his imperial
majesty
Doug
Scharin's masterful polyrhythms provide the pulsing backbone for
groups such as Rex, Codeine and Out In Worship, as well as his own
outfit HIM. Mike Barnes hears why the Chicago drummer's equatorial
rhythms sound equally at home on post-rock slowcore and urban slugHop
labels.
There
are many pretenders to the title of HIM. For one, the late Haile
Selassie, Ethiopian emperor and spiritual leader of Rastafarianism,
insisted on being addressed as His Imperial Majesty. In the midst
of an obsession with deep dub, Chicagoan drummer and multi-instrumentalist
Doug Scharin, chose to name his rolling group project HIM
out of deference to Selassie. However, when I meet him in London during
his recent visit to the UK, he is preoccupied by the existence of
a very different HIM, who are due to play the city the following week.
"I'm about to get embattled with the
evil HIM - from Finland," he informs me. "They're sort of
a Death Metal band, but it's a little more glam - they have songs
like "Love Affair 666" and "Join Me In Death" and all this shit. And
they're apparently really big in Germany. Their HIM stands for His
Infernal Majesty. I'm seriously opposed to it, man, and as far as
I can make out, we had the name first."
That may explain what's in this particular
name, but it doesn't actually clear up who or what Scharin's HIM is.
His version debuted with Egg
in 1995 on Southern.
An excellent and diverse series of HIM releases followed. Yet their
press profile has been next to non-existent, despite Scharin having
resided amidst the musical ferment of Chicago for three years now.
But until this year, the outfit had played less than a handful of
gigs, mainly due to Scharin's involvement with various groups, including
the recently defunct June Of 44.
Somewhat anomalously, this loose-limbed drummer had cut his teeth
in the ultra-slowcore rock of Codeine
and later Rex.
Although nowadays HIM is definitely a group
entity, it began as Scharin's solo recording project, worked on during
time off from playing in his two existing groups. He explains the
genesis of Egg: "Rex had bought some real basic recording equipment
at the time and I was just fooling around with it. I was trying to
learn basic studio techniques and it was the music I was doing to
learn them. It was great at the time but I'm glad I'm not working
on cassette anymore," he says with amusement. "I had a minimal amount
of gear and it taught me to how make the most of it."
The results were impressive, based on an array
of exotic percussion tampered with to create a dubbed out sense of
space. Soon afterwards, Scharin met Skiz Fernando, owner of New York's
Wordsound
label, while hanging out at Bill
Laswell's Greenpoint studio. (Scharin has known Laswell since
he was 12, when one of the bassist's early groups rehearsed in his
mother's basement.) As a result of this timely encounter, Scharin
ended up working on the door at Fernando's parties in a room above
Greenpoint. He admits he hadn't heard of Wordsound before then, yet
he found some overlap between his own music and the crawling, decelerated
beats and Middle Eastern cross-rhythms of Bedouin Sound System and
Scarab. Eventually, one of his earliest HIM recordings made it onto
the label's first Crooklyn
Dub Consortium Certified Dope compilation, while the second
HIM album, Interpretive
Belief System, was released on Wordsound in 1997.
Along the way, Scharin formed another group, the
curiously named Out In Worship, by teaming up with one Joe Goldring,
who had been unhappily playing bass with Swans.
They released a couple of albums and toured in the US with a live
line-up that included Pere
Ubu bass player Tony Maimone. "It was disastrous," Scharin recalls.
"We cancelled the tour halfway through. Once we got out there we realised
that we didn't get along very well." Just to complicate matters, the
first Out In Worship album (which appeared on Sub
Rosa, inexplicably credited to Out Of Worship) had been intended
as a HIM record, but lacked the requisite low end dynamics. "It wasn't
so embedded in the heavy dub," Scharin explains. "I guess I felt I
couldn't have any HIM record without the deep, deep bass groove."
The
HIM story really starts with last year's superb Sworn
Eyes (Perishable),
which featured Chicago luminaries Rob Mazurek on cornet, Bundy Brown
on bass and Jeff Parker on guitar. Scharin talks about the low end
of dub as the signature of HIM, but his own abilities as a soundscaper
and "originator" of the material, or so the credits would have it,
found him expanding dub's inner space into a kaleidoscope of rhythm,
texture and timbre. The 20 minute opening track, "A Verdict Of Science",
is HIM in microcosm, the edited material progressing and recapitulating
with an extraordinary deftness. It takes in a mass of musical data,
variously evoking the rushing currents that A Certain Ratio navigated
on "Flight", the rhythmic bliss of Can's
Future Days, mid-70s Miles and King
Tubby.
Scharin responds with a grin: "That's one
of my favourites," he says. "We went in the studio for two days; I
had some real basic sketches and Rob and Jeff really changed the direction
and made the form on a few of those pieces just because they play
together so well. The original tracks for that song are really different.
Like Bundy's bassline - there was so much rhythm going on already,
I had marimba parts which were offsetting it from the drum part, all
these different grooves, and he put on all this 9/8 shit. So I had
to cut his bassline up... it's all really cut up."
Scharin used some of his original drum tracks,
then took samples of his kit and overdubbed them in real time on an
electronic Drumkat pad, while even managing to work in a loop of a
rhythm by Bernard Purdie. "I had loops running for weeks. I couldn't
shut off the power! I just wanted the loops to keep going, so when
it was time to bring something back in, it was kind of random, so
it just kind of took on its own form. I spent two months in the studio
with it. It was two days recording that shit and two months in my
room.
"I'm really into finding an interesting
point in a track and manipulating it in different ways and finding
various combinations of instruments and seeing what can happen," he
continues. "I like to physically edit on tape. I don't have a computer.
I like the splicing block, I like the sound of tape edits - they're
punchy."
His studio technique in piecing these elements
together had come a long way from his earlier experiments. It doesn't
take a genius to work out that the long shadow cast by the Bitches
Brew-era electric jazz productions of Teo Macero had severely
impacted on his work. But the question had to be asked. "Aesthetically,
definitely," Scharin responds, laughing. "Up to the point of making
that record I'd probably been playing [Miles
Davis's] Dark Magus every day for a year. And then I got
that Bitches Brew [Complete Sessions] box. And the liner
notes are pretty involved: they give you the time when there are edits.
I found that really fascinating. I kept it as my little Bible."
Spending time watching Laswell at work was
also instructive. "Bill is drawing from a lot of production techniques
those guys ewere doing at the time. He was always kind enough just
to let me hang out at different recording sessions. So I saw Pharoah
Sanders do a few tracks in the studio; I saw Tony Williams do a few
tracks in the studio, and I sat and watched Bill mix and edit shit
together."
But although the music on Sworn Eyes was,
in Scharin's view, potentially playable live, that line-up soon dissipated.
"Those guys, they're all so busy we couldn't get everybody in the
same place," he says. Now Scharin and Fred
Erskine - also formerly of June Of 44 - and saxophonist Carlo
Cennamo, who had played with Erskine in The
Boom, are finally the nucleus of a semi-stable group line-up.
But each of this year's tours almost inevitably found other musicians
coming and going. "It was something I was battling against and I wasn't
really willing to accept the line up changes," he says, "but I've
come to really embrace it now, I think it's a good thing. It's keeping
everything really fresh for us. It's allowing us to form the music
to the chemistry of the particular group at the time. It's keeping
it musical."
HlM's new album, Our Point Of Departure,
maps out new ground. Listening to the album is like walking in on
a group playing live, walking out again and returning every ten minutes
only to find everything has moved on each time, even as it always
sounds quite familiar. Seeing how the basic tracks were recorded in
a couple of hours, that's not so far from the case. Scharin: "I wanted
to do a record that was seamless, all cut together, one piece of music,
so we decided to do it all in the same time" signature, at 1 30 bpm.
Me and Freddy went in and did all the bass and drums [over the click
track]. It took some shape, and then me and Carlo would go off into
pairs and write some horn lines. It was single overdubs, pairing up
and improvising over it, and then that record is pretty much left
as it was played." Even so, Scharin's edits mould the structure and
his electronics flesh out the sound.
Scharin
says that when engaged in sedentary studio work, he can hear his drum
kit "calling" to him from up the road to come and put sticks to skin.
He agrees that many rhythmic styles are in essence fairly similar
and can be shifted from one to another by relatively minor changes.
The rhythms on Our Point Of Departure, for example, derive
in part from Ghanaian patterns. His approach to expanding his repertoire
is refreshingly pragmatic.
"I was studying them out of a book on traditional
African rhythms that were adapted to drum set," he explains. "I thought
it was time I got my shit together and figure out what I'd been doing
all these years and try to actually learn something. I'm self taught
and have never had any lessons, so it was cool. It's like all this
independent shit going on. To see it written out was revealing to
me, to see how it related to jazz rhythms, a lot of the stuff I'd
been into, like Ronald
Shannon Jackson's drumming. He does a lot of ostinato shit with
his feet and polyrhythms over the top."
Pressed
to categorise HIM, Scharin reluctantly
describes the music as "fusion", fully aware of the word's ambiguous
status following that genre's heyday in the 1970s HlM's fusion may
not be dance music, but live, with two drummers, bass, keyboards,
horns and the whole cast swapping instruments on stage, HIM becomes
an irresistible avant groove machine. Live sampling and electronics
are also thrown in. "We're trying to pull off some of the same studio
techniques from the record live, and it's working to varying degrees
of success and failure," he says drily.
The group is hitting its creative stride now,
writing as a six piece during a summer tour of the US. Scharin is
excited by the results. "We recorded a whole 'nother record this summer,"
he enthuses. "Another hour's worth that we're sitting on. It was really
cool to write with another drummer [John Theodore]. The rhythm going
off... wow, man... I knew there was some cool shit, but it wasn't
till we recorded it and listened back I realised that there were some
really nice things going on. There's so much information to it, tons
of information. I'm really looking forward to mixing it because I
think it could change in the studio."
Our Point Of Departure is out now on Perishable
(US) and Fat Cat
(UK)
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