Most experimental music is at least a little absurd. Unlike conventional songwriting, whose intentions are usually pretty clear, the any-sound-goes approach often provokes the question “why are you doing this?” For some artists, seriousness of intent and dedication to craft are self-evident answers. But others also see the question as a chance to play, to be humorous or ridiculous or twisted or confusing. In other words, to laugh and make you ask again. At its most absurd, that kind of experimental music is like a trippy cartoon, dizzyingly unpredictable and fearlessly free. That’s why John Zorn found so much inspiration in Carl Stalling, whose zany mash-up compositions scored many Warner Brothers cartoons.
Absurdity has shown up in the individual work of experimenters C. Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, and Lasse Marhaug, so their collaboration as part of Software’s SSTUDIOS series seemed likely to spark humorous fireworks. It did: Wake Up Awesome is a bubbling, restless sonic fun house, filled with comic samples, oddball turns, surreal transitions, and enough activity to power a jet engine. It’s not novelty music—many moments, especially those involving Lee’s expressive cello improvisations, are as compelling as the gravest experimental music. But the trio is unafraid to sound novel, silly, or absurd—and that’s what makes listening to them so much fun.
Their attitude is evident right on the surface, in tongue-in-cheek song titles like “Serious Cat’s Milk”, “The Mermaids of Extended Technique”, and “Tonight We Sleep Like Empty Hard Drives”. Those recall the goofy monikers of early Boredoms songs, and in fact some of the music evokes Boredoms too, minus the psycho shrieks of Yamataka Eye. Both groups create a sense that anything could happen, and that the participants are always eager to surprise. In the case of Yeh, Lee, and Marhaug, that eagerness creates moments that might make you laugh out loud. On “Anise Tongue and Durian Wet Dream”, a sample that sounds torn from a rickety player-piano loops around drools and gargling, while synth squiggles in “Mission: Possible” sound like Pac Man dying. Perhaps funniest is “Throw Down the Fishcake”, whose messy percussion is like a pile of overlapping punch lines.
What makes Wake Up Awesome more than just a joke is the way the trio mixes laughs with tension and drama, sometimes simultaneously. That’s most evident in Lee’s cello, which seems able to emit any tone and convey any emotion imaginable. On the aforementioned “Mermaids,” she scrapes out chilly notes that match the grind of Ghil, her excellent solo album from earlier this year (which Marhaug helped conceive and record). On “Ophelia Gimme Shelter,” her slow lines are mournful, while on “Mission: Nothing” similar figures are majestically stoic. Cut those moments with Yeh and Marhaug’s punchy interruptions and jarring juxtapositions, and you get a record that can sound like multiple albums playing at once.
That effect was one of the promises of sample-heavy experiments like turntablism, which seemed capable of smashing hundreds of styles into seconds of music. But outside of the hyper-cut "plunderphonics" of John Oswald, much of it stuck to a narrow sonic range, and got predictable pretty quick. Yeh, Marhaug, and Lee avoid that fate by leaning on their well-honed improvisational skills, injecting gravity into Wake Up Awesome’s airy playfulness. Thus an album spilling with ideas still manages some containment—though when the final track cuts off abruptly, you get the sense that, like kids at recess, this trio stopped playing only because they had to.
