Features

Bill Laswell: The Bassist with a Thousand Faces

Photo by Guy van de Poel

With many albums of hard-core dub to his credit, including his pair of depth-charged Sacred System releases, the hypnotic bass rumble and pinging atmospherics of classic roots reggae flavor much of his work. Fantasizing heady late-night sessions and shadowy chambers well-stocked with smoke and mirrors, with visions of dub deity Lee “Scratch” Perry in his Black Ark Studio skanking in my head, I’d initially suggested to Laswell’s publicist that the producer and I might hang out at his mixing deck sometime.

“Oh, I never let people into the studio,” Laswell informs me when I wonder out loud why we’re sitting in this restaurant rather than digging his secret unreleased Miles Davis sessions together across the Hudson. “We just work in the studio and every second counts. Some people never leave the studio. But I arrive about noon and never work for more than four or five hours. Everything is focused. And if something isn’t working, I might leave after an hour and rethink it at home. I never work late at night and I never work in the morning. We never eat or drink in the studio. We just come in and do it—boom! That’s how it’s always been. I really don’t think I’ve been in that studio past seven o’clock in like five years.”

Still on the topic of studio etiquette, Laswell mentions that he’d recently recorded a new album with the aforementioned Perry. “People say he’s a maniac, that he’s crazy,” says Laswell. “But he was totally professional—and totally straight. You’d expect trouble, but he really gave everything he had. I paid him, of course, and in this business when you hand somebody money, they usually do their job.”

Although he long ago eschewed production and mixing for hilarious onstage chicanery, Perry remains one of Laswell’s primary role models. Like Perry, Laswell works quickly and intuitively, never second-guessing or overthinking his decisions. “If I do something, it’s done,” he says. “I never go back and redo it, no matter what.”

The evidence of his two new Method of Defiance albums, clearly suggests that there isn’t a honky on the planet who is making better reggae albums than Bill Laswell at the moment. Where Jahbulon is a more or less orthodox album of songs featuring various vocalists, Incunabula is serious next-level instrumental mischief. A third album, Dub Arcanum Arcandrum, will consist of remixes by dub giants Scientist and Mad Professor, while a still-untitled fourth album will deliver what Laswell simply refers to as “weird instrumental stuff” and “remix playing.”

Incunabula’s title signifies “beginning,” or “return to the source,” and Method’s music reflects that intent. Jahbulon, meanwhile, condenses “Jah” for God of Israel, Jahweh, “bol” for the Christian demon Baal, and “on” for the Egyptian god Osiris. “It’s a secret code word in Masonry,” explains Laswell, whose titles and album art are thoroughly saturated with icons and symbology borrowed from thousands of years of esoteric lore. Laswell is a serious and wide-ranging reader, but just how seriously are we meant to take this encyclopedic mash-up of codes and imagery?

“It’s camouflage, chaos, fun and it throws people off the track,” he replies. “Sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don’t. But information— that is, exposing people to different potentials—is key. I like to include random themes, metaphors and predictions, but none of it is philosophical.

“To me it all comes down to two points,” he continues. “Existence lies in the tonal universe, where everything is understood and harmonically correct. And then there’s the nagual, which is the unknown. I tend to hope I’m based more in the nagual because I prefer the unknown. A lot of these things drift in from the research of people like William Burroughs, Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley, and I always hope it’s not too overbearing.”

I try in vain to draw Laswell out about some of his favorite and most embarrassing recordings, if only to save myself the trouble of filtering out his greatest hits myself. He doesn’t take the bait, though, so I ask if there was ever a golden period in his career when he felt everything was just right.

“Every second,” he says simply. “It’s all the same. Any regrets?” he continues, predicting my follow-up. “When you’re young, you say, ‘No, I’d never do it differently.’ But as you get older you say, ‘It’s all regrets.’ You coulda done it all better. But when you’ve done as much as I have, it doesn’t matter.” At the end of the day, he says, it’s all about “integrity, quality and dedication.”

Although he certainly looks healthy today, Laswell’s cosmic assembly line nearly came to a screeching halt in 2008, when he was diagnosed with a serious bone infection that made it difficult for him to walk or move around much. But it was the medicine rather than the disease that almost brought him down the following year.

“My immune system kind of collapsed,” he recalls, “When that happened, I started taking painkillers and got addicted. They say you shouldn’t drink alcohol when you’re taking painkillers, so I stopped drinking. Then I started again. The only thing going through my system for awhile were painkillers and alcohol, so I almost died. But everyone almost dies, and then they finally do die, so…”

I’m sure that I’m not the first to point out that one of Laswell’s more extreme noise bands, a fiercely uncompromising collaboration with John Zorn, was called Painkiller.

“Every superhero needs a theme song,” he replies with a grin.