This project began in Spring 1996 when Jim played me an extremely assaultive and very rare compilation track featuring a live performance by Masayuki Takayanagi's New Direction Unit (or whatever he was calling it at the time). Instantaneously this music showered from the car speakers with potent, undeniable vitriol. Despite a typically clean and well-engineered Japanese-style recording, Takayanagi and band were summoning a noxious, brutally dense and furious hailstorm of noise from their meager instruments - guitar, cello and percussion. My immediate response to Jim was, "This is good music."

Hearing a few minutes of this particular performance knocked something loose in me. Since I became fully embroiled in esoteric music forms as a teenager it looks like I have unwittingly prioritized intensity, speed, kineticism, velocity and extreme emotional outpouring as primary attributes I desire in art. The concept of creating works with seemingly superhuman energy levels and endurance (creatively and physically) is appealing to me as an attempt to conjure a state of transcendence. I'm striving to divert some of my own attention away from the mundanity of life in the societally-reinforced mediocrity of current American behavioral conditioning.

For years I had privately explored and developed long-form approaches to unconventional rhythmic momentum pioneered by people like Rashied Ali, Sunny Murray, Beaver Harris, Milford Graves, Tony Oxley, Han Bennink and Charles K. Noyes, but had engaged few opportunities to punish an audience with these discoveries at very much length. My drumming in the Flying Luttenbachers, although consistently intense, had mostly been limited to expressing the parameters and restrictions of various succinct compositions.

It seemed very clear at this point that we brave warriors needed to bring the noise out from the cellar and directly to the people! I booked a show in Chicago to take place in July '96 and Jim and I decided to enlist the lively Fred Lonberg-Holm as our cello player. The results of this debut concert are audible as the opening track on the CD. If anything, the performance came out more conventionally "musical" and less "extreme" than I think I originally had in mind. Consider this piece, "For Jojo/Freebasing Styrofoam", a warm, sonically varied and inviting 30-minute test run for the more fully-realized "Give Me Head 'Til You're Dead" (track four).

There comes a point in a boy's life where noise-making for the sake of noise becomes stultifying and ineffectual (and I'm not sorry to brag that I think old Jim arrived at this point of sonic puberty several times during the sessions, bless his black little heart). What I'm personally trying to convey with a piece like "Give Me Head..." is human energy and movement, not ham-fisted oppression and punishment. Perhaps residual psychic bitterness inevitably manifests itself as a vibrationally negative element in my own aesthetic displays, but rest assured I'm doing this in the name of good clean fun and not for the purpose of martyrdom (pardon me while I stick another thumbtack into my eyeball)...

Besides, if anyone should (predictably) deem our music masturbatory, we might as well show our lack of respect by cumming all over THEIR wigs, certainly not our own doughy bellies (cf. Whitehouse). It sure feels great to play this music! Track two, "Endless Corridor of Roasted Babies" is our attempt at a slightly more painterly and gentle method of instrumental mutilation. Perhaps you might use the toilet at this point or make a sandwich with nails and broken glass in it. Mr. O'Rourke is wonderfully subtle on this track, mostly to the extent of inaudibility. Bravo! I took it upon myself to play the guitar solo on track three. Evidently I'll continue to make my artistic point until I feel it has been completely understood and I care not which instrument is used to make it (look out for my blistering solo kazoo 10 CD box set due out next month...).

The final piece "Triumph of Death" came as a last-minute afterthought (besides, the producers seem to think longer is better!). I figured this apocalyptic set of music needed a more concrete resolution: vast numb nothingness. It's purposely a bit on the loud side to wake you up out of your chair after succumbing to the previous hour of torture.

Have a nice day!

your friend, Weasel Walter

It would seem more or less improbable that anyone would attempt to explore the work of Japan's late, great free jazz guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi. But here it is, a tribute album by Weasel Walter, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Jim O'Rourke, that uses Takayanagi as the jumping-off point to their own inspired pieces. Walter and O'Rourke take turns trading off guitar duties, while Walter spends plenty of time with drum duties, and Lonberg-Holm is, as usual, at home on cello, whatever project he seems to be working on.

Takayanagi started out performing pretty traditional jazz, but into the 70s and 80s, he pursued free jazz with an exploding, assaulting style, carrying out the best tradition of the works of Ornette Coleman, late Coltrane, and obviously Sonny Sharrock. His New Direction Unit blasted down walls of expectation and jazz cliches, and built a furious and formidable presence that is still pretty difficult to listen to/endure today. There really is no one who can replace Takayanagi and his style, and I can't think of anyone else who can hurt both a guitar and the listener's ears in exactly the same controlled, precise, methodical way.

As for Walter, O'Rourke, and Lonberg-Holm, with their tenacious antics in the New Direction Unit direction, it's a whole other world, even down to their great, gory song titles ("Endless Corridor of Roasted Babies" and "Silted Tit" to name a few). Whether hurtling dense walls of guitar and drumming, or laying out dark, moody droning, this trio proves that sometimes a tribute is equal to doing covers. And in the case of Takayanagi, with his often, nearly impenetrable improvisational style, I don't think I would even see the point of trying to do a cover. For comparison, when Noels Cline and Gregg Bandana posited their Interstellar Space Revisited last year, their attempt to cover Coltrane and Ali's duets with electric guitar and drums instead of sax and drums, they opened up a hole of both possibility, and implausibility. They have been able to carry out segments of songs for good measure, and master a feeling. What happens on Tribute to Makayuki Takayanagi is more along the lines of mastering a feeling, a sort of density and electric whirlwind, an extraction of the essence of Takayanagi that parallels and simulates but does not replace or copy.

Standouts: "Slitted Tit", "Give Me Head 'Til You're Dead"

Music By: Forestter Cobalt/www.supersphere.com