75 Dollar Bill – I Was Real
Glitterbeat/Tak:Til – 28 June 2019
I’ve always been fascinated by musical cliché’s. A cliché is something so over-used that it loses all meaning, but every cliché started out as something cool, presumably. The blues is such a cliché. Butchered, misunderstood, played badly, watered down beyond recognition, stripped of meaning and tradition, the very words “blues jam” instil fear and horror in many a music aficionado.
But go back to the roots of the blues and you will find a world of wonder. The blues are the roots of most of today’s popular music, and if you can find it in its original form as played by the descendants of freed African slaves, you will find a fascinating blend of half-remembered African rhythms and melodies, European folk tunes transported to America, and a uniquely African-American sound and style, all played on ramshackle pawnshop instruments. In scratchy recordings from the 20s and 30s, past and future met, often in cheap hotel rooms or rural settings, beneath the hot Southern sun, fueled by cheap booze.
In a sense that is what 75 Dollar Bill are doing: going back to the essence of music, stripping it of all but the bare essentials, and going full blazes with the resulting minimalism.
75 Dollar Bill is essentially a duo, based in, not surprisingly, New York City. Guitarist Che Chen plays a hollow body guitar fretted for microtonal playing and percussionist Rick Brown plays a wooden crate, various kinds of hand percussion and what is cryptically referred to as ‘primitive horns’. The result sounds like a cross between early electric blues, psychedelic “desert rock” from North Africa, and garage bands like the Black Keys.
I was Real is their third album. Four years in the making, it features eight guests total, on guitar, bass, sax, percussion, viola, signal processing and hi-hat, expanding the band’s sonic palette. The result, however, is anything but watered down. 75 Dollar Bill’s sound remains earthy and primitive, relentlessly pushing forward and circling around meditatively at the same time, like some ancient musical ritual brought into the 21st century through electricity.
To call this music ‘improvisational’ may be a misnomer, as there is none of the sometimes aimless meandering that purely improvisational music can lead to. Instead, this is very much drone-and pattern-based music, bringing to mind anything from Buddhist chanting to the work of avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith.
Guitarist Che studied with Mauritanian guitarist Jeich Ould Chigaly for ten days in 2013. Although Chen readily admits it was necessarily a superficial training, the influence of North African blues by the likes of Bombino and Kel Assouf is unmistakable. Chen’s guitar tone is raw and distorted, while at the same time honed to perfection, cutting like a knife through the simmering textures and swampy rhythms of I Was Real.
“Every Last Coffee or Tea” sounds like an electric raga, with Bombino-like guitar playing that is beautifully minimalist. “Tetuzi Akiyama”, named after a Japanese experimental guitarist, is another trance-like tune that makes me imagine Chuck Berry rocking out to a tribal beat somewhere in the North-African desert.
Title Track “I was Real” starts off as an Indian raga, with Brown’s wooden crate percussion sounding vaguely tabla-like. Over a drone of harmonium and strings, Chen’s guitar repeats the same riff over and over, till it starts to mutate slowly as the music ebbs and flows. An awesome demonstration of the band’s mastery of dynamics and textures. “05WZN3” brings to mind the Velvet Underground, yet another icon of primitive cool, at their most experimental. Fuzzed–out guitars and droning violin lay down a relentlessly pulsating tapestry of drones and overtones.
Much experimental music is either overly intellectual or seems made for a small clique of connoisseurs, but 75 Dollar Bill does not fall in either category. They’ve carved out a niche for themselves as an experimental group with a vision and a sound that is unique. 75 Dollar Bill are the missing link between archetypal blues, experimental, and drone-based music. Influences from different cultures drift in and out, and in the end, you can only say this is truly “world” music in that it is both from everywhere and nowhere. 75 Dollar Bill have stitched their diverse influences together into a powerful, hypnotic sound that is as unique as it is mesmerizing. I Was Real showcases the band’s scope, imagination and raw power, whether in stripped-down duo form or expanded with various musical guests. Warmly recommended.
CD/LP:
Digital: https://idol.lnk.to/I_Was_Real
Photo Credit: Alex Phillipe Cohen