Don’t sigh – it’s Zzaj; that’s what I say!!!

I tried listening to this one here CD (“Speeches for the Schizoid”) on ear-phones, but the channel separation – very distinct – made it sound too strange inside my head, so I resorted to those loud loud speakers of mine. I have a stereo connected to the computer, another conveniently placed with controls by my bed, and the third – big one – in a bigger room… and for now I choose the bed stereo. I mean… the title, the title… I might need to lay still with the sheet over my head, trying to come to terms with all my Is, right (Just I, me and myself…)

Seriously (or …?), this is the second darn compact disc I listen to from the workshop of Mr. Rotcod Zzaj (Dick Metcalf) – and I never could figure out which of those names should be considered the real one, a foreigner as I am, I am, a foreigner as I am! Perhaps the schizoid theme reflects something inside the character of Mr. Zzaj/Metcalf? I hope so!

This may seem a perfect (but crazed) studio co-op by two of the most prolific musicians of present day America (Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Rotcod Zzaj) but the truth is that U.S. Mail is a co-producer here. It’s a funny thing, but when you think of it a little more, a perfectly natural event, that these original souls, stuck somewheres in widely dispersed sections of the Land of the Free, should make music through the mail. As I have come to understand it, it is quite common these days too, in the creative subculture of post-Kerouac, post-Ginsberg, post-Snyder (etc.) America, to handle things this way. I’ve learned that some of these guys that put out these wonderful CD-R prod’s never actually meet, but then, so what? I’m a member of several mailing lists, and I feel I know those people in New Zealand, the U.S.A., Germany and Romania, like a grand old family – yeah, they’re family! We live like this now – me too! We’re sitting around at our computers, socializing with kindred spirits all over, and distance doesn’t mean a thing anymore. I go out to see people outside the house too, in the fresh air, but wouldn’t you know, the people I chose to know on the net are closer to me… so making music this way is in line with these global circumstances.

This CD was a 4-track story, with tapes flying back and forth, and the result is just as rewarding as the former CD I took a look at (“Elements of Suspense”). This time I take a more light-hearted approach to this, since that’s the way I feel today, having just broken a rib trying to get a sofa dismantled, after I just promised a woman at the reception at the police station where I work (yes!) to help her move tomorrow. I mean, when ridiculous things like that happen, all you can do is be light-hearted, read some Emanuel Swedenborg and hit hard with one of these Zzaj productions (and possibly a pain-killer)!

Ernesto and Rotcod had gotten to know each other pretty well by this production, having in fact put out no less than eight CDs before this one!
The tracks are fairly short for ART-music (ART ART ART!). The longest one is 8:47, the shortest 2:25 – but there’s so much happening in the web of sounds that it very well pictures the conglomerate of thoughts and twisted ideas that entangled the rising cigarette smoke in the air at the psychiatric ward where I worked in the 1970s in the town of Shitville, Sweden; a psychosis “treatment” ward. (Treatment was coffee, cigarettes, psychopharmacological drugs and an occasional strap-down on the bed, when the voices gave too many strange and anti-social orders…)

The title track – “Speeches for the Schizoid” – moves on in with might, as Diaz-Infante’s mangled guitars spook anyone within earshot. Zzaj’s Kurzweill 88 doesn’t make things any easier, but there is a progression here, sort of heard through the wall of the ward as you probably lay stripped-down and strapped-down, vomiting, seeing a row of nodding tulips pass by on the wall, each bowing once before smelling…

In track no. 2 – “Blue Smoke and Bass” – a maddening distant conversation and an equally distant jazzy melody paints itching scenes of smoky bars by nightly avenues on the inside of your eye-lids, and the whole structure is hallucinatory – mescaline, peyote; western Indian drugs to get on speaking terms with the spirit in the sky (that’s where I’m gonna go when I die…)

On track 4 – “Voicemail from Venus” – you may be able to imagine the state of affairs. It is truly beautiful as metallic – still distant (that’s a quality through-out here) – voices converse on top of some kind of behind the wall, behind the curtain, behind the corner jazz tune. This could be an extra-terrestrial cop radio, ten-fouring across the universe! Man, there’s a space vehicle pile-up between Neptune and Uranus, don’t you know. There’s a space travel advisory out! A pulsating rhythm through this piece makes the good old Space Cattle Herders (I will explain some day...) from Austin swing their laser lassos with a certain spaced-out esprit!

Track 6 – “Messages” – is one of the longer tracks, sprouting with aspects of terminating end-of-the road lunacy, in cleverly distributed layers of simultaneous auditive events, taking you through the nitty-gritty of messages left on answering machines. Beautiful!!! The voices are treated in different ways, mostly through speed-ups and slow-downs, and boy, languages are mixed too, like in the Friedrich Jürgenson 1960s recordings of spirits on reel-to-reel, reviewed elsewhere on this site… Now, this track alone is worth whatever this CD might cost you, boys and girls on Earth, or where ever you may be (hello, young lovers, where ever you are). This track makes you fall in love with whatever circumstances brought Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Rotcod Zzaj together!

Another fairly long track is “Hiddenspeak” (Man, the title, the title!!!). Sounds like Ernesto is playing a bass guitar here, together with a whole array of other guitars, but who can tell for sure? The spoken words here are hidden, sure enough, but you hear that they are being spoken! This is what brother Marx meant when he talked about alienation, but the folks back then misunderstood it and off Russia went into the melancholy of Communism! Marx was well ahead of his day, but he’d appreciate this Diaz-Infante/Zzaj alienation, mixing the roughest parts of Stockhausen’s “Kurzwellen” with the dictatorship of the proletariat! C’mon Lenin, c’mon McCarthy, enjoy the mixed bag of earnest out-pour! It’s a Donald Duck/Uncle Fester type joint, and Captain Nemo rumbles beneath! If this isn’t love, I don’t know what is!

Disappointment isn’t a relevant word anywhere near a universe where a CD like “Speeches for the Schizoid” (of the schizoid?) can exist, turning over in full glory, majestically, in a nauseous joy of ground-down, swept-aside, sucked-in split-personality earthling crowds of one-self!