doncbruital (FMA Admin)

An all-timer of avant-garde creation myths is the one, apocryphal though it may be (all the good ones are), that tells of a conversation between Brahms and Mahler held along the Danube’s Vienna banks, wherein the former, decrying the state of contemporary composition, lamented for the lost spirits of Mozart and Beethoven and the long-gone golden age, in response to which der Mahler merely pointed to the river, noted it was impressive, sure, but that its flow ensured new waters for every consequent glance, so that one could never greet the same river twice. The Danube, yea though it may be immortalized time and again in story and song, doesn't even really exist, not as a changeless constant at least. So was it for music, constantly flowing, never at rest. Heraclitus, probably talking about a different river, nonetheless sez it best: "the river is never the same river, nor the man the same man."

Then there are those who get in on the river-flow act in different ways, not content to fight the current or transform with it or get dumped out into the Black Sea of time or, uh, wherever. Nah, some folks might be better thought of as prowling the edges, like a 'Big Ole Bear' of song on the lookout for prey, poaching discrete ideas and forms from the ever-shifting waters of musical tradition like a grizzly poaching those salmon from the river. And like poached salmon, the result is often weird and tasty. One such practitioner of a timeless mixture of musical forms is LITTLE HOWLIN' WOLF, whose presence on the FMA enables you, lucky listener, to get in touch with some of your own time-animal tendencies.

Little Howlin' Wolf's work is somehow simultaneously junkyard cutup from the American Folkways archives, noisy outstrumentation, and wild animal sound that'd be equally at home nowadays as in the days of neolithic river worship. There's lots of essential stuff on that FMA page, including the 2006 set from Brian Turner's show to which you had better just listen--I'll stop blathering, as I can't compete with the essential indescribability of these riverrun fragments--just start prowling 'em yourself.