#znr

Adris Hoyos had never played the drums before when Bill Orcutt persuaded her to play in Harry Pussy, but her kit-slaughtering rhythms and manic shrieking vocals defined this pioneering free-improv noise outfit and influenced a whole generation of bands – Magik Markers, Sightings, Clockcleaner, Hair Police and others. Chris Corsano, in the first ever Dusted Listed feature from 2002, said “No drummer has made my jaw drop lower than Adris Hoyos.” Harry Pussy labored mostly in not-very-receptive Miami during its brief mid-1990s heyday, getting national exposure only when members of Sebadoh and the Dead C tapped them for larger scale tours.

When Harry Pussy fell apart, Hoyos worked with Graham Lambkin in Transmission and Elklink, and with Chicago noise trio Monostadt 3. 

For nearly two decades, Graham Lambkin has been redefining our concept of domestic disturbance. From his time in The Shadow Ring to his solo ventures (2003’s Poem for Voice and Tape and Salomon Run, from 2007) to his collaboration with Jason Lescalleet (2008’s The Breadwinner), he has continually transformed everyday atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, synthesizers, chance operations, and the thick ambiance of domestic field recordings. Lambkin’s playfully surreal perspective is also present in his work as a visual artist. For those who missed The Shadow Ring the first time around, Lambkin’s own label, KYE, released Life Review (1993-2003) earlier this year, a retrospective of the group’s decade-long output. Future plans call for reissues of the group’s entire discography, another solo album and a second collaboration with Lescalleet.

1. ZNR - Barricade 3 (Isadora) The debut ZNR LP has long remained one of my all-time faves. A collision of eccentric Satie-esque miniatures, strange, amateurish keyboard/synth explorations and the occasional song, delivered in a mixture of French and Spanish tongues. I always think of the creepy, over-ripe vocals on Seynete as one of the LP’s most memorable moments, but there are many. A genuine hybrid of weirdness and beauty, Barricade 3 has kept me entertained for the better part of 18 years.

2. Jan Dukes de Grey - Mice And Rats In The Loft (Transatlantic) One of my favorite UK underground folk LPs. Three extended tracks that wildly roam through the darker variants of human psychosis, leaving its better known bedfellow, Comus’s First Utterance, in the shade. A big influence on my worldview circa Wax-Work Echoes, and it still does the business today.

3. Van der Graaf Generator - World Record (Charisma) When it’s time for The Boys to come off the shelf, this is the one to pull. One anthem after another after another. And how about that side 2 then? Did VdGG ever cut a better side of music than "Meurglys III (The Songwriters Guild)" > "Wondering"? The latter so heroic it’s hard not to choke up on those opening chords. "Wondering" also has the hands down best ‘promo video’ of all time.

4. Tyrannosaurus Rex - Unicorn (Regal Zonophone) In our house Marc’s the boss. From Toby Tyler to "Hot George", we do the lot, but this one’s Dads favorite. With a fuller sound than its predecessors, and that great, booming Spector-esque drum production, Marc’s unintelligible elfin warble never sounded more potent. Steve Took also scores highly for his colorful backdrop of animal impersonations and all around musical dexterity. Gone but not forgotten.

5. Lou Reed - The Bells (Arista) Lou’s best. Queasy, deranged and confessional. Lou’s rarely this playful – parading a range of affected, varispeed voices, ad-hoc lyrics and recycled backing tapes. The towering presence of Don Cherry and Nils Lofgren doesn’t hurt either. This is a hangover in a sleeve. Just beautiful.

6. The Good Missionaries - Fire From Heaven (Vinyl Japan) Alternative TV hits the bottom of the barrel and comes up smelling like a free festival. Hearing this record for the first time was like being hit in the face with a brick of hash. A total shambles, in one of the best WTF sleeves ever. I always like to supersize mine with the equally great "Vibing Up The Senile World" 7". What humanity needs now is a decent reissue of their elusive live cassette. Anyone have it?

7. Gilli Smyth - Mother (Charly) The first solo flight from Mother Gong, and the one that reaches farthest into the blackness of space. A role-call of Gong luminaries smoke their way through two sides of cosmic whisperings, meditations on prostitution, creepy fairy tales and a voicemail from Father Christmas, framed brilliantly in Daevid Allen’s hazy tape-collage. Played this one a lot during my two-year tenure at Coombe House.

8. Joe McPhee & John Snyder - Pieces Of Light (Atavistic) Back in 1993 one of the chief concerns of the then fledgling Shadow Ring was to emulate the electronic textures of John Snyder’s ARP. Armed only with Darren’s brother’s Casio we had our work cut out for us. I love McPhee’s ambition and scope on this LP, tackling everything from trumpet and fluegelhorn to modified nagoya harp, bird chimes, voice and beyond. Of interest – Joe McPhee and I now happily share the same branch of Stop & Shop.

9. Moniek Darge - Sounds Of Sacred Places (Igloo) One of my favorite LPs of tape-based music. Moniek is better known for her work with the Logos Duo (along with her partner Godfried-Willem Raes) and is relatively under-documented as a solo artist. This LP has a beautiful, unhurried pace that slowly reveals its rich detail like a developing Polaroid. Every mixtape I’ve made over the last 13 years has featured a track from this LP.

10. Daniel Steven Crafts - Soap Opera Suit / Snake Oil Symphony (Lutra) This record has always seemed very exotic to a non-TV owner such as myself. Crudely sampled dialog and music excerpts ripped from TV adverts and soap operas, lightly whipped into two side-long repeat-pattern brain-freeze epics. A great exercise in turning domestic banality into high-art banality.

Adris Hoyos

Adris Hoyos had never played the drums before when Bill Orcutt persuaded her to play in Harry Pussy, but her kit-slaughtering rhythms and manic shrieking vocals defined this pioneering free-improv noise outfit and influenced a whole generation of bands – Magik Markers, Sightings, Clockcleaner, Hair Police and others. Chris Corsano, in the first ever Dusted Listed feature from 2002, said “No drummer has made my jaw drop lower than Adris Hoyos.” Harry Pussy labored mostly in not-very-receptive Miami during its brief mid-1990s heyday, getting national exposure only when members of Sebadoh and the Dead C tapped them for larger scale tours. When Harry Pussy fell apart, Hoyos worked with Graham Lambkin in Transmission and Elklink, and with Chicago noise trio Monostadt 3. She no longer makes music.

These are some records that influenced me when I was in Harry Pussy. They are not in any particular order.

1. Pussy Galore - Corpse Love (Caroline) “Constant Pain” is just a great thing to hear when you are having a bad day. The whole album just has a great energy. A lot of fun.

2. Unsane – Singles 89 – 92 (Matador) Great heavy drum sound. This was a big influence on my drumming.

3. Royal Trux – "Red Tiger" 7” (Drag City) This was one of my favorite singles at the time. I like the heavy stoned blues thing the band does. And I really liked Jennifer Herrema’s hair.

4. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks – No New York compilation (Antilles) I first saw Lydia Lunch doing poetry readings with Henry Rollins when I was a teenager. She seemed so amazing – the ideal feminist: street smart and tough.

5. Germs - (MIA) The Complete Anthology (Slash) When I was growing up, I watched “Decline of the Western Civilization” maybe a hundred times. Darby Crash was just such an exciting performer.

6. Patty Waters – Patty Waters Sing (ESP-Disk) When I first heard this, I had heard some jazz singing, but nothing like this. I was really taken aback. The range of what she could do with her voice really took me by surprise. But there was still something really fun about the music.

7. Sonic Youth – Evol (Geffen) I like the entire Sonic Youth discography; this was the first Sonic Youth record I bought. I once got given a hard time about calling Sonic Youth the most evil band in the universe. This album is totally evil. Very scary and very insane. Like watching a really good horror movie and sitting at the edge of your seat. I remember watching them play “Tom Violence” at a concert, and I was right up front, and people were moshing, and I got hit in the head and blacked out for like a minute. It was like this crazy out-of-body experience.

8. Black Flag – TV Party EP (SST) Black Flag got played a lot in my mind when I was a teenager in high school. This was one of my favorite singles. “I’ve Got to Run” just captures all that teenage angst I felt growing up in the 1980s. Saying that, Black Flag was just really fun, high-energy music. Henry Rollins has an amazing stage prescience, and he is a terrific writer. I always wanted to be him.

9. Destructors – Exercise the Demons of Youth (Illuminated) I picked this album up when I was a teenager and just thought they were fun songs. Really generic punk songs. When I started singing, I would sometimes sing lyrics from this album and just mangle them up.

ZNR

"Barricade 3"

(LP. Recommended rcds. 1981 / rec. 1976) [FR]

The real trick to this week’s challenge is all about cohesion - about making something that is not only independently interesting, but something that fits neatly within the overall structure of a set that otherwise can’t be changed. That last part is key, because we can’t remake the decisions of the entire set: just our one card. If we try to change too much, we just wind up with one card feeling out of place.

If you want a deeper inside look at the process that led to Zendikar Rising, Mark Rosewater’s recent articles on the topic can be found here and here. Rather than rehash everything he has to say about it, I’d like to talk more generally about the ways sets establish themes: and by extension, the ways that we can identify and support those themes through our own designs.

Mechanics

The first place most players think to look to understand what a set is doing is that set’s named mechanics - and rightly so, as this is what most clearly distinguishes one set from another. A set’s named mechanics determine what cards in the set are able to do beyond what’s normal, but they also help dictate what cards in the set want to do as well.

The named mechanics in Zendikar Rising are Landfall, Kicker, and Party - you can include Modal Double-Face Cards as that’s definitely a mechanical theme, even without a name. When looking through the set, be sure to consider not only how the cards with those mechanics are using them, but how the cards with each mechanic support the other mechanics, and how the cards without any of those mechanics bridge the gaps between them. Similarly, pay attention to how these mechanics aren’t used: highly flexible mechanics like DFCs and Kicker could make thousands of designs, and part of keeping the set cohesive is limiting them to what works best alongside the other themes involved.

Archetypes

Players who have experience with Limited have often trained themselves to quickly identify the themes of a new set by focusing on ‘signpost uncommons’ - multicolor uncommons that are designed to signal and reward players for committing to specific archetypes in Draft and Sealed. Because the bulk of the design work that goes into a Magic set is involved in making Limited work, these signposts are also excellent hints at where the design work that’s already been done is focused.

There are generally at least ten archetypes (one for each color pair), so I won’t detail all of them. Some will line up explicitly with the named mechanics from before, while some will exist between those mechanics and see some support from several. The big point here is understanding how the patterns used to establish each archetype set expectations, as setting and delivering on expectations is really the core of good design.

Cycles

One thing that often catches players’ eyes in particular are cycles - they are an excellent way to build expectations and create a cohesive feel across colors and rarities within the set. Cycles can be either ‘horizontal’ (in multiple colors, generally at the same rarity) or ‘vertical’ (in multiple rarities, generally in the same color), and both are great at communicating the breadth of a theme within a set.

While on the topic of cycles, I would be remiss not to mention incomplete ones: the Inscription cycle from Zendikar Rising notoriously excludes both White and Red. While this may seem like an obvious place to slot in a ‘missing treasue’, just be aware that they were excluded because the design team struggled to come up with satisfying designs that didn’t somehow undermine or conflict with the themes we’ve already talked about. While you shouldn’t let that discourage you from trying, it’s an excellent reminder that all of the elements we’re discussing interact with each other, and that focusing on one to exception of the others does not make the set more cohesive overall.

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These are some of the most widely used ways in which designers weave cohesion into a set. As you look through the new set with these things in mind, you are likely to find several other patterns that are not explicitly covered here - and I’d encourage you to do that, as that same ability to recognise and extrapolate patterns should come in handy for this week’s challenge.