April Issue of WIRE magazine
DEGENERATE ART ENSEMBLE
The Bastress
By Nick Southgate
For more than 12 years The Degenerate Art Ensemble have stampeded over every artistic boundary they have found before them. Much of their reputation is based on their multimedia performances, where they don oulandish costumes reminiscent of some macabre pantomime.
The Bastress, their seventh studio album, has to stand alone from this visual support. Nonethless the music is so rampant with ideas that it peoples the theatre of the imagination with its own compelling actors. The line-up is a nonet conducted by Joshua Kohl, and the most immediate and visceral force on the recordings is the voice of Haruko Nishimura. Her dextrous howls and screeches skittle over the opening "Oni Gorshi" and the title track, where she is answered, provoked and confronted by a chorus of male voices.
Equally striking are the instrumentals. The big-band-gone-bad rollercoaster of "Beast With a Bellyful of Bedsprings" is intense and overwhelming. "Tits And Honey" opens with a helter-skelter bass riff and angular guitar line, the drums rising and rolling underneath. The brass section vamp in an off-kilter manner, only for the whole performance to subside to a shuffling whisper. It revives itself for guitarist Sam Mickens to execute a stabbing solo, before stumbling and rumbling into a capitulating diminuendo.
The impact of Nishimura's voice and the versatile energy of the group's collective instrumental prowess combine most memorabley on the closing track "Smoking Baby", a sinister prowl that explodes and climaxes with her wretched intoning "Lonely, lonely, lonely" with a disturbing and invasive frankness.
Organ Magazine (London)
“So, what is the Degenerate Art Ensemble? An orchestra? A live band? A dance troupe? An experimental theatre company? Forget even trying to pop the Degenerate Art Ensemble into any of those pigeonholes - yet they are all, and much more than the sum of those. It’s performance art that has broken out of the seclusion of the art house into that dirty
real world of gigs... The Degenerate Art Ensemble have smeared together the styles called classical, experimental, world, jazz and rock music so completely that it seems pointless to ever untangle them again. Remember the time when there were such things as boundaries?”
Berliner Morgenpost (Berlin)
“This music and movement ensemble create work outside of all music and dance conventions... telling surreal stories filled with sweetness, power and humor. The unexpected is accomplished and a mysterious mythology emerges.”
Kultur Magazine (Prague)
“They entranced the audience... the secret of their performance is perfect drama, gradation and splendid visuals, indescribable costumes and a punk-symphonic-garage-big-band style. Dynamic upheavals were turning into relaxing passages and everything was falling into place like wheels in a post-modernist clock machine.”
Willamette Week (Portland)
“Prepare for some serious aesthetic bastinado... make way for a few conceptions about boundaries between theater, classical and rock music to melt... it leaves a huge chunk of the rule book tattered in the gutter.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian (San Francisco)
“(DAE’s dancer/choreographer) Haruko Nishimura gave a performance that sparkled with the looseness of an improvisation, all the while maintaining the control of a master.”
Nichibei Times (San Francisco)
“Low tones of bass and the creaking of DAE’s self made panthrastic harp zither created an exquisite and harmonious soundscape as the movement of Nishimura’s limbs stirred the audience into ecstasy. She captured internal emotions and sentiments awakening and arousing - her velvety smooth movement producing a supernatural and ghostly air.”
The Seattle Weekly (Seattle)
“Nishimura evoked Mothra, Marlene Dietrich, and a live-action cartoon character, captivating and surreal, proving that she’s one of Seattle’s most gifted performers.”
Guy Montag, KFJC FM (SF Bay Area)
The Bastress offers ambitious, hyperactive,
convulsive, swirling busied tension & high strung
post-punk spasms from these apocalyptical jazzy
degenerate visual dance performers. Much like Anna
Homler and, to a much greater extent, Diamanda Galas,
Haruko Nishimura uses her versatile voice not only as
a mischievously bewildering tool, but as a fearsome
weapon. Imagine Sleepytime Gorilla Museum musically
invoking the spirit of Peter Brotzmann or Jeff Kaiser
while auditioning Cornholio’s Tourette’s syndrome
tirade. The experience tends to make one woozy and
disoriented similar to invasive military experiments
in audio terrorism. Yet this is on a completely
different creative level, albeit an intensely weird
one, given their interpretive avant-garde theatrics &
cinematic quality. Moods and rhythm shift constantly
on this recording. It’s predominantly frantic and loud
with crushing jazz overtones but has unique transient
low-key moments, which are minimal, mellow, and even
pleasing. Perhaps this was done so you could catch
your breath before being plunged back into the high
wire percussive punches, brass barrage, guitar grime
riffs and violent viola & vocal outbreaks. Think
you’re up for the adventure, Dr. Jones? The D.A.E. is
likely to run your ass over like a rapidly rolling
boulder if you don’t watch your step!
The Stranger Review Article
DEGENERATE ART ENSEMBLE
The Bastress
(Tellous)
recommended recommended recommended recommended
The first time I heard Nina Hagen's "Nunsexmonkrock"
was on three hits of acid in a Spokane Nazi's art
studio. This new Degenerate Art Ensemble record
induces more musical-genetic transmutation than that
experience ever did. The Bastress, the seventh album
of the 12-year-old, nine-member collective sounds
totally new, vividly recreating the death
hallucinations of a decaying city in their
noise-streams. Haruko Nishimura's senses-snaring
vocals play as one of the instruments. Joshua Kohl,
conducts while Josh Stewart plays trumpet and sings;
together the trio score and compose with the band.
The music is great, controlled-to-the-point-of-madness
psych-noir, as Nishimura squeals, shrieks, scats, and
shines throughout. Stewart constructs cacophony
through the Shostakovich-meets-bebop of "Tits and
Honey (AKA James Taylor)," and the grunting and
spinning skronk of "Smoking Car" (inspired by a
Bukowski poem).
Don't miss their October 1st show, as Nishimura (also
of the Butter Sprites) uses her formal Butoh-dancing
training to twitch and flow every part of her body and
startle the audience with visual caresses and
suggested internalized violence. The band will be
restored to the nine-piece that recorded this (their
most accessible, but still mind-fucking) album. As
with any DAE show, you will be forced to respond
somehow with and against those around you—personally,
I haven't seen club-goers induced to react to a band
as they have to DAE since the final days of GG Allin.
- CHRIS ESTEY (The Stranger -Seattle)
Interview with THREE IMAGINARY GIRLS
"We get about 100 new albums a DAY coming in here now, (about 100,000 total), and The Bastress is one of the best I've ever heard." - Derek Sivers, Founder, CDBaby
1. i love this record.
2. a defiant circus of carefully crafted
chaos...sublime and raucous.
3. a jedi mind-fuck.
4. this is a beautifully crafted, yet marvelously
unhinged sonic adventure.
- Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat Trio, Sleepytime Gorrilla Museum, Charming
Hostess, Tom Waits, Tzadik Records)
"This is visceral, smart modern music with a huge dynamic range, from delicate shards to explosive grooving enhanced by the full-on banshee wailing of vocalist Nishimura. Complexity without nerdiness and drawing from on a wide world of sound filtered through the kind of anti-authoritarian sensibility that's the perfect antidote to ambivalent alt-rock." - Elliott Sharp (NYC)
"Man, this stuff is great. This is cool!" - Bill Frisell