When will it end: Graveyards

Confession: everytime Wolf Eye John Olson reaches for his saxophone to blow his sick breaths of fire out of the thing I can't help but to feel a slight sensation rippling down my backspine, circling around my thighs while shaking my balls. Too much information? Maybe so, but if you're in the slightest interested in improv, jazz, minimalism and a tiny bit of noise you will like his threesome with cellist Hans 'Bunny' Buetow and Ben 'Hell' Hall on percussion.

I managed to get my hands on one Graveyards LP recently and I'm damn proud of it too. Transparent vinyl housed in a yellow cardboard sleeve with in the right bottom corner a black and white photo of some oversized teeth on fucking piece of sandpaper! Pretty much everything is released on Buetow’s Editions Brokenresearch label which doesn’t have a website yet, although he promised me that should be fixed soon. For now, I've only listened to that LP, Bare Those Excellent Teeth, once because my lousy recordplayer decided to put a layer of annoying static on top of the music. Before you start to panic and go all; 'oh but I thought' on me; I do have a batch of other Graveyards recordings I listened to a lot this past year. Not all of them, the bastards choose to put out almost every live performance and 2006 has seen around 16 Graveyards releases on a variety of formats but some of them are definately worth your while. So here's a small selection.


Graveyards
John Brown, On His Way to the Gallows
This is one of the rowdiest and fiercest Graveyards recordings around. Where others tend to lean heavily on space and minimalist structures John Brown offers some full-on avantjazz explorations. Two tracks here, the first starts with some electro-acoustic bell tinkering while Olson let's his sax hover above, airing out subtle but threatening tones. That threatening vibe is a constant factor in Graveyards' music, there's a lot of silence, slow, smothered movements, haunted sounds but there's always that looming fierceness that makes Olson's saxplaying. Hall’s percussion makes up a lot of the noise here with Olson injecting the atmosphere with mostly slowmo Ayler-ish patterns. The second tracks begins even more mystifying, sparse percussion and shadows of saxophone and the occasional blurt of energy that tells you to keep focused. Buetow makes his cello heard with some mournful but heavy stringscraping, toning it down again and finally getting the band into full action although not for long. The spacious gaps between every outburst of clattering percussion make it sound like Han Bennink while asleep, and that’s not neccesarily a bad thing considering Bennink can hand out major blows with his eyes closed.

Graveyards
The Breath Stop
Seven breath stops on this cd-r released on Editions Brokenresearch. No information whatsoever about this awesome disc, I found the mp3's somewhere in a slsk dungeon. Nevertheless, these are among Graveyards' best and least minimal. Their haunted jazzfuckery seems to work well on more than one level but to the guts it feels better when they play it loud. Could depend on the setting as these probably were live recorded as well.

Graveyards
Vulure's Banquet
This could well be jazz as imagined by an orgasmic Einstürzende Neubauten circa 1981. From the start the trio plays a ramschackle, screeching set. Hitting everything with everything while Olson makes love to his saxophone's dark side.

Graveyards
Endings 3
Starting off as a microtonal adventure into the thick melée of Hall's percussion weaponry while Buetow makes hesitating moves to cut the circle in half with sawing cello movements. Olson kicks in at four minutes with small pockets of austere skronking, moving in and out randomly and by doing so creating a vibe of uninhibited freedom by way of uncertainty. These recordings were made during gig practice, goes to show how much focus and effort these guys put into 'just' a sideproject.