In case you hadn’t heard, John Zorn (who turned 70 on September 2) has at long last allowed his Tzadik label’s catalog to appear on streaming services like Spotify and Tidal. With close to 1000 releases, there’s a lot to sort through, and not all of it is gonna be for everyone. There’s a whole lot of it that’s not for me. But I want to talk about one particular project that I’ve gone back and forth on for almost 25 years, and how a new live album has put it in a new light for me.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a fully baptized member of the church of Keiji Haino. I’ve heard dozens of his records and seen him live four times, including a show with Zorn at CBGB, a percussion show at the original Knitting Factory, and a Fushitsusha show at Tonic that was supposed to be two sets, one solo and one with the band, but then Haino decided to make it a single three-hour marathon and holy shit. That was one of the greatest nights of my musical life, no qualifiers. I interviewed him once, kinda — my recorder didn’t work and the translator I arranged for wasn’t really up to the task. But I brought him a chocolate cake from Dean & DeLuca, which he really liked, so if nothing else it was a friendly encounter.
In the fall of 1998, Haino formed a trio with bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Rashied Ali, calling it Purple Trap. (There’s also a Fushitsusha live album called Purple Trap, but the two things have nothing to do with each other as far as I can tell.) They went into Laswell’s Orange Music studio in New Jersey and recorded two hours’ worth of material, which came out on Tzadik as the double CD Decided…Already The Motionless Heart Of Tranquility, Tangling The Prayer Called “I”.
I ordered a copy instantly. I mean, talk about your power trios! I was expecting some unholy cross between Fushitsusha, Last Exit, and the John Coltrane/Rashied Ali duo album Interstellar Space. I was prepared to have my head torn off and dropped into my lap. But it didn’t turn out to be the sonic apocalypse it could have been. Haino was playing more clean, almost Derek Bailey-style improv guitar than I expected, and while Ali was great, free but surprisingly swinging, Laswell often made the choice to use pedals to head into a psychedelic dub zone instead of going for the hard funk-metal bass sound that would have pushed the music into overdrive.
Several of the tracks are quite long. “Supposedly Generous Possessors of Death Meet a Warning While Napping,” one of the most Fushitsusha-esque pieces and one of my favorites, runs nearly 18 minutes, while “The Reassembling Place of Dispersed Holy Murderous Thought” is almost 12, “I Already Know the Settlement of Iridescent Happiness” is almost 13, and “Continously Draw a Gentle Spiral… Red Death!” lasts an astonishing 30:50. Others are short; the opening “Who Decided the Number 1?” lasts just 3:35, and pretty much every other piece is between five and seven minutes long.
There are some beautiful moments, and some stunning ones, but it still often feels like a missed opportunity, like they fell just short of glory. When I interviewed Laswell in 2011, I asked him about it, noting that it seemed like he was operating on a different path from either of them. He agreed, saying, “I’d have to hear it again, but I remember that Rashied just played a texture, and Keiji Haino did the same, and I felt that if I just contributed the same kind of thing to that, that it would just be like Merzbow or something, there wouldn’t be a dynamic. So I kept trying to put in dynamics and breaks and stops and elements that might change the course of what otherwise could be a fairly redundant program.” That’s not 100% accurate — he falls in line with the other two about half the time, but when he’s working against them, he really works against them.
Anyway, despite not loving it the way I thought I would, I’ve been listening to Decided… for almost 25 years. It’s one of those records that’s fascinating precisely because it’s almost there. And I bet if I sat down and put together a collection of just the high points, it would be one of the most incredible things you could ever hear. Well, now the story of Purple Trap has a second chapter. Seven years after their one studio session, Haino, Laswell, and Ali got back together for a single December 2005 performance at Zorn’s performance space, The Stone. It was recorded, and it sat on Laswell’s shelf for 17 years until he released it in January of this year, as part of his BASSMATTER subscription program, available via Bandcamp.
(If you’re a Laswell fan, it’s a good deal — he’s got some otherwise unavailable Last Exit concerts up there, an incredible Praxis show from the Knitting Factory that I was actually present for, and a bunch of other unique live recordings and rarities. It’s $22 a month, and if you think it’s for you, I recommend taking the plunge.)
The performance, which runs just about 49 minutes, is divided into seven untitled tracks. I’m sure if Laswell had asked him, Haino would have come up with beautiful, long-winded, poetic titles, but whatever… the music is what matters, and it’s searing. Haino is mostly going back and forth between two modes/sounds: No Wave skronk/splatter and thundercloud/tsunami psychedelic overload. On the final track, his guitar sounds like sheet metal being fed into a tree shredder. Ali is all over his kit, a barrage of pure energy music, dicing time into smaller and smaller increments, then punctuating it with a thunderous roll. And Laswell really seems to be working with the two of them, rather than attempting to nudge them in new directions. He’s the middleman this time, which makes the music more cohesive, but also less startling. It’s not as transcendent as the best material from Decided…, but it’s not as aimless as that album’s lesser passages. Recommended.