JERRY COLBURN

Smell the love

CD, Strip Mall of Noise

The good thing about something being eclectic is that whenever you think you have figured it out, something new and surprising is bound to come around the edge and hopefully make you smile. On the other hand there is also a kind of dull and boring eclecticism that should rather be called collecting without plan, talent or idea. Fortunately, Jerry Colburn has talent, ideas abounding and definitely a sense of humour. Accordingly, within the first six or seven tracks of his debut CD as an electronic musician you’ll be dragged through something like a chamber concert, a banjo, squeaking sounds, electro beats, an electric guitar from the eighties, weird sucking sounds, a hip hop beat, a Johnny Guitar Watson-guitar, some noisy in the background, a distorted wah-wah-guitar with an electric piano and a Hammond, a slow rock beat, some more unidentifieable noise, and so on and on and on. You get the idea. And all in all there’s 23 tracks on here.

So, Colburn likes to mix things and he likes it short and straight away. I guess, he’d also prefer a Gin & Mangojuice-drink to a strawberry-Daiquiri, but graps a handful of peanuts on the way out anyway. That’s one thing he has in common with Rob Steady, but he is even shorter albeit less experimental and avantgardist. Maybe it has already come to this, since it was inevitable from the beginning: the electronic avant-garde has slowly grown into the mainstream so much that new things keep seeping back. If I think of Jamie Liddell’s laptop-funk and soul I am amazed that it sounds so organic and real. That is not at all those soziopathic types lurking behind their laptops anymore. The next thing will be electronic Big Band-music and country & western. With the last one the first rings would go out to Jerry Colburn for using a Banjo. (I am omitting the Swedish techno-project “Rednex” and their cover – if you want to call it that way – of “Cotton Eye Joe” on complete purpose, because we are talking about music here and not about, ah, something else. I just read an interview where Josh Homme said that it is all about trying to play cool music that noone has played before, and this incident in music history is not at all about that. Okay, I’ll stop ranting now.)

Jerry Colburn is quite unique within the array of electronic musicians single-handedly trying to conquer the world alone. It is just a hunch that he is trying to do so, but he is definitely a solo-worker. Like aforementioned Rob Steady aka Stephane Obadia, or Books on Tape or Greg Headly and I guess there must be a million more. At first I was thinking, if he hasn’t chosen the hard way. His kind of music is too strange for the mainstream crowd and too uncool for the hip hopers who’d otherwise listen to RJD2. For the electronica avantgardists it is too obviously freaky with all its little snippets from ethno to hair-metal. In a way, most listeners of electronica are looking for a certain style, like minimal glitch techno from cologne but only on 12” or brutal digital noise that sounds as if it is from Japan but was done by guy in Barcelona or even cool hip hop beats with that special Sopranos feeling and baggy pants. I can think of a couple of artists and records fitting that description. That’s the way people answer when being asked what they are looking for in a record store. A specialised record store, but you won’t get “Smell the love” in a chainstore anyway (another hard way point). Okay, so they might be looking for a special record they have read or heard about, but those music collectors and treny types are looking for a certain “style”. Colburn’s music on the other hand has (as of yet) no such record bin sticker, no defined style. Which is good, because it means that it is unique and original. On the other hand people won’t find it because they are looking for something.

Then I figured, if it is that what you want to do – see aforementioned saying by Josh Homme – an artist shoudn’t care if he has chosen the hard or easy way. Therefore Colburn has set himself neatly between a lot of seats, and I hope he is comfortable there. Maybe he will win a lot of friends who like to listen to this kind of music. Me, when I get asked “What kind of music do you listen to?” I usually answer “all sorts of kinds”. True, sometimes I answer “Slayer”, because Slayer is cool and the look on people’s faces is well worth it. But with “all sorts of kinds” I now have a record where I can do that right away on a single disc. And that is definitely a great thing.