Introducing Riprap
n. A loose assemblage of broken stones erected in water or on soft ground as a foundation
Today I’m happy to introduce the fifth Guma LP, Riprap. It’s set for release on June 7, 2024, but starting today you can pre-order the 12” LP and listen to one of the sides at the Guma Bandcamp. Being the first Friday of the month, today is a day that Bandcamp waives all of its platform fees, which is why I’m featuring it on this week’s Substack post. At the bottom of the post I’ll share a coupon code for 50% off the LP, valid this weekend only. Where else can you get a 12” full-length of great music for less than $10?
The Guma roster on January 16, 2023—the day all of the music on Riprap was recorded. From left to right: Adam Ostrar, T.J. Masters, Gary James, Sam P. Rives, James Gwyn, Carolyn Trowbridge, Justin Bernard Williams. Photo by Greg Ciotti.
Literal riprap. Photo from AustinTexas.gov
I love spoken word recordings. The human voice—“that most beautiful of all instruments”—is maybe at its most intriguing when it’s merely speaking to us in our own language. My earliest memories of spoken word recordings are indistinguishable from music, as I discovered both forms via artists that did both, and each on the same medium (compact disc). I remember falling early for prank phone calls, hidden album tracks, long swathes of dramatic, dark poetry set to original music, and even morbid documentary. The voice, unique enough in itself, obtains new aural signifiers and personality tics depending on the method & medium of recording it. Whether it comes off a dictaphone’s picocassette or it’s a YouTube video playing in the other room, a recording of a voice almost always draws one’s attention.
Over the years, one record in particular has grown in my mind as a kind of totem—the ideal spoken word recording—both for how it is produced and in its overall structure. It’s a record called Private Parts by Robert Ashley. Ashley was an artist and composer who, at the time of recording Private Parts, was the director of the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music in Oakland, CA. Many of Ashley’s collaborators were first his students.
Robert Ashley appearing in 1983’s television “opera” Perfect Lives, two acts of which are the two sides recorded five years previously for the Private Parts LP. Screenshot from YouTube
Ashley had been making experimental music for decades by the time Private Parts came out. To my ears, his early recordings are derivatively atonal at worst and often alienating. They are post-Cagean to the extent that all mid-century American experimental music can be defined by its relation to John Cage. But by 1969, the year he started as director at Mills College, he had homed in on the human voice as instrument of choice and developed a style of storytelling informed by the process of “automatic writing.” Automatic writing comprises a spectrum of handwriting behaviors from the patently absurd—the belief that you are actually channeling a spirit or an alien through a writing utensil—to the scientifically mundane—free association by any other name—to the innocuous act of letting your mind and your pencil wander in equal measure.
I’m not sure where exactly Ashley stood on that spectrum, but suffice to say that automatic writing involves a commitment to a kind of egoless-ness, or at least to removing one’s own influence from the page as much as possible. Ashley took this to another level in performance, developing a soft-spoken and breathy vocal style as if to allow words to escape from his mouth without actually having to produce any of the air or muscle tension to create them himself.
And that’s where we find him at Private Parts.
With only two songs—one per side—the record still clocks in at a respectable 40+ minutes. Each song has similar instrumentation: a piano, a tabla, and some synthesized pads that float lightly in and out. On top (and sometimes amidst) this ensemble is Ashley’s voice.
The overall effect is soporific, hallucinogenic, trance-inducing. One of the things I love about Private Parts—aside from the fact that the text itself is equal parts humorous, philosophical, surreal, and pathetic, that is, containing pathos—is that its length (among other aspects) makes it nearly impossible to understand in a single sitting. You become hypnotized, you become distracted, you enter in/out of any number of psychological states in the span of any given forty minutes. You have to return to this record to really hear everything that Ashley says, and still certain phrases tuck in behind musical crescendos and elude parsing. Over and over again it rewards repeated attention, which is a hallmark of any truly classic recording in any genre or style.
I wanted to make a record like this—something that has semiological density—but with the spontaneous, improvisational, playful, sonically dense style of late-era Ken Nordine/Jerry Garcia/David Grisman.
Studio panorama shot by Greg Ciotti
We met on the morning of Monday, January 16, 2023 at King Electric Studios in South Austin. Gary James (electric bass), James Gwyn (drums), and Sam P. Rives (Wurlitzer electric piano) had formed most of the ensemble for the Workingman’s Guma sessions a year prior and were now augmented by three new players: Carolyn Trowbridge (vibraphone), Justin Bernard Williams (tenor saxophone), and Adam Ostrar (guitar). Almost all of the musicians knew each other, some had played together in other groups, but none had played in this particular configuration. There were no rehearsals for this recording session. This is a little bit of a trick I picked up from tapping Chris Schlarb to produce a couple of records for me: how to strike a good balance of familiarity vs. novelty (both musically and socially), preparedness vs. looseness, having rehearsed vs. responding intuitively in the moment… I’m a believer that leaving space for this element of chance is one of the key pillars of making compelling music.
By way of preparation for the entire day, I had brought one melody (see below) and one chord (Ebmaj7(#11)add13). We started the session by warming up into a drone which became the introduction to “The Signature”—literally the first recorded note of the day is the sound that starts the record. Then we improvised as a septet around the melody for three takes of about 15 minutes each (take 2 is what made the record). The only instruction was to start at the melody, detour into group improvisation after a certain number of repetitions, and return to the melody at my signal—a pretty standard jazz form. After a short break, we cut a 20-minute vamp around my chord suggestion which became “The Public Service Announcement.” The take that made the record is our only take and the raw recording itself begins with me saying “let’s just give it a try and see what it sounds like.” Sometimes making a record is about accepting the material exactly as it appears and not asking questions or fiddling too much. By 5pm we were done for the day.
Left to right: Adam Ostrar on electric guitar, me on Moog synthesizer, Gary James on electric bass. Photo by Greg Ciotti.
The melody that became the A-side of the record, as transcribed by Sam P. Rives from a voice memo of me humming it.
I’ve tried to dig up as much information about the recording process for Private Parts as I can, but like many small records, that information is either trapped in the minds of the people who made it or doesn’t exist anymore at all. I think I read that the voiceover was recorded separately from the music (maybe the night before?) into a cassette recorder. I do know that Ashley was interested by the coincidences that occurred when layering recordings in different time signatures on top of each other—coincidences that could not realistically be planned any other way—and so I decided to record my voiceover separate from the ensemble but along with a metronome (a pulse) that represented the tempo for each track.
When we finally did layer the voiceover on top of the music, Gary and I (who mixed the record) were stunned at the number of sonic coincidences between the text and music that emerged, many of which seemed nearly pre-destined. Indeed there are moments on the record where the band seems to respond to not just the pacing of the narrative but to the content of the narrative itself. Of course this is impossible given that I had not shared any of the text with the group before or during the recording session, but to my mind it affirms and elevates the mysticism of the album; it came from seven of us, but in its cosmic “rightness” it has transcended all of us.
One more note about Robert Ashley: most of his music was self-released on a small label run by his wife Mimi Johnson. The label was called Lovely Music Ltd., and in fact Private Parts was release number one. It’s a phenomenal starting point for anyone interested in the intersection of experimental, classical, and conceptual music after the post-modern era (spoiler alert: electronics and synthesizers were about to dramatically change the game).
To that end, I’m releasing Riprap on my own after self-funding all of the recording costs, musician salaries, and manufacturing costs. Only time will tell if it becomes the start of a bold new independent catalog (survey says: it already is!), but I hope that if you’ve read this far, you’ve been convinced to give it the attention I think it deserves. Everyone in that picture at the top of the page is immensely proud of this one. I split the writing credit evenly among the seven of us, and so almost any engagement with this material can help generate income for a handful of working class musicians in Austin.
The logo for the in-house Guma label (and this newsletter!) as designed by Robert Carroll
The Guardian published an article last week about the state of touring as a working class musician. I didn’t need to read it to know what an unrealistic mess it is to try and hold down a stable home life, afford life (and emergency) expenses, manage multiple small streams of income or work as a freelancer with no benefits, shoulder the full tax burden of self-employment, not have health insurance… and also constantly travel around the world to promote your music, which is not generating any substantial royalties from streaming in the first place. And that’s all if you tour solo, with no bandmates. But it’s the first article I’ve read that has ever unequivocally given due credit to the ostensible Source: the artists. “People who work at labels think bands make loads of money touring, while booking agents think they make loads of money on publishing and so on,” [says artist manager Dan Potts]. “Everyone thinks artists make money from the other side of the industry they’re not involved in. Artists are the biggest employers in the industry [my emphasis]. They pay for the tour manager, session musicians, agent, manager, crew, insurance, travel, accommodation, equipment, rehearsal space, production. Everything. I don’t think people know this is all the stuff that the artist pays for and does.”
In my opinion, the bold text should be the headline. There will not likely be a seven-piece band touring Guma music any time soon, but it’s not for lack of energy. I have to be happy enough that we get to make music, make records, and that my collaborators walk away feeling they were treated respectfully, had fun, and were compensated fairly.
What Else is Going On
There’s a lot to be happy about in the Gumaverse this week. A music video that I directed and shot on 16mm film was released, and I will get more in detail about that process in my next newsletter.
Riprap will be supported by a short film that I scripted and edited and which was funded by a grant from the city of Austin. The film will premiere later this month in Austin with the soundtrack performed live, the grant will cover all the musicians with fair wages to do it, and I’ll write more about it then.
Chicks are growing! They’re at roughly six weeks, feathers are sprouting like mad, and yesterday they got their first experience of real grass. Can you imagine going from a box of pine shavings to the big wide world full of bugs and soft green edible plants? They were losing their minds! The babies are in transition from the garage to the outside world where they will join up with the adult hens. Yesterday at sundown we moved them into a locked cage which is itself locked inside the coop so that the hens can get familiar with their sight and smell but can’t reach them to attack or peck at them. After about a week of acclimation, I’ll wait until they all go to sleep one night and move the babies to the roost. When they wake up in the morning, adults and babies alike will be kind of fooled into behaving like it’s been that way all along, and they’ll be officially integrated into the free-range flock.
What Am I Watching?
Mostly the NBA Playoffs—high-level, high-stakes basketball is on every night! I don’t want to detract from the multiple recommendations I’ve made already in this newsletter, but if you want more Robert Ashley the entire six-part Perfect Lives opera is on YouTube. It’s more than a little strange, but then again so is anything worth seeing once.
Cheap Records
Oh yeah! Use the code GVERSE when you check out at the Guma Bandcamp for 50% off! It’s good for all weekend, but remember that today is the only day that the platform waives its 10% fee. There are now five Guma LPs in the world, all with actual, physical forms: my art! Thanks for reading and for keeping up with me.