47, ovarian cancer
53, heart failure
58, complications from pneumonia
54, breast cancer
46, self-inflicted gunshot
59, pancreatic cancer
38, motorcycle accident
48, breast cancer
58, overdose (“yet to be determined,” “toxicology report,” and “bottles of various prescription medications”)
35, drowning
46, died in a fall
57, sudden heart attack
50, heart attack suspected
42, heart and kidney failure
45, car accident
59, complications from a brain hemorrhage
49, killed himself by hanging
59, lung cancer
40, sudden cardiac failure
50, ovarian cancer
I think that anyone would get the picture here. No peaceful, natural deaths. It was either bad luck or bad living. Or, I guess, a bad attitude (the suicides).
FEBRUARY 20
Nik sent me his latest CD. I found the package in my mailbox (he always mailed his CDs to me). I undid the undecorated, restrained brown paper packaging. The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2, it said on the spine of the CD jewel case. Volume two of twenty volumes. But he counted backward, so the next album would be the first—and presumably the last—volume in this epic series. The O.O.W. was released on his experimental record label, Pause Collective. He began it in the mid-nineties. Every six to twelve months he would release an album in the series. Each CD had an edition number. Mine was number two, which meant after Nik’s copy, I got the very next one. Always it worked this way. There was a handful of fans (let’s be clear here: with the exception of Ada and me, everyone was either an ex-girlfriend or an ex-bandmate) on the mailing list, but I was always number two.
Not only did each disc have a limited edition (10? 12?) handmade cover, but each cover fit into a larger piece. This CD cover would fit, I knew, with the eighteen previous CDs in the series to make a huge self-portrait collage of Nik. Each cover worked on its own but also played a part in a larger mosaic. Just to have the second-to-last piece felt like a long battle almost won—were we really coming so close to completing the epic, endless thing, or would he extend the plan? I didn’t see how he could get out of the finite rubric he had created.
In addition to the CD, there would be a vinyl release (which would just be the 12-by-12 cover with an old dummy piece of vinyl in it—he didn’t actually have the ability to press vinyl). But the paper center label would be carefully covered with one of Nik’s hand-painted adhesive labels. His Pause Collective was strictly for wackier, non-pop experiments. Its elaborate center label featured a color photocopy of a pen-and-ink snake carefully drawn in hundreds of hatched lines with a distinctly occult/medieval feel. The “logo” contained the word Pause hidden in the complicated hatches of the snake. The name of the album, the copyright date, the catalog number, and the name of the artist (uh, Nik Worth) were inked on top of the photocopy in a careful, matched script of Nik’s devising. The back of the LP usually had liner notes. These would be written on the cardboard in the same font. A photocopy, or sometimes a typed copy, of the notes would be pasted carefully in the Chronicles. And another copy of the liner notes would be folded up and tucked next to the CD in the digital edition, as well as reproduced in a photocopied and barely readable size on the back of the CD case itself. It was all quite systematic and gratuitously laborious. I loved its elaboration and counted on it. How deflated I would feel if he ever just handed me a blank paper sleeve containing only a blank compact disc with his name and the title Sharpie-scrawled across it. (Nik did make some faux bootlegs that had a cultivated amateur feel to them, but he never had the taste for the sloppy or the minimal. Even his bootlegs appeared to be made by obsessive fans with acute horror vacui.)
I unfolded and read the liner notes for The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2:
When I first met Nik Worth back in 1978, he was in two bands and not yet a star. He fronted the power pop band the Fakes. They would have three songs in the top ten by 1980. And back then I already guessed it. There were the clean, perfectly rendered songs of heartache and youth. The crystalline gorgeous harmonies got them compared to the Beatles. But they were also minimal in production, they never overwhelmed the songs with sentiment and bombast. They had a pared-down, solid unadorned sound. They resisted the ubiquitous processing of the time. (Remember gated reverb? Have you listened to any of those records lately?) They bucked the trends, the boilerplate, and yet—or maybe I should say, and so—attained top-seller status. That would have been career enough for anyone. But, as we also know, Worth also fronted the Demonics, and anyone familiar with their two brilliant albums knows that Worth was already testing boundaries and breaking new ground.
When he broke up the band in the early eighties, he embarked on a marvelous, unprecedented path of experiment and innovation. He would release a brilliant Fakes album every year, each one charting and succeeding. But he also nurtured a new path leading to his releasing two solo records under his own name, Nik Worth. These were made on a four-track in the living room of his isolated estate in the hills of Topanga, Western Lights. He was holed up for months, and rumors of a car accident or a drug habit multiplied. The truth was, Worth had gone through a nasty divorce from model Alize Clement. During the divorce proceedings, he was driving his vintage Triumph motorcycle on the PCH and crashed. No one knows the full details of the accident, but he retreated to his private hermitage in the mountains to recover. Part of his recovery included the recording of these ache-and-angst solo records. The critics praised the new direction. Both of the albums have cult followings, but neither of them charted.
Then there was nothing for four years. Until 1990, no releases from Worth except the Fakes’ album Here Are Your Fakes, a double album of previous hits and some unreleased songs from the vault. It was the top-charting album of 1989, and fans scoured it for clues about the future of Nik Worth and the Fakes. Nik Worth, we later learned, had been living as a Buddhist monk in a monastery in New Mexico. He took a vow of seclusion and adopted the Dharma name Jikan, which means “silence.” Would he ever record again? In 1990, we got our answer. Worth got the old lineup of the Fakes back together and recorded an all-new studio album, TAKE ME HOME AND MAKE ME FAKE IT. It is generally considered to be the sine qua non of nineties power pop albums. Then, in 1992, Nik Worth also released an album called The Ontology of Worth: Volume 20, on his own mysterious label, Sound Traces (later to become Pause Collective). This album was apparently the first of twenty planned releases starting with twenty and counting backwards to one. As soon as you dropped the stylus, you were hit with the central thematic conceit of the Ontology: side one contained six bled-together linked songs about a character called Man Mose. The entire side two, infamously, contained one “song,” a cacophony of feedback experiments that were somehow tied to the story of Man Mose. Full of cryptic and hermetic references, Man Mose (one gathers) lives in tunnels under the streets and hears things through the ground as he moves from place to place. He apparently makes or records his “music” all the time. Side two is the music MM hears (makes?). Underground music, indeed. Who would have guessed that what we were all waiting for was a collection of atonal, arrhythmic assault compositions mixed with concept sound poems?
Undeterred by a rather chilly reception, Worth would go on to produce eighteen more of these albums over the next twenty years, each more “underground” than the last.
What have we learned about Worth from this long journey of slow baroque noise, garage concrete music, Indonesian gamelan evocations, electronics, acoustic low-fi living room experiments, trance and Ramayana monkey chants, sound collages, narrative and anti-narrative, soundtracks for unmade films, dissonance and odd slack-key guitar tunings, Komoso ametric and polymetric music, tape loops and audiotape manipulations, dub and sampling, prepared guitar and piano modifications, silence and his so-called “sounded silence
”? And always in there somewhere, however faintly, Man Mose appearing and disappearing like the trope that refused to die? Does the willfully obscure and difficult music play against and in effect count on the need to make order of it, to make it cogent, what Karl Popper described as “the intrinsic and constant drive to find congruence”?
Critics have called it “naive and embarrassing” (Village Voice, 1992). THe Ontology has also been called “the most pretentious work of any rock star, anywhere, ever” (New Musical Express, 1995). And about onTologY: Volume 3: “A painful illustration of the limits of autodidacticism” (Rolling Stone, 2001). But to those of us who stuck with it, there has been an undeniable power in these accumulations. If approached with an open mind and an open heart (and perhaps some mind-expanding hallucinogens), and if approached with a willingness to dwell in the endless runout groove of another’s obsession, these albums can lead you on a riveting journey. Is Volume 2, in fact, the penultimate record? Is this epic, eccentric freak ride coming to an end? Listen and judge for yourself. As Worth has said, “It’s all there, it’s all there.”
Mickey Murray
Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music
The New School for Social Research
I slipped the CD in my purse to listen to on my drive to work. I sat at my computer and went, as I always do, straightaway to Ada’s blog. I saw that she, too, had received Nik’s CD:
lowercase a:
daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker
February 20
As my loyal readers know, nearly every day I run from the West Village to the river. Today’s run stood out from the others. Yes, that’s right, I got a new record from my eccentric uncle Nik. (For those of you late to the lowercase a party, you can read what I have posted about him here and here and here.) As I ran through the sliver of the west side park, always in sight of the Hudson, my ipod was loaded with my uncle’s new release, The Ontology of Worth, Volume 2. Those of you who frequent this space know how much I dig my intense uncle’s complicated self-published recording career. And you might also know his experimental stuff is not my favorite, especially his epic (ahem) experimental stuff. I prefer the pop stuff, the side projects, the low-fi simple songs. He can make perfect three-minute pop songs that will hypnotize you and haunt your every waking second. But the epic dirge pretensions of the multivolume work? No thanks. The avant-garde (I guess, but avant-garde circa 1975) noise/song cycles, the hermetic codes and references, the doom and the darkness that seem to deepen with each volume. Not my style, way too ponderous and concentrated for me. It’s at best annoying and at worst unsettling (maybe that’s the other way around). But, as I am your ever-open-minded lowercase a, I touched play. No music on this at first, just spoken words. “Soundings,” he calls it. I gave up guessing (but so much about the fun of music is that kind of guessing at what is coming and then being surprised or disappointed, being satisfied or being bored). I let the “Soundings” wash over me as I hit the rhythm of the run. I went with it. And wow, I must tell you, it blew me away. It was the perfect mix of the moment and the sound. And it also gave me an idea. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you what it is!
a.
I hadn’t had a listen yet, and I felt a pang of regret reading Ada’s “review.” Often Nik would review his own records for the Chronicles. He had several rock-journalist pseudonyms that he used when he wrote these reviews. Many, of course, were hyperbolic raves. Some were carefully considered and annotated essays that were in fact fascinating exegeses by the artist. And quite a few were scathing, harsh hatchet jobs or faint, lethal dismissals. Nik would sometimes send me copies of the reviews with the CD. I would make a point of not reading them until after I had a clear, unframed listen of my own. In this case, there was a “clipping” included, but it was an interview from Nik’s fantasy fanzine, Butter Your Toast:
BUTTER YOUR TOAST
Our Girl Anna Conda Tracks Down the Elusive Nik Worth Western Lights, Topanga Canyon, California Today, fans, is the day. Volume 2 of The Ontology of Worth has hit the stores. Looks like we are getting very near the end! Don’t miss it, or the free promo poster, and don’t forget the limited-edition covers all work together to make three different unique images (back copies are still available for the previous eighteen volumes, but hurry—they are limited and are already commanding high prices on eBay). We have been informed that once these discs are gone, no more will be made!
Nik Worth, aka Nikki Trust, né Nikolas Kranis, pop wunderkind turned underground wizard, has agreed to talk to us about his latest release:
Butter Your Toast: What made you decide not to use music on some of these tracks?
Nik Worth: Why not? I like to experiment. Call it a Futurist sound experiment, a dada poemlet.
BYT: Yeah, okay, but when are we going to get some pop songs?
Nik Worth: The Pause Collective is not a pop label.
BYT: How do you expect your fans to listen to this?
Nik Worth: I expect complete and total attention for all of my work. I want my fans to drop whatever else is going on and devote themselves. I want them to listen, with rapt and dire attention, to the prior eighteen volumes, in order, and then I want them on their knees, eyes closed, with the whole fifty-six minutes of the CD played at top volume. I want them to repeat that undistracted deep listening until they see the patterns, themes, and ideas that link and resonate through the entire nineteen volumes. I want them to understand any failings they may perceive in the work as part of its terrible beauty, and I want them to embrace the mystery and beauty of the project as a whole. Then I want them to hold those thoughts and feelings and wait breathlessly for the final chapter—Volume 1. Soon to come. That’s all I expect.
BYT: And when will you drop the final chapter, Volume 1?
Nik Worth: Sooner than you think. This year. I’m almost done.
BYT: And?
Nik Worth: It cannot, I repeat, cannot, be topped. This truly will be the last record.
I know. There was no mistaking the finality of his statements. But to be fair, I had heard things along these lines for years.
FEBRUARY 21
I do all my listening in my car. It is the only thing that makes my commute bearable. Each day I get up earlier to “beat” traffic. I had begun to leave my house while it was still dark. I watched the light gradually press behind the mountains; the glow of the headlights of the few other cars made me feel as if I were part of a secret, determined club of commuters. I inserted Nik’s CD and tapped up the volume button to a nearly uncomfortably loud level. I wanted to feel the music as well as hear it. In the anticipatory silent seconds before any sound could be heard, I felt a little lift of desire and possibility, something that felt marginally like wanting a cigarette or a morning coffee or, more aptly perhaps, starting the last chapter of a book you have been reading for a long time. I had a second to wonder, breathlessly, what world would come. This little edge of wondering right before was an active part of the pleasure: the matrix of expectation based on the past, the thrill of the unknown that isn’t fully unknown because the work is from such a familiar, intimate source. I knew, in a larger sense, what was likely to come. I, after all, had heard so many of Nik’s CDs—each and every one of his CDs, which was no small amount—all of his CDs, as far as I could tell. And listened closely, listened with devotion and attention. It should be somewhat predictable by now, shouldn’t it?
Nik’s voice came on. He spoke instead of singing, and there wasn’t any music.
A spoken-word intro? Really? But then I stopped. I listened. I knew how to listen to him. He had earned that unique faith that comes from knowing the work and the person making the work. He wasn’t reciting words, but rather rhythmic sounds. Wordish sounds. They were nonsense but compelling somehow. He chopped a sound and let it hang there, unrushed. I felt a movement forward, a lean in me toward a future second. I picked up the CD case. My left hand gripped the top of the steering wheel. I glanced a
t the thickening traffic on southbound 170, made a minor calculation that I made so often: a person in control of a speeding car (seventy miles per at the moment) could momentarily not look at the road she traveled but could sneak a look at a piece of writing, or at the radio controls or a telephone keypad, and the risk that something would happen that would require her eyes and attention—well, it was worth taking, as it was unlikely to have any consequences given the brevity of these glances. The CD said: “Track One: Soundings (32:10).”
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