CALHOUN CONQUER (1987 - 1993) is an experiment failed ... like all other half-decent and self-respecting experiments are bound to.
A casual survey of what’s been written about CALHOUN CONQUER shows the usual things one would expect to read from people writing about curious music of curious bands. There are a number of stabs at trying to jam CALHOUN CONQUER's style, which sprawls fractally off in a number of directions, into one genre or another, sometimes having to hyphenate new genres until it begins to resemble a German translation.
The fact is, outlier bands like CALHOUN CONQUER that sit on the edges of a number of different strategies aren’t easy to grasp and therefore often get mislabeled, and through that mislabeling generate the wrong kind of expectations engendering frustration. There’s certainly a tradition of calling bands like this Thrash or Metal. Nonetheless, placing them in that symbolic space alone can have real repercussions on how one listens to their music, i.e. with the album Lost In Oneself, any of the vestigial bits from their earlier works (see mp3 player below) that might have been construed as Hardcore, are lost in songs written from the vantage point of avant-garde Crossover and Prog.
There’s a book by Henri Focillon called The Life of Forms in Art that goes into this idea in much greater depth, but the gist is that historical circumstances may account for certain constraints on the forms in art, however, the only way to account for the forms themselves is to look at their internal lives. And this calls for the experiment of redrawing the cognitive map; succeeding or failing is, always has been, besides the point.
If anything, then CALHOUN CONQUER stands as an attempted metamorphosis of the inheritance from groups such as Helmet and Yes, Talking Heads and Tool, Hüsker Dü and King Crimson, the early Alice Cooper and Prong, Voivod and Hendrix, etc; it would make more sense to connect them like this.
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A casual survey of what’s been written about CALHOUN CONQUER shows the usual things one would expect to read from people writing about curious music of curious bands. There are a number of stabs at trying to jam CALHOUN CONQUER's style, which sprawls fractally off in a number of directions, into one genre or another, sometimes having to hyphenate new genres until it begins to resemble a German translation.
The fact is, outlier bands like CALHOUN CONQUER that sit on the edges of a number of different strategies aren’t easy to grasp and therefore often get mislabeled, and through that mislabeling generate the wrong kind of expectations engendering frustration. There’s certainly a tradition of calling bands like this Thrash or Metal. Nonetheless, placing them in that symbolic space alone can have real repercussions on how one listens to their music, i.e. with the album Lost In Oneself, any of the vestigial bits from their earlier works (see mp3 player below) that might have been construed as Hardcore, are lost in songs written from the vantage point of avant-garde Crossover and Prog.
There’s a book by Henri Focillon called The Life of Forms in Art that goes into this idea in much greater depth, but the gist is that historical circumstances may account for certain constraints on the forms in art, however, the only way to account for the forms themselves is to look at their internal lives. And this calls for the experiment of redrawing the cognitive map; succeeding or failing is, always has been, besides the point.
If anything, then CALHOUN CONQUER stands as an attempted metamorphosis of the inheritance from groups such as Helmet and Yes, Talking Heads and Tool, Hüsker Dü and King Crimson, the early Alice Cooper and Prong, Voivod and Hendrix, etc; it would make more sense to connect them like this.