chilly reception, Worth would go on to produce eighteen more of these albums over the next twenty years, each more “underground” than the last.
What have we learned about Worth from this long journey of slow baroque noise, garage concrete music, Indonesian gamelan evocations, electronics, acoustic low-fi living room experiments, trance and Ramayana monkey chants, sound collages, narrative and anti-narrative, soundtracks for unmade films, dissonance and odd slack-key guitar tunings, Komoso ametric and polymetric music, tape loops and audiotape manipulations, dub and sampling, prepared guitar and piano modifications, silence and his so-called “sounded silence”? And always in there somewhere, however faintly, Man Mose appearing and disappearing like the trope that refused to die? Does the willfully obscure and difficult music play against and in effect count on the need to make order of it, to make it cogent, what Karl Popper described as “the intrinsic and constant drive to find congruence”?
Critics have called it “naive and embarrassing”
(Village Voice,
1992). THe Ontology has also been called “the most pretentious work of any rock star, anywhere, ever”
(New Musical Express,
1995). And about onTologY: Volume 3: “A painful illustration of the limits of autodidacticism”
(Rolling Stone,
2001). But to those of us who stuck with it, there has been an undeniable powerin these accumulations. If approached with an open mind and an open heart (and perhaps some mind-expanding hallucinogens), and if approached with a willingness to dwell in the endless runout groove of another’s obsession, these albums can lead you on a riveting journey. Is Volume 2, in fact, the penultimate record? Is this epic, eccentric freak ride coming to an end? Listen and judge for yourself. As Worth has said, “It’s all there, it’s all there.”
Mickey Murray
Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music
The New School for Social Research
I slipped the CD in my purse to listen to on my drive to work. I sat at my computer and went, as I always do, straightaway to Ada’s blog. I saw that she, too, had received Nik’s CD:
lowercase a:
daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker
February 20
As my loyal readers know, nearly every day I run from the West Village to the river. Today’s run stood out from the others. Yes, that’s right, I got a new record from my eccentric uncle Nik. (For those of you late to the
lowercase a
party, you can read what I have posted about him here and here and here. ) As I ran through the sliver of the west side park, always in sight of the Hudson, my ipod was loaded with my uncle’s new release,
The Ontology of Worth, Volume 2.
Those of you who frequent this space know how much I dig my intense uncle’s complicated self-published recording career. And you might also know his experimental stuff is not my favorite, especiallyhis epic (ahem) experimental stuff. I prefer the pop stuff, the side projects, the low-fi simple songs. He can make perfect three-minute pop songs that will hypnotize you and haunt your every waking second. But the epic dirge pretensions of the multivolume work? No thanks. The avant-garde (I guess, but avant-garde circa 1975) noise/song cycles, the hermetic codes and references, the doom and the darkness that seem to deepen with each volume. Not my style, way too ponderous and concentrated for me. It’s at best annoying and at worst unsettling (maybe that’s the other way around). But, as I am your ever-open-minded lowercase a, I touched play. No music on this at first, just spoken words. “Soundings,” he calls it. I gave up guessing (but so much about the fun of music is that kind of guessing at what is coming and then being surprised or disappointed, being satisfied or being bored). I let the “Soundings” wash over me as I hit the rhythm of the run. I went with it. And wow, I must tell you, it blew me away. It was the perfect mix of
What have we learned about Worth from this long journey of slow baroque noise, garage concrete music, Indonesian gamelan evocations, electronics, acoustic low-fi living room experiments, trance and Ramayana monkey chants, sound collages, narrative and anti-narrative, soundtracks for unmade films, dissonance and odd slack-key guitar tunings, Komoso ametric and polymetric music, tape loops and audiotape manipulations, dub and sampling, prepared guitar and piano modifications, silence and his so-called “sounded silence”? And always in there somewhere, however faintly, Man Mose appearing and disappearing like the trope that refused to die? Does the willfully obscure and difficult music play against and in effect count on the need to make order of it, to make it cogent, what Karl Popper described as “the intrinsic and constant drive to find congruence”?
Critics have called it “naive and embarrassing”
(Village Voice,
1992). THe Ontology has also been called “the most pretentious work of any rock star, anywhere, ever”
(New Musical Express,
1995). And about onTologY: Volume 3: “A painful illustration of the limits of autodidacticism”
(Rolling Stone,
2001). But to those of us who stuck with it, there has been an undeniable powerin these accumulations. If approached with an open mind and an open heart (and perhaps some mind-expanding hallucinogens), and if approached with a willingness to dwell in the endless runout groove of another’s obsession, these albums can lead you on a riveting journey. Is Volume 2, in fact, the penultimate record? Is this epic, eccentric freak ride coming to an end? Listen and judge for yourself. As Worth has said, “It’s all there, it’s all there.”
Mickey Murray
Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music
The New School for Social Research
I slipped the CD in my purse to listen to on my drive to work. I sat at my computer and went, as I always do, straightaway to Ada’s blog. I saw that she, too, had received Nik’s CD:
lowercase a:
daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker
February 20
As my loyal readers know, nearly every day I run from the West Village to the river. Today’s run stood out from the others. Yes, that’s right, I got a new record from my eccentric uncle Nik. (For those of you late to the
lowercase a
party, you can read what I have posted about him here and here and here. ) As I ran through the sliver of the west side park, always in sight of the Hudson, my ipod was loaded with my uncle’s new release,
The Ontology of Worth, Volume 2.
Those of you who frequent this space know how much I dig my intense uncle’s complicated self-published recording career. And you might also know his experimental stuff is not my favorite, especiallyhis epic (ahem) experimental stuff. I prefer the pop stuff, the side projects, the low-fi simple songs. He can make perfect three-minute pop songs that will hypnotize you and haunt your every waking second. But the epic dirge pretensions of the multivolume work? No thanks. The avant-garde (I guess, but avant-garde circa 1975) noise/song cycles, the hermetic codes and references, the doom and the darkness that seem to deepen with each volume. Not my style, way too ponderous and concentrated for me. It’s at best annoying and at worst unsettling (maybe that’s the other way around). But, as I am your ever-open-minded lowercase a, I touched play. No music on this at first, just spoken words. “Soundings,” he calls it. I gave up guessing (but so much about the fun of music is that kind of guessing at what is coming and then being surprised or disappointed, being satisfied or being bored). I let the “Soundings” wash over me as I hit the rhythm of the run. I went with it. And wow, I must tell you, it blew me away. It was the perfect mix of
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