It was only a matter of time, really, until the hoary old traditional genres of
music would find their way onto the digital boards of the splice and dice
generation. With Inflatabl’s blu tribunL record, the venerable oldster on the
chopping block is the hand-worn blues of the Mississippi Delta. Akufen, Freeform,
and The Rip Off Artist each contribute four tracks (with an extra forty-nine seconds
of steel pedal guitar hoedown for good measure from Freeform) and take a healthy
delight in cutting down the twelve-bar blues and reimagining the genre into a
splintered construction of clipped phrases and interrupted loops.
The Rip Off Artist cracks open each phrase and lifts out the individual notes of the
guitar in the lead off track “What Kind of Blue,” reorganizing the melodic line into
a stuttering, looping melody that sounds like bursts of guitar compressed down into
hard nuggets of sharp sound. He finds an old vocoder and whispers a lo-fi crooner
version of “Must Be Catchin'” over a bed of squiggly noises and watery beats; in
“Guitar Trouble,” The Rip Off Artist tries to stick to the twelve-bar standard, but
gets caught up in his technology, reducing the melody to a twelve second patter,
skewing the melody with squirts of water noise and bleats of dry static. A weak
organ tries to lead the guitar out of the vale of digital terror and nearly
succeeds, but the glitch catches up and breaks everything down again.
On the other hand, Akufen disappears into an ocean of glitch, bullying the blues
before him and letting the tiny particles and static of the digital sea bite at the
shape of the guitar, taking away the sonorous sound of the finger-picked instrument
into a wash of micro-beat noise. “Ain’t Gonna Beg You No More” hops and skips like
a Thomas Brinkmann record (and there’s a good deal of the flavor of Brinkmann’s Soul
Center funk to be found here) before finding its center, lock-grooving around a long
phrase of an old bluesman (whose looped repetition becomes so pervasive that you
can’t mistake it for anything else but begging). The cantering beat picks up an
equally geriatric harmonica player and, in lock-step tandem, they show these
youngsters how the old crew can work up a sweat. The vocal line of “The World Wanna
Know” is chewed up by digital artifacts, their binary segmentation destroying the
traditional “got the blues bad” delivery. Piano and kick drum wander around behind a click track and a harmonica struggles to find itself in the regimented
structure. “I Won’t Buy You” is filled with digital glitch; is this the sorrowful
lament of the machine age, the faded echoes of the old bluesmen turned into a
digital playground of clicks, glitches, and muttering oscillator static?
Freeform wanders through more sedate atmospheres, leveraging a field recording of
rain against an old wooden roof as background to a slow wail of theremin and organ
for “Blue Movies.” A steel pedal guitar is run back at double-speed, hurrying along
the mournful lament of the theremin in the rain. He builds songs which are both
steeped in their musical heritage while simaultaneously cut free of all landmarks.
“No More Blues” adds a pop and whistle to the steel pedal guitar as if the song is
being performed by a street musician in Toyko whose accompaniment in a Casio drum
machine, a couple of tiny Furbey-esque toys, a worn squeezebox and the battered
steel guitar. “It’s Not My Blues” rollicks along like a old-style Western, complete
with earnest cowboy riding a 1950’s style mechanical horse to the beat pattern of a
couple of coconuts. The spirit of Bobby McFerrin hums alongside an old and cracked
guitar that is slowly coming apart as its strings are being played in “Blue
Too.”
Inflatabl’s blu tribunL is a strange little record and it will surely cause purists
of the blues to have epileptic seizures, heart attacks, and blackout periods where
stereo equipment will be destroyed in an attempt to drive out those digital demons
which have ruined the very soul of the music with their cut and paste commands.
However, if you are not a purist, then blu tribunL is a funky little record which
slipes lopsided ways into your brain and offers tiny distorted slices of the blues
magic to your ears. It grows on you, yes it does. Give it time.
blu tribunL is out now on Inflatabl Records.
