While past releases saw the band's avant folk dosed somewhat conservatively with the blues, free jazz, heavy psych, and metal, "Gipsy Freedom" brings these other, non-folk elements to the fore and generally turns the volume up. It's the band's most confounding and rewarding release. You may hear the faint echoes of "Island Harvest"-era Albert Ayler on one track, Iommi-derived riffage on the next, torch songs that sound torn straight from the Gershwin songbook on the next, and Can-style epic grooves on the next. Radically different, yet sustaining the group's high level of musical and thematic consistency, "Gipsy Freedom" is the sound of a band breaking out of the box and using the discarded shapes to construct strange new universes.
Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice
Gipsy Freedom
[5RC; 2006]
Rating: 8.4
A lonesome trail of warm, bleating saxophone and the faintly audible, clammy click of keys opens Brooklyn-based ensemble Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice's fifth proper full-length, Gipsy Freedom. As smoky melodies form from the curling, resonant notes, Heidi "White Diamond" Diehl's theatrical vocals declare, "Peace is a phoenix right out of the sky." Each word, delivered with Diehl's unique character and emphasis, drops like a pin through the mist of separated notes, pulling them together into a melee of skeletal structures.
Gipsy Freedom is mostly configured from mosaics of folk-influenced guitar and a series of other less distinct instruments. But like all of WWVV's recordings to date-- the group shares the present noise/experimental scene's dedication to prolificacy, having produced a striking number of cassettes and CDRs in addition to their more widely available releases-- Gipsy Freedom departs from the band's previous work. The acoustic loveliness of The Flood, for example, is less articulated; instead, the band takes strides toward broken and fractured jazz, which frees them to experiment with a broader range of space and sound.
An instrumental wash of bass and flute provides the foundation for improv track "Hey Pig He Stole My Sound"; it's quickly embellished with the rickety twinkle of bells and clattering cymbals. "Don't Love the Liar", perhaps the most traditionally structure song here, forms around a bony kickdrum and prowling bassline. Perhaps best serving as an example of what Wooden Wand choose not to do on this album, the track flickers out less than two minutes in. Of course, there's also ample evidence of the band's strong roots in noise music (original member Tovah O'Rourke comprises half of Dead Machines with husband John Olsen of Wolf Eyes): "Dead End Days with Caesar", though not of Prurient/Wolf Eyes school of ear-splitting torture, is a 20-odd-minute avant-garde jamboree, thick with jaunty rhythms and contact mic explosions.
Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice have managed to maintain a delightful sense of mystery thus far: From their website's far-flung but not entirely convincing biography (apparently, their history embraces Czech runaways, traveling carnivals, and childhood literary prodigies) to their quasi-mythical stage names (Satya Sai Kali Jehovah, Glucas Nonhorse Crane, etc.), the band clearly enjoys building their mystique, thriving in an ambiguous, hypnotic make-believe world. But here they've finally broken the essential barrier that many of their noise-dabbling Brooklynite peers have yet to penetrate: Gipsy Freedom is the first release on which the group's music is as fascinating, enigmatic, and multifaceted as their shadowy personas.
-Mia Lily Clarke, March 06, 2006
Review by Ned Raggett
The continuing career of Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice could almost be described as that of enjoyably amused willfulness -- they seem all too readily to be lumped into the neo-psych/folk collective ramalama of the early 21st century, but then they start an album like Gipsy Freedom with a song consisting of nothing but low-key free jazz sax and female singing and all of a sudden the spirit of Patty Waters reincarnated proves a better touchstone than Syd Barrett. With the sax being provided by guest Daniel Carter, the five piece band takes the title of this album seriously -- in fact it could arguably be a perfect phrase for their career of multitudinous releases, labels, and incarnations. Two lengthy explorations provide near bookends for the album: "Didn't It Rain" is part steady pluck-and-drone, part scrabbling collapse, while the twice as long "Dead End Days With Caesar" has a great stoned-poetry rap which Iggy Pop probably would love to use sometime if the reunited Stooges ever did a show of nothing but "We Will Fall." In contrast are two tracks under two minutes, including "Don't Love the Liar," which might be as close as Wooden Wand get to a garage/punk number -- at least, in an alternate universe, and with a suddenly shrill start to the chorus. The various explorations throughout reach a level of exultance that show the group is much more than just a bunch of folks thinking the height of improvisation is a drum circle: "Hey Pig He Stole My Sound," with its collage of melodies and clattering beats culminating in a final minute of fierce, insistent rhythm, while the skeletal death folk of "Dread Effigy" has all sorts of drone, feedback, and more lurking in the mix which evolves into a richer, wordless singalong by the end of the song.
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