Locust Music
No Neck Blues Band meets The Clear People with Mystery Gypped
Live at Ken's Electric Lake (US,rec.1998,re.2007)***'
From all the recordings the No Neck Blues Band, who also recorded under the name of NNCK, Locust Music chose this 1998 outdoor improvisation, because it is “looser, groovier ad more in a communal state of mind than ever”… “A classic testament to the urban dwellers’ gone wild and ranks as among their finest displays of tribal churn choogle in the band’s 14 year history. Neo dada attacks were sapped out for psychedelic vibrations, midrange mystery for outdoor atmospherics.” This label description captures this item quiet well.
This sounds like an outdoor kitchen percussion demonstration, with lots of clicking rhythm sticks percussion, (as well as handclaps, and the search for a socially united form of thumb piano like rhythms) bass, amplified guitars that return most often to lead the structure a little, but slowly and with some repetitions of a few chords and a bit of oscillation harmony patterns.
Just once it seemed that there was a jazz guitar in mind, elsewhere quirky loose-funky effects were added, but perhaps not fully appreciated and adapted as abnormal enough so that in its communal form of music too much order always tends to rise up as the opposite, so that everything remains spontaneous, and constant, moody, but open as well, a combination of a post-kraut affair mixed with the idea of after free-jazz amateurism but then just like a pro-tribal communal affair linearism with rules that keeps open enough freedom.
The music more or less forms itself into a self-organizing natural continuity and order, and just when it tends to fall back at times to too much order, it becomes heavy emotional cacophony, and then refocuses itself to the rhythmical trance-psychedelic heights, where some of the percussion can be a bit more cooperative, -native-Indian like-, if wanted, and wordless vocals are able to sweep it up to freedom again with enthusiasm for a certain hanging together mode.
While the second CD starts almost like a Saharan African ritual, the group form directs also to all different mentioned areas of more chaotic wildness, like a semi-native Indian hippie ritual. At some other time had the impression that not only fitting object sounds were added, as well as vocal shouts, but also some real chickens (run after ?) were participating into the compositional improvisation. With a train-like bell, and some additional flute improvisations, the whole communal vibe finally comes to a halt and to a satisfying conclusion.
