(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
When Dazzling Killmen disbanded,
bassist Darin Gray joined Jim O'Rourke to cut
When In Vanitas (Skin Graft, 1994) under the
Brise Glace name, an album which also featured
Illusion of Safety's Thymme Jones on drums.
The following year
Gray and Jones played also on Yona Kit (Skin Graft, 1995),
another O'Rourke's project.
Then Gray and Jones, with another Dazzling Killmen's outcast,
guitarist Tim Garrigan, formed You Fantastic.
The band debuted with the
EPs Riddler (Skin Graft, 1996), which contains ten untitled fragments,
and Pals (Skin Graft, 1997), which contains one long minimalist
trance. The inspiration for these records came from Slint, but with
an emphasis on rhythm and loud "noise" which harks back to early Sonic Youth.
The structure of You Fantastic's debut album,
Homesickness (Skin Graft, 1999), recorded between 1994 and 1998,
recalls the band's first EP: 22 brief instrumental compositions, and a
cornucopia of styles ranging from hardcore to free jazz.
A few tracks are simply excerpts from live performances (often no more than
a one-minute snippet). While the album is reminiscent of the
post-modernist collage technique of
This Heat, the overall feeling is closer
to the disjointed works of Rake and
God Is My Co-pilot.
Highlights include Friendless's
quarreling of the trumpets on the calm motiv of the guitar,
Memphis's tour de force of stone-age noise rock music
(with Fred Frith-style's experiments in guitar noises and
a long coda of industrial banging and psycho drones) and
the two versions of Slowly's industrial mantra of horns and electronics
over a syncopated dub rhythm.
The limit of the album is that most of these fragments are just that:
rough, unfinished ideas.
The absolute chaos of Cicero's,
the childish banging of Retraction
and so forth, aer personal notes of the musicians, not music for the rest of us.
After disbanding You Fantastic, Gray formed
On Fillmore (Locust, 2002) with percussionist Glenn Kotche.
Their experiment was streamlined on Sleeps With Fishes (Quakebasket, 2004):
Kotche's switch to the vibraphone lent the sound a typical jazz-rock tone
that defuses whatever r/evolutionary idea was originally behind the composition.
Then came
Grand Ulena, whose Gateway To Dignity (Family Vineyard, 2003) sounds like
adult, rocking, straightforward Dazzling Killmen.
The mini-album Neosho (Family Vineyard, 2003) collects leftovers
from the same sessions as the album.
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