Nightwalker
In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music By Nightwalker 1984-93
1999, The Fading Captain Series
As a collage artist, Robert Pollard is crazy about contrasts. Whether he works with images clipped out of vintage issues of National Geographic or works with piles of his own songs, he’s always looking for those two pieces that make no rational sense when joined together, but the fit is somehow perfect nonetheless. He’s looking for those two bare wires that you can press together to make an interesting spark. Deconstruct and reconstruct. That’s his game. Or it’s one of them, at least.
Many of his albums at this time are patchworks of different types of songs and sounds. Lo-fi home recordings sit next to full-bodied studio bangers. Rockers rub up against slow and sparse moments. After a great pop melody, something weird usually follows.
Album sequencing is an obsession of Pollard’s. So is sleeve art, which he almost always designs himself–by hand, with an x-acto blade and some glue and a stack of old magazines–with an eye toward making them all look different and mysterious and interesting to flip through.
The ride through Pollard’s body of work is bumpy, but that’s intentional. You’re not supposed to relax.
When he started his own label, The Fading Captain Series, devoted to his own music, the same approach applied. Each new record would be different from the last. The label’s catalog would be every bit as scattered and crazy as a Guided by Voices album. The Fading Captain Series itself, as a body of work, would be kind of a collage, too.
Fading Captain #1 was Kid Marine, an arty, ethereal singer-songwriter LP, lush and lovely on a low budget and under no pressure to produce a single.
About five months later, #2 and #3 came out simultaneously:
Ask Them was a fast and fierce garage rock EP recorded in one day.
Right next to it was In Shop We Build Electric Chairs, a pile of lo-fi basement sludge recorded over the span of a decade.
Contrasts, ladies and germs. Contrasts.
Not a lot of people ask Robert Pollard about Nightwalker. He hasn’t talked about it much. My armchair guess is that he dug through his old basement tapes and picked out some of the more fucked up stuff and called it Nightwalker, but to really get the joke, you need to read Sponic zine, issue 1.3 from 1998, which includes a very funny “interview” with Nightwalker leader Jade Radar (aka Robert Pollard, I assume) in which he spills his whole story.
(If you’re a hardcore collector, you need the zine anyway because Pollard did the front and back cover art; it also includes a 7″ compilation that features an exclusive Nightwalker song, “One-Track Record”, a ragged aural collage of several old then-unreleased tracks.)
The legend summarized: Nightwalker came from Bloomington, Indiana and lasted from 1977 to 1987. They were devoted to lo-fi and are so proud of their songs that they consider each to be an “LP” (Jade Radar: “Each one is a whole album squeezed into one song, disguised as one song”). The band broke up after Jade Radar got mauled by a pack of wild dogs and had to take a break from music, a break that ended up being permanent. Nightwalker never wanted to play live, but in 1986 they reluctantly opened for a band called The Carbon Whales at a show in Dayton, Ohio. The members of Guided by Voices were there and they all hung out afterward at their manager Pete Jamison’s place, which was a trashed, empty building that used to be a nursing home.
The two bands played their music for each other. Pollard put on Forever Since Breakfast (Jade Radar: “We thought it was total shit. They were a complete R.E.M. rip-off. But they were nice guys, so we smiled and pretended to like it.”) and Nightwalker played tapes of their music and explained their ideas.
Fast forward to a year later when GBV puts out Devil Between My Toes, an album that RIPS OFF Nightwalker’s vision whole hog. Pollard took everything that Jade Radar told him about lo-fi and brevity and made off with it like a common thief.
Even worse, GBV so thoroughly ransacked Nightwalker that when people hear old Nightwalker music, they think it’s a Guided by Voices side-project, which pisses off Jade Radar to no end.
That’s the story. Now here’s the album, Nightwalker’s final “fuck you”. Their letter bomb to rock ‘n’ roll. Previous Nightwalker releases were 7″-only. Now they get to really stretch out. An eleven-minute track won’t fit on a 7″. As far as I know, at least.
It’s an album that plays like the weird cousin of Devil Between My Toes. It throws out the songwriting craft, but keeps the noise. From its ramshackle intro (“Drum Solo”, which is just that, even if it ain’t exactly John Bonham) to the closing dirge, this music gives you a psychotic stare for a little over thirty minutes and dares you to shut it off.
I like it, but it ain’t for everybody. It’s a collection of basement dust bunnies. This is music bathed in the strange light of 3 AM and made with no thought that anyone might ever hear it.
The most tuneful moment is “Dogwood Grains”, a brief lo-fi lullaby that sits in the middle of side one like a flower that somehow survived an atom bomb. Other semi-lucid moments include “The Fink Swan (Swims Away)” and “Amazed”.
For the far-gone stuff, see “Ceramic Cock Einstein”, a directionless slop show driven by restless drums and a sample that sounds recorded off of television. “Weird Rivers & Sapphire Sun” comes off like a prayer delivered in an ancient language. “Trashed Canned Goods” wants to be a song, it seems, but the band decided to smash it against the basement wall instead.
Nightwalker’s real masterpiece of audience alienation though is easily this album’s grand finale, “Those Little Bastards Will Bite”. Its eleven minutes sounds less like a band playing and more like a strange animal breathing. It plods and drones. It hisses and scurries. Toward the end, a little tune emerges that this Robert Pollard bastard totally stole for the song “Postal Blowfish”.
Rock music is dead. I’ve been hearing this for twenty-five years now. We’ve all heard it so much that rock music’s death is now a part of its character. Rock music is like Bruce Wayne’s parents. It lives to die and every new generation kills it off all over again.
I think that Nightwalker is Pollard’s commentary on this.
At the very least, Jade Radar is one cynical guy. As he says in the Sponic piece, “All new music is shit. By around ’79 or ’80, everything that could be done in music had been done…. One of the reasons Nightwalker ended was because even though we were experimental and we were doing interesting work, we had really done everything we could with a traditional band.”
Robert Pollard has old school tastes and probably agrees with that to an extent.
However, Guided by Voices don’t wear bitter vibes well. You can’t twirl a microphone or do a high-kick that way. It’s not their style. GBV don’t do death trips.
But Nightwalker can. Nightwalker has nothing to lose. Nightwalker can tell us that it’s all over and that there’s nothing left except for a post-apocalypse of tape hiss and noise and caveman percussion. Nightwalker can say that rock music died ragged and lo-fi in Bloomington, Indiana. Nightwalker can go down drowning in its own dirge. R.I.P. Not coming back.
The coolest part is that I don’t think that Pollard ever sat down and decided to make Nightwalker music. Rather, I think he went through his giant cassette archive of his own lo-fi basement rock going back to the 80s and found Nightwalker in there. He built Nightwalker out of his old tapes.
In other words, Nightwalker is collage art. Scattered blurts assembled into a nightmare.