Fans of Lou Reed will remember his now-infamous 1975 noise-rock experiment Metal Machine Music, if their ears aren’t still ringing more than three decades later. Now it’s being reformulated into a museum installation in California.
Reed and producer Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Kiss) helped kick off the exhibit this week at the — no kidding, here — Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, Calif. “The Metal Machine Trio: ‘The Creation of the Universe'” runs through April 15 at the University Art Museum in Long Beach, Calif.
In it, Reed collaborates with artists Ulrich Krieger and Sarth Calhoun to create an audio installation based on the album as an “ongoing improvised idea,” Reed told The OC Weekly. The original album — memorably described by Rolling Stone magazine as something similar to “the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator” — was basically an hour of roaring feedback and guitar skronks mixed at various speeds by Reed. Here, Reed says, “we’re creating new songs using different electronics and different sounds.”
The exhibit includes an ambisonic 3-D recreation, using 12 loudspeakers arranged to create a fully immersive 3-D sound lab. Visitors are invited, if they dare, to sit in strategically placed chairs throughout the exhibit space.
Here’s a look back at our thoughts on the Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Click through the titles for complete reviews …
LOU REED AND METALLICA – LULU (2011): As per usual, there were a lot of reviewers out there straining themselves to come up with clever ways to say how much they hated this record. This reminds me of St. Anger, which had a kind of brutal and claustrophobic intensity that really dug in. And speaking of brutal, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays were drenched in it — a young German dancer sexing it up with rich men, rampant violence, and even a collision with Jack the Ripper. So all of those comments about Reed’s “random mumblings” are more than a little off base. Me, I kinda dig it when Reed is croaking out “Jack, I beseech you!!” as the boys are grinding away behind him.
LOU REED – ANIMAL SERENADE (2004): Before I began paying attention to Lou Reed, these were the only songs of his that made any impression on me. All of Lester Bangs’ rants had no effect. Velvet who? Didn’t matter. There was as yet no ‘there’ there for my adolescent brain to muckle onto. It took a few years of living to figure out that, hey, there’s just something about that weird dude and his even weirder voice. Fast forward to 2004, and this live album. Instead of the early-Animal GlamRockOnSteroids sound, Lou’s very talented band delivers the goods in an elegant, almost cerebral fashion. The influence of wife and fellow art-weirdo Laurie Anderson, maybe?
FORGOTTEN SERIES: NICO – THE MARBLE INDEX (1969): An album that Lester Bangs famously claimed “scared the shit out of him,” though it failed commercially and disappeared without a trace upon its release. Its contemporary listeners could find nothing they related to in its glacial, European avant-garde sounds, but it later claimed a new set of admirers among the post-punk, Goth scene. Today, the album is often seen by critics as merely an interesting musical oddity, which fails to respect the haunting beauty of Nico’s song writing. Album producer John Cale, who Nico had previously worked with in the Velvet Underground, said: “It was so highly personal, that was why it was so powerful.”
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