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50,000 Reasons: UT

These pen portraits build up into a gallery of special people. These people have made unique contributions to popular culture. Some of the stories will be fairly familiar, and some may seem slightly strange. There are some glaring omissions, and some odd inclusions. A thread of narrative runs through, and it’s all as subjective as hell.

Just occasionally you read something on pop matters that has you punching the air with sheer joy. One of those moments for celebration came chancing upon a delightfully detailed Ut interview at Warped Reality, where Andrea Feldman had long been flying the flag for one of the great pop groups. The reissue by Blast First of the In Gut’s House and Griller titles by Ut gave the perfect opportunity for Andrea to delve, and it gives a great excuse to air my Ut story.

Way back in the mid-‘80s when I started a new job I was distracted by an envelope on one of my new colleagues’ desks, addressed to one Jacqui Ham. I was intrigued. Jacqui Ham was a member of Ut, the cantankerous pop explorers. Could it be her? Eventually I plucked up the courage to ask. My new colleague didn’t have a clue what I was on about, but promised to check with her partner who mastered records for a living. And, yes, it turned out it was our Jacqui Ham, and he had been, erm, utterly astonished to hear his partner come home talking about Ut, warning her that the new work colleague must be into some strange stuff.

It was an early incarnation of pop writer Everett True, when he was The Legend!, that woke me up to the possibilities of Ut when scribbling for Alan McGee’s legendary fanzine Communication Blur, which made up for deficiencies in literacy with its extraordinary enthusiasm which was completely contagious, vitally important, and incredibly inspirational. I seem to recall The Legend! comparing Ut to the Young Marble Giants, in terms of stark simplicity, but that could be my memory playing tricks on me. Was it the Raincoats?

And memories do play tricks on me. I somehow had got it into my head that there was an article on Ut in an old edition of much-loved Manchester fanzine Debris by Lizzie Borden, with photos by Birrer. Dave Haslam’s great magazine definitely did run an Ut feature (1987-ish), but it turns out it was by Elizabeth Johnson and starts fantastically: “For me, Ut represent one of the most intense musical experiences in the known universe. Are you ready to have your head trip with infinite velocity, sheer and primal ferocity?” She goes on: “To consider their music a random clang of guitars, erratic rhythms, and screamingly abstract vocals is to commit exorcism on their cohesive dark-sided collage.” Birrer did take the pictures, by the way.

And anyway a Lizzie Borden did write for Debris, and in fact in a slightly earlier edition reviewed Diamanda Galas’ The Divine Punishment: “She is a rare flame of brilliance shining her talent on subjects as these and illuminating them in such a unique way, that anyone who is brave enough to bear that torrent and whirlpool of sound can see them by a flaming light of truth.” The next review is of Marc Riley decimating the NME C86 cassette.

Lizzie Borden is if anything best known for the early ‘80s film, Born In Flames, which like much of the art of the time was a response to having little money. While in turn it is known for the Lora Logic/Red Crayola title track, the film itself is an absolute gem, enriched by its revolutionary feminist theme, and the more things change the more they remain the same sense.

Born In Flames features a freewheeling improvising Adele Bertei as a revolutionary preacher on a pirate radio station, somewhere between her days as a member of the Contortions and her solo “success” strangely in the wake of Madonna, with records like the great Little Lives where she sings about Jim and his saxophone and the gang hitting the East Side back in ’79 and how “crazy visions kept the fools on the run but times keep changin’ and money keeps changin’ hands when Angels with Dirty Faces turn into Babes in Moneyland.”

Ut emerged from that same downtown NYC art/punk no wave scene that has since been the stuff of so many dreams. Interestingly where DNA’s Arto Lindsay traced roots and connections to Brazil and Caetano Veloso, so the girls from Ut traced roots and connections to the UK underground and The Fall in particular. Maybe more than anyone Ut understood where The Fall were coming from and what they were saying and how they were behaving. And it seems Mark E Smith was incredibly accommodating and encouraging and supportive of Ut’s stretching of pop possibilities.

The reissue of In Gut’s House and Griller respectively highlight how far ahead Ut were as a pop unit. Their determinedly democratic approach to structuring sound reached fruition on these wonderful sets, and what is most striking is the taut tenacity that is held so strikingly in check, with an impressive discipline, along the lines of Mark E Smith hectoring his boys not to start improvising. As with The Fall and Fire Engines, there is no such thing as a conventional guitar solo in an Ut song. It’s what you always dreamed Sonic Youth would be.

Emerging from the same milieu, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon has been quoted as saying her group was always trying to catch up with Ut. The interesting thing, perhaps by dint of their background (check out Andrea’s interview!), is how Ut avoided the clichés of American rock which so attracted many contemporaries and who claimed that their upbringing was so coloured by the Black Sabbaths, Bostons, and Kiss curls of sound on the AOR radio. Despite being way ahead, Ut left behind such a slim set of recordings (you need to hear the early 12”s and live recordings by the way), whereas Kim coolly has seemed so organised, with Sonic Youth, and her X-Girl clothing range with Daisy von Furth, and side projects like Free Kitten (we love their rendition of Teenie Weenie Boppie) and the astonishing SYR 5 with DJ Olive and Ikue Mori, and before that Harry Crews with Lydia Lunch, whose own Teenage Jesus kick started so much.

Unlike many pop peers Ut knew when to stop, but devotees new and anew are urged to track down offshoots like Jacqui Ham’s Dial (and that envelope by the way contained a DAT of Dial) and Sally Young’s Quint who both continued the pioneering work of the parent group. Quint’s addition of trumpet adds a strangely warped pop veneer eerily reminiscent of Ut contemporaries the June Brides, which can only be a good thing. —John Carney

Reposted from Tangents.co.uk | © John Carney

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Feral Epiphanies (from Plan B #13)

Ut, In Gut’s House
Griller (Blast First/Mute)

Ut: music: the syllable used in the fixed system of solmization for the note C.

White Columns Noise Fest Flyer, 1981
Noise Fest Flyer, 1981

This is where music ended.

Every gig these three New York ladies played between migrating to London in 1981 and splitting in 1990 felt like it could be their last, such was the force of their emotion, their unwillingness to compromise. Guitar strings were coerced, battered, detuned, retuned – and maybe only then returned, bruised and bewildered, to their original state. Vocals were spat out, mumbled, suddenly roared: Jacqui Ham and Nina Canal and Sally Young taking an eternity to switch between instruments (the band was truly democratic) and mic duties, seemingly unaware of the restrictions usually placed upon a band by its attendant audience (ie, to actually perform).

First time we saw Ut at a Birthday Party gig, me and my mate Geoff sat studiously on the edge of the stage with our backs towards the trio, such was our hatred for their lack of presence and seeming reliance on crap guitar tuners. A few years later, we had bottles thrown at us by Fall fans – Fall fans, for fuck’s sake – for dancing to Ut’s jagged, post-No Wave rhythms. We went on to see Ut about 45 times: sure, we were aware of Sonic Youth’s turbulent guitar-storms, of Live Skull’s almost narcoleptic haze, of the Butthole Surfers’ depraved pyrotechnics and The Membranes’ shimmering fury – but no one could touch these women for sheer intransigence and confrontation.

The deeper into themselves Ut dug, the more the audiences seemed to hate them: the gaps between songs would often became longer than the songs themselves as bickering took hold, but still they persisted, heedless yet acutely focused.

It was hard to tell where the roots of this music lay – perhaps in Nina’s previous band, Robin Crutchfield’s rackety Dark Day, or in the relentless surge of Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus, or in John Cale’s howling viola – but Ut were always something separate, something apart. When I first experienced Babes In Toyland, I tried to explain their dissonant surge in terms of Ut – but soon realised that beyond the two bands’ beautiful, scaly noise there really weren’t that many parallels to be drawn.

Ut, Griller
Griller, 1989

Ut’s reluctance to pander was matched only by their hatred of the studio – or so it seemed. A cassette, Ut Live, was released on Out in 1981, and a 12-inch followed, both of which captured Ut in their brutal, uncompromising rawness. But it took eight years after their conception in December 1978 for the band to be accorded a full-length release, 1986’s Conviction wherein the band finally documented some of their torturous unease, their fractured individuality shaped through bloody-mindedness into a coherent whole. It was excellent, as was 1987’s long overdue retrospective Early Live Life, both records as dense and emotional and fragile as you’d expect from a band who’d made a career out of onstage deliberation. It wasn’t until Ut released their final brace of records, however – the double 12-inch In Gut’s House (1988) and Griller (1989) – that they managed to truly capture the intensity of their live shows on vinyl.

Even 18 years on, In Gut’s House is astonishing: 10 songs that scrape and scour away until they reach that elusive core at the very heart of music, the core so very few bands reach (maybe The Velvet Underground on ‘Venus On Furs,’ perhaps Sonic Youth on ‘Death Valley ‘69’).

On In Gut’s House, Ut transcended their origins, their surroundings – everything and anything – most especially on the two middle songs, the violin-scarred ‘Shut Fog’ and ‘Homebled.’ The entire album is a series of epiphanies and denouements, bursts of impassioned vocals offset by clattering drumbeats and needling guitar. Lyrics were dark utterances, part Patti Smith, part something altogether more feral and vulnerable.

Griller is damn fine, too, but it pales in comparison. Maybe Ut realised they couldn’t hope to repeat the moment. The 11 songs present still shredded; deep, malicious, urgent and intricately layered. (You can tell now where its producer Steve Albini discovered the sound he later used to such devastating effect on PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me.) Brief guest member Charlie D pounded up a welter of intent on the drums: relentless, heavy, frantic and … just … blam blam blam blam blam blam blam…

Everett True interviews Ut
Motivation: “Compulsion.”
Inspiration: “Contempt.”
Confrontation: “Revelation.”
Realisation: “The goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick.

— Everett True

Reposted from the Plan B Archives, Issue 13.

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Theoretical Music

Sham Shack, November 2010
Ut playing "Sham Shack" at AS220, Providence, RI

On Site
Theoretical Music: Ut + Talk Normal
 Issue Project Room
New York, USA

During a panel discussion on the No Wave era, part of the three-night multimedia survey Theoretical Music, Thurston Moore shared an amusing downtown-NYC yarn. In the early ’90s, he met six-string wizard Robert Quine in a studio, and the latter attempted to initiate a blues jam. It was a futile gesture; the Sonic Youth guitarist was clueless when it came to such conventional modes. Relating the tale, Moore seemed humiliated, but also proud to have invented musical vocabularies rather than simply built on old ones. His stance echoed the remarks of bandmate Kim Gordon—a participant in another No Wave panel earlier the same evening—who spoke about how the unmooring of punk performance practices from rock & roll orthodoxy was the era’s key innovation. More specifically, it was the revolution that gave her, a self-described non-musician, tacit permission to try her hand at music.

Revisiting the primal lurch and skronk of, say, DNA, it’s easy to hear exactly what Gordon was getting at. Some of the sounds that emerged from NYC’s downtown scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s did seem ahistorical. But even as Theoretical Music organizers Branden W. Joseph and David Grubbs cultivated this viewpoint and echoed a recent rash of books (by Moore and Wire contributor Byron Coley, as well as Marc Masters) in singling out No Wave as a hermetic movement, they issued a shrewd corollary by booking the reunited trio Ut as their marquee performer. The band’s enthralling set, their first in the US since 1991, exhibited a deep idiosyncrasy, yet it also thrived on time-tested rock & roll energy.

Tellingly, the most memorable moment of Ut’s performance was also the most conventional. During “Wailhouse,” from the band’s final LP, 1989’s Griller, members Sally Young, Nina Canal and Jacqui Ham —who, as in the old days, swapped instruments throughout the night— and guest drummer Tom Surgal (of White Out) locked into an insistent, slow-churning swagger. Young’s sultry, goth-chanteuse vocal drove home the notion that the band wasn’t as far removed from the blues as No Wave fetishists might assert.

Of course, the set also featured plenty of old-fashioned artiness: Young bowing her bass with a drum stick, Ham’s steel-wool guitar scribbles, drum-set rhythms from Canal that thudded in and out of meter. At times, these gestures made the trio seem more like an insular tribe than a band, enacting its own secret rituals. But overall, Ut registered as more human and less severe than listeners who had only heard them on record (me, for one) may have expected. Despite their motley appearance —the tallish, silver-haired Canal in black clogs, Young sporting a leather mini dress and Ham looking at once disheveled and ultra-stylish in a gray suit— and marathon tuning sessions, they came off as inviting, even friendly. Canal won over the crowd between songs by cueing up a surfing video (featuring the most anti-No Wave imagery one could think of) and even amid technical travails, the three band members exchanged easy smiles. Their easygoing attitudes cut right through the arty pretension that inevitably surrounds nostalgia for the downtown New York of yore.

Musically too, Ut didn’t come across as a band tied to any movement—instead these were three distinct musical personalities meshing in multiple equally effective configurations. In the strongest of these, Ham layered her weird, plaintive whine over Canal’s rough-edged yet deeply propulsive drumming, while Young’s sturdy, repetitive bass lines provided crucial melodic hooks. Ut’s instrument-switching was no gimmick; it seemed more like a logical set-pacing strategy, such that near the show’s end, when Ham (who had spent much of the show on guitar) finally sat down at the drums to play a gangly tribal groove, it felt like a triumphant payoff. Overall, Ut exemplified the freedom of No Wave while at the same time bucking the movement’s retrospectively calcified aesthetics.

Opener Talk Normal, the NYC duo of guitarist Sarah Register and drummer Andrya Ambro, summoned a more foreboding mood. Their driving yet amorphous sound fields obscured song and left the audience to puzzle out the structural elements. Ambryo acted as a both compass, directing the pieces with brisk, repetitive beats, and engine, galvanizing them with moments of explosive intensity. The set reached a gripping climax when she shoved her stool aside and jitterbugged spastically as she pounded out dense snare and tom rolls. There was a harshness in these outbursts, echoed in Register’s eerie guitar haze and alarmed wail, but as with Ut, other emotions crept in. During a break, Ambro walked over to Register’s area and borrowed her beer for a quick chug. The guitarist grinned and patted the drummer on the back, as if to acknowledge that even in the avant-garde, rock & roll’s first principles still prevail. — Hank Shteamer

This article originally appeared in The Wire issue 322, December 2010. Reproduced by permission. www.thewire.co.uk | Photo: Andrea Feldman

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An Unnerving Calm

Ut with Tim Hodgkinson, 1984. Contact sheet

In Gut’s House by Ut (1987)

If five stars seems excessive for an album of squeaks, yelps and scrapes, then consider this: beauty is not a well-defined concept. To ask someone, “Isn’t that beautiful?” is to invite them into a shared viewpoint, one they might not have previously considered. Yes, that person is not conventionally good-looking, yet there is something intensely moving about how he holds himself; a fragility which fascinates the viewer, and which his portrait has somehow captured. If you’ll allow that feeling in. Many don’t, and who can blame them? Fear is a scary thing.

An Unnerving CalmI loved the idea of Ut — three noisy women who swapped instruments and argued on stage — before I ever heard them play a note, but I had to learn to love them for real once I got over the disappointment of their not being as I’d imagined. Not all that noisy, actually. Not in a crushing, masculine way, at any rate. And not a Throwing Muses precursor, either, except perhaps in their best-known, misleading song, “Evangelist,” which opens In Gut’s House. Get the skew-pop over early, girls, then on with the show.

It’s almost impossible to describe what you will find when you do allow yourself to enter these kaleidoscopic corridors, these labyrinths of unease. It is fairly easy to point to the New York No Wave scene of the early 80s as the garden from which these fracturing sounds sprang; we can look at the freedom of rhythmic invention those times allowed, when every sub-beat was not micro-timed and synchronized, when pop’s permitted patterns were yet to be fully described in terms of the histories of two monoliths called “Rock” and “Dance;” we might point to their deliberate relocation in the early 80s from the disco-bound US to an England which still permitted the perverse likes of The Fall to persist; we could try to describe Jacqui Ham’s forlorn scat in terms of freed female contemporaries such as Gina Birch (The Raincoats) or Ari Up (The Slits); we could mention a subsequent lineage perhaps taking in Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey, Huggy Bear, Coping Saw and Katastrophy Wife. These things get us somewhere close to what Ut sound like before our moment of surrender, but they are just circumstances. Every truly great band transcends their medium, and, like fellow No-Wave refugees and labelmates Sonic Youth, Ut were —ultimately, completely, indelibly— themselves.

Ut is an invitation to do nothing less than re-hear music itself. Where noiseniks like Glenn Branca and Michael Gira embraced nihilism, Ut’s art is closer to avant-gardists like Stockhausen and Cage who pointed towards the Zen stillness at the heart of life, while celebrating its chaos. The world according to Ham, Canal and Young is undeniably a restless place — witness ‘ID”s jagged drums, the darting vocal and harmonica stabs on ‘Mosquito Botticelli,’ guitar gravel scattered all over ‘Swallow.’ But over and above this there is an unnerving calm. Like one of the moving cities in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines saga, every song is an awe-striking leviathan, slow to wake but unstoppable in its crocodilian movements, accompanied by the rattling of Handre-teeth. The album reaches its stumbling peak on side three of what was originally packaged as a double twelve-inch: ‘Homebled‘ is all rickety violin and soft guitar clawings under a plangent Ham monologue, while ‘Shut Fog‘ is catacomb-dark and arachnophobic; both songs oozing such sweet, sweet resignation all that can be done is to hold on for life itself. The album ends, surprisingly perhaps, with a sunrise — ‘Landscape”s interpenetrating ice-planes suddenly meltwater under a sustaining yellow crayon guitar sun.

While they went on to produce a more muscularly powerful record, Griller, which scored more points with the hip-watchers, it is In Gut’s House – in all its sullen, cracked beauty – that will still be there a thousand years from now. — Razor

REPOSTED FROM THE PEER : AN UNNERVING CALM. | © Razor

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Ut: Primal, Uncompromising

Ut, consisting of Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham, and Sally Young, [is] a fascinating band on any number of levels. Genealogically, they span the great divide between New York’s mythic No Wave outburst of the late 1970s and the legions of bands (the most prominent among them being Sonic Youth) that would spring up in their wake and ultimately eclipse them. Politically, they are three women making challenging music. — John Tuma, Ut Archivist

Ut, In Gut’s House (Blast First/Mute)
Griller (Blast First/Mute)

Barely more than confidential to begin with, Ut was long ago swallowed by the quicksands of rock history. Now, new reissues of the trio’s last two albums show that the band was a musical UFO that somehow squeezed itself into the tight interstice between the corpse of no-wave and then-nascent indie rock.

Constantly switching instruments and trading vocals, Jacqui Ham, Nina Canal and Sally Young wrote songs that blisteringly explored a very female-centric psychic and corporeal anxiety. The band’s masterpiece probably is its second album, In Gut’s House (1988), a fantastically abrasive heap of hesitantly tribal drumming, chanted vocals and serrated guitars, with an occasional screechy violin thrown in for extra color (black, of course). The wheezy “Mosquito Botticelli,” which anchors this manifesto of uneasy listening, sounds like the remains of punk turned inside out and left to rot. Even when Ut flirts with straight-ahead songwriting, the result is claustrophobic, as if the women were desperately scraping at the closing walls of unshakable disquietude.

Engineered by Steve Albini, 1989’s Griller was the band’s swan song. The sound feels more ample, and at times the group hurtles forward, propelled by more orthodox rock drumming. But don’t expect anything soothing: Griller also suggests a certain primal vortex, ready to suck in unsuspecting listeners. And that’s the thing about uncompromising fucked-upness: It just doesn’t get old. — Elisabeth Vincentelli
Originally posted  in Time Out NY