dustdevil and crow

I spent a little time last week working on a bio/one-sheet-ish sort of thing for Michael's dustdevil & crow project (with Bendle from a door and a window), whose third full-length is now available on bandcamp and via the Free Music Archive. Michael said it would be okay if I shared it here, and I thought it came out pretty well so here goes...

dustdevil& crow
…and chuang tzu dreamed that he was me

“I've always hated electric guitars! I've played one myself, so this is a thorny relationship, but in pop and "rock" music i often want to silence the guitarist, especially solos (I often feel the same about sax players in jazz!),” says Bendle, ex of late 1970s/early 1980s post-punk outfit The Door and the Window and now one-half of the electro-acoustic, noise-folk-industrial experiment known as dustdevil & crow. “ And here I am playing with a guitarist - who makes this amazing noise! I always feel honoured that such a brilliant musician wants to work on my songs!”

That guitarist is Michael Duane, one-time leader of NYC No Wave mainstays The Dustdevils, erstwhile Wedding Present guitarist and, more recently, a collaborator with Railroad Jerk’s Steve Cerio (in psych-rocking Atlantic Drone) and Jackie-O Motherfucker. He and Bendle have been working together as Dustdevil& Crow since 2008, when they connected via a blog post Duane had made about The Door and the Window.

Bendle contacted Duane to thank him and a musical conversation ensued, conducted, then as now, entirely over the internet. Bendle sent Duane some solo material, including a song meant for his next album. Duane replied, “I need to play bass on this!" and the partnership began. “Initially I'd build a bed of loops and sing a melody line over the top, and Michael would add stuff and then I would add more. Often I'd then remove some or all of my original loops,” Bendle explained. “Now the beginnings of songs come as often from Michael's end as from mine.”

Working in this way, mostly by exchanging files, but occasionally touching base by phone, Bendle and Duane created three albums together, 2009’s while walking slowly you can see the grasses grow, 2010’s while speaking softly you can hear the insects sing and now …and chuang tzu dreamed that he was me. The album was named for the 4th century (BC) Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu who, myth has it, once dreamed he was a butterfly and woke up wondering if he were a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang Tzu.

A dreamlike sense of mystery pervades the title track and, indeed, the rest of the album, in elliptical poetic lyrics and a hazy intuition of alternate realities. Yet the songs are also fringed with rock aggression, rough-edged guitars, abrasive noise and, in two places, a drum beat reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” There are clearly two very different sensibilities at work. The way they mesh with and contradict and reinforce each other is part of the fascination.
Bendle said that he was occasionally surprised by what Duane had added to his compositions, but that the two worked from a foundation of trust. “Sometimes I can't even hear a connection between [what I’ve sent and what he’s written] when i first listen, but I have learned that it always works,” Bendle said. “After all, he's the musician in this band. I am maybe good at constructing music, but have limited capacities for properly playing anything... after many years of on/off performing and recording music I am still a non-musician.”

He continued, “I’m also always amazed that Michael accepts my processing and sometimes mangling of what he does. For example ‘November’ began as a guitar duet from the same session, and having the same kind of sound as,’Fritz Haber’... and I turned it into something rather different! And even on “Fritz Haber’, i took the original guitar parts and cut and spliced them in a way that I felt worked for the song.”

…and chuang tzu dreamed that he was me, as well as the two earlier dustdevil& crow albums, can be downloaded via http://bendle.bandcamp.com

For all other enquires, use the contact button at the bandcamp site above.

I am a bead on the thread connecting my father and daughter

My friend Michael sent me some rough mixes of his second album with Bendle (Crow) last summer, and I’ve been meaning to write about them ever since. The album, which is now finished and mixed and available via Michael’s blog, is called While Speaking Softly You can Hear the Insects Sing. It’s really beautiful, like the first one, with a sort of dreamy layer of murmured spoken word (that’s Bendle, I think) over a mesh of incandescent guitar and drums (Michael, I assume). Last time, I said it reminded me of Current 93, and I think that’s still a fair reference point, though I am also hearing bits that remind me of the Incredible String Band this time around, and other auras that sound like Belong and William Basinski, and as someone else mentioned last time, later, more experimental John Fahey. My favorite piece is something called “Zebra Mix 12feb,” which starts in a sort of monk’s chant and weaves through a hallucinatory landscape of echoey, interleaved vocals, eastern tinged guitar and hand drums. I am also quite taken with “Breathing In Mix 19 June”, which has a circling, almost round-like quality, three voices this time, one a woman, in overlapping layers, whose delicacy is not at all undermined by some very distorted guitar and battering drums. But anyway, why take my word for it, when you can have the whole thing?

Dustdevil & Crow

You can now listen to pretty much all of the latest album from Dustdevil & Crow on the Free Music Archive. Dustdevil, if you didn’t know, is Michael Duane of the no-wave DustDevils and numerous other projects – Atlantic Drone, some others. (he’s also youngmosstongue.blogspot.com … and knows pretty much everything there is to know about punk, post-punk and 1960s-1990s experimental music.)

Crow is Bendle of the late 1970s experimental band The Door and the Window (and, again, other projects).

The music is quite beautiful, mysterious, dream-like, with overlapping vocals and warped effects, so that you feel like you’re moving through water or fog or sheets of very thin cloth. There’s not actually that much guitar on it, though some It reminded me a little bit of Current 93 at first, but now I’m not sure that’s right at all.

Anyway, here’s “Moss”


IF you want more, go to www.freemusicarchive.org and search for Dustdevil (or Crow if you want to sift through a lot of extra stuff).