TWISTED TUTU – Play Nice (oo Discs, USA –CD only)

Pay attention to the stick figures. On the cover of twisted tutu’s first full CD (that I know of) they grin a bit mindlessly, going out of focus and atoms scattering below the waist though they might be. As if they didn’t know, as if they had not looked down yet. Behind these are the band members, Eve Beglarian scratching her head as if to ask rhetorically, was this all such a good idea, and Kathleen Supove smirking as if to reply, Of course. And it was. PLAY NICE is a CD of shoals and wallows and the odd tidal wave, and thanks to some very smart programming of one cut after another it is never 100% predictable how track after track is going to hit one even if you know which song is coming up. Might be a rollercoaster, might be a succession of dioramas, might go by too fast to make an impression. But if every time you hear something different, and I certainly do, maybe that’s an indication of how absorbing it all is, and how these two very different artists combined to make something really quite vast, and not just in playing time (72:08).

My first chance to see Ms. Beglarian was at the Ersatz Festival in 98, and I recall meeting Ms. Supove later that same year: twisted tutu (Ms. Supove’s membership in Doctor Nerve and her and husband Randy Woolf’s involvement with the delightful Exploding Music series aside) was one of the first things she mentioned. Loved the group name; there were still a few decent band names left, who would have thought? I first heard them on Mr. Woolf’s maelstromic "Your Name Backwards" (to be found on his CRI Records CD, ROCK STEADY). Armed with a Farfisa, Ms. Supove cleaved the air with it in my listening room not too unlike Hugh Banton on van der Graaf Generator’s 1971 "Darkness (11/11)", and Ms. Beglarian in a funhouse of voices whispered of drawing animals, nattered detachedly "…we walked for lunch across the Brooklyn Bridge," frantically admitted, "when I first saw you I didn’t know what to do!" and in the end while the Farfisa disappeared down its own black hole, she followed over the event horizon muttering detachedly, "I forgot everything when you told me your name… backwards." I still haven’t quite figured it all out, but as in a good Burroughs novel (you pick), the denotation looks pretty clear: we never know enough to be safe. We never are in a position to fully master the situation. The walls are glass, even if they don’t look like they are. The stick figures popping up throughout PLAY NICE’s liner booklet suddenly seem awfully lucky, having no insides and nothing to hide.

But of course one song doesn’t define a band, and here twisted tutu wisely prefer not to define themselves either (one track is a combination of Vietnamese and Tanzanian children’s songs, another is a snippet of a far-too-hip 13-year-old Tibetan Buddhist dropping a dime on the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards and how they are not exactly Dharma bums, to the sound of cut-up/ speeded/ slowed chants). In so doing they make all musics and all targets within their reach. The thoroughly brilliant Kitty Brazelton contributes "I Touched Your Cheek," a lazy, reflective blues until bisected conversations with an offstage significant other force Ms. Beglarian to declare with irritation, "Hi, listen, I can’t make it over tonight, this piece is just too important and I don’t think I can make it to your mother’s on the 23rd…" As cogent a reason why the blues is still a viable form; ‘cause we all got ‘em, admit it or not. And then there’s the down-and –dirty Hammond organ licks Ms. Supove favors us with, Ms. B’s tart Billie Holiday tribute some 9:35 in ("Thank God I got no gun, thank God I’m no man…"), the Zappa-like chopped synth parts throughout, an Ursula Dudziak moment… it’s the album’s tour de force. Until later.

twisted tutu have elected on PLAY NICE to cram as many raw ideas, studio gimcrackery and classic deconstruction/reconstruction tactics as possible on one CD, and you will hate some of it, you will love most of it and bits will completely miss you. I don’t care if you’re the departed spirit of Iannis Xenakis returned to check your royalty statements. The Robin Lorentz-penned "Tahoma" doesn’t really get to me (a two-violin duet written for two artists who don’t play violins? Neat on paper, but…), not because it’s bad but because Tim Hodgkinson’s 1997 composition for 3 prepared violas, "For Looking Inside," travels the same rails and gets to more interesting places. The picked bit in the middle has a nice dulcimer feel to it, though. And "Boytoy/Toyboy" is another possibility but it seems to me to need words to be anything other than a painted-up vehicle for another manic VCS3’d organ break from Ms. Supove. Would like to hear her do a Jimmy Smith standard one day, although I admit new composers deserve more of her time! "The Buncacan Song" ‘s good fun too, nonsense lyrics, juice harp and all, but I can never remember it after I put the CD away. Of course, that could be me.

But there are far more hits than misses here, and I doubt your idea of misses will match mine; the title ditty allows Ms. S and Ms. B to duet this time on toy pianos, and it’s simultaneously delightful and drop-your-souffle hilarious. Some might think the idea is facile. Their loss. "God B’s Lullaby" uses a Cage-like fall of snowlike notes (play the piano key that the flakes drop on, maybe) and a distant Ms. B singing a section of James Merrill’s CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER from the midst of some great silence. Which Mr. Merrill, Ouija board in tow, would have had us think the words originally came from. Here, he wins the argument. "Touchtone Tony" is sweet and sad, a forest of dithering telephone key tones crowding about Tony trying to make conversation with somebody who may never hear him. Hope he called, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch. In "Tea Song" Ms., B’s vocal recalls German chanteuse Dagmar Krause, though without Ms. Krause’s stern sense of disapproval: though the words are variations on a set of classical instructions for tea-making ("when the water begins to generate bubbles as big as fish-eyes…" ), there is a sense of utter desolation here (something Ms. Krause’s former band Henry Cow were past masters at). As if making tea were the only thing left in the world to do. Is it August 6, 1945? Is there a B-29 approaching? These seem to be important questions, given the context.

So twisted tutu are studio whizzes, yes, but they also have no small sense of chops on other levels; check out "My Feelings Now," a lovely trance ballad for echoplexed violin (courtesy of Ms. Lorentz) and piano that might have been a song cut from the ‘40s Broadway show LADY IN THE DARK. It’s that gorgeous and that evocative, and Ms. B sings her heart out nearly without having to raising her voice (a colorful alto). I’d have thought that a physical impossibility, until now. Or if you’re a traditionalist at all, there’s a sprightly cover of the Duke Ellington warhorse "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart." Nervy for these two, but it works, even the tape loop in the middle which grabs a chord sequence out of the melody and loops it while Ms. S. channels Keith Tippett on the old 88. Considering he’s still alive, I’d like to know how she managed it. But what’s most endearing about the take is Ms. B’s witty whistling of the melody and Ms. S’ perfect negotiation of Duke’s piano chords early on and after the loop soup evaporates she redoes them a la Thelonous Monk. Too cool.

But twisted tutu save the best for last. "Written on the Body" hails from "Your Name Backwards" territory, but only in general air; if anything this track recalls for me a sort of anima response to the animus-heavy Doors song "The End." Again, that’s probably just me. No matter, it’s a devastator: beginning with scatters of whispered words that slowly coalesce into "who taught you to write in blood on my back?", a synthesized frog voice breaks the otherwise silence, slipping in and resembling at first a field of crickets, slowly metastasizing into something far more threatening ("You’ve scored your name into my shoulder," she answers). An Oberheim sequencer describes a field of rising and descending needles ("you tapped a message into my skin"), a funereal French horn points to the inevitable destination ( I won’t say where because you already know), while Ms. B’s voice pronounces the damnation: "your morse code interferes with my heart/ I had a steady heart before I met you." Though she whispers on, coming to the song title "Written on the body is a secret code," voice rising and falling in the mix, though her voice slowly drowns in gray waves of static, that couplet remains, even at the end when only the dancing needles are audible.

twisted tutu go to the head of the class on their first CD. This is modern art song at its most effective. As far as I’m concerned, everybody else lines up here behind them and their collaborators. Just keep an eye on those stick figures, because there are always occasions when we wish we looked a lot more like them than we do.

-–K.E. (oo Discs, Web site: www.oodiscs.com )