If I may pause briefly here to pat myself on the back, I’m really pleased with how Ball of Wax has often become a platform for people to branch out from their usual modes, to try new things they might not have otherwise tried without someone saying “hey, send me long, weird songs.” Take James Kelly Pitts, for example. While he has his own unique, idiosyncratic approach, his material generally falls squarely in the “guy with a guitar singing a song” canon. Instead of just picking up his guitar and writing a really long song (which is totally what I did), he went to his corner laundromat for sonic inspiration. “When It Happened I Got So Dizzy It Happened Again” is an extended, wordless composition with a tumbling, jerky rhythm that you probably wouldn’t have guessed came from a broken washing machine, but as soon as you know, you can’t unhear it. Rather than turning that beat into a looped 4/4 bed for a folk/pop/rock song, James just kept going further into musique concrete territory, creating a rhythmic sound collage with percussion, feedback, and many layers of drone that jerks and swells and spins and rinses your mind clean. A welcome experiment for Mr. Pitts, which I hope he builds upon in the future.
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And it’s fantastic! I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out the rhythm’s source. It has just enough herky-jerkiness to make it unsettling, except that you can still dance to it (we know because we tried it!).