Bugskull

Bugskull, the brainchild of Oregon's guitarist and vocalist (and former folksinger) Sean Byrne, coined a style of arrangement that was the post-rock equivalent of Brian Wilson's orchestral productions: a catalog of musical mistakes instead of an abundance of instrumental counterpoint. The "songs" of Phantasies And Senseitions (1994) were jams of found sounds, electronic sounds, distortions, out-of-tune passages, abstract noise, and, last but not least, senseless lullabies. Snakland (1996) focused on the core (the tune) rather than on the shell (the cacophony), but the program remained one of wrapping tunes into layers and layers of cacophony. Distracted Snowflake Volume One (1997) marked the formal triumph of his techniques of lo-fi avantgarde. Each piece was carefully sculpted with a myriad of sounds, resulting in "songs" that were both overwhelming and exhilarating. The Bugskull project was started in 1992 by Sean Byrne in Portland, and was originally meant to be a private endeavour in the realm of avantgarde folk-rock. Two tapes were released for the Shimper and Eldest Son labels. A few years later Byrne was leading a trio, also called Bugskull, which included multi-instrumentist Brandan Bell and percussionist James Yu. In the meantime, Byrne had made a reputation as a surreal and dark songwriter with a fistful of increasingly popular singles. The gentle and intellectual minstrel of Fences/ Stiff As A Board (Road Cone, 1993) slowly mutated into the abrasive and dissonant experimenter of False Alarm/ Sunny Day Song (Quixotic, 1994), a master of bizarre orchestration (bells, violin, organ), and would soon mature as a shy and awkward Syd Barrett of the underworld with The Bloat (Ross, 1995), his most regular song so far.
The first Bugskull album, Phantasies And Senseitions (Road Cone, 1994), is a fantastic collage of sonic nonsense. The (mostly short) fragments rarely coalesce into a true song. They proudly exhibit a dadaist persona, although they are often conducted at funereal pace. It's like listening to Frank Zappa or the Residents transformed into serious composers. The Intro, embellished by an orchestra which is tuning the struments, is an allegorical manifesto of Byrne's ambitions. If such a thing as symphonic garage-rock can exist, instrumental piece Shorty could claim to be its archetype. Bugskull's music is rock, and certainly garage-style rock, but the atmosphere is hardly 'garagey", rather somber and threatening. The keyboards play a solemn requiem that contrasts ghoulishly with the guitars' theme and the drums' pace. Another instrumental piece, Old Towne, is instead a delicate lullaby full of nostalgy, its tender melody hummed by a clarinet: were it be played by guitars only, it would fit in a Leo Kottke album. Elfin Magic's minimalist fanfare is created by looping frogs, flutes and organs. Long Corridor manages to compose a jam of industrial music for broken objects, hissing, metronomies and pots. as far an instrumental rock goes, all of these tracks are masterpieces that revolutionize the traditional genres. You wouldn't believe that they last only two minutes or so...
However, the core of the album is the songs. Bugskull do not disappoint when they sing, although "sing" is not the appropriate term: the songs are "recited" in a tone which is annoyed and depressed; they are arranged in a madly spartan way, below "lo-fi" level, and developed through a logic that is without logic. Recoder is almost a classical piece masqueraded by rock song.
The setting is often more important than the singing. The cadaveric whisper of Opening Theme surfs through cycles of out-of-tune violin and our-of-mind flute. Byrne strums casually on a terrifying background of noise in Death Valley '94. The jazz-flavored chaos of Almost Blue yields the least humane clarinet solo since the times of Captain Beefheart. Seguara soars in hypnotic jamming. Concrete Boots expands in a magma of hallucinated echoes. Inhuman is steeped in musique concrete and electronic turbulences. The catalogue of impersonations is endless. Possibly, the apex is reached with Concave Life, when Byrne's distorted whisper delves in drones and rhythms which smell exoteric. What these songs share is that they are situated in a sonic and moral landscape which is extremely depleted. This landscape, this tragic waste land, is interior, psychological, and almost trascendent. Bugskull's music tests the subconscious, adrift in the vast ocean of irrationality. Bugskull's feast of fatal harmonic mistakes and gross sonic misunderstandings, is unrivaled, except maybe for the german band Faust, 25 years before.
when you least expect it, Byrne manufactures two regular songs: Sit On This and Olympic. On another planet the latter could become a hit.
Byrne, which has behaved for most of the album, vents his avantgarde libido with the abstract piece of Space, a blasphemous hybrid of John Cage, free-jazz and Edgar Varese.
As far as "lo-fi" rock goes, Bugskull may be vaguely related to Pavement and Guided By Voices, but the level of creativity is just tremendously higher. It's not the melodies (and it's not the lyrics), but rather the sonic landscape as a whole, and each detail in particular. Red Crayola, Supreme Dicks, Faust, are probably better reference points.

The soundtrack in seven movements of Crock (Pop Secret, 1995), composed by Byrne, represents a pantagruelic summa of psychedelic, ambient and progressive music. The pieces are entirely played on electronic machines and on guitar (itself deeply manipulated). The rhythmic attack of Storm The Fort, between Neu and Morton Subotnick, coexists with the intense quiet of Pretty Boy's Tent, the jazz fusion innuendos of The Lost Patrol Relax In The Sun coexist with the ghostly carillon of The Lost Patrol Return Home. The album has two supreme moments: The Lost Patrol's Psychedelic Exp's nine minutes of abstract noise and The Cactus Corps's sixteen minutes of intergalactic meandering. The latter more than justifies the album's excesses with a continuous discharge of abrasive shocks at frantic pace. Sean Byrne, which started his musical career by composing tape-loop music, and Brendan Bell, who seems responsible for most of the arrangements, have become two of the most fervid minds of our times.
Snakland (Scratch, 1996) continues, instead Byrne's experiments with the rock song format, and in particular his knack for wrapping it into layers and layers of electronics and cacophony (a method reminiscent of Silver Apples). The majority of the tracks are hard to define, but the most accessible ones are a fanta-psychedelic mixture of Hawkwind, Red Crayola and Pink Floyd.
As usual, the first track, Bring The Clowns, is a metaphor for the entire album: a collage of samplings that yields a fanfare for clarinet, violin, keyboards and guitar. The album picks up speed with the psychedelic merry-go-round of Mind Phaser, led by abominable guitar feedbacks, and with the dadaist piece of Egg Chamber, littered with little noises. Another instrumental track, Bouncer, bleeds electronic maelstroms and distorted riffs from a tribal rhythm. The lengthy Exit Wound (eleven minutes) opens at the martial pace of a native american ritual but slowly deteriorates into a hodgepodge of cacophony (samplings, guitar distortions, electronic hissings, assorted percussions).
Less abstract, more expressionistic, less surreale of the previous albums, Snarkland has also more of a rock feeling (guitar and drums are prominent), although the founding principle remains the idea of making music that does not sound like music anymore.
Phantasies And Senseitions (Road Cone), Crock (Pop Secret) and Snakland, not to mention the countless singles, must be ranked among the masterpieces of the last decade.
Byrne has also recorded the 7" Instress Volume 3 (Road Cone, 1996), which is credited to Capital Eye. The track Subplot is a return to his avantgarde origins.

Burne is basically alone for Distracted Snowflake Volume One (Pop Secret, 1997), a concept album which expounds one more time the "lo-fi" song format but arranges it like avantgarde music (Flowers Smile, Grand Canyon, all the way to the casual humming in the pandemonium of Vacancy).
The album's key numbers are still the dadaist pieces. His scores are not only unpredictable, they are also futuristic. It's amazing how in Icecream Daydream the organ's catchy carillon is sustained by a tepid polirhythm pulsed by bass and keyboards. Another limping rhythm, again obtained by overlapping rhythmic events, leads the synthetizes tune of Winky's Wild Ride. These tracks share the same minimalistic praxis: the song is built little by little by repeating a slowly changing theme and by overdubbing a handful of heterogeneous events. In Goodbye the melodic theme is "played" by the bells, while the percussions are left wild in the foreground.
A distorted, gigantic, martially paced riff, a vortex of sampled voices, and electronic sounds open Sun in the most metaphysical manner. Guitars and keyboards duel to the end. Indian-style percussions prevail over everything and turn the grand finale into a psychedelic raga updated to cosmic music.
As a whole, this is Byrne's most experimental work, an album which takes him into a new genre of music.

Distracted Snowflake Volume Two (Scratch, 1999)

Despite the usual rainfall of noisy detours, The Big While Cloud (Scratch, 2002) is Bugskull's most relaxed and accessible album.

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