What makes someone an experimental musician? The answer seems to be simpler than the complex, wide-ranging music brought forward by that anti-genre genre would suggest. Whether you’re sculpting the envelope of a synthesiser’s output or conjuring improbable improvisations from a saxophone, if you want to be experimental, then you have to experiment.
It makes perfect sense, then, that such a well-respected mad scientist of rock as John Cale should be happy to give us a peek inside his laboratory. Nearly 60 years after he helped to turn popular music inside out as one of the Velvet Underground’s architects, he’s continued to ride the tide of critical acclaim with recent albums Mercy and Poptical Illusion – two scathing, abstract chronicles of despair and hope, calmly reflecting our bilious political climate in a warped fairground mirror.
Now, MiXology (volume 1) pulls together a collection of previously unreleased songs taken from the albums’ sessions, alongside one alternate mix of a track (‘I Know You’re Happy’) which devotees of those discs will already know. Like any offcuts compilation, the work here may not boast the tight, clean edges of the material that made it all the way, but that’s a necessary trade-off for the treat of hearing Cale’s creative process in swirling motion.
What’s more, with these songs standing on average at over five-and-a-half minutes and comparatively lacking in disciplined hooks, Cale finds enough space to go all-out on the cavernous, shuddering, time-worn darkness which, on Mercy and Poptical Illusion, he only dips into. Dubby opener ‘Clap Clap’ is as eerily impersonal as an empty airport, with Cale’s voice initially crackling through in distant, scrambled form as if chewed up by an echoing tannoy. Things don’t get any more comforting once we can make the lyrics out, which show he hasn’t lost his modernist knack for elliptical image-making (‘there’s a priest in the back room / with a broken nose’).
‘1000 Years’ sustains the ghostly atmosphere in style, set over the fuzz-edged tones of an almost dubstep-inflected bassline and destabilised further by chopped-up beats. Although taken from the Mercy sessions, get a Thom Yorke soundalike singing this and you’ve got something which sounds for all the world like a lost cut from Kid A. ‘Daylight’s getting longer, darkness doesn’t exist,’ Cale sings, but the optimism implicit in the imagery is turned brutally on its head. Appropriately enough for such a relentless boundary-pusher, he knows that some of the deepest horror lies in the irrevocable loss of things taken for granted as immovable certainties.
Just as Mercy was a group effort, seeing Cale collaborating with the likes of Weyes Blood, Fat White Family, and Animal Collective, two standout tracks taken from those sessions find their guest musicians making a memorable mark. The relatively relaxed and poppy original version of ‘I Know You’re Happy’ on Mercy, featuring the vocals of Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter Tei Shi, was one of that album’s brightest spots, but now we find its packed production thinned out into a ‘Chill Mix’ which is more spine-chilling than chill-out. Not only do those affectingly resigned lyrics now have crucial room to breathe, but Tei Shi’s haunting, glass-pure vocal line soars above Cale’s multi-tracked voice as if in duet from the other side of the galaxy, striking right at the heart of the alienation and disconnect the song is trying to communicate.
Then there’s ‘Long Way Out of Pain’, which boasts none other than the late, legendary Tony Allen on drums – and of course, it’s his rhythms which really make the track. Dextrous, stimulating, unmistakeably the work of human hands but so artfully complex they near well blow your mind if you stop and think it over, it’s little surprise that Brian Eno called him ‘perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived’. That’s not to do down Cale, of course, whose vocals boom with particular power here. Imbuing the memorable opening line with the measured import it demands, his sepulchral tones are strengthened by a feather-light organ bedding which grows slowly thicker as the song unfolds.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. While songs from the Mercy sessions comprise the record’s first half, the second is given over to the side-products of warmer, catchier follow-up Poptical Illusion. ‘Invention of Language’ is the record’s smoothest offering with its sunny guitar and rich strings, the angelic backing vocals no longer writhing in disjoint but sliding effortlessly into the main melody while Cale’s pleas for hope and connection feel, at last, like they have success in their sights. ‘I’m hoping for the best,’ he sings, ‘the best that you bring out in me.’ In spite of its tentative existential angst, this isn’t a beaten-down acceptance of a cruel world but a humanistic, even heart-warming recognition of how we can – must – all help one another.
Having said that, Cale’s admissions of vulnerability can be as unsettling as they are moving. This is especially the case on ‘The Adventures of SupaCane’, a faltering, dissonant number which, like so many of Poptical Illusion’s tracks, draws inspiration from the sample-based sound collages of avant-garde hip-hop. Cale folds flickering piano, clinical beeps, a barking dog, and the kind of deeply queasy irregular-heartbeat bassline familiar from Meat Beat Manifesto’s terrifying ‘Radio Babylon’ into a gristly stew of sound. ‘SupaCane, I need you,’ he begs over the top of it all, his gruff yet high-pitched quaver a million miles from the detached, limpid lilt that so beautifully put the shine on 1973’s classic album Paris 1919.
That takes us all the way to ‘Standing Next To You’. As the track unwinds, the dreamily aquatic synth throb which anchors it is met with both sweetness and dissonance from the sounds around it, adding up to the perfect closer. It’s a haunting, elegant way to sum up the half-in-darkness, half-in-light approach of Poptical Illusion, pointing the listener cautiously towards an open-ended conclusion which gleams with hope.
Still, to think of the song and the album in this way might well be missing the point. MiXology (volume 1) is more of a sketchbook than a painting. Every single song here comes across as an arrested work in progress crackling with still-green imagination, and the record’s inspirational power is arguably all the greater for it. If Mercy and Poptical Illusion can be said to have a message, perhaps it is one about the necessity of striving for solutions in a broken world rather than having passive faith that something better will turn up, even if perfection is ultimately unachievable. What better way to realise that lesson than through a collection which celebrates, from first note till last, the act of making something new?
MiXology (volume 1) is physically released on Friday 8th August via Double Six / Domino – order here
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Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Madeline McManus
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