On 1st January 2023, I embarked on a new project, the objective being to listen one album from the past I’d never heard before, and to do that on every day that year. I enjoyed the frequent engagements with fellow Twitter users and was constantly surprised that, even after many years of crate digging, I was still being introduced to fantastic LPs I would otherwise have known nothing about. It is true that the deeper you dig the greater your realisation that you know nothing at all. My intention was to do a short write up on all the records, but that part of the plan didn’t materialise. Time and energy grew thin and I ran out of steam a mere two weeks before I got to the end of the year. Christmas – as it often does – got in the way. Nevertheless, the project worked – it was an education. There were so many startling discoveries, but of all the records I listened to, perhaps around ten or so absolutely knocked me sideways. One of those was Out Of The Blue by Blue Gene Tyranny.
I knew nothing about the album beforehand, nor had I even heard of its creator, although I really should have. Tyranny (real name Robert Nathan Sheff) died in 2021. Four years before he made Out Of The Blue he had been part of Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power touring band, a vision of fire sporting bright red light-emitting diodes in his hair. Listening to Out Of The Blue, that seems almost impossible to imagine. I undertook the obligatory bit of research and began to notice a few parallels with John Cale. Tyranny, I discovered, was a highly respected experimental / avant-garde composer, who had worked with John Cage and LaMonte Young in the early 1960s, and, like the great Welshman, became an accomplice of James Jewel Osterberg, in Tyranny’s case in the fledgling pre-Stooges outfit the Prime Movers in the mid-60s. But I was unable to make any kind of comparison between what heard now and anything I knew by Messrs. Cale or Cage. Instead I heard something almost uncategorizable. What was it? A melancholic folk-tinged AOR-suite? A bizarre avant-garde ambient tone poem? I couldn’t fathom from whence it came. And it was released in 1977 – such a pivotal year – lending it a particularly kooky charm. Just where this was supposed to fit in? Certainly not with the new guard, punk or new wave, but it seemed equally distanced from the past, free from the pat cliches and bland conventions that gave rise to punk’s arrival.
Recorded and mixed by Tyranny at Mills College, this album emerged following the fabled 1976 ‘Trust in Rock’ concerts, where Tyranny had collaborated with Peter Gordon. He had drawn some inspiration from dabbling in more conventional forms of music, but the fruits of this curious dilettantism were about to ripen.
‘The Next Time Might Be Your Time’, on first hearing, might seem like in inauspicious beginning – with its MOR guitar licks (courtesy Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek) and bursts of R&B-style sax. Tyranny’s glistening electric keyboard line (somewhere between clavinet and harpsichord), later followed by washes of synth, were interesting enough, as were the shifting tempos and rhythms, all of which encouraged me to persevere. And in any case I was struck by Patrice Manget’s vocals, as vulnerable as they were perspicacious, which steered a perfect path through the pretty melody.
But, towards the end of the second track, a largely uninspiring instrumental of AWB-style funk / fusion, entitled ‘David Kopay’ (aka ‘for David K’) I was feeling a little underwhelmed. By this point you might be tempted to give up. I was. But I would urge you to be patient. Around 90 seconds from the end of the track, some strange things began to happen – first a brief, fairly muted robotic brass exchange, the kind of which you’d more likely expect to find on a Robert Wyatt record, followed by a futuristic synth outro that floats into the ether. Hmmm…let’s hang in here a little longer.
Just as well, for the real fun was just about to begin. Side Two – also comprising two fairly lengthy tracks – was something else altogether. ‘Leading A Double Life’ is the shortest track on the album, and the music – unlike on the other tracks on the LP – is performed entirely by Tyranny on his piano and polymoog. An otherworldly blend of past and future, it sounds like the McGarrigle sisters (in actual fact Lynn Morrow and Jane Sharp) warming the coffee house via some forgotten Goffin & King composition, but Tyranny’s arrangements lift it into another orbit entirely. He procures these solitary sustained keyboard notes stretched over rolling piano, that seem to create time and space for memories to flood in, creating a veritable tsunami of melancholia. It is absolutely extraordinary.
But it is merely the warm up for the 25- minute ‘A Letter From Home’, which rather bizarrely begins with similar train noises that signal the end of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds LP, but this time marking the beginning of the journey. Distorted fiddle and bashes of cowbell then mutate into an onslaught of Reich-ian electronic loops, alongside some seemingly impenetrable poetic discourse, a narrative meditation described by Tyranny as an exploration of “the Doppler effect as a metaphor for the the development of consciousness.” Don’t let that put you off. The keyboard sounds are truly visionary, zig-zagging futurism blending with ethereal electric piano. You won’t have heard anything remotely like it.
Indeed, the same could be said of the album itself. (JJ)
The New Perfect Collection 