Y Pants
Beat It Down

Dying, I heard a fly buzz

The silence in the room

Resembled the silence of the air

Between successive waves of storm. (Emily Dickinson)

"Homemade music," dated 1982 but antecedent, made by three New York artists, more tied to visual arts than to music. Delicate and disoriented domestic music, surreal and auratic. Stuff that would disavow the Raincoats of “Odyshape” and foreshadow the post-punk funk of ESG’s “Come Away With ESG.”

I don't remember what Janis Joplin said she sang with, but within "Beat It Down" is the essence of female rock. Another sensitivity. And haughty. A path that intellectualizes every sensual side, abstracting it, in a fully ideal eroticization: every languid aspect is dismissed, while the nakedness of sound shines ivory and crosses, disheveling, the darkness that has swallowed all external confusion and noise.

A toy piano, a ukulele, a Casio mini keyboard, a bass, an innocuous Mickey Mouse percussion kit, a drum set, three voices. No phallic guitars!

New wave, no wave, avant-funk, Dadaist and linear music. Barebone rhythms, tribalisms, and chants. Minimal arrangements, yet incisive in their icy geometricity. Rain-driven structures guided by hypnotic choirs. Out melodies, anti-pop, as abstract and symbolic as naïve. The approach is as coarse as it is finely intellectual; free and ingenuous at the same time. Originality here is a total artistic-creative process, not mere provocation. It is pushed far beyond the general minimalism of which it is a daughter, for its evocative potential, for suggestion and poetics.

They almost conceive a possible counterpart of "Trout Mask Replica."

They love verses: "Barbara's Song" refers to Brecht, "The Fly" adapts Emily Dickinson.
They love exoticisms even if rendered anemic: "What Do You Take For Me?" implements Arabesque scales, "Lulu" lays out a backdrop of Pan-African beats.
They detest sexual violence: "The Way Boys Are."
They advocate a sui generis aesthetic, an innocent, mechanical, and timeless "small music" with "Obvious," a dreamy and shabby choir, with "Beat It Down," a cartoon-like resonant propellant, "Love's Desaise" and "The Shah Song," libertarian squeaks at the sides of an enchanted attic.

The paradigms of reference could be: Shaggs, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Raincoats, ESG, and Theoretical Girls (one of the three was dating Glenn Branca). But here, it almost seems like watching an avant-garde. A unicum. A hapax. A trope, translating photographs or actions into music: buzzing flies, dancing natives, ringing bottles, gasping breaths, veiled gazes, depicted bodies, contorted toys; a city compressed in a museum room.
A feminine sound escaped from the hands of three expert artists (a photographer, a filmmaker, a visual artist), loaned to music, for an album estranged from the surrounding world, between immediate thoughts and elusive sounds. 11 restless, free, alchemical, quintessential songs. For an unknown archetype. An unknown masterpiece.

Forever thanks to Barbara Ess, Gail Vachon, and Virginia Piersol. And to the only thing that mattered to you: art.

We dream –and it is good–
It would harm us –were we awake–…
It's safer –to dream. (Emily Dickinson)