Pynchon Music: Chef Menteur

Formed by Alec Vance and Jim Yonkus in 1998, Chef Menteur (“Lying Chef”) is an instrumental band from New Orleans. Falling somewhere between psychedelia and wordless dream-pop, Chef Menteur plays a very amiable form of post-rock, the kind of music that offers the perfect soundtrack for just about anything: cruising along a twilit desert highway, trudging through a blizzard, watching nature documentaries with the sound off, taking a space walk above Jupiter, getting stoned with your cat, setting up for the Friday night coven ritual; Chef Menteur’s got you covered! You La Tengo and Pink Floyd are obvious influences here, but there’s plenty of shoe-gaze, Radiohead glitch-pop, and the fuzzed-out distortion of Godpseed! You Black Emperor. The band also cites Neil Young as an influence, which is harder to spot until you find yourself submerged under waves of muted feedback.

Chef Menteur named their first full-length album We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, the famous phrase from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. A lovely blend of space rock and hazy psychedelia, the album shimmers with a dreamlike obscurity reflected by its oblique song titles, many of which have an allusive, “look it up and it’s a real thing” quality. Undoubtedly for many listeners, this would be true of “W.A.S.T.E.”, the acronym used by Lot 49’s underground postal system. The weirdest track on the album, “W.A.S.T.E.” comes across like a transistor radio tuning through different stations. What begins as dark, glitchy groove à la Boards of Canada takes an unexpected turn into sunnier territory with the introduction of an upbeat banjo riff repeated over the sound of, well, actual waste collection—apparently an impromptu recording of a Crescent City garbage truck in action. By the time the jaunty handclaps arrive, you know you’re in the early Naughts—the song wouldn’t feel out of place on a Polyphonic Spree album. New instruments make their appearance in between bursts of static: dulcimers, guitar, some rattling percussion. The song concludes with a skittering shower of electronics, more a malfunction than a conclusion—or perhaps the radio was crushed by the garbage truck?

Wait! There’s more…
While it’s not a Pynchon reference, a song on Chef Menteur’s even-better 2012 album East of the Sun & West of the Moon is named “Oxen of the Sun,” presumably after the chapter in Ulysses where Joyce playfully recapitulates the evolution of the English language. Which is pretty fucking cool.

The debut full-length album from Chef Menteur is an instrumental epic released shortly before Hurricane Katrina that finds the band at its darkest and most psychedelic so far: an epic and heady journey into deep watery spaces that includes filmic soundscapes, organ grooves, eastern-tinged melodies, heavy guitars, ambient pastorals, and more than a few dark moments. The culmination of two years of homemade sonic experimentation on lo-fi recordings by Chef Menteur in their (now lost) tiny New Orleans studio.

“One thing that the original liner notes do not include is that the yelping on the song ‘W.A.S.T.E.’ is actually New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board sanitation employees picking up (and throwing back down mercilessly) the garbage in the early morning as captured with a mic sticking out the window. Combining it with the 16 tracks of handclaps Bryan and I layered with the dulcimers led one reviewer to describe it as a ‘hootenany.’”
—Alec

1. Europa (7:23)
2. Pointu (4:52)
3. Paysans de la Mer (2:10)
4. Matiasma (2:36)
5. Charlie Don’t Surf (3:01)
6. W.A.S.T.E. (6:19)
7. Pseudologia Fantastica (3:21)
8. Maida Vale (2:35)
9. Caverns of the White Widow (7:17)
10. Ad Astra Per Despera (6:02)
11. Pointu II (10:04)
12. Io (17:05)

Musicians
Bryan Killingsworth—Pro-1 synth, banjo.
Alec Vance—guitars, organ, sitar, dulcimers, synths, vocals.
Jim Yonkus—bass, synthesizers.
Chris Sule—drums.
Mike Mayfield—drums.