As the already impressive machine of online promotion and internet taste-making continues to pick up inertia, a reconfiguration of the development of a band has taken place, and the concept of a regional scene may soon prove a casualty of the increasing globalization of even the most underground of musics. To some, the discussion of scenes has always been a futile exercise in semantic construct and tenuous linkage, but the cross-pollination that can occur in a multi-disciplinary artistic community can provide a healthy stream of new ideas, re-contextualization, and inspiration.
Cleveland's Land of Buried Treasure took their love of their musical compatriots to heart, finding that there's no better way to benefit from the energy of those around you than to harness it directly. On their most recent release, the trio of Jae Cristoff, Nate Scheible, and Mike Wilkinson collected a troupe of over forty Cleveland musicians, and, rather than form an unwieldy one-off supergroup, recorded everyone in smaller sessions, working after the fact to create a fifty-minute patchwork of collaborative variety. The organizers' took part in each session, though, as styles shift and atmospheres change, there's little in the way of obvious fingerprints left by the trio, who seem as though they were more intent on capturing a variety of sounds and moods than forcing their musical will on those with whom they played. It's an intriguing concept, to be sure, the amalgamation of one's entire musical circle into a single entity, though East 36th and Celebrity Weather Reportis rife with the sorts of little surprises and snafus that one would expect within such a context.
The intermittent cover of "Fernando" that appears on the disc's second track is its most concrete offering, but while the album is largely abstract in nature, it's not without a smattering of songlets that surface amidst the sound. These bits of seemingly composed concoctions are often enjoyable diversions, but, like an ice cream sundae, if one doesn't like the flavor of the ice cream, a colorful array of toppings won't help, and it's the improvised segments of the disc, whether frantically wild or languidly hazy, that make up the bulk of the album. To characterize the music further would surely be folly, cataloguing its shifts in sounds even worse, but suffice it to say that East 36th... largely flows in a more experimental vein, with even the rock music therein usually of the noisy, blown-out variety, and the pretty bits molested by lo-fi imperfection and meandering focus. Cristoff, Scheible, and Wilkinson don't work in seamless transition; often, in fact, the jarring discrepancies in the volumes and densities of two segments are exploited via unexpected cuts, and it's rare that any idea is allowed to continue long enough to truly take control of the sound. The spoken word and gentle organ that make up much of the disc's sixth track are an exception, and, alongside the more rapidly shifting landscape of the rest of the album, such concentration on a single sound comes across, quality notwithstanding, as a bit of an unexpected lull.
It's unlikely that any one listener would be a fan of every participant in this disc's festivities, and there exists a damning facet of East 36th...'s construction, in that the good bits are sometimes fleeting, and there exists so much going on in a stream of sometimes awkwardly meshed musical vignettes that the disc feels far more like a compilation than its intended purpose as a grand scale collaboration. The idea's a great one, and while the execution isn't perfect, there is something to admire in East 36th and Celebrity Weather Report and its adventurous take on a particular corner of Cleveland's undergound.
