If somehow you knew that you might die at your own hands because of your art, would you still be an artist? Maybe the question is nothing more than warmed-over romanticism in your eyes, an abstract idea at best. For Jason DiEmilio, the Philadelphia-based founder, leader, and much of the time sole member of the Azusa Plane, perhaps it was not.
Not when the guitar-derived sounds he made and released over six years of work from 1995 to 2001 were the sounds that later made him unable to perform any more, to seek refuge in close friendships and movies, to desperately hope for a medical solution to the double impact of tinnitus and hyperacusis that afflicted him as a result. Not when he felt he had no further relief or hope and took his own life in late 2006, severed from the artistic world he had taken so much joy in because it could only bring him horrific, indescribable, literally inescapable pain.
Not when the exultation, the sheer release, and beautiful joy in the sounds of feedback and drone and extremity was that powerful, not when he was remembered by so many as someone driven by his passions and dreams and humor and good spirit, as the liner notes in this new compilation on the Rocket Girl label all unfailingly, one after another, point out. Everything said is said with a sense of loss, and everything you hear on Where the Sands Turn to Gold is something that is heard two ways, as the expression of intense feeling thrillingly captured and as the mark of personal destruction.
Try, if you can, to separate context from the sounds, that sense of understandably automatic sympathy, and Where the Sands Turn to Gold almost leaves one breathless. DiEmilio feels like a prophet almost without honor now, somebody who, years before the time of artists releasing endless amounts of music on 20-copy runs or streaming mixtapes, did just that as a matter of purpose. Besides three formal studio CDs and a live collection, his songs would appear on compilations, split EPs, and cassettes across the world, seemingly on almost every continent. In those terms, Azusa Plane was almost a constant one-way conversation, something which the relative rarity of their live shows outside Philadelphia balanced out.
Those songs appear here two ways-- a complete mp3 collection of every one of those lost tracks and two CDs of full audio files cherry-picking from that massive overview, from the B-side of his debut single onward. The mp3 collection itself comes on a DVD containing a video of one of those live shows, the power-trio incarnation of the band in full raucous rapture, but that simply can't be seen as what the band was fully like, not when there was so much going on with just DiEmilio's work on his own, an argument that was simple but clear: "You can just have an electric guitar and you can create worlds, individual worlds, distinct ones. And I'm going to take you there."
Retrospection and celebration should not mean oversimplification. You can hear the roots and contemporaries throughout the collection; Azusa Plane was not a case of some lost soul rewriting the rulebook, but someone helping to expand the palette, making his own case to be taken as seriously as someone like Loren Connors or Keiji Haino, maybe not as extreme but no less adventurous, a fan with a sly sense of humor as well as talent. On "Every Wave Has Its Own Integrity" is the exaltation and beauty of mid-1980s Cocteau Twins with rougher edges; throughout the lengthy "Two Views of the New Zealand Landscape" is a clear nod to that country's own towering avatar of solo electric guitar, Roy Montgomery; on "This is Not Spacerock", frazzled static and lovely reverb sum up the appeal of Flying Saucer Attack in four minutes. Song titles reference members of the Velvet Underground and Sebadoh, the Who album titles, the Mountain Goats, and much more.
Yet for all the contexts, what mattered was the ditching of them. Consider the cover art of Where the Sands Turn to Gold, an obvious reference to the cover of the Smiths' The Queen is Dead. As the liner notes indicate, DiEmilio's greatest musical passions included the Smiths as well as Bruce Springsteen-- and think of how many bands now talk of the two in the same breath, and how many of them just want to be either of them or some other well-meaning combination together, and how many fail to be nothing more than that derivative well-meaning combination, a photocopy, a pixellated video clip. The work of Azusa Plane argues here, throughout, not for recreation but creation, to resist musical cowardice, to acknowledge where you came from but to never, ever stop within the comfort zone.
Combine Where the Sands with his three formally released albums, as well as a live collection, and the full portrait is one of power and delicacy and an escape from the everyday. Enjoy Where the Sands on its own, and the feeling is still similar, a great introduction even in its comprehensiveness, something that could have been simply the start of something more instead of a summary. Nobody would have wanted DiEmilio to suffer the fate he did, the horrible turning point, the final conclusion. Where the Sands Turn to Gold is a labor of love and loss, sometimes hard to appreciate in its own right through the sense of cruel catharsis. But damn, there's some fine music here, and that is reason enough to listen, and reflect, and remember.
