Various Artists - I Said No Doctors!

Pitchfork 62

For Tom Tolleson, the fourteen-track compilation I Said No Doctors! began with a personal fascination. The founder of oddball record label Dymaxion Groove, Tolleson began tinkering with ways to manipulate his guitar, making it sound strange and unpredictable. He soon encountered the famed Dutch luthier Yuri Landman, who has long built unorthodox guitars and instruments for experimental stars. Several gear purchases and years later, Tolleson started assembling I Said No Doctors!, an hour-long survey of such eccentric instruments used in wildly different contexts, from meditative free jazz and surf rock to folk hokum and total noise. It is an exhibition of instrumental diversity, an attempt to showcase the possibilities of sound and song when the sources are no longer standard.

There’s plenty of intrigue and some inevitable filler here, all bound together by instruments that, as Tolleson puts it, are “only in tune with [themselves] by the way [they’re] made.” Dan Deacon’s MIDI triggers a trillion tiny notes from a grand piano on “Opal Toad Segment,” while a bowed Indonesian plough on Senyawa’s “Anak Kijang” conjures a militia of aging cellos. David Grubbs doctors his guitar until its notes ring like hiccups and gurgles. The synthesizer builder Peter Blasser wields his invention, the Deerhorn, to reshape a lovely torch song into a lonely transmission from an alien jukebox. And Simeon Coxe uses the Simeon—the amorphous electronic namesake that’s been the core of his Silver Apples for fifty years—to create a soundscape that crawls with creepiness. Tolleson himself plays a mutated kalimba made by Landman here, while Landman’s own band, Bismuth, contributes a simmering, Sonic Youth-like instrumental.

Deacon’s stunning “Opal Toad Segment” is the true standout, making good on his professed love of daring composer Conlon Nancarrow by turning a storm of fast piano notes into billowing clouds of sound. It comforts with cacophony, and its busy structure somehow soothes. Likewise, Oval’s “ISND” lands perfectly between the prickly and the pleasant, with chimes and drums dissolving into one another like ripples from raindrops on a lake. Both tracks suggest new possibilities for their composers—one point, after all, of such technical innovation.

The diversity of I Said No Doctors!, though, stalls out at sound. There are more prepared guitars and novel programming arrangements here than women. In fact, there’s only one, Pauline Kim Harris, whose adventurous, cliffhanging turn with scrambled classical duo String Noise should have served as a potent reminder to build the roster’s gender balance. The compilation’s one concession to diversity—the radical Javanese duo Senyawa, whose contribution is an acoustic uproar—smacks of exotic fetishism, given its total outlier status.

The realm of making and using experimental instruments isn’t a white men’s club, but I Said No Doctors! presents it as such. Hell, a quip from Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore inspired the design of the Deerhorn, deployed on one of this compilation’s most interesting tracks, “Deer Biphenyl.” That the past and present of experimental sound brim with and depend on both women and people of color should be obvious enough. The potential roster for a more-balanced survey is astounding, from guitarist Mary Halvorson and harpist Mary Lattimore to pedal steel master Susan Alcorn and synthesizer legend Laurie Spiegel. Their omission here lands less like mere oversight, then, than an insulting insinuation that instrumental innovation stems only from boys with toys. For a compilation so concerned with possibility, I Said No Doctors! overlooks more than half a world of it.

Ultimately, Tolleson’s fascination yields the musical equivalent of a coffee-table book, the kind of record you keep around as a conversation piece when friends come over or pick up from time to time for a scan when you’ve finished a better book. You keep it around for a spell because of its curios (remember, a bowed plough!) or its genuine accomplishments (like the radiant pieces from Deacon, Oval, and String Noise) before passing it along to a used bookstore, finally realizing it was out of date before it even went to print.