The recording that resulted from this afternoon is a gauntlet for any sane listener, the simple vocal chanting at the end of track one a welcome respite from the chaos. That piano sounds like this note, yeah? He maybe just zonked on the sax way up this high, right? Let’s just feel it out and see what happens. They were not hampered by their inability to play music with any skill or practiced know-how. They were hampered by their kitchen desktop’s Microsoft recording software, with which you could only record one minute at a time. They were methodical, almost scientific, in their process, listening to one minute of the album at a time, then recreating that minute of music to their best of their ability. And my friend, 16 years old, drummed on a toy drum set. The middle brother, at 13, played the saxophone (he was in middle school band). The youngest, at 11 years old, played the piano. My friend and bandmate had two younger brothers, and one Saturday afternoon the three of them decided to recreate A Love Supreme. Years later, there’s still one recording session I regret missing out on, even though I hadn’t been invited in the first place.
TROUT MASK REPLICA HOW TO
I didn’t know how to do anything well, so I did whatever I wanted to. My favorite performance is still the one where we covered “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” in a swirling mass of chaotic drum machines, high-pitched squeals, and a looped sample of a ringing telephone.
My favorite years with the band were the first two, when we were a noise collective who always asked to go up first on the bill so we could get the cops called on us before anyone else got the chance to play. I played a sampler at our live shows, and a pair of amps plugged into one another so that what came out when they were both turned on and turned up was a sort of modulated feedback loop. I played the ukulele, acoustic and electric. I played a Casio I stole from my mom’s basement. When it comes up in conversation that I was in a band throughout high school and into college, the first question people always ask is “What instrument did you play?” It’s the logical question to ask unfortunately, I don’t have an answer, or I guess I have too many. Which is another way of saying it sounds like nonsense. He called one of the songs “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish,” and another one “My Human Gets Me Blues,” and another one “The Blimp (mousetrapreplica).” Its is 2019, 50 years after its release, and Trout Mask still sounds like difficult art. Then when they all got together to rehearse and later record, he shouted surrealist poetry over it. It was cut and paste, a real ctrl+c, ctrl+v kind of music-making. He asked them to get to know each of these parts blindly, without hearing what any of the other portions sounded like. What can we do with difficult art? Captain Beefheart did not know how to play the piano, not really, but still he used the instrument to write each individual part for every member of his Magic Band, for each song on their newest record. Cool.īut it’s a respite from the hurricane, and however deeply you love a good hurricane will surely dictate your appreciation of the song, and of the album surrounding it. Half an hour in, there’s even a bona fide blues song, no frills, very familiar in this way, “China Pig” comes across as both the best and worst song on the album.
There are a hundred different moments scattered throughout Trout Mask Replica that trick you into thinking you’re listening to something familiar, something you could feasibly move your body to.
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