Rangda and AFCGT: Seattle's premier avant-rock supergroups

Collaboration, in art as in other endeavors, leads to one of two ends: either the dilution of individual character and effort into collective slurry; or a communion of minds and bodies, blending singular egos into a fortified concoction that transcends the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the rock "supergroup" is a recipe that too often yields bland, watered-down, or simply underwhelming results. This, luckily, is not the case of AFCGT and Rangda, two all-star combos which have recently gushed forth from Seattle's underground rock wellspring.

Of the two groups, Rangda probably enjoys the most international renown. A non-traditional power-trio, the band formed in late 2009 and features guitarists Rick Bishop and Ben Chasny alongside percussionist Chris Corsano. Bishop is a long-time luminary on the experimental rock scene, a member of seminal avant-garde tricksters Sun City Girls, and a prolific solo artist who has explored world folk and rock guitar styles under the name Sir Richard Bishop. Chasny, a recent Seattle transplant, is the main creative force behind the psychedelic folk/rock project Six Organs of Admittance. And Corsano is perhaps Earth’s greatest living free percussionist, collaborating with a laundry list of spectacular artists including Paul Flaherty, Jandek, Björk, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Nels Cline, and most of the members of Sonic Youth. While Chasny and Corsano previously played together on School of the Flower, one of Six Organs’ most expansive and contemplative releases, Rangda is to the best of my knowledge both artists’ first recorded meeting with Bishop. They debuted with a mind-melting live performance at The Sunset in Ballard in autumn of last year, and in May they released the album False Flag on the Drag City label.

False Flag offers about what one would expect from a group of Rangda’s pedigree: assured, magisterial psychedelic and classic rock tropes delivered with searing improvisational energy. Structurally, the album alternates between noisy, free-form experiments and gorgeous, even restrained pieces that showcase each artist’s signature sounds. Both sides of the LP kick off with attention-grabbing blasts of razor-sharp guitar shredding and explosive thunder-peals from Corsano’s kit, on tracks appropriately titled “Waldorf Hysteria” and “Serrated Edges”. The entry-point for curious listeners should be the album’s second piece, “Bull Lore,” helpfully featured on the band’s MySpace page. Over an ominous foundation of spaghetti-western arpeggios and slashing outbursts of guitar and drums, Bishop lays down an acid-drenched lead that is at turns aggressive and mournful, especially when Chasny’s backing transitions into a major key during the middle of the song. As Corsano’s drumming becomes more martial in tone, Bishop ups the distortion for a fiery finale. Corsano’s limber, highly textural percussion occupies the foreground of “Fist Family” while strands of guitar noise twist in the wind. Meditative tracks close out each half of the album: “Sarcophagi” features the expressive, gentle side of Chasny’s take on pastoral psychedelic folk; while the epic “Plain of Jars” allows the trio to stretch out for a quarter hour, delicately circling around an anthemic riff that sounds like it could spiral off into eternity. Imagery of wind-sculpted sand dunes, meteor-streaked skies, ruined monuments to long-dead empires. In addition to satisfying fans of all three individual artists’ work, Rangda’s False Flag should also appeal to aficionados of the stoner-metal duo Om, world music-influenced post-rockers the Grails, and astral jazz icon Alice Coltrane.

While yielding an end result of equally high caliber, AFCGT’s collaboration is less recognizably a product of the individual brains and brawn behind the ruckus. AFCGT stands for A Frames/Climax Golden Twins, the two Seattle bands from which the band’s five members (three guitars, one bass, and percussion) are drawn. Erin Sullivan, Lars Finberg, and Min Yee of A Frames released three albums of scabrous, post-apocalyptic art-punk before temporarily going on hiatus during the later 00s (they’re back to playing live shows as of early 2010); Climax Golden Twins’ Jeffrey Taylor and Robert Millis traffic in displaced found-sound snippets, twisted Americana roots, and free improv sensibilities, as well as managing Wall of Sound, one of Seattle’s best indie record stores. The collective entity cryptically and hilariously describes its sound as “Drooling Hillbilly Metal, Sea Urchin Psychedelia, Yukon Freak Thrash, and Beatnik Swamp Drone.” They released a few appetizers (always self-titled, always on vinyl) on boutique labels like Uzu Audio and Dirty Knobby before transitioning to Sub Pop to release their first fully-realized long-player in 2010.

AFCGT is a beautiful-looking slab of ivory-colored vinyl accompanied by mysterious imagery and containing even more mysterious sounds. None of the pieces are easy to characterize, and describing the album’s general contours would require graduate-level experience in advanced topography. The churning, gut-wrenching “Black Mark” introduces the album, all atonal noise rock squall and blown out guitar leads, before segueing into the slow-burn psychedelia of “Two Legged Dog,” probably the album’s grooviest track. Wordless babbling vocals and Jeffrey Taylor’s bluesy slide guitar riffs simmer and sizzle atop a lumbering low end of galloping drums and wobbly bass courtesy Lars Finberg and Min Yee—think a country-fried Public Image Limited and you’ll be maybe half-way there. The album’s most formally compelling piece is “New Punk 27,” which in three short minutes cycles through movements of lo-fi noise punk jams, free-jazz freakouts, chaotic minimalist improvisations, slashing discordant riffage, and back again. The band’s weird sense of humor is epitomized by a brief moment at the end of the transitional track “New Punk,” where a deranged voice parrots some sort of Terrence McKenna-esque New Age snake oil about “major cycles” and the expectation of “a grand phase of destruction”. The only other recognizable vocals on the album are found on “Nacht,” which builds up a sinister atmosphere of gamelan-like cymbal tones and twisty guitar squiggles, over which a disembodied voice intones seemingly-random words in a series of languages—I recognize German, Spanish, at the very least. Even more unsettling is the horrific industrial drone of “Reasonably Nautical,” sounding like chopped-and-screwed Einsturzende Neubauten. After all the foregoing creative ferment, AFCGT makes the decision to close the album with “Slide 9,” an amorphous haze of queasy slide guitar, tinkling percussion, and what sounds like Sun Ra’s Atlantis­-period electronic organ noodling. It takes the album out on a typically obtuse note, leaving the listener sedate but disoriented.

The success of both Rangda and AFCGT attests to the great fertility and potential for cross pollination within Seattle’s experimental rock community and beyond. Listeners inspired by either of these releases would do well to explore other local artists associated with the responsible parties: try looking up Master Musicians of Bukkake (featuring AFCGT producer Randall Dunn), Alan Bishop (brother of Sir Richard, fellow member of Sun City Girls, and curator of the world-renowned label Sublime Frequencies), Scott Colburn (producer of False Flag as well as Animal Collective’s Feels) and avant-punk acts like The Intelligence, Unnatural Helpers, and Walls, for starters.

Originally written for the Rainy Dawg Radio blog.