Hillulah could be considered Gang Gang Dance's lost recordings. Between their debut recorded in 2001, the Revival Of The Shittest 12" being assembled out of old practice tapes, and God's Money being written & recorded in the later half of 2004; there is a sizable gap of innovative music that has remained unheard by anyone who missed them live. The period of late 2003 through early 2004 was extremely fruitful for Gang Gang Dance. Every show was different as the band constantly experimented and pushed the limitations of their equipment to create new music. In the days approaching an event the band would disappear and practice non-stop, workshopping material to create a unique live set for the performance. The results were at their most basic the epoch of practiced improvisation and at their heights the music equivalent of spiritual Hillulah. Originally cut together as a CDR in November of 2004 for a tour with Animal Collective, Hillulah was compiled from live recordings of such performances. The material was sewn together by GGD drummer Tim Dewitt over a marathon seventy-two hour session at Junkyard Audio Salvage; the fruit of this work comes together in a way that defies the conventions of most `live' albums. In the resulting forty minute montage creates a listening experience very much akin to a GGD performance: an audible onslaught which grabs the listener within the first few moments and removes them from the experiential world for the breadth of the set returning them to the natural world in an altered state, exhausted and overwhelmed.
Gang Gang Dance
Hillulah
[The Social Registry; 2005]
Rating: 6.9
Initially released as a limited edition CD-R for a November 2004 tour with Animal Collective, this 33-minute collage stitches together four live shows recorded between mid-2003 and early 2004 at the Knitting Factory, North Six, Passerby, and the Cooler (RIP), and includes an additional 30-plus minutes of live video footage. Don't expect Bruce Springsteen's Live 1975-85: Hillulah isn't a straight-up archive. Treating the recordings like found material, drummer Tim Dewitt spliced and shifted hours of two-track audio into these extensions, and like most of GGD's best work, the rhythmic incantations are hermetically removed from the everyday, so cheers and other live-album trappings are minimal.
Stylistically, the four pieces phase through and reintroduce sounds contained on each GGD release: broken dub, colorful piano embellishments, blurred calypso, oxygen-deprived hiccups, island wattles, prismatic fractures, Fluxus sutures, earthy drum circles, etc. At one point Lizzy Bougatsos dives into a cavern after engaging in Tourette's syndrome howls with an unspecified male, astride electronic bleeps, drumstick rattles, and guitar blooms. Elsewhere, guest vocalist Sean Reveron of A Gun Called Tension shouts post-punk vitriol alongside boorish implosion. Occasionally, bits of instrumentation are trashed (like a dropped second), offering the feel of a loop (or lope). Percussion accelerates, tapping a constant, techno-friendly palpitation.
For genealogy completists, Hillulah glances outside the studio and practice room, suggesting multiple bridges between 2001's Revival of the Shittest, the self-titled Fusetron LP, and God's Money. Personally, I like that it was compiled over just three days, because as one might expect, the transitions are at times sketchy, the movements not entirely in-synch. Looseness is its charm. In that sense, Hillulah supplies imperfect (and pretty) off-the-cuff glances at Gang Gang Dance's past, but realistically speaking, it's a documentation for diehards, not curiosity seekers.
-Brandon Stosuy, August 17, 2005
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