Crack Wars by The Incisions

You may not be familiar with my name, nor my association with that most untethered chimaera of bands, The Incisions, though I’m sure you’ll have little trouble demarcating the innards of my numerous credentials as record producer. My career began on a high note after I encountered Harry Nilsson at a bedraggled Los Angeles bar in 1973 and ended up cutting my teeth producing a still as yet unreleased solo album recorded immediately prior to his sessions with John Lennon where Nilsson fatally ruptured his vocal cord by trying to outjockey Lennon in a booze and coke fuelled screaming match.

I then befriended Rocket From The Tombs and documented their rehearsal loft recordings in the mid 70s. I suffered a mental and financial quagmire in the early 80s, rinsing the drum stools free of faecal traces for Bathory’s incontinent percussionist Jonas Åkerlund. Connections and dissociations led to producing many an unpublished sonic masterpiece for the likes of: Chic, The Blue Humans, a Pino Donaggio scoring session for an unreleased De Palma project, demos for ESG’s pre-Hannett era, touring and doing sound for Diamanda Galás (also curating her footwear for performances), transcribing the dictations of Judee Sill for a book on theosophy and animalia; later a demo for New Zealand band Die! Die! Die!’s album with (my nemesis) Steve Albini at the helm, and finally an early Mean Street (later Street Chant) recording.

In the late 90s I thought I’d finally retired in sleepy Canterbury, New Zealand when I heard the sound that forever altered the trajectory of my life and made my heart stop: The Incisions performing a scalding live set at my daughter’s high school disco that melted the faces of many a youngster. From that moment on we were bound by a communal desire to document the unit’s every attempt at creating a timeless, yet conflagrant strain of pure Rhythm & Blues. Think about it. Blues... Rhythm... This is precisely Tony Valens’ recipe for the sickly concoction that his Incisions dreamt up and spattered into your quivering lap. The tone of early African American R&B acts on Sun Records filtered through a phantasmagoric abyss. Listen to final song Cut-Throat Blues for the earliest and most Memphis-like inscription in The Incisions’ discography.

Crack Wars is presented in chronological order, apart from tracks 31-34 which I recorded live at The Wunderbar and based my Hadean mix on Valens' then obsession with Mainliner and High Rise. Valens actually played a show with Guitar Wolf (when drumming for The Hi-Tone Destroyers) back in the late 90s and I remember the headliners blasting Iggy’s recent mix of Raw Power over the PA as they stalked around the venue in glistening leather. They offered us some coke backstage (though only their singer was snorting it) before The Hi-Tones played and their bass player (who'd also taken some) literally jumped on top of and smashed the bass drum and the rest of the drum kit Valens was borrowing from a local band at the end of the set. Luckily he was the only member with a well-paying job and wrote them a cheque on the spot. I fondly recall Guitar Wolf’s drummer standing at the side of the stage giving Tony a thumbs up as he was crushed underneath the demolished kit.

Either one of The Datsuns or The D4 (which featured Vaughan Williams who would perform with Valens in a later project and is still the first bass player in line for a potentially reformed Incisions) informed me that the White Stripes used to blast The Incisions debut, self-titled album (lovingly released by early adherent Andrew Tolley) on their tour bus. Though in return Tony would label them “superannuated spittle”. In fact, Tony once explained to me that he considered The Incisions to be one of the only true 21st century emissaries of Fire Music. Future music, never mere revisionism. Free Jazz was a huge influence on the group, especially the singular nature of Valens’ guitar solos. Jimmy Lyons, Arthur Jones, Kaoru Abe, Milford Graves, Peter Brötzmann (who Valens once witnessed live, sitting behind Thurston Moore and the woman he was cheating on Kim Gordon with), and Arthur Doyle were all of grave importance.

Valens as drummer (formally of The Hi-Tone Destroyers, The Brunettes and The Palace of Wisdom, Andrew O’Connell’s band who were mystically affiliated with The Incisions in more ways than one) and was asked by Chris Heazlewood to join him on the West Coast for some post-King Loser recordings after experiencing Valens performing a “miraculous” Free Jazz set with Soon Kim, the vastly talented alto saxophonist and student of Ornette Coleman (Valens was once fortunate enough to speak to Ornette on the phone at Soon Kim’s house on a Sunday morning at 7am). Currently, Valens flails skins in the Aotearoa Snuff Jazz Ensemble (with Bruce Russell) and makes audiences vomit as bass player in Moider Mother (with his wife and son-in-law).

Mick Elborado infamously doused Valens with a litre of beer during a live, single song, one hour, ceaseless, freeform ostinato. He complained to confidante Matt Alien that Valens was “on fire” and needed to be “put out.” Masayuki Takayanagi can be traced here as the most direct influence on Valens’ shredding solos; the almost anti-jazz improviser who proudly never passed any of his students. Our eventual mutual obsession with Japanese musicians led to my producing a Masayoshi Urabe album for P.S.F. Records in the early 2000s, but the performer was unsatisfied with my (only mildly) peaked out recording levels and engaged me in a ragged Shinjuku street fight, dislocating my hip by repeatedly kicking my pelvis against the sharp corner of a brick guttering, while restraining me with one of the chains he routinely performs with. I’ve been confined to a wheelchair ever since.

Valens was also working on his project The CM Ensemble (which I helped produce) whose improvisations wrangled their way into the fabric of The Incisions’ compositions. In a legendary live to air performance (represented here via the group’s cover of “Rumble”) and interview with Valens’ close friend George Gosset, the band (including that mythical infant Bam Bam on drums) sheepishly admitted to an unnecessarily guilty love of hair metal bands such as Winger, Stryper and Dokken, but Valens later noted that they liked them solely for their names, not their musical content, which he’d never actually heard.

Possibly in an attempt to outdo Blue Cheer’s legend of driving a canine to death with their deafening sound onstage, Boy Howdy (bass guitarist [“guitarist” is crucial here as Valens always insisted upon the rhythm guitarist using a detuned guitar, not a bass] on tracks 19-22 and 31-34) threw a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon (the group’s favourite beverage, the taste of which they grew sick of due to a relentless wave of fascistic sponsorship) at a light above the audience, causing an electrical fire that resulted in the tragic death of fan Mason Loomis (1983-2001). While facing charges of manslaughter, Boy Howdy made a misguided attempt to console the grieving mother of the victim by grafting a guitar pick for her out of remnants of the boy’s flesh which Howdy discovered below the stage and retained for a later date.

I recall doing sound for The Incisions’ first Auckland show at Pizza Pizza Pizza where a western-style standoff ensued that spotlighted support band The Coolies throwing metal chairs at the visiting band during their set, possibly due to their perception of improper billing on the poster. I’ve come to believe that The Coolies actually are possibly one of the only bands that can hold a chair to The Incisions. Bass guitarist Ray Davis was hospitalised for a shattered molar and a dislodged eye.

Ritchie Lewis should be considered the group’s not-so-secret weapon, gracing the majority of cuts with an unwavering devotion to mauling the living fuck out of the skins of his trap kit. Blondie session saxophonist, David Ironside, was desperate to join The Incisions for a two night appointment at The Wunderbar (later revealed as a Nazi propagandist venue), but unfortunately the tracks you hear (31-34) are extracted from a recording of the blistering first night. David joined the trio on the second night as they broke out the slow jams portion of their set to add his trademark Hollywood skronk while sexily snarling along to standards such Blue Moon.

But we have no time here for ballads, only fire music is permitted. In fact, fire music has driven me to my current predicament. I write this tract from the greasy cigar smoke-coated sill of a decrepit Aranui rest home with Valens’ treacherous lure of a $20 authorship fee for penning this overdue hagiography that hangs over me like a putrid, pregnant monsoon cloud.

~ Hans Van Der Clumens.

"Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting them."

~ Emil Cioran.