Art Bears: The World As It Is Today

ART BEARS: THE WORLD AS IT IS TODAY (1981)

1) The Songs Of Investment Capital Overseas; 2) Truth; 3) Freedom; 4) (Armed) Peace; 5) Civilisation; 6) Demo­cracy; 7) The Song Of The Martyrs; 8) Law; 9) The Song Of The Monopolists; 10) The Song Of The Dignity Of Labour Under Capital; 11) Albion, Awake!.

I always found it hard to comprehend how it is that alt-left, pro-Marxist ideological attitudes so frequently go hand in hand with viciously avantgarde music (and not just music). Punk rock — no problem, this is something with which the suffering working class can identify in a matter of moments. But dissonance, atonality, weirdass time signatures, total disdain for the bourgeois attraction of a pop hook? It only really works with a thoroughly idealized concept of the «new worker», such as might have been entertained by occasional Soviet dreamers in the turbulent 1920s and never ever existed in reality. Instead, the main audience for this kind of music can only consist of relatively well-to-do middle class kids with intellectual yearnings. In between the Clash for the rebels and the Bee Gees for the rest, Art Bears, with their political agenda, never stood a real chance, not even when they pulled their act together and released a thoroughly politicized musical manifesto — right on the heels of their fling with the RIO movement, which never evolved beyond a couple of declarations and a couple of friendly get-togethers.

This is not to say, mind you, that pro-Marxist avantgarde rock has no place in art (or under the sun in general). At least in the case of this last album by Art Bears, it seems to me that ideologi­zation has played a positive role — after the somewhat sleepy Winter Songs, The World As It Is Today sounds almost demonically imbued by a new-found energy, and not just because Dag­mar Krause turns into a raging fury when rattling out Chris Cutler's lyrics, but because Fred Frith, too, seems dedicated here to producing an atmospheric masterpiece of doom, chaos, and atonal apocalypse. The result is a record that is, yet again, nowhere near as diverse or unpredictable as Hopes And Fears, but far more violent and overwhelming than Winter Songs.

Although a song title such as ʽThe Songs Of Investment Capital Overseasʼ is prone to making one giggle rather than sit up and take stern notice, the actual music is nowhere near comical — for­tunately, it is not entirely without its own warped sense of humor, but you will have to spend some time sniffing it out, in certain small corners of the musical arrangements and occasional ironic lyrical twists. As it stands upon first sight, though, the band takes its agenda very seriously, with dramatic piano chords strung together in bass-heavy phrases, waves of amplified piano resonance, and scurrying percussion creating a stormy atmosphere right from the very start — as if they really took that "overseas" aspect seriously, with visions of greedy capitalists crossing treacherous waves in sailships, their holds creaking and straining with chests of money expropri­ated from exploited workers.

Starting from the second track, the song titles get shorter and seem to be aimed at dismantling the propagandist lies behind such concepts as ʽTruthʼ, ʽFreedomʼ, ʽPeaceʼ, ʽCivilisationʼ, ʽLawʼ, and ʽDemocracyʼ. Once again, Krause plays the role of the Sibyl, but this time, a very mad, eccentric Sibyl, who might even resort to long periods of screeching like Yoko Ono's twin sister (ʽFree­domʼ — fortunately, her voice is a little lower than Yoko's) if it helps her get her point across. At the same time, Fred Frith is chopping down the pillars of Western civilization with his threate­ning soundscapes, three key elements of which are the bass section of the keyboard, screechy avantgarde violin playing, and guitar feedback. On ʽDemocracyʼ, in particular, the band raises the biggest ruckus up to date, despite the track being very short: first, we quickly learn that demo­cracy, according to Cutler's words and Krause's dramatic declaration of them, is a venom of scorpions bred from the bodies of a lion and a snake who killed each other, and then, in confir­mation of the judgement, a minute and a half of a musical tempest that pretty much equates democracy with anarchy... except these guys are supposed to love anarchy.

Despite my somewhat ironic assessment of the contents (you guessed, right?), there are plenty of fascinating musical ideas here, especially when the songs pick up steam, which they do quite often: ʽThe Song Of The Martyrsʼ, for instance, has a ferocious bassline accompanying the mes­sage of "things seem worse than ever", and ʽLawʼ is a brief funny snippet of avant-vaudeville, delivering its message in less than a minute's time and in the most hooliganish terms available to anybody with a loud set of pipes and a piano. ʽThe Song Of The Dignity Of Labour Under Capi­talʼ is a hilarious deconstruction of a stereotypical «worker song», culminating in a fulminous battle of two out-of-tune pianos — almost enough to get me thinking that, perhaps, they can't really be too serious about all this. And, according to Cutler, the original lyrics to ʽAlbion Awake!ʼ were so violent that even Krause refused to sing them (eat your heart out, Sex Pistols!), leaving the song as an instrumen­tal cobweb of aggressive, but minimalistic keyboard parts, a more appropriate title for which should have been ʽEverything Is Brokenʼ.

That said, I am not altogether sure that I want to equate the positive effect of this album with the one of Hopes And Fears. In spite of the band's best efforts, the blunt political framework gives the whole thing a comic flavor — sometimes intentional, sometimes not — and the theatrical power of the work is undermined by this confusion. If it is serious, why is it all so over the top? If it is ironic, why is there such an atmosphere of seriousness? At times I begin to suspect that, perhaps, all of this album and not just its last track would have worked better if it were purely instrumental (and note: this has nothing to do with the anti-establishment / revolutionary nature of the lyrics, and everything to do with the ways they are integrated into the music). As it is, this forced marriage of political radicalism and avantgarde musical exploration now seems dated... heck, it must have probably seemed dated even way back in 1981 (didn't Jefferson Airplane, after all, try to do something similar in their Volunteers phase?).

It is unlikely that Art Bears split up due to creative differences — the project was never intended to become a long-term one in the first place — but it might be argued that The World As It Is Today, with its rigid political agenda in danger of overriding the music, got them cornered, and splitting up was the best way to get out of this place. Whatever be, I am not putting the album down: as I said, it can be musically fascinating right down to the point of kicking first-rate avant­garde ass, and the concept as such is at least amusing, if not exactly intriguing. But even so, and even against the potential arguments of the band's hardcore fans, I would insist that it promotes a more close-minded understanding of avantgardism than Hopes And Fears, a record that (per­haps incidentally — but who cares?) was much less afraid to weave together the challenging and the conventional, whereas The World As It Is Today, with its decisive lack of compromise, is not only less enjoyable, but even ends up making less sense.

Art Bears: Winter Songs

ART BEARS: WINTER SONGS (1979)

1) The Bath Of Stars; 2) First Things First; 3) Gold; 4) The Summer Wheel; 5) The Slave; 6) The Hermit; 7) Rats And Monkeys; 8) The Skeleton; 9) The Winter Wheel; 10) Man And Boy; 11) Winter / War; 12) Force; 13) Three Figures; 14) Three Wheels.

Art Bears' second album is a fun initiative, much appreciated by the band's small handful of fans, but from that particular perspective which does not simply follow the rule of «the weirder, the better», Winter Songs is, mildly speaking, a bold, yet barely successful experiment. According to the most common story, all the texts here were written by Chris Cutler, based on series of car­vings on the facade of Amiens Cathedral in France — and then rather quickly, almost spontane­ously, set to music by Fred Frith and then recorded in a matter of 14 days in a Swiss studio. This inevitably means that, compared to the refreshing diversity of Hopes And Fears (a record whose content gradually accumulated over several different periods), Winter Songs is more mono­tonous, and its songs, despite the usual intricacy and complexity, give the impression of having been dashed off way too quickly.

Although the whole thing consists of 14 short tracks (one per day?), something that should help comfort prog-wary passengers, they feel more like variations on a single given theme than 14 completely different entities — an album like Thick As A Brick is infinitely more diverse in its movements. Much of this has to do with Dagmar's singing streamlined and restricted to a single style, the stream-of-consciousness avantgarde-free-verse one, which has by now stepped over the dead body of Kurt Weill and is not turning back. Double-tracking and having different vocal lines overlap each other is a common trick here; reversing the vocal tapes is much less so, but when it does happen, it is seriously irritating (ʽFirst Things Firstʼ). Eventually, I find myself tiring of this vocal style, whereas on Hopes And Fears Krause's voice stayed inspirational from start to finish. And while the actual pronounced words are intriguing (I mean, let's confess this, who of us has never dreamed about being treated to a cycle of haiku-like poems inspired by Amiens Cathedral?), it is hardly good for one's sanity to spend 37 minutes listening to the Sibyl's rantings. And at any rate, Chris Cutler sure ain't the new Nostradamus.

As for the music, much of it consists of slow, labored avantgarde textures, sometimes with a bluesy base (ʽFirst Things Firstʼ again), sometimes growing out of vaudeville (ʽGoldʼ), some­times out of jazz-fusion (ʽThe Summer Wheelʼ), sometimes presaging post-1983 Tom Waits (ʽThe Slaveʼ, tearing blues-rock a new one), and sometimes still reflecting Fred Frith's obsession with Celtic folk (ʽThe Hermitʼ). This sentence seems to directly contradict the accusation of monotonousness, yet Art Bears put their own stamp on everything they touch, meaning that every song stutters and stumbles along as if on the verge of falling apart — which never happens, since these guys are professionals, but it can still make you sea-sick.

Amusingly, the band even put out a single from the album, and even more amusingly, it kind of made sense, because ʽRats And Monkeysʼ is indeed the most clearly outstanding track here. Un­like everything else, it rushes forward at an insanely fast tempo — something to be valued in the era of punk and post-punk — and with its noisy and echoey production, Dagmar's psychotic wailing, and screechy violin runs that occasionally degenerate into feedback, it is easy to see the track appealing to the fanbase of, say, Siouxsie & The Banshees. It is a fun romp (think gypsy music on real strong amphetamines!), yet also fairly atypical of the rest of the album; one could, in fact, throw ʽRats And Monkeysʼ away as a «joke» number on a record that generally takes itself far more seriously. But at least it gives the reviewers something to cling on to.

For its conceptuality, abrasiveness, and total lack of compromise Winter Songs may be easily construed as the apex of Art Bears' short career, but this is not my way of thinking: I think the best art bears imprints of a good balance between the conventional and the experimental, and Winter Songs breaks the balance that existed on Hopes And Fears. With multiple listens, the album may become enjoyable even for laymen, but I have not been able to break through so far: it always seems as if the level of pretense and bombast here fails to match the rather thin and quiet sonic textures, and the effect is irritating. Still, avantgarde fans will find a plethora of challenging ideas in these arrangements, and, you know, if you ever get sick listening to legions of normal Celtic folk albums, you can always come back to ʽThe Hermitʼ for salvation from routine. Also, good enough publicity for the Amiens Cathedral, I guess.

Art Bears: Hopes And Fears

ART BEARS: HOPES AND FEARS (1978)

1) On Suicide; 2) The Dividing Line; 3) Joan; 4) Maze; 5) In Two Minds; 6) Terrain; 7) The Tube; 8) The Dance; 9) Pirate Song; 10) Labyrinth; 11) Riddle; 12) Moeris Dancing; 13) Piers.

Although the career of the Art Bears is inextricable from that of Henry Cow, it might be argued that the quintessential Henry Cow — the band that had previously engaged in some of the most convoluted and inaccessible avant-jazz-rock-fusion on the Legend album — had already ceased to exist by the time their second album, In Praise Of Learning, started making waves. From that point of view, it is not altogether clear if Hopes And Fears could/should be called the last Henry Cow album, or if In Praise Of Learning should be dubbed the first Art Bears one. Perhaps the former, since the recording actually started out in the name of Henry Cow (the first sessions in Switzerland in January 1978) — but ultimately ended in the name of Art Bears (the last sessions in London three months later). But maybe the latter, since one only has to remember ʽWarʼ from In Praise Of Learning to realize that that was truly the first Art Bears composition in all but name.

So let us bow down to naming technicalities and start it off from a clean slate: Art Bears were Fred Frith (all melodic instruments except for occasional guest spots by fellow Henry Cowherders), Chris Cutler (all percussion), and Dagmar Krause (all lightly German-accented English vocals), breaking their commitment to Henry Cow by systematically making commercial, openly marketable music — well, marketable to about a few thousand people, at least, which would already be a huge fuckin' sellout compared to Legend. The hopes were to produce an intelligent synthesis of hard rock, free-form jazz, Celtic folk, modern classical, and Kurt Weill that could appeal to lovers of adventurous sound explorations all over the world; the fears, on the other hand, were largely confined to the contents of the album, whose first track title — ʽOn Suicideʼ (with lyrics conveniently adapted from Bertolt Brecht) — already suggests that, despite the jarring surrealism of the music, its emotional and artistic content was supposed to make some perfectly earthly sense.

As somebody who usually wastes little time in becoming pissed off at the senseless pretentious­ness of much avantgarde music, I will have to state, right at the very start, that Hopes And Fears is so directly focused upon catching you off guard now and again, that the windows of opportu­nity for getting pissed off are quite tiny. Its main inspiration, as evidenced primarily in the vocal style and mannerisms of Krause (but also in the instrumental music as well), is neither rock nor jazz music, but rather the pre-WWII German scene, everything from the cabaret-meets-high-art style of Kurt Weill to the atonal experiments of Alban Berg. If you «get» that kind of musical attitude, you will have absolutely no problems assimilating most of the record — wild, desperate, ablaze with angry Teutonic passion but also deeply humanistic at heart. That the vibe would, of all people, happen to be revived by a bunch of English musicians at a time when conditions for it could not be less auspicious, is curious by the standards of the late Seventies, but completely irrelevant now that time has finally all but flattened out in the 2010s.

However, as I said, Hopes And Fears is really a synthesis, and by no means a «Kurt Weill with rock instrumentation» kind of record. A good example is the album's wonderful nine-minute epic, ʽIn Two Mindsʼ. Starting out as a sort of acoustic avant-folk oratorio in which Krause offers a passionate character study of a «fallen woman», it goes through a number of sections, one of which sounds as a barely veiled tribute to The Who — with Townshend-style power chords propped up by Keith Moon-style powerhouse drumming, reminiscent of the Quadrophenia vibe. These «two minds», alter­nating with each other several times, create an odd contrast that totally catches you off guard upon the first time, but eventually becomes perceived as a natural up-and-down trajectory of the human spirit. And Krause, whose natural vocal timbre is not the most pleasant thing in the world but agrees well with the long-standing tradition of «masculine singing» by self-empowered Ger­man ladies, does a great job vocalizing in lamenting / anthemic ways on both parts.

Much of the work is still instrumental, although short bits of vocalization tend to be present everywhere, contributing to the various moods. ʽMazeʼ, true to its title, is an avantgarde track that loyally recreates the sensation of being trapped and disoriented in a labyrinthian structure (of your own mind, no less), with dissonance, wild time signatures, and Berg-like strings paranoi­dally humming in tandem with electronic feedback; ʽThe Tubeʼ is even more claustrophobic, with waves of Metal Machine Music-like heavy guitar feedback given a cavernous production, giving you that cool feel of standing in a post-apocalyptic metro tunnel populated with giant acid-spitting cockroaches, rather than merely getting caught up in the hurly-burly of underground traffic. (The obsession with twisted underground corridors is, apparently, not coincidental, since further on down the line you also find ʽLabyrinthʼ, a two-minute synthesis of Weillesque singing, atonal feedback, and an odd industrial percussive track).

On the other hand, there is ʽThe Danceʼ and later still, ʽMoeris Dancingʼ, tracks that reflect Fred Frith's interest in traditional Celtic music and feature an avantgarde reinterpretation of the jig-and-reel pattern — although when it comes to the wild violin stylizations on the latter track, it is hard to tell if it is really the Celtic vibe that remains prevalent or if a Mid-Eastern wave of in­fluence has caught up on it, as even Krause succumbs to dropping her Lotte Lenya skin and doing a bit of a spinning-dervish imper­sonation instead. Never a dull moment with these guys for sure.

Does it all make grand sense? Hard to say, but at least there is no nasty feeling here that the musicians are simply fucking with you for their own egotistical reasons. Because of the various stylistic influences, there are moments here that sound genuinely tragic, others that sound sincere­ly rebellious, and still others that betray romantic yearning and lust for freedom (ʽPirate Songʼ and ʽPiersʼ with their marine references — and, as it happens, yet another allusion to Weill). It also helps that most of the tracks, with the understandable exclusion of ʽIn Two Mindsʼ, are reasonably compact, as, I believe, most openly experimental compositions should be: be it Krause's passionately free-form arias or Frith's chaotic mixes of jazz chords, feedback, and gypsy violin, they never give any individual track sufficient space to irritate the beejesus out of an un­prepared listener (although even a fully prepared listener might find oneself secretly longing for a cool glass of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ midway through the album marathon).

All in all, this is quite an ambitious and adventurous affair that finds itself, strangely enough, almost completely free of the clutches of contemporary New Wave conventions — despite occa­sional use of electronics that still brings to mind old-fashioned Faust rather than Gary Numan — and is, of course, forever doomed to linger on the taste fringes of those who like their modern classical converted to popular genre formats: a small, small bunch indeed, but one that would probably enthusiastically approve of this thumbs up rating. Not that there's anything bear-like about this music, though: Art Chameleons might have been a far more appropriate moniker for these guys.