1996 Part One

(213CD)
by Joshua Brown

Rollins’ label pays tribute to a long tradition of underground poetic intelligentsia who express their vision through rock ‘n’ roll, free jazz, and spoken-word performances. 1996 Part One is a sampler of recent releases from 213CD (many of them reissues), and it’s, without a doubt, a boys’ club as there is nary a female artist among the twelve participants. (Insert your own conclusion.) The collaboration between Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, and Ben Vaughn is the CD’s most engaging listen. Its blues base, with a torso of swishy anthemic keyboard work, and a head of pre-classic rock vocals, plays like the credits rolling at the end of a great and cathartic film. Coming in a photo-finish second are pianist Matthew Shipp‘s two collaborations, one with Roscoe Mitchell, co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the other with bassist William Parker. Shipp is adept at feeding one’s head with off-the-wall moving pictures of frantic but deliberate jazz pieces. Old friends like the Birthday Party and Gun Club are featured, as are spoken-word tidbits by Hubert Selby, Jr. (author of Last Exit to Brooklyn), rapid-fire social commentator Ian Shoales, and Henry Rollins himself.

The second CD, Suicide/Alan Vega Anthology, is an overview of the New York punk/performance art iconoclast’s work from 1977 to the present. The most striking of Vega’s material lies at either end of his own unfinished timeline. “Jaxson Gnome,” taken from his latest solo LP, Dujang Prang, is a highly disturbing piece of confrontational experimental sound and cynical poetry, that reeks of sweaty bedsheets after waking from a nightmare of Urban Hell. “Ghost Rider,” from Suicide’s ’77 debut, is a classic electro-garage spit in the eye of mass culture, which was covered by Henry Rollins on his first solo LP, Hot Animal Machine (“America, America is killing its youth.”)