At last, Greg Fox might’ve drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation. For the last two years, the wildly prolific Fox has worked with a dozen projects, from his own electronic rampages as GDFX to the spirited explorations of the improvisation-and-academia sublimation squad Zs. There’ve been stints with the drum militia Man Forever and the arid punk band Cy Dune, treks with garage weirdos PC Worship and sets with stylistic jester C. Spencer Yeh. But through most all of this, Fox’s name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). For all the talk of treatises and transcendentalism, Fox was Liturgy’s locomotive, powering their metal with his relentless and intricate drumming. Fox hasn’t been in the band since October 2011, but the association is just now, at last, beginning to peel from his side.
In large part, Fox’s name has begun to hold sway without that former association because he’s just so goddamn busy—the aforementioned are only a sample of his manifold projects since leaving Liturgy. More important than accretion, though, has been the excellence of his Guardian Alien, the wild-eyed, open-ended troupe that emerged just before Fox split with Liturgy. Guardian Alien couples Alexandra Drewchin’s spasmodic vocals and electronics and Turner Williams’ electrified Indian zither, the shahai baaja, with a daunting power trio—Fox on drums, surrounded by bassist Eli Winograd, and former Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann. Their debut LP, the one track See the World Given to a One Love Entity, recalled Fox’s recent past only through the force of the rhythms—primal, knotty cataracts spilling over refracted dub and jazz, noise and abstraction. It was a primer for Guardian Alien’s broad musical reach, suggesting a group whose interests were as wide as the psychedelic sky above. It was, in earnest, the start of Fox’s post-Liturgy liberation, a process that reaches its next phase with a pair of new LPs—Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP, Spiritual Emergency, and Mitral Transmission, a wonderful and ponderous collaboration between Fox and jazz pioneer Milford Graves.
Spiritual Emergency follows the noble freak/free music tradition of pitting one or several sides of short takes against one sidelong epic. The album’s first half links four divergent improvisations, while Guardian Alien commits the flip to an extended, excited span that starts near silence and ends in paroxysmal explosion. The structural decision places Guardian Alien in an idiomatic continuum that includes John Coltrane, Patty Watters, Frank Zappa, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Amon Düül II. It also spotlights the band’s admirable willingness to tinker with most anything: That first side includes a duet for chopped-and-stacked samples and percussion that might recall the Books and an electric guitar drone that stretches and then drifts into the distance, like Bardo Pond on a lunch break. “Mirror” is a drum-and-noise tirade that mirrors Lightning Bolt, while opener “Tranquilizer” bounds between rhythms and samples, effects and instruments like a warm-up jam from the salad days of Gang Gang Dance or Black Dice. That tizzy of activity and references, mind you, happens in an erratic 20 minutes—not enough time for any of the ideas to congeal into something greater or for the pieces to feel like more than loose leaves from the Guardian Alien’s collective notebook. Momentarily intriguing but never quite transfixing, they are exercises in exercising.
Their slightness comes in bas-relief to the audacious title track, the new pinnacle of Guardian Alien’s limited output. “Spiritual Emergency” begins with a reading by Stanislav Grof from Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes A Crisis, a book that argues for working through freak-outs of faith rather than treating them like mental illness. Guardian Alien takes the idea as precept here, rising and falling in and out of momentum and confusion. They struggle to keep the rhythm and find the groove, to build from basic ideas into something grand. Drewchin’s voice drifts like a ghoulish invocation. Gann winds through the hyperactivity with a sterling desert-blues riffs, daring the quintet to follow him into the distance. They do for a bit, idling into a land of jam-band torpor just ahead of the 16-minute mark. But it’s a feint: All at once, the band bursts forward, drums and voices and guitars surging into the ecstasy of volume. It’s a new peak for Guardian Alien, a breakthrough that shows their ability to be mutually focused and wild, composed and chaotic. It’s exhilarating, liberating stuff, a deserving entry in the sidelong canon it follows.
As with “Spiritual Emergency”, Mitral Transmission succeeds because of its singular direction and focus. For years, Milford Graves—the border-defiant drummer, medicine man, scientist, and theoretician who played on many ESP Disk albums that shape Guardian Alien’s larger aesthetic—has recorded and analyzed the heart beats of musicians in his Queens basement laboratory. “His heart research can help anyone,” wrote New York’s Mark Jacobson in 2001, “but mostly he works on musicians, ‘so they hear how they sound naturally, let them compare that with what they’re playing.’” Graves invited Fox into his lair for one of these sessions, connecting him to sensors and software that allowed Fox to listen to the beat and pitch of his own body. He used that data as the basis for Mitral Transmission’s four compositions, wondrous instrumentals that fascinate with or without their biosynthetic context.
These tracks float occasionally toward the negative connotations of “new age music,” with long stretches of steel drum radiance, plucked harp patterns, softly pattered rhythms, and nebulous tones that suggest a breeze across a meadow. But the music’s too busy and prickly for somnolence. Just when the motion starts to settle, Fox adds a brief shock of noise or a new trace of rhythm to upset the system ever so slightly. “Heartbeat cycles with asymmetrical time values are more healthy,” Graves once told Wavelength Magazine. “This asymmetry is called the chaotic heartbeat.” Fox’s interlocking meters and melodies shape a pinwheel sort of gamelan, spinning forever into new moments of wonder. Less esoteric than its origins suggest, the music lands somewhere between an acoustic recasting of Four Tet’s coruscant electronica and Matmos’ alien-but-accessible trip.
Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.
