Graveyards - "Blues for the Night People" - Troubleman Unlimited (Pictures of red/green vinyl coming soon!)
Graveyards – “untitled” (full-trio set at WFMU) MP3/download
John Olson (Wolf Eyes, American Tapes), Ben Hall and Hans Buetow (Editions Brokenresearch) = Graveyards … I didn’t know this until I saw an unseemly double-LP, unlabeled, sitting amid the leftovers at a record store soon going out of business.
Little did I know Blues for the Night People, named for a fairly innocuous Charlie Byrd song, I assume, was a super-limited — 300 copies — 2XLP on green/red translucent vinyl, delivered in the best-possible fashion: Totally anonymously, no labels, no bandnames, just the pretty psych-tiger-striped mess you see above.
One of them’s a sax player, one diddles the cello and one clanks around on non-drums. It’s a pretty duck-and-cover way to present music, reveling in silence, that distance between sounds that some find boring and others find enchanting (with me, honest-to-god, it’s both).
I prefer the spare nature of Blues for Night People to, say, Suite Bittersweet by Nels Cline, Wally Shoup and Greg Campbell, not because the latter is necessarily inferior but because loud, boisterous improv often takes on a certain tone; after you’ve heard enough of those guy/guy/guy/dude combo recordings you can set yr watch to them, I shit you NOT (Sonic Youth and their SY-R series being the main culprit).
Not so with BfNP, a soupy stroll down a foggy dock at midnight, waves lightly lapping up against the sides of the wooden planks as you disappear into the mist of floating boats, reduced to ghost-like figures without their rich owners to take them out.
The cello on Side B is monstrous, rocking back and forth like yr grandma’s old chair amid the noisemakers, tom/timpani (Do they have access to a timpani? I doubt it but it totally sounds like one) and other rustles in the thicket.
Then, backing up a bit, it sounds like someone’s inflating a tire at the beginning of Side A. The mechanic is joined in his garage by greasy thumps, tapped-together metal gaskets, more inflating, wrench-clanking, what MUST be a pan flute and other unidentifiable clicks/taps/scrapes.
Did I mention the kazoo? Yeah, musta blocked that out, but it’s there too, making time with the cello and going steady with the wrenches. More inflating …
Shitballs, I done ran out of shit to say. This is going to be a tough one to get yr hands on; I wouldn’t say forking over tons of cash for Blues is justified, but for the right price this is a wonderfully creepy-crawly sax/cello nugget to wrap yr mind around, particularly if you love the jazz-combo life and wanna get filthy.
