Electric by Cyclone Trio

CYCLONE TRIO - ELECTRIC

It’s 1992 and the drums have chosen me. They say an instrument chooses you and in my case it’s true. I had been playing guitar for 10 years, never really progressed beyond the basics, but I had no intention of playing any other instrument. I was a guitarist.
The drummer, Ian, in our trio of guitar, bass and drums was an Indie-pop drummer, so when I tried to entice him to play more angular rhythms, he’d had enough. Luckily for me, he left his kit, which he said he’d pick up later. I sat down, started to play the drums and realised they’d been waiting for me.
I’d recently had another life-changing moment when I walked into my local record shop and Peter Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun” was playing over the speakers. I could not believe what I was hearing and immediately bought the album. It wasn't the first time I'd encountered Free-Jazz. I’d seen Derek Bailey and Alan Wilkinson back in the early 80's, but this was just so audacious. It wasn't background fumbling. This was in your face and stayed there. A whole universe had opened up to me and I wanted in.
So, our trio of guitar, bass and drums became a duo. An experimental rock duo. Except neither of us could play rock. Russell had only recently started playing bass and I, after my double revelation, was firmly in the Free-Jazz camp. What we did have was enthusiasm and lots of volume. Having met through an appreciation of SWANS, Sonic Youth and all things Lower East side, volume was our thing. I built a harmonics guitar to play while drumming to add another dimension, while we looked for a guitarist. Invented by Glenn Branca, the harmonics guitar is a long guitar with a bridge in the middle, you play one side and on the other it’s amplified, so you only hear the harmonics. We named ourselves Ascension. After Glenn Branca, John Coltrane, Olivier Messiaen and, of course, Jesus. We played short shows, one of them was 30 seconds long, but most were around 10-15 minutes, a blast of pure energy. At one gig Russell was using a new amp he’d just bought. The volume on stage was so loud that I was completely disoriented and couldn’t discern what either of us was playing. We sent a tape to Stefan Jaworzyn of Shock records, as we were big fans of Skullflower, not realising that he’d left the band two years earlier. He liked it and wanted to put us on a compilation CD he was thinking of putting out. Stefan confided that he’d wanted to play with Ascension when he heard us, not realising that we were looking for a guitarist. He had also been looking to form a band called Ascension, but we beat him to it. So, I invited him to have a jam. At the time, I was unaware that Russell had decided he wanted to do something else. We spread a rumour that when Russell heard Stefan’s playing, he ran for the hills. Stefan in, Russell out.
The whole dimension of Ascension changed with the addition of Stefan’s spiky guitar playing. We started to play longer shows. At Stefan’s first gig, one of the other bands on the bill greeted us with “Oh, you’re the 10-minute noise band”. We played with The Blue Humans when they came to London. Ascension vs The Blue Humans. Tom Surgal used my drum kit and said it was the worst he’d ever played. I’d bought it from an ex-girlfriend when Ian had collected his kit a year or so before.
Stefan had an idea to augment Ascension with Charlie Wharf on sax and Simon Fell on bass and call it Descension. We applied for a grant from the Arts council for a tour and as we had never played together, we didn’t have any recordings to give them. So, I mixed a tape of Ascension with Charlie and Simon playing together, the tracks were all out of sync, but we got the grant. We started rehearsing for the tour, but the sound was all wrong. Simon was inaudible behind the wall of noise that me and Stefan were playing and I glanced over to see Charlie turning blue trying to keep apace. So, we amped them both up.
On the tour, the venues we played in were quite taken aback by the volume we were playing at. Fortunately, we didn’t have too much problem…until we got to Leeds. We played in a gym and the sound bounced all around the walls making a horrible cacophony. When an elderly lady, arms crossed, appeared in front of us demanding that we turn it down, we turned it up. Unbeknown to us there were other meetings happening in the same building. The promoter escorted the elderly lady off and calmed her down.
The Descension tour ended with a support slot for Sonic Youth. A few days earlier I had played, along with Stefan and Simon, to a very receptive crowd with some of the mainstays of the London Avant Jazz scene with Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. I had naively thought the Sonic Youth audience would be more accommodating. How wrong could I have been. To say the crowd was hostile is an understatement. After playing to a hail of plastic beakers raining down on the stage, we finished to a fusion of boos and cheers in equal parts, unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.
Ascension did a live session to a radio station in the San Francisco Bay area that Stefan had set up. It was the first time we had been in a recording studio. It was only afterwards that I realised the time we had played in London would have been early Sunday morning in San Francisco. Just in time for the local residents to rise, nursing hangovers and switch the radio on. We released a CD of the recording, it turned out to be our last release. Ben Watson described it as our “Trout Mask Replica”. The last Ascension gig was in 2004, a request from Noxagt to open for them. The gigs had largely dried up in London, Free Jazz was out of favour and Stefan was becoming less interested in playing. By the time I had moved to Brisbane a year later, I had virtually stopped playing altogether and I didn’t have a drumkit. So, when the local supermarket was selling a kit off for $170, I bought it. I changed the heads and bought some new cymbals. It certainly wasn’t the best kit I’d ever played, but it was better than the one I had used in the early days of Ascension. In the mid 90’s I had recorded a solo album using all the guitars and amplifiers in the rehearsal room. I improvised, hitting guitars with my drumsticks, building up a sustained guitar drone while I played the drums. I decided to revisit this concept and take it on the road. I bought a couple of cheap guitars and built another harmonics guitar. I added them to the set up and I started looking for gigs.
By about 2010 I had discovered the local underground scene and went to a few shows. Brisbane had a pretty good experimental scene which existed from around 2010 to 2013, a mix of scuzzy punks and jazzers just out of the Conservatorium. A good blend of lo-fi experimentation and art school abandon. Lots of house shows and gigs in unusual places. But like all scenes, as soon as you realise there’s a scene going, it’s over. At one show I got to know Joel Stern, a mover and shaker in Brisbane at the time, and asked him for a gig. I thought it highly unlikely anybody in Brisbane was going to know who Ascension was, but Joel knew of Ascension and more to the point, who I was. The next day Joel texted me and asked if I wanted to play that evening, he said it would be an honour. The gig was at Real Bad. A legendary venue, originally a squat, which went through a number of events that would have finished any other venue off. At one point there was a fire in the kitchen area, another the roof blew off during a storm. The rickety staircase was an accident waiting to happen and that was before you even got into the venue. Real Bad is immortalised on the cover of Ed Kuepper’s “This is the Magic Mile” which was taken a few years before it became Real Bad. Situated between a busy road and a railway line, it was the perfect place to make a racket and nobody would complain. It was finally killed off in 2018 by a fire which razed the place to the ground, but in December 2010 Real Bad was the centre of the Brisbane underground scene. The gig wasn’t in the main room upstairs, but in the ex-porno bookstore downstairs, still with remnants of its former self littering the shelves. The gig turned out to be a big success and I followed the show with more solo gigs around Brisbane. It was at one of these gigs that Tim Green caught me in action. Tim had his own Free Jazz trio with Tim on drums, Max Fowler Roy on Bass and Massimo Magee on sax. I was amazed. There was Free Jazz in Brisbane.
I got to know Tim and he suggested we do something together. So, he set up a date at the conservatorium. Rather than just us playing a drum duo, I told Tim to bring somebody along to make it more of a project. He brought Massimo. We knew as soon as we started playing that it was working. I didn’t really know Massimo and had only heard him play a couple of times in the trio. His playing would go from melodic to ferocious and everywhere in between and he seemed to be able to follow anything we were doing, didn’t overplay and allowed space. I was very impressed. We ended up capturing almost an hour and were astounded at the results when we listened back to the recording. As an homage to Glenn Spearman, we named ourselves Cyclone Trio, because cyclones are in the Southern hemisphere and we sounded like a cyclone.
We had a few more sessions over the course of the next year and recorded three LP’s worth of material and played our first gig at Real Bad. We shopped the recordings around, but apart from a loose promise, that first recording never came out…until now.

Tony Irving
July 2020

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