Ava Mendoza / Gabby Fluke-Mogul / Carolina Pérez – Mama Killa Review

The thing about music is, it’s great. If you are not a certified music-enjoyer, this feels like a weird corner of the internet to inhabit, but you are welcome here either way. For the rest of us, I’ll posit that one aspect that gives music an alchemy irreducible to its constituent parts is how the experience of it as a listener depends just as much on what the music is as on what it is not. Unless we are stricken with a pure case of amusia (think of this neurological condition as the musical analog of amnesia; Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia is a fascinating investigation of all the many ways music acts in and on our brains), each time we hear music we are, in some way, hearing it against all the other music we have heard. 

This is how music coalesces into form, genre, history, discipline. When I hear a 12-bar blues, I can anticipate the I-IV-V progression before it happens. When I hear a song in 3/4 time, my toes can tap the waltz without being taught. Despite the fact that so much of jazz’s identity is built on improvisation, the same pattern holds: when I listen, I’m hearing what the music is doing by virtue of what it is not doing. The matter at hand today is the bracing, tooth-gnashing muscularity of the album Mama Killa by a new trio comprised of Ava Mendoza on guitar, gabby fluke-mogul on violin, and Carolina Pérez on drums. If, like me, you’re already sick of reading this, please step away from your screen secure in the knowledge that Mama Killa is like cracking open an eons-old geode full of pure electric current. That is, it rips like absolute hell.

By now, you might have noticed that you are reading a heavy metal website and it seems to be gesturing at the (almost) by definition not heavy metal universe of jazz. Keep in mind what I said above about how music works, though, and appreciate along with me the sheer coincidence by which I came across the following in the writer Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: “In a general sense perhaps all statements are also counter-statements. Even the simplest pronouncements, for example, whether of measurable fact or of a point of view, are also assertions to contradict something that is assumed to be otherwise. Perhaps even the most objective descriptions, definitions, and formulations… are in effect counter-actions against the void of the undefined, unformulated, and confusing.”

Can we all give it up and agree that “the void of the undefined, unformulated, and confusing” is a pretty fucking sweet way to define jazz, BOTH for people who hate it and for people who love it? The reason I’m popping Mama Killa in front of your eyeballs and eardrums today, though, is that no, it’s not jazz. It’s also not metal, nor yet again is it noise or drone or punk or post-rock. The only thing you can truly say this album is is a coming together of three voices who make a thrilling new chorus. Ava Mendoza is an avant-garde composer and guitarist who has played across all manner of musical sandboxes, and whose chosen instrument is as likely to churn into gutbucket caveperson blues as it is to scrape and squeal and shred like Joe Satriani tossed in a cement mixer. gabby fluke-mogul has a similarly heterodox approach to the violin, playing it clean or electric, wailing or whispering, in wild, scything solo improvisations or in deep conversations with others. Carolina Pérez has the heavy metal bona fides of the group, as the drummer for the bands Hypoxia and Castrator (the latter of which has a new album, Coronation of the Grotesque, coming out on 8/15, and which totally kills), yet her approach on the album, while certainly summoning up death metal’s righteous clatter, is altogether more nuanced and diverse than one might expect based on her prior pummelings.

The album opens with “Puma Punku,” where fluke-moguls’ right-channel violin plucks out the melodic frame while Mendoza’s left-channel guitar moans and gently weeps. Pérez has the job of prodding the pair along with a jabbing, half-time funk undergirded by double bass kicks and a seriously heavy snare hand. Mendoza provides some sparse, snarled vocals on the tune, and her scraping, bent distortion goads fluke-mogul upwards into shrill, tense outbursts. “Mama Huaco,” by contrast, opens with several minutes of unaccompanied guitar from Mendoza. She layers down a deep, Sunn O)))-level droning catharsis but then steps out into nervy, clean arpeggios and threatening arcs of tremolo. When Pérez joins in just before the four-minute mark, she stomps and swarms Mendoza’s guitar to egg it on.

Much of the album flies by in these open-hearted tangles of interaction – most frequently, all three are carving wide rivulets of sonic ash through the bedrock, but they hold space for each to speak alone, or for two of them to brainstorm while the other observes. “Trichocereus Pachanois” opens with Pérez in flailing solo mode, but when Mendoza joins in partway through, Pérez switches to a ride-heavy cymbal pattern like Dave Lombardo in Slayer. “Partera Party” features some stunning solo improvisation from fluke-mogul; over the course of the spot their violin sounds both like a fiddle and a harmonica. When fluke-mogul really lets loose with their violin and Mendoza digs in deep with rudely scuzzy guitar moves, it can feel like you’re listening to a version of the Dirty Three even more likely to knife you in a back alley.

If you’re still feeling twitchy that, hey man, this is a heavy metal website and I don’t understand these sounds, what if you came into it focusing on how Mendoza’s guitar sometimes sounds like My Bloody Valentine-styled sculpted noise by way of Gorguts’s Obscura? Or what if you looked at how “We Will Be Millions” opens with a snare drum four-count from Pérez that immediately erupts into a squall of noise? What if you slotted this adventurous, omnivorous album next to Aluk Todolo’s Occult Rock and Chaos Echoes’s Transient in your next “freak-rock death-noise” listening session? But how much should we have to lean into what Mama Killa is not in order to sink our teeth into the bloody, palpating energy of what it is? Then again, if I tried to tell you I wasn’t listening to Pérez’s mid-song solo on “Nowhere But Here” at least a little bit like if it was the intro to Judas Priest’s “Painkiller,” I’d be insulting you with lies. At their best, though, when these songs lean into noisy, woolly rock improvisation, they approach the same sort of blissful, genre-agnostic annihilation of Japan’s Boris.

“Amazing Graces” might be my favorite of these eight songs. It rolls with a huge swaggering country twang, but by its midpoint, fluke-mogul and then Mendoza careen off into insanely high-fret needling and sonic manipulation. fluke-mogul’s violin saws and stabs towards the ground, briefly forcing the trio down into a gorgeous folk-like cadence that glitters like something Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have built out into a hulking reunion epic, but these three don’t force the expected crescendo. They nudge each other towards silence, towards a pure distillation of thought and gesture. Yes, your experience listening to the live-wire heat of Mama Killa will depend one hell of a lot on the specific things you are not hearing. You are not hearing orthodoxy. You are not hearing academic exercises. What you are hearing is nothing less than what your own personal geography maps onto the gritty, lurid, extravagant savagery of these three voices gnawing their muses straight down to bone.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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