Nothin' Sez Somethin': Art as Crime, Crime as Art

15 August 2020

Art as Crime, Crime as Art

Incestuous...

Ornette Coleman; Sonny Sharrock: Pharoah Sanders; Anton Fier; Herbie Hancock; P.I.L.; White Zombie; The Golden Palominos; Swans; Ginger Baker; Sly & Robbie; James Blood Ulmer; Iggy Pop; Afrika Bambaataa; Tony Williams; Fred Frith; & of course, Bill Laswell...

This is just a partial list of musicians & bands that guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, a member of New York's Downtown Music Scene, has worked with throughout his storied career. As a teenager he became an integral fixture on the East Village downtown "no wave" scene. In the late 70s & early 80s he performed with bassist & partner-in-crime Bill Laswell in the avant-rock unit Curlew. Later he played in one of the various iterations of Material (with Laswell, Michael Beinhorn, & Fred Maher).

Frame the slow creation of a stage upon which the Underground tambourine arrives at a facsimile of reportage, advice, & instruction relating to electronic whistling & a distant guitar solo enterprise. It goes beyond the renunciation of familiar television strategy. Elevation & coda form a contrast.

Subverting the traditional with ubiquitous bell & fretful violin, guitar, gently plodding bass & a velvet rest. Succeeded by a brief burst, the attainment of joy as eminently worthy, played on the high strings, an example of guilt proclaiming that guilt need not exist. Complete in itself with an unrelated plateau pausing on the level, only to rise again.

So we are put in mind of the theater mask, wearing blank tendencies, influenced by the relaxations after the climax.

The coda guitar...

Nicky Skopelitis - Ekstasis, Axiom 314-514 518-2, 1992

all decryption codes in comments

Tarab
Meet Your Maker
Ghost of a Chance
Proud Flesh
One Eye Open
Heresy
Jubilee
Witness
Telling Time

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While I was compiling this I saw that the following year, Skopelitis would be working with Hakim Bey on T.A.Z. Having read Bey's original, I couldn't resist adding this. The book describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. A Temporary Autonomous Zone is a liberated area of land, time or imagination where one can be for something, not just against, where new ways of being human together can be explored & experimented with. Locating itself in the cracks & fault lines in the global grid of control & alienation, a T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest, where we all become the creators of the art of everyday life. Burning Man is probably the best known example in today's frame of reference. Seattle needs Hakim.

"The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself, to re-form elsewhere / elsewhen, before the state can crush it." - Hakim Bey.

This release features the explorations of the political, the personal, the social, & the metaphysical from writer/spoken word artist Hakim Bey backed by a soundtrack from musical terrorist Bill Laswell.

Bey advocates nearly everything, including creating free states for like-minded cabals & collectives. He recommends marginalized groups form secret societies & concludes with a lengthy piece on boycotting cop culture. Musique concrète cloaks his words in an eerily seductive wash of avant-garde noise & ambient music, providing a swirling, surreal vertigo of information & methods for 'escape' woven with the kind of airy tones & hallucinatory rhythms that Laswell loves to lay down, Bey' unfolds an age where missing information & the icons of late capitalist high-tech correspond with an increasing alienation of this generation's most primitive needs.

Hakim Bey - narrator accompanied by Material featuring: Nicky Skopelitis & Buckethead - guitars; Bill Laswell - bass & sound collage; Wu Man - pipa (Chinese pear-shaped lute) & biwa (Japanese short-necked fretted lute).