#che chen

Here’s the best part about “WZN#3-Verso”: it’s a swelling wave, rolling thunder, one of I Was Real’s most exciting moments and you don’t need to know anything about its construction to enjoy it. All that stuff about overdubs and everything else in the last paragraph is for record nerds, Discogs ogres, formalists, and critics. Yes, 75 Dollar Bill makes music by and for music geeks, but at their best, as they often are on I Was Real, they also make thrillingly direct body music, rooted in tradition and totally far out, the sort of avant-democratic jive that Henry Flynt’s bands never quite nailed. You don’t need to show your underground credentials and identify who “Tetuzi Akiyama” is to get lost in its massive stomp, the blurring boundaries of the guitar and sax’s taffy-like timbres and the way they trade off melodic fragments, fulfilling James Brown’s apocryphal dictum, “Every instrument a drum!” Even the side long faux-raga of the title track is rhythmic and sly enough to, like all good meditations, engage body and brain in equal measure. Truly weird, but never experimental for its own sake, I Was Real is just accessible enough that Bo Diddley, RL Burnside, Chen’s one time tutor Jeiche Ould Chigaly, and your world music/blues loving parents might grudgingly dig it. 

At 69 minutes, I Was Real is a lot to take in. Newcomers are advised to start with W/M/P/P/R/R, the concise, big band counterpart to I Was Real’s occasionally meandering chamber music. Still, I Was Real is sure to puzzle and please whether your devotion to rock and roll and its antecedents is intellectual or physical. Sure, all of that stuff about Mauritanian modes, compound rhythms, and microtones is interesting, but when “Every Last Coffee or Tea” levitates you, all that matters is the music: strange, familiar, stark, funky and new under the sun. 

The Spectrum Does is drawn from two performances that took place in 2011, one at Issue Project Room and the other at Glasslands. On side one Lee comes out swinging, blowing his taragato like Peter Brötzmann (the Eastern European reed instrument’s main contemporary proponent) was looking over his shoulder. Chen responds to his tough, tunneling lines with coarse, choppy fiddle scrapes that sound like Tony Conrad playing the way a traffic cop talks until their abraded timbres fall together and then subside into a machine-like whir. Next, delay-distorted sounds rise and retreat from a carpet of harmonium, turning the vibe both prayerful and apprehensive. Then the violin returns, still Conrad-like, but Lee counters with a slow, pastoral melody played on a great bass recorder.  

Some improvisers might keep duking it out, but Chen switches to bass recorder himself. Whether they relate aggressively or passively, even when you can tell who is playing what, that seems to matter less than the consonance of mood and uncertainty of century that they create together — there are passages where it sounds like some Hungarian goat herder from the 1760s is playing with some turtlenecked freaks in a 1960s NYC art loft via a time portal held open by vibrantly fluttering magnetic tape.  There’s really nothing else around that sounds like this stuff, and it’s a shame that the duo is done, but we have another piece of analog magic to tell you what they sounded like — this fine record.