Three years ago, RVNG Intl.’s loving survey of Pacific Northwest musician Kerry Leimer revealed a contemplative player in the American late 70s/early 1980s underground who didn’t quite slot into any one category or scene. He wasn’t really a punk, though he took a decidedly unlearned approach to music-making. And despite delving into synthesizers and ambient soundscapes, Leimer didn’t really turn himself into a new age cottage industry. He even made twitchy, drum-heavy tracks as Savant, but he wouldn’t quite be considered a dance music producer either. In retrospect, Leimer seemed mostly like a one-man iteration of American kosmische music.
A sense of detachment from genres and scenes comes up again on this reissue of Leimer’s long out-of-print soundtrack for Alan Greenberg’s 1982 documentary, Land of Look Behind. Not readily available on streaming sites, the film is one to track down. It remains one of the most fascinating looks at the Rastafarian culture that begat Jamaican music, its eye trained on both the dense, tangled “bad land” of Cockpit Country as well as Kingston in the wake of Bob Marley’s funeral. And while plenty of Jamaican music fills the film, Leimer’s contribution to the score expertly hovers between the island’s ritualistic nyabinghi drumming and futuristic analog synthesizers. It’s a soundtrack for a film that at times seems like a vague remembrance of a film itself, disassociating certain elements from the celluloid and imagining them in strange new ways.
Call it ambient reggae—even if it’s too fidgety to fully settle into either of those sounds. When the nyabinghi drums crop up, they’re often background sounds rather than immediate thunder, adding just a subtle pulse to the sublime shimmer of “The Outpost.” And when the drum circles move to the fore—as on centerpiece “The Cockpit”—Leimer makes the ambient washes more ethereal, recalling some of Steve Roach’s work with percussionists from the ’80s. On “Confusion in Belief,” sunburst synths entwine with tribal drums from the film, mixing with Leimer’s keys and a battery of percussionists: Steve Fisk, Kevin Hodges, David and James Keller. At times, the sound anticipates Boards of Canada, with chunky drums, drifting chords, and voices swirling about, just at the verge intelligibility.
It’s rare to have vocals emerge in Leimer’s work, so his way with looping, tweaking, and layering voices from the film into rhythmic counterpoint fascinates. Chant, casual chatter, an overheard conversation—they all get minced into sound. A location recording of a crowd clamors in the distance on the post-punk landscape of “Gun Court.” Leimer then samples a Jamaican voice discussing the bush and contorts it into all sorts of patterns on “Testimony and Honor.” He chops up that distinct patois and adds an array of handclaps, bird sounds, tapped hi-hats, and rewound tape atop it.
Three bonus tracks are tacked onto this reissue, though Leimer didn’t finish them until many years later. Outside of an extended version of “The Cockpit,” they don’t grapple with the coarse elements of Jamaica; Leimer instead emphasizes the piano and other acoustic sounds in his studio. In a decade that would see numerous artists engage in ethnic music and modern composition, from the likes of Jon Hassell to the Made to Measure series, the eight tracks of the original soundtrack remain unmatched in the decade. By turns raw and elegant, rhythmic and unearthly, Leimer’s music evokes and retains the mystery of Jamaica itself.
