At the beginning of the eponymous first track of Rough Americana, pianissimo effects involve machines in acoustic music's old project of soothing. Electronic hush and calls to hush extend that project however much noise without signal is said otherwise to operate. A roar is preceded by a faraway approach to melody and, after a minute, channel switching commences: percussive transfer to sustained but glottal hum; beaten string to an orchestral sample of lost, paradisal engines. It's not that every sound is in Rough Americana; rather, every sound is possible there, here. DJ Mutamassik's and Morgan Craft's improvisational performance, recorded live in Brooklyn in 2002, moves within a tradition of the extraordinary in that it reinitializes such possibility even as it is radically ordinary in its emphatic rendering of the everyday beauties and brutalities of a global sonic field, structured as much by war and migration as by the constant insistence and celebration of locale. This music is driven by the tension between its assertion of a new and unenclosed musical commons and its depiction of the sounds that attend the ongoing politico-economic enclosure. Does the genre of work that works like that have a name? Black Music, I guess, which is all, which is the all, something called Rough Americana could ever have hoped to be. I am greatly tempted to call it Great Black Music, ancient and futurial, for the questions it raises. Those questions, of course, have to do with how and what Rough Americana sounds. Does its sounding of an idea of who and where we are (by way of what these musicians call “electric black improvisation” or “Afro-Asiatic roots and technology music”), its assertion of another mode of sociality breaking out of and into already existing social life, sound good? Does it sound good in or because of or in spite of that assertion and those ideas? Does sounding good matter now? How does the matter of sound matter now?
In raising these questions, Rough Americana bears a collusive and corrosive abstractness that fatally disrupts the programmatic content, the doctrinal accompaniment, that has constituted the historical impetus of black music, whether that music is characterized as an expression of sorrow or its corollary, freedom. Moreover, it carries and (dis)articulates the terror and delirium of enjoyment, of the party, the set, which is to say the constraint that paradoxically is that historical impetus. The incorporated divergence or broken fold implied by “(dis)articulates” is fundamental in music that gets with a program of refusal by refusing to get with the program. It expresses the most radically authentic possibility in the tradition by radically challenging the traditional ground for any claim for or to authenticity. It does so by way of broken thread and rough beauty. The music sounds good and it matters that and how it does.
Consider the history of what has been done to strings in America: pulled, broken, frayed, bent, yanked, plucked, twisted, fingered, thumped, thumbed, rubbed, burned, fuzzed, tuned, plugged, tied, bitten, bottle-necked, box-car'd, mail-ordered, masturbated, remastered—they've been suspended between leeway and seizure all for an open set of sounds. Wire is tacked to a door frame. Minutemen and cannibals twang and warn. Strings have been loved toughly like God loves the poor, and roughly, for the sake of reproduction. They've had to tolerate disinvestment and unfair trading. Giving props to the improper but always subject to veiled conventions, they've been claimed by me and the devil and whomever else. Often taken for evidence of roots and rootlessness, they've been mobilized in the doing and undoing of root work. They've been party to many illicit deals and seem to keep getting people into and out of various jams. People break words to them. People make breaks with them. Now Morgan Craft opens this ensemble of open sounds and soundings by pulling stunts with them. Stunt guitar is like big air guitar, on the half-pipe, no engine, with somebody else's wheels. The materiality of his imaginary playing is shocked and amped so that a whole history of enabled technical disability comes out as a whole new surprise virtuosity.
But stunts happen against the backdrop of a blank screen against which a constructed background is projected. Sometimes the stuntman seeks escape from the soundscape that is newly mixed for him; sometimes he accepts its embrace. The broken chastity of marriage is intact and definite in Rough Americana. Mutamassik turns the tables on the very idea of the rhythm section, singly reenacting it by way of subdivision, as multiplicative incursion. What she brings to the mix is the mix but her mélange is an effect of trouble, of violent effects. The tracks of every stunt are successfully taken beyond its extreme to failure. What the track numbers indicate is not a new song but a portal between sets of scenes and series of illumined phrases that are gathered in the formation of a soundscape already given but composed, found but recombined, fugitively performed and on the run from pre-formation. Mutamassik is the working archivist of a way-out soundscape, a soundscape in which ways out are the essence of its code, a sound(e)scape. She lays groundwork with a phonics of calculated wandering while the itinerant, acrobatic guitarist, riding in and out of blinds, is looking for a home. The oldest song—of flight from settlers and settling in the hope of some other settlement—is serially, collaboratively found and renewed in Rough Americana. The liberated zone within which the song catcher would move is, however, virtual. The ubiquity of the military helicopter, as much as Stockhausen's helicopter quartet, preaccompanies this music as if in surveillance of a set of effects that call it into being. The one who would move within and re-create this soundscape does so critically, hastily, and with a kind of thrift (manifest in the creative re-fusing of whatever fragments remain of whatever oppressive wholes one might have destructively refused) that shows up as extravagance in a work that is not (simply) one.
Rough Americana contains massive, but also microscopic and microphonic, interplay between pause and incursion and the breaks between units are small un-uniform models of a larger break that Mutamassik and Craft enact. “Air Raids” most emphatically questions the logic of track divisions, pointing to the status of Rough Americana as continuous composition. This is to say that the breaks between tracks—some of immeasurable thinness, others whose thickness and color approach the notion of a border—are part of the composition. This is not to say that the idea of the track is disrespected, that tracks are not laid down. On the contrary, the composition is given by way of that nervous, nervy non-self-possession that seems to attend the state of being-musically-possessed, letting us know that such train-like, trane-like brokenness—the chased, chasin' (chaste, chastened) fugitivity of something running both from and after something—is the condition of possibility of both continuity and composition. This bridge is not natural but engineered, so that the helicopter, rather than silence, announces another track change. When the helicopter arrives, “Granma Dearest” begins. With slips of melody underneath, the chopper sounds too good to fly. Lower to the ground, the city sounds beneath. Interrupted phone call interrupts then Cecil speech scratch Pickett to the closing jail door punctuation of “74M3.” But attempts to identify the samples, to enumerate a set of multicultural, transnational building blocks, when the most important thing is the ruined, reconstructive disposition of the ensemble, don't matter. What's at stake, rather, is the profligacy of the break within a serialized persistence, imposed by the conventions of the album/CD itself, which makes its own deliberate approach to the idea of “the work.” This sustained, collaborative break (that is composed of breaks) worries development, totality, time, and the very nature of the operative unit within and out of which something is presented that seems constantly to defy and disrupt the very idea of the unit (scene, song, phrase, note).
But any analysis of the break in Rough Americana must be mixed (and this fact must constantly be remixed, which is to say reiterated) with the realization that its experiments in the architecture of sound are possible only by way of a massive condensatory drive. Rough Americana also revolves around the paradox, which Adorno identifies with Webern, of “total construction” as a means of achieving immediate utterance. This interplay of distillation and elaboration is fundamental to the unsettling and resettling of the (musical) unit. This music moves—which is to say that new musical form and a new articulation of time emerge—by way of profligate interruption within an orgy of musical moments. Momentary concentrations of impurity serially interrupt and entangle one another. Americas—loved and hated, loved and left, entered and hated, stolen and loved—are jagged; distilled but unfiltered, their anoriginal flavor depends upon proximate impurities. Uncut Americana is given by way of mergers and acquisitions as well as cuts and breaks. This is the composed brokenness of the rough cut. This music erupts from the deadly social life of way more than a thousand cuts and an endless series of incorporations. Somewhere here but up ahead of us this music is one thing with many things in it that comprise and undo it for the common good. There's a certain amount of dreaming (musically pre- and post-traumatic syndrome [grouped signs and events; composed things and symptoms]) in Rough Americana. It's an expression of stress that salvage, recovery, and invention situate against the placebo of old, bad, inaccurate, imperial news.
Sampling is, therefore—and again in Adorno's terms—the ultimate, off-scale “little heresy,” marking the return of the extended, twisted, broken musical moment, where the high resolution of the edge is internal to and multiplied in every broken unit. Each rupture of each arbitrarily determined, deliberately given track delineates another mode of cut pleasure, a frayed satisfaction of rubbing or, even, of maceration, as in the Arabic Antillean blur of “Calaloo” enacting the eclipse of melody by rhythm, the eclipse of rhythm by slur, by unnotatable nere. At the same time, poised in the way a bridge is immediately before collapsing, this music expresses the violence of things fitting into a new, because newly destroyed, place. The beat's compromised ability to withstand the agitation it engenders is further troubled by outside agitators as well. “Amid Debris” is funk for nervous times, giving about one hundred seconds conventional dance before requiring parts of the body to fly off in response to unforeseen complications. The implications of Jimmy Nolen turn out to have been disruptive all along. This insight is made possible by Mutamassik's and Craft's research, which shows that black (Reconstruction) music is a music of ruins.
“Memphis USA” sticks with those funky disruptions that cut and redouble b-boy sensibility. Riley King was a Memphis DJ before reinitializing a long stint of pre-stunt guitar begun on a porch in Indianola, Mississippi. The edge of Tennessee is one of two sites serving as Craft and Mutamassik's spatio-temporal musical coordinates, gateways to different deltas, different changes, different ancient resources. Rough Americana could be said to initiate a new, transatlantic musical discourse of cotton when “Memphis Africa” asks if disturbed minimalism is better known as black madrigal. Its rearranged co-presence of musical moments confirms this soundscape of juxtapositions. Who you next to? Who you rub? Who ran into you? Who you running from? The sense of being allowed, but not to cohere, is given in this alternation between etiolation and metastasis of form. So that when “End” gestures towards some kind of coming (non-)full circle, the listener can only conclude, before starting over again, that the reprise is meant to indicate an open sore. The necessity of this cut conclusion, which Rough Americana constantly utters, is inseparable from its orchestration which is, itself, so complete as to necessitate this other set of questions regarding the impossible being of what we listen to again, now, and have been listening to all along—the music of another common tongue, another common logic, another (natural and unnatural) common law.
When sonic extremity comes out of clash, embrace, and the mix/marriage of the break, then whatever retentions, abdications, augmentations, and amputations of whatever authentic anti-, sub-, and/or extracultural assertions—independent of the history of false universalities—make it possible and necessary to look for what one has come upon again, as if for the first time: the new thing, the other thing, the black thing that it takes a certain madness of “the work” to understand.
The new black music is this: find the source and then open it.
