Austin Sound

This week we are excited to debut a new column on Austin Sound, “Music Is Happiness.” Each month, Noah Mass will feature what’s been turning his stubborn head locally, be it old garage 45s or some of Austin’s best underappreciated artists. Noah is tough to impress by nature, so you can bet that if something’s caught his ear, it’s worth hearing. After all, music is happiness, but good music is bliss. To inaugurate the column, Noah takes a look at local instrumental duo Transmography, who recently released Polydactyly on 8088 Records. You can also catch Noah on the radio every Sunday night from 11pm-12am on KVRX 91.7.

Music Is Happiness: Transmography Kicks My Ass
by Noah Mass

I’m sitting in a bar in Austin, Texas, about to interview two men: James Evans and Michael Frazier, the buddy team that is the band Transmography. Transmography was a band I happened across while surfing MySpace sites for god-knows-what - some band’s page must have linked to theirs - and I was immediately taken with them. These two dudes produce between them an instrumental music that is by turns experimental and melodic, familiar sounding yet impossible to immediately classify. Although the tunes rely heavily on drums, guitar, and keyboards, their best trick is one that I describe as “climbing the mountain”: building a musical structure which starts out in calm, almost meditative beginnings, and which then coalesces into a pounding mixture of power chords and percussion. It’s anthemic stuff, but abstract, too. And all from just two guys!

An “experimental rock duo,” or so Jimmy describes the band to clueless club owners, Transmography started as a straight-up instrumental quartet before the band evolved into its present twosome, with Jimmy mostly playing the stringed instruments and Michael mostly drumming - although they tend to trade instruments now and again. Influenced by everything from Japanese pop to industrial music to rap, the duo had to work for a while to come up with their present sound. As Michael explains, “I listened to a lot of hip hop, especially when I was younger, as much as I listened to rock, so my drumming kind of fits with Jimmy’s dancey riffs that he comes up with. [Our music is] really dark in a way, but it’s really bright at the same time.” Jimmy has a similarly disparate background: “When I was like, 15, and I first started playing guitar, I really liked Sebadoh. I like !!! (Chk Chik Chick), and lately I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.” He also notes, among his latest listens, Funkadelic, Mort Garson, Kraftwerk, and Out Hud.

This varied stew of musical influences, as well as exposure to local Arkansan (for Jimmy) and Texan (for Michael) bands of various stripes eventually led the two to their current radical modus operandi, in which they combine grinding noise and power chords with jazzy percussion and pop melodies. Unjustifiably excluded from a slot at 2007’s SXSW, they none-the-less produced a heart-stopping set at a free showcase organized by their label, the 8088 Records Collective. Which is, what, exactly? “It’s a cooperative, and you get out of it what you put into it, but it’s not exclusive, anyone can link their music to it and sell their music in the [on-line] store,” says Jimmy.

“It’s non-binding, and what you put into it is what you get out,” continues Michael. “We do most of the promotion, but right now it’s more like a show trading network.” Being involved in a larger cooperative enterprise has helped Transmography make connections to bands in other cities, but it’s also given them the expansive vision that’s necessary in order to weather the often divided reaction that they get from out-of-town audiences. “[Audiences react in] one of two ways,” Jimmy acknowledges. “One, people either walk out of the venue or, Two, people are just mesmerized and completely awed by it, and a lot of people say that� they see that we’re doing something different.”

One listen to their new record, Polydactyly (8088), the first with the two-man lineup, helps to explain the band’s powerful, but occasionally off-putting, effect on the uninitiated. At barely 30 minutes, the record’s eight tracks cover a lot of musical ground, and the variety among tracks doesn’t allow the listener to relax for an instant. Huge, loud, metallic statements such as “Slimeline” alternate with calmer keyboard-dominated pieces such as “Calerpa.” Perhaps the most abrupt stylistic shift comes in the record’s second half. Sandwiched between the brief drumming workout, “Heal Thy Fish,” and the contemplative guitar and percussion-click sprawl of “Jolly Rancher,” comes “Bhopal,” perhaps Transmography’s sharpest left-turn move. Named for the 1984 Union Carbide chemical-spill disaster in that Indian city, the track is three-and-a-half minutes of syncopated metal scraping on metal, accompanied by computer-generated outbursts and wildly varied drumming from Michael.

The tunes grew out of the pair’s musical collaborations, but each one had its own unusual genesis. “IceCreamManFromJapan,” a slowly-building masterpiece of controlled tension in live performance, came about from a composition exercise. “We used up all the black keys on it, which is an ‘eastern’ scale, and the tune sounded like what an ice cream truck would sound like in Japan� I guess,” laughs Jimmy. “Prime Numbers,” a series of rising and falling piano scales accompanied by some of Frazier’s most inventive drumming had, as the title suggests, a similar origin. “The pattern is sort of based on prime numbers,” says Jimmy, as Michael adds “There are a lot of prime-number-like hits in the middle, the syncopation. Um� a weird math thing going on.”

Logical contrivances aside, however, Transmography’s music never comes off as cold or artificial. In a live performance that followed our interview, Evans and Frazier pulled out all the stops, switching off instruments and producing squalls of noise and pounding riffs that unmercifully smacked the audience about the face and neck. The show concluded with an aggressive new number whose climax was Jimmy’s shouted refrain, “Break out of your cocoon!” You got it, boys. We yield.

James Evans’s Recent Listens:

1. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun-Pink Floyd
2. Feel Good Hit Of The Fall-!!! (Chk Chik Chick)
3. Black Mass Lucifer-Mort Garson

Michael Frazier’s Recent Listens:

1. U.S. Mint-Hot Snakes
2. New World Water-Mos Def
3. Some Of My Best Friends Are DJs-Kid Koala

Tune into the Noah Show every Sunday night from 11pm-12am on KVRX 91.7.

Website:
Transmography’s Myspace