East Infection

Master Musicians of Bukkake are the logical successors to the Sun
City Girls’ pantheistic, panglobal, sonic headfuckery. They’re carrying
their fellow Emerald City eccentrics’ torch (of the mystics) into the
great post-Bush unknown—while wearing mad costumes.

If you’ve been paying attention to local weird music this decade,
you’ve probably caught at least one of MMOB’s shambolic live spectacles
or heard their 2005 debut album on SCG member Alan Bishop’s Abduction
Records, The Visible Sign of the Invisible Order, which garnered
positive reviews in high places, including UK avant-garde bible the
Wire.

Back in their first incarnation with guitarist John Schuller, MMOB
had a rep for erratic, debauched behavior and a scattershot,
improvisational approach to creativity, using their minds and bodies as
chemistry experiments while filtering ritualistic Asian and African
musics through an “anything goes as long as it’s mind-warping” mindset.
Gamelan, Tibetan monk chants, Moroccan trance rock, and other exotic
strains of psychedelia all became Bukkake-fied, with alternately
sublime and grotesque results.

After Schuller left the group a few years ago, MMOB went on brief
hiatus and “reprioritized our concept,” according to Randall Dunn,
keyboardist and producer extraordinaire at his own Aleph Studios. With
the addition of Diminished Men drummer Dave Abramson and Ghidra
guitarist Bill Horist (also an outstanding solo artist), MMOB now
operate as a septet, with more serious intent.

“There was a certain tongue-in-cheek-ness [MMOB] had early on,”
Horist observes during an interview at Zeitgeist Coffee. “It’s gone
from irreverence to a polyreverence.”

“It’s definitely got more spirit now,” guitarist Milky adds.
“Instead of tongue-in-cheek, it’s more like a heavy-metal new age…
We’ll play stuff for yoga moms, and then people who like a
face-melting, we’ll give that to them. We’ll have intense moments where
it’s very much a group instrument; it’s more focused in that we try to
stick with a good theme, and everything’s elaborating off that.”

Whereas MMOB once welcomed damn near anyone within their
freak-centric fold into Aleph to make noise, now they only keep an open
invitation to Bishop (their “spiritual father”) while allowing the core
seven (including multi-instrumentalists Don McGreevy, James Davis, and
Brad Mowen, the main vocalist) to wield their sonic sorcery within
tighter—but no less mind-expanding—parameters.

Horist likens MMOB to “an archaeological sanctuary. We’re all very
active in other things and have our identities in other [projects];
then we traipse around the world in different sonic spaces and bring
these little artifacts to this collective, where we become a little
more anonymous. It becomes a more ritualized,
archaeological kind
of a trip.”

That process can be heard on the new MMOB album, Totem One,
the first part of a trilogy to be released throughout 2009 on Belgium’s
Conspiracy Records. Reflecting a slightly lighter tone than the debut,
Totem One reiterates MMOB’s mastery of gamelan, Master Musicians
of Jajouka–like Moroccan roll, monastic Tibetan “om’s,” and
majestic-sunrise psych rock à la Popol Vuh. On album peak
“People of the Drifting Houses,” MMOB forge the ultimate show-climaxer.
It’s lurching yet serpentine, buoyed by Bishop and Mowen’s
extraordinarily moving, muezzin-like emissions; it could be a great,
long-lost outtake from Sun City Girls’ Torch of the Mystics.

Listening to Totem One, it’s clear that MMOB have expunged
past jokiness and plunged deeper into myriad ethnic musics’ sacred
aspects—while also rocking harder, as on “Schism
Prism/Adamantios.” “There’s always a ritualistic aspect to anything we
do,” Dunn states. “When we go into something with that energy, it can
be refreshing to a listener and hopefully comes through in the
recording. It encapsulates the live shows, that energy.”

“Sometimes I’ll listen to these ideas and think, ‘How can this be
compelling for 20 minutes?'” Horist says. “But I think we all have this
faith that it will be compelling. That’s how great religious musics of
the world are made—that faith component that seems so touch and
go in Western music.”

However, such high-minded rhetoric contrasts with the group’s name.
Does “Bukkake” (heinous Japanese niche porn) sometimes backfire on
them?

“The name is giving the finger to the music industry—the whole
structure of putting youth before talent,” Milky claims. “I’m all for
sexy music, but why would you want to be accepted into that world?”

With his usual reasonableness, Horist concludes, “The music industry
is a short-
circuiting electrical machine, and why not just
soak it?”