Acclaimed Drummer Blake Fleming Releases New Solo Album
The Dazzling Killmen co-founder gives us a track-by-track account of The Beat Fantastic
“I record a bunch of ideas, like making an aural mass of clay, improvising with myself and building layers on intuition, finding different puzzle-piece-rhythms along the way.”
So explains master drummer Blake Fleming about his newest work, The Beat Fantastic, which finds the Dazzling Killmen co-founder creating what the hype sheet calls a “mesmerizing journey of percussion-driven psych noir.”
Fans of off-kilter beat tapes and Olutanji alike will no doubt get down to the audio journey Fleming constructs here, which is more Endtroducing….. than Face of Collapse.
Released on Tuesday in Europe via his own label, Mr. Fleming took the time out to give Rock & Roll Globe a track-by-track account of the new album and all the work it entailed and cool stuff that inspired it.
Find The Beat Fantastic on BandCamp.
“First Transmission”: “I have an old portable transistor radio from the 50s, the kind about the size of a lunchbox with the large tuning dial. There are entire galaxies of crunchy. electrical, static impulses between the few AM stations it tunes in and I’ve always loved those in-between worlds. The start of The Beat Fantastic is in part a small tribute to John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape no. 4. A piece for 12 transistor radios and 24 performers I first encountered as a performer in college. What sounds like a guitar entering is actually an old out-of-tune piano re-amped and distorted – recorded in an 18th century farmhouse in the northwestern Catskills. This is the beginning of a soundtrack to a movie unmade. This was an overriding concept when sequencing and arranging the pieces for the record. My music seems to drift into cinematic territory, partly due to its instrumental nature.”
“Desert Frame One”: “Like a hard cut from one disparate scene to another, the listener is thrust into a desolate expanse of heatwaves on the horizon. Mouth and eyes dry, disoriented but stable, the journey continues. The title makes reference to film and the large frame drum I play for this piece. I wanted to establish very early the unpredictable turns in this record. Enjoy…but don’t get too comfortable.”
“The Girl With The Electric Pants”: “Coming out of some kind of monastic-gong-dream-sequence, we finally get the satisfaction of full funky drum kit action. This entrance is one of my favorites and immediately compels the body to move. The layers of drum kits coming in and out gives a very 3D aural/visual to this one for me. As for the title, while creating the drum parts, I envisioned a frenetic, kinetic woman dancing at fever pitch—her face indistinguishable, but her perpetual motion inspired the name.”
“Devolution Revolution Evolution”: “Inspired by the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, ‘Ball of Confusion’ by The Temptations, the funky yet militant marching of the drums here was a reflection of the police brutality and racial violence that surged during the summer of 2020. Things were devolving so quickly that revolution of some kind was the only path toward evolution. The sound of the main drum part is the result of overdubbing various drumkits with different tunings recorded at variable speeds, creating a sort of apocalyptic drumline. The medium-pitched bell shadowing the main drums is an agogo from West Africa made from old car parts. This lament was a call to action, for peace.”
“Desert Frame Two”: “The barren, shifting sands fade into view once again. Acting like a “homebase” for the first side, the desert landscape is where our protagonist keeps returning. Maybe the other pieces are just hallucinations manifested from the dehydrated, depleted state? Is this the path to enlightenment?”
“Get Up”: “The title here is a bit of an homage to Mile Davis’ 1974 heroin-soaked dark offering, Get Up With It. Here the tom toms take the main ‘melody’ or hook while multiple drum-sets jab and flail. I hear words loosely spoken between drums and other instruments when the mix and arrangement is right. I hear conversations, not with exact words, but with word-like sounds; the kind a vocalist will make when working on a melody without lyrics yet. They’ll make sounds that approximate words, feelings, gestures etc. This is what I hear between the drums in a piece like this. I hear this ‘drum dialog’ in most of my music. The instrumental sounds become vocal. The harsh takeover by the evil subway sound and other instances like it on this record, reflect the uncertain times we all live in. The sense of always being on guard, of wondering what’s coming next down the pike or around the corner.”
“Time Slip”: “The feeling of suspension, floating. The isolated, reverberant dripping of water in a cave. Space and Darkness. The album is taking a breath here hoping you will too. Drones made from close miking a suspended cymbal, recorded at a fast vari-speed so it will be much lower in pitch and quite dark when played back normal speed – as well as capturing the lower overtones of an openly tuned floor-tom, probably vari-sped a bit too. Fades out and that’s the end of Side 1.”
“Drum Killah”: “Side 2 begins with a nod to the 45s James Brown released, where the B-side would seamlessly continue from the A-side. ‘Drum Killah’ breaks the door down like some kind of Tarantino/Blaxploitation film mixed with 1970s Mancini. This is a cop-chase/car-chase scene for sure. The simple and repetitive tympani part hammers out an urgent speedometer burying pulse that’s always close to the edge. The epic car chase of the 1970s film, Vanishing Point, was an inspiration.”
“Dense Jaki”: “My humble little tribute to Can’s master beat maker, the late, great Jaki Liebezeit. This piece is denser in its instrumentation than CAN or Jaki’s drumming, thus the title. Nothing to esoteric going on here, just some good, funky drumming with a nice breakdown in the middle. But…WTF?? here comes that crazy evil subway sound again. There are things that thread in and out of this album adding a continuity to the whole. That was the idea at least, to have aural elements that tie it all together.”
VIDEO: Blake Fleming, John Colonna and Tong Cherd Live in Gilbertsville, NY 6/27/24
“PaleoCyberKineticism (for the MC5)”: “Lifting part of the title from John Sinclair’s revolutionary-tinged liner notes to the MC5’s gritty debut, Kick Out The Jams, this piece pays tribute to the sound of that original record. Like the sound of the actual vinyl. Big surprise, I’m a life-long record nerd and the sound of that first pressing of Kick Out The Jams is so fucking fierce and unruly, the way the guitars are breaking and shattering, as if your head were precariously on stage, I wanted to capture that intensity without rock and roll.”
“Delancey Stomp”: “The Delancey in the title is twofold, referring to the heavenly little Hamlet of Delancey I used to live in up in the Catskills and Delancey St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which was also my stomping grounds. In the hamlet of Delancey my studio used to be in a massive basement of an old country church where my first solo album, Time’s Up, was recorded. The main “melody” here is carried by some quick decaying splash cymbals placed on a drum set. I love doing simple things like that that give acoustic percussion an electronic sound or feel. In the beginning of the piece we hear what could be tabla but is actually another Indian instrument, the Kanjira, which is a single-headed, single-jangle tambourine, but you can alter the pitch of the head by pressure. I really like mixing ethnic instruments from around the world with basic Western percussion and working with various gain stages on the mic to color and alter sound. This one is for booty shakin’ with abandon!”
“The Shadow Cast”: “First conceived and recorded for 2020’s Drum Killah EP, the title and sound of this piece are again reflections of that tumultuous summer of 2020. The ominous implication of the title is deliberate as so many dark clouds descended on the U.S. experiment. The massive tam tam explosion at the beginning is another one of my favorite entrances. It’s just massive and sounds so Hi-Fi while setting a dystopian tone. Part of this piece was originally composed for the Video Artist, Janet Biggs, for an installation shot in the Artic. This is one of the only pieces where you will hear other instrumentation besides percussion. The pulsating organ/keyboard sound was from my old Farfisa. Playing with the percussive drawbars on that thing brought loads of fun. Unfortunately, I had to sell it some years ago when things got rough financially. The record closes out with more alien transmission from the transistor land of AM.”
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