The Return of Metal Machine Music

With Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio landing on these shores this weekend, I found myself remembering one of the most memorable listening experiences of my life; the first time I heard Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music. How do you get your bearings in music that comes at you like amplified tinnitus, neither anchored by rhythm nor pulled into focus by vocals? Metal Machine Music is the authority that you must either surrender to, or flee the room from. Back in the Eighties, a friend of mine would listen to it almost ritualistically, so I felt obliged to approach it with similar reverence. And so on that occasion I did surrender to its blanket bombing of screeches and screams, its breadth and its sprawl, its majestic ineluctable presence, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Recently, Lou Reed used just two words to sum up this 1975 experiment in harnessed noise: “Feedback forever". Maybe if he had called the album that in the first place it wouldn’t have ended up being withdrawn by the record label after only three weeks, while simultaneously becoming the most returned album of all time. When it first appeared on the racks, Reed’s fans were still high on the wry sparkling pop tunes of Transformer. And even Transformer’s decidedly downbeat follow-up, Berlin - with its claustrophobic yet epic tales of doom and gloom – couldn't have prepared them for more than an hour of lovingly manipulated guitar feedback.

But returning to one of the most memorable listening experiences of your life isn’t always a good idea. After only 10 minutes it begins to feel like the sonic equivalent of staring into the sun. Oddly compelling, yes, but its scarily intense white light and white heat is relentless, and if you are not in a surrendering mood it can seem like Munch’s Scream going on forever, or every car horn in New York blaring simultaneously. Reed, ever the sonic perfectionist, has even replicated the original “quad” sound by re-releasing it as a surround-sound DVD, thus giving listeners a kind of sonic virtual reality experience, putting them at the still centre of this tornado of sound and therefore giving them a chance – in theory at least - to unravel its dense mesh. Fifteen minutes in, and its sadistically honed tonal range really is beginning to feel like an intrusion, a violation even, and the silence that follows my pressing of the pause button is truly blissful.



But don’t get me wrong; Metal Machine Music is an extraordinary artistic statement, up there with Pollock’s action paintings. It’s just that I’ve already been there, and I simply don’t have the cojones for this kind of sonic abstract expressionism anymore. There are melodies in there somewhere, but the wood is so dark and dense it's hard to get to the trees. And so we come to Metal Machine Trio, who are altogether a different kettle of metal fish. Their new double CD, The Creation of the Universe (released to coincide with the trio’s European tour, which lands in England this weekend) is not nearly as wilfully opaque. So although this universe is still swathed in distortion, melodies and chords are much more of a dominant presence. Perhaps because it features a number of free-jazz-style improvisations, produced in response to Metal Machine Music rather than in an attempt to replicate the album, it is inevitably more musical.

The story of Metal Machine Trio began in 2002 when Reed got wind of the fact that German composer and saxophonist Ulrich Krieker had somehow achieved the impossible by transcribing Metal Machine Music into something playable by a small chamber orchestra. Reed heard the resulting piece and was so impressed that he ended up flying to Berlin and playing with Ulrich and the Zeitkratzer Orchestra on a number of occasions, one of which can be experienced on a live DVD. It’s quite a spectacle to see classical musicians ferociously bowing away to produce an orchestral facsimile of Reed’s self-replicating feedback loops. But the trio that Krieker then formed with Reed and Sarth Calhoun in 2008 are something else again.




Krieker, Reed and Calhoun must have finally concluded that there’s as much point in trying to recreate what was on those two original pieces of vinyl as there would be in trying to copy every arterial arc of paint of a Jackson Pollock with hyper-real exactitude. So there live performances are more of a response to the album, and all the more intriguing for it. The beginning of CD1 of The Creation of the Universe (a live recording of two gigs performed at Redcat, Los Angeles) sounds like a great ship looming out of fog. At times the music shifts almost imperceptibly, tectonically, before growing to a thunderous climax of distortion. Its great waves of noise sound like they should have physical dimensions and a will to power, like the ever-expanding universe of its title. At times I’m reminded of the sublime 1979 Reed track “The Bells” where trumpet and guitar duelled with ecstatic abandon. We are moving towards Rothko rather than Pollock territory; all sombre but glowing hues - music as a window on to the void.

But perhaps the missing link between Reed as 1970s rocker, and Reed as present-day avant-garde composer, can be found in a little-known album he released in 2006. Hudson River Wind Meditations consists of five sonic soundscapes that Reed originally recorded to provide himself with a sympathetic ambience while practising tai chi. But when friends started requesting copies he decided to release it. The end result is like a diffuse, ambient yin to Metal Machine Music’s implicitly aggressive, frighteningly focused yang. But then Reed has always been a yin and yang kind of guy in his love of both gloriously, unapologetically dumb rock 'n' roll, and his admirable ambitions to produce an equivalent to the Great American Novel in the form of a three-minute rock song. So perhaps we should let the man himself have the last deadpan, bullshit-free word on Metal Machine Music; “I was in love with the feedback of guitars.” How sweet.

• Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio are on tour from 17 April: Cambridge, The Junction, 17 April - Box Office: 01223 511 511; Oxford O2 Academy, 18 April - Box Office: 0844 477 2000; Ether Festival, London Royal Festival Hall, 19 April – Box Office: 0844 875 0073
• Metal Machine Music, newly re-mastered by Lou Reed, is released by Cargo Records in the UK
  on 10 May on double vinyl, audio DVD and Blu-ray. Further information visit www.loureed.com
• Find Lou Reed on Amazon

Metal Machine Trio demonstrate that distortion can be ambient too