Look, I know it's nothing to you, but I'm depressed. I'm depressed about music. Tito Puente died and left us alone with Marc Anthony. Fox recently called Britney Spears "the voice of a generation." Sting just won't go away. It's depressing. And what's even more depressing is reading about music: everyone's a critic, and every critic's a polemic. Weblogs trade barbs and apologies, and at some point the music itself is sloughed off, discursified, made circumstantial. Death of the author, death of the lead guitarist, whatever. It's depressing.
Seriously. I spent the first four minutes of this disc muttering, "What the hell is going on here? What is happening here?" but by the six minute mark, I had changed my tune. "Christ, Ryan's trying to kill me. I don't know why he sent me this thing, this creature, but it's going to kill me. He sent this thing to me in the mail. It's a letter-bomb-- it's a letter-thing, it's a letter-creature-- and it's, oh my god, what is that noise?"
Nipples is a 1969 recording, freshly re-released by Atavistic, of a famous session featuring some of the biggest names in European free jazz. The creature I thought was going to take my life, the title track, is nearly 20 minutes of amorphous noise recorded by a sextet consisting of piano, double-bass, drums, guitar and two saxes. The second track is slightly shorter and slimmed down: fifteen minutes of sax, piano, double-bass and drums. The entire album clocks in at just over 33 minutes, but they're some of the most frenetic and alien minutes you may ever live through.
Initially, Nipples seems like the work of a sextet of toddlers who have been unleashed in a room full of musical instruments. It's grating and frustrating, and seems to exhibit a lack of structure surprising even for free jazz. After the third or fourth time through, though, a logic begins to present itself. Blocks of instruments drop in and out to highlight the tensions between the various sounds with a bowed double-bass and sax often serving as a foundation for the movements of other instruments. These six people listen to each other, coordinating their movements over a framework that remains invisible throughout. Stereo effects are used to enforce a sort of organization, marking out the individual territories of the various instruments.
The first of the two tracks is the most rewarding, and achieves an almost mesmeric effect that the second track never gets close to. The presence of two saxes contributes quite a bit to this: they carry on a conversation of sorts that makes the 20 minutes of noise slide by quicker than seems possible. At points, it becomes difficult to believe that this music was recorded live in the studio-- these people make noises with their instruments and construct a layered sound that eludes most players with walls of effects at their disposal.
There's a point about two-thirds of the way through Nipples where all the instruments-- with the exception of Peter Brotzmann's tenor sax-- stop playing. For about one minute, the sax emits long, almost toneless keenings. The sound just doesn't make sense. Then, you realize that Peter Brotzman has stopped playing his saxophone, and Papa Legba has taken over instead. Papa Legba is riding this man's sax-- a human being could not possibly be responsible for a noise like this.
Today's musical landscape is marred by the footprints of lightweights and the layabouts who write about them. Emo-rockers who record albums while cramming for the SATs? So-called Latin superstars who have to see a tutor before recording a song in Spanish? Überhip geeks who spend less time and energy on their music than on installing home theaters in the mansions of famous murder victims? Forget it. Nipples may be by turns aggravating, inscrutable, cacophonous and soulless, but sitting next to today's crop on the New Release rack of your local Sam Goody, it seems the work of giants. Crazy, strung-out, Teutonic giants, but giants nonetheless.
