Peter Hammill/Gary Lucas, "Other World"

I’ve been friendly with the gui­tar­ist and singer/songwriter Gary Lucas since the late 1980s, so I’ve fol­lowed, some­times from a fair remove, some­times pretty up close, his col­lab­or­a­tions with the likes of Peter Stampfel, Jeff Buckley, Jon Langford, Dean Bowman (I wrote the liner notes for their under­ap­pre­ci­ated 2010 album Chase The Devil, and many oth­ers. I don’t recall hav­ing been quite so excited to hear about one of Gary’s col­lab­or­at­ive pro­jects as I was in late 2011, when at a lunch he told me that he would be soon work­ing with the British musi­cian Peter Hammill.  I think one reas­on the pro­spect delightedly agit­ated me to such an extent was because as much as I imme­di­ately thought “Oh, per­fect!” when Gary men­tioned Peter’s name, there was also the fact that as much as I felt it was a con­spir­acy made in heav­en, I also had abso­lutely no idea what it would sound like. When Gary worked with the artists I men­tioned above, while I could­n’t say the res­ults were predictable—Gary’s brief in life has nev­er been to make pre­dict­able music—I always had a strong notion of the mode he’d fall into with each part­ner. With Stampfel he made eclect­ic, antic, irrev­er­ent slap­stick roots music. With Langford, man­ic angry urb­an B‑picture punk with an irre­press­ible smirk. With Bowman, implac­able, earth­shak­ing deep blues. With Buckley…well, the Buckley thing is a whole oth­er thing, and I still feel a bristle of irrit­a­tion in sym­pathy with Gary over the fact that a lot of people who go into mys­tic fits of ecstasy over “Grace” and “Mojo Pin” some­times seem will­fully unaware that those tunes belong as much to Gary as to Jeff. Like I said, it’s anoth­er thing. To circle back to my point, I had, here, no idea what the res­ult of a Lucas/Hammill sum­mit would sound like. And that was excit­ing. (And it had a lot to do with the fact that Hammill him­self, over the course of an almost impossibly pro­lif­ic 45-year career, both solo and as a founder of the icon­ic art rock out­fit Van Der Graaf Generator, has remained both entirely sui generis—once you hear his voice for the first time, you’ll nev­er mis­take it for any­one else’s—and stead­fastly hard to pin down. Although his tunes do tend, largely, to take off from a darkly anthem­ic E minor, his instru­ment­a­tion bounces from keyboard-heavy prog form­a­tions to punk­ish 1−2−3−4 gui­tar front lines to near-musique-concrete electro-acoustic combinations.)

The record that came out of their early 2012 ses­sions, Other World, is as fas­cin­at­ing and affect­ing and unex­pec­ted as I had hoped it to be. It’s just Gary and Peter, no band, no bass and/or drums. No key­boards either. Both men play acous­tic and elec­tric gui­tars with a panoply of effects. While Gary is  a fine all-around song­writer him­self, here Hammill handles all the lyr­ics and does all the singing. This is as it should be: if you’re mak­ing a record with Peter Hammill, you want Peter Hammill singing. His mord­ant, vin­eg­ary, voice has a present­a­tion­al the­at­ric­al­ity that some find sim­il­ar to David Bowie, but with Hammill there’s no sense of a mask, no irony; it’s almost as if he’s taken to heart the adage from a film we’re all fond of, “The only per­form­ance that makes it all the way is the one that acheives mad­ness.” Or exor­cises it. Listen to Hammill’s vocal con­tri­bu­tions to Robert Fripp’s 1979 Exposure; prac­tic­ally prim­al scream therapy.

Other World begins in a rel­at­ively sed­ate, under­stated mode with “Spinning Coins,” maybe the most con­ven­tion­al song on the record, a largely acous­tic bal­lad (show­cas­ing Gary’s abil­ity to make a steel-string acous­tic sound like a vir­tu­al orches­tra) in which a love affair is decided in a coin toss, and Hammill, sound­ing rel­at­ively isol­ated, muses on the “out­comes of ran­dom­ness” as Gary con­jures up sound­scapes, blue notes trans­muted through echoes and delays and phas­ing into cos­mic points of bleak­ness and awe. 

The themes of the songs are largely not unfa­mil­i­ar in Hammill’s ouevre. “Some Kind of Fracas” obliquely alludes to get­ting fucked over in the music biz, and “This Is Showbiz” and “The Kid” are iron­ic­al and stage-frighted por­traits of the artist as a cap­tive of his own “profession”—“applause can­’t sus­tain you alone.”  Gary’s finger-picked chords on “Showbiz” impart a sar­don­ic jaunti­ness to the obser­va­tions, some­thing you don’t get, say, on sim­il­arly inspired mus­ings fea­tured on such Hammill clas­sics as Nadir’s Big Chance or The Future Now. But Hammill’s most stun­ning and dis­turb­ing lyr­ics are about the way, as a 65-year-old man, he lives now. “Reboot, and count to ten/God knows I hope this pro­cess isn’t shot down,” he sings, stead­ily, on “Reboot,” which, when the lyr­ic’s over, turns into an aur­al light show of wow-and-flutter riff­ing, hooks and licks lost in space try­ing to find a groove. “What remains/What’s left before me/is the prick­ing of the thumbs, the needles and pins/the thin­ning out begins/of kith and kin,” he sings on “Kith and Kin.” I like the jux­ta­pos­i­tion of The Searchers and Shakespeare in those lines, a wel­come bit of humor in an oth­er­wise grim but clear-eyed obser­va­tion that Gary orna­ments with notes like droplets of tears.

So, no, this is not an “upbeat” record­ing. But it is a nour­ish­ing and exhil­ar­at­ing one—ostensibly psy­che­del­ic music with a bra­cingly sober per­spect­ive. Not a raging against the dying of the light but a stiff-backed and stub­born cel­eb­ra­tion of the light that still remains. Some reviewer—well, one review­er, par­tic­u­larly, Clive Bell in The Wire, writ­ing a deeply ambi­val­ent but intel­li­gent and attent­ive notice on the record—balked at on ostens­ible over-reliance on effects from Gary, but I can­’t say I was bothered. The man is a stone vir­tu­oso of the gui­tar straight (if you doubt it just take down your copy of Beefheart’s Doc At The Radar Station and play “Flavor Bud Living” and get back to me in the morn­ing) and when he goes elec­tric effects are a part of his arsen­al; the manip­u­la­tion of his gui­tar’s sound is an exten­sion of his play­ing, not a short cut for some­thing he can­’t acheive with his own two hands. In any event, the effects are hardly used to slap­dash ends. He cre­ates halls of mir­rors, has the srt­ings talk back to the sing­er, all sorts of things. The name of the record is Other World, but the point of the title is that it’s a world spun off this one we all share, a cre­ation of Hammill and Lucas’ heads, hearts, hands, and voices (lit­er­al and meta­phor­ic­al). It is a rich and dis­turb­ing one. I hope they get around to cre­at­ing anoth­er some day soon. In the mean­time, I can­’t say I’ve exhausted this one yet; the record is as rich and deep and con­stantly treasure-yielding as any I’ve heard in years. 

You can pur­chase the record via Amazon, or through the web­site for its par­ent label, Cherry Red.