The name Craig Leon won’t be familiar to most music fans, but take away the albums he recorded and our Top Albums of the 1970s list would look very different indeed. In the late 70s, Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations, ranging from the recorded debuts of Suicide and Blondie to the Ramones’ self-titled and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation EP (as well as the early singles from DMZ, Weirdoes and Zeros records released on Greg Shaw’s mighty Bomp! imprint). It’s easy to imagine that Leon brought a certain level of professionalism to these earliest punk sessions-- these days, Leon mostly produces classical recordings for the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, the London Symphony Orchestra and Joshua Bell-- but for his own debut album, Nommos, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him.
Originally released on John Fahey’s Takoma imprint in 1981, Leon’s debut album joined ranks alongside such glorious catalog oddities as The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, Joesph Byrd’s Yankee Transcendoodle and Basho Sings!, not to mention Fahey himself, prone to play guitar atop audio collages of Tibetan monks and Nazi marches. And since Takoma is also regarded as the birthplace of placid New Age guitar, releasing early albums from George Winston and Will Ackerman, one can only imagine how Nommos made a certain type of music listener’s teeth grind, to where the album stands alone as the most audacious and “punk” effort ever released on that label.
So it makes sense that it's remained out of print for 30 years. Since then, it’s found favor with Fall fans (Leon produced three early 90s Fall albums), fans of industrial and primitive electronic music, techno enthusiasts as well as the recent spate of noise artists like Pete Swanson and Andy Stott who pair bracing noise to 4/4 pummel, to where the album fetches ludicrous sums online. Booted in the past few years, it now sees a more legitimate release. Opener “Ring With Three Concentric Discs” sets the album’s tone in a slightly schizophrenic manner. There’s a nerve-rattling metallic loop not unlike a broken fan belt thwacking aluminum siding but before long, a gorgeous warbling synth melody drifts over the noise, just smoothing down the sharp edges so that it might find good company alongside Cluster & Eno or Harald Grosskopf.
It then leads into the polyrhythmic tock of “Donkeys Bearing Cups", which sounds like every hi-hat, handclap, snare, rattle and thump was triggered by one of Kraftwerk’s showroom dummies: stiff yet strangely funky. About a minute in, Leon introduces some unidentifiable noise that does its best anticipation of My Bloody Valentine, at once blinding and body-melting. The title track again strikes a balance between skeletal beat and juxtaposed synth line that with its sense of strange negative space seems to be a subconscious template for the sorts of beats the Neptunes would craft two decades later for Hell Hath No Fury.
The eleven-minute “Four Eyes To See The Afterlife” and seven-minute robotic rhumba of closer “She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap” comprise Nommos’s second half. And it’s here that the sparseness of Leon’s evocative metallic throbs slowly but surely steer the album away from merely being strange electronic music to drop into an adventurous DJ set into a more rarefied and unsettling space. “Afterlife” slowly develops from a near-empty clang to something approaching hypnosis. And when a female wail arises midway through the piece, it turns into this anxious slice of early 80s electronic minimalism that has few peers. It’s a strain of minimal, nearly New Age music that-- rather than dissolve your anxieties away-- gives you the night creeps.
