Stone Arabia (11 page)

Undeterred by a rather chilly reception, Worth would go on to produce eighteen more of these albums over the next twenty years, each more “underground” than the last.

What have we learned about Worth from this long journey of slow baroque noise, garage concrete music, Indonesian gamelan evocations, electronics, acoustic low-fi living room experiments, trance and Ramayana monkey chants, sound collages, narrative and anti-narrative, soundtracks for unmade films, dissonance and odd slack-key guitar tunings, Komoso ametric and polymetric music, tape loops and audiotape manipulations, dub and sampling, prepared guitar and piano modifications, silence and his so-called “sounded silence”? And always in there somewhere, however faintly, Man Mose appearing and disappearing like the trope that refused to die? Does the willfully obscure and difficult music play against and in effect count on the need to make order of it, to make it cogent, what Karl Popper described as “the intrinsic and constant drive to find congruence”?

Critics have called it “naive and embarrassing”
(Village Voice,
1992). THe Ontology has also been called “the most pretentious work of any rock star, anywhere, ever”
(New Musical Express,
1995). And about onTologY: Volume 3: “A painful illustration of the limits of autodidacticism”
(Rolling Stone,
2001). But to those of us who stuck with it, there has been an undeniable power
in these accumulations. If approached with an open mind and an open heart (and perhaps some mind-expanding hallucinogens), and if approached with a willingness to dwell in the endless runout groove of another’s obsession, these albums can lead you on a riveting journey. Is Volume 2, in fact, the penultimate record? Is this epic, eccentric freak ride coming to an end? Listen and judge for yourself. As Worth has said, “It’s all there, it’s all there.”

Mickey Murray
Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music
The New School for Social Research

I slipped the CD in my purse to listen to on my drive to work. I sat at my computer and went, as I always do, straightaway to Ada’s blog. I saw that she, too, had received Nik’s CD:

lowercase a:

daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker

February 20

As my loyal readers know, nearly every day I run from the West Village to the river. Today’s run stood out from the others. Yes, that’s right, I got a new record from my eccentric uncle Nik. (For those of you late to the
lowercase a
party, you can read what I have posted about him
here
and
here
and
here.
) As I ran through the sliver of the west side park, always in sight of the Hudson, my ipod was loaded with my uncle’s new release,
The Ontology of Worth, Volume 2.
Those of you who frequent this space know how much I dig my intense uncle’s complicated self-published recording career. And you might also know his experimental stuff is not my favorite, especially
his epic (ahem) experimental stuff. I prefer the pop stuff, the side projects, the low-fi simple songs. He can make perfect three-minute pop songs that will hypnotize you and haunt your every waking second. But the epic dirge pretensions of the multivolume work? No thanks. The avant-garde (I guess, but avant-garde circa 1975) noise/song cycles, the hermetic codes and references, the doom and the darkness that seem to deepen with each volume. Not my style, way too ponderous and concentrated for me. It’s at best annoying and at worst unsettling (maybe that’s the other way around). But, as I am your ever-open-minded lowercase a, I touched play. No music on this at first, just spoken words. “Soundings,” he calls it. I gave up guessing (but so much about the fun of music is that kind of guessing at what is coming and then being surprised or disappointed, being satisfied or being bored). I let the “Soundings” wash over me as I hit the rhythm of the run. I went with it. And wow, I must tell you, it blew me away. It was the perfect mix of the moment and the sound. And it also gave me an idea. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you what it is!

a.

I hadn’t had a listen yet, and I felt a pang of regret reading Ada’s “review.” Often Nik would review his own records for the Chronicles. He had several rock-journalist pseudonyms that he used when he wrote these reviews. Many, of course, were hyperbolic raves. Some were carefully considered and annotated essays that were in fact fascinating exegeses by the artist. And quite a few were scathing, harsh hatchet jobs or faint, lethal dismissals. Nik would sometimes send me copies of the reviews with the CD. I would make a point of not reading them until
after I had a clear, unframed listen of my own. In this case, there was a “clipping” included, but it was an interview from Nik’s fantasy fanzine,
Butter Your Toast
:

BUTTER YOUR TOAST

Our Girl Anna Conda Tracks Down the Elusive Nik Worth
Western Lights, Topanga Canyon, California
Today, fans, is the day.
Volume 2
of
The Ontology of Worth
has hit the stores. Looks like we are getting very near the end! Don’t miss it, or the free promo poster, and don’t forget the limited-edition covers all work together to make three different unique images (back copies are still available for the previous eighteen volumes, but hurry—they are limited and are already commanding high prices on eBay). We have been informed that once these discs are gone, no more will be made!

Nik Worth, aka Nikki Trust, né Nikolas Kranis, pop wunderkind turned underground wizard, has agreed to talk to us about his latest release:

Butter Your Toast:
What made you decide not to use music on some of these tracks?

Nik Worth:
Why not? I like to experiment. Call it a Futurist sound experiment, a dada poemlet.

BYT:
Yeah, okay, but when are we going to get some pop songs?

Nik Worth:
The Pause Collective is not a pop label.

BYT:
How do you expect your fans to listen to this?

Nik Worth:
I expect complete and total attention for all of my work. I want my fans to drop whatever else is going on and
devote themselves. I want them to listen, with rapt and dire attention, to the prior eighteen volumes, in order, and then I want them on their knees, eyes closed, with the whole fifty-six minutes of the CD played at top volume. I want them to repeat that undistracted deep listening until they see the patterns, themes, and ideas that link and resonate through the entire nineteen volumes. I want them to understand any failings they may perceive in the work as part of its terrible beauty, and I want them to embrace the mystery and beauty of the project as a whole. Then I want them to hold those thoughts and feelings and wait breathlessly for the final chapter—
Volume 1.
Soon to come. That’s all I expect.

BYT:
And when will you drop the final chapter,
Volume 1
?

Nik Worth:
Sooner than you think. This year. I’m almost done.

BYT:
And?

Nik Worth:
It cannot, I repeat, cannot, be topped. This truly will be the last record.

I know. There was no mistaking the finality of his statements. But to be fair, I had heard things along these lines for years.

I do all my listening in my car. It is the only thing that makes my commute bearable. Each day I get up earlier to “beat” traffic. I had begun to leave my house while it was still dark. I watched the light gradually press behind the mountains; the glow of the headlights of the few other cars made me feel as if I were part of a secret, determined club of commuters. I inserted Nik’s CD and tapped up the volume button to a nearly uncomfortably loud level. I wanted to feel the music as well as hear it. In the anticipatory silent seconds before any sound could be heard, I felt a little lift of desire and possibility, something that felt marginally like wanting a cigarette or a morning coffee or, more aptly perhaps, starting the last chapter of a book you have been reading for a long time. I had a second to wonder, breathlessly, what world would come. This little edge of wondering right before was an active part of the pleasure: the matrix of expectation based on the past, the thrill of the unknown that isn’t fully unknown because the work is from such a familiar, intimate source. I knew, in a larger sense, what was likely to come. I, after all, had heard so many of Nik’s CDs—each and every one of his CDs, which was no small amount—all of his CDs, as far as I could tell. And listened closely, listened with
devotion and attention. It should be somewhat predictable by now, shouldn’t it?

Nik’s voice came on. He spoke instead of singing, and there wasn’t any music.

A spoken-word intro? Really? But then I stopped. I listened. I knew how to listen to him. He had earned that unique faith that comes from knowing the work and the person making the work. He wasn’t reciting words, but rather rhythmic sounds. Wordish sounds. They were nonsense but compelling somehow. He chopped a sound and let it hang there, unrushed. I felt a movement forward, a lean in me toward a future second. I picked up the CD case. My left hand gripped the top of the steering wheel. I glanced at the thickening traffic on southbound 170, made a minor calculation that I made so often: a person in control of a speeding car (seventy miles per at the moment) could momentarily not look at the road she traveled but could sneak a look at a piece of writing, or at the radio controls or a telephone keypad, and the risk that something would happen that would require her eyes and attention—well, it was worth taking, as it was unlikely to have any consequences given the brevity of these glances. The CD said:
“Track One: Soundings (32:10)
.”

Well, okay, Nik had his pretensions, and I was also glad to know that it just didn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter if he was repetitive or derivative. It also didn’t matter if he was stuck in some dead-ended wrong-turn rut where experimental music met art met folk met acoustic rock and roll. (Did that rut even exist? Maybe briefly back in 1979 or so—I was, of course, making all of this up, guessing, more or less. I had no
idea of the precursors and probably neither did he, but even if he did, it would not stop him. Nothing would ever stop him.) Nik was liberated from any dialogue with the past work of others and certainly with the current work of others. His work was his own exclusive interest now and had been for years. I knew his solipsism had become his work, in a sense, that this was complicated to think about, but at some point there is the unyielding, the concentration, and the accumulation that becomes a body of work. Whatever the nature of that work, it is hard to argue against. Maybe. I’m not sure about it. In this case, Nik’s case, it meant he could do whatever he wanted. No one—not me, certainly—could deny that this was a form of purity.

How could I have missed how things had begun to escalate? He had developed a swollen foot, which made standing difficult for him. I determined it was a kind of rheumatoid arthritis—what they used to call gout. I came by to bring him some prescription-strength anti-inflammatory pills that my doctor prescribed for what he used to call premenstrual syndrome but now depressingly calls perimenopause syndrome. Nik had called me, complaining of a tremendous pain in his toe. I dismissed him at first, but it soon became clear he really was in terrible pain. He didn’t have insurance, of course, how could he? And he felt too stupid to go to the emergency room over a sore toe.

I got off the phone and went straight to work. I made my diagnosis through the internet. I spent several hours (it was never less than that when I tried to figure these sorts of things out) online. I typed symptoms into search engines (inflamed toe highly painful) and then tried to evaluate the vast responses such searches returned. I would “refine” my search and try again, as instructed. Eventually I reached a stasis, a sameness and repetition factor, that would lead me to a hypothesis. I figured
that if enough people said it (wrote it) in enough places, that had to mean something. I thought it was gout. I plugged
gout
in to Wikipedia. Here is what I found:

Gout
(old name:
podagra
) is a form of
arthritis
caused by the accumulation of
uricacid
crystals (due to
hyperuricemia
) in
joints
. It is an immensely painful disease, which in most cases affects only one joint, most commonly the big toe. Patients with longstanding hyperuricemia can have
tophi
(uric acid stones) in other organs, e.g. the cartilage of the ear.