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Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
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Raga On
by Skip Fox
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Triumph of the Damned, a CD by Arundo.
Emergency Records, Oakland.

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Arundo, not the tender reed cut from its culm, but G. P. Skratz and Andy Dinsmoor, words and music respectively, and I thought that was the last good thing I might find to say about this disc gauging from the first track, but I was wrong. This is sweet shit. The first cut, "Ignorance Sutra," is a willy-take on the black-clad poetry-sniffing coffee set, ironic generalized narratives stuffed with petulance and a cut-rate transcendent vocabulary, not the "bad beatnik poetry" I'd taken it for, but a parody, actively conscious, with some fairly high-rent verbal pyrotechnics in interesting places, and there were plenty of hints, like the title, which hadn't registered (or I am so used to being disappointed in these matters, I expected the worst). It was not, in fact, until I was fully interwoven into the play as plasticity of "Freaser Teaser," the second piece, with its irritating strobe narrative suggesting the paralysis of a death experience, nearly recommending it, to end in the farcically enigmatic, that I realized "Ignorance Sutra" for what it was, and went back and actually listened. All a set-up for the third, a must click if there ever was, "Art and Culture," beautiful evening raga, Godzilla like they shoulda done it, all flapping appendages and stereoscopic narrative, turning in pain and horror, frozen epic death struggle, a damned intelligent thing.
     Throughout Scratz reads these pieces deeply attentive to the dramatic register, the melodia or heart of the story in each. He is thinking. Dinsmoor is also sensitive to the pieces, or he is, equally, the pieces for me, now that I have heard them as the songs they are, in collaboration, though to suggest labor would belabor it. Vibrant as the cut reed itself, he plays guitar, tabula, bass, sitar and recorder. Scratz is a poet and Dinsmoor is a musician. Not that they need anyone to tell them.
     Another sign of art going on: each of these pieces is distinct, each fully conceived. There are comic elegies, narratives both as fluid tissue and as flying overarching mental landscapes, ideas mundane and fantastical cheek to cheek, singing. (Do you think these guys know the Fugs? How not?) Even my notes on the remaining cuts reflect the variety and vitality of the entire: "Round Midnight," crisp suburban haiku; "Banana Ghazal" and "Banjo," snippets of surgical mistakes, flying foreskins, magical fields of artichokes at evening, and so forth; "The Exterior Distances," echolalia of worlds within words; "Triumph of the Damned," darkness raga, magical formulation, words caught in their spell; "Doorwayman," neo-prophetic stylings à la WWF, that he would spit his tooth is smart.
     Some pieces might be a few light notes too heavy for me, but it is so lovely to run into intelligent and human work that I would overlook far greater than that which might be, after all, a simply a difference in taste, a difference within which there is much we share.


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