Arcana - 1997 - Arc of the Testimony

Arcana

1997

Arc of the Testimony

01. Black Money (4:17) *
02. Gone Tomorrow (9:39)
03. Illuminator (6:07)
04. Into the Circle (9:27)
05. Returning (4:30)
06. Calling Out the Blue Light (6:38)
07. Circles of Hell (7:15)
08. Wheeless on a Dark River (4:29)
09. The Earth Below (5:30)

* Bonus track on 2018 and 2021 reissues

Bill Laswell / basses, electronics, producer
Tony Williams / drums

With:
Pharoah Sanders / tenor saxophone (2,7)
Buckethead / guitar (3,5,7,9)
Nicky Skopelitis / guitar (2-8)
Graham Haynes / cornet (2,4)
Peter Apfelbaum / tenor saxophone (1)
Byard Lancaster / alto saxophone, bass clarinet (4,6)

Maybe the heaviest, sickest record I've ever heard, but this is absolutely *not* heavy metal or any other genre known for heaviness. It is a truly genreless work of such distinction and originality that I can only hope to give a tiny hint of its gravity and reality in these casual comments.

At the very least I can identify some of the parts here. Ultimately, however, the whole is a mystery that resides in the mind of Bill Laswell. At the top of the parts list, the drumming is by Tony Williams (in one of his final recording sessions before his death) and it's basically his classic sound of pounding the living shit out of his drumkit with insane virtuosity and nimbleness, pure Tony Williams drumkit shred. This goes a long way toward accounting for the heaviness of this music. Just the drumming alone is a heavy and sick wonder to behold. Listening to this reminds me there was only and will only ever be one person who can make a drumkit sound like this, the teenager who got hired by Miles Davis during his most advanced period and went on to reinvent his instrument. If there was ever a truly bad-ass motherfucker, it's Tony Williams. Behold. I'm not a Williams expert, but this might actually be the heaviest shit he ever laid down short of the original Lifetime stuff. In an interview, Laswell refers to the "velocity, force, and aggression" of Williams' playing in these sessions and it's in a totally different league than the work Williams had been doing toward the end of his career, not to discount the classic Jonas Hellborg album The Word.

Another reasonably easy-to-describe ingredient is the sick sick sick shredding guitars of Buckethead and Nicky Skopelitis. These guys have laid down hours of sick shit over the years and this is totally uncompromised, over-the-top speed explosions and piercing tones. It's not relentless shredding, though, but rather short episodes of hair-raising extremes. And they do a lot of slower, textural, melodic stuff as part of the shifting web of sound.

There are moments when the drums and guitar are both exploding in such a powerful way it feels like the sky is opening up and God is doing that whole dark, cataclysmic "the time has come for my power to be known" geo-pyscho-drama embedded in the theatrical imagery of Judeo-Christian mythology and memetically known to myself and virtually any other inhabitant of Western culture. It's just huge. Cataclysmic. Cosmic. It makes me wanna push the volume knob higher and fall to my knees in worship of the gods of power-fusion sound-ritual-frenzy-orgy-meditation. Sound-worship. It's a religious experience.

If listening to other peaks in the history of spiritually intense extreme-high-octane electric devotional music like Mahavishnu Orchestra is like being attacked by a tiger for a few minutes, this is more like being suddenly squeezed by the trunk of a placid mastodon, lifted to the sky, slammed to the ground, and then stepped on. Needless to say, it's, uh... visceral. But why "placid"? Hmm, it must be all the synth/sampler textures on the record.

Back to the parts list. You've got free jazz saxophone legends Pharoah Sanders and Byard Lancaster (who also plugs in some very fine low-toned clarinet musing) going way out in a few sections, playing fire music on the summit of an active volcano. But this is not some kind of drum/guitar/sax/etc noise blowout. The intensity ebbs and flows and solo passages have a space in the mix that makes them *count*.

You've also got trumpeter Graham Haynes in there adding to the timbres and textures that swirl around, and you've got Bill Laswell laying down throbbing, melodic bass guitar lines, offering more conventional instrumentalism than typical for his contributions to recordings.

All this cosmic fury is embedded in layers of dreamy, drifting, melancholy, slow ambient electro-acoustic and electronic music that would turn a lot of ears in its own right. You've got synths, Laswell's textural, processed bass guitar stuff, etc. Major vibe action. This description suggests something pretty cheesy, I know, but this is the real deal, not wallpaper music.

I think one of the deepest reasons for the effect of this record is the way the more relaxed, ambient stuff is balanced with the sick, out shredding on drumkit, guitar, and saxophone.

Some other things that help include constantly shifting, inventive rhythms driven by Williams. My guess is that Laswell just had him go into a studio and play the the hottest solos he could muster, and then the music was built up around excerpts of that. The macro-scale/supra-sectional compositional structure transcends what you could possibly expect from any real-time performing ensemble.

And now we're getting to the heart of the matter, Bill Laswell's production. For all I know, he might be responsible for the inspired compositional maneuvers in weaving all these glorious parts together in just the right way, but one thing is clear: the man took great music and gave it a sound-manifestation that amplifies its power by a thousand-fold. Never have I heard a drumkit sound so HUGE, so sonically overwhelming coming out of speakers--for better or worse, it even sounds slightly distorted. Laswell pushed the envelope of sonic experience here. In fact, whatever he did blending the different layers of bass guitar, guitar, synths, etc makes the drumkit sound more powerful than I could imagine any drumkit sounding if I were standing next to it.

I don't call myself a Laswell fan--most of his stuff just doesn't excite me as anything more than background music and when I hear about stuff with him I tend to have a <yawn> "whatever" reaction--but between this and a large handful of other achievements, the man deserves to be called a genius. I'm talking about his role as a concrete hands-on sound-organizer and mad scientist impresario here, not as an instrumentalist, although he does automatically go in the history books for playing on Massacre's Killing Time, the holy grail of the Downtown oeuvre, and has done a good share of other ass-kicking along those lines over the years.

The total sound package he created here is just miraculous and every time I play this album it's a profound, gripping experience that makes me think of this in a category of its own. It helps that I like overdriven fusion and Buckethead shred. It helps that I can dig electric Miles at its nastiest. It helps that I'm a big free jazz fan.

It also helps that I'm a King Crimson fan, because some of this music has the ghost of Starless and Red lurking in it. Interestingly to me, this latter aspect is part of its occasional similarity to the Bozzio/Levins/Stevens tour de force Black Light Syndrome, one of my special favorite records that also does something totally fresh and unexpected with aggressive fusion, although it doesn't in any way come close to the inscrutable, mysterious, cataclysmic heaviness of Arc. Compared to Arc, Black Light is polite and clean, but still quite visceral and powerful.

With my attempts to convey the transcendental intensity of this album, I haven't given enough hints of another big part of the story, the fact that this record is flat-out beautiful. I mean, in some conventional pitch-structure way that I wouldn't know how to talk about any better than saying "beautiful" and really meaning it.

Arc of Testimony is one of the last recordings to feature legendary drummer Tony Williams, and its bold, experimental textures are a fitting epitaph to his career. Arcana was formed by bassist/producer Bill Laswell with the intention of exploring the outer reaches of fusion, ambient and free jazz. Like the group's debut, Last Wave (released only in Japan), Arc of the Testimony is a freewheeling, unpredictable blend of electronic and acoustic sounds. However, this record is even more adventurous, since it finds a common ground between improvisation and post-production studio trickery. All of the musicians -- Williams, Laswell, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, saxophonist Byard Lancaster, cornetist Graham Haynes, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis and guitarist Buckethead -- are open-minded and help push the music forward, resulting in a thoroughly involving, challenging listen.

Imagine Tony Williams, Bill Laswell, Pharoah Sanders, and Buckethead walk into a bar?

You don't have to.

This is oh my God intense instrumental music. Also Tony William's last album before he died.

Spacey jazz rock with a little metal seasoning. So synthymetaljazzrockfusion? Not well known but well worth getting to know.