SLINT, MATMOS - 3/10/2005 - Great American Music Hall - San Francisco, CA

I couldn't really afford to go

\sounds good, though, I like Slint

No I don't get it!

SLOW FADE
by SASHA FRERE-JONES
The afterlife of an indie band.
Issue of 2005-04-11
Posted 2005-04-04

In the summer of 1989, a band called Slaughterhouse played at the Pyramid, a club in the East Village. The band was generically noisy, and hostile in a manner that was common at the time, especially among groups that performed in the neighborhood. David Pajo, a young guitarist with Slint, a Louisville band that was scheduled to appear later that night, watched the show from the bar.

“Slaughterhouse had many televisions onstage with them,” Pajo recalled. “I remember a video loop of a girl opening her mouth while a guy pissed in it; a girl fellating a mule in a barn; and a woman putting her footless leg into another woman. Quite disturbing.” Partway through the set, Pajo left the club to check out the homeless people living in Tompkins Square Park. While he was gone, Slaughterhouse’s lead singer set his hair on fire and vomited. When Pajo returned, it was Slint’s turn to play. Brian McMahan, the group’s singer and second guitarist, carefully wiped the vomit from the microphone. The band’s members were wearing shorts and looked wholesome, as though they were on loan from a private-school squash team.

They performed songs from their album “Tweez,” and some longer, slower numbers, all executed with unusual precision. Few of the tracks featured singing, and what vocals there were seemed like an afterthought. As unlike each other as two rock bands could be, Slint and Slaughterhouse had roots in a subgenre of nineteen-eighties independent rock which was sometimes called “pigfuck” by the music press, and which was exemplified by Big Black, a band known for its harsh sounds and shock tactics. (The first edition of Big Black’s 1987 EP, “Headache,” came sealed in a black vinyl bag containing two photographs of a man who had recently removed his head with a shotgun blast.) But Big Black had also created some smart music, inventing a gloriously discomforting, trebly howl that made you feel as though you were being rubbed down with hot stones and ammonia.

Slaughterhouse must have looked at Big Black’s icky photos; Slint had listened to its music. “Tweez,” which was released in 1988, had been recorded by Steve Albini, Big Black’s singer and guitarist, who was also a contributor to Forced Exposure, a widely read fanzine. Albini was the Jackson Pollock and Clement Greenberg of eighties indie rock: he made important music and told people how to talk about it. When Albini announced in Pulse!, a free magazine put out by Tower Records, that Slint was the new band he was most excited about, fans paid attention.

By the time Slint appeared at the Pyramid, however, indie rock was undergoing a transformation. Big Black had broken up in 1987, and major-label bands like Nine Inch Nails were taking aggressive noise and violent subject matter into the mainstream. Slint had outgrown its noise-rock beginnings, and the slow, nearly wordless songs that the band performed that night were something new.

In the fall of 1990, with the help of an engineer named Brian Paulson, the group recorded a new album. But in January, 1991, a few weeks before it was to be released, and three months before Slint was to embark on its first European tour, McMahan quit the band. The tour was cancelled. Slint, it seemed, was history.

Then the album, “Spiderland,” appeared. On its cover was a black-and-white photograph of the musicians swimming in an abandoned quarry, their smiling faces hovering above the water. But the record was not the product of feckless youths; it was a foray, both brave and frightened, into adulthood. Just six songs and thirty-nine minutes long, “Spiderland” was sui generis, a series of compositions so studiously arranged that they sound as though they might have been notated, like classical music,though they retain the rawness and intimacy of improvisation. Several of the tracks feature clean guitar arpeggios rotating over slightly dissonant bass pedal points, and build to glowing codas of resonant sound. All but one song is anchored by Britt Walford’s drumming, which rides the back edge of the beat but never falls off, creating a delicious tension. The few lyrics are nearly inaudible and sound like excerpts from short stories: a boy takes a girl on a roller coaster; a man leaves a party, thinking about what he should have said; and, on “Good Morning, Captain,” the album’s final cut, a sailor awakes after a shipwreck and is confronted by a small child looking for help.

During the nineteen-nineties, “Spiderland” sold steadily, a rare feat for an obscure, independent band that no longer existed and had performed live fewer than thirty times. (According to Nielsen SoundScan, forty-eight thousand copies of the album have been bought in the United States to date, but since not all independent record stores report their sales to SoundScan, the number may be much greater.) In 1991, Albini reviewed “Spiderland” for Melody Maker, a popular British weekly, calling it “flawless” and awarding it “ten fucking stars.”

Slint spawned so many imitators—Mogwai may be the best known—that the band became a genre within indie rock, a style in which boys, choked with emotion and capable only of murmurs or shouts, play each song more slowly than it wants to be played, and find deep significance in their every utterance. “Spiderland” deserves the overheated praise, but it was partly responsible for the enervation and increasing insularity of independent rock music during the nineties, a decade in which hip-hop, teen pop, and dance-hall, by contrast, became ever more formally omnivorousand pleasurable. The problem was that Slint did not create a simple, easily imitated beat like Bo Diddley, or an elemental song like the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which anyone could learn to play. Slint—or “Spiderland,” because the two had become interchangeable—was like that grilled-cheese sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin Mary: an unlikely and irreproducible marvel.

After years spent dodging disappointed fans, the band’s members were persuaded by Barry Hogan, a British concert promoter, to perform together at a music festival in Camber Sands, England, in February. That appearance led to a twenty-two-date tour in the United States, during which Slint played before approximately twenty-four thousand people.

The reunion was strictly temporary; officially, Slint remains broken up. In mid-March, the group performed a three-night stand at Irving Plaza, in New York. The mood in the audience on the night I went was reverential and slightly tense, like a prom at which only boys—the crowd was disproportionately young and male—have shown up. There was some earnest shushing during the painfully quiet songs, the faithful apparently wanting to commune in peace with the human beings who had made that record.

The band played all of “Spiderland” and much of “Tweez.” The set began with Slint’s most satisfying song, “Good Morning, Captain,” a creepy vamp held down by a drumbeat that could readily be turned into a hip-hop sample. For six minutes, the track inched along until—in one of the evening’s few traditional rock moments—it exploded with two enormous, distorted chords, each separated by tiny pauses, as McMahan screamed, “I miss you!” The words seemed, in the context of the show, to be a proxy for all the stuff that boys don’t talk about: that excruciating weekend with your new stepfather; that scary walk in the woods; that rift with your best friend, whom you haven’t seen in years. As the band played, I scribbled down names and associations, few of them related to music: Samuel Beckett, imagined movie dialogue, and snippets of vaguely recollected episodes of “Wild Kingdom.” Instrumental music demands this kind of coloring in, and Slint’s triggers an ever-changing series of mental slides.

In the middle of the evening’s tumultuous closer, “Rhoda”—a song from “Tweez”—Walford twice screamed “One, two, three!” to cue the band back in. It was thrilling and a little startling, like watching an actor break character to pick up a stray prop. As Walford pounded away, McMahan and Pajo used their hands to make the only sounds that night which truly resembled singing, manipulating their guitars to create a noise like birdsong. The number ended abruptly, and a white screen came down, concealing the musicians. As the audience shuffled dutifully toward the doors, a faint echo of guitar feedback lingered in the air, and then died.

Not to be too nit-picky, but isn't this statement paradoxical? Wouldn't the praise be overheated if it was more than was deserved? If the praise was deserved then it would seem to have been heated the right amount.

Anyway, I enjoyed the review, although it did seem that he was straining at a couple of points to assure readers of his pro-pop credentials. For instance: the notion that "hip-hop, teen pop, and dancehall" were colonizing new frontiers of pleasurability in the nineties while Spiderland played Pied Piper to the indie-rock minions, leading them ever further into an austere hinterland of steadily diminishing returns. It seems he never really resolves this tension. Is cerebral wannabe-classical instrumental rock pleasurable or not? Or is it pleasurable in a different way than the poppier musics? Or is there more to music than pleasure? I wish he had addressed some of these questions.

When the DVD chronicling iconic indie rock act Slint's recent reunion tour hits stores at the end of the year, it will feature a piece of footage not even band members knew existed: a 1987 performance by the group at guitarist David Pajo's Louisville high school during a "battle of the bands" contest.

"We told everyone there was only a little footage of us practicing, and that was only excerpts -- not even a complete song," Pajo tells Billboard.com of Slint's scarce visual archive. "That's the only stuff I know about. But [director] Lance [Bangs] somehow dug this up. It was amazing because the reunion was exactly like the way it was in '87. There's tons of tuning in-between songs, except we didn't have tuners then. So we're tuning by ear and it's really loud, but it's even longer between each song. The stage dynamic is exactly the same."

The DVD booklet is also expected to feature a high-school newspaper review of the concert by a then 14-year-old Drew Daniel, better known now as half of experimental electronica duo Matmos. "He talks about how it took us an hour and a half to set up our equipment," Pajo chuckles. "People started yelling at us."

The as-yet-untitled DVD, which will be released by Touch & Go, will comprise highlights from two reunion shows in San Francisco. "The goal was to have one complete show from start to finish, but each night there are some mistakes in certain songs," Pajo says. "One night is better than the other, but I can't justify these songs I really like being in sloppy versions that will be documented and everybody remembers."

Pajo says he's very pleased with the brief reunion, which found the group playing highlights from its two albums: 1989's "Tweez" and 1991's "Spiderland." But after vocalist Brian McMahan and drummer Britt Walford finally agreed to regroup with him after a series of in-depth meetings, the guitarist admits playing with his old friends after so long was "pretty weird."

"Once we finally flipped on the amps and started playing, we had maybe three or four songs we wanted to start with," he recalls. "We hadn't sat down to listen to them to learn them; we were just going by memory. So it was really funny and sloppy, but I was surprised by how much we all remembered. We still had that connection, and I guess that's just what happens among people who grow up together."

Pajo admits the door is not closed on the possibility of new Slint music at some point. "We talked about maybe doing a soundtrack, where we don't have to play live," he says. "It would give us the chance to write again. It didn't seem like anyone was opposed to it, but it would be such an undertaking."

"It's a great band," he continues. "But every tiny decision is up for long debates. So it would take such a large amount of time. I just don't know if it will happen. I mean, it could. I'm not saying it won't, but in a way, I think we're happy just to deal with the stuff we already have on our plate and not deal with composing new stuff."

As previously reported, the artist's new album, "Pajo," is due July 12 via Drag City. He is also playing in a new band tentatively named Dead Child with Slint touring musicians Todd Cook and Michael McMahan.

http://www.brainwashed.com/matmos/news.html

About 1/4-1/3 of the way down the page.

dude, i need that covers album!
m.

2005 >>>> 2007

:-\

;_;

we missed the So Percussion and Zeena Parkins shows :(

cept in 2005 we had to deal w/ that gygax! dude. wtf was up w/ that guy?!

I thought I spotted gygax once while I was in NYC, but he was across the street.

hstencil I loved seeing you at the Slint show, sorry our rehearsal dragged on and we didn't connect in Greeenpoint.

For what it is worth, I thought the LC shows were fun, we did a suite of stuff based on Verdi's "Aida". It was a cool way to turn 36. I was pleased with what went down, sorry that the tix at L1ncoln C3nter are fairly astronomical, for us it was a midtown outreach program situation. I'm not sure who invited the old classical music critic at the New York T1mes to the party but he pretty much harpooned us. Ouch! Now I'm back in SF but not for long as it is packing time chez Matmos. The thing I want to ysi to you guys is the 45 minute version of the song "Bo Diddley" that we played in Paris.

link nytimes?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/arts/music/23rose.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The weird part is that they also wrote a glowing So Percussion preview two days before. Can you link that too? It works better as classic set em up knock em down if they're both there. Plus there's a photo with my body as a blurry indistinct blob in the foreground and my face is cut off! Cool!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/arts/music/20perc.html?ref=music

Drew you got the free nytimes pass for .edu people right?

I have yet to wield the awesome powers of drewdan✧✧✧@j✧✧.e✧✧

but now I will try to get on the train . . .

I thought I spotted gygax once while I was in NYC, but he was across the street.

-- Drew Daniel, Monday, July 23, 2007 9:31 AM (2 hours ago)

when/where? the ghost of gygax! is said to haunt various North of 14th locales.

Drew are you having a going away party open to the public?

Drew you got the free nytimes pass for .edu people right?

-- Catsupppppppppppppp dude 茄蕃, Monday, July 23, 2007 5:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

wait tell me more

also i am sorry i missed matmos in whitefish ;_;

pps someone please tell drew daniel it was a pleasure to see him in nyc last week, too. i am still banned.

-- hstencil, Monday, July 23, 2007 6:46 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

cap'n save a jo(rel)

I will unban joel if he only posts about famous people who are close personal friends of his.

hahaha

unban suzy

wait do suzy and joel know each other??????