Prepare Yourself for the Cosmic Eclectic

Cosmic Light Clusters, Eclectic Maybe Band (Discus Music)

Coughs, Brian Ruryk (Scatter Archive)

Back in the 1970s, Guy Segers was bass player with Univers Zero, one of the original bands (along with Henry Cow, among others) in the Rock in Opposition movement, a collective of progressive rock bands brought together by the music industry’s refusal to recognise their music. Since then, he’s been involved in many projects, both live and in the studio, often releasing material via his own Bandcamp page. His main project for the last few years has been the Eclectic Maybe Band. Drawing on a large pool of musicians, including Art Zoyd trumpeter Jean-Pierre Soarez and former Univers Zero colleagues, clarinettist Dirk Descheemaeker and oboist Michel Berkmans, he gathers small groups together in the studio either to improvise, or to record more structured compositions. The compositions are built up in layers, each player adding their part one at a time. Improvisations and compositions are then edited by Segers into the tracks that appear on the albums.

Cosmic Light Clusters, their fifth release, is a welcome addition to their discography. If you’re unfamiliar with the earlier albums, I’d say they’re well worth checking out. The previous album, Bars without Measures, which came out in 2022, features the voice of Julie Tippetts. Cosmic Light Clusters, by comparison, is described in the notes that accompany its release as ‘somewhat more introspective and textural than its predecessor’ and I wouldn’t argue with that. As the title suggests, there’s a breadth and seriousness to it. A few tracks stand out. ‘Prisme Souriant’,  could be described as a miniature violin concerto, with something of Bartok and Stravinsky about it. I know titles can plant ideas in your head, but, listening to another improvised track, ‘Mineral is Growing Slowly’, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the sense of wonder I felt as a child on visiting show-caves. One of the composed tracks, ‘Hypnopédie’, features a multilingual text, a ‘creation-of-consciousness myth’ if you like, that charts the emergence of conscious life from darkness and its decay back into dust. The title, incidentally, means sleep-learning, or learning while under hypnosis. Another composition, ‘Elipse Seated’, has something of  a klesmer feel to it.

Eclectic Maybe Band is an intriguing name. It could be a moniker for the whole of humanity and has you intrigued even before you start listening to the music. And eclectic it is: they have a distinctive, genre-fluid sound, part jazz, part rock, part classical, but always EMB. One sometimes gets a nostalgic whiff of earlier RIO bands (in ‘B2 or Not 2B > Astrum Argentinium’, Cathryn Robson’s voice has overtones of Dagmar Krause on Henry Cow’s ‘Living in the Heart of the Beast’, I thought). I get the feeling, though, that ‘style’ here is simply the end product of whatever it is the musicians need to do, which is how all imaginative, innovative music should be.

When Canadian guitarist Brian Ruryk was a kid, his father had a job with the Dictaphone company. The young Ruryk got into playing with the machines his dad brought home. When he acquired a cassette recorder, he began bouncing sounds between the cassette machine and his dad’s dictaphones. He became fascinated with the creative possibilities of noise and went on to play guitar in a No Wave band. All that, though, is a long way in the past. He’s been playing solo since 1982. Of his work before that he said (in an interview with  Andrew at Navel-Gazers – see links, below) ‘I hope those cassettes ended up as aggregate for roads and buildings, or something. Incinerated at least….I’d like to find and compile some of the early dictaphone/cassette bounces perhaps, that might be fun…who knows.’ Recently released by Scatter Archive, Coughs is Ruryk’s latest solo album.

Isolated mellow chords. Silence. A scribbled chaos of samples. Distorted guitar. A drone that could be an electric motor. Mains hum. White noise. More chaos. There’s a guitar in there somewhere. Is that a guitar or the sound of smashing glass? It’s hard to tell. ‘Party Psycho’ takes us back to the mellow chords of the first track, only for us to be plunged back into the noise-fest with ‘Love Rat.’
One minute it’s raining, next he’s strumming an atonal chord. Then silence. Then close, visceral scrabbling. Guitar. Insect noises. Traffic noises. Bird noises. Guitar again – spaced out, mellow (‘Too Many Punks’). A crazy guitar zig-zagging through space (or is it a shortwave radio? Could be either or both).  A metal machine noisily disintigrating. A wall of fractured, distorted guitar sounds. Then layers – one mellow, one fractured. Somewhere in there, they’re still smashing up the machine. Scratching in stereo. More virtuoso spatial zigzags. More mellow sounds (they’re still smashing up that machine). What sounds like Spanish muzak coming from somewhere. Deep, apocalyptic sounds, suddenly careering off into chaos (‘To All the Swampers’). Then the crazy noise-collage that is ‘Owl Swallows a Whole Scorpion’, followed by half a minute of mellow guitar musings (‘Give a Shit’).

Apart from the odd moment of respite, Ruryk zigzags through space from one idea to the next, always leaving you feeling exhilarated, wanting more. As he says in the album notes, ‘Hey! prepare your guitars all you want, you’ll never be prepared enough!’

Dominic Rivron

LINKS

Cosmic Light Clusters:
https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/cosmic-light-clusters-188cd-2025

Coughs:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/coughs

Interview with Brian Ruryk:
https://blog.navelgazers.co.uk/2024/03/brian-ruryk-almost-thinking.html

 

 

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