01	One Nail Draws Another						14:58
	02	Two Looks At One End						07:03
	03	Dance Of The Awkward						02:24
	04	Both Your Houses						07:52
	05	Yellow Umbrella Gallery						05:10
	06	The Judas Goat						10:07
	07	Vagabonds Home						14:46

U Totem
self-titled
Cuneiform (rune 24)
USA 1990

Emily Hay, voice, flute, piccolo;
Sanjay Kumar, piano, electric keyboards, sitar;
Eric Johnson, bassoon, contrabassoon, soprano sax;
James Grigsby, guitar, bass, vibraphone, tapes;
David Kerman, drums, percussion, tapes;

with Kaoru, voice; Howard Shepard, voice; Maria Moran, guitar; Becky Heninger, cello; Herb Diamant, soprano sax; Curt Wilson, voice; Greg Conway, guitar; Georgia Grigsby, voice; Rod Poole, guitar; Daev Lizmi, guitar; Miriam Meyer, violin

Tracklist:
1. One Nail Draws Another - 14:54
2. Two Looks at One End - 6:57
3. Dance of the Awkward - 2:18
4. Both Your Houses - 7:49
5. Yellow Umbrella Gallery - 5:04
6. The Judas Goat - 10:01
7. Vagabonds Home - 14:46

total time 62:23


bob

I found this album in a used CD store, filed away in the jazz section of all places. It's definitely not jazz, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what this music is. I guess the term RIO describes it best, but this disc contains everything from beautifully melodic and "classical" sounding passages to upbeat rock to operatic vocals (Emily Hay has one of the best voices I've ever heard) to dark atmospherics. And the band tends to switch between these styles unpredictably and often.
As I mentioned in the review for U Totem's other album (Strange Attractors), the band supplements the usual rock instruments of guitar, keys, bass and drum with orchestral instruments such as flute, piccolo, piano and bassoon. It gives the band a very full, rich sound, without giving any "elevator music" feel at all. In fact, just the texture of the music alone makes this a great disc - couple that with the wonderful compositions found on this CD, and you end up with what is probably one of my top ten favorite albums of all time.

My favorite tracks are "One Nail Draws Another", "Dance of the Awkward" and "Yellow Umbrella Gallery". The first is an epic track which covers all sorts of musical ground and features cryptic lyrics about political intrigue in a fictional land. One listen to this track hooked me on the band. "Dance" is just what the title implies - a short, odd-time instrumental that sounds like it should be danceable, but you may end up with a broken leg if you try. It makes nice use of a sitar in the background. And "Yellow" is possibly the most avant sounding piece on the disc, with the music overlaid by sound clips of people discussing music (including one woman who sarcastically talks about "high falutin' artistic" music).

If you've been considering looking into the RIO sub-genre of prog, this album is a good place to start. It has its unusual and experimental aspects, but it's also accessible enough that I enjoyed it on first listen (even though I was pretty new to RIO myself at the time).


steve

Along with 5uu's Hunger's Teeth, this is one of the best progressive rock (actually, chamber rock would be more precise) albums of the 90's. These musicians play progressive music influenced mostly by the avant-garde classical scene. Some of these influences probably include composers like Frank Zappa, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, and bands like Henry Cow and Stormy Six. The music transforms almost every measure. As soon as a melody or theme is stated, it is replayed again in variation. Rhythms are, well, arhythmic. In fact, the rhythms are so complex that some passages feature the musicians playing in different time-signatures and tempos. It is absolutely fascinating for people heavily into music, but I will agree that it's not for everyone. Strangely, I have played this CD to some of my non-prog friends, and they loved it. So the dissonant, and abstract nature of the music also has a certain beauty that appeals to even casual music fans. Check it out (as well as the Motor Totemist Guild's City Of Mirrors); maybe you will agree with me that this is a masterpiece.
undated


brandon

U Totem, more than any other RIO band I've heard, do a fantastic job of building tension by contrasting conventionally pretty melodies with all-out avant "noise". All the tracks on this fantastic debut album have passages that traditional symphonic prog fans would find extremely appealing, but invariably they quickly veer off into more experimental territory. It's this juxtaposition of things that I find very appealing.
Highlights for me include the vocal sections of "One Nail Draws Another", which at several points involve three different vocalists singing in counterpoint in three different languages. It seems like a ridiculous idea, but somehow it sounds great in practice. I also enjoy the bouncy rhythms and melodies in "Two Looks at One End" and "Dance of the Awkward", both of which are pretty neat little upbeat pieces. The rest of the tracks are equally good; they are quite diverse and nearly impossible to describe.

Woodwind work is found throughout the album - lots of bassoon - and flute, bass and piano also take roles on the forefront. It's more of an ensemble than a rock band - indeed, fans of chamber rock may take to U Totem quite well. Emily Hay's voice provides a great focal point for parts of the songs - her high, precisely controlled voice is angelically beautiful (well, except perhaps in "Both Your Houses", in which she screams like a banshee for nearly 35 seconds straight). The mood of the music is overall much less dark and foreboding than most RIO bands; indeed, in large part it is quite upbeat sounding.

Accessible despite its chamber-ensemble tendencies and lack of grounding in the straight-ahead rock genre, I'd highly recommend this disc to anyone interested in the least in the RIO group of bands.




U Totem
Date of Release Jan 21, 1992

U Totem, both the band and the eponymous album, is the result of a merger between two avant-garde bands of progressive rock/Rock-In-Opposition allegiance: the David Kerman-led 5uu's and the James Grigsby-led Motor Totemist Guild. U Totem is a two-headed beast, a wonderful beast that is. But the integration of the two creative forces wasn't complete and one can feel important style shifts between the Grigsby-penned tunes and the Kerman collaborations. Grigsby is classically trained and shows great interest in contemporary music and Japanese culture, something that would become a leitmotiv in his future works with U Totem (Strange Attractors) and with his Motor Totemist Guild (All America City). Therefore, his pieces are full of complex and contrasting textures with a lot of emphasis put on acoustic instruments like flute and bassoon. Kerman's interest resides more into rock, but a rock derived from Henry Cow. His pieces share affinities with Grigsby's on the complexity level, but his are more structured in terms of rhythm, more driven by powerful drumming and lightning-fast keyboard chops. These differences can be very well felt in the album's highlights, the orientally-inclined "One Nail Draws Another" (although for a Grigsby tune, it rocks!) and the News from Babel-feel of Kerman's "The Judas Goat." This first album is very strong and has become a requirement to any avant-prog fan but, as a band, U Totem will deliver an even stronger opus, the conceptual album Strange Attractors. - Franзois Couture

1. One Nail Draws Another (Grigsby) - 14:58
2. Two Looks at One End (Kerman) - 7:03
3. Dance of the Awkward (Grigsby) - 2:24
4. Both Your Houses (Beck/Grigsby/Kerman/Kerman/Kumar) - 7:52
5. Yellow Umbrella Gallery (Grigsby/Traditional) - 5:10
6. The Judas Goat (Angelic Voices of Faith/Johnson/Kerman/Kerman/Kumar) - 10:07
7. Vagabonds Home (Grigsby/Herrin) - 14:46



U Totem - U Totem (1990)

Crash.

Crash, crash.

Three more crashes.

A low, moaning flute sound.

More crashes, and an electronic squeal.

A splatter of electric chamber music, rife with tone clusters.

Dense, chromatic figuration for piano and winds. Hints of Ligeti, "L'Homme Arm," rapid scalar motion, and -- what's that -- tonality?

Yes, it is. Sort of. This is the opening of U Totem's "One Nail Draws Another," a composition by James Grigsby and one of the great compositions in the history of experimental rock. In a mere fifteen minutes, it's practically a microcosm of Western music, from High Renaissance polyphony and contemporary chamber music to Broadway and rock music. Melodic, consonant vocal sections are offset by blasts of heavy, dissonant instrumental chamber rock. The music is never the same for more than a minute, and yet it holds together perfectly. Perhaps the most impressive moments are the two slightly martial-sounding sections of modal vocal polyphony, in which Emily Hay, Kaoru Mansour and Howard Shepard sing the same texts in three different languages -- an idea which may sound gimmicky or pretentious, but feels utterly right in the context of the piece.

Let me back up a bit. As you probably know if you're reading this page, U Totem was a short-lived collaboration between two other groups: Dave Kerman's aggressive avant-prog outfit, 5uu's, and James Grigsby's wildly eclectic chamber group, the Motor Totemist Guild. This, their first album, alternates between compositions by the two of them, and their different but related styles mesh quite well, producing something akin to a more accessible Henry Cow. In fact, a few passages actually recall specific Cow moments quite exactly, as in the heavy, angular guitar passage towards the beginning of "One Nail Draws Another" (probably inspired by a rather similar passage in Cow's "Living in the Heart of the Beast"), the jumpy bassoon work in "The Judas Goat," or the funereal wind melody in "Two Looks at One End," which reminds me quite a bit of a section in "Falling Away." Emily Hay also sounds slightly like Dagmar Krause, although her voice is unaccented and quite a bit less strident. All in all, though, the album is too eclectic and too warm to really sound like Cow -- nor, I think, is it as good.

, I have to admit, I don't love the album as much as some people do. There is "One Nail Draws Another," which is simply excellent. Another highlight is Kerman's "The Judas Goat," which alternates somber woodwind passages with wild atonal rock-outs that will take your breath away. In fact, the "chamber" passages have a surprising poise and delicacy that's generally absent from 5uu's music, and I'd like to hear Kerman write more for classical instruments. But, to my ears, the rest of the album doesn't live up to the standards of these two songs. I do like Grigsby's shorter pieces -- the fact that he managed to have rock instruments playing rock and classical instruments playing classical at the same time in "Yellow Umbrella Gallery" (to say nothing of the wonderful use of vocal samples even on top of that) is quite impressive. But Kerman was, in general, not as developed a composer in 1990 as he is now, so "Both Your Houses" and especially "Two Looks At One End," for all their great passages, don't seem to have quite enough material for their length, and wind up seeming a bit repetetive. Grigsby's long finale, "Vagabonds Home," is the most problematic; while it too contains some beautiful music, it goes a bit overboard in the area of fragmentation and winds up feeling kind of aimless. When he finally does get to a conventional "melody" at the end, he repeats it for an entire three and a half minutes, which definitely strikes me as overkill. The result is not that the album is in any way unpleasant, but just that it's too long. If it lost about fifteen minutes, it could be perfect. As it is, it's merely "very good." - Alex Temple [February 2002]


1. One Nail Draws Another - 14:58
2. Two Looks At One End - 7:03
3. Dance of the Awkward - 2:24
4. Both Your Houses - 7:52
5. Yellow Umbrella Gallery - 5:10
6. The Judas Goat - 10:07
7. Vagabonds Home - 14:48

Emily Hay - voice, flute, piccolo
Sanjay Kumar - piano, electric keyboards, sitar
Eric Johnson-Tamai - bassoon, contrabassoon, soprano sax
James Grigsby - bass, guitar, vibraphone, tapes
David Kerman - drums, percussion, tapes
with:
Kaoru Mansour - voice
Howard Shepard - voice
Maria Moran - guitar
Becky Heninger - cello
Herb Diamant - soprano sax
Curt Wilson - voice
Greg Conway - guitar
Georgia Grigsby - voice
Rod Poole - guitar
Daev Limzi - guitar
Miriam Meyer - violin







U Totem
Formed 1989

U Totem was formed by members of two bands: drummer/composer David Kerman's 5UU's and bassist/composer James Grigsby's Motor Totemist Guild. These two groups were active in the Los Angeles area beginning in the early 1980s. The groups recorded their own albums before collaborating on the LPs Elements and Shapuno Zoo. In 1989 Kerman and Grigsby were invited to perform at the 2nd International Art Rock Festival in Frankfurt, Germany. They enlisted Motor Totemist Guild vocalist/flautist Emily Hay and 5UU's keyboardist Sanjay Kumar for the performance, and U Totem was officially born. Eric Johnson (bassoon/soprano saxophone) joined for the recording on the band's self-titled debut disc, and guitarist Steve Cade joined for the recording of Strange Attractors.
U Totem's rock music has many influences, including Renaissance polyphony, twelve-tone serialism and Indonesian gamelan. The band has performed with Laotian and Cambodian musicians and appeared with such diverse artists as The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz, and Michael Nyman. - Jim Dorsch


1992 U Totem Cuneiform
1995 Strange Attractors Cuneiform







U Totem [USA]
Updated 9/7/01
Discography
U Totem (91)
Strange Attractors (94)


Reviews
U Totem is the combination of the 5UU's and the Motor Totemists Guild. They are very good. Their style reminds me of Messaien or Lutoslawski. The best description I can offer is they are what Henry Cow wanted to be. The levels of control in this band is astonishing. The compositions are chordally dense and can, at times, be as dark as Univers Zero! There are 5 people in U Totem. They play keyboards, percussion, flute, bassoon, bass, male and female vocals (the female singer is IMHO *better* than Annie Halsam from Renaissance - I compare them because they sound similar). I only have their self titled CD but there are several earlier things avaliable (from Wayside) from when they were 5UU/MTG. They are avant but not obnoxiously so, the music makes sense (to me). VERY PROG. To hear a band this adventurous producing work in the 90's is reassuring.
Strange Attractors disappointed me. Maybe because their self-titled is one of my favourite albums, and a real eye-opener as far as getting into RIO music goes. This is as complex, if not more so, but it relies more on cheesy synth-sounds, and that's the biggest gripe I have with it, especially since what I loved about their first one was the classical orchestration, which is less present here, and unsuccessfully mixed with that darned synthesizer. Seems James Grigsby concentrated fully on the story (intricate but uninteresting) and forgot about the songwriting (leaving David Kerman completely without writing-credits). A lot of magical moments though, but if you're getting only one of U Totem's albums, you should definitely go for the first one. Emily Hay delivers as usual. And you already know about 5uu's and Thinking Plague, right? -- Daniel