Label: TDK Records – TDCN-5058-9
Format: 2 x CD, Album
Country: Japan
Released: 1993
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Experimental, Avantgarde, Minimal, Drone
La Monte Young's 'STOMPIN' 90s recordings with The Forever Bad Blues Band. (NM)
The music of The Forever Bad Blues Band represents Young's latest contribution to the ongoing dialogue with his plugged-in rock and roll progeny. Out of Young's early sixties performing group came most of the original lineup of the Velvet Underground, a band that syncretized the sounds of the machine shop and the blues bar and eventually inspired several generations of sonic rockers. In the early eighties, Rhys Chatham's and Glenn Branca's compositions for massed electric guitars in just intonation became a finishing school for a new breed of rock musicians who went on to challenge the hegemony of equal temperament -Sonic Youth, Band of Susans. These bands, along with a slew of compatriots from the U.S., England and Europe, have been moving from the "alternative" rock ghetto into the mainstream, bringing with them an elaborate lore of non-equal-tempered guitar tunings that ultimately derives from Young's groundbreaking work.
In the Village Voice, Kyle Gann rephrased a statement originally made by microtonal composer Ben Johnston: "One cause of society's problems is that people grow up bathed in loud rock in the usual equal-tempered tuning, and ... the irrational intervals of that tuning create an unconsciously disturbing disharmony in the ear." If that's the case (and didn't Plato say something similar?), then the growing tendency in rock toward a more just/Pythagorean tuning approach is a welcome development indeed. And Young's pioneering, systematic investigation of ancient, non-Western, and other tuning alternatives qualifies as a public service.
Now, with The Forever Bad Blues Band, Young is reminding his rock and roll "children," as well as the rest of us, of the basic blues verities. Looking back over his career as a composer, it's evident that he was zeroing in on the core of the blues experience all along, moving from an early concern with macro-structure (the blues chorus, blues modes) to micro-structure (the microtonal architecture of melodic language and syntax). And this is perhaps the essence of Young's singular contribution to the music of our time: like a sonic archaeologist, he is always digging for fundamental truths. And finding them.
—Robert Palmer, 1993
Tracklist
Young's Dorian Blues In G (B♭ = 60 Hz)
1-1 Just Stompin' 1:01:52
2-1 Just Stompin' 1:00:23