Alexis Gideon’s scripted work is still unpredictable

By Jamie Gadette
Published: September 22nd, 2009 | 12:00am

Alexis Gideon is reluctant to discuss his earliest musical pursuits. After some persuasion, you might get him to spill about the band that performed songs detailing specific characters and episodes from Saved By the Bell, or Planet Springsteen and the Long Island Sound, whose mission was to transform all of planet Earth into New Jersey. It’s important to revisit these long-gone projects — not for laughs or kitsch value — but to understand the improvisational cycle that informs Gideon’s career, and how with his latest release, Video Musics (Sick Room), he is rounding the bend to full circle.

The Chicago native started out on a typical pre-teen guitar-diet of Jimi Hendrix and later gravitated toward jazz, which he studied for years before diving into more experimental noise. In college, he met Mike O’Neill, and together the two musicians started forming one-off groups for kicks, entering Battle Of the Band competitions under the name Battle Of the Bands, for example. Eventually, they stopped messing around and formed Princess, a cross-dressing, avant-garde hip-hop duo that, like the less-serious pursuits, incorporated elements of improv into its stage shows. After a while, though, the spontaneous aesthetic wore thin.

“When you improvise a lot, you develop a personal language and end up repeating yourself,” Gideon says. So while producing songs on the fly at first seemed incredibly liberating, it eventually became a crutch Gideon employed when the creative well ran dry.

“The process made me want to focus on more composition,” he says, which is exactly what he did when Princess fell apart. O’Neill relocated to New York, where he now plays with Ladybug Transistor and MEN (the brainchild of Le Tigre’s JD Samson and Johanna Fatemen), and Gideon moved to L.A., where he composed premeditated albums.

Both of his 2007 Sick Room releases, Welcome Song and Flight Of the Liophant, garnered Gideon a reputation as somewhat of an eccentric, mostly because people didn’t quite know what to make of his vocals — think Mike Patton when singing; drrrty Southern MC when rhyming — paired with face-melting guitar solos, distortion pedals, and playful electronic beats.

Video Musics is the sum of his Mr. Bungle–Kool Keith–Residents influences plus one hell of an intricate storyline and multimedia presentation. The new CD-DVD is a hip-hop opera loosely based on Hungarian mythology, folklore, and ballads set to claymation and animation. Live, Gideon projects images on a white sheet while playing glockenspiel, melodica, and guitar, applying various effects, looping sounds, and sequencing programmed beats with a DVD player.

The Hungarian mythology — which reflects Gideon’s ancestry — provided welcome structure to a rough concept he’d been batting around since the days of Princess. Surprisingly, he enjoyed a great deal of flexibility adhering to pre-existing material. In contrast to rapping freestyle, memorizing lyrics allowed Gideon to relax and focus on the music.

“There’s something about hip-hop that I find very challenging — just the sheer amount of words that go into a song,” Gideon describes. “It was very freeing to have these texts, and from there, to generate lyrics. To think, ‘Here is this story that has to come through.’”

Listening to Gideon’s super-fly flow, it’s hard to believe he’s ever at a loss for words, particularly on Video Musics’ standout, “Brimstone Blaine,” whose refrain sounds like it’s dragged through molasses for ridiculously cool effect. Like the rest of the five-chapter album, it’s freaky fun whose takeaway is surprisingly deep.

“The second chapter [“Clement Mason”] is from an old ballad — these masons build a castle that keeps falling down, which is a very common trope. In the process they are killing someone and putting their ashes into the mortar to make it stronger,” he explains.

For Gideon’s next project, Video Musics II, he condensed highlights from the classic Chinese epic, Journey To the West (or Monkey as it’s often translated in the West), into an hour-long electro-folk hip-hop opera, outsourcing animation to friends Ezra Daniels, Becca Taylor, and Shelley Short (his current tourmate, whose new album he played on and produced).

His recent work, playing guitar in CarCrashLander and recording-producing White Hinterland’s forthcoming record, has buoyed his interest in collaboration. He even thinks about, down the road, reuniting with O’Neill and revisiting unscripted creativity.

“Right now, there’s not much room in my performance for improvisation,” Gideon says. “But things go in cycles. I’m sure there will be some point in my life where I do that again.”

—