Like a just-awoken brontosaurus (which let’s remember never existed), the skronk is a powerful gesture of noise making. The next gathering of the Lodge (MAY 27TH!) features a short piece I wrote called The Duck’s Fancy, in which I ask Mr. Joe White to emit a variety of programmatic skronks from his dear honeytone amplifier & the attached guitar. As a preview for that piece, I want to share a history of my favorite skronks, guitarist by guitarist.

Sonny Sharrock is kind of the alpha & omega of this form for me. He got there first for a lot of people my age by virtue of the Space Ghost Coast to Coast theme song. What’s great about his Space Ghost work (as Zorak and the Original Way Outs, I believe) is that it’s a fairly conventional backgrounds with this gnarly, almost melodic, tense line over it. It sings! It’s not just noise, and this is a key feature of the skronk in my mind. It’s rather different from just being noise, it’s more articulate than that, but it’s pretty impossible to sing along with. It’s particular to the guitar for all the extra sounds you can get in there that make it not melodic, but it comes from a person (usually) with a keen melodic background. Hence you get things coming from Mr Sharrock from the relatively staid & lovely end as well as some great fire music type stuff with Last Exit.

There are time when Marc Ribot can be a touchstone for this kind of work, he of course being a man of many sounds. Less him solo, more him as a sideman, like the skronk-y touches on his solo in Voice of Chunk or the little extremes he throws in in his Tom Waits work. Not skronk itself, but a feel. I love Ribot’s playing in the Tzadik studio release of Zorn’s Xu Feng - actually the game piece records have some great skronking on them, Eugene Chadbourne being another major contributor in something like Lacrosse. Chadbourne in general. What a fella.

There’s a direct link from these guys into Mary Halvorson, who as 50-33% of the band People has done some excellent work in the skronking field. I like to think of People as a band that skronks – it’s less that her lines are super skronk-y, it’s more that the aggregate texture is that of general skronk. Here’s a fine taste. This connection invites in Nels Cline (Mary, Nels, & Ches Smith in a not so skronk-y context) who can for sure go there, and do it on a bigger stage than probably anybody else as part-time Wilco guy. Which also brings in Jim O’Rourke, former Wilco producer & another man of a thousand styles, and the great Keiji Haino. This is pretty epic. At this point we’re getting a little more pedal-y & a little more punk, but it’s still there. I love watching Haino’s hands; they’re not always fast, but they look kind of uncomfortable, something impressive to the eyes. Ascetic skronker.

I would like to humbly submit a few examples of my own work in this vein, which as someone pointed out to me is pretty high on a google search for “skronk guitar”. How’d that happen? Here’s a tune called Brutal Josannah and a few improvisations from 2005. I think the fun part is to think of it in really speech-like phrases, which is not syntactical to music but makes sense in one’s head. That’s how it comes out of me anyway.

One thing that just dawned on me when compiling this list is that these folks are all coming from a jazzier place. You don’t hear it much from the classical rock/pop side of things or a more western art place, that’s firmly in a note-ier vein, something seeking order & clarity. Metal too in many instances… perhaps in something more like doom metal skronk-like sounds could live in harmony, really slow skronking, which might just be a different thing. But most kinds of metal it would not truck with the sloppiness of this stuff. Punk is probably more likely, there’s a perhaps stereotypical view of jazz & punk that prizes the expressiveness, the catharsis of skronk. Come to think of it, some of the jazziest punkers around, the Minutemen, have some keenly skronk-ish moments. Can’t find any at the moment, but there are those moments when D Boon solos super skronkily over a “fake jazz” kind of bass & drum texture.

Hope this is informative & interesting, and come hear how we skronk May 27th at Exapno!