Pynchon Music: Bill Laswell

Bill Laswell got his start playing bass in Detroit-area funk bands. In 1970, he moved to New York City and began a career that would encompass dozens of musical styles and genres, including funk, jazz, reggae, dub, hip-hop, ambient, rock, punk, and electronica. (So far there’s been little advancement on the Bill Laswell sea shanties-and-polka front.) Laswell founded record labels, produced albums, and still managed to take part in a dozen-odd bands, from backing Daevid Allen’s Gong to forming the grindcore-jazz group Painkiller with John Zorn. The list of Laswell’s musical collaborators is too extensive to include here, but includes George Clinton, Sly & Robbie, Fred Frith, Brian Eno, Wayne Shorter, Yoko Ono, and Buckethead. Laswell is also deeply influenced by mysticism, and many of his albums are organized around esoteric themes. In 1989 his group Material collaborated with William S. Burroughs on Seven Souls, an extraordinary album of electronic funk based on Burroughs’ occult novel The Western Lands.

In 1984 Bill Laswell co-produced and played bass on Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak, which also included readings by William S. Burroughs. The album included the song “Gravity’s Angel,” which Anderson dedicated to Thomas Pynchon. Sixteen years later, Laswell himself turned to Gravity’s Rainbow for Dub Chamber 3. The third of his “Sacred System” projects, the album features two tracks named from Pynchon’s novel: “Beyond the Zero” and “A Screaming Comes Across the Sky.”

The first opens the album, immediately introducing Nils Petter Molvær’s subdued trumpet. The texture of the horn calls to mind the latter work of Miles Davis, one of Laswell’s biggest musical influences, and Molvær’s playing is the highlight of the album. The tabla ushers in the main groove, a jazzy dub buoyed by Taborn’s throwback electric piano. Less a dub deconstruction than chill-out music in “exotic” mode, it’s likely Laswell’s inspiration was the spiritual von Braun quote heading the novel rather than anything about rockets, erections, or bananas.

After two pieces built on the riff from Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved?”, the final track returns to Gravity’s Rainbow. Despite its aggressive title, “A Screaming Comes Across the Sky” remains pretty mellow stuff, a pleasant groove bolstered by Nicky Skopelitis’ tasteful guitar. Ten minutes in, Laswell shifts gears. The electrics guitar is swapped for an acoustic 12-string, its chords drenched in reverb as keyboards swirl around a submarine bass-line. Still far from “screaming,” it’s a little bit of darkness that brings some “chamber” to the “dub.” While nothing here achieves the brilliance of King Tubby or Scientist at their best, Dub Chamber 3 is never boring, whether the listener is paying attention to its intricate details, or just wants to shape the evening into a more relaxing contour.