It's a mystery as to just how Mike Bell's YouTube videos started showing up in Disaster Amnesiac's feed but somehow they did. Glad for it, too! Along with presenting great footage of Baltimore's AMAZING Motor Morons, a band that was playing shows during the time that I lived near enough to their town to have actually had a chance to take one in, had the information been presented, the channel also hipped this listener to Road Dogs, a 2020 release featuring Bell with drummer Ed Wilcox. Over four rather long tracks, Bell's instrument is the sounds of short wave and CB radios, from which he coaxes very primitive synthesizer type drones and whirls and beeps and pops. Voices of actual truckers are also very present, and indeed they represent a kind of lead vocal aspect. They often sound as if they're arguing about some type of issue, or maybe just debating the ins and outs of long haul etiquette. For a person that watched Smokey and the Bandit type of films a lot as child and having also spent some time working as a short haul truck driver, these samples resonate firmly. From a more objective perspective, they provide quite intimate glimpses into a very specific sector of the American economy, one that's actually still functional. As such, it's more than a little bit essential. Disaster Amnesiac has thought that Road Dogs should be submitted to the Library of Congress as evidence of such. Temple of Bon Matin drummer and student of the Late Great Milford Graves Ed Wilcox displays his singular drum style over and around trucker/short wave audio, with what sounds like a pretty sparse drum kit. Ed has mastered a kind of Free Improv/Garage Rock blend. His break beats chatter along in dialogue with Bell's sample work until he hits these really long and artful press rolls. Disaster Amnesiac has been a fan of his work since the late Andrew Palmer introduced it to me ten years back or so, and it's work that I love to hear and whenever possible online, see. The man's got the junk shop Jazz aesthetic down and it's highly digable, from the bass drum on up to the cracked cymbal bells. Wilcox's drumming meditations, as stated, are distinctively his own. Taken as a whole, the four main tracks of Road Dogs make for fascinating deep listening or amusing background sounds, their aspects mixed so that the elements of voices, radio wave frequencies, and drums dwell on equal plains within the sonic spectrum. Both listening styles have been utilized over here by I-10 in Tucson and they're both worth the time spent. Road Dogs is a very thoughtful and exceptional release both in the musical approaches of its players and its significance as a sociological window. It also comes with close to thirty minutes of bonus material in which one's ears can bathe in the untreated and unaccompanied voices from the CB chatter that Bell captured in 2020. To quote one of the predominant voices therein, "bye bye bye!!!!!"
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