James McKain / Damon Smith / Weasel Walter - ....seeing the way the mole tunnels... (Balance Point Acoustics / International School of Evidence, 2025)

 

By Richard Blute 

“I’ve always been attracted to extremity in music. I started listening to free jazz at the same time I was listening to punk and no wave in the ’80s. I put them on a somewhat even keel, and although they were different idioms, I felt they were saying similar things. That’s really the core of my aesthetic—I want music to be wet with bodily fluids, a certain bloody-mindedness that’s part of my music and attitude. I want to see sweat and blood, a little pain and struggle in music. This is not a style—it’s an abstract idea applied to music, and I’m more interested in those essences.”

-Weasel Walter, All About Jazz interview, 2009.

I spent most of my teen and student years listening to hardcore punk and other extreme music. So I feel a great affinity for the quote from Walter above, and that attitude can be found in abundance on ....seeing the way the mole tunnels... by James McKain, Damon Smith and Weasel Walter. Listening to this album for the first time, I felt the same rush of excitement and the same desire to bounce around my office that I used to get when I picked up a new Dead Kennedys album.

Weasel Walter is a drummer, guitarist and composer. His most well-known band is probably The Flying Luttenbachers, which he describes as brutal prog. He has a band called Vomitatrix, whose music he describes as acid grind. He has a band called Cellular Chaos, a noise-punk band. (It’s my favorite of his ongoing projects.) He tours regularly with Lydia Lunch, legendary singer of the no-wave scene. But he’s equally at home with jazz. I saw him perform a fantastic duo with Vinny Golia. His album with Damon Smith and John Butcher, The Catastrophe Of Minimalism, is superb.

Damon Smith is one of free jazz’s great bassists. He has developed a highly expressive language for improvising on bass which is well-displayed on this album. His label, Balance Point Acoustics, is a fine repository for his music. I find myself exploring it often. Check out the album with Walter and John Butcher mentioned above, or Mimetic Holds or Groundwater Recharge, which are favorites of mine.

I’m less familiar with saxophonist James McKain, only having heard him previously on the 2024 album A Man’s Image with James Paul Nadien, Jared Radichel and Tom Weeks. It’s a fine album with the two saxes providing an intense slashing attack. It was on my 2024 year-end list, and listening to it again now, I should have ranked it even higher.

On ....seeing the way the mole tunnels…, McKain is ferocious right from the opening notes of the first track, Wrecked Brain in the Capital. Walter’s drumming is unrelenting, pushing his partners on to more and more intense music. But he can also be more subtle, adding texture to the more quiet sections, as on the track A Cloud Which Does Not Last. Smith switches back and forth between bowing and plucking his bass, so that at times he’s conversing with the sax and at times adding more percussion. What I like best about the music is that it is very much a conversation. None of the three of them are grabbing the spotlight, every note struck is in response to something their partners have played.

Fun side note. All of the titles of the album come from the poetry of German novelist, poet and playwright Thomas Bernhard. I’ve never read his poems, but I have read a few of his novels. His style could be described as lyrical ranting. He wrote in an obsessive freeform style about all the ugliness he saw in the human condition. But at the same time, there’s an almost hypnotic beauty in his writing. It can also be hysterically funny. I can hear all of those aspects of Bernhard’s writing in this great album.