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Clang Quartet’s second CD: sacred blasphemy 30 April 2003
35 year old Stoneville, North Carolina drummer, composer, instrument maker, and performance artist Scotty Irving aka The Clang Quartet seems to think so. Going by his new album I’m inclined to agree. The Separation Of Church And Hate, The Clang Quartet’s second CD and fourth album (the first two came out on cassette) came out last fall on Raleigh, NC’s Silber Records, and you can pick it up from the label Website (check our link, below). The disc begins with a couple of instrumental tracks, Amazing Disgrace and Under God. As intrumentals, there’s nothing apart from the names to clue you in to Irving’s agenda. Indeed, the tracks are some of the coolest avant-garde rock and noise that Rockbites has had the pleasure to audition. Amazing Disgrace is essentially a one-chord instrumental with harmonic embellishments in 7/4 time. It begins with strummed guitar and successively adds drums, a second guitar, a third guitar, and synths, growing insistently but compellingly to a climax that never arrives—and then abruptly goes to silence. Under God sees Irving riffing on The Crutch, a home-made instrument built on a real crutch that includes such items as an office stapler, toys, a broken cymbal, a drill, and a saw blade. Other tracks on the new LP are either instrumental or spoken word with percussive or noise-rock backing. The music (even as background to spoken samples) is interesting enough, and the overall sound collage is finely crafted enough, that it bears up very well to repeated listening. The ten-minute-long The Infidel Within explores, with radio and television samples, the supposed satanic connections of the Proctor & Gambel company—an over-used hobbyhorse of fundamentalist American Christians. It concludes with a statement by Irving: “You will always be afraid of something as long as you are ignorant to it.” The title track is a spoken word piece in which Irving lays out one of his primary messages: racists, bigots, and hate mongers who hide behind the name of Christianity ought to wake up and smell their own shit. The Clang Quartet is a live performance project in which Irving plays Jesus and seeks to evoke original awe in his audiences, hoping to break through stagnated thought patterns. Such a thing would be difficult to capture to tape, one might think. I have not had the opportunity to experience The Clang Quartet live and so cannot compare, but I have to admit that this record contains an unusual, charismatic power. Irving rarely tells his listener what to think, but rather presents his own passionate philosophy in music and word with what I can only describe as devine devotion. (And I’m an atheist, by the popular definition of that word.) Quite a trip. As strange as this record is, it hangs together as an art/philosophy piece too strongly to dismiss as any sort of novelty. The award-winning, 13-minute film Armor Of God, released by Bright Eye Pictures a couple of years ago, is a biographical documentary of Irving and his performance. It has screened in dozens of theaters across the US, and you might be able to catch it at some point. You can purchase a copy on VHS tape or DVD from the Bright Eye Pictures site (check our link). | The Clang Quartet | | Silber Media | | Armor Of God info | | top of page | |
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