3 posts tagged “buckethead”
Bill Laswell's Praxis project, originally a turntable-and-sampler affair, changed direction in the 90s to invent the "cyberthrash" genre. With a core lineup of Laswell, Buckethead, Bernie Worrell, and Brain, they constantly switched gears from funk to metal thrash to hip-hop to ambient to free jazz, often within the same song. Praxis has always been primarly an instrumental band. Their latest album, Profanation, includes a series of guest singers and a dose of nu-metal; it's watered down the Praxis concept, but on the other hand they now have some anthemic choruses to shout along with. On first listen the fourth track, "Furies," grabbed my attention, because it sounded like Peter Murphy singing. Peter Murphy on a Praxis album?! Then as I listened and the singing went into a higher register and exhibited some very un-Murphy-like inflections, I decided it must be Iggy Pop, remembering that Bill Laswell had produced his Instinct album. And it is indeed Iggy Pop, but did you ever notice how similar he and Peter Murphy sound sometimes?
It was not long after that that I happened upon Iggy Pop again, this time on the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was listening to for my spy music roundup. The Stooges' 1973 classic "Search and Destroy" plays during the scene in which Steve Zissou drives the pirates from his ship, a perfect bit of snarling energy for the onscreen action:
1973: the Vietnam War, IRA bombings (which caused the "Urban Guerilla" single to be banned by the BBC, and ultimately withdrawn from the market), the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army, revolutionary (and pseudo-revolutionary) terrorism and bloody counterterrorism were in the air worldwide. Iggy Pop and Robert Calvert both picked up on it, apparently independently, and produced a pair of songs that will now be forever entwined in my mind.
My brother gave us the Air Guitar Nation DVD for Christmas, which chronicles the USA's first entry into the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland in 2003. The documentary centers on US rivals Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane and David "C-Diddy" Jung, the latter shown here:
Need I mention that the movie is a blast? My daughter is so taken with it that she has signed up to do air guitar for her elementary school talent show. I helped her pick out a song last night, then edited out some slow bits to get it down to under three minutes. She asked me to post the song here, so here it is: she'll be rocking out to Buckethead's "Brewer in the Air"--
I've been hankering to listen to Zillatron's Lord of the Harvest again recently, and after about a week of looking I located a copy. "Zillatron" is one of the alter egos adopted by Bootsy Collins for this 1993 album, produced by himself and Bill Laswell for Ryko's shortlived Black Arc imprint (and reissued by Innerhythmic in 2004). The other driving force behind this album is guitar phenom Buckethead; the album as a whole achieves a weird balance between Bootsy's supremely funky bass playing, Buckethead's metal licks, and a running thread of William Burroughs paranoia and Area 51 UFO conspiracy theories, either sampled from movies or narrated by Bootsy through a vocoder. The sound is rounded out by P-Funk alumnus Bernie Worrell's keyboard wizardry. Frankly, all the crazy talking can get tedious when you want to hear music, so I've snipped the first minute and a half from the album's tour de force, "Fuzz Face" (another character played here by Bootsy):
This is another album from my earliest days of parenthood, when I couldn't afford to buy any music, so I would tape the new CDs that my friend Brian (a.k.a. "Tumbleweed") brought over every Saturday. I distinctly remember listening to my Zillatron tape in the car on September 23, 1994, driving home after spending the night in a recliner in my wife's hospital room with our newborn son. I was exhausted, but "Fuzz Face" woke me right up and carried me home. (And when it got to the part where Bootsy says, "My speakers blown, my speakers blown," it was almost prophetic, as I'd cranked it all the way up by then.) It also carried me home from work last week, but that wasn't quite as momentous.