33 rebellions per minute
"With the tide I'll steal you away"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1993
Miranda Sex Garden, SUSPIRIA
A proper tale of Miranda Sex Garden would definitely start with their 1991 debut MADRA, in which three British conservatory women, discovered singing for cash on streetcorners and signed to (of all things) the industrial-music Mute Records label, perform madrigals from the late 1500's a capella. I don't own the record, because I've never been the sort to buy madrigals, but if I ever find it cheap, I'll snap it up. Katharine Blake, Donna McKevitt, and Kelly McCusker have remarkable voices: Blake's lead vocals are classical, elegant, pure, and more than a little domineering, while the other two provide strong harmonies at notes one doesn't expect a human being to even be able to reach. If the only thing their voices had in common with other Mute acts was a sense of finely honed, emotionally removed power, I can still almost imagine how that plus a cool name and a photogenic look got them signed.
Be it label influence or sheer cussedness, however, MSG then began one of the more remarkable evolutions in music history. By SUSPIRIA, their 2nd full-length, they'd added Ben Golomstock on guitar, Trevor Sharpe on drums, and Antony Wilson on bass, while Blake decided to make use of her many years of violin and keyboard lessons, and McCusker and McKevitt (the latter a newcomer, replacing original vocalist Jocelyn Hall) took their violas from the closet. Together they became a rock band, in the tradition of ... well, no one, really, as one had to at least suspect from the opening 45 seconds, in which a rusty swingset attempts to keep time while being dismantled, on.
"Play", track 5, which happens to be what's playing while I type this, is as good an example of SUSPIRIA as any. The song enters with softly inquisitive lyrics by Blake that lead naturally to sustained vocal "Oooooo-oooooo-oooooooh" ascensions, while classical violas saw gentle 2-note patterns. Blake howls a lyric, and synth-strings emit vaporous screeches, neither of which disrupts the prettiness vibe much. Then the guitar and thudding drums enter, and the massed enflaed detuned strings, and somebody starts breaking things, and the instruments all loudly threaten injuctions against each other for doing so, all of which really is _not_ pretty. Then a truce is reached and the song ends quietly, and "In Heaven" starts also-quietly on voices and strings, a bit like Andrew Lloyd Webber trying really very hard to write a requiem that sounds less celebratorily showy and more like something from Fantasia. In fact it stays quiet, and only barely goes atonal. "Bring Down The Sky", paced by lumbering drums, circling string-quartet hook, and a counterpoint between a four-note chorale round and a different four-note organ ostinato, is actually catchy -- in an obsessively crescendoing and decrescendoing way that almost disappears midstream, to be sure.
SUSPIRIA's strengths, in my view, have something to do with MSG's fusion of exuberant youthful weirdness with the weight of ancient traditions ("Ardens Sempre"'s gypsy folk, "Open Eyes"'s church pipe organ and hymnal authority, the respectful tonal chamber pieces amid at least half the songs), and a lot more to do with pure sensuality. The songs and lyrics, which I'm sure Blake worked hard on, serve for me only as an excuse for the girls to sing, beautifully. The demands of a rock audience serve mainly as an excuse to let Trevor bash stuff, to let Ben ring out slow and weighty chords and watch them reverberate, to let Katharine and Donna and Kelly make their strings teacher wonder if introducing them to the muscular darknesses of Stravinsky and Bartok was really a good idea. Virtually every song builds up from extreme quiet to serious noise, sometimes twice, and that quirk gets annoying fast, but it's not so bad once you stop listening for compositional skills and just let the sound wash over you.
One of the central principles of progressive rock is that all musical traditions should be drawn on as one, and merging madrigals, hymns, string quartets, modernist symphony, war dance, and King Crimson is at least a modest start. One of the central principles of punk rock is that unnerving the audience by playing as hard and defiant as you want can be fun. A common tertiary principle of punk rock is that progressive rock played by people from conservatories can't be punk. But I always thought that was bigoted and stupid.
1994
Miranda Sex Garden, FAIRYTALES OF SLAVERY
As large a jump as SUSPIRIA was, however, only the ninth track, "Feed", hinted at how much farther MSG thought they had yet to grow. For FAIRYTALES OF SLAVERY, they hired, as producer, Alex Hecke of Einsturzende Neubaten, the German machinery-noise band whose translated name (Collapsing New Buildings) openly warned how literally they took the concept of "industrial" music. Hacke's only producer on FAIRYTALES, mind you, and "Transit" is the only song to list "drill" among its instruments. But the singing of Blake and McKevitt (no McCusker anymore) -- while still impossibly pure, firm, sustained, high, and accurate -- isn't quite the anchor it was before.
"Cut" opens the album with machine-gun drumming, a squealing violin/viola backbeat, and harmonized double-whole-note syllables from which Blake doesn't even try to curtail the acid in her tone. "Fly"'s hollow plucked guitar of uncertain tuning comes out halfway between Gastr Del Sol and a koto recital, and the two brief drum assaults have all the deliberative shock value of Gil Ray's solo on the Loud Family's "Nice When I Want Something", plus the added drama of a nice reverberating gong. "Peep Show" comes out closest to a standard pounding rock song, except at the end, where Katharine's Broadway-hymnal singing over the wavery synth tone is actually quite lovely. "Wooden Boat" has appealing text, an invitation to share an escapist fantasy (something like an offer to be queen of Terabithia), and assembles several dozen increasingly bizarre noises from at least two incompatible musical scales and two time signatures in a way that's extremely impressive now that they're not stuffing massive crescendos down the listeners' ears every goddamn track. It's a highlight; the bouncy polka cover of Brecht/Weill's "Havana Lied" (in the original German) kindly offers a pause to reflect and catch breath.
The next five tracks, polyrhythmic and dense and exploratory with only minor role for vocals, can fairly be considered the heart of FAIRYTALES. Collectively I find it more unsettling than Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor comes up with awesome noises, in the true sense of "awe", but the soul of his work is human, an extroverted rage that only barely covers (as does all rage) a helpless all-encompassing fear which I once shared with him and really haven't for years now. Katharine Blake sounds rather cruel at times, but utterly confident and collected about it, and McKevitt is entirely angelic, leaving the threat implied in MSG's music entirely alien and -- thanks to Sharpe's drumming and Golomstock/Hacke's noisework and the eerie strings -- persistent. You can decide for yourself if this is a desireable feeling to purchase.
But while you're making up your mind, FAIRYTALES has some unexpected warmth left to confuse you. "The Monk Song", a humble showstopper, is wordless voices, playfully intermingled vocal exercises eventually pushed along by persistent but harmless cymbal-tapping. "A Fairytale About Slavery" itself, finally, is a simmering but empathetic song built around a 5/4 recorder hook. It has no real comfort to offer the slave it sings to, just sympathy and questions. Sympathy, questions, and the promise that if you flip back to side one, the slave can go home safely, and the machines will start eating the rest of us again. But prettily.
2000
Miranda Sex Garden, CARNIVAL OF SOULS
If I'd spent the next six years after FAIRYTALES waiting to see where MSG would go next, I strongly suspect I'd think CARNIVAL OF SOULS was inadequate excuse for a six year break. Luckily, I knew half a decade ago that Miranda Sex Garden had broken up. The news made me unhappy -- any band that had gone all the way from MADRA to FAIRYTALES in three years had an incredible amount of unused potential, I felt -- but I spend quite a lot of time discovering new bands, and the loss of an old one does settle. I hadn't thought of FAIRYTALES as a finished masterwork, but it had to become their masterwork after all just to make the story end happily, and by now I've long forgotten why it seemed the wrong shape peg to put in the desired hole. I didn't know the story was due for a sequel until I saw CARNIVAL in the store. I bet I spent fully a minute just holding it, looking it over, and trying to convince myself it was real. I took it home, and you darn well bet I've been liking it.
Musicians who age six years usually don't end up fiercer and more dangerous, and despite some personnel changes (Blake is the only singer left from MADRA; Trevor and Ben remain, but the bassist, keyboardist, and lead violinist are new), MSG aren't the exception. "Tonight" is a deadpan sophisto-jazz orchestration, for chrissakes (okay, it's a good one), and "Sleeping Beauty" revisits the chiming and tinkling sounds of "Wooden Boat" without taking them anywhere a child's nightmare would go. The marimbas and echoing guitar strings of "Without Trace" cycle in unnerving ways, and the bass feedback seems to have been dragged through a wind tunnel and violated there, but Blake's melody could be the hope-bled dirge from the alternate JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR where the hero dies from being trampled by runaway cows. "Escape From Kilburn" uses gypsy tunings and whammed drums and intensely sawed strings, but even it seems meant as dance music; the unresolved disagreements about how many legs the average person has seems to be mere oversight.
I'm no longer at all sure FAIRYTALES needed to be progressed from in the same direction, though, and thus CARNIVAL OF SOULS seems an inspired expansion of the band's revisited earlier missions. SUSPIRIA's church and chamber-music overtones remain, along with its full role for Katharine's typically amazing singing; FAIRYTALES contributes some chaos and erratic propulsion to the proceedings, along with a continued keen ear for fascinating sounds to play with. But now there is room too for crooning, for balladry, for piano, for the sort of acoustic guitar Steve Earle might play in a contemplative mood. Not in every song ("Are You The One?", leading off, may be the best classic-style MSG song ever), but when the new old elements appear, they're all mingled together, as if the styles never belonged apart. Did they? I'm pleased to say I can't remember.
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