Love That Zeena

{Liner notes, more or less, for the reissue of Nightmare Alley. We had a swell little chat over tea in her tiny tenement walkup above Max Fish, the notoriously model-swarmed Ludlow Street bar, which now looks a bit like the first cantina to stake out the Gold Rush. Zeena's pad has some of the same feel: an artist's cocoon, used for pitstops between tours, redolent of a time when the Lower East Side was neither trendy nor particularly safe afterhours -- maybe a dozen years or so ago, back about the time I first saw her rock the electric harp in Atlanta.}

She goes the whole wide world, Zeena Parkins does. The sonic spectrum she annexes via her inventively modified electric harps, beautiful instruments of handcrafted rigor and industrial elegance, streaks across the tangled terrains of genre and history. Her purposeful distortions, stark noise-bursts, mysterious elisions and hypnotic reveries expand not only the language of the instrument – indeed, she is nothing less than its Jimi Hendrix – but have been her passport to a colorfully varied career. It’s one that has taken Parkins from the grungier precincts of Lower Manhattan’s performance scene to the glittering spectacle of the global arena. She has, in the course of being singularly distinguished at what she does, stepped free of predestined musical niches. Parkins has managed the micro and the macro: She was an integral member of such important improvising ensembles as Skeleton Key (with Fred Frith and Tom Cora) as well as a key player in ongoing creative scenarios with John Zorn, David Shea, Butch Morris and Elliot Sharp, among others. At the same time, she’s rocked out with the boisterous likes of Courtney Love and Hole, and tours a good part of the year with the Icelandic avant-pop diva Bjork. Almost furtively, Parkins has succeeded in connecting with the large, worldwide audiences that would seem out of reach to most of her downtown NYC peers -- save for the occasional Sonic Youth or Marc Ribot. Recorded in 1992, Nightmare Alley resonates from a moment when notions of popular music and “the avant-garde” were on a collision course. Punk rock was about to bust mainstream (in the guise of Nirvana), a decade-plus of arty/improvy/jazzy/noisy New York sounds began to consolidate around a club called the Knitting Factory, and, out in San Francisco, a record label called Table of the Elements was in its embryonic stage: Parkins would become its first recorded artist, and this CD its first release.

But long before Parkins became the preeminent improvising electric harpist of her day – indeed, the one improvising electric harpist whose name comes most immediately to mind when the question is popped on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? – she worked in the circus. The traveling troupe billed itself as the Janus Circus, and because its number was small, each member performed a variety of tasks and, natch, amazing feats. Parkins designed costumes. But she also played the accordion, while dressed up as a dancing bear, the kind of bear that might also make a fearless dash and leap through the terrifying “heart of fire.” On an afternoon in downtown Manhattan, many years later, Parkins took in a matinee at Film Forum. The feature? Nothing less than the 1947 film noir sideshow Nightmare Alley. A grim and despairing look at the making of a low-rent carnival huckster (Tyrone Power), who ultimately comes to get his geek on, the film is downbeat morality tale laced with deliciously lurid details of carnival life. Parkins was sketching ideas for this album, and became totally inspired by what she saw on the screen. “I completely fell in love with the film,” Parkins says. “At that time it had particular resonance for me. And I knew instantly that I would shape the album around the film in a loose kind of way. It just fit into a cozy spot for me. And of course there happens to be a main character whose name is Zeena – a clairvoyant – so how could I possibly resist?”

Parkins choice of the harp was somewhat more incidental. Originally a piano player, she was assigned the instrument while in a Detroit high school and participated in what she describes as “a boot camp harp training situation.” The instructor was firm. “She inspected our fingernails to make sure they were tidy and clean and we were instructed to wear special shoes while playing harp and a proper pastel gown while performing concerts,” Parkins recalls. “It was a bit ridiculous. I resented that sort of superficial regiment but loved the instrument.” The next three years provided her only formal training. Instead of developing a classical technique, Parkins taught herself, creating a performance style that is more purely idiosyncratic. In that, she is consonant with many improvising musicians of her generation, who have taken instruments associated with certain types of music and, in effect, retrained them to suit new purposes. Whether it was what John Cage and David Tudor did with their “prepared” pianos, Derek Bailey with notions of guitar tradition, John Zorn with his duck calls and compositional cut-ups, Eugene Chadbourne and his plugged-in rake, Zeena Parkins cast a similar gaze upon the harp. “I decided to have a rhythmic approach – more like a rhythm guitar player or a drummer than a flute player or a violinist. I see the instrument as a luxurious sound machine more than a sweet angelic stringed creature floating around on a cloud.”

Nightmare Alley, the album, is at once psychic and luxurious, though not in ways you might easily assume. The release, as the flagship title for Table of the Elements, marked not only a beginning, but a sign of things to come. During its 10-year history, the label has consistently championed various forms of exceptional string music, made by artists looking for ways not only to extend the potential of their instruments but also to more richly explicate the fundamental impulses that animate their vibrations. These include sonic magi such as Arnold Dreyblatt, Tony Conrad, Paul Panhuysen, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, and Rhys Chatham. In a very real sense, the album helped to forecast a growth market in so-called “unheard music,” and an expansion of possibilities for art musics that had previously been fostered only by universities, galleries and the international warehouse bohemia. And while many of the 15 tracks on Nightmare Alley connote a sense of hall-of-mirrors distortion, unreeling as if a long, shimmering dream sequence, deeper listening reveals a genuine, if not always comforting, lushness: Here, tucked away behind the gawkers and hawkers of the sideshow, is a consuming bed of sound.

“I had a kind of map for the pieces, instructions that I followed in the studio,” Parkins recalls, “and also pieces that developed from an improvisatory beginning but were layered and edited in the studio. I also had ideas for various studio techniques that I wanted to try — these were pre-Pro Tools days. The record was recorded on 2-inch tape, so there was turning of tape inside-out, changing the speed of the tape, wobbling the reel, and so on—as well as experimenting with different amp setups as well. Many of the pieces developed in this way, taking full advantage of some of the things I had access to in the studio: fancy effects processors, and beautiful vintage amps, a Leslie tone cabinet, overdubbing, things that were not possible at a gig or in my rehearsal space.”

Pieces such as “Freak” overlay loping note patterns, mocking psych-out effects that suggest Zippy the Pinhead channeling Jimi Hendrix, and a percussive attack on the strings that would not be misplaced on a Sonic Youth record. “Peephole” generates a flurry of dueling harmonics that eventually opens into a fusillade of musical effects: from nimbly articulated rhythmic dialogues to deranged heart of midnight clangor. “Hairless,” which begins with the gentle, contemplative bending of strings, gradually takes on sinister, unsettling airs. Again and again, the music lures the listener into a parallel world of sensations, one that is disorienting and surreal, strangely pleasurable and more than a little dangerous. Nightmare Alley proved to be the living end for Tyrone Power’s corrupt carny, broken like a butterfly on the karmic wheel of fortune. But for Parkins, it’s an occasion for some truly amazing feats, no less than a leap through the heart of fire and animated by the same spirit of derring-do. You won’t believe your ears.