Chattanooga Pulse

Six Finger Satellite
Half Control
(Load)

One can only imagine where the sci-fi post-punk band Six Finger Satellite would be now if it had only started a half-decade after it did, but instead, the group’s last album, The Law of Ruins, came out in 1998, well before terms like “electroclash” and “dance-punk” were being bandied about.  After being disbanded for most of this decade, singer and keyboard player J. Ryan reformed the group last year with drummer Rick Pelletier and began working on new material.  However, the release at hand, Half Control, is actually comprised of songs recorded back in 2001, revisited, and remixed for mass consumption.

Six Finger Satellite is at its best when it resembles the aural equivalent of some Road Warrior-esque jerry-rigged motorized juggernaut, held together with bicycle chains and barbed wire.  It’s got the visceral stabs of punk and rogue dystopian synths, with a nagging feeling of instability where things might explode at any second with bits of Chrome-plated shrapnel.  The band’s insane 1995 masterpiece Severe Exposure was so memorable because every element had its place in the group’s sound: the warped Moog synths, the ear-shattering Travis Bean guitar licks that bordered on white noise, J. Ryan’s unhinged vocals, and jagged, high-tension drums.

Half Control is not a retread of Severe Exposure, and that would be fine, theoretically, if each element that was benched was replaced with something equally interesting.  However, most of the first half isn’t as deranged and hysterical as prime 6FS, especially in the vocal department, and when a synth emerges on tracks like “Artificial Light,” it isn’t as strange and unnerving as one might want.  The almost-thrash-metal opener “Thrown Out” provides a good jolt, and the second half of the release gets by on pure energy.  However, 6FS did more than that in the past to set itself apart from the crowd, and now that people are finally catching up to what the group made in the ’90s, it will have to try harder.

Gino Robair
I, Norton
(Rastascan)

The San Francisco composer, percussionist, electronic musician, and improviser Gino Robair takes on the curious, true story of Emperor Norton for his latest release, a spectacular 70-minute opera (of sorts) that manages to sustain a healthy level of unpredictability for the entire duration.  In 1859, the oddball Norton declared himself the Emperor of the United States and made decrees like abolishing Congress.  People were tickled by his character and played along with it to a degree, but of course, Norton was bonkers.  I, Norton serves as a worthy tribute by also being bonkers, with an impressive lineup of dozens of musicians all playing along with the game.

The opera captures the last breaths of Norton, who before ascending to heaven, watches his life flash before his eyes.  Much of the libretto uses passages from Norton’s proclamations and also letters to his love interest, Miss Minnie Wakeman, and vocals sometimes appear as electronically sliced and diced snippets.  Tom Duff reads the part of Norton with a spoken-word approach, but Aurora Josephson, who plays Wakeman, uses more adventurous methods, with an unusual vocabulary reminiscent of the Dada sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters.  The album’s centerpiece and most spacious track is the 28-minute “Mobs, Parties, Factions (Part I),” which is a live recording of the sfSound Ensemble, with full-on strings, winds, and brass; samples were recorded in real-time and instantly recycled for use in the proceedings, using speakers scattered throughout the orchestra.

A lot of territory is covered with a variety of instrumentation, with electronics and gongs providing the dominant sounds, and there are various nods to musical iconoclasts, such as John Cage (with prepared pianos) and Charles Ives, and possibly even Harry Partch, with the use of microtonal chords.  In the liner notes, Robair welcomes musicians to stage their own improvised productions of I, Norton, but his own offering—a sprawling, gloriously peculiar and stimulating work—sets the bar pretty high.