So we're set on doing these weekly lists - not the first to do it, but those things have been around since the advent of groceries, so if you think our homely publication is ripping you off, well tough.

No better person than Mike Wexler for our first list. His album, Sun Wheel, is out this spring on Amish Records.



First off I spend most of my time listening to On the Beach, Rock Bottom, & Love Cry. All fairly well known quantities. Here are some other things I like:

THE SECRET MUSEUM OF MANKIND Volumes 1-5 Ethnic Music Classics 1925-48.
What you think of as more recent developments musically show up here in spades, in what is just the last (& only) recorded gasp of a long lineage that seems to have emerged from the depths of history only to say its peace & disappear. There are avenues going back who knows how far that are now closed off & this is the record of that closing off. It's tragic but reassuring to know that before radio & whatnot people were into The Most Out-There Shit, Ever.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY: A STUDY OF WILLIAM BLAKE by NORTHROP FRYE. Ostensibly
it's about Blake, but I'd say it cuts a pretty wide swath & leaves a lot of carnage in its wake vis-a-vis the preeminent bogeys & hobgoblins of the Western World. I use it like a compass.

DIVINE HORSEMEN, THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI. The film, the book, & the record. Maya Deren went to Haiti to film Voudoun ritual & wound up an initiate herself. So you get a "documentary" & an anthropological study that cross the line into identification with the subject in a kind of ecstatic empathy. It crystallized the idea of belief for me where before there had just been an abstraction. See it & tell me these people are not POSSESSED BY THE LOA. Voudoun, by the way, is to religion sort of what the delta blues is to music...

BOLA SETE- OCEAN This is pretty much unique in his recorded output. The one record he did for Takoma, it's predictably Fahey-esque, but more fluid & of course, Brazilian. Set me to
thinking about dynamics & the ways in which time in music can be...dilated.

MARION BROWN- AFTERNOON OF A GEORGIA FAUN. Anthony Braxton & Chick Corea
are on this record, along with what MB calls "assistants": "The people who I chose to assist are not actually musicians, but people who have a sense of rhythm & melody. My idea here is that it is possible for non-musicians to participate in a musical experience without being technically proficient in a theoretical sense. In the future, I intend to use some non-musicians for the same reasons. It works. Try it sometimes." Hmmm... he may have something there. First they play the rain, then the sun coming out after the rain, then all the creatures of the wood put in an appearance...

HART CRANE. I'll take him over almost anyone you'd care to mention. You have to actually live in a book like White Buildings; I spent about a year in there & you come out of it with a whole new set of senses. Unlike other writers who do too much explaining, he skips the preliminaries & gives you the synapses firing. But there's a quality to his word combinations that I've never come across anywhere else. It's like the English language contained another
hidden language unknown to anyone, a language that obeys a subtler, profounder, more spiritual logic, & that's what he's speaking.

JIM PEPPER- PEPPER'S POW-WOW Have to mention this once more because it's a record whose time has come. Through some sort of wormhole, probably, but nevertheless. The music here, which is largely jazz-pop & country, is an unassuming vehicle for some pretty scathing satire. Pepper (who recorded with Don Cherry, Peter Walker, & The Fugs, among others) was part Kaw & part Creek Indian, & to hear him play "cowboy" in a country & western context, with lyrics about as un-country as they come--call me crazy but I hear a lot of angst here, thinly veiled. and when the record ends-- after finally erupting into unabashed skronk on "Now
War Dance"-- with the apocalyptic "Drums," I think it's safe to say the tables have been turned:
& there are drums
beyond the mountain
Indian drums
that you can't hear
there are drums
beyond the mountain
and they're getting
mighty near