The music of Austin based psych drone collective Water Damage is guided by the pleasing dictum “maximal repetition, minimal deviation”. Operating within simple structures and shaky guard rails the sound they produce is vibrant, driving, and hypnotic. The band have just been in Europe playing a short tour of the low countries and perhaps to mark this visit Cardinal Fuzz are reissuing their first two albums Repeater and 2 Songs.
No doubt you will have heard stuff like this before but I feel that Water Damage have, through careful choices, avoided some of the familiar pitfalls. Psych rock trance music often gets spoiled by ego or diverted either by arrangement or the chaotic indulgence of none. Here everyone starts together and the end is decided by the length of a reel of tape. There are no solos, at least not in the usual sense, no crescendos, no breakdowns, just everyone rolling with the looping groove until it stops.
While it is conceptually outlined and a degree of discipline is involved to keep it on track this is not clinical, cerebral art music, it’s hot ‘in-the-red’ minimalism, blown out and overwhelming. The impulse is elemental and seemingly eternal, ecstatic trance music for beyond the rational space. It taps the unconscious, it’s pre-language. Or post language, or simply outside of it. It doesn’t tell stories, there’s no narrative, only sound. It is music of love, music of purity, of the stretched elastic moment. In this sense it’s holy, a channel to the divine.
The tracks on Repeater are numbered after their tape reels, the two shorter ones on side two slightly diverging from the plan. 2 Songs features one full reel per side, gaining the helpfully evocative titles ‘Fuck This : Reel 11’ and ‘Fuck That : Reel 13’. The seven piece line up on Repeater is joined by Mari Maurice (More Eaze) for 2 Songs, but the make up of the collective live and since is more fluid, the only rule being that there must be two bass players and two drummers. A rule which ensures the ragged and robust quality of their music while also underscoring the lack of ego involved.
They’re definitely a band for annoying your friends who don’t really ‘get’ all that weird music you like
“so it just goes like this?”
“yep”
“for how long?”
” …’bout twenty minutes”
“oh.”
The mantra of maximal repetition, minimal deviation does kind of mean all the pieces are essentially the same, making comparing and contrasting them somewhat redundant. Still, I would argue that the players and the idea of the band gel a little more on 2 Songs than on the earlier Repeater. ‘Fuck That’ has twinkling bells and a repeating organ(?) note that make it feel brighter than the dense buzz of ‘Fuck This’.
Not the sort of band to play the hits exactly but also undoubtedly, and perhaps essentially, an incredible live experience. It isn’t hard to tune it down into the background but Water Damage is music to get lost in, turn it up, let it drown everything else out, still your jabbering mind, merge with the drone. Embrace its sensory overload as a pathway, if not as far as enlightenment then at least to calm. Which might just be the same thing. The sound is an ever changing constant, like a river you step into. Beneath, before and beyond time or language, a garage rock band tearing it up on the universal frequency.
