Bill Horton
Dancehall for Midgets

The mad “Dancehall For Midgets” is a record that maybe, indeed probably, not to say almost certainly won't please you, but it will keep you awake, or provide you with interesting dynamic nightmares. It proceeds with jumps and leaps, being the result, I believe, of a schizoid and visionary attitude, which is evident from the hallucinated declamation of Bill Horton. He has nothing to do with the band, still going today, The Reverend Horton Heat, nor with Bill Horton & The Silhouettes, a fairly well-known melodic group in the late fifties, to be remembered if only for the fact of having reunited 19 years after their breakup (1961, 1980), but that's another story, which I nonetheless thought useful to open this brief review with a hall of mirrors game functional to describe certain atmospheres.

A theatrical air imbues Bill's vocal and guitar interventions. There's something of Tim Buckley in this man, a suggestion linked to the vibrato of the singing - in Horton's case, to its gutturalization -, but only in flashes. The voice is actually quite monotonous in its alto tenorism, whereas Buckley's was imbued with a wide range of nuances.

Two little-known musicians collaborate with Horton, who appears on the cover in the center of a pupil: on bass and electric sitar (an instrument for which I recommend listening to Clem Alford's “Mirror Image” from two years earlier) we find Steve Fricker; on percussion, Dave Gardner, who is made to disappear when Horton, at his indisputable whim, imposes his absolute centrality, at times so provocative and superfluous for the economy of the piece that it becomes nothing more than exhibitionistic.

Sometimes, and these are the best episodes of the work, you find yourself floating suspended on a guitar arpeggio, in that same void celebrated in “Rages of Emptiness”, one of the most incisive tracks, but hostage to the subsequent vision, which at any moment can break in mercilessly from the dark basements of the seer's psyche.

The apex of this approach is recorded in the suite “Dreams”, which covers much of the work, a very paced piece, in a sort of loop, with electric guitar embroideries and frantic accelerations, continuous pauses, and reprises united by their own irregularity and held together by Horton's storytelling.

The overall impression is that of two good musicians, Fricker and Gardner, for whatever fault locked in a recording studio and enslaved by an eccentric, charismatic tightrope walker - perhaps also inspired by the Great Captain Beefheart. But this would be a trial of intentions: always better to listen.