Rocktober: The Axman Swings His Blade

Can't let a Rocktober pass without some offering to the deities of rock's past. The eighteen year old dorm room rebel that blared Black Sabbath, Slayer, and Led Zeppelin with unabashed adoration is jumping out of me as I follow the stonerific releases from White Hills and Gnod. In name of the fall, in name of girls named Autumn, beards, and looking back at our American heritage, I invested in the releases of Vintage Records, a subsidiary of Rockadrome in Texas. They've been releasing some spectacular reissues of collector item hard rock LPs from the seventies and eighties that strike you right in the stoner bone. Only lame part is that they are on CD, so it is harder to pretend that it actually is 1974, you actually are stoned, and you are just deciding that the hardest rock of all is named metal.

First, hailing from the invincible Camden, NJ (Represent!), recent guest to Bon Jovi's playground build, hails Negative Space who recorded the landmark LP Hard, Heavy, Mean, and Evil in 1970. Fantastic reissue of the dream high school band, digging into some of the hard rock masterpieces of the time like "Johnny B. Goode" and "Purple Haze," these kids took cues from all the right places. So what if they are not sure exactly how to play in the same key as the rest of the band. So what if the drummer drums to his own tempo. This is rock and roll at a gritty and raw reality. The kind that can't be taught. Lester Bangs said that "grossness was the truest criterion for rock 'n' roll, the cruder the clang and grind the more fun and longer listened-to the album'd be." I agree. These kids were definitely on to something, and you will spot this record in Trenton fetching a mighty high fee, despite the fact that it is mostly garbage. I mean treasure. The first eight tracks are the most inspired, from the original LP.

Negative Space - Hard, Heavy, Mean, and Evil

Beyond the reissue, it looks like these guys reincarnated as a hard rock tribute band of the same name. so good. my favorite part of this video is the commentary arguing about whether one band member is a nerd or not.

Another great release from Vintage Records is the reissue of Iron Claw. Iron Claw is a Scottish roots-rock band that grinds out some burners, psychedelic blues rock in its purest. Their release Dismorphobia is fantastic. Though they were supposedly a Black Sabbath cover band for much of their career, their LP from 1970 is golden metal. If my internet was working better I'd upload that too. Maybe I will update this post with it soon enough.

Columbus Day

Columbus incited the annihilation of the 3 million Taino people of Haiti. Happy day off!

Five hundred years later Alan Lomax visited Haiti to document the music of a displaced people. Anthropologically the music connects the polyrhythmic essentials behind blues and jazz with African music. Some historians argue that due to the nature of slavery in the Caribbean, African culture was not subject to the same paternalism as in America (where drumming was outlawed for fears of rebellion). Coupled with the successful rebellion that formed the first black republic in the world, music in Haiti remained distinctly African. By the time Lomax records this, the music evolved to include elements of Highlife and Cumbias. Musically this is sounds like early Cajun music, cumbias, Dominican merengues, and fife and drum. Harte Records 102 will be a ten CD box set of Lomax's Haitian field recordings. Here is a taste.

ps: TURN IT UP!

Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Tell You performed by Dave Paul, originally recorded by the Bee Gees.

















The Difference Between Mechanized Reverb and Delay

Delay attempts a perfect echo; reverb attempts a natural one.

A delay device, like a pedal, will try to replicate or sample and repeat the sound being sent to it at timed intervals, most through a chip called a bucket brigade. The invention of this in the 1970s lead to the development and concept of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which is in every digital camera or video capture device. However, there are limits to the fidelity of the devices, and even sophisticated tape delays, which use a series of magnetic tape recorders to sample and loop the sound like the Gibson Echoplex, will colour and change the sound of the repeats from the original.

Mechanical reverb was first built for the Hammond electric organ when it started being used in homes and smaller churches. Pipe organs were always accompanied by a large reverberation, and it was thought any organ must have that large cascading sound of a shout heard on high. The solution of how to create echo in a small space was to bounce the instrument's electrical sound around inside a metal spring, as in spring reverb, or across a metal pan, in plate reverb, and have it come back to you after being bounced around.

These are just for analog types of delay and reverb. If we were to start talking about digital types of the same effects, the point becomes moot, as digital emulations are essentially virtual sound, and not real.


Elijah James Santoyo
www.myspace.com/perfectrack