Guru & Zero / Zmrzlina
Hemlock Tavern
August 31, 2002
photos
Review
by Michael CaloreThe music room at the Hemlock Tavern is small. Not bread-box small, but small to the extent that a sell out ends up being rather tightly packed in. And packed in we were. We braved the parking, fought the crowds, and elbowed our way up the stairs to sweat together. We cleared this particular saturday night off of our calendars in anticipation of the Guru and Zero show, a collaboration between Kawabata Makoto and Cotton Casino of Japanese psychedelia troubadors Acid Mothers Temple and Aussie acid king Daevid Allen, formerly of the Soft Machine and the progenitor of endless iterations of the Gong project. Who was Guru and who was Zero? Did it matter?
The opening band was the local outfit Zmrzlina, a five-piece consisting of violin, guitar, bass, drums, and synths. After being plagued by sound problems, the band led us through a set full of single-chord drones, feedback symphonies and Sonic Youth-isms. The all-female rhythm section in the band was tight in the spandex yoga pants sense. They can groove like few in this town, and they provided the punch that the male singer-guitarist and keyboardist needed in order to play solidly and effectively. They finished, we applauded, we sweated.
Guru and Zero. None of us knew what to expect. Daevid's twenty-odd effects pedals cast a spider-web of chaotic cabling across the front half the stage, quietly humbling Kawabata's guitar rig in the corner. Cotton's only equipment needs, as usual, were her Roland synth and a vocal microphone. The performers hit the scene in a mass of hair and stoned smiles. Kawabata wore a Gong t-shirt, Daevid advertised the Acid Mothers from beneath a Guatemalan knit job, and Cotton wore the only outfit I've ever seen her wear -- a loud jersey with a wrestler's name splayed across it. Then the music started. Daevid barked, yelped and chanted, adding his trademark glissando guitar, an adapted trick that takes Syd Barret's fabled "ball bearings down the neck" and warps it into the more timely "whammy bar on the strings" technique. Harmonics further twisted by effects, dreamy, lush, and just a touch disturbing. Kawabata bowed out long successions of minor scales, casting the creeped out minds in front of the stage even further into the darkness. Cotton gave us an array of bzz bzz noises and shrieking vocals.
The theme switched after about fifteen minutes when Kawabata put down the bow and launched into his familiar Pink Lady Lemonade melody, on top of which Daevid dropped some improv poetry and Cotton did all she could to keep up. At times, the two could only stand and smile as Kawabata dove further into full-on "oh fuck" speed thrash territory, abusing his stratocaster in unseen ways by flipping it upside down and shaking the sounds out of it. Daevid, looking a bit confused and weary, tried to leave the stage, but neither the crowd nor the other performers would let that happen.
The "encores" for the evening began as Daevid solicited phrases from the crowd and digitally looped them to form a collage of voices. Kawabata bowed a bazouki and Daevid played more glissando guitar. In the last ten minutes of the unscripted jam session, the power player was Cotton Casino. Her beautiful angelic voice floated above and weaved through the dense feedback washes of her bandmates, grounding the otherwise dehumanizing performace. It seems that the thread of the evening that had been introduced by Zmrzlina was being reinforced -- the men thrashed about with guitars and feedback loops with cosmic abandon, but the women brought it back to Earth with grace and power.
Guru & Zero
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All photographs are copyright Debra A. Zeller, ©2002 - For permission to use any of these photographs for whatever reason, please send me an email at daz@playinginfog.com
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