AEM023 Zeke Virant

I first met Zeke Virant when I was liv­ing in the East Vil­lage after my first year of col­lege. Virant was liv­ing nearby with a model who liked to cook bis­cuits and gravy. He would fre­quently pop over to my tiny sixth-floor walk up. We’d cram into the lit­tle bed­room I shared with a friend and play god knows what with a bass and 3 drums. Those were the days. Virant’s musi­cal gifts were imme­di­ately appar­ent. He had an amaz­ing ear for slink­ing bass lines and liked to play around with extended tech­niques (includ­ing, but not lim­ited to play­ing the bass with a spoon). We only had a sum­mer of musi­cal inter­ac­tion, but that was long enough for me to real­ize that I had encoun­tered some­one truly special.

Virant went on to study poetry and music at Bard col­lege, a hotbed of young artis­tic activ­ity along the Hud­son. Under the tute­lage of the for­mi­da­ble critic and com­poser Kyle Gann, among oth­ers, he devel­oped some seri­ous com­po­si­tional chops, going on to write an absolutely killer opera (as he put it, “a cham­ber ensem­ble with cho­rus in a story-telling psy­cho­log­i­cal thing opera” ) includ­ing the per­sonae Pep­per­mint Man, Shades McGlenn, and Shades’s band—The Wob­bler (drums), The Doc­tor (gui­tar) and Taps Fahren­heit (bass). He also devel­oped a killer work ethic. A friend once told me that Virant refused to party on a Fri­day night because he was read­ing about Mahler. “Why are you read­ing about Mahler,” my friend asked, “if you hate him so much?” “Because I hate him!” responded Mr. Virant.

The pic­ture I’ve painted here might not match the accom­pa­ny­ing musi­cal mate­r­ial. In a way, how­ever, the styl­is­tic diver­sity (and sense of humor) on dis­play here are an even fur­ther tes­ta­ment to Virant’s abil­i­ties. Take A-side “Baby, Don’t Cry,” a won­der­ful 50s-inflected ditty. Barely hang­ing together, admirably casual, it’s not unlike the booze-soaked tapes of Beck’s Mel­low Gold or the psilo­cy­bin pas­tiche of Ween. Plus, you gotta love any song with enough vocal fuzz to make pipes sound like a synthesizer.

B-side “How Much Corn Can You Put Up Your Nose?” fol­lows genre-hopping suit, this time ven­tur­ing into the realm of kinky techno. The title is ridicu­lous, the lyrics are ridicu­lous (I bet you can guess them with­out even hear­ing the song), but the song avoids total silli­ness by virtue of its awe­some­ness. All in all, it’s a pretty inven­tive arrange­ment with crazy-sounding and hilar­i­ous acid synths. Outstanding!

Talk­ing to Virant, I’m reminded of the avant-garde/pop, serious/kitsch dichotomies of Frank Zappa, a man who wrote songs about fel­la­tio in Span­ish and com­po­si­tions con­ducted by Pierre Boulez in the same career. “I like to do a lot of dif­fer­ent music, not styles (ain’t got none), but per­for­mance sit­u­a­tions. Some­times the garage-band rock band thing (The Tri­an­gle Goons), some­times, some­times I will dress up as an old burnout per­former named Shades McGlenn and tell sto­ries and sing songs. I was born in Geor­gia in the mid­dle of nowhere, but I’ve been away from that long enough that it’s hard to claim I’m a “South­erner” in a musi­cal sense. I mean, I like the All­man Broth­ers Band, but I sort of fucked that up by going to school, so of course, now I lis­ten John Cage and Mozart a whole lot, too. I do a lot of writ­ing because it’s sup­posed to be a whole lot of things work­ing towards one goal. Prince and Jimmy Page are Prince and Led Zep­pelin not because they just played gui­tar or wrote songs. Those moth­er­fuck­ers put on makeup and dragon suits, spent years devel­op­ing a per­sonal style of record­ing their music and mak­ing a sound, AND they wrote and played the music to incor­po­rate it all. So, what I’m try­ing to do is to try to fig­ure out a way of incor­po­rat­ing poetry peo­ple would oth­er­wise not read, with music peo­ple would not lis­ten to, with a body that no one would desire, and work with it!”

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — Baby, Don’t Cry 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 — How Much Corn Can You Put Up Your Nose? 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]]]