Build Back Better: Greatest Heads by Al Karpenter

Recently, Carlos Giffoni posted on social media that, as he was opening old boxes and finding treasures from the early 2000s, he started playing with the idea of writing a book about those crazy times in New York City and what they meant to him. The Venezuelan artist and experimental musician found a vibrant scene of noisy, free and wild sound experimentation when he moved to the city in the early 2000s. In fact, he was one of the main instigators, playing both solo and with the likes of Monotract and Death Unit, along with artists like Chris Corsano, Jim O’Rourke and Mike Connelly from Hair Police and Wolf Eyes, organizing mythical events events like No Fun Fest.

Sifting through his trove of old pictures and festival brochures, Giffoni asked if anyone would be interested in such a book and I realised how much I would love to read something like that. It was not long ago that I wrote a piece in remembrance of the recently deceased and sorely missed Miguel A. Garcia (aka Xedh), one of the main driving forces behind the mythic Larraskito Club in Bilbao and Zarata (meaning ‘noise’ in Basque) Fest around that same era. An explosive experimental scene in Bilbao and the Basque country that also included Ertz Festibal in Bera, MEM Festival in Bilbao and Arto Artian collective among others. As the great musician and cultural agitator Mattin, another key contributor to that community perfectly pointed out in an interview in The Wire #476 (October 2023): “the ethos could be described as a radical openness in regard to materials and approaches where different people are encouraged to collaborate independently of being part of this or that particular scene.”

All these memories, and a bit of nostalgic longing for that great outburst of wild, untamed, dangerous and exciting creativity come to my mind when I listen to Greatest Heads. I recall again a time when we all could sense a new musical language being born and taking shape in front of us. But most importantly, the album reminds me that the gates remain open for anyone who dares to enter and still offer endless possibilities for research and joy. It is not so much in terms of how much or for how long a certain sound can be twisted and re-shaped in new iterations, but how much it can still mean and communicate to those willing to engage.

Mattin’s output is so prolific that sometimes it becomes impossible to fully grasp for most of us. He’s part of the bands Billy Bao, Regler and Al Karpenter and has over 100 releases on different labels worldwide including recent collaborations with Keith Rowe, Annea Lockwood and Valerio Tricoli. But it is also amazingly diverse, unconventional, rough, uncomfortable, always thought-provoking and vividly stimulating. However, and curiously enough, his most (sort of) conventional rock band sonic mutation as Al Karpenter is possibly his most rewarding and fascinating to date.

Al Karpenter was originally the alias of Bilbao’s Alvaro Matilla, who edited Brutus fanzine, steeped in no‑wave and alt‑TV aesthetics in the mid-2000s, while performing in the duo KRPNTRS with Barbara Karpenter. They disbanded in 2012 and Mattin got involved around 2014, pushing the output of Karpenter into yet more uncompromising and daring territory. But it was only in 2022 that Al Karpenter truly became this shapeshifting confluence of noise, polyrhythm, and free‑rock we can now find behind Greatest Heads. On bass and guitar is Marta Sainz, joined by the kinetic percussion and analogue synth buzz of Enrique Zaccagnini, both veterans of sound experimentation and underground cultural activism in the Santander area. And of course, the whole thing is anchored by the deep, multi‑instrumental force of Mattin whose contributions include electronics, harmonium, double bass, drums and production.

Their music has been compared and associated (among many others) to the likes of Alan Vega, Lux Interior, Pere Ubu, and even and very particularly Scott Walker when referring to Matilla’s idiosyncratic voice, as well as to Iancu Dumitrescu, Iannis Xenakis, the earliest and most ragged bits of Royal Trux, Reynols or The Dead C when referring to the rough but rich textures of their sound. All of which are certainly well put when applied to specific points of the group’s extensive palette. But such comparisons can only offer a glimpse of the whole picture. Al Karpenter’s sound may seem at times chaotic and all over the place on the surface but on closer listen reveals an extraordinary internal cohesion, largely sustained by Matilla’s singularly unmissable and weirdly hypnotic vocal delivery.

Greatest Heads is the fifth album in their career and follows and somehow crowns the collaborative research and development done on the two previous records, The Forthcoming and Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante released by New York’s Ever/Never label in 2023 (the latter a joint album recorded live in Berlin with CIA Debutante, the Paris based baroque futurist duo of Paul Bonnet and Nathan Roche and the former featuring key contributions from Triple Negative, Sunik Kim and Dominic Cole). By all accounts, the unplanned group improvisation they shared with Triple Negative and Sunik Kim at London’s Cafe Oto in 2022 seems especially shapeshifting for the development of the sonic fabric embedded in these albums. Now and thanks to the detailed razor-sharp clarity of mastering engineer Rashad Becker, that textural melange feels truly and fully conceived in the extraordinary collection of tracks found in Greatest Heads.

When trying to put some words to this, I sense a polyrhythmic urgency weaving through shards of free music, punk rock intensity, obscure shadows of spectralism and processed electronics that creep like insects under the skin. African Head Charge meets Los Angeles Free Music Society while a spectral echo of William Burroughs’ spoken-word albums lingers around.

“We are all carpenters of life… But we are not good at it…” Al Karpenter chants with his deep, slightly nasal voice, hinting perhaps at an idea of building and rebuilding using the debris and the discarded remains of our ultra-accelerated consumerism. Powerful imagery, poignant and pointed messages mixed with intriguingly surrealist passages that I can’t help but connect with another great unsung hero of the Spanish underground like Victor Nubla and to the likes of Jaco or Zozobra of Magia Roja label run by Viktor of Dame Area. As I surf in lurching waves of distortion in an ocean of abrasive yet silken sound, feral and tender, inhospitable and welcoming at the same time, I think of the Sun City Girls and see myself dialling through a distorted hiss full of static noise, connecting to a remote worldwide Sublime Frequencies radio station.

Tuning, detuning and retuning in different channels, like pieces of a puzzle that needs redoing in my ears. Or perhaps reassembling the debris of a big bang that floats around. Fragments of a once-conventional album that you can recombine now into a completely different collection of songs and share the fun Al Karpenter’s crew had in the process. Or why not? Echoes of that wild early-2000s era that come to us recombined and adapted to these troubled times to make perfect sense again. Layered, surprising, richly conflicted, Greatest Heads is a record of rugged elegance and strange grace that truly deserves your attention.