into the air again, the air the surrounding clicks — mechanical crickets? time-traveling meteorites? there’s a swarm of whatever they are — slice through…
Vega and Rev had nothing on these soul-crushing, soul-reconstructing waveforms and pure tones: nor did the blustery industrial, frequently macho headscapers of Cabaret Voltaire, who picked up where Oliveros (and her few West Coast pals) left off. Her feedback is the opposite of hypnotic, making you more aware of yourself, more intent on this world, more likely to find your own groove.
At least that’s what happens to me when I re-hear “III.” YMMV. While I was writing this long overdue piece about Oliveros as a proto-punk composer, my thirteen-year-old — themselves a bit punk — walked into the room. “What’s that noise?” they said. “Is that music? I thought your computer was breaking.” It wasn’t. But I was.
STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mandy Keifetz on The Trashmen’s SURFIN’ BIRD | Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono’s MOVE ON FAST | David Cantwell on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 TEARS | James Parker on The Modern Lovers’ SHE CRACKED | Lynn Peril on The Pleasure Seekers’ WHAT A WAY TO DIE | Lucy Sante on The Count Five’s PSYCHOTIC REACTION | Jonathan Lethem on The Monkees’ YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA | Adam McGovern on ELP’s BRAIN SALAD SURGERY | Mimi Lipson on The Shaggs’ MY PAL FOOT FOOT | Eric Weisbard on Frances Faye’s FRANCES AND HER FRIENDS | Annie Zaleski on Suzi Quatro’s CAN THE CAN | Carl Wilson on The Ugly Ducklings’ NOTHIN’ | Josh Glenn on Gillian Hill’s TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT… | Mike Watt on The Stooges’ SHAKE APPEAL | Peter Doyle on The Underdogs’ SITTING IN THE RAIN | Stephanie Burt on Pauline Oliveros’s III | Marc Weidenbaum on Ornette Coleman’s WE NOW INTERRUPT FOR A COMMERCIAL | Anthony Miller on Eno’s NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL’S EYE | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sonics’ STRYCHNINE | David Smay on The New York Dolls’ HUMAN BEING | Michael Grasso on the 13th Floor Elevators’ YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME | Holly Interlandi on Death’s ROCK’N’ROLL VICTIM | Elina Shatkin on Bobby Fuller’s I FOUGHT THE LAW | Brian Berger on The Mothers of Invention’s WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE? | Peggy Nelson on The Kingsmen’s LOUIE LOUIE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!