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"The Jewelled Antler is an alternative to being in a single band rehearsing and recording the perfect song," Chasse intimates from back in the triangle again. "We pick friends up and go places with a car full of instruments. When we are outside, we amplify acoustic instruments with little toy amps and get weird electronic effects. The fact that we record outdoors and in old abandoned structures" -- like the deserted Army bunkers peppering the Marin Headlands -- "defines our recordings. You get strange spatial effects. You can put bows to old cracked pipes and amplify them. You play the actual space. It's all very imaginative."
And Donaldson supplements this with, "When you get people together in a setting like the outdoors this is the kind of music played. It's modal, mysterious, and free. It's a very natural way to play." Thus, Jewelled Antler bands are not defined by what they sound like, but by their family-gathered-around-the-campfire collective attitude, which is even extended to their live performances. Most JA bands prefer playing warehouse spaces, galleries, and strange outdoor locations such as this gigantic drainpipe that Thuja performed inside of during a trip to Wisconsin last summer. JA bands occasionally travel to another state or country for special performances, but they do not tour per se because, well, because the family around the campfire would not tour.
As Chasse puts it, the Jewelled Antler is "more of a way of playing rather than what we are playing," informed and shaped by: the musicians' sincere passion for spontaneous improvisation; the psychedelic imagination; abstract sound; direct commune with nature and friends; Eastern music and thought; the deconstructing of traditional folk music; recycled flea-market-bought instruments; and explorations of new recording techniques. The Jewelled Antler places bold technological experimentation in the service of nature-mysticism similar to the way the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia used mathematics as an aid to merging with pure nature (but please forget I wrote that).
On Thuja's Suns, for example, this fusion of science and nature adopts the form of 10 cavernous cosmic drones, from which fractured string-picking, softly resonating piano chords, and a wraithlike rattling regularly emerge then subside. Thuja possesses this uncanny ability to alchemically manipulate its recordings until the band has forged a sound that is so otherworldly -- so totally free of origins -- that no one, including Chasse and Donaldson, is capable of deciphering who is playing what, when, where, and how. This is not music for passive appreciation; this is an egoless, collectively generated om ideal for temporarily erasing the internal hard drive. (The answer is yes, I have attended three yoga classes to date and will attend more.)
The aforementioned qualities feel even more palatable on Coelacanth's hypnotic disc, The Glass Sponge. Coelacanth is Chasse and Jim Haynes, and I have not a chance in hell of explaining how these two bore the tones and timbres herein. According to the JA Web site, their last performance utilized "tape, shortwave, voice, rust, clocks, etc." To these ears, this music thrums and murmurs like the unified pulse of all aquatic life, but, then again, how do I know what that sounds like?
I don't, really. So, let me mention a few JA bands that sound more overtly folksy (but still warped): the Child Readers (Chasse and Jason Honea), Blithe Sons (Chasse and Donaldson), the Franciscan Hobbies (Chasse, Donaldson, and "friends"), and Hala Strana (Steven R. Smith with help from guess who?). Each one of these bands crafts a unique and often eerie amalgamation of plaintive, minimalist folk-hymns buried in a heavy field-recordings vibe. The Franciscan Hobbies' new disc, Walls Are Stuck, is totally shattered, hobbit-noise, free-folk rock that can also drift and ripple like an Indian raga. Meanwhile, Hala Strana's two-disc set, Fielding, is a massive collection of reworked Slavic/Balkan traditional-folk ingeniously grafted to field recordings evoking lonely street scenes from archaic Hungarian villages.
Now, somewhere back in paragraph No. 6, I mentioned delicate folk-pop, and that referred to the Skygreen Leopards (Donaldson and Donovan Quinn), and their latest release, Life and Love in Sparrow's Meadows. Here's the skinny about the Leopards. If the Jewelled Antler aesthetic generally comes off rather sober and contemplative, à la the mysticism of William Blake, then the feathery, slurred falsettos of Donaldson and Quinn are ecstatic and wholeheartedly wasted on nature's splendor, à la the romanticism of William Wordsworth. The Leopards (who often record out at some East Bay ranch) blissfully twang and strum their guitars and pick 'n' pluck away at the strings. A tattered nest of rattles, flutes, mouth organs, wood blocks, hand drums, and tambourines maintains an impish, acid-electric pace. These tunes feel old, as if they were actually crafted before their influences, the classic jangle of the Byrds and the Monkees. In fact, they sound so off-the-cuff spontaneous and beyond time that the Leopards surely lifted them from our collective unconscious. (And I apologize for my cosmo-mystic babble, but in the words of the Leopards themselves, "I don't mean to seem like some 15th-century king/ I just want to sing of these flowers and things.") Anyway, I truly believe this is the quintessential modern Californian pop album for getting stoned to on beautiful days and wandering Highway 1, Mount Tamalpais, and (my fave) Point Reyes, just like the Dead's American Beauty and CSN&Y's Déjà Vu must have been the quintessential albums for our hippie ancestors doing the exact same things.
And finally, there is this intense little disc titled Winged Leaves by the Ivytree. The Ivytree is Donaldson somber, quiet, and alone with his quiet falsetto, which resembles that of a medium channeling. Wounded, broken phrases repeatedly evaporate into a choked, dead-of-night cry, the backdrop being a compacted blend of barely picked six-string, banjo, and baroque touches of tambourine, whistle, pitch pipe, and bells. Throughout the disc, these vocal-lead trances alternate with equally expressive instrumentals: minimal but dense layers of muted organ, softly crackling radio static, and accordion. I turned numb on my first listening as I reached the disc's midway point. So I switched on my computer and began typing, "I know who the best acid-folk singer in the Bay Area is and his name isn't Joanna Newsom or Six Organs of Admittance it's --," and I stopped because that sentence is so totally boring; it doesn't understand the mystery. So I just closed my eyes.
