Matchmaking

Irwin Chusid presents Hello, Autumn’s “Never Getting Married” and Robert Alberg’s “I Been Single All My Life” on WFMU, 9/6/2006 – Between 1997 and 2002, Irwin Chusid and Michelle Boulé hosted Incorrect Music, a weekly program on WFMU in which they played an hour of what is commonly known as “outsider music.” The name of the show was quite diplomatic in that it didn’t quite condemn the work being presented so much as acknowledge that the oddball obscurities did not conform to anyone’s ideas of what music should be – mainstream, avant garde, or otherwise.

Much of the music aired on the show (some of which has since been featured in Chusid’s book Songs in the Key of Z and its attendant cd anthologies) is astounding, compelling stuff; documents of artists who seem to completely lack the sort of self-consciousness that holds most people back from either revealing too many embarassing aspects of their personal life in song, or creating music that ignores the very basics of musical composition and performance out of incompetence and/or a skewed vision. Incorrect Music was the show that got me into WFMU as a teenager, and its influence is still rippling through the world. Its aesthetic is gradually sinking into the margins of mainstream culture, most notably in the cult success of the Langley Schools Music Project reissue, which simply would not exist without the efforts of Mr. Chusid.

Though the Incorrect Music program is gone, Chusid has not completely abandoned the world of “outsider” music, choosing instead to fold the sort of tunes that would have been earmarked for IM into his regular weekly show on WFMU, where they sit in the context of a lot of relatively normal recordings. In this segment from Wednesday afternoon’s show, he plays a fairly recent song by a young woman known as Hello, Autumn whose work he sort of accurately describes as sounding “like Cat Power fed through the Jandek wringer,” though in some ways it’s probably more fascinating for being like the lyrical intent of early Liz Phair warped by the sort of whiney entitlement fostered by Sex And The City reruns and bad self-help books. In its way, it is not thematically far removed from a lot of contemporary pop sung by young women – she’s striving for empowerment and social leverage, but happens to be lacking in status, sexual charisma, and good fortune. It’s a bit hard to get through the song, but it’s undeniably fascinating in its apparent lack of self-awareness and total commitment to expressing the sort of sentiment that is often best kept to oneself if just because it is so unflattering and self-defeating. If nothing at all, recording this track and putting it out there for public consumption is evidence of some kind of bravery.

Chusid follows up the Hello, Autumn cut with a somewhat unnerving track by a troubled man named Robert Alberg that he suggests is the musical, emotional and thematic mate to her “Never Getting Married.” He’s exactly right. They seem to answer each other like a bizarre, bleak mating call that goes unheard by either. Though Alberg sounds totally insane and is in fact locked away for producing the bio-chemical weapon ricin at his home in Washington state, hearing the recordings back to back makes you want to set the two songs up on a blind date. Surely for every terminally lonely song in the world, there is another that it ought to be paired up with, if just for companionship if not a full-on love connection. However, since it’s very clear that Hello, Autumn’s song has sort of convinced itself that it’s got it going on, it may be holding out for some dreamy Conor Oberst tune, and poor ol’ Robert Alberg will continue to be single for all his life. (Click here for more music by Hello, Autumn.)