WAR by SLY PIG

COMPOSED by JL CUNNINGHAM

JL CUNNINGHAM - All instuments + field recordings
with guest:
TARA WAROLIN - "Guess/Know" vocal on TANSSI UNESSA


“Save your hate, Achilles. It will keep.” — Christopher Logue, War Music


"When someone else is driving, I'm scared," is one of the great lines from one of the greatest of films. The darkly ironic line is uttered by Mario (Yves Montand) toward the end of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, a 1953 film about a quartet of nothing-to-lose fellas who are hired to transport trucks filled with volatile nitroglycerin over treacherous and harrowing route of mountain switchbacks.

WAR is a self-possessed, often tense and confounding, and beautifully raging document and it is driven solely by Sly Pig, aka Joe Cunningham —with similar intention, wryness, and more than a hint of danger and swagger.

It’s noisy, cinematic, brimming with good-natured chaos, shards of tenderness, and —without being didactic or statement-heavy—is a refreshing antidote to what Sly Pig called the “rot of the world.” Confounding, because (having known and played music for a very long time with its creator, in largely improvised, and often so-called jazz settings) I didn’t recognize the music’s well, source, or trajectory, and that unfamiliarity was such a glorious surprise to wade into.
Playing all the instruments, Sly Pig, a veritable, one-man callithumpian consort, has delivered without fear a compelling sonic tantrum over and against tidy category that picks the lock on the tyranny of label and genre and ultimately makes me think of FT Marinetti’s energetic futurist manifesto:
“We shall sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick-step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.”

A few thoughts. On the first couple tracks of the first side, I fell in love with the overarching sound palette, especially the urgency of the drums: sonically falling somewhere between the cathartic abandon and howl of vintage Milford Graves and the overloaded gate and tape distortion of an 80s basement punk band captured on a Panasonic RQ-2108 cassette recorder.

Once upon a time, your forebears might have had their wedding commemorated by the tradition known as "shivaree" – where townsfolks, kinfolk, and friends would come to uninvited and bang pots and pans, shoot guns, and create a loving ruckus. There’s a little of that here, transcendently harsh and refreshing.

Flipping things over, the second side (I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have A and B sides) unfolds over 20 minutes with Tanssi Unessa, a dance in a dream, that is a stunning and cinematic excursion, I kept thinking about Carla Bley’s use of the word “chronotransduction” to describe Escalator Over the Hill—a word invented to describe journey through time, sound, and imagination. It bears repeated listens. At different times of the day. It wants to be loud. And its begging for a dance to accompany it.

There’s a lot of freedom at play here. While I referred to “good-natured chaos” earlier, this record is anything but willy-nilly or off the cuff. It’s steeped in a deliberation, focus, and a discipline that allows its freedoms to rip the seams. Sly/Joe talked shared ideas and phrases that framed some of his thinking —and I was struck by his mentioning of “beginner’s mind,” Shunryu Suzuki’s reference to the act of or attitude of openness and eschewing of preconception or expectation.

Isaiah Berlin, and more recently Timothy Snyder in his brilliant On Tyranny and On Freedom, distinguish between negative liberty (“freedom from”—if not for those people/these regulations we’d be free) and positive liberty (“freedom to”— the freedom to thrive, freedom as the value that makes all other values possible).

One of the essential things that create the conditions for a welcoming freedom is “significant roughness.”

When we allow for a significant roughness —seeking out experiences which challenge us, overtaking a path toward the comfortable, unexamined life— we’re allowing for an unpredictability that ideally encourages us to navigate ambiguity and accept freedoms and their attendant beauty in unsuspecting ways.
Freedom in music is so often a freedom-from (time, structure, melody, etc.) and never as much a freedom-to (freedom to take risks for futures we choose). With WAR, we have the latter in spades —let it carry you.

“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” ― Michael Herr, Dispatches

—Tim DuRoche (Portland, Oregon)

JL Cunningham writes and plays music for SLY PIG, Battle Hymns & Gardens, Blue Cranes, CATFISH, Black & White Pilot, and this and that and the other thing.

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