tuxedomoon, "crash" (1980)

Posted on September 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #18

Tuxedomoon were possibly the most straightforwardly pretentious band on the arty but goofy Ralph Records label in the late 1970s, best known for the Residents and also featuring underground expermentalists like Snakefinger, Renaldo and the Loaf, Fred Frith, Yello, and MX-80 Sound. Tuxedomoon were less silly and more moody than most of their labelmates; over time their various members tended toward soundscapes, but early Tuxedomoon records were recognizably songs, albeit pretty odd songs.

"Crash" is an instrumental, the b-side of their great single "What Use?", probably their best known song. "Crash" was not included on either of Tuxedomoon's (excellent) first two albums, Half-Mute and Desire; so far as I can tell, it only ever appeared on two Tuxedomoon records, neither of which was ever issued on cd: the Tuxedomoon compilation A Thousand Lives By Picture, and the Ralph Records compilation Frank Johnson's Favorites. In the time I've had no turntable -- most of the last fifteen years -- I had fruitlessly searched for "Crash", because it's one of my favorite instrumental rock songs ever. I never found it on peer-to-peer networks, though frustratingly I found several copies of another mix of the song, which were very different and lacked the power of the one I knew.

But! a few months ago some wonderful person uploaded an early 1980s album called Night Air by keyboardist / violinist / guitarist Blaine L. Reininger, co-founder of Tuxedomoon. Though I had a few later Reininger records, I'd never seen this one, and it included this copy of "Crash", which -- hurrah! -- is absolutely the version I knew and loved. So at this point I'm unsure whether to list it as Tuxedomoon or Reininger -- but the physical records I had credited it to Tuxedomoon, so I'm going with that for now.

"Crash" is a simple song, alternating between two parts, each of which winds up tension and releases it repeatedly. A guitar howls throughout, a layer of melodic noise behind the lead piano. Drum rolls punctuate the end of every passage. The two piano hooks are a simple ascending and descending line, and a down-up, down-up, UP-down-down-down-down-down one. No bridge, no coda, no intro, really, just a kind of fade-in. What makes it work so intensely for me, I think, is the layer of tension the guitar lays on. While the piano releases its melodic tension every time it winds it up, the guitar just keeps squawling, never letting go. I think my favorite moment of the song is when the second part has been going on for bar after bar after bar -- the first part was relatively short -- and finally explodes back into the first part at 3:08, after the guitar has drifted up to one long high howl. That transition comes back around again at 4:08; if I had any complaint about the song, it would be a wish that they'd go through the changes again one more time. If you listen to "Crash" a second time, check out the restlessness of the drumming, which constantly plays small variations on the beat, never enough to break the rhythm, coloring the song just under the immediately perceived surface. One last thing: I love the way the song sits there and vibrates just a little after the cold stop at the end, humming like a great machine.

13 comments.

jordan

Comment on September 16th, 2007.

Thanks for writing about this! I'd been vaguely wondering whether that Reininger album was worth seeking out; you've convinced me.

Scraps

Comment on September 16th, 2007.

Excellent! If you're investigating post-Tuxedomoon stuff, I can recommend the Steven Brown / Benjamin Lew collaborations.

Anonymous

Comment on September 22nd, 2007.

Thank you for the post
I share your love for this piece
I have another version, simpler. i think it comes from here:
http://www.french-new-wave.com/compilation.php?annee=1995
email me if interested

Scraps

Comment on September 26th, 2007.

That's the one I've had before! Thanks very much for the offer, though.

jonathan

Comment on October 6th, 2007.

some things are perfect and never leave you. this song is one such thing. i had the original vinyl

Anonymous

Comment on February 13th, 2009.

so what happened to the project?

davey

Comment on June 25th, 2009.

was passing along tuxedomoon's crash mp3 to someone and googled on a whim only to find your 2 cents.

you sound like an interesting fellow so i would like to send you one of the most psychedelic tunes of all time, recorded lo-fi on a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder in 1986...pure sonic magic.

but I cannot figure out how to email you from your website and am not a facebook kind of guy.

sir, if you care to email me at the address i've listed
it would be my honor to share something mega cool with you, just for supercosmidelic fun.

thanks

davEy
daveydudely@primus.ca

there are no coincidences
but sometimes the patterns are more obvious.

-bonzo dog band 1969 keynsham

richard

Comment on August 10th, 2009.

There are 3 versions of Crash. The original was on the "What Use?" 7", b-side, and is also featured on "A Thousand Lives by Picture" LP, a Tuxedomoon compilation on Ralph. The Remix version was on the b-side of "What Use?" (Remix) 12", and is called "Crash (Remix)". These songs were remixed by The Residents. The "What Use? (Remix)" is terrible, but Crash turned out, in my opinion, as better than the original. Anyway, both songs are featured on the BLR CD "Night Air", but are Tuxedomoon songs. The third version is available on CD as part of the Tuxedomoon 30th anniversary box set on Crammed Records. The CD is titled "Lost Cords", and the track's title is "III (April in Afghanistan)(Prototype of Crash 79)". The song was written by Blaine Reininger, and the guitar is played by Michael Belfer, a short term Tuxedomoon guest. As far as I know, no-one else plays on the song. The guitar is just a few simple notes played backwards to create a wonderful wash of distortion.

Richard

Comment on September 16th, 2009.

I just read in Issabelle Corbiseur's TM book that the song was about creating the mood of J G Ballard's book, "Crash".

Jocelyn

Comment on December 4th, 2009.

Excuse me for french langage, but my english is too bad for I write here.

Salut Scraps,

Je cherchais la version de Crash tiré de l'album "A Thousand Lives By Picture" et je désespérais de la trouver un jour en CD quelque part. C'est maintenant chose faite grâce à toi et je t'en remercie infiniment.

Isabelle Corbisier

Comment on June 15th, 2010.

Depicting Tuxedomoon as "pretentious" is probably the most inaccurate description of who there are and this is being said by someone who devoted a 476-page book (Music for Vagabonds - the Tuxedomoon Chronicles) to them... To the contrary Tuxedomoon's ambition was always to bring "progressive" music outside from the confines of University campuses. When they lived in Europe, they humbly "melted" with the locals, learned the local languages etc, something very uncommon for Americans. Depicting them as "eclectic" or "rebelious" would probably be more accurate, also when you consider that this band is composed of two University drop-outs (Reininger and Brown) united with a freak of Chinese origin (Tong) and an ex borderline juvenile deliquent (Principle). When you depict them as "pretentious", you are in fact following right-wing comments that were made about them in the US in the late seventies (they were depicted as "heroine chic" by some commentators), such comments forming part of the reasons why they moved to Europe in the early eighties.
Cheers,
Isabelle Corbisier

Scraps

Comment on June 18th, 2010.

Believe it or not, I meant no insult by "pretentious". I realize that it's going to read it that way, though, and I apologize. I meant, more nearly, that they were serious, surrounded by somewhat goofballs that were the other Ralph Records artists. (Though I like the goofballs too.)

Isabelle Corbisier

Comment on June 18th, 2010.

Hi there, no problem. Yes they were serious as the times were kind of serious as well. However there's always been a sense of humor/self mocking in everything they do. I saw that the rest of your comment wasn't in the "pretentious" vein. But it's kind of tiring to see that kind of depiction repeated over and over again, especially when one knows the origin of such comment, reason why I posted.
So no reason to apologize, I was just contributing to the debate here ;-)

Leave a comment

Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are appreciated but not required (emails aren't displayed).

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image