!Tchkung!
Incite: A Soundtrack for Post World Insurrection

"…clandestine radio stations may well be the voice of the revolution" intones a gravelly voice that surfaces during the opening sound collage on !Tchkung!'s new album, Incite. This opening sets the stage nicely for the percussive, confrontational and occasionally mesmerizing stream of sonic insurrection that follows.

!Tchkung! are, I think, activists first and foremost, and their music is largely steeped in the mold of guerrilla theater. Weaving the spoken and melodious word, field recordings, a host of different drums and rhythms, and an inventive use of digital sampling, there are moments on Incite that sound completely new. The interplay of doumbec, timbale and "metalaphonic scrap" percussion with rich bass loops and an assortment of unusual and unexpected instruments serve as a rich, modern tribal backdrop for the steady barrage of dissidence from vocalists Devon Cecily and Rick Tahoma Wilson.

And it's wonderful to see a band so obviously committed—in action and theory—to the ideals of liberation. The promotional material that accompanied the CD related, among other things, that !Tchkung! toured El Salvador in 1997 as guests of the FMLN, created riot simulation/civil resistance training exercises during the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada, organized and performed in a protest outside the APEC summit in Seattle in 1993, and were involved (through one member) in organizing the September, 1998 "taxi wildcat" strike in Seattle. So, figuratively speaking, this is a band that puts its money where its collective mouth is.

My expectations of a band's musical talent decrease in proportion to how prominently they wear their ideology on their (jacket) sleeves. For instance, as an enormous fan of Fugazi and what they stand for, I've always been mildly disappointed by their lack of inventiveness with their music. There are only so many times I can listen to an album that doesn't captivate me on a purely musical level. I've felt much the same way about a lot of Gang of Four, Minor Threat, or Rage Against the Machine. One reason, I think, is that it's hard to stick with a relentlessly serious monologue. The lack of emotional ebb and flow (beyond just quiet and loud) really mute the moments that ought to reach into your guts and tug at your finer instincts. Another reason, I think, is that these artists and groups thrive on the social aspect of music and performance. The immediacy of a band, the crowd, and the dynamics that evolve between them add another crucial dimension to their music that simply isn't communicated on a reproduction. The fairly slick production values on Incite only serve to increase this distance.

That said, let me be clear that !Tchkung! are more inventive, in many ways, than any of the aforementioned artists. After the opening sound collage, "Khat (NAAHS)" explores some truly novel ground with a nicely fuzzed bassline, galloping Eastern percussion, a violin and heavily distorted word salad vocals spitting out lines like "land sharks in office parks . . . pistol mace and cellular phone . . . taxi beetle red light gritty / crawl across the face of the city." "Smash Things Up!" has a great backbone and instrumentation, but the heavily distorted vocals (which at times come dangerously close to repeating the same message ten different ways) keep it from really breaking through. In fact, there were a number of points on the disc when I wished for less of the distorted and frequently strident vocals and more of the mesmerizing chants that serve, without bombast, to inspire a sense of something larger and better than the foundation we're all currently standing on. I look forward to hearing !Tchkung!'s next effort, but more, I look forward to catching them live, where I can experience firsthand the energy they must surely engender.

Reviewed by Brian Brasel
01.25.99

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