The Tinklers are the duo of Charles Brohawn and
Chris Mason, two Baltimore-based multimedia artists whose musical
pursuits place them squarely in the Half Japanese tradition of
deliberate artlessness, though with an often more accessible, rather
childlike playfulness.
Although the first Tinklers album did not come out
until 1990, the roots of the band are in the mid-'70s performance art
scene in their native Baltimore. Charles Brohawn was a painting and
sculpture student at the Maryland Institute College of Art when he met
Chris Mason, a Minnesota native who had moved to Maryland to study
poetry in the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University. At
that time, the leading light of the Baltimore avant-garde music scene
was Jad Fair's Half Japanese, a duo that Brohawn in particular found
immensely influential. (Mason was more interested in the theories of
John Cage at the time.) Brohawn and Mason formed the Tinklers in 1977 as
a four-piece noise rock band with a rhythm section, but by 1979, they
were, like Half Japanese, a two-guitar duo.
Unlike Half Japanese, however, the Tinklers
maintained their interest in both visual and performance art while
pursuing their musical activities; early Tinklers gigs usually took
place at local art galleries at which Brohawn's paintings and drawings
were on display. An early project was called "The Tinklers' History of
the World": Brohawn and Mason constructed a 50-foot-long time line
(reproduced on the cover of their debut album, Casserole) and performed
while walking along it, stopping at various points and performing songs
related to that moment in history. This multimedia project and two
others, Home by the River and Our Childrens' Childrens' Worlds, were
self-published as books in the '80s. During this time, Mason also
started a cassette-only label, Widemouth Tapes, as a spoken-word and
performance medium for local poets and artists. Oddly, it wasn't until
1986 that Widemouth released a self-titled tape of the Tinklers' early
recordings, some of which date back to the band's earliest days.
In 1989, the Tinklers came to the attention of
Kramer of Shimmy-Disc Records, who signed the duo and produced their
first album, Casserole. A more disturbing record than the Tinklers'
sunnier early works, with unsettling undercurrents and topics taken from
rather depressing news stories like the shooting of an elderly woman by
SWAT cops during an eviction gone awry, Casserole was an atypical
debut. The 1992 follow-up, Saplings, was closer in content to the
Tinklers' early performances, as was the celebratory EP James Brown,
released on Washington, D.C.'s Simple Machines label the same year. The
1993 LP Crash and the science fiction-themed 1995 EP UFOs found Brohawn
and Mason moving into a slightly more mainstream arena, dropping the
30-second song fragments and allowing a slightly more mature world view
into their music. After a four-year layoff, the Tinklers returned in
1999 with the aptly-titled Slowpoke, an album that had been
self-recorded on Brohawn's four-track over the preceding four years,
released on their friend and artistic cohort Diana Froley's Serious
Records label.
Tracklist
| 1 |
Trees Like To Rot In The Forest |
3:10
|
| 2 |
I Got To Be Patient |
1:59
|
| 3 |
One Meatball |
2:39
|
| 4 |
Pow |
0:20
|
| 5 |
The Dodo Bord &The CalvariaTree |
2:33
|
| 6 |
Chugga-Chugga |
0:55
|
| 7 |
The Future |
2:19
|
| 8 |
Zoom |
0:26
|
| 9 |
Around To Maryanne's |
3:15
|
| 10 |
Hmm |
0:30
|
| 11 |
Quack Quack Beep Beep |
0:52
|
| 12 |
Waah |
0:27
|
| 13 |
Dinosaurs Are Better |
2:19
|
| 14 |
What It Wags |
2:44
|
| 15 |
Lucky In Love |
4:40
|
| 16 |
Zone Fare |
2:57
|
| 17 |
Cheesewolf |
2:28
|
| 18 |
Allergic To Everything |
2:41
|
| 19 |
Come On Down To The Beach |
2:53
|
| 20 |
Kid With A Curved Spine |
1:58
|
| 21 |
Paul Bunyon |
11:16 |