Disinformation Book of Lists (32 page)

This almost unrecognized musical genre is alive and well. In Boston, Eric Royer comprises the totality of Royer's One Man Band. He plays traditional bluegrass with a banjo in his hands, a dobro (related to the slide guitar) across his lap, an acoustic guitar at his feet (he built the contraption that allows him to play it footsie-style), and a harmonica held to his mouth by a brace. Royer has released five albums, including
Barefoot Breakdown
and
Bluegrass Contraption.
Alternative music mag
The Noise
believes that his music sounds “more blended than most five piece bluegrass bands.”

If you think playing a guitar with your feet is impressive, you ain't heard nothing yet. Choctaw one-man band Joe Barrick built a device that allows him to use his tootsies to play guitar, bass guitar, banjo, and snare drum at the same time. With his hands he works a double-necked instrument (also his own creation) that is half mandolin, half guitar, sometimes switching to a fiddle. Around his neck is that staple of one-man bands, the harmonica. That's a total of six or seven instruments, plus vocals, simultaneously.

Hasil Adkins, according to his official website, has been playing “true lonesome country, hopped up blues, and boogie woogie rockabilly nonstop since 1949.” As of early 2004, he's
still
touring. Considered the progenitor of the psychobilly genre, Adkins wails on an untold number of instruments at once. He claims to play piano and organ with his elbows, and on some tracks he can be heard somehow playing spoons.

Some purists feel that a
true
one-man band not only plays at least three instruments at once, but must be able to remain mobile while cranking out the jams. Among this extremely rare breed is Australian industrial designer and jazz musician Tom Nicolson, who walks around playing banjo, bass drum, cymbals, kazoo, and whistles, while singing.

10

Animal music

Humans aren't the only animals that make music. Birds and whales are known for their beautiful songs, and they've supplied the content for many “sounds of nature” albums. Recordings of other life forms in the act of singing are harder to come by, but they're around. The bland title
Animal Music
masks the fact that this album of a team of sled dogs howling together is quite a stunner. A German reviewer marvels: “The chorus of dogs definitely seems to have its lead vocalists and harmonizers and after a while one can hear the motifs of the leading parts being expressed in stretto as though in a fugue, but then also inverted and even, dare I say, in retrograde form.”

At times, humans have attempted to incorporate animal sounds into their music. Mozart swiped some melodies from his pet bird. The Paul Winter Consort played with animal sounds, and on the hopelessly obscure Euro-album
Bugs & Beats & Beasts: Natural Techno
, Ammer & Console go heavy on the insect sounds and light on the artificial music.

Graeme Revell—cofounder of the experimental German performance group/band SPK—created
The Insect Musicians
, an album built on the sounds made by crickets, grasshoppers, cicadae, beetles, flies, gnats, wasps, bees, and moths. In many cases, the creepy-crawlies make noises that are inaudible to humans, but through the magic of technology, Revell has brought these hidden sounds to our limited ears. The liner notes of the album explain:

I thus chose to make Volume I of The Insect Musicians a series of vignettes of a multicultural nature
.

Each traces a development from the raw sound to its digital transformation and its position in the musical structure. At most 8 different sounds are used in one piece, the better for the ear to trace the modification and its development as syntactic and semantic component in musical organisation. Some sounds (the scrapes & clicks) lend themselves more to rhythm, whilst those more tonal (chirps & buzzes) to melody. I have tried to remain faithful to the essential “nature” of each sound, and where possible to use an insect native to a particular continent in the context of a musical theme based on the ethnic music of that continent.

On the album
Natural Rhythms
by Ancient Futures, musicians including Michael Morfort play with frogs in Bali and Cali. The album
Experimental Musical Instruments: Early Years
has a similar track on it in which the aforementioned Jim Nollman (see item #5) plays guitar with a group of whales.

Similarly, the avant-garde/jazz pianist-composer Kirk Nurock has used vocalizations, didgeridoo, and piano to coax dogs, cats, guinea pigs, wolves, sea lions, an owl, and other animals into making yips, howls, squeals, and other noises. He only chooses to work with the individuals who have the most melodic and interesting vocalizations. His live compositions include “Sonata for Piano and Dog,” “The Bronx Zoo Events,” and the three-dog, 20-human chorus of “Howl,” performed at Carnegie Hall. He's currently working on a CD in which jazz musicians and various furry or feathered creatures improvise with each other.

Another form of animal music—probably the rarest—occurs when the critters play instruments, either manmade or improvised. At one point, circuses—including Barnum and Bailey—featured “elephant bands,” but no recordings appear to be extant. At least one entire album of pachyderm music is available—
Thai Elephant Orchestra.
In it, six young elephants at a conservation center in Thailand play
renats
(similar to a xylophone), a bow bass, slit drums, and a gong, while sometimes trumpeting with their trunks. Beforehand, David Soldier—founder of Mulatta Records, the label that released the tusked ones' album—thought he'd have to sample the sounds the elephants made, then mix them into a human composition. Turns out the elephants were so musically inclined that the tracks are exactly as they were performed live. Soldier played the songs blind for many people, who all thought they were performed by
homo sapiens.
A critic at the
New York Times
even named chamber music groups who play near Lincoln Center as the likely performers!

A
New York Times
critic—who knew the true source of the music—wrote: “The players improvise distinct meters and melodic lines, and vary and repeat them. The results, at once meditative and deliberate, delicate and insistently thrumming, strike some Western listeners as haunting, others as monotonous.”
The Economist
remarked: “They clearly have a strong sense of rhythm. They flap their ears to the beat, swish their tails and generally rock back and forth.”

One of the few other such recordings is “Monkey Business”—the first cut on the epic percussion box-set
The Big Bang
—in which leading nature-recorder Bernie Krause caught chimps making excited guttural sounds and beating on trees in the rain forest. It sure sounds like they're trying to make music.

 

1

An Oakland band formed in 1993,
Fuck
has a name that may make you think of death metal or industrial noise, though they're actually an alt pop/rock band along the lines of The Church and Belly. (Incidentally, when KISS was getting started, they considered naming the band Fuck.)

2

With two women and two men,
Nashville Pussy
sounds like its name—loud, harsh, and rude. Two years after forming (in Georgia, not Tennessee), they released their debut album:
Let Them Eat Pussy.

3

Not surprisingly, the grindcore band
Anal Cunt
trafficks in extremely dark, obscene humor. Their songs rarely last more than a minute, meaning you get 50 to 60 cuts per album. With titles like “Jack Kevorkian Is Cool,” “I Became a Counselor So I Could Tell Rape Victims They Asked for It,” “Recycling Is Gay,” “I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America's Funniest Home Videos,” “I Fucked Your Wife,” and “You're Pregnant, So I Kicked You in the Stomach,” maybe brevity is a good thing.

4

Songs by the experimental industrial band
Tit Wrench
include “Corporate Sponsored Sex Change Operation,” “Everybodily Orifice Needs School Prayer,” “Stomach Lining of God,” “Pit Bull With AIDS,” and “Cops Hate Firemen.”

5

The punk band
Schlong
ground out such ditties as “I Wanna Scratch My Butt,” but they're best known for their cover album
Punk Side Story
, which gives the entire classic musical
West Side Story
a loud, debauched makeover.

6

Just as Nine Inch Nails is really Trent Reznor, the “band”
Prick
is simply Kevin McMahon. Its only full-length album—produced and released by Reznor—failed to make a dent, just a prick.

7

Heavy metal band
3 Way Cum
released only one album, 1997's
Killing the Life.

8-19

The most oft-used profanity in band names is “bitch,” hands down. Two bands use the word as their full name, and are joined by
Bitch Magnet, Bitch Alert, Bitchcraft, Bitch & Animal, Anvil Bitch, Son of a Bitch, Psycho Bitch, Southern Bitch, Little Bo Bitch, 7 Year Bitch
, and others.

Honorable Mentions

Several bands have names that are raunchy only if you're in on the joke.
Steely Dan
is named after an industrial-strength dildo in William Burroughs'
Naked Lunch.
At least three band names are references to cum—the
Lovin' Spoonful
and
10cc
(both reflect the amount in a typical ejaculation), and
Thin White Rope
(another Burroughsism). Although I've never heard anything to support the idea, I wonder if
Pearl Jam
doesn't also fall into this category.

Richard Metzger, the creative director of The Disinformation Company (the publisher of this book), relates that he was once a part of a punk band called
Jizz Janitors.

1.
Ababeal
(death metal)

2.
Alookal

3.
Amertad

4.
Arteebun

5.
Black Blooms

6.
Fanoos

7.
Fara

8.
Fat Rats
(punk)

9.
Hack

10.
Khak

11.
Kharazmi
(Gothic trance)

12.
Kooch

13.
Kuarash
(acid jazz)

14.
Lunatics on the Grass

15.
Mud

16.
Namjoo

17.
Nefrin
(reggae-pop)

18.
Oolan Batoor

19.
Saar

20.
Soma

21.
Stainless Steel

22.
StoNail

23.
The Angels of Hell

24.
Uzima

25.
Xakestar