War-torn, bombed-out urban landscapes give root to plants and trees that sprout from the rubble, according to San Diego artists Helen and Newton Harrison. The Trummerflora Collective take the Harrison’s name for this foliage as nom-de-guerre, though their improvisational excursions are equal parts explosive-plow and seed. Coagulating around common interests in free jazz and world music, seven post-national musicians found their niche together as Trummerflora while fomenting interest in experimental, non-commercial sound-artistry in late-’90s San Diego.
Their double-disc No Stars Please is more historical document than manifesto for this local movement, recorded live in 2000 at various galleries and freak-out strongholds. Some of the record’s open-ended tracks seem directed at border issues that are generally relevant in these WTO days (e.g. “From The Waste Up” and “Punch Press Pull”), but you probably have to be there (at the exhibit-opening gig, with the fine boxed wine) to fully understand what’s afoot with the electronic/organic-interface chaos, especially since the wandering cuts (like a 27-minute version of “Frosty the Snowman”) become painful to sit through.
The San Diego/Tijuana nexus — with its maquiladoras, immigration battles, and tourist consumerism — has provided enough of a war zone for creative cross-pollination, resulting in such border-crossing art as Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s New World Border and the NorTec DJ Collective, and Trummerflora fit right in with the cultural schizophrenia.
October 2001, Illinois Entertainer
