AEM006 Extra Life

The first time I saw Char­lie Looker, I felt bad for the dude. Here he was with his band Zs, play­ing Philly for the first time, pour­ing every ounce of energy and spirit into the per­for­mance. I was a young buck, only 16, smok­ing cig­a­rettes out­side and wait­ing for head­lin­ers Les Georges Leningrad to come on when my friend sent me a stern text from the belly of the beast: “Dude. Come in.” So I curi­ously re-entered my favorite church base­ment to find six air­tight musi­cians blast­ing away with hor­ri­ble sym­me­try, squawky sax shards play­ing against dis­so­nant gui­tar chords and won­der­fully unpre­dictable rhyth­mic cells. To put it sim­ply, Zs took me to the nether regions of musi­cal abstrac­tion and I never looked back. Unfor­tu­nately, the major­ity of the crowd was less recep­tive. Between songs the young band endured some pretty bru­tal mock­ery. If any­thing, I think that response was a good indi­ca­tor of how forward-thinking, how much musi­cians’ musi­cians Zs truly were. And hey, all’s well that ends well: Sev­eral years and per­for­mances later, Zs had attained leg­endary sta­tus in the New York avant-community, play­ing some of the most mind-altering new music ever laid to space, with balls to boot. How many new music ensem­bles have you seen where the drum­mer breaks his bass drum play­ing too hard?

Char­lie Looker was a found­ing mem­ber of that band “back in 2001 when I was just a tiny shoot,” as he put it to me. As a stu­dent at Wes­leyan dur­ing Zs’ for­ma­tive years he would com­mute down to New York for rehearsals, the rest of his band being enrolled at the Man­hat­tan School of Music. He even trav­eled to the Czech Repub­lic for a music con­fer­ence with mem­bers of Zs. As Char­lie once told me, “we were really up in each oth­ers’ heads” (how else could one make music so f-ing tight?). Clearly, the incred­i­ble uni­for­mity of the band’s expres­sion was an exten­sion of their per­sonal con­nec­tion, their count­less hours spent together por­ing over the small­est of musi­cal details. So you can under­stand my sur­prise when Char­lie left Zs to pur­sue his solo mate­r­ial as Extra Life.

Extra Life marks a cer­tain depar­ture from the music of Zs. Although Char­lie was respon­si­ble for one of the only (and best) Zs songs with lyrics in “Nobody Wants to be Had,” very lit­tle of the Zs mate­r­ial dis­played the won­der­ful melodic sen­si­bil­i­ties that have been put to the fore in his solo mate­r­ial. “This was my return to singing, which had been a part of my music pre-Zs but had fallen by the way­side,” explains Char­lie. “It was my return to my voice, but in a way it was my real begin­ning as a vocal styl­ist with my own vibe. I got so inspired by the solo songs that I decided to form a band and do tight arrange­ments of them. I got so into the band that I left Zs to do Extra Life full-on.”

Extra Life still retains some of the com­po­si­tional moves that made Zs such an intrigu­ing force. The ele­ment of rhyth­mic abstrac­tion, a topic I had the plea­sure of dis­cussing many times with Char­lie, is still retained in all its glory. Check the asym­met­ri­cal sludge of A-side “I Don’t See It That Way.” It’s a true feat of the manip­u­la­tion of musi­cal time. You want to sway with its giant, lum­ber­ing riff, but the tem­po­ral irreg­u­lar­i­ties make you quiver as though at the feet of a stum­bling drunk mon­ster. This is one of the best exam­ples of a con­sciously non-metrical rhyth­mic style, where the rhythm is freed from tra­di­tional para­me­ters and given a new range of unpre­dictabil­ity and expres­sion. The song also reveals Looker’s gift for tex­tural con­trast. The high-tone accen­tu­ated hi-hat triplet is a won­der­ful move that gives the melody an even more dynamic qual­ity and makes those bass tones seem all the more fear­some. Looker traces some of these moves back to his days at Wes­leyan when he was for­tu­nate enough to study under mod­ern musi­cal deity Anthony Brax­ton: “I was never a deep dis­ci­ple of Brax­ton, but I took classes with him in col­lege and played a lit­tle with him. He is deep. I can say that play­ing Braxton’s music exposed me to a cer­tain rig­or­ous approach to very irreg­u­lar rhythms. That shows up clearly in the music I wrote for Zs and on a lot of the first Extra Life record.” Of course, this shouldn’t be taken as an oppor­tu­nity to pigeon­hole looker as some kind of prog nerd. Looker’s manip­u­la­tion of musi­cal mate­r­ial goes far beyond the look-what-I-can-do aes­thetic of many sim­i­larly tech­ni­cally pro­fi­cient musi­cians. He once described his com­po­si­tional process as let­ting the notes tell him, so to speak, the rhyth­mic orga­ni­za­tion, as opposed to enter­ing the cre­ative zone with a pre­con­ceived idea of which moves to employ. In more recent cor­re­spon­dence, Looker hints at a new direc­tion: “Nowa­days my rhythms are straight­en­ing out again (rel­a­tively speak­ing). So who knows where the Brax­ton influ­ence has gone. That rhyth­mic lan­guage isn’t really specif­i­cally Brax­ton­ian any­way, it’s part of mod­ernist clas­si­cal music too.”

Extra Life’s influ­ences run much deeper than 20th cen­tury abstract alchemists: “Some of the music that has moved me most deeply over the years has come from exper­i­men­tal metal, mod­ern clas­si­cal com­posers, Medieval and Renais­sance music, free jazz, goth and new wave pop. My lyrics are always some­what informed by what I’m read­ing, which over the past year has included Georges Bataille, Oscar Wilde and the Sopra­nos. When I write music I draw upon every­thing I have ever loved, but so much of that is uncon­scious. It’s often hard to say where cer­tain ele­ments or aspects come from. I don’t make music as a direct ref­er­ence to influ­ences from the past, the way most cur­rent bands in indie rock do. What­ever I may be informed by, my record or book col­lec­tion isn’t the topic of the music.”

This is what gives the music of Extra Life its par­tic­u­lar power. Rather than con­struct­ing a lin­eage of influ­ences, Looker con­structs a lin­eage of expe­ri­ence that is both intensely pri­vate and cos­mi­cally radi­ant. When he sings about the dog-eat-dog men­tal­ity of mod­ern life on “I Don’t See It That Way,” he’s not just paint­ing a con­fes­sion of per­sonal expe­ri­ence, he’s let­ting us in on the dis­cus­sion as if to say, “you’re a part of my world, you’re impli­cated in this giant social web, where do you stand?” As Looker explains, this is by no means acci­den­tal: “What inspires Extra Life on a more gen­eral level are my per­sonal expe­ri­ences and feel­ings, con­scious reflec­tion, pure willpower and most impor­tantly com­mu­nion with the most uncon­scious lev­els of intu­ition. The uncon­scious processes are what’s most impor­tant because that’s what imag­i­na­tion really is. Any sen­si­tive per­son can have intense emo­tions, any intel­li­gent per­son can reflect on them, and willpower can always be sum­moned; but when these things res­onate with the Uncon­scious, both per­sonal and col­lec­tive, that’s when the music takes on the mys­tic power I aim for. That’s why very dif­fer­ent peo­ple can relate to Extra Life, peo­ple with dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences, tastes, back­grounds. No mat­ter how per­sonal or eso­teric the source is, Extra Life aspires to the universal.”

B-side “I’ll Burn,” an acoustic ver­sion from a split 10” with the Dirty Projectors’s Nat Bald­win (Shat­ter Your Leaves, 2009), orig­i­nally on the debut LP Sec­u­lar Works (I and Ear, 2007), fore­grounds one of the most present forces in Extra Life: Medieval music. Lis­ten to how Looker flexes his melis­matic mus­cles like a modern-day Machaut, a fit­tingly gor­geous vehi­cle for sad, hum­ble lyrics. “Medieval music is beau­ti­ful and cold,” he told me, ”It’s some of the most gor­geous, serene, entranc­ing, tran­scen­dent music ever. Even though it’s thor­oughly pleas­ing to the ears, and hardly ever dis­so­nant, it’s still so alien in many ways. The medieval sense of melodic unfold­ing is so exotic and sub­tly nuanced, I can’t even claim to have a full grip on it. There are a mil­lion nerdy musi­cal details which I love about Medieval music. But I think for me it’s really about the spirit of it. This was a time when not only did every­one believe in God and lived every minute quak­ing in fear and love of him, but they had a cor­re­spond­ingly devout belief in the power of music to change con­scious­ness. All medieval music is just radi­ant with the deep belief that music is a move­ment of the soul. You can feel that con­vic­tion ema­nat­ing from it. They believed that tun­ing sys­tems and musi­cal inter­vals cor­re­sponded to rela­tion­ships of the plan­ets and stars. Cos­mic har­mony, music of the spheres. To them, how two notes were com­bined wasn’t just an issue of aes­thet­ics but one of the high­est cos­mic, moral and spir­i­tual order. Half the bands in Brook­lyn right now can’t even work their gui­tar ped­als. You see what I’m get­ting at here? I also love Medieval music because I feel it has this real sense of humil­ity, in a way which I could see as both dark and enlight­ened. It doesn’t sound proud or self-congratulatory like clas­si­cal music or later Euro­pean music. There’s this sense of Man as a tiny insect crawl­ing the earth, totally hum­ble in the face of invis­i­ble forces which could either uplift or crush him. It’s shrouded in dark­ness and abase­ment but it aspires upward toward the divine. It’s the sound of a cul­ture start­ing over from noth­ing after Rome burned. The start of the Age of Pisces, Christ’s age. I think you can feel this in the music. In a way I guess it’s a far cry from our cur­rent cul­tural spirit, but if our civ­i­liza­tion destroys itself we’ll find our­selves again in some­thing like this Medieval state: hang­ing our heads before God, pick­ing through ruins and using our imag­i­na­tion to inter­pret omens while we pick through burnt books, shards of bones and cell phones.”

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — I Don’t See It That Way Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — I’ll Burn (Take 2) Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]