The critic Roselee Goldberg credited the violinist Henry Flynt with taking the fascism out of bluegrass. Flynt's own self-appraisal was no less grandiose, once claiming that he "did for hillbilly music what Ornette Coleman did for jazz." These were grand conceits for a man who ceased making music more than 20 years ago, and whose total recorded output had been until recently consigned to oblivion.
But time has a way of transmuting self-mythology into canon, and recent years have seen Flynt's reputation loom ever larger. The last five years have witnessed the unearthing of a substantial and often stunning catalog of Flynt recordings by labels like Locust and Recorded. These works document the road not taken by the majority of Flynt's early minimalism cohort, many of whom abandoned Western music for the sacred east under the authoritarian tutelage of Pandit Pran Nath. Flynt on the other hand played the prodigal son, returning to the native musical soil of his Carolina boyhood. In doing so, Flynt prospected the vast rocky territory of a new American primitivism, mining veins in which the antiquarian and the avant-garde were reconciled.
Flynt's vision of a "new American ethnic music" has surely found its avatar in the great awakening of American free music currently underway. Ensembles like Pelt and Jackie-O Motherfucker have offered up grave séances of the American musical past, in which old voices have been conjured to speak new words. Meanwhile the late John Fahey's monumental Revenant label continues to diagnose a common American savagery in artists as diverse as Charlie Feathers and Albert Ayler. We should not be surprised at this minor renaissance afoot. Americans are always after their own wilderness.
More surprising is the participation of Europe. One would be hard pressed to think of a time when the old world and that American frontier seemed more impossibly distant. Yet the Belgian Bram Devens has traversed time, ocean and the war to speak the language of that great wilderness. Devens borrowed his moniker from a fitting piece of Americana, the malevolent brick-hurling mouse Ignatz of George Hermann's celebrated pre-war cartoon strip, Krazy Kat. On his eponymous debut, Ignatz casts his bricks in brutally slow motion and lets them careen into vast darkness.
Ignatz is oddly glorious. Not unlike Robert Lowe's fine Lichens project, Devens conjures sparsely with guitar, pedals, and sampler. Slow, twanging guitar chords open the album on "Rebound from the Cliff". Devens barks out barely comprehensible lyrics in a thick reverberating drawl, like some cybernetic Dock Boggs. The song is soon subsumed into a flurry of melodious finger-picking treated to sound like an amped-up player piano, looping into ruin. The somber "Echo All Acoustically Correct" follows, no more than spectral folk punctuated by spurts of tar black noise.
On the grand and ethereal acoustic number "I Look at Her with the Euh", Devens wails like Roscoe Holcomb on nitrous oxide, his cartoonishly high-pitched vocals ever shading into inhuman distortion. Again, Devens croons deliriously over zombie blues and bells on "The Radiant Sheen", a track that would sit comfortably on either volume of Flynt's own Backporch Hillbilly Blues, or just about any entry in the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection series, rising from gas-addled jaunt to a cracked no wave crescendo of busted guitar carnage.
"All My Hopes Have Collapsed" is corroded bluegrass, as if reconstructed by Matthew Bower under his Sunroof! moniker-- all static and scree. The mandolin-like runs sound jury-rigged from alien sources, the hollow foot stomp slowed to a dead knock. The album resolves in the eight-minute epic "The Sinister Snow Squaws". A simple, mournful melody is reiterated against an insistently ringing throb, like the wind through steel wires. Crippled guitars duel as the wind evolves into thick miasma, descending like a pall over everything and yielding finally to silence.
Listen carefully and you will catch the real American folk revival unfolding, not the bearded acoustics of handsome hippies and earnest neo-troubadours. It lies behind them and beneath them, and yes, even in Brussels. The music is noisy and untrammeled. It does not speak of clouds and it does not speak of justice. But it will occasionally undertake the hard work of all true folk music, which is reckoning with the gravity of the past. And at its best, it will find the New World old again, ineluctably old.
