Jackie-O Motherfucker started in 1994 as a mere duo. Multi-instrumentalist Tom Greenwood and saxophonist Nester Bucket utilized a lot of tape loops of found sound to augment their basic guitar-saxophone foundation. Since then, after cranking out five full-length LPs (two of them double sets), one split 12" and two CDs, the group has grown to encompass as many as twenty rotating members in three US cities - Portland, New York and Baltimore.
Tom Greenwood (guitar, turntables, percussion, more) and Jef Brown (guitar, sax, more) are the core instigators of the chaotic JOMF madness, but JOMF operates under the collective model; all members (including longimte saxists John Flaming and Nester, drummer Jessie Carrot, multi-instrumentalist Barry Hampton, vibist/guitarist Brooke Crouser) assert invaluable influence over the band's sound.
Inspiration is drawn from an impossibly diverse array of sound and vision: free jazz, noise rock, graffiti, space rock, folk music, Xeroxed art, the list goes on. It's safe to say, however, that the underground experiments of the 60s are a key touchstone - musically, especially the NY loft avant-garde; visually, including Harry Smith's film loops; socially, in their grubby, seat-of-the-pants approach to life and personal politics (further evidence: the inclusion of a cultural signpost of the 1968 French student revolt on the back of the Liberation CD: "La beaut? est dans la rue").
JOMF's first Road Cone CD, Fig. 5, was a great artistic leap forward for the band and has received heaps of praise for its semi-improvisational "primitivism." What started as a desire to spend comfortably large amounts of time in the basement expanding upon their rock-based, ESP-informed whoosh-loop-jazz fix somehow turned into something else: an anthropological foray into America's musical history, as filtered through the Jackie-O psych treatment. Yet the basement goals remained, and so the album became JOMF's own field recording; they are both inside and outside history, even as they are wholly of it.
Just as Fig. 5 subconsciously tapped into America's collective unconscious, so Liberation tapped into a spiritual realm without even trying. It's not a self-conscious or prescriptive tract, it just is. At least, that's one way to interpret this record, as an organic, emotionally cohesive path that starts with ecstatic disorientation and ends with an elevated calm. JOMF are indisputably self-aware and muse at length upon their process and goals, but in the end, instinct overrules calculation. The yield is a rich, multivalent music that reflects and refracts the larger world.