Material - 1989 - Seven Souls

Material

1989

Seven Souls

01. Ineffect (7:34)

02. Seven Souls (5:42)

03. Soul Killer (4:32)

04. The Western Lands (6:54)

05. Deliver (5:48)

06. Equation (5:06)

07. The End Of Words (5:06)

- Bill Laswell / 4-, 6- & 8-string basses, acoustic guitar, tapes, percussion

With:

- William S. Burroughs / narration of passages from his novel The Western Lands (1987)

- Fahiem Dandan / voice (1)

- Foday Musa Suso / voice (5)

- Rammellzee / voice (6)

- Nicky Skopelitis / 6- & 12-string guitars, baglama, coral sitar, saz, Fairlight

- Simon Shaheen / violin

- L. Shankar / violin

- Jeff Bova / electronic keyboards

- Sly Dunbar / drums, Fairlight

- Aïyb Dieng / percussion

- Jah Wobble / basss (8)

- Tetsu Inoue / electronics (8)

- DJ Spooky / noises (8)

One of my favorite one-off albums of strange bedfellow components, with a completely off-the-wall premise.

William Burroughs monotonously mumbles snippets of his own loose interpretations of Egyptian mysticism, peppered with his bored-bohemian-drifter-in-a-mint-teahouse-in-suffocating-North-African-heat musings. It comes off part ancient mystery, part heroin-baked hallucination. Behind him, middle eastern and NYC musicians play 1989 proto-techno from the virgin days of World Music, with beats, pan-Arabian melodies and Laswell's BIG bass holding up Burroughs' oft-penetrated rear.

Buy the 1989 original release. Please. On the '97 Triloka label redux, Laswell---or whomever---way overprogram the lounge-disco North African fusion beats, mixing them far too up-front and purposeful. To make matters worse, they superimpose three superfluous and uninteresting remixes at the opening of the album. Total overkill. The original album's unique value is the balance it achieves between the Saharan lounginess, the mathy bass lines, and just the right amount of Burroughs.

At their most effective, the lounge beats on the original 7-track album are an effectively serrated platform for the Naked Luncher's sand-in-his-voice aridity of purpose and delivery. There's an opposites-attract vibe the way Laswell rubs brooding Bedouin bluster up against Burroughs' laconically croaked belittlements and blasphemies.

The worldbeat segments do sound hammy and overcooked at times, when Burroughs isn't around to staunch them with his monotone. But when he's reciting colorful, enigmatic and possibly nonsensical pseudo-mysticisms as if indisputable fact, it's all a grease bath in gauche eccentric lasciviousness.

"The old writer couldn't write anymore, for he had reached the end of words," Burroughs stammers like a bullfrog with a sinus infection in the wrap-up track. Which may be why the hipsters are playing souped-up casbah music---to fill in the silences behind you, Bill.

Conceived as a conceptual tie-in to William Burroughs' novel The Western Lands - arguably his last major creative effort - Material's Seven Souls offers up avant-jazz dub interpretations of Middle Eastern music set against Burroughs reading extracts from the novel.

To use an appropriately Burroughs-esque metaphor, imagine listening to Peter Gabriel's Passion album - another fusion of traditional world music and modern electronics with mild prog sensibilities hailing from the same year - and feeling the first uneasy pangs of cold turkey coming on; that gets across the eerie tone of the album.

Play it on something with decent bass, because though Laswell acts as a multi-instrumentalist here (by now Material was just him and a constellation of guest musicians), he's a bassist at heart and if your setup obscures what he's doing with the bass, you'll miss half the action.