Cul De Sac

Amos had been playing since the 1970s, in Florida, and mostly electronic music. In 1977, relocating to Boston, Amos was involved in the creative explosion of the "new wave" and was briefly a member of Daevid Hild's Girls, and briefly a peer of Roger Miller and Kramer. In 1991 Amos and Jones were in Shut Up, that recorded an album for Brash Music. When the guitarist quit to form Christmas, Amos and Jones met Guttmacher and Fujiwara, all of them college students, and coined the name Cul De Sac.

Ecim (Northeastern, 1992 - Strange Attractors Audio House, 2006) toyed with an idea that was both amusing and experimental: a mostly-instrumental form of folk-rock for chitarra, synth, bass and drums that bridged John Fahey's folk primitivism and avantgarde music. The structure of Death Kit Train was both linear and eccentric: pulsing, minimalist repetition in sufi-like crescendo flying on a tribal percussive carpet, with psychedelic overtones that evoked Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, and electronic noises that harked from another planet. Nico's Dream used a similar concept to weave a cosmic tapestry, a tender tribute to the Velvet Underground's singer. Homunculus mixed the Brecht-ian vocal delivery of Art Bears, rhythmic patterns a` la Neu and Pink Floyd-ian psychedelic distortions. Cul De Sac's music was not brainy and not harsh. In fact, their pieces often sounded like surreal/exotic postcards: The Moon Scolds The Morning Star, a dejected middle-eastern litany sustained by dazed guitar and synth dialogue; The Invisible Worm, halfway between Indian war music and Talking Heads-ian martial dance-rock, with demented David Thomas-ian vocals; etc.
The band is capable of just about any eccentric blend. The breezy but dissonant surf music of Electar bridges the era of Telstar and the era of post-rock. Lauren's Blues sculpts a tender, trancey melody over a mutating waltz-like and bolero-like rhythm.
A John Fahey cover and a Tim Buckley cover provided the coordinates of Cul De Sac's location in the vast nomansland of experimental music.

If the single Milk Devil (New World Of Sound) heightens the trance in the bickering between guitar tremolo, tribalism, and spacey electronics, I Don't Want To Go To Bed (Nuf Sed, 1995), which collects pieces recorded between 1990 and 1993, completely transforms their improvisations into solemn psychedelic mantras. Four tracks brush up against or exceed the ten-minute mark: Abandoned Hospital, a minimalist piece halfway between Terry Riley’s In C and Glenn Branca’s symphonies; Doldrums, a noisy and tribal suite in the vein of Amon Düül and Hawkwind; Graveyard For Robots, a somewhat Oriental-tinged pantomime with frenetically detuned guitars; This Is The Metal That Do Not Burn, a Middle Eastern march conducted in a suspenseful atmosphere like the raga-psychedelic rituals of early Pink Floyd. The other seven tracks seem more like experiments aiming to combine Jones’ ultra-distorted solos (The Fraud Of Satisfaction, Roses In The Wallpaper) with violent and cacophonous group jazz-rock improvisations (Count Donut, For Seasickness). The album is worth what it is: a document of the group’s early years.

The next single (for Shock) contains Sakhalin and Cant, two of their most gripping and ingenious instrumentals (a hallucinated surf piece and an asylum-grade spaghetti western).
Another single, a revision of Doldrums, once again paints transcendent surf chords, like a cross between Dick Dale, John Fahey, and Ravi Shankar.

Having replace Guttmacher with Men & Volts' drummer Jon Proudman, Cul De Sac progressed towards a more fluent and elegant style on China Gate (Thirsty Ear, 1996), possibly their masterpiece.
The exotic meditation of Sakhalin is sustained by an explosive combination of Jones' frantic middle-eastern strumming (and a couple of wildly distorted solos) and by a hypnotic rhythm a` la Pink Floyd's Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. The guitar unleashes an intimidating barrage of noise and melody. The same effervescent mood propels the surf music of Doldrums to transcendental heights, despite noisy electronics, tribal drums and a sitar-like guitar drone that erupts in the middle of it. Something similar happens in Hemispheric Events Command, where a loud, distorted guitar sound derails an otherwise lazy (but no less atonal) shuffle. The most atmospheric of these fast-paced bluegrass/surf/minimalist/tribal pieces is The Colomber, which, fueled by titanic drumming, accelerates to a supersonic bacchanal.

On the more intellectual/abstract front, the funereal, noir suspense of James Coburn relies on unstructured jamming. The loose, nine-minute hallucination of Nepenthe is wrapped in haunting guitar tones, eerie electronics and almost free-jazz improvisation. The eleven-minute tour de force of The Fourth Eye is the ultimate detonation of Cul De Sac's faux retro-chic. Subliminal reverbs, sparse gong-like drumming, electronic fibrillation and, in general, surrealistic sound-painting replace the linear accelerations of the surf-like tracks.
Cul De Sac have greatly reduced the contribution of the synthesizer, that may not fit with this austere and ambitious course.

The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones (Thirsty Ear, 1997) was composed and performed with John Fahey. Gamelan Collage, New Red Pony, Our Puppet Selves, Magic Mountain, and Tuff are fairy-tale–like, almost esoteric exercises in the evocation of otherworldly realms.

Amos is also involved in a techno project called Beyond Freedom And Dignity, and Jones is working on an album for solo guitar.

In February 1999 the single The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith California (already on Ecim), a piece by Fahey, was released. The quartet sounds bursting with health on Crashes To Light (Thirsty Ear, 1999). Although the album features eight tracks longer than six minutes, it is their most compact work. The sound has been cleansed of all sharp edges, the textures have been simplified, and the rhythms have been brought back under the logic of melody. The result is an exemplary essay in instrumental progressive rock, and at the same time the most accessible work of their career.
Etapin Shrdlu (nine minutes) and Sands Of Iwo Jima (twelve minutes) are emblematic of how Jones manages to build a harmonic flow from an eclectic multitude of ideas. In the first, a bouzouki pushes its way through the synthesizer’s gurgles and intones a hypnotic motif halfway between a Mediterranean saltarello and the sitar of the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black, only to be swallowed by a stormy crescendo of percussion and electric guitar, with a suggestive juxtaposition of psychedelic jam stereotypes and surf instrumentals. The tour de force of the second unfolds as a majestic, imposing crescendo of all the instruments, linking back more directly to the psychedelic jams of the 1960s. Here the rhythm section dominates with its constantly shifting Gothic cadences, while the electronics lay down sheets of extraterrestrial wailing and the guitar raves in distorted, cosmic delirium.
More than one track carries spiritual or metaphysical overtones. A Voice Through A Cloud (nine minutes) opens with the guitar singing a gospel hymn in an atmosphere of almost new-age ecstasy. The melody shatters into a gentle chaos of chords, like a long plume of smoke. The melody of K is instead marked by the guitar’s metallic chords over a backdrop of sinister keyboard sounds. The guitar also transforms Father Silence (nine minutes) into a philosophical poem, weaving dreamlike riffs—halfway between living-room fusion jazz and melodic hard rock—over the slow, almost country-like gait of the rhythm section and the funereal, baroque requiem tones of the keyboards. Hagstrom begins with a crackle of noises but soon settles into a fluid melodic theme—half Hawaiian, half surf—on guitar. In these more relaxed pieces, the influence of John Fahey—his fairy-tale mirages and transcendent trances—is especially strong.
The album closes with the threnody On The Roof Of The World, a poignant elegy frantically strummed on guitar as though it were a sitar or harp, immersed in a vortex of electronic wind and marked out in martial fashion by drums and double bass.
The instrument dominating these existential pantomimes is Glenn Jones’ guitar. Jones has become a minor virtuoso of the instrument, capable of ranging across a very broad front of techniques and timbres.
What limits the album’s scope is only the absence of a truly sensational novelty—a track that makes one cry out for a miracle. All the suites are impeccable, but rarely memorable.

Along with Tortoise and Labradford, Cul De Sac are among the principal protagonists of the renaissance of instrumental rock at the end of the millennium.

Immortality Lessons (Strange Attractors, 2002) captures a 1999 live performance of (mostly) previously unreleased tracks. Etaoin Without Shrdlu, from Crashes To Light, highlights their guitar and keyboards technique of sculpting a raga-like structure halfway between surf music and Terry Riley's minimalism. Blues In E is a surreal piece that wavers for a while around a jazzy bolero theme only to bloom in a guitar-driven Hawaian aria. The influence of early Pink Floyd is visible in the lengthy The Dragonfly's Bright Eye. Tension is what keeps Immortality Lessons lighting up (a track originally recorded with John Fahey in 1997): its hypnotic middle-eastern crescendo is a tapestry of fluctuating patterns. However, the standout has to be Frozen In Fury On The Roof Of The World, an atmospheric and somewhat nostalgic "toccata and fugue". While not as groundbreaking as, say, China Gate, this album is a worthy follow-up to I Don't Want To Go To Bed (which also contained live improvisations).

Death Of The Sun (Strange Attractors, 2003), the first album of studio compositions in four years, adds bassist/violinist Jonathan LaMaster and electronics/turntabilist Jake Trussell to the axis of Robin Amos (keyboards), Glenn Jones (guitars) and Jon Proudman (drums). The music is deeply indebted to the folkish tape pieces that featured prominently on The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones, Cul De Sac's collaboration with guitar primitivist John Fahey. Dust of Butterflies (9:54) begins as an unfocused ethno-collage, but slowly acquires a more focused shape as a concert of minimalist chord plucking lends itself to the fragile flight of violin and other melancholy drones over ever more opalescent structures. The contrast between the electronic undercurrent and the insistent acoustic tinning of the guitars is the leitmotiv of the entire album.
Turok Son of Stone (7:26) proceeds from a frantic barrage of percussions. Steve Roach-ian snake-hisses and prehistoric moans challenge the ever increasing beat, while haunting female vocals cry in the distance.
The feverish magma that exhales electronic miasma in Death of the Sun (8:46) is of a different nature. Instead of jungle-esque polyrhythms, the propellent is a metronomic beat (loudly distorted towards the end).
The intense sitar-driven raga of Bamboo Rockets and the protracted ceremonial-music suspense of Bellevue Bridge (6:13) indulge in dejectedly exotic overtones. The closing, poignant litany of I Remember Nothing More (5:40), sampled from some obscure, crackling record, seals the fatalistic, languid-abandon tone of the album.
It is all well-architected and impeccably packaged, but, somehow, not completely convincing. Like everything that is "artificial" in nature, it tends to sound impersonal and inorganic. The artifice works wonderfully, but it remains an artifice, which is, fundamentally, a deception. This is neither terribly revolutionary, by the standards of musician who have been doing this kind of things for years, nor as enchanting as the original Cul De Sac sound.

Strangler's Wife (Strange Attractors, 2003) collects the music composed by Cul De Sac for a film's soundtrack (18 brief vignettes). Amos and Jones shine at their respective instruments, as does Proudman's inventive and frequently Mason-ian drumming, There are echoes of Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd and of the Nice/Colosseum school of (neoclassical) thought (First Victim), but overall this is their least conceptual and least ambitious work. It flows with grace and dignity (Fifth Victim), but it is also enveloped in a somewhat disappointing torpor.

Glenn Jones' album This Is The Wind That Blows It Out (Strange Attractors, 2004) is his solo venture into the progressive acoustic folk of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. Jones' original style is probably best displayed in Sphinx Unto Curious Men, a calm tapestry of shimmering notes that proceeds for nine minutes with the tone of a fairy tale. The Doll Hospital is more of the same, except that the leading motif is stronger and the whole piece can be viewed as a series of variations around it. Jones is equally capable of crafting melodic arias such as Friday Nights With and Fahey's Car. Jones' debts to traditional music are quite small. Except for the duet with Jack Rose, Linden Avenue Stomp, the music is suspended in a stylistic limbo more neutral than Fahey's, not particularly western, eastern, blues or folk. Nora's Leather Jacket might recall Balkan folk dances, but the breathtaking fingerpicking leaves a feeling of existential quest. The brilliant execution matched by inspired material makes for an impressive contribution to the genre.

The double-disc Abhayamudra (Strange Attractors, 2004) compiles some live improvised sessions between Cul De Sac and Can's vocalist Damo Suzuki. The collaboration (and the format) is a mixed blessing. The massive ultra-psychedelic free-form sound (the first four minutes of Beograd 6) can be truly intimidating, but neither the band nor the vocalist likes to indulge in them. They prefer more subtle palettes. The problem is that Suzuki's psychodramas (when the recital prevails), such as Kopenhagen 3, Halle 2, Zagreb 3 and Baltimore 5 (often stretching to 20 minutes), are an acquired taste: the man is certainly a mesmerizing shaman, but several minutes of his monotonous cantillation can exhaust even his most passionate fans. The marriage of voice and instruments succeeds in the ethereal post-blues meditations of Cambridge 1, in the haunting, tribal, Doors-ian Berlin 3, in the soaring gothic march of Berlin 6,

Against Which the Sea Continually Beats (Strange Attractors, 2007) was Glenn Jones' second solo album, highlighted by the eleven-minute Freedom Raga but burdened by a mood that was a bit too relaxed and domestic. The Wanting (Thrill Jockey, 2011) injected a bit of post-rock dynamics into Jones' ancestral folk meditations thanks to a sprawling duet with drummer Chris Corsano, the 17-minute The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville.