Few figures within the long, strange arc of American experimental music have occupied terrain quite as singular as Tom Recchion's. Co-founder, in the mid-1970s, of the Los Angeles Free Music Society - the gloriously unruly collective of basement noise-makers, exotica obsessives, tape manipulators, and assembled-instrument visionaries whose lineage runs through Smegma, the Doo-Dooettes, and Le Forte Four - Recchion has spent the subsequent decades assembling one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of solo work to emerge from that fertile underground.
Issued in 2006 by the Italian imprint Schoolmap, Sweetly Doing Nothing gathers six long pieces dispatched from a laptop running Ableton Live, three decades into what the label, with some understatement, called Recchion's practice in sonic explorations. There is a peculiar humour at work throughout. Titles like The Elephant God, Jazz 10,000 A.D., and Ho Ho 66 announce themselves with a wink, but the music inside is anything but light - long-form ambient pieces unfolding through submerged loops, treated voices, drifting tape textures, and the unmistakable warmth of someone who came up listening to Martin Denny and Les Baxter as readily as to Pierre Henry or AMM.
Oozings stretches across nearly twelve minutes of slowly mutating tonal vapour. Underwater Girls closes the album in a hypnogogic register, voices and processed gestures suspended in deep reverberant space. Recchion uses digital tools the way a potter uses clay - and he is, not incidentally, also a potter - patiently, with attention to surface and weight, never allowing the software to dictate the shape.
Recchion's collaborative web stretches outward from the LAFMS to David Toop, Christian Marclay, Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, and John Duncan. His lifelong fascination with exotica - lounge music's tropical strangeness, organ-driven mood records, the kitsch sublime - places him in unexpected dialogue with the post-Hassell strain of ambient music. A patient, idiosyncratic record from one of the genuinely underheard figures of West Coast experimentalism. Long out of print, and worth the search.
