MR BUNGLE | Disco Volante 20 Years
Mr. Bungle
I Quit (Danny Heifetz) – "a woodblock", production
and sleeve art layout and design
Trevor Dunn – bass guitar, "vile" (violin),
production and sleeve art layout and design
Uncooked Meat Prior to State Vector Collapse (Trey Spruance)
– pípá, keyboards, organ, guitar, electronics, production and sleeve art layout
and design
Clinton McKinnon – tenor saxophone, clarinet, keyboards on
"After School Special", drums on "Violenza Domestica",
production and sleeve art layout and design
Patton (Mike Patton) – vocals, microcassette, organs on
"The Bends" and "Backstrokin'", ocarina on "Sleep
(Part II): Carry Stress in the Jaw", production and sleeve art layout and
design
Theo (Theo Lengyel) – "eb reeds piped in from
Ithaca", production and sleeve art layout and design
Reviews
University of Connecticut school paper | October 1995 | Clint Boulton
Paranoia, extreme psychosis and manic depression are
just a few of the adve rse moods one can be thrust into by listening to Disco
Volante, the new epic fr om Mr. Bungle. This amazing free-form ensemble
featuring Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton is musical chaos. Moreover, it
collectively defies any attempts at categorization. The jams are laced with
maddening techno, funk and lounge-act b ites in random order. Should anyone
want to send their grandparents to early graves, they could play them any three
tracks from Disco Volante. Bloody gloves not required.
Metal Hammer | October 1996 | Jonathon Wright **** out of *****
It begins as you might expect when you realise Mr. Bungle is
the side project of Faith No More's Mike Patton. "Everyone I Went To High
School With Is Dead" is a rush of guitar distorsion. Then, as one track
runs into another forcing you to guess what you might be listening to, things
get infinitely stranger,
The press release, a document which steadfastly ignores such
passing details as when and where the album was recorded and who played on it,
claims: "We are absolutely thrilled to play danceable funk-metal for
anyone who was frozen in ice four years ago". this is a candidate for most
misleading statement of the year.
Instead, Mr. Bungle embark on a musical odyssey encompassing
(choosing at random) the spirit of 'Ghost Town' period Special's experiments
with film music; be-bop horns; a Beach Boys pastiche (without any harmonica);
techno pushed to it's limits; and guitars that would cheerfully grace any
Napalm Death album.
All of which makes perfect sense. Because, while fuk metal
has become a generic term, the names that so often get checked in this context
- Gang Of Four, Bootsy collins, the Pop Group, whoever - were all innovators
who knew how to mix different music.
The danger here is self-indulgence, and Mr. Bungle don't
entirely avoid this trap. but, mostly, just as your attention begins to wander,
a snippt of melody pulls you back or a sketchy, surreal vocal is inserted. At
one point, for instance, Mr. bungle announce, "My mom is better than your
mom and your dad too / She's there when she needs to be there / That's why I'm
here today". They sound like the words of an axe murderer. Or the
soundtrack to a slasher because, ultimately, "Disco Volante" sounds
like a collection of film music. Not U2's big budget material; Mr. Bungle write
soundtracks for 60's B-movies or early John Carpenter flicks.
Further information? A phone call to Mr. bungle's press
office brings a response along the lines of, "Idon't know who's in the
band. If I did they'd all be false names, and everything might change tomorrow
anyway." so with the exception of the FNM connection, you're forced to
judge Mr. bungle without any preconceptions. which is, of course, the way we
should react to all music.
Kerrang! | November 1996 | Jason Arnopp | KK out of KKKKK
If someone invited you to pay £14 for the privilege of
sitting at their table and listening to a bunch of college kids spout in-jokes
and sniggering behind their hands for 69 minutes, would you hand over the cash?
Of course you wouldn't, unless you wre particularly masochistic or just plain
demented. But that's basically what Faith No More singer Mike Patton and his
Mr. Bungle side-project are suggesting with "Disco Volante". It's not
an attractive proposition.
Mr. bungle's first LP gave us a glimpse of exactly how
demented Patton would become if given full rein, but this follow-up depicts the
man on the edge of a full breakdown. But unlike last year's FNM albm "King
for a Day.." - his jabbers, screams and multiple personalities are not
entertaining at all.
Featuring Trey Spruance, who played on "King..."
before deciding he couldn't be bothered to tour, some of "Disco
Volante" is intriguing and impressive. "Carry Stress In The Jaw"
and "Desert Search For Techno Allah" show that Mr. Bungle's avant
garde doodlings do throw up some good work. They're also technically
remarkable.
On the other hand, the vast majority of the album is just
irritating. At times, you want to tell Patton and his giggling bunch of
Zappa-headed musos to shut the f**k up. but there are more positive things to
say about this effort. for one thing, it's commercial suicide, and this has
always been an interesting thing about Patton. Faith No More's cover of The
Commodores's "Easy" got them into the charts, and proved that the
singer could make himself a lucrative career out of real crooning if he wanted
to. But no. Patton prefers to write songs about eating shit and generally
acting like a child.
Within the bounds of FNM, which are pretty loose when it's
all said and done, we wouldn't have it any other way. But this child has just
been given too many toys to play with. "Disco Volante" reveals in
it's utterly abstract non-structured, chopping and changing styles like a
radio dial being twisted continually. It deliberately messes with your head,
which doesn't make for much fun after a while.
Mr Bungle is clearly a valve for Mike Patton - allowing him
to let off excess steam that FNM doesn't tap into. In FNM, he can go absolutely
nuts and howl his face off, but at the end of the day the band write *songs*.
There's apparently a side to the singer that doesn't always want to do that. His experiences as a reluctant teen pin-up in the late 80s changed him for life.
That's fine, and it's also fine that we don't have to listen
to "Disco Volante" if we don't want to. The average person walks this
Earth for about 70 years. While that might sound like a long time, Mr. Bungle
still waste too much of it.
AllMusic | 2002 |Greg Prato
Mr. Bungle is the musical equivalent of a David Lynch movie.
On its uncompromising second release, Disco Volante, the group focuses its
sound a bit more than on its 1991 self-titled debut but still keeps things
unruly and completely unpredictable. This is a band whose sole purpose is to
break all the pre-existing rules of music and doesn't think twice about taking
chances. What they've created in the process is a totally original and new
musical style and an album that sounds like nothing that currently exists. The
group, whose members go by aliases, may be the most talented rock
instrumentalists today, as they skip musical genres effortlessly, while Mike
Patton illustrates why many consider him to be the best singer in rock. The
group tackles plodding death metal ("Everyone I Went to High School With
Is Dead"), deranged children's songs ("After School Special"),
and a Middle Eastern techno number that has to be heard to be believed
("Desert Search for Techno Allah"). Many of the songs radically
change genres mid-song, encompassing the sounds of Ennio Morricone, John Zorn,
Frank Zappa, and other heretofore unthought-of musical mutations. Not music to
unwind to after a hard day, but it will challenge your mind when the right mood
hits.
Stylus | 2005-11-30 | Cameron Macdonald
For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our
autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six
months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the
internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an
album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly
lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought
to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.
Mr. Bungle’s “The Bends” is a string of ambient pieces that
narrate the journey of a diver getting cut off from his boat and then sinking
to his demise in a deep-sea trench. However, there is one segment that has
haunted me for ten years to this week, and I do not want it to stop. The piece,
“Aqua Swing” begins as a cartoon. The San Francisco band first awakens with a
rubber-band synth noise that causes a bass violin to stumble out of bed and a
harpsichord to draw the curtain. A bebop riff chimes in from the back of the
room, and then the bassline begins to cast the spell. Every time I hear that
damn piano that follows, I’m thrown onto the dancefloor throwing down drinks,
tables, and patrons. The delirious melodies nearly outgun Cecil Taylor when he
treats his keys as a drumset with actual sticks. Mr. Bungle suddenly halts as a
5 a.m. prayer call to Allah is heard outside. Mike Patton then continues the
swing and imbues it with soul in his gentle scat that clenches a dagger behind
the back—his voice floats in the evening while the band swats at him. The song
then abruptly ends with a vintage sound effect of a villain disappearing in a
smoke cloud. The too-few minutes of “Aqua Swing” was the first time that I
heard jazz that saw reality titled at 45 degrees. In other words, it proved to
me that jazz could indeed be surreal, instead of merely being on display at the
Smithsonian.
Disco Volante was perhaps the first explicitly experimental
album I heard. The group took my 16-year-old imagination to an alien terrain,
filled with grotesqueries like angler fish and viper fish, no sunlight for
miles, and no chance of staying alive if one ever tried to swim to the surface.
Besides the gothic mystique that took cues from HG Wells and 19th century
science fiction, the band also delved into a soundworld that seemed arcane, but
is more hallucinogenic than retro. “The Bends” perfectly replicated the tacky,
but still eerie-as-hell sound effects and musical scores heard in countless
60’s sci-fi and horror flicks. A Merzbow-style sandblast of white noise later
washes away all corn and damages human health in the process. There’s also the
coda of “Carry Stress in the Jaw” where the band locks into a Cramps-style
surfer groove and someone aping Grandpa Simpson chiming in. Or “Backstrokin,’”
whose opening flute tone play is more vibrant than that in the Beatles’
“Revolution, No.9” before moving into further intoxicated enchantment under the
sea with a lounge-jazz number. That song ends with Patton muttering curses over
a guitar that mews out a somber melody. The Spanish soap opera number heavily
indebted to Morricone, “Violenza Domestica” is utter camp, but it can’t mask
Patton’s wife-beater’s assurances that everything will be all right, amid a
construction site of a cacophony outside a window. I was already a fan of
Patton when he seemed like the coolest skate-punk/lone high school weirdo in
Faith No More. Patton himself eschewed his FNM rasp and proved to be alt-rock’s
most versatile vocalist—shifting from Cro-Magnon growls, blue-eyed croons,
cartoon blurts, and hyperventilating scats. Given that most of the music I
heard at the time was either sold to me by MTV or hardcore punk bands with
legacies pre-cooked for consumption, Disco Volante was equivalent to waking up
in a foreign country with no money and little hope of learning the native
tongue.
Of course, I didn’t like everything I heard. There were a
few songs that I could not listen to without winching. The band’s zest for
skipping across a dozen genres within one song—often throwing in thrash-metal
assaults seemingly thrown in for the hell of it—gave me headaches. I
fast-forwarded through the bulk of the album closer, “Merry Go Bye Bye,” where
they dump a grind-metal excursion into a garbage disposal. It’s the same way
that Mr. Bungle’s 1991 eponymous commercial debut often annoyed me, where the
primarily ska band channel-surfed itself through genres. Their Howard Stern-ian
outlook on human mating, the female sex and excretion (i.e. Patton’s simulated
diarrhea attack) was also a bit much. However, the band was on to something
with the finale, “Dead Goon.” Under John Zorn’s production, they narrated a
death and ascension to heaven through Patton’s croaks with a modern-jazz rhythm
section hovering above.
A decade later, Disco Volante still sounds daring. My ears
have received enough damage from noisicians with laptops and white noise
generators, that I can now tolerate more of Disco Volante’s discord. The
album’s strengths are stronger and weaknesses more annoying. The Danny
Elfman-goes-Latin zinger, “Chemical Marriage” is still a gas, alongside the
apocalyptic Country & Western opening of “Merry Go Bye Bye,” but the
throwaways haven’t increased in value at all. The sludge-metal opener,
“Everyone I Went To High School With Is Dead” still seems to be meant to scare
away newcomers as the shoddiest in execution is poisoned with gangrene, while
“After School Special” is a ballad that still doesn’t find the humor in child
abuse (there is none). But it’s to be expected, Disco Volante is an album that
illustrates a fantasy world only they, and a cult, could fully understand. It’s
the finest sort of San Francisco art-rock: right in line with the Residents’
Eskimo, the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s Mother of All Saints, Caroliner
Rainbow distributing their records in diapers and used pizza boxes, and DJ
Disk’s Phonosycographdisk. Perhaps it is the countless hours hiding under
bedsheets and garages, away from the fog and the freezing Pacific air, that
forces the escapism.
I, for one, would never want to return outside.
Interviews
RAVE | IOctober 30, 1996 |
There's a point that most of us visit all too infrequently,
if ever in our music travelling. It's that point where we listen with ears that
are completely open, the aural blinkers that so many of us carry discarded, and
sound becomes exciting again. For those of us under 30 years of age, to whom
the names Can and Captain Beefheart register more as obscure supermarket items
than active musical outfits, Mr bungle present the opportunity to dip a toe (or
a leg, or a head) into the waters of chaos, that frequently run uphill.
They have a newish record out called Disco Volante and it
is, hands down, the best thing I've come accross since it's release last year.
As you've heard, one of them is kinda famous, but that has no correlation to
anything here. It's an album that thrawls high and low through stylistic
boundaries, regurgitating the sickest blasts of avant metal and free jazz
within an eyeblink of each other, dumping techno and Broadway-style pomposity
into the one grand genreless blender. Reading or writing about Mr Bungle is
basically a futile exercise, because their world is the aural and visceral, and
fuck these attempts at study and intellectualising. To dissect something, it
has to be dead. I tracked down Trey (guitar), Bär (hornsand keyboards) and Danny
(drum action) the evening they arrived on out Antipodean shores.
So you've been in the country for a couple of hours; any
impressions so far, other than waiting in the lounge of an airport?
"Well, we go to sit in some declaration line for about
an hour," muses Danny, "but the transportation part was fantastic.
Right now we're trying to fit in like other people, sleep normal hours like
them."
"I love the architecture," says Trey.
"We've been able to get a really good cheap Vietnamese
meal," Danny recalls, "Thai Thai, bye bye".
"And we're definitely no slouches or newcomers when it
comes to Vietnamese food.," Trey chuckles.
"That's right. We're jaded fucks in that sense."
The Bungle songwriting style has always been something of a
mystery. How is it done? Does everyone live in the same town?
"Yeah, we do finally," says Bär sounding relieved.
"When we write music and work on it, we're actually all
in the same room a lot of the time," Trey offers, "But the songs vary
in how they're written a lot of the time. Sometimes one person will write an
entire song, and when we trade parts it's usually a group effort at the
arrangement stage." Bär continues, "I've found that a lot of the time
it'll be two people working off each other at a time, like I might consult with
somebody else, throw out some ideas, like some riffs or whatever, and I'll
trust somebody elses opinion on how it should be arranged."
"If somebody's gutsy enough to just show up with a new
song, it'll usually work," says Danny.
"You can cram your song down everybody's throat,"
Trey ruminates, "but if you feel particularly vulnerable about any part of
them..."
"Like my songs!" Danny laments.
Trey sympathises, "Unfortunately Danny's songs will
never see the light of day, which is a shame, because he's got hours and hours
of great music that'll never be heard. The only way to do it is top steal his
riffs and use them. if only he'd come forward."
"Over several years," says Bär, "I've
realised that there is no real way of going about things. I use to have the
idea that things were done in a certain way, so I left a lot of stuff on the
backburner under that assumption, but I've been realising that with people like
Trey you do just have to put your foot down and stuff it down everybody's
throats, insist that it goes a certain way and go into the situation with that
idea."
"If there's a disagreement over something, you can just
curtail it until it's right, and everybody will know that it's right when it
gets there. Everybody's real cooperartive after that." theorises Trey.
Is it hard to work from a purely organisational sense , just
physically getting together to play when you're all in other bands as well? Do
you have to plan it out, like 'Okay, in September we get together and do Mr
Bungle again?"
"Exactly." says Trey.
"Exactly." agrees Danny, "We really need to
know a couple of months in advance what's going down"
"We really have to have something that brings us
together, like say we have to get ready for a tour or do a recording, we don't
just get together to be Mr Bungle, it has to centre around something we're
working together on." explains Trey.
It must be nice to work without the self-imposed pressure
that so many bands put themselves under, where they just work and work until
they're completely burnt out.
"That's insane," Trey concurs, "I pity them.
You'll burn out so fast rehesing every fucking day."
"We're pretty good at not letting that ruin what we
have." gloats Bär, "It's always fresh , it's always very fresh and
happening."
Trey has some words of advice: "The best course of
action is, early on, to just train yourself learning death metal because you
have to remember so much shit, all this complicated bullshit and fuckin'
changes, and then once you finally get around to making other forms of music
you'll have this incredible memory archive."
The majority of people on tour will never have seen the band
perform live. Can we expect very specific representations of the records, or
something radically different?
"They shouldn't expect too much," begins Bär
before pausing pregnantly. the whole room burts into laughter.
"No, no, wait! I'm not finished! Actually, you guys are
right, that was good. What I mean is that people shouldn't assume anything
cause that's kind of a mistake, and if they come in assuming we're one thing
they're gonna be vastly disappointed."
"There are some things that are totally
representative," continues Danny, while pulling armfuls of strange and
exotic items out of his drum case.
"There are things that we've taken massive liberties
with, and others as well are pretty much up in the air."
And as pre-packaged stadium rock begins to die another of
it's grisly and undignified deaths, take solace in the prescence and rise acts
of Mr Bungle.
Before we leave, anything really profound or witty that
you've always wanted to say in the press?
"Yeah!" chirps Danny "Fuck NBC!"
I'm not sure how many Australians will relate to that.
"Sure, but I can't say it at home, they'd kill
me."
Videos
Comments
Post a Comment