Rangda feature at PopMatters

This is probably my favorite piece (of my own) for 2012. Really good record, too.

Just Don’t Call Them a Super-Group: The Rangda Interview
By Jennifer Kelly 5 November 2012

All three members of Rangda—that’s Sun City Girls’ Richard Bishop, Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny and free-jazz drumming legend Chris Corsano—have their own claims to “super-ness”, at least in pure musical ability. Just check out Bishop’s blur-speed, ethnically-tuned bouts of picking, Chasny’s hallucinatory arcs of psychedelic folk, or Corsano’s manic, chaotic yet totally-in-control percussive wizardry. Still all three palpably bristle when you bring up the term “super group”.

“It’s pretty ridiculous,” says Chasny, when asked about a phrase usually associated with unit shifters like Asia, Chickenfoot and the Travelling Wilburies. “That is a term generally given to bloated rock stars. You never hear that with jazz—‘Oh! That was Miles Davis’s super group!’ No, you just note the people playing.”

“Super groups are always kind of less than the sum of their parts,” says Corsano, noting that these ensembles are often put together with more of an eye towards commercial impact than artistry. “Rangda totally wasn’t that,” he adds. “It was Ben saying ‘I’ve played with Chris, and I’d like to play with him more. And I’ve played with Rick and I want to play with him more.’ I think that’s how every band should get together.”

Yet while Rangda may have started as the casual confluence of three major talents, it has evolved through touring and a second album. Formerly Extinct, released in September 2012 on Drag City, shows the threesome evolving from a fearsomely talented pick-up band into a living, breathing, continuing entity. We spoke to all three members about Rangda’s beginnings, their egalitarian approach to sharing leads, and their emergence as one of the most interesting part-time gigs in indie rock.

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Rangda, Round Two

I've got a PopMatters on Rangda coming (it's done but in the pipeline), but meanwhile check out my review of the band's second album, up late last week at Blurt.

Rangda
Formerly Extinct
(Drag City)

The last Rangda record, 2010's False Flag, was recorded just a couple of days after the band's three principals had their first practice session, a day max after the first time they played on stage. It was a rough, improvisational triumph, somehow melding the Richard Bishop's Eastern-tinged pyrotechnics with Ben Chasny's molten psychedelia, Chris Corsano's explosive energy with the two twining, exploring guitars. This second entry in the Rangda catalogue is altogether more premeditated, though still writhing with untamped power. It came after a month of East Coast shows, a day or two at Corsano's home to rough out songs and a full week of studio time at Jason Meagher's Black Dirt facility.


The songs are, consequently, more fleshed out and complicated, containing, in several cases, multiple movements and moods. "The Vault," for instance, starts in a blur-paced barrage of percussive picking, a batter and clash of chaotic drums, a bee swarm of noise and musical ideas that crowds sonic space right to the edges, everybody hammering at once. And then there's a break, and a slow, stately 1960s psych melody breaks out, two guitars moving in ritual accord, one frayed to breaking with dirt and distortion, the other ringing clear and luminous over it.


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Couple of things I've been listening to

I've been on some deadlines lately, listening pretty hard to records that I have to write about quickly. Live show reviews, in my view the most rushed of music writing projects (because you have to write before you forget what you saw and can't make out your handwriting), have taken up more than usual of my time.

So, I haven't been listening to as much random stuff, but there's been some, namely:
The Swell Maps, Jane From Occupied Europe...truly mental proto-post-punk from 1980. I like "Blenheim Shots" the best, sort of a straightforward banger, but there's very little that's straightforward about this album.



Rangda, Formerly Extinct...haven't really gotten to the bottom of this one, since it's not out until September-ish. It's a second album from Richard Bishop, Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano has, like the first one, a jawdroppingly beautiful long track ("White Nile") right in the middle. I don't think there's any free audio anywhere yet.

Arbouretum, Covered in Leaves...Rob sent me this live album from one of my favorite bands, and I'm liking it a lot, especially the cover of Pure Prairie League's "Amy" (Arbouretum spells it "Amie").



I'm also kind of enjoying the new Mojo compilation The Roots of the Rolling Stones...a bunch of early rock and blues tunes that everybody's heard ("Suzy Q" "I Just Wanna Make Love", "Not Fade Away") but nobody could mind hearing again.

Rangda, Major Stars, Sunburned Hand, holy shit!

So, after hardly going to a show all summer, I suddenly escaped my living room twice last week, first for Rangda, Major Stars, and Sunburned Hand of the Man at the Flywheel (reviewed below), and last night for Tortoise at the Iron Horse. Both really good. Still struggling with what to say about Tortoise, but my piece on Rangda ran this morning at Blurt. It begins:

We had ALL the guitars Thursday night.

Or at least that was how it seemed on a hot night in Easthampton. It was like all the guitars, all the pedals, all the guitar players had stepped onto a tilted board and slid helplessly towards the Flywheel. There were two of them in Sunburned Hand of the Man, three in Major Stars, two in Rangda (and at least one pretty famous one in the audience), and when they got going, in Sunburned's endlessly morphing drones, in Major Stars' psychedelic 1960s mayhem, or in Rangda's closing waterfall cascades of guitar notes, Sun City Girls' Richard Bishop and Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny locked together in the beautiful downward scales of "Plain of Jars," it could sound like an army. If you were looking for a guitar last Thursday and you were anywhere else, good freaking luck. You should have been at the Flywheel.

the rest

Here they are playing “Sarcophagi” in Dublin last summer.

I went to see Rangda last night

...and it was awesome.

I'm going to write about it tomorrow, but for now, a few photos.

Sunburned Hand of the Man, or some of them...there were 12 people on stage at one point, including one guy in a Spiderman mask




Major Stars...Kate Village is my new hero



And the really incomparable Rangda...if you get a chance, go see this.