Q: What do you get when you cross a twee pop No Wave band, a post-industrial noise outfit, and some Universal Indians, what do you get?
A: Nowhere close to anything you’d expect, whatever that might be.
“Is that supposed to be some sorta joke?” you may be asking yrself. No, more like a truism, a reminder that the subtle, magical art of collaboration is more like alchemy than addition. Even with only five variables the equation quickly becomes unbearably complex, especially when those variables have spent time in the farthest-flung, most extreme corners of the musical sub-underground.
Threshing Floor is about as close to a supergroup as the completely uncommercial, “no audience underground”, as Radio Free Midwich puts it, gets. Threshing Floor is comprised of members of Wolf Eyes — Nate Young and John Olson; Love Child — Alan Licht and Rebecca Odes; joined by Gretchen Gonzales, who plays in a wide array of underground bands from in and around the Detroit area, with perhaps Universal Indians being the best known and one also involving Olson.Most of these musicians are some of the most documented ever laid to acetate, this side of Sun Ra‘s discography, and are likely no strangers to the readers of Freq. This may give you some sort of preconception diving into Threshing Floor’s single-sided claptrap — a temptation well-known to those of us drowning in press releases — which is why I led this review off with that little morsel of Zen humour.
No matter how familiar you may be with the Michigan noise scene, how many Wolf Eyes CD-Rs you’ve internalized, or how much No Wave you know, you simply have no idea what you have in store when you drop the needle on Threshing Floor’s single-sided LP. Given that ⅔ of the band emanate from the notoriously noisy rustbelt Michigan underground, you’d understandably expect Threshing Floor to be drowning in Wolf Eyes’ signature electronic stew — all paranoid echoes and malignant reverbs, malfunctioning oscillators and foundry percussion — especially considering that Gonzales’s Universal Indians trades in a similar sound.This would be yr first mistake.
Threshing Floor does bear some similarities with its core components, though, most notably a similar structure. Like a longform Wolf Eyes jam, Threshing Floor is one long, sprawling fifteen-minute session that builds and grows more dense as it progresses. Darker, more disturbing elements swim into focus as things solidify — a rusty hinge, scraping in a draft; a distant murmuring; a cracking whip; and the din of unnamable machinery.
Considering that these are some of the best-known and most prolific members of the noise / improv scene, it is a testament to their collective abilities and improvising sensitivities that you really can’t tell where one person ends and another begins. Who’s making the weird gamelan fork-tine windchimes? Who’s responsible for the sonar pings? The deep gelatinous reverb well? Who can say?While I’m not as familiar with Universal Indians or Love Child, I’ve heard quite a few Wolf Eyes albums and, lemme tell you, Threshing Floor doesn’t sound like any of them. But it sounds similar, in the same galaxy at least… It is truly something that over twenty years and hundreds of albums — and thirty years for Alan Licht — that these musicians are still making new, interesting, unique, and imaginative sounds. If you’re a fan of Wolf Eyes, Alan Licht, Love Child, or any of Gretchen Gonzales’s projects, don’t miss Threshing Floor.
-J Simpson-
