Various Artists - Tarot or Aorta: Memories of a PRE Festival
(Smack Shire)
Since The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, the epic swan song of To Live and Shave in LA, Mr. Tom Smith has been relatively quiet. His current outfit, Ohne, released their debut album to little fanfare on Mego Records, and Tom's made a few other sundry appearances here and there, but there's not been a lot of Ohm Myth to speak of. Smith's record label venture, Flemish Masters, in collaboration with Weasel Walter and Nondor Nevai, is now unfortunately defunct, though, after an appropriate delay, The Smack Shire has risen to take its place, already releasing music slated to be on the Flemish label. Tarot or Aorta, part of The Smack Shire's debut bevy of discs, is another long-awaited offering, the CD documentation of the Tora! Tora! Tora! festival organized by Smith in late 1996.
Tora! Tora! Tora!, which spanned three days, boasted an impressive roster of twenty-six artists, each of whom is represented here (mostly) in alphabetical order, minus Melted Men, whose performance was lamentably lost. The roster is surprisingly diverse; though such damaged rock artists as Harry Pussy, The Flying Luttenbachers, and Smith's own To Live and Shave in LA represent a good portion of the disc, Eugene Chadbourne, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Alva, and Mr. Quintron provide sounds from different dark corners of the musical spectrum. There's both an Electric Eels reunion (of sorts), and tracks from post-Eels outfits Amoeba (raftboy) and Brian McMahon and the Choke Cherries, as well as a track from Wolf Eyes' Aaron Dilloway's Hercules project. The live recordings aren't always of A+ quality, but are far from unlistenable, and there aren't too many tracks that will create the urge to seek out the stereo's remote. Bypassing genre classification, there's a sense of "the other" that pervades the recording, this is the glue that holds performances, which might feel disparate together to form the larger whole.
The old cliché says that only a rare compilation can be frequently endured from beginning to end, and Tarot or Aorta isn't an exception, though this is due to the length of the disc and amount of artists as much as the quality of the music. Highlights include Alva's weirdo-baroque "Flux," Monotrona's chaotic "Jing-Pow-Ki-Poo," and Harry Pussy's untitled rumble. Bobby Conn's "What Do You Like About Shabbat?" is amusing, sure, but a more substantial track would be more appealing; the same can be said for the Luttenbachers' "Self-Subverting Heterogeniety," which consists mostly of Weasel ranting about numerous failed beginnings to the band's songs. As both a document and a disc, Tarot or Aorta would have benefited from the inclusion of representative material from each artist, but, all the same, as disc and document the CD is still a success.
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