Kramer
The Guilt Trip

Mark Kramer knows a lot.

His omnipresence in the most fertile rock underworlds, where real novelties are born, from the late Seventies to today, touches the holy gift of ubiquity…

To mention some "events" in which he participated in the most varied ways, I can tell you that around '79 you could hear him playing "country" in some ramshackle venue in New York alongside none other than John Zorn (a clever "jazz" genius well represented on deBaser..), that he was for some time the bassist of the enormous Butthole Surfers during their most prolific years, that, above all, he is the demiurge of that indie-pendent Institution which is the Shimmy Disc, the recording studio that, to name a few, hides the secrets of people like Galaxie 500, Half Japanese, the crazy Daniel Johnston, the Palace Brothers of Will Oldham, "Naked City," an absolute masterpiece by the already mentioned Zorn…

But if up to this point one can appreciate the talents of Kramer as a producer, it is with Bongwater, kind of a new and fantastic psychedelic Mothers Of Invention reminiscent of Zappa, that the "repressed" spirit of Kramer as an artist comes out… "The Guilt Trip," his first (and by far most interesting) solo work from 1993, is the result of an old gluttonous hippie past his prime who, perhaps, in the breaks, in the nights when he wasn't forced to oversee and refine others' work, dedicated himself with a few close friends to his truest passion: old and dear psychedelia…

And what his boundless ego and his vast experience as a "studio beast" have finally conceived is this imposing, sometimes overflowing, triple LP with 36 songs… It mostly consists of instrumental tracks around three minutes long that develop short ideas or fragments of ideas, often simple riffs, taken, stolen or remixed in an almost "pop" art (in a Warholian sense), of citation and self-citation… It starts from the intro with three electric "space" notes exasperated in an intense crescendo (his favorite "technique"), then moves through a bit of everything, Barrettian ballads with a Red Crayola tail, a funereal elegy with Flaming Lips-like flavors, heavenly instrumentals with liquid wah wah guitars and fluttering organs, hard rock riffs on a tribal base Popol Vuh style, studio tricks Residents-taste, power pop à la Who to mini jam blues-rock...

You've got it, the size and variety are the strength and the flaw of the album and the "too much" experience, the good and the bad of Kramer… Anyway, it's still an important work, too little considered and worth discovering in its entirety…