75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real

The Quietus

This is the third album from New York duo 75 Dollar Bill, and percussionist Rick Brown and guitarist Che Chen are working with an expanded ensemble. The instrumentation is thoughtful and sometimes surprising, and any record that makes explicit use of the wonderful Casio SK1 is alright by me.

I have noticed that there’s stuff online concerning the influence of Moorish modal music with 75 Dollar Bill, but as far as I can tell, Chen spent only a short time in Mauritania and he acknowledges the impact as inevitably “superficial”. Besides, I think I hear as much John Cale here as I do North West Africa.

Perhaps a more readily graspable way into this part of their work is the use of re-fretted quartertone guitars, which, while they don’t charge away from equal temperament to the realms of Harry Partch, do provide a wonderful palette of kind-of microtonal riffs and melodies that twist around the broad drones, strings and wind to dizzying effect (check ‘WZN#4’). These elements, set against assured and purposeful repetition (which comes hand in hand with a clear understanding of the value of difference), give us a deeply satisfying structural landscape to sit in and enjoy what this album does best.

And that is timbre – like the sax against guitar on ‘Tetuzi Akiyama’, for example. It’s the kind of timbral coupling that Mark Hollis did so brilliantly, though here rendered through a wilder set of methods. Percussion, too, benefits from this skillset (besides being gloriously unaffected at the point of production) as the sounds – plywood, stamps, claps, and whatever else – fairly combust with urgency and just enough otherness to skew those elements that still feel like popular music.

It’s a tough record to summarise quickly. There’s jazz, blues, post-rock, folk… (at least). There’s distinctly non-Western strands, a tranced, shamanistic fury to everything, and a deft application of different kinds of harmonic distortion. Yet, it’s not so demanding to hear. In fact, it’s pretty accessible. Nothing here is troubling, nothing jars or feels incongruous. I guess, really, it’s exactly what we should expect from a city like New York with so many distinct (and indistinct) ethnicities and histories bubbling through its streets and avenues. I Was Real feels like an exercise in embracive multiculturalism, trans-historicism, and focussed, intense musicianship. Slippery to define or place, and all the better for it.

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The Guardian 80

(tak:til/Thin Wrist)
The instrumental duo have made a gloriously unorthodox album of blues inflected from all corners of the globe

75 Dollar Bill are like something from a musicologists’ parlour game: without looking at the label, where are these guys from? The lulling, circular riffs are reminiscent of the lo-fi electric guitars played by Tuareg artists like Tinariwen or Mdou Moctar; the rhythms are sometimes like Moroccan gnawa; the harmonium-like drone underneath the 17-minute title track seems to hint at Indian devotional music. And then when you’re sure they must be a bar band from Tennessee on the blues-rock knees-up Tetuzi Akiyama, it turns out the song is named after a Japanese guitarist they admire.

This fascinating, deeply involving record is more than just catnip for record nerds, though. The New York instrumental duo are comprised of guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown, who beats out his rhythms on wooden boxes and is credited as playing “crude horns” – he gives the record its occasionally Alan Lomax-y feel. His is a loose yet robust rhythm section that offsets Chen’s tight and dextrous playing, oxygenating and hypnotic on the likes of WZN3. They’re augmented here by a host of supporting musicians, such as Cheryl Kingan on sax and Karen Waltuch on viola, who bolster the melody of Every Last Coffee Or Tea, lifting it to a mythic musical space somewhere between Appalachia and New Orleans. There’s something quietly political about their exploded view of the blues: this is music that exists across cultures and borders, something innately human.

The Guardian 80

(tak:til/Thin Wrist)

This New York underground outfit’s breakout album, Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (2016), attempted to quantify 75 Dollar Bill’s engrossing sound, developed over a series of cassette releases and one previous studio effort. They preside over a contemporary swirl of mantric psychedelia made with down-to-earth material tactility.

Percussionist Rick Brown most often plays a wooden box; guitarist Che Chen, inspired by Mauritanian wedding music, conjures up intense, evolving drones with various stringed things, nodding to west Africa here, or the near east there. On I Was Real they are augmented by electric bass and amplified viola, adding yet more depth to their placeless, gripping grooves.

Pitchfork 76

The experimental New York duo morph into a crack ensemble on their wide-ranging new double album, blurring genres and record-store categories.