Recorded in Minneapolis 35 years ago and shelved by Sire Records shortly thereafter, Microminiature Love had been a ridiculously obscure find-- assuming anyone was looking for it at all-- until its vinyl reissue last year on Destijl. Now the album is experiencing its biggest push ever, thanks to Seattle powerhouse Sub Pop who've just given it its first-ever CD pressing.
Michael Yonkers' backstory is, frankly, intense: When he committed Microminiature Love's seven tracks to tape in the fall of 1968, he was a four-eyed technophile in his late teens who'd just graduated from surf-rock to the more sinister sounds of the Stones, et al. Only two years later, his career and livelihood would suffer a devastating blow: While working at an electronics warehouse in 1971, he was crushed by 2,000 pounds of computer components, severely injuring his back. Subsequently, the dye used in the invasive x-ray procedures led to a degenerative condition of the inner lining of his spinal cord.
He managed to self-release four other Jandek-styled folk records on his own eponymous imprint in the 70s, but soon after shifted much of his attention to dance therapy as a means of easing his pain. His condition reached an apex in the mid-90s, forcing him out of the live circuit entirely, but due to the attention brought his way by the reissuing of his music, and with the help of a homemade back brace and stand for his guitar, he's recently played some live dates with Wolf Eyes, Six Organs of Admittance, and Low.
It makes sense that he's shared bills with these black-as-night DIY noisemakers, washed-out acid-folkies, and blissed-out dream-poppers. A consummate techie, Yonkers built and modified all of his equipment: he created two effects pedals, made one guitar out of two, constructed synths from childrens' toys, and chopped his Fender Telecaster down to a small rectangular plank to facilitate his psychedelic experiments. (He still uses the scaled-down Tele, which these days is held together by duct tape.)
Microminiature Love put Yonkers' homemade equipment to good use: the album is characterized by its droning open-tunings, choppy distortion, twangy folk ministrations, outer-world speaker pans, and bevy of crazed fretwork. But there's a point at which this record shifts from wacky historical curiosity to full-on psych-rock excellence: the clanging fireworks that launch the final vibrato of "Boy in the Sandbox" from gloomy minor to stratospheric noise triumph. The song spins anti-war slogans into a narrative about an everyday kid who passes time with toy soldiers until outgrowing his "sandbox days," when he discovers girls, love, an actual war, and finally, a "tomb of sand." The song's narrative leaves an open ending as the song breaks into the extended, atonal epiphany.
Elsewhere, "Scat Jam" is a deconstructed space-out that recalls Comets on Fire, featuring strangely out-of-left-field drum breaks, entropic wooden percussion, Yonkers' gleeful shouts, and Wayne Rogers' guitar-blast tectonics. The more staid, midtempo garage of "Kill the Enemy" (another grapple with the suffocation of Vietnam) is buttressed by the shimmering, soft white-noise of sandy-beach radio waves; targeting religious self-righteousness in the face of military action, it fades along a plateau of pulses after Yonkers lets out a final blistering fuck-off! scream (despite his youth in these recordings, he sounds something like a throatier Roky Erickson howling discord through an acid-fried Roy Orbison).
Though some of Microminiature Love's six bonus tracks drag, and not all of it is as moving as the more powerful moments I've pointed out, there are more than enough quavering wah-wah nuggets to make it a heady audio experience-- especially for fans of The Troggs, The Zombies, more blistery Animals, Red Crayola, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and that Twisted Village stargazing vibe. For those of us who do most of our shopping in thrift stores, it's these forgotten bits of a visionary history that make our continual searching worthwhile.
