Metamusic

That's it -- Roland Kirk. I knew you'd remember his name -- I couldn't for the life of me. Fellow with the funny horns. Thank you also for your careful delineation of the issues involved.

As you deduced, I had been thinking of the Anchovies as a (metamusic)al group. As you so rightly point out, a meta(musicalgroup), and indeed even a simple (music)al group, need contain no (music)ians of any type. That observation reminds me most forcefully of what undoubtedly is another forerunner of The Anachronisms, the Velvet Underground, and through them Andy Warhol. Warhol of course springs from the same tradition as another artist whose work the Anachronisms have recorded, Wallace Stevens. I don't know if either Warhol or Stevens was musical, but I am sure they would have been worthy members of a metamusical group. The important point, however, is that they were not members of a metamusical group.

I suspect these influences have been consciously felt most by S. Herpes, but the metamusicianship enters when he introduces his own works from this tradition to the other members of the group and they elevate them to a higher artistic plane. The re-working of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is a stunning example of this. It went far beyond what Sid was capable of alone (insert own joke here). Interestingly, the same session produced "The Ride," an obverse of the Stevens-Warhol tradition, in which we get not form without meaning but meaning without meaning. It is a parody of the conventional view of the work of art, peddled chiefly by high school English teachers, of the work of art as a puzzle to which only the educated know the key. "Correct" "interpretation" of symbols allows the initiated to commune mystically with the artist. The "meaning" of "The Ride" is that it is a work of art; it is (metameaning)ful.

I agree about SunRa and Ornette Coleman. Roland Kirk had his moments, too. What I failed to emphasize is a conception of the Anchovies as meta(musicalgroup) rather than meta(musical)group or meta(musical)meta(group). Which is to say that the Anchovies stand in relation to the entity "musical group",as a semiotic construction in modern society, as "metaphysics" stands in relation to "physics" or "metamucil" in relation to mucillage. Which in no way denies that the members of a metamusical group may be metamusicians or that metamusicians may assemble into metamusical group; I would deny that metamusicianship is a necessary condition for such membership, however. It may even be possible for a musician to be a member, although it's unlikely. What we do seem to agree is that, these theoretical considerations aside, the only actual instance of a group that meets both necessary and sufficient conditions for a metamusical group is that of the Anachros. Quite possibly a "supergroup", too, but that's a matter for another day (perhaps).

Many have aspired to metamusic, but few have been chosen. Four have been chosen, to be exact. Jazz spent a long time obsessed with incorporating non-Western influences, but the result was metacultural rather than metamusical. Ditto similar attempts in various pop genres, such as KRS1's attempt to rap in a South African accent.

Thank you for raising the issue of metamucilage, which takes us back to my first article about the Anchovies, "Inward and Upward with The Anachronisms". Das ist noch eine lange Fahrt. It seems to me, though, that a metamusical group is ipso facto a group of metamusicians.

Is that enough foreign languages for you? No? Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe. Onder het rijden, niet spreken met de bestuurder. Erin go bragh.

Aha! Captain Beefheart may have foreshadowed the Anachronisms with his "Come On Down to the Big Dig," an interesting inversion of the scaling of Everest.

But to return to the question you actually asked, what about Sun Ra, for example? Or, for that matter, Ornette Coleman? They are best considered precursors of metamusic, but their work did sketch in very faint detail the otline of what might be an ideal of metamusic.

A poem by Sid Herpes:

MUSIC

If music be the food of love

I barf.

(pp D. D. de Nemours)

The 50th anniversary of the scaling of Everest by a White Man reminds me that it's pretty lonely out here, being a metamusical group. Who may be said to be our sherpas or vice-versa? Captain Beefheart had his metamusical moments but was he a group? Could he be said to have constructred an oeuvre beyond "Trout Mask Replica"? David Wisdom of Radio Sonic (on the wretched CBC) promotes Wildman Fischer (Fisher?), who was some sort of protege of the Cap'n but I'm dubious. The nearest we get are some deep-core 60s ensembles; the Bonzos, Pete Brown and his Battered Ornaments, the Liverpool Scene, Scaffold and, possibly, Kevin Ayres and the Whole World, but these were, on the whole, far too conventionally musical and have not left any sort of oeuvres. Since then, the pickings have been slim; some might suggest The Residents, whom I would classify as outliers along the spectrum of those pursuing "music", i.e. in similar company to people like Phillip Glass and John Cage, who are definitely not metamusicians. I would also emphasize the "group" aspect of the Anachros; it's a "metamusical group" not a "group of metamusicians". How does a metamusician differ from a musician? This is not what concerns me, any more than how either differ from metamucil; the Anachros remain the archetypal, possibly singular, metamusical group.

I have a bootleg version of "O, I've Leaf Sex" by the neopunk band VO2 Max. Is this retroactive telepathic unconscious plagiarism? I think we should be told. Lyttegaet, Apeehl, Apeehl, Apeehl and Appelagen should be put on standby.
The Law is an asp
Slithering through our souls
Its fangs ever bared

An excellent point -- the Anchovies' work is also meta-anagrammatical. The title is also an anagram of "O, I've Leaf Sex," the art-rock classic which I composed in my head in 1968 but forgot to write down and which hence was never recorded. And of course it is also an anagram of "Feel Via Sox," the "supreme rule" of Japanese cult leader Hiroyuki Roshomon, author of the haiku

I can feel my feet
Through the shroud of my sox
The nails are too long

True but it's also an anagram of "Vales of Xie", which is a well-known reference to the works of the so-called drunken poets of Xie, which is in Guangdong province. An example:
I lie
on a bed
which is
not here
so
I lie.

Wentworth Sutton writes: The worship of virtuosity is simply another sign of the dominance of the obsessive-compulsive personality in society, a dominance, as I have pointed out elsewhere, which is waning with the increasing sophisitcation of communications technology. In the new schizoid-dominated society there will be no virtuosi. Any human function which can be will be offloaded to software. Music will be created through software of previously undreamed-of virtuosity, but the audience for any work of music will be one person, the "creator".

As for the title of Axes of Evil, too little attention has been paid to the fact that it is an anagram of "Foxie Slave."

"When you're not technically a virtuoso, you have to be saying something. You've got no place to hide." (Art Farmer)

In the Anachro-oeuvre, virtuosity and non-virtuosity are combined. Virtuosi on one instrument play other instruments, for example.

It's truly metamusical. You have been told!

We considered heavy metal posturing but decided we would go with four dimensional quadrophonic mirroring instead. It was all Hector's idea (you know the French)