Perhaps the best-known configuration of the ever-shifting alliances within the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is the art-noise supergroup Extended Organ (XO). There’s some irony in this—apart from the very concept of an art noise supergroup—in the fact that XO was founded in the 1990s, during the period when that fragmentary, shambolic network of DIY avant-garde experimentalists was being transformed into a bona fide art-historical footnote, thanks to the patronage of non-founding members Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

On a surface level, there’s something a little slick about XO, whose music and staging self-consciously incorporate many of the developments in avant-garde music between the LAFMS’ anarchic idiosyncratic heyday and its respectful historical decontextualization. It’s the difference in contextual potentialities between a dingy Pasadena warehouse and the immaculate European kunsthalle.

The problem with this reading is that XO actually kick ass, ranging sonically from the roar of full-frequency-spectrum PTSD-triggering capital-N Noise to melodic Zappaesque avant-gardisms, gentle hardware-drawer rustling, off-register hippy drum circle freakouts, and Futurist mechanical field recordings—often all within the space of a couple of improvised moments.

Extended Organ, Vibe (LP cover designed by Tom Recchion), Important Records 2019.

Alongside McCarthy and Kelley’s ghost (he left behind a stash of recordings to throw in the mix) the current configuration consists of LAFMS stalwarts Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, and Tom Recchion, plus newbie Alex Stevens, and their latest project is a sumptuously packaged vinyl LP from Important Records entitled “VIBE,” containing two side-long sound works, each of which reflects the elegantly erotic anarchism at the heart of the organ.

Perhaps the best-known configuration of the ever-shifting alliances within the somewhat less legendary Butte County Free Music Society (BUFMS) is the wonkily concrete Bren’t Lewis Ensemble (BLE), a group whose hazy history appears to reach back into the early ’80s, though the bulk of its 25+ discography seems to have been issued in the last half decade—three of them in the first half of 2019 alone!

I first learned of this Bizarro-world mutation of the LAFMS last year, when I subbed for Don and Mitch on KXLU-FM’s “Glossolalia” for a live in-studio set by the BLE, which turned out to be exactly the kind of combo that gets my humors boiling.

This radio session is recounted—along with the rest of the BLE 08/2018 tour—in “What’s Going to Happen to Us?” a beautifully designed tour diary by bandleader Gnarlos/Seymour Glass, whose “Pynchon-bites-HST in an exploding simile factory” literary voice you may remember from epic noise zine Bananafish. The satirical conflation of absurdity and quotidian detail at play here offers a clue to how many misunderstand this genre as mere avant-piss-taking.

Like a Rube Goldberg machine with a couple of missing pistons, the usually three-man BLE operates under parameters that automatically disrupt any best-laid plans, and guarantees improvisational authenticity—quality be damned! Just kidding—any group that has been improvising together this long develops a subtle and nuanced sonic vocabulary and localized collective consciousness that lends credence to the idea of improvisation as instantaneous composition.

Loose Meat, Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble CD, BUFMS 2019.

Musique Concrete—basically anything incorporating sounds not made with a musical instrument—has had a long and convoluted evolution, with a significant schism between its academic iteration and the vernacular model that emerged from the psychedelic, post-punk, and industrial subcultures. The BLE, firmly in the latter camp, is typical of the eclecticism of its sources, which comprise an entire encyclopedia of auditory phenomena, ranging from a plethora of electronic and analog children’s toys to terabytes of samples stored on obsolete cell phones.

Staying on top of the exponentially expanding and densifying soundscape of the combined natural and digital worlds is something music scholars—in spite of their enthusiasm for computers—have been unable to do, maybe due to their institutional investment in orchestras and sheet music sales. It falls to groups like the Bren’t Lewis Ensemble and Extended Organ (and most of their respective free-music-societal comrades) to conjure aural soundscapes that actually reflect the contemporary human condition, and not just pins dropping in an ivory tower.

https://importantrecords.com/products/extended-organ-vibe-lp-pre-order

http://www.lafms.com/

https://buttecountyfreemusicsociety.bandcamp.com/music

https://brentlewiisensemble.com/