Jackie-O Motherfucker

Jackie-O Motherfucker was the project of New York-based multi-instrumentalist Tom Greenwood (a former Railroad Jerk). It started out as the duo Greenwood and saxophonist Nester Bucket. Alchemy (nov/dec 1994 - Imp, 1995), and Cross Pollinate (Imp, 1996) already displayed a schizophrenic inspiration that mixed psychedelic guitar, country slide guitar and free-jazz improvisation, as if a very stoned Jimi Hendrix played Hank Williams backed by the Swell Maps. The latter consists of only four pieces. Lethargic rhythm and guitar chords, jazzy moves and turntable scratching open the twelve-minute Birds And Insects, and, if after three minutes the two guitars intone a lopsided psychedelic country melody, that soon deflates into moribund jamming. The eight-minute Misery Failing does little more than sketch a generic loose jam with a bit of harmonica to liven up things. The twelve-minute Spanish Massacre (possibly the standout) adds free-jazz reeds and a theremin whistle to the already nebulous and disjointed narrative. At this point the eight-minute March To The Witches Castle is redundant.

The double album Flat Fixed (Imp, 1998) is much more complex, thanks to an extended line-up and to lengthier and noisier jams, although the results are mixed. Contributors included female guitarist Honey Owens. Latin-tinged beat, Tibetan trumpets and jazzy bassoon and flute pepper the eleven-minute Turtles, as usuall all drenched in a psychedelic atmosphere. Bewitched is denser, faster and louder, but also rather bland. Ferraris is anemic to the point of hardly qualifying as music. The 13-minute Honey begins with raga-like suspense dominated by the saxophones but then doesn't quite go anywhere. The most surreal piece is the eight-minute Dot Riot, a nightmare of frenzied electronic beat and synth chirping. For seven minutes the 16-minute Wolf Brothers Blues sounds like vintage prog-rock, although capped by a stately doom atmosphere, but then the dissonances hijack it for about five minutes before the lyrical Indian-esque ending. The 24-minute Crazymaker is six minutes of cosmic glissandoes and distortion at a brisk rhythm, but then suddenly dies out and becomes a much less cohesive piece, further sabotaged by collages of warped voices.

Greenwood then relocated to Portland (Oregon).

The founding duo tried a few experiments on Fig. 5 (Road Cone, 1999), a typical transitional work, aided by impromptu collaborators, and using a larger arsenal of instruments, and crossing a wider range of styles: psychedelia (the somnolent, stoned ten-minute Beautiful September, evoking acid-rock of the 1960s), free-jazz, folk, blues (even a cover sung by a woman of the traditional blues Go Down Old Hannah, first recorded by Leadbelly in 1939), country, electronica (Analogue Skillet), chamber dissonant music (Native Einstein), gospel (a ten-minute version of the classic gospel number Amazing Grace that doesn't sound even remotely similar to the original, totally deconstructed into a free-form jam), ... There are, however, quite a few low points, and notably tedious is the hypnotic playing and chanting in the nine-minute Your Cells Are In Motion. The 24-minute Michigan Avenue Social Club attemps the uber-fusion: tribal, ghostly, jazzy, noisy, psychedelic, all in the same piece, and with a final, almost shamanic spasm.

Wow (Fisheye, 1999), that lost Owens, contains two lengthy jams and is probably their most dissonant and free-jazz influenced recording. Wow (24:19) is calm and sophisticated cacophony, while Love Horn (16:33) is a sea of drumming and guitar strumming disturbed by saxophone winds. Both pieces are faceless, with no center of mass, and not much in terms of melody, floating freely although anchored to the drumming.

The jazz elements all but disappear on the double-disc Magick Fire Music (Ecstatic Peace, 2000), an epic journey from noise collage a` la Residents to ambient melancholia a` la Godspeed You Black Emperor: the 13-minute Quaker is falsely subdued as it ignites a jam of Jew's harp, saxophone, bouzouki, while the guitar performs a purely metronomic function; the twelve-minute The Cage is a very sparse and almost philosophical guitar piece that creates an atmosphere of mystery, almost like a post-rock version of Ennio Morricone's soundtracks; the 13-minute Second Ave 2AM is a duet of Hendrix-ian distortion and lazy saxophone that picks up intensity via frenzied raga-like strumming and saxophone cacophony. After a slow start, the 16-minute Extension becomes a hypnotic tapestry of guitar effects. The eight-minute Lost Stone is the most surreal piece: a pattern of minimalist vibrations wed to casual percussion. At the other end of the spectrum, the nine-minute Black Squirrels is the most traditional jam, a cosmic freak-out and bacchanal.

Wow - Magick Fire Music (All Tomorrow's Parties, 2003) combines the two albums.

Liberation (Road Cone, 2001 - ATP, 2005) focused on the ensemble's most original technique: the crumbled, chaotic and dissonant symphonic mayhem of Ray-O-Graph (13:57), which sounds like a glitchy remix of a traditional country song before the final crescendo, and of Peace On Earth (10:04), a cascading chromatic triumph from which the most unlikely of melodies emerges. The ghostly Pray (9:29) does indeed evoke the atmosphere of a prayer. The Pigeon (10:34) is even lyrical, despite its clock-like undulating movement. The longest piece, In Between (19:01), is instead a bit too indulgent (very little helpes in the first 13 minutes).

U Sound Volume 2 (Usoundarchive, 2002) collects two live performances.

Despite the wealth of instrumentation (guitars, violins, cellos, sax, reeds, vibes, percussion), and an increased reliance on Sonic Youth-ian guitar minimalism, Change (Textile, 2003) is not significantly different than its predecessors. It is, in fact, more acoustic. The majestic blues of Everyday and the jazz refraction of Feast of the Mau-Mau increase the degree of organic structure within their scientific paradigm.

Our Nakedness Was Our Picket Sign (Cast Exotic, 2003) is a live album.

Jackie-o Motherfucker's female guitarist Honey Owens is also active in Nudge, a Portland-based trio formed with two members of Fontanelle, percussionist Paul Dickow and keyboardist Brian Foote (the project's founder). They released Trick Doubt (Outward, 2002) and Elaborate Devices for Filtering Crisis (Tigerbeat, 2003), which contain experiments in sculpting glacial and fragile post-rock elegies that seem to be permanently on the verge of disintegrating. The latter opens with the noisy slo-core Blue Screen and the glitchy instrumental Till The Sun Expands, two pieces that set the mood for the rest of the album. Their creativity manifests itself in multiple, although always subdued, formats: the floating dub-tinged vocalizing of Multiply By What Remains, the cryptic lake of drones of 3hit, the somnolent jam of jazzy horns in Are Our Hours, etc.

Nudge's vivisection of sound was continued on Cached (Kranky, 2005), their most mature statement yet. Classic Mode straddles the border between lounge soul and acid freak-out, with its blend of spaced-out guitar distortions, sparse percussion and wavering keyboards; and it segues into the cosmic/ambient electronica of Standing on Hot Sidewalk. Juxtaposing the disembodied dub-funk-jazz jam Contact and the pounding punk-industrial polyrhythms of My New Youth, Nudge keeps disorienting while "re-orienting" the listener. Tribal drums and snippets of harmonica form the basis of Remove Ya, while the components of the ethereal Parade are even difficult to enumerate, let alone explain. Blon reveals a bit of the process at work in the other tracks: the instruments and the rhythm are digitally diluted until all is left is a shapeless, watery surface of tones that fades away in the void. No Come Back extends beyong that aesthetics: it works not with a linear story that must be disassembled into unrecognizable components, but with the components themselves, used to create a chaotic assembly of sounds (in this case producing a nightmarish effect). Foote and his cohorts are somehow the musical equivalent of "pointillistic" painting; fucsing on the pixels rather than on the overall picture in order to produce a different view of the form being painted.

Owens also played guitar in Tra La La with keyboardist Brian Foote. Owens then hooked up with Yume Bitsu's Adam Forkner and the duo started recordings as World.

Honey Owens' solo albums Blood Is Clean (2007) and Naked Acid (Kranky, 2008), credited to Valet, are more experimental than anything she had recorded with other musicians, especially the second one, an intimate psychedelic nightmare in the vein of David Crosby or Bruce Palmer. The prayer sung by a male and a female voice in We Went There has to cope with shamanic bells and rattles as well as screaming guitars before disappearing in a cosmic cloud of drones. Drum Movie, the longest piece at almost eight minutes, is a sort of collage that lines up a choral "om", a violent storm, a duet of pagan tom-tom and droning keyboards, and finally a ghostly whisper in an ethereal space of sparse free guitar tones. Just a few seconds shorter, Fuck It starts out as an anguished blues jam and then unleashes a soaring Indian-tinged guitar solo over pounding drums. The far more aggressive Streets is shock therapy via looped industrial noise and spastic dance beat. A song like Kehaar that boasts a real melody and a real guitar riff (not to mention drums) is the exception to the rule (and it's devastated by distortions before too long). So is Fire, taken from the eponymous single, a somnolent ballad that could have been a hit in 1967 in San Francisco.

After a 2005 split with
My Cat Is An Alien, Jackie-O-Motherfucker (that featured Owens again on bass) surprised everybody with a folk album, Flags Of The Sacred Harp (All Tomorrow's Parties, 2005), including four traditionals.

Jackie-O Motherfuckers' guitarist Nick Bindeman launched the project Tunnels of droning psychedelia with a number of releases: Tunnels (Yarn Lazer, 2007), Cluster Of Rainbows For The Angel Who Announces The End Of Time (JK Tapes, 2007), Radiant Bodies Of Scorched Light (Cut Hands, 2007) also experimented with manipulated vocals. However, Astral Collage (Abandon Ship, 2008) moved beyond the drone. Other Tunnels recordings include Vexations (2007), On A Body Of Nothing But Radiance (2008) and What Happens To Us Is Pure (2008).

Nudge's fourth album As Good As Gone (Kranky, 2009) is even more fragile and more subdued than the previous ones. It opens with an otherwordly crescendo of vocals and accordions, Harmo, and, chromatically, peaks with the abstract soundscaping of Aurolac, but its emotional core is represented by the dilated soul-jazz ballad Two Hands and the eight-minute celestial lullaby and jam of somnolent noir-jazz Tito. It ends on an even more lethargic tone, with the slow, slow, slocore Burns Blue and the whispered nine-minute trance of Dawn Comes Light, which in the 1960s would have been hailed as an epic psychedelic hymn.

Jackie O Motherfucker's America Mystica (Very Friendly, 2007) documents four live extended jams and Freaker Pipe (Unity Sound Archive, 2007) documents three.

The short Valley of Fire (Textile, 2007) contains another colossal jam, We Are Channel Zero. Freedom Land (Very Friendly, 2008) was mediocre at best. The Cryin' Sea (Awesome Vistas, 2008) contains the lengthy live jam The Cryin' Sea.

Two former Jackie-O-Motherfucker formed the Evolutionary Jass Band that recorded Change Of Scene (Community Library, 2006) to toy with traditional jazz.

Meanwhile, Jackie-O-Motherfucker was undergoing a middle-age existential crisis. Blood of Life (2008) documents a live performance. Ballads Of The Revolution (Fire, 2009) contains two covers and four originals, with the originals returning to the format of the murky acid-rock jam (Skylight and The Cryin Sea) except for A Mania that was one of their most regular songs. Earth Sound System (2011) seemed torn between the folksy ego of Flags Of The Sacred Harp and the acid alter-ego of Ballads Of The Revolution, with the latter well represented by Raga Joining and Raga Separating. The band's involution was beginning to evoke a similar transformation that occurred 40 years earlier to one of the greatest bands of all time: the Grateful Dead.