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12 CENT DONKEY!

Given just how much the Dark Sunny Land and JAS Cee-Dee's have been flibbin' my jib as of late it's no wonder I spent the entire afternoon going through boxes and boxes of disques in order to find these two tea coasters! Both of 'em feature DSL/JAS guitarist Steve Painter along with his pals Fish Eye Bro and (on WHERE THERE ARE NO ROADS) Rick Breault making the unholiest kind of racket you can imagine, and given that the high energy just ain't comin' at'cha as fast as it was back when we was wuz kids it's stuff like this OUTTA KILTER ASKEWED FREE FORM SPLAT that typifies the music that reflects our mindset and modes better'n anything dontcha think? As far as being a reflection of the times go 12 Cent Donkey just might be the mode of the music changing that will make the walls of the city shake and it's too bad Tuli Kupferberg won't be here to experience the blast first-hand given how he was doing his own wall-city shake a good fortysome years back!

NO CASH VALUE on Slippytown is unfortunately long out-of-print, though what would you expect with a Cee-Dee-Are that was issued in a limited edition of a mere 127??? Funny that this one took less time to sell out than the Screamin' Mee-Mee's/Hot Scott Fischer platters but then again I guess the underground buying public might just be hotter on Donkey's crazed blues-unto-screech that they whip up on what are billed as the "red" and the "blue" bulb sessions. Don't know exactly what that means and really don't have the time to ask anyone as if that really matters...anyway these two sesh's are whatcha'd call a mighty exemplary rehashing of the country blues into a more metalloid psycho-revisionist music that's about as much part Red Krayola and part Nurse With Wound as it is part rural haller. Hearing the Donkey revisit Howlin' Wolf's "Natchez Burnin'" and "Moanin' at Midnight" being rendered into scarcely-unrecognizable sound mass is something that will remind you of the braver moments of v. late-seventies avant rock excursions (and their take on Dock Boggs ain't anything to pass up either!), plus the originals "He Was Blind" and "In the Land of the Lotus Eaters" are beautiful in their own quasi-incoherent surrealist way that does easily enough echo the pathburning work of the LAFMS. Might be a download of this somewhere you might not want to forget about until it's way too late.


Survivors might also want to try WHERE THERE ARE NO ROADS, the Donkey's offering for Gulcher where the now-threesome perform what sounds like a thicker, non-bedroom, recording with a fuller sound that comes closer to the Dark Sunny Land/JAS approach and feel. Def. references to the like-minded O-Type recordings can be easily discerned as will an overall addled mindnumbing feeling that Smegma has been known to produce on occasion. Nice amorphous aural puh that naturally makes for pleasurable bg listening to old FRITZI RITZ comics, but even in the foreground this comes off as a majestic attempt at creating new vistas for the new decade if not the rest of the millennium. And right when the electronic blur finally makes you submit up comes Painter doing this acoustic folkie thing that sounds way outside the usual "outsider" pantheon of underground snobbery mixing a little John Fahey with a lot of Mayo Thompson.

Nice befuddling sound you got there 12 Cent Donkey. You certainly ain't dabblers in the hallowed realm of DIY idiocy, that's for sure!