Bill's Hyperbolic Music Reviews #2: U Totem- "Strange Attractors"

U Totem is a collaboration between members of the two bands 5uu's and Motor Totemist Guild, both "difficult" "art" bands led by multi-instrumentalist composers. In the 5uu's case, it's Dave Kerman, and in Motor Totemist Guild's, it's James Grigsby, both of whom wrote music for U Totem, though on this disc it's solely Grigsby.

This album falls mostly under the umbrella of avant-prog, a pretentious subgenre of progressive rock that actually isn't quite pretentious enough for this record, as Strange Attractors boasts perhaps too much modern classical influence to be strictly in the "rock" canon. This ain't Stockhausen or anything, though, so don't be as frightened as you would be by, say, Klavierstucke. There's drums and guitar and shit on this, and the vocals, which, despite being mostly irritating because most of them are sung by some chick who should've been making the other band members a nice pot roast or something instead of shrieking over the top of everything, still aren't far gone into primal howling or whatever the hell it is Phil Minton does. I'm just saying that facts like the predominant use of faggy woodwinds like the flute and bassoon, the continual intervallic and metric dissonance, and the lack of any FUCKIN' KILLER RIFFS, DUDE!!!! might push this into chamber-music territory as much as anything else.

Thankfully, though, none of this is simply scattershot noodling, probably because Grigsby doesn't have a tendency towards aleatoric bullshit like some other composers I could mention. This is all tightly-composed, generally rhythm-section-led stuff, and the jump-cutting motifs always seem controlled and never just random. Some of the less experimental pieces really are your everyday Rock in Opposition-ish material that seems to give Belgian music nerds wet dreams (sorry, that was a pretty obscure quasi-joke, although actually it might be a bit frivolous to apologize for that at this point, as I've made probably a half-dozen of those already. This one was the worst, though, so I guess I'll keep this bit in.) and keeps American music nerds like me from getting laid because I enjoy it too much and so spend my Saturday nights listening to Henry Cow instead of smoking the reefer or whatever it is you damn kids do these days. In conclusion, stay the hell off my lawn!