Chaos Spoken Here
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I don’t know about that, but over the course of a couple more singles and three albums–including the brand-new Talker, which comes out Tuesday–U.S. Maple has certainly warped the old form. The four band members, all of whom were raised in the Chicago suburbs, started out inauspiciously enough, playing in two different bands at Northern Illinois University. Johnson and guitarist Mark Shippy were in Shorty, which put out a couple records here and in Germany, and Rittmann and drummer Pat Samson were in the slightly less established Mercury Players. Both groups to some extent worked from the ugly rock template set by Touch and Go bands like the Jesus Lizard, Killdozer, and the Laughing Hyenas. But by the time Shorty released its second record, the 1994 Fresh Breath EP on the local Skin Graft label, Johnson says, he and Shippy were ready to try something else: “There was a ceiling on the other members regarding how much they wanted to explore, but that wasn’t happening with Mark or me.”
Rittmann says at first they spent a lot of time talking about what they wanted to do; when they finally picked up their instruments they wrote and rewrote the material, reducing the songs to hard kernels with no waste. (All the band’s albums clock in at around 30 minutes, though the density of the performances can be exhausting.) On the debut LP, Long Hair in Three Stages (Skin Graft), the guitarists were studiously “turning riffs around and inside out,” according to Shippy. But with the 1996 follow-up, Sang Phat Editor, they didn’t have to think so hard, and now, says Rittmann, “We’re creating this thing instinctually. There’s sort of an internal language that we’re all familiar with, and each song is kind of a dialect of it.”
Postscripts
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
