McCarthy was married three times, and (as was revealed in a Vanity Fair article shortly after his death) conducted a years-long affair with a woman named Augusta Britt, whom he first met when she was sixteen. As Wyatt Mason puts it in a New York Times essay, “By any reasonable measure, McCarthy comes across as delinquent and double-dealing and selfish.” But he continues:

“If we are disappointed in what we now see of McCarthy, it’s important for us to remember why. It’s because we have been so invested in how he saw. Britt’s story forces us to ask the question: How is it that someone could be that and yet, on the other hand, do this? Daugherty does not directly raise the question, but his detailed account of McCarthy’s life may do something better — give us the means to consider whether the art was able to transform, even transcend, the life.”

Many of our great artists force us to wrestle with the question of how someone could be that and yet, on the other hand, do this. Two of the best and worst of them were born 100 years ago: Miles Davis, whose centennial was celebrated in May, and Chuck Berry, whose centennial arrives on Sunday, October 18.

Chuck Berry was one of the greatest and most important artists in the history of US pop music. The 1981 compilation The Great Twenty-Eight is basically the Big Bang. Berry’s music was part jump blues, part R&B, part country and a tiny bit of jazz; you can hear the influence of Nat “King” Cole, Muddy Waters, Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker, but it was his urbane-hillbilly personality and his wily lyrical brilliance that changed the world. Songs like “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Maybellene,” “Thirty Days,” and “You Can’t Catch Me,” among others, were witty broadsides from a keen observer of American life, and when he began to aim explicitly at the teenage market with “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and more, he created a global audience that was conscious of itself, which is how gods are made.

What’s astonishing, nearly 70 years after it was recorded, is how much bite this music has. Mostly backed by pianist Johnnie Johnson, bassist Willie Dixon, and various drummers, Berry’s bluesy guitar leads slash at the listener like a switchblade. (Berry-indebted punk rock guitarists like Billy Zoom and Steve Jones actually sound cleaner than the man himself.) It’s immortal music; it’ll leave you giddy and gaping at its power the first time you hear it, and the thousandth.

And yet, it was all the work of a very nasty man. Reading RJ Smith’s Chuck Berry: An American Life is an often chilling experience. For all his wit, intelligence, ambition, interest in literature and love of poetry, Berry comes across as a cold-eyed sociopath. Although he was married to the same woman from 1948 until his death, and was a good father according to his children, when he was on the road he would have sex with pretty much anyone who caught his eye, including a 14-year-old girl whom he’d brought to St. Louis from out of state to work at a nightclub he owned. (After two trials beginning in 1960, he served nearly two years in prison, re-emerging in 1963 into a radically changed musical market.)

Berry is quoted in the book as saying, “The business side of music is more important than the pleasure because I play music to satisfy people and my satisfaction is minimal.” And Chuck Berry the businessman was a paranoid, corner-cutting shark. He’d tour alone, recruiting local bands to back him, and demanded cash before taking the stage. He would write songs in the studio, and not in a “sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike” way but in a “I’m gonna write these ten songs, and then we’re gonna record them, and we’re gonna be gone by dinnertime” way. And then there’s the issue of “My Ding-A-Ling,” a truly embarrassing dick joke that somehow became his only #1 hit. Smith devotes many more pages to this song than almost anyone would argue it deserves, but somehow makes them worth reading.

Berry came up, and did his greatest work, in the singles era, and never truly became an album artist. (The closest he came was 1969’s Concerto In B Goode, a psychedelic blues album with four short songs on the A side and the title track — a nearly 19-minute, side-long instrumental jam — on the flip.) But the songs he wrote defined America, and rendered him somehow inextricable from the country itself. America — racist, greedy, violent, punitive America — made him, and he returned the favor, sometimes with a kiss (“Back In The USA”) and sometimes with a slap (“Promised Land,” the lyrics of which are a series of oblique, if-you-know-you-know references to the Civil Rights movement).

The lurid tales of perversity and predation that defined his later life cannot overshadow the brilliance of Chuck Berry’s best music. He was that, and more, but he did this. And a hundred years after his birth, his music retains every bit of its charm and power.

I’m not as familiar with the work of trumpeter Jon Hassell, who died in 2021, as I maybe should be. I remember reading about him in David Toop’s book Ocean Of Sound, but the facts of the case: that he’d studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, worked with La Monte Young, collaborated with Brian Eno… all of that felt more like a warning than an enticement. Guys like Eno and Hassell — whose big idea was what he called “Fourth World” music, which combined his trumpet and electronics with rhythms and ideas from around the world — often seemed to me to give off a patronizing, “look what I found in the trash!” vibe when it came to what they “borrowed” from non-Western cultures, rarely seeming to acknowledge the astonishing depth of those cultures and their indigenous musical traditions. It was all just superficial inspiration and sample fodder for mildly diverting, tripped-out art music, was my impression. But maybe I’m just querulous by nature, and was receiving the wrong message from ignorant journalists.

Anyway, Hassell’s final studio albums, 2018’s Listening To Pictures and 2020’s Seeing Through Sound, both of which were part of a series called Pentimento, have now been joined by a live album, Music Is Invisible. Interestingly, it documents (kinda) a trio performance featuring Rick Cox and John von Seggern, multi-instrumentalists who appeared on the aforementioned studio discs, but was actually recorded in 2015. “Pentimento” is a painting technique defined as “the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over,” and if one was a cynical prick, one could call this a smartypants way of saying he’s rehashing old ideas. And in fact, he’s literally doing that at times; there are sampled sounds from previous Hassell records buried in here. But as you’ll see here and in the reviews below, I think that’s just called having a style.

The three records absolutely work as a trilogy, if not a suite; they’re available separately and as a 3CD set, but I can’t imagine wanting to own one but not the others. The music is so thoroughly processed that the only immediately recognizable instrument is Hassell’s horn, and even that is warped by electronics. I recognize affinities with the work of Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvær, but Hassell, being American, has an extroverted quality they lack, even when he sounds like he’s floating in an isolation tank as he plays. And while I believe that the raw material for Music Is Invisible was recorded live, it sound 100% of a piece with the two studio discs. This is all one big shimmering cloud of tones and concepts. You could as easily turn them into a shuffled playlist as listen to them in sequence.

(There’s a very interesting piece about the new album by Blake Leyh at The Tonearm. He knows much more about Hassell’s music than me, and interviews one of his collaborators, Jeff Rona. Go read that.)

Bana Haffar is from Saudi Arabia, but currently based in Montreal. Her music is made with modular synthesizers, as well as samples and field recordings. Ancient Future is her sixth album, and her third for the Touch label. In the press kit, it says, “Bana Haffar is an electronic music composer working with the materiality of sound. Through research-creation, she works with sound design and sample based music sequencing as they relate to various non-musical systems.” This kind of art-gallery language often prejudices me against the artists that use it. But the album is beautiful and compelling enough that I’m willing to look past the high-flown bullshit and just sink into the music. A lot of modular synth stuff is intentionally blissful, trying to suffuse you in a peach-colored haze and align your chakras. Haffar’s music is more aggressive than that; sometimes it reminds me of Autechre, or like the distant, muffled explosions at the beginning of Blade Runner. Her synths are often groaning with frustration and poorly contained anger. The first single, “Like Branches,” does have a gentle and drifting quality that nods to Pink Floyd or The Orb, but don’t be fooled. There’s a lot more grit to this record than that.

German producer Michael Fiedler released a bunch of singles and three albums under the name Jah Schulz: 2020’s Dub Over Science, 2021’s Dub Showcase, and 2023’s Dub Over Science Chapter II. It’s good stuff, ranging from relatively traditional Creation Rebel-esque dub to more dub-informed electro and techno tracks. But lately, he’s been working on music I really like under the name Ghost Dubs. The first GD album, Damaged, came out on Kevin “The Bug” Martin’s Pressure label in 2024, followed by a companion remix EP, Extended Damaged Versions, in 2025. Then there was Implosion, a split album credited to The Bug vs Ghost Dubs, and Imploded Versions, another remix EP. Now the second Ghost Dubs album, Oblique, has arrived, preceded by the single “Low Times,” which received three remixes, one by Fiedler and two by Martin.

I recommend listening to this album two different ways. Through speakers — especially, I imagine, through far bigger ones than I have in my house — this is music you feel as much as hear. It hisses and pulses, steady as a gigantic mechanical heart. The bass pushes gently at your torso. Through headphones, it’s like having your brain squeezed. Each track consists of minimal variations on a simple melodic pattern, mostly consisting of changes in the way it echoes, or dropping elements out and then bringing them back. You know — dub. It’s deeply soothing, though at times ominous as well.

Juliana Venter is a South African vocalist — a trained opera singer and much more — currently resident in Norway. She performs with drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrom, and others. Home Galactic is a solo album, mostly solo voice, recorded inside a water tower. Naturally, this gives her a lot of reverb to play with, but the microphone(s) must actually have been pretty close, because it’s a very intimate-sounding record; she’s right in your ear. She sings in multiple languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Nama, Norwegian, and Zulu. And while some of her singing is very clear and traditional, she also goes into more extreme registers — not as extreme as Diamanda Galás or Blixa Bargeld, but enough to make you jump in your seat. On certain tracks in the album’s second half, she plays performs traditional African instruments, including the Makhoyane musical bow from Eswatini and the Umrhubhe bow of the AmaXhosa people, both of which sound to me like the Brazilian berimbau, as well as water bowl and bell. This serves to draw the listener even deeper into the experience, giving it the feel of a ceremony.

Justin Broadrick (another Kevin Martin collaborator; check out their work as Techno Animal and Zonal, and dig up the long-out-of-print CDs by God and Ice if you can find them — and here’s an interesting bit of trivia; Jon Hassell plays on Techno Animal’s Re-Entry) is retiring Godflesh soon, after nearly 40 years. The group’s six-song debut EP was released in 1988, and since then there have been ten albums, several remix albums, and a bunch of singles, EPs, and the like. It’s a deep catalog, and surprisingly varied — some albums are sludgy and crushingly heavy, others (comparatively) lighter and more electronic. Decay is one of the final two Godflesh albums; the next one isn’t done yet, but will be out before too long, we’re told. Broadrick has experimented with the group’s core sound (big riffs, programmed drums, electronics around the edges) in various ways over the years, even bringing in live drummers sometimes. On Decay, he’s returning to old ground, kinda; there’s a beat on “Living/Ending” that sounds like “Spite” from 1992’s Pure, and “Feral Colony” reminds me of the Killing Joke homage of “Life Giver Life Taker” from 2014’s A World Lit Only By Fire. The last Godflesh album, Purge, was also a conscious attempt to reckon with the group’s past work, and apparently this music was made during the same sessions. But again, that’s called having a style. There are some subtle elements buried within the agonized pounding that reward careful listening; check out the (I assume sampled) wordless background voices on the nearly 12-minute closer, “Consume Me.”

The second time was on my birthday in 2006, at the Nokia Theatre; they were supporting Children Of Bodom, and Gojira and Sanctity opened. They were still climbing the ladder, a tight, aggressive band with plenty to prove, but the crowd was with them all the way. I remember being really into Gojira that night, too. (Years later, I’d work with Gojira at Roadrunner Records.)

The third time was in February 2014, at Irving Plaza; they had long since graduated to headlining status, and frankly could probably have played a bigger room. They had support from Enslaved and Skeletonwitch, both of whom were just OK. By that time, Hegg had evolved from a gruff warrior to a Falstaffian entertainer and party host, drinking from a horn between songs and exhorting the crowd to roar between songs.

The last time I saw Amon Amarth live was in October 2019, at the cavernous Hammerstein Ballroom. They were headlining again, and had put together an all-Swedish package that included Arch Enemy, At The Gates, and Grand Magus. I never thought I’d have the chance to see Grand Magus live — they’re not popular enough in the US to justify a tour — so I got tickets immediately, and they were the band whose T-shirt I bought. Amon Amarth’s stage set was gigantic and elaborate, worthy of an even bigger band, and they had fully embraced Viking kitsch, adopting a cosplay-esque warrior identity. But the songs remained good enough, and stylistically uniform enough, that they were more than able to stack a 75-minute set with fist-pumping anthems.

I came on board the Amon Amarth longship when a lot of other people did, with their fourth album, Versus The World. It opens with what’s still my favorite of their songs, “Death In Fire”:

That was the album they were supporting the first time I saw them. I’ve read in interviews that if it hadn’t succeeded, they were probably going to break up. Well, it turned out to be their breakthrough release, and as you can see from the description above, they’ve gotten bigger and bigger with each album. These days, they headline festivals in Europe, and play the largest clubs and theaters in the US. They’re not arena-sized over here yet, but I wouldn’t bet against them.

From the time of Versus The World on, Amon Amarth were honestly one of my favorite bands. I bought their albums With Oden On Our Side, Fate Of Norns, Surtur Rising, Deceiver Of The Gods, and Jomsviking as soon as they were announced. Amon Amarth was a brand I could trust. (Their 2008 album Twilight Of The Thunder God, one of their best releases, was released while I was the editor of Metal Edge magazine; several members of the group came by the office to promote it, so my copy is signed.)

They do basically one thing, and when they’re really dialed in, they’re the best on Earth at that one thing. All their songs are fist-pumping, hard-riffing metal anthems, set to a simple, pounding beat (they’re often described as death metal, but they don’t blast), with lyrics about Norse mythology and being a Viking warrior. Sometimes they get goofy — their 2022 album The Great Heathen Army has a song about a mythical goat — but other songs are surprisingly introspective, taking the listener deep inside the warrior’s mind and grappling with existential dread and despair.

And then they stumbled. Their 2019 album, Berserker, was the first one I didn’t buy a physical copy of. I downloaded the promo from the label, listened to it, and thought… Eh. It’s an Amon Amarth album. It’s fine. And when I saw them on tour that year, they played some songs from it, which fit into the set perfectly well, but I was really there for the old stuff. I still wanted to hear “Death In Fire.”

Their 2022 album, The Great Heathen Army, was an even bigger stumble. The first single was “Get In The Ring.” Watch the video.

What the fuck is that, I ask you? Quonset huts? Jeeps? Guns? What does any of this have to do with being a Viking? This (video and lyrics) is some Five Finger Death Punch-ass bullshit. And the rest of the album, while mostly sticking to their tried and true subject matter, just felt rote and unimaginative. I didn’t buy that one, either. Frankly, I was starting to lose interest in Amon Amarth entirely.

Well, my interest was rekindled about a year ago, when the song “We Rule the Waves” came out. Here’s the video:

Now that’s the old-school Amon Amarth I once loved. A big, dumb, chant-along song about being a Viking. No modern affectations in the video, pure cosplay. I’m sure it goes over huge at their shows.

Now, they’ve got a full album, The Allfather Awakens, coming out on Friday. The promo arrived in my inbox last week. They’ve made two other videos so far, for the opening track, “Gjällarhorn,” and “Eight Legs of Thunder.” Unfortunately, the latter is another attempt to modernize their image — with the horses, guns, and pickup trucks, it comes off like they’re hoping for a cameo on a Taylor Sheridan TV show. The song’s good, though.

And that’s the thing about the new album. They’ve written some genuinely good songs this time out, ones that sit among the best in their catalog, in fact. And they’ve experimented with some new ideas — “Upphaf” is an acoustic number, with female vocal harmonies, and it works really well. (It would have worked better if Hegg had sung it in a clean baritone; speak-singing the lyrics in his usual growl just makes him sound more like Cookie Monster than ever.) Some songs are slower, heavier, and doomier than usual; “Die With a War Cry” is pure punch-a-stranger-in-the-face. Others are faster and more aggressive than usual; “Oden’s Hunt” is practically thrash, absolutely charging along. And the last track, the nearly seven-minute “Ascending Like an Eagle,” is as epic and thrilling as its title. Track for track, this might be their best album since Twilight Of The Thunder God.

Earlier this year, Amon Amarth toured the US with what’s currently being passed off as Pantera. My brother went to see them in, I think, Maryland, and bought me a T-shirt. If The Allfather Awakens had sucked, I might have felt weird about wearing it. But I am fully back on board the Amon Amarth longship. And if you’ve never listened to them before, this album will make an excellent entry point.

Supplemental reading:

Daniel Ekeroth, Swedish Death Metal (Bazillion Points, 2006)

Robert Ferguson, The Vikings: A History (Viking Penguin, 2009)

Neil Price, Children Of Ash And Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020)

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers Of The Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (W.W. Norton, 2024)

Before any of these artists emerged on the scene, though, there was Jin Hi Kim. A composer and master of the komungo, Kim studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and Mills College, currently teaches at Wesleyan University, and has won a Guggenheim fellowship, written for the Kronos Quartet, and accomplished far too much to list here. She’s major.

She has recently released a 9CD box, simply titled The Jin Hi Kim Collection, offering five CDs’ worth of her composed music, performed by various ensembles, including the Kronos Quartet, the Sirius String Quartet, the Either/Or Ensemble, and more; and four CDs of her improvising encounters with luminaries of the avant-garde jazz and free music scenes, including guitarists Derek Bailey, Bill Frisell, Henry Kaiser, Hans Reichel, and Elliott Sharp; percussionists Gerry Hemingway, Susie Ibarra, and Tony Oxley; saxophonist Oliver Lake; bassist William Parker; and many others.

There is a lot of music here — nearly nine hours’ worth, more than 50 tracks. And astonishingly, because it’s created as an educational archive, it’s available for free/name your price download via Neuma Records’ Bandcamp page, and you can get a physical version for $1 plus shipping. Below, I’m going to talk about five tracks that particularly stuck out for me.

Eternal Rock is a piece for komungo and orchestra, performed by Kim and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York on March 18, 2001, with Dante Anzolini conducting. It’s a heavy piece, somewhat “traditionally” avant-garde, with powerful percussive accents and horn fanfares that remind me of Schoenberg, Thorvaldsdottir, and Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack to Planet Of The Apes. Kim’s komungo doesn’t dominate the music; it’s an element within the larger piece, sometimes functioning rhythmically, which is pretty fascinating.

Nori is a piece written for the ensemble Zeitgeist (Pat O’Keefe on clarinet, Susan Billmeyer on synths, Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd on percussion) and Kim on electric komungo; it was recorded at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN on June 1, 2002. Again, there’s lots of percussion, playing patterns that sound to me derived from Korean music, but occasionally adding a slight sense of swing, and the electric komungo creates an eerie effect; every note seems bent. The synthesizer is an incongruous element, like something from a low-budget horror movie or video game soundtrack. But the interaction between Kim, O’Keefe and the percussionists is suspenseful and fascinating.

“Circle of Time” is a duo improvisation featuring Kim on electric komungo and janggu and Susie Ibarra on kulintang and percussion, performed as part of the Asian Sound Revolution Concert in Chicago on October 13, 2024. Ibarra has spent many years creating her own musical language that blends jazz, Filipino music, field recordings and environmental sounds, and extended percussion techniques. Here, she’s playing a jazz drum kit and a few other instruments, and Kim starts out on the electric komungo, but for most of the piece is playing the janggu, a double-headed, hourglass-shaped Korean drum. The dialogue between the drums is intense and almost ritualistic.

“Companies” is a trio performance by Kim (on electric komungo), Derek Bailey (electric guitar), and Tony Oxley (percussion) from Company Week in London, July 22, 1992. Bailey’s scratching, pinging approach to the guitar complements Kim’s twanging, groaning electric komungo very well, and Oxley sounds like he understands the role of percussion in Korean ritual music, whether he ever studied it or not. This is the sound of two people who know each other pretty well already figuring out how to best support a newcomer, and everyone sounds excited by the opportunity.

“Quagmire” features Kim on komungo, Oliver Lake on flute and saxophone, and William Parker on bass. It was recorded in concert in Buffalo, NY on September 29, 2000. With no percussion instrument present, this is a quiet and thoughtful three-way interaction; Parker in particular seems subdued and supportive, while Lake takes the lead in a somewhat conventionally out-jazz manner. He’s listening to what Kim is doing, but seems to view her as an accompanist, exploring the limits of the alto saxophone’s range in an almost Roscoe Mitchell-ish manner as Kim and Parker strum and throb along behind him. I wonder what might have happened if he had decided to support her, perhaps with long tones as she went off on high-energy runs.

These are just five examples of the wide range of music on this box. Jin Hi Kim is a fascinating artist whose work merits immersion, and a nine-CD set is a pretty good start. And at that price, how can you say no?

As he explained in an interview with his friend (and noted hip-hop journalist) Jeff Chang for The Believer: “People always ask whether I’ll make another album like Endtroducing, but it was always intended as an ending — it was exactly what I wanted to do at the time, so why would I do it again?”

He elaborated on the point in a 2012 interview with Lainna Fader from XLR8R, saying, “I felt like I was on to something when I was doing ‘In/Flux,’ my first single for Mo’ Wax, ‘Lost and Found,’ my second single, and the What Does Your Soul Look Like EP. All of that preceded Endtroducing….., and the reason why it’s spelled with an ‘E-N-D’ is because it signified the fourth and final chapter in a series of pieces that I was doing for Mo’ Wax with a certain sound, a certain tone, a certain atmosphere. And I feel like my work really changed after that. It was the summary of this sound, and [the album] wrapped up the series. I had this vision at the time that every album I did after that would be completely different, and that’s something I’ve been trying to be adamant about — maintaining that autonomy from record to record.”

“In/Flux” (originally credited to DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers) is a 12-minute excursion over a simple, looped beat; there’s some halfway virtuosic scratching, a few melodic samples, and a ton of vocal samples from here and there. It reminds me of the Coldcut remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” but slower — many people call it a key early example of trip-hop. “Hindsight” is less of the same. “Lost and Found” is a 10-minute track released on a split 12” with DJ Krush. There are fewer samples, they’re looped more frequently, and there’s more scratching. These three tracks are all versions of one idea; they’re the sound of Shadow finding his voice.

What Does Your Soul Look Like represents a breakthrough. A 32-minute, four-track EP, he’s said that it was originally meant to be the first half of his debut album, but then Mo’Wax label head James Lavelle decided to release it as an EP, forcing him to start over. The four sections of “What Does Your Soul Look Like” (which run out of sequence, 2-3-4-1) are a long and patient journey, groove and atmosphere blending together to create a kind of lucid dream state in which lines of movie dialogue float past, shadowed (no pun intended) by saxophones, flutes, guitars, choral voices, and more. The music is deceptively simple, lulling you into a trance that makes you receptive to a message, and gradually convinced you’re receiving one. But it’s also more lush and arranged/orchestrated than anything before it, and lays the groundwork for what was to come on Endtroducing.

There are absolutely no live instruments on the album. Everything is sampled from somewhere — sometimes incredibly obscure records, sometimes well-known ones (there are snippets of Björk, Tangerine Dream, and Metallica buried in there) — as well as the eerie monologues from the 1987 John Carpenter movie Prince Of Darkness.

In a 1996 interview with Tape Op, Shadow told Eric Stenman, “I grew up on sample-based music. Breakbeats are the foundation of what I do. I like the fact that, even though it doesn’t always sound the greatest, someone could go out and find the beats. They are out there. Everything I use can be found somewhere else if you look hard enough. I think that makes it very interesting. I love finding other people’s samples. It’s great to not only find the sample but then to also see how it was used. It’s great when people aren’t lazy and take the sample as a whole. I like it when people chop up stuff and flip it around.”

Describing his equipment, he said, “Mainly, I just use an Akai MPC-3000… When I first started using my MPC-60 Mach II back in early ’92 it was so new. No one was using them. Everyone was still so SP-1200, SP-1200, SP-1200. Now, it’s time for something new. I think that when you change your instrument, you change your sound. But, I still want to keep it simple… My home studio would still fit on a dinner table. Turntables and my 3000.” He added, “Endtroducing was recorded to ADAT because that was all that we could afford back then.”

In a 1997 conversation with Greg Rule for Keyboard magazine, he said, “There are lots of overdubs on the album, as well. But all the record was 100% sample- or vinyl-based. All the sampling was done on the MPC. It all went straight from turntable to the MPC to tape. And any other things you hear were done straight off the turntable, pitched in. Like, if a song is in a certain key, and I overdub a string bit, I have to manipulate the pitch control on the turntable until it works.”

He described sampling not just loops, but individual drum hits and even the “air” on a record, the soft hiss and crackle of the space between sounds, and using that to construct entirely new beats that nonetheless sounded organic and smooth. “That way I can reconstruct the beat from the record for some bars, but then I can create new beats for others. The big tip I learned on the MPC is about the fade function. I never like my chops to sound really choppy, unless they’re intentionally supposed to be choppy, if you get my drift, like in a jungly kind of way… If it [the drum pattern] sounds complex, it’s supposed to. I want people to get the impression that I spent a lot of time on every detail of the samples. I treat the sampler the way some people treat the electric guitar or a drum kit. I want to be the best at it.”

The finished album is an absolutely stunning work of audio collage. It begins with a jump-cutting 46-second mix of scratching and braggadocious samples, before the first full track, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt,” kicks off. That piece blends piano, a big beat, and a wordless female voice with the sound of a man describing his own progress as a musician (“I’m a student of the drums… but I’m also a teacher of the drums”), a woman talking about astrology, and more. Shadow’s ability to finely chop sampled drum breaks is demonstrated by his creation of what sounds for all the world like a drum solo, but it’s clearly been played on the pads of the MPC-3000.

Over the course of its 63-minute running time, Endtroducing….. jumps back and forth between moody, midtempo pieces like “Building Steam…” and “Changeling” and more aggressive, pounding tracks like “The Number Song” and “Mutual Slump.” Three tracks simply labeled “Transmission” 1, 2 and 3 borrow the aforementioned creepy voice from Prince Of Darkness. Two tracks from What Does Your Soul Look Like are repurposed on the album; we get a shortened version of “Part 4” about a third of the way through the record, and its final full track is a “Blue Sky Revisit” of “Part 1.” One of my favorite tracks, though, is the under-two-minute “Organ Donor,” on which he chops up an organ solo into a lunatic eruption.

This album transcends categories. It’s not just a collection of hip-hop instrumentals, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone rapping over these tracks. But to suggest that it “elevates” hip-hop and sampling to the level of high art would imply that such “elevation” was necessary, which is obviously a bunch of classist bullshit. I would compare Endtroducing….. to an album like Larry Young’s Unity, which was simultaneously a brilliant work of avant-garde jazz and an organ trio record like a thousand others. It’s a demonstration of what can be done within a seemingly defined and limited form… if you’re a genius. And it’s utterly timeless; it sounds as stunning today as it did the day it came out. If you’ve never heard it before, I envy you.

DJ Shadow will be performing a live set based entirely on Endtroducing….. on tour beginning later this month.

I wrote about late Coltrane for the Brooklyn Rail, a piece which has generated some heat, particularly on Facebook, where people go to share their most conservative takes on art. Anyway…

Coltrane’s former record label, Impulse!, is focusing their centennial product rollout around The Tiberi Tapes, a collection of amateur recordings made in the early 1960s in New York and Philadelphia nightclubs by obsessive fan (and fellow saxophonist) Frank Tiberi. It’ll be released later in the year, and I may have more to say about it at that time.

The Tiberi Tapes is far from the first unofficial John Coltrane recording to be made available by Impulse!, though. Over the last 25 years, there’s been a string of these releases, and while the playing is always at a high level, the quality of the recordings and the intense, unforgiving nature of much of the material makes them some of the most alienating, for-diehards-only music in his catalog. So let’s talk about which ones the merely Coltrane-curious might actually want to hear.

The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording, released in 2001, was recorded on April 23, 1967 in New York, roughly three months before Coltrane’s death from liver cancer on July 17. It featured his final group — Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums — joined by percussionist Jumma Santos and bata drummer Algie DeWitt. They play two numbers, a 29-minute “Ogunde” and a 35-minute “My Favorite Things.” This is a crude recording, made at Coltrane’s behest by an engineer he knew. Sonically, it’s a blown-out, distorted mess, and to my ear it has little to recommend it unless you’re a total free squall diehard. The studio version of “Ogunde,” released on Expression, is a beautiful three-minute ballad. Stretched to ten times its length, and sounding like it’s coming from a malfunctioning public address speaker… no thanks.

Four years later, One Down, One Up (Live At The Half Note) arrived. It featured recordings from March and May 1965 by Coltrane’s “classic quartet” of pianist McCoy Tyner, Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. The music had been taped by DJ Alan Grant of New York radio station WABC, and copies of the recordings sat in Coltrane’s personal collection until his son Ravi rescued them and got Impulse! to put together a 2CD set. Because they were recorded professionally, for broadcast, the sound quality is excellent, even if the first disc does begin with Grant announcing the performers over a Garrison bass solo already in progress. The subsequent title piece, nearly 28 minutes long, is one of the best live Coltrane performances ever captured, full of the lyricism and passion of his best work. After this, he would dive headlong into the high-intensity free blowing of his final years, but if you’re a fan of his work from My Favorite Things through A Love Supreme, this set is worth checking out.

Offering: Live At Temple University, released in 2014, was another glorified bootleg, recorded with a single microphone planted center stage. It was recorded November 11, 1966 and features Sanders, Alice Coltrane on piano, Sonny Johnson on bass, Ali on drums, and a slew of guests: Algie DeWitt on bata drum, three conga players (Umar Ali, Charles Brown, and Robert Kenyatta), and two local alto saxophonists, Arnold Joyner and Steve Knoblauch, both of whom just asked to sit in. It’s not quite as badly recorded as The Olatunji Concert, but it’s close; the sound is relatively clear, but Coltrane, Sanders, and the drummers are the only audible players 90 percent of the time, and if you’re someone who believes Coltrane lost his way, creatively speaking, after 1965, the performances here will support your position. They are blowing hard, and there’s almost nothing conventionally beautiful about it. The 21-minute version of “Leo,” which has the feel of a vodou ritual, especially when Coltrane begins vocalizing, is of some interest, but still… enter at your own risk.

A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, released in 2021, is a pretty amazing discovery. Recorded October 1, 1965, the night after a flame-throwing show captured on the Live In Seattle double LP, it’s only the second known live recording of Coltrane’s most famous work, the other having been taped in France a few months earlier, with only the quartet that made the studio album onstage. This features an expanded ensemble — the quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, plus Sanders, alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, and second bassist Donald Rafael Garrett — and together, they stretch ALS out to over 75 minutes, expanding its four movements and breaking them up with several improvisatory interludes. It’s quite well recorded, and the music is brilliant. The way they segue from the sections of ALS into the more exploratory passages, then bring it back in and keep the piece flowing, is fantastic. I like this even better than the French performance, which is now available on the 2CD ALS deluxe edition.

Evenings At The Village Gate, recorded in 1961 and released in 2023, is co-credited to Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and also features Tyner, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and Jones. It was recorded on a single microphone dangling over the stage, so like Offering, it’s in mono, and Jones’ drums are the loudest element in the mix, with Coltrane’s saxophone sounding surprisingly subdued, Dolphy only slightly more present, and the piano seeming to drift in from far away. It’s all really good, but the obvious highlights are tracks that can’t be heard on multiple other Coltrane live albums, like a version of the standard “When Lights Are Low” and a 22-minute “Africa,” only recently recorded for the Africa/Brass album and featuring an extended pas de deux between Workman and Davis. This music was recorded during an era when Coltrane was reaching the first in a series of artistic peaks, and it’s quite beautiful despite the sonic limitations.

I love a lot of John Coltrane’s music, from all his various eras. But I do not put bootleg recordings on the same level as finished, polished studio albums (or professional live albums). None of the albums I have discussed in this essay will ever replace A Love Supreme, Crescent, Meditations, Soultrane, Traneing In, or Settin’ The Pace for me.

(There is one recently unearthed, and somewhat overlooked, Coltrane collection I can wholeheartedly endorse: Blue World, a 2019 release of a 1964 studio session on which the quartet performed new versions of older tunes like “Naima,” “Like Sonny,” and “Traneing In.” It’s great.)

Worse, the proliferation of crude live recordings like these has two potentially negative effects: It risks distracting the new listener from genuinely important works that should be heard first, and it risks turning John Coltrane into a subject for study, rather than a musician whose work can be listened to by normal people for entertainment. So as good as some of the albums reviewed above are, if you’re new to or curious about Coltrane’s music, my advice is to avoid all of them, at least until you’ve checked out the canonical works. Once you’ve done that, by all means dive deeper. But none of the records here should be anyone’s starting point.

Assimilated Transdimensionalization is a solo project of Tisza Kara of Budapest, Hungary. To date, he’s released four EPs — Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine, Neuroflesh Incubation Through Cosmic Machinery, and Cosmic Erasure Of Biogenesis — and one full-length album, Neuroforged In The Womb Of Wires. His latest release is Exo-Cognitive Matrix, a four-song EP.

All of this music has been released in less than two years, so there’s not that much stylistic evolution to be heard. The Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine EP lays out the template, which is basically chugging, technically complex death metal that reminds me of Wormed or Defeated Sanity. Kara is a really good drummer and bassist, and a competent guitarist. There are occasional jazzy bass passages, but no squiggly guitar solos, just riffs. So many riffs. I like the fact that the snare drum sounds like a snare drum, and not like a metal ring being hit with a hammer. There are a few quiet moments here and there, where Kara actually lets the atmosphere breathe, instead of hitting you with a dialogue sample from some horror movie, and he’s got one production trick I really like where everything drops out except the guitar, and that’s muffled like it’s coming through the wall from your neighbor’s apartment.

The muffled-guitar trick is absent on the new EP, which is unfortunate, but the vocals are great, a mixture of guttural demonic roars and anguished screams, and there are some other interesting touches, like a robotic voice reciting… something… in Hungarian. The whole thing blasts by in just 10 minutes — if you buy the entire Assimilated Transdimensionalization catalog on Bandcamp, like I did, you could fit it all on a single CD.

Organist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein, and drummer Bill Stewart have been making music together for 35 years. I believe their first album was Intimacy Of The Blues, released on the Minor Music label in 1991 as the Larry Goldings Trio, with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman guesting on three tracks. They’ve also recorded under Bernstein’s name, and served as a backing band for other artists. But somewhere around 15 years ago, they started billing themselves under all three of their names. Anyway, Rhombus is their six hundredth album or so, and it’s a collection of nice, pretty tunes, some of which you may recognize. They play Keith Jarrett’s “Everything That Lives, Laments,” Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly,” Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope,” Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mamma,” along with two original compositions. Everybody plays clean, and nobody lurches sideways into free jazz or psychedelic rock, though Goldings’ “Rhombus” gets close. It almost sounds like a Doors instrumental, or some of John Zorn’s recent music for organ trio, so of course it’s the shortest piece on the record. There are a few unexpected bursts of energy from Stewart on the Irving Berlin number, too. It probably seems like I’m dismissing this record, but look up at the title of this newsletter again. This is an album you need to hear, because these three men know each other like brothers, and they do their collective thing brilliantly. They’ve chosen tunes that allow each person room to make a statement without Making a Statement, and sequenced them in a way that flows. It’s an album that understands how albums work. It’s one of the best examples of craft I’ve heard all year. And it snuck up on me; I didn’t decide to share it with you until I’d heard it three times.

Alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill loved writing for saxophone quartet, and later for saxophone sextet, occasionally adding flutes and clarinets to ensembles as needed. He co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with fellow members of the Black Artist Group (BAG) Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake, plus David Murray. After leaving the WSQ, he formed his own ensembles and continued to perform saxophone choir music. On this 2CD set, Marty Ehrlich — who played on the Julius Hemphill Sextet albums Fat Man And The Hard Blues and Five Chord Stud — has assembled a pool of players including Allan Chase, Rob DeBellis, Brian Landrus, Andy Laster, Jeff Lederer, Lisa Parrott, and Jason Robinson to record all 40 of Hemphill’s saxophone quartet compositions. And they are absolutely compositions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (OK, some of them fade out). The harmonies are stacked up beautifully, with Ellingtonian lushness and string quartet gravitas. There are solos, but they’re not the point — the orchestrations and conversations between horns are the point. Indeed, 11 of these pieces are under two minutes long; they’re intended as statements, potent and precise. At the same time, put a swinging drummer underneath these pieces and you’d have the whole room dancing.

I know – and you may know – Lesley Mok as a jazz drummer: a member of pianist Myra Melford’s Fire And Water Quintet, whose next album Sure Grand Out is arriving this month, who appeared on Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, and made a terrific album, A Reflection Distorts Over Water, with saxophonist Camila Nebbia and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Mok’s first album as a leader, 2023’s The Living Collection, had horns, strings, and electronics. Transient, on the other hand, is an almost entirely electronic effort. Yes, it features live drums, most obviously on “in the funhouse,” but they seem to be used as source material more than anything else. They’re often surrounded by electronic patterns, reshaped by studio effects, and otherwise disguised or downplayed. When I listen to this album, particularly on speakers (as opposed to headphones, which is my usual listening practice), I’m reminded of Autechre, but also of early Tangerine Dream and even of ultra-minimalist early 2000s works by electronic music artists like Bernhard Günter, Sogar, Taylor Deupree and Motion. I’m particularly impressed by the deep but precise low-end pulses on “midland.”

Sulida is a Norwegian trio — Marthe Lea on tenor sax, flute and percussion; Jon Rune Strøm on bass; Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums — whose debut album, Utos, was released on the recently shuttered Clean Feed label in 2024. The following year, they played a concert with trumpeter Axel Dörner, which has now been released as Etiwe. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in; I had this idea of Dörner in particular as a “lowercase” improviser, the kind of guy who makes very soft hissing and kissing noises into the trumpet rather than, you know, playing music through it. But this is very definitely a type of free jazz, one that reminds me at certain points of Other Dimensions In Music, at others of Irreversible Entanglements, and at others of the work of Don Cherry, whether with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, with Sonny Rollins, or with his own groups in Scandinavia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Dörner fits right in with the ensemble, never feeling like a “special guest” or like he’s being deferred to. Strøm and Andersen are an excellent team, creating forward momentum without “swinging” in the conventional sense, as the horns carry on intriguing conversations. And when Lea begins to sing, Dörner is a friendly shadow/interlocutor, spurring her on.

In the modern era, the Bad Plus built a sizable audience with covers of rock and pop songs by Black Sabbath, Blondie, David Bowie, Nirvana, Pixies, Rush, and many more. Brad Mehldau has recorded songs by Paul Simon, Radiohead, and Nick Drake, among others. And coming at it from the opposite direction, Adam Wakeman (son of Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman and a touring member of both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band) has created Jazz Sabbath to perform piano trio versions of Black Sabbath songs.

Ulysses Owens Jr. is a jazz drummer and a professor at Juilliard. He’s released several albums on his own, and has recorded as a sideman in multiple contexts, working frequently with trombonist Michael Dease and bassist Christian McBride. A couple of years ago, he appeared on the Drumeo YouTube channel, where drummers are played a song they’ve never heard before, with the drum track removed, and asked to come up with a drum part on the spot. They gave him Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and this was the result:

Owens currently leads a band, Generation Y, composed of musicians he’s worked with at Juilliard and in other educational contexts. He’s attempting to shape and foster them in the way bandleaders like Art Blakey and Betty Carter did for decades, scouting talent and giving them room to run.

The first Generation Y album, A New Beat, was recorded in the Rudy Van Gelder studio in New Jersey (but with a live audience present) in 2023; it features Sarah Hanahan and Erena Terakubo on alto saxes; Benny Benack III and Anthony Hervey on trumpets; Luther Allison and Tyler Bullock on piano; Philip Norris and Ryoma Takenaga on bass; and singer Milton Suggs on one track. They play a few originals (one each by Hervey, Allison and Benack) alongside lesser-known pieces by Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, Roy Hargrove, Louis Armstrong, Luther Allison, Ray Bryant and George Cables.

A New Beat is a good student album. It feels like a final exam (it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the live audience was made up of the bandmembers’ parents), and heard from that perspective it’s perfectly fine. Everybody demonstrates skill and knowledge of the material, and nobody goes off track. (Suggs’ vocal on the Louis Armstrong tune “Heart Full of Rhythm” is the one weak point; he sounds like a Broadway singer, not a jazz singer.) And look, jazz is hard music to play well. So these musicians are to be congratulated on their ability to execute at this level. And Owens understands his assignment, too. He spurs the band on without ever steamrolling them or pushing them beyond their comfort level; he’s a good leader who inspires the musicians in front of him.

On the second Generation Y album, 2025’s Around The World With U, Hanahan, Allison and Benack had embarked on solo careers, so the lineup solidified around Terakubo, Hervey, Bullock and new bassist Yasushi Nakamura, with trombonist Nanami Haruta appearing on two tracks. This time, Bullock, Terakubo, Nakamura, and Haruta brought in compositions, which were recorded alongside pieces by Dizzy Gillespie, Cedar Walton, Hoagy Carmichael, and a version of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.”

Around The World was recorded after the group had been out on the road, developing the kind of rapport and collective sound that only live performance can inspire. As a result, it’s a more exciting album and one that takes the ensemble beyond “student recital” to “actual band.” Hervey’s trumpet solos in particular leap out — he’s a fleet, lyrical player with a willingness to take a line to unexpected places at times. The version of “Espresso” is more than a novelty; through deft arrangement of the vocal melody, turning it into a conversation between the horns over a dancing swing rhythm, they render the song unrecognizable (in the sense that you don’t sit there the whole time thinking, This is that Sabrina Carpenter song) but create something that’s very enjoyable on its own. “Morning Prayer,” Nakamura’s piece, has some of the contemplative abstraction of the 1960s Miles Davis quintet, and the closing version of Cedar Walton’s “I’m Not So Sure” is a high-energy blowout. On this album, Owens’ role and playing have shifted. He’s no longer an instructor leading his students through a program of material; he’s a race car driver, keenly aware of what his machine can do and pushing it to its limits.

So what’s all this got to do with musical exchanges between jazz and rock? Well, a year or so after the Drumeo video above, Owens and Generation Y were invited into their studio and challenged to create a spontaneous arrangement of another Nirvana song, “Heart Shaped Box”:

That in turn inspired the third Generation Y album, which came out August 14. It’s called Kind Of Grunge, and it’s entirely made up of jazz interpretations of songs by ’90s rock bands. The band’s lineup has shifted again; it now includes Benack on trumpet again, Langston Hughes II on alto saxophone, Bullock on piano, Dan Wilson on guitar and percussion, and Thomas Milovac on bass. Together they essay songs by Mudhoney, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Hole, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Smashing Pumpkins, and Stone Temple Pilots.

This is obviously bait for a guy like me. I saw Mudhoney live in 1989, and TAD in 1990. (TAD were such a great band.) I never got to see Soundgarden live, to my eternal regret, but Badmotorfinger is one of my favorite albums ever. (I was never a Nirvana fan, though.) And even the songs on this record I don’t actually like, I’m very familiar with from the radio. (Shout out to NJ hard rock/metal station WSOU.) So yeah, I was intrigued, and I bought the album out of genuine curiosity.

You can take this as criticism or praise, or just description: the songs are mostly unrecognizable. A lot of them didn’t have very complex forms to begin with — they’re basically a simple verse melody sung over a repeated guitar riff, followed by a chorus melody sung over an even simpler repeated guitar riff. Some of them don’t even have a bridge. That doesn’t give a jazz arranger a whole lot to work with. And the musicians were being asked to create their interpretations on the spot, like they’d done in the video before. So the members of Generation Y largely fall back on jazz methodology, hanging onto the melody and chord changes and just using those to construct an entirely new piece.

Some of the resulting pieces are quite good. Their version of Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” goes Latin jazz halfway through, without warning, and/but it works. Their take on Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” has a New Orleans feel that reminds me of similar pieces by Wynton Marsalis from the Live At The Village Vanguard box set, and yes, I mean that as a compliment. Others are impressive when taken on their own, but I find it just a little too hard to connect them to the original song. For example, I think Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” is one of the greatest songs ever. I wrote a whole piece about it for Stereogum. But Generation Y’s version has nothing to do with that song; it’s a post-bop burner that exists on its own merits, demonstrating jazz virtuosity (in contrast to the anti-virtuosity of the original). Similarly, their take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounds more like Steely Dan. Which is fine. Their Brazilian-style version of “In Bloom” is better. And their reggae-fied version of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” will remind you that the Skatalites were a jazz band.

Owens’ Generation Y project is a valuable one. Jazz needs more artists willing to make an artistic project out of mentorship. I’m gonna be interested to see how long he keeps this going, and I’ll continue listening.

Pussy Galore were one of the best bands of the ’80s. Their relatively compact discography of four EPs (Feel Good About Your Body, Pussy Gold 5000, Groovy Hate Fuck, SugarShit Sharp) and three studio albums (Right Now!, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, Historia De La Musica Rock), plus a couple of live recordings and scattered singles, was a remarkable journey from utterly ramshackle noise to a skillfully crafted mix of punk rock, hip-hop, and industrial clatter… disguised as ramshackle noise. They were smarter than anyone gave them credit for being, and a genuinely exciting live act. (I saw them in summer 1989, on their final US tour.)

The key to the whole thing was the (creative) relationship between the two guitarist/vocalists, Jon Spencer and Julia Cafritz. They met as students at Brown University, and were both just 20 when the band formed in Washington, DC. As Spencer recalled in a 2022 interview, “I was playing in a very straight ’60s garage punk group playing bass guitar and then also at the same time playing in a totally abrasive, totally out there industrial noise group, and in that band I was playing a mixture of drums and percussion, and I was doing both things at the same time. When I finally started my own band with Pussy Galore, on a surface level it was combining those two strains.” Interestingly, that garage punk group was called Pussy Galore; Spencer took possession of the name (with its founder’s permission) at Cafritz’s urging.

(This interview with Cafritz offers a ton of detail about how the band formed and its early years.)

On the group’s first release, 1985’s Feel Good About Your Body, they were a trio: Spencer, Cafritz, and percussionist John Hammill. The EP began with a noisy punk song, “Die Bitch,” then swerved through a number of tangents: “HC Rebellion,” on which Cafritz read letters to the hardcore zine Maximumrocknroll over a repetitive guitar melody; “Constant Pain,” a minimalist guitar noise-over-metal percussion rant; and “Car Fantasy,” a crawling, doomy feedback storm over which Spencer groaned and wailed like Michael Gira of Swans.

Before leaving Washington, DC, Spencer, Cafritz, Hammill and fellow percussionist Rick Hall recorded the seven-track Groovy Hate Fuck EP, a deliberately offensive collection of short, noisy outbursts. (“You Look Like A Jew” was his dismissal of Dischord Records bands and their close-cropped hair.) There was always an element of self-subversion, though; “Cunt Tease” allows Cafritz to counter Spencer’s parodic sexual braggadocio, ending each chorus with a screamed “Fuck you!” and delivering a wrathful, dismissive tirade mid-song.

The dynamic between them, particularly onstage, was fascinating. Cafritz, by her own admission, was musically inept, but the sheer force of her personality made her vital to the entire operation, both onstage and off. As she says in the interview linked above,

“I think that in terms of the image that I projected, that was actually… fueled by something real, in terms of… a real desire, let’s put it this way, to somehow assert myself in an arena that I didn’t really feel like I belonged in. But if I was going to belong in, I wanted to do something well. Consequently, I think between the fact that I was basically just screaming rage-filled insults at men all from stage, and the fact that I was smoking four packs a day, and dressed in black, and — probably sort of the quicker person. I mean, Jon is insanely smart… but he doesn’t like to talk. And so if anybody wanted to talk, they had to talk to me. Because Jon’s very polite, but he can’t — he doesn’t really want to form sentences. (laughs)Or he didn’t back then. And so I could sort of dominate in that way.”

In summer 1986, Spencer and Cafritz moved to New York, where they made friends quickly on the CBGB scene. In Kim Gordon’s autobiography, Girl In A Band, she writes, “Julie Cafritz is one of the funniest people I know, under-acknowledged as an indie rock ‘girl’ guitar player and singer-goddess. When Julie and I first met years earlier, her band Pussy Galore had just moved to New York and was looking for a drummer. I introduced her to Bob Bert, who had just quit Sonic Youth and seemed perfect for them. Julie and her bandmate Jon Spencer were slightly scary, I remember, all black clothes with tons of ’tude.”

In addition to Bert, who, despite being a decade older than the two transplants, was ready to rock, they added two more guitarists, Neil Hagerty and Cristina Martinez. Bert’s arrival solidified the PG sound: he was a good, heavy backbeat drummer, but (at Spencer’s insistence) he replaced his snare drum with a car’s gas tank, giving their rock ’n’ roll a literal junkyard feel. Together, they came up with a brilliantly hilarious idea. As Bert recalled it in a recent interview,

“At the time, Sonic Youth was mouthing off to the press about recording their version of the Beatles’ White Album — of course, it never happened. I think we got through ‘Back in the USSR’ at a rehearsal, that was it. So when I joined Pussy Galore, Jon said to me, ‘In response to that, we should do a version of Exile On Main St. by the Stones.’ I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, it’s a much better record anyway.’ We recorded that in some old school room on a beat up 8-track cassette recorder.”

Pussy Galore’s Exile On Main St. was recorded 40 years ago this month, on August 24-26, 1986. It’s a brilliant idea — a totemic album controversial in the context of its makers’ own career, revived/desecrated by a new generation — and the execution is astonishing.

If it was just a collection of raw, one-take Rolling Stones covers, it wouldn’t be very interesting at all. But Spencer’s always been an underrated musical conceptualist, and there are a whole lot of ideas at work here, manifested through very careful manipulation and assembly of sounds. Yes, the band, which again consisted of four guitarists and a drummer/junk percussionist, bash through the songs, turning the basic rock riffs into mind-warping mantras (often because the guitars were cheap, shitty and out of tune, and playing through equally cheap and shitty amps), but the recordings are extensively manipulated after the fact.

The whole thing begins with Cafritz ranting into the recorder: “Hello, I hate your fucking guts. Fuck you, I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate this fucking machine. I don’t know how the fuck to use it. I hate your fucking guts. I’m gonna make my own fucking music.” The first song, “Rocks Off,” begins, and you can immediately tell that Spencer and Hagerty — who are singing the vocals as one, in rough harmony, over an energetic beat from Bert — are making a serious effort at playing the song, while Cafritz (still barely able to play guitar) adds a one-note line in the middle of the music and Martinez does something similar. But when Cafritz takes the microphone on the second song, a blasting version of “Rip This Joint,” her performance is pure fire-spitting energy, matched by an atonal, clanging solo from (probably) Hagerty.

Every song on the tape is a mix of earnest effort and chaotic subversion. There’s always a steady core (usually Bert’s clattering backbeat and Spencer’s and Hagerty’s guitars), but there’s also always at least one element sliding sideways, whether it’s an unexpected burst of amp noise, a discordant sliding chord, or a rudely shouted vocal interjection. And that’s before we even talk about the post-production work done to the tapes. We hear between-song dialogue (including an enraged Spencer screaming at someone), snippets of the actual Rolling Stones, bursts of static and changing radio stations, and electronic humming from poorly aligned microphones; portions of songs are rewound and played back again; at a few points, the band is singing over the original record… also, the record has a conceptual flow. The first few songs are the most coherent and reverent to the originals, despite possessing a raucous punk energy; by “Shine A Light,” we’re in the realm of almost pure abstraction, a half-heard vocal submerged in electronic drones like something from a Throbbing Gristle live tape, and it ends with a loop of Lou Reed singing the word “Heroin” from The Velvet Underground & Nico. But the closing version of “Soul Survivor” is one of the best and most straightforward performances on the whole thing… until the tape begins to warp and slow down to half speed, looping the last chorus into a doomy groan as whooping, sirenlike sound effects and washes of static and noise take over. Finally, we’re back to Julie Cafritz screaming “I wanna fuck you!” over and over until it all ends with tape slice.

In a 1987 fanzine interview, Spencer said, “The Exile thing, to come right out and say it, is kind of a joke…” He explained the Sonic Youth/Beatles story, then added, “It’s not really a joke, and it’s not the greatest thing — parts of it kind of suck — but it’s okay. The cover’s real cool. Rick Hall, Julie’s boyfriend, did that.”

The band released Exile as a limited edition of 550 cassettes; obviously, no label would ever release such a thing. But it was instantly notorious, and raised their profile on the scene substantially. A month later, they recorded Pussy Gold 5000, a five-track EP full of short, sex-charged punk tracks (“Pretty Fuck Look,” “Spin Out,” “Get Out” and a cover of Ty Wagner & the Scotchmen’s “No Count”), plus one weird tangent — “Walk,” a hypnotically tuneless five-minute attempt at psychedelic blues, sung by Hagerty. That came out on the Hoboken-based Buy Our Records label, after which Martinez left the group.

Another guitarist, Kurt Wolf, joined, and Pussy Galore signed with Caroline, who released Right Now!, SugarShit Sharp, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, all of which are masterpieces, and Historia De La Musica Rock, which is not. Cafritz quit halfway through the recording of Dial ‘M’… because Spencer had announced, in the middle of a tour, that it would be their farewell album, and Wolf quit after the 1989 tour. Historia… was recorded by the trio of Spencer, Hagerty, and Bert, and is a pretty enervated album. Spencer went on to form the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hagerty focused his creative energy on Royal Trux (a band I’ve never connected with), and Bert played in Action Swingers (with Cafritz), the Chrome Cranks, and other bands. Cafritz formed the short-lived trio STP and Free Kitten, a project with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Yoshimi of the Boredoms, and Mark Ibold of Pavement (and later Sonic Youth).

For years, Exile On Main St. was a legendary underground thing. You couldn’t find copies of the original cassette, but half of the tracks showed up on a bootleg LP (which I bought at the record store at CBGBs Gallery, next door to the club) and a couple of other songs were recycled on a 45. Four tracks were ultimately included on the 1992 compilation Corpse Love: The First Year.

But here’s the weird thing. Now, in the streaming era, it’s as accessible as anything else they did. More accessible, even. For years, Pussy Galore’s Caroline releases, never mind their early stuff, weren’t on Spotify or Tidal or Qobuz, presumably due to rights issues… but Exile was. In fact, if you have a Qobuz subscription, you can buy it as downloadable WAV files, and I recommend doing so. It’s a genuinely brilliant artistic gesture, and for much of its hour-long running time, it fucking rocks.

[Disclosure: When I was a magazine editor in the early 2000s, I published three articles by Goad.]

When he first emerged in the 1990s, there was more to him than that. There was always an ugly side to his work (N.B. I have never read Answer Me!, the four-issue zine he published with his then-wife Debbie), but he sometimes asked questions that were worth asking. His 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto (subtitled America’s Scapegoats: How We Got That Way And Why We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore) is often crude and overwrought, but there’s a real consciousness at its heart. This is how he began Chapter 5, “Workin’ Hard”:

The working class doesn’t write a lot of history books. The working class doesn’t produce many movies or radio shows. The working class doesn’t tend to hire media consultants or theatrical agents. The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its popular image.

That’s because the working class was too busy working.

A page or two later, he writes, “If someone were to devise a machine that could measure hatred… I’d bet all my wooden nickels that more hatred exists between bosses and employees than between blacks and whites… Of all the hating I’ve done in my life — and I’ve done my share — ninety-nine percent of it was directed at rich white people, most of them my bosses.” Goad had a keen understanding of class in America, and did his research; there are sections of Redneck Manifesto that can be read alongside any “serious” history of labor you can name. But be warned that even the good stuff is delivered in language that you’re probably gonna hate, so if you decide the digging isn’t worth it, you’ll get no argument from me.

Goad’s life went off the rails in the late ’90s, when he was divorced from Debbie and involved with another woman, Anne Ryan. He was physically abusive toward both, and served two and a half years in prison for assaulting Ryan. When he came out, his writing grew more fevered and self-pitying; his second book was an autobiography called Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt. No New York publisher would touch it, so it was released by Feral House, a small press run by journalist Adam Parfrey.

Parfrey was a few years older than Goad, and had first come to underground prominence in the late ’80s as the co-founder of Amok Press (related to but not part of Amok Books, an LA-based bookstore and mail-order source for fringe literature). The press released only eight titles, including a novel by Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (I own a later edition from AK Press, but Amok is thanked for bringing the book to light), and Apocalypse Culture, an anthology of writings on subjects ranging from necrophilia to eugenics to extreme body modification. When the company shut down, Parfrey left Los Angeles for Washington state, where he founded Feral House and remained until his death.

Since 1989, Feral House has published hundreds of books on all sorts of subjects related to history, politics, and pop culture. Some of their best-known titles are Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and Parfrey and Cletus Nelson’s Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes. All of these inspired, or were adapted into, movies.

Other Feral House titles that I have read and enjoyed over the years have included Ika Johannesson & Jon Jefferson Klingberg’s Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story (reviewed here), Michael Tau’s Extreme Music: Silence to Noise and Everything In Between (reviewed here), Mel Gordon’s Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, It’s A Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps (edited by Parfrey, and reviewed here), and Timothy Wyllie’s Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment (discussed here).

Parfrey died in 2018, but Feral House continues under the guidance of Christina Ward. This summer, they published Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader, a thick collection of his journalism, quotes from interviews (blended together into one mega-interview; it’s a good idea that works pretty well), scans of letters Parfrey received from people like Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, and John Wayne Gacy, posts from a blog on the Feral House website, and more. (Buy it from Amazon.)

The book is very much a mixed bag. Some of the more traditionally journalistic pieces, including several investigative/immersive features on fringe religious organizations originally published in the San Diego Reader in the early ’90s and later reprinted in Parfrey’s book Cult Rapture, are fascinating and well-crafted. Others, like a story on a physically handicapped couple who formed a small sex-positive group, exhibit a sneering cruelty that’s more than a little off-putting.

There’s an interesting kind of revisionism at work in Apocalypse Omnibus, especially in the section Fascists, White Supremacists, And Their Friends. It includes an interview with a skinhead, an article on SWAT police, a long story about “soldier of fortune” and right-wing activist Bo Gritz, as well as the introduction Parfrey wrote to the Goebbels novel mentioned above. But perusing this section of the book (which is one-fifth as long as the collection of excerpts from his grumpy, misanthropic “HelL.A.” newspaper columns) will not tell you anything about, for example, Parfrey’s decades of friendship and collaboration with fascist artists Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan, nor about his correspondence with neo-Nazi writer James Mason.

In the introduction to his book Rants And Incendiary Tracts, Parfrey wrote, “To hold an opinion and dare to express it is the final prerogative of the free man. Announcing an incendiary truth may be the last remaining vestige of human dignity.” In the introduction to this book, Christina Ward writes, “Adam Parfrey understood that the only durable response to challenging ideas is to bring them into the open and examine them without illusion.”

In the same introduction, she provides an explanation of his methods that in 2026 reads to this veteran journalist like ass-covering:

Parfrey did not approach his subjects as a journalist seeking balance or as an academic maintaining distance. He approached them as a collector of evidence, which required access to people and networks that do not open themselves to declared opposition. Access was obtained through building relationships, patience, and, at times, strategic accommodation. He listened without interruption, allowed subjects to speak in their own terms, and, when necessary, reflected their language back to them to gain trust. [emphasis mine]

So when Parfrey espoused personally racist views in letters to James Mason, it was just his way of cultivating a source? What about when he became friends with Holocaust denier Keith Stimely, or when he, Rice, Moynihan, and Nikolas Schreck formed the Abraxas Foundation? Same deal, I guess. You never know when relationships will yield a good story, right? It’s just kinda funny that he never wrote about, say, the Black Hebrew Israelites for Cult Rapture. I guess it might have been too difficult for him to reflect their language back to them to gain trust.

People under 50 have no idea what “the underground” was like in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The amount of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that passed under the aegis of “fearless investigation of humanity’s dark side” would, in 2026, send most people screaming out of the room. Apocalypse Omnibus is a time capsule from that era. The sneering, “look at these freaks” attitude of the cult section; the “isn’t this fascinating?” ingenuousness of the profiles of Nazis; the bilious, eye-bulging hatred in a piece on confrontational feminist and anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin: it’s all very familiar to me. Even the prose, overheated and wrathful, is very, very ’80s; you could put these pieces right next to anything from back then by Steve Albini (who regretted, and apologized for, his edgelord years before his death) or Lydia Lunch (who never apologizes for anything).

A lot of people, in the old days, would claim that it was OK to use racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language because they didn’t actually hold those views and didn’t know anybody who did, so it was understood in their circles to be all in good fun. Or they’d argue that when you were exploring the dark side of American culture, you had to expect to get a little bit on you. I don’t know what Adam Parfrey actually believed. His writings are deliberately opaque in that regard. He operates as a mouthpiece for his subjects. Which is fine. But his choice of subjects — the people he thought were worth handing a megaphone to — provide some clues.

I’m glad Feral House exists. Their catalog is wide-ranging, full of valuable and informative books. But the world has no more need of edgelords. The age of material and political comfort that allowed (white) “underground” culture to spend its time being “provocative” has passed. We live in an America governed by a senile criminal and his fascist goons, where cities are subject to military assault and citizens are swept up in racist purges, where women’s rights — not just the right not to have children, but the right to vote — are under direct threat, and trans people are being legislated out of existence. In this America, Adam Parfrey’s work has some historical value, but the attitudes underpinning it are a different story. His decades of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and serial killers, occasionally winking at the reader to let us know it’s all fine, we’re just turning over rocks to watch the bugs scatter, don’t feel so much like a warning (the back cover copy to Apocalypse Omnibus begins, “Adam Parfrey saw it coming”) as like a relic: something you find on a dusty shelf in the garage and ask, Why are we still keeping this around?