NEWSBITS

I say 'tend to' and 'supposed to be', because it's very rarely you see a musician billed as 'the finest in amplified ukulele mayhem'. It's a description that's appearing next to this artist's name on promotional literature around town at the moment, and it sounds strange, doesn't it?

Yes, except this is no ordinary place. He might hail from somewhere an ocean plus another thousand miles away, in Illinois, but there's something Williwaw has that belongs in Glasgow.

Not literally, of course - he's not nicked someone's Discovery pass - but in the sense that in this fair city, there's always an audience that appreciates artists like him.

By that I mean ones who draw on unique musical influences, experiment with a broad spectrum of sound, produce work that overlaps many sub-genres and are not easily categorised.

If you're going to push me, I'd say Williwaw is a blend of shoegaze and post-rock, but to try and pin down his style is probably missing the point. His music is supposed to be an enigma, an intriguing fusion of electronic and acoustic sound, which bemuses yet beguiles.

With an amplifier and some complex time signatures, his ukulele can generate a cauldron of noise, but it is also capable of transcending the chaos with a blissful melody. It can be heavy, while also ambient. Basically, no song is at all like the last.

Williwaw is fortunate that such musicians and performers find huge success when they move here, but with the talent and originality he's unpacking from his suitcase, he's certainly meeting the requirements of his lease.

Ukulele Madness

Rock That Uke, released in 2003, but still being screened in cafes, libraries, and ukulele conventions across the country - features punk ukulele, folk ukulele, jazz ukulele, and a lot more besides. There's Casey Korder, a Las Vegas schoolteacher who performs original material on a sky-blue Konablaster, an electric uke that once sported a live .30-06 round under its bridge. (Safety concerns prompted a recall, and the casing is no powderless.) Did I mention that Korder performs - and apparenly grants interviews - in a cow suit? Well, he does.

There's Carmaig de Forest, a veteran punk uker who has opened for the Ramones, Wall of Voodoo, and Dexys Midnight Runners and whose poignant "But She Doesn't Fuck Me" nearly brought tears to my eyes.

And there's my old friend Bill Whitmer, a.k.a. Williwaw, who first introduced me to the wild and woolly world of progressive-uke music 15 years ago.

Bill and I met as graduate students in the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bill had a background in physics and ukulele - he had taken up the instrument when he realized just how much it annoyed his older brother - and he was far too intelligent to last long in academic musicology.

Fortunately, he didn't have to. After leaving the musicology program at the U of I, he picked up a Ph.D. from the Parmly Hearing Institute at Loyola University. He then spent a year running behavioral experiments on chinchillas (apparently, the little critters have freakishly good powers of pitch perception) before landing a job doing basic research on hearing impairment.

I find this ironic since Bill's work as a ukulelist is not exactly conducive to good ear health. While he does sometimes play unplugged, most of Bill's output as Williwaw is amplified - heavily amplified.

"I was dealing in quadrophonic sound for quite a while," Bill recently told me. He began his Williwaw career on electric uke, playing Van Halen's "Intruder" and some ditties he worked out for his home answering machine at clubs around Champaign. He soon began routing multiple signals from multiple amps - first two, then four - to multiple effects boxes. At his peak, he was up to 24 such boxes - enough to completely mask the native sound of his instrument and evoke everything from heavy metal to breaking glass.

He's since pared back a bit on the gear, but he's no less adventurous.

Back in 2001, Bill performed in the Chicago Sound, a musical free-for-all co-organized by Weasel Walter, a multi-instrumentalist who co-founded the Flying Luttenbachers, a no-wave/free-jazz/punk-rock trio with a cult following. The Chicago Sound was essentially a whacked-out karaoke session, in which musicians were required to play covers of rock classics as the originals were played over the monitors. They were, however, not allowed to tune up. "It turned into a horrible - well, not horrible... let's call it a beautiful train wreck of sound," Bill says.

Soon after, Bill caught a performance by the Alloy Orchestra, a trio that creates new scores for silent films - in this case, the classic vampire flick Nosferatu.

These two experiences led Bill to form the Williwaw Ensemble, an all-uke organization dedicated to rule-based improvisation. The group's first all-acoustic performace "basically sounded like a bunch of cicadas molting." In subsequent performances - some amplified, some not - the group has played rock, jazz, and "just noise" behind Laurel and Hardy and "Felix the Cat" shorts. They have also accompanied a video fireplace tape.

Things have been a little slow lately, but the continued circulation of Rock That Uke, which features lots of footage of Bill talking and playing, has him thinking about his next Williwaw Ensemble project.

(When he isn't playing the ukulele, Bill plays Javanese drums in a gamelan orchestra maintained by the Friends Of The Gamelan, a non-profit group associated with the University of Chicago. The Friends started playing in the 1970s on a collection of instruments that were brought from Java to the United States for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 - the same world's fair that introduced the Hawaiian ukulele to mainland audiences.)

I, for one, cannor wait. But while I do, I will content myself with the performance footage on Rock That Uke. After all, how often do you get to see Robert Moritz of the '90s-era electric uke band "Uke Til U Puke" smashing his tiny ax on the ground like Pete Townsend in a funhouse mirror?

Not often enough.

Or at least that's what I thought until an unassuming firecracker of a CD out of Champaign, Illinois found its way to me. Hell, if John Cage could make music by plucking the pricks of a cactus, who's to say the ukulele can't steal the spotlight from guitars and keyboards now and then -- especially when it comes to batshit-crazy tunes like those dished out by Williwaw?

The tracks on A Portrait of Shelves are tough to identify by name, so please forgive me for sticking to the numbers. Track two, clocking in at fourteen minutes, runs the gamut from simple, unadulterated uke plucking to a chugging, indecipherably thick aural assault. When Williwaw gears up the effects and latches on to a catchy hook, look out, because this noise will not only piss off the neighbors -- it'll stir your soul a bit too.

While the first few balls-to-the-wall tracks strive to overwhelm you with strident uke gusto, some later cuts mellow, casting the instrument as a hypnotic rhythm maker. Track 6, for instance, with its hypnotically repetitive patterns that evolve so slowly you're almost lulled into sleep, could well be a Steve Reich composition. Yet, lest the listener grow too comfortable, Williwaw follows up that cut with a distorted rocker. As the fuzzy uke lead builds over a droning sea of distant howls, one wonders if Sonic Youth or Flipper might have contributed to this odd album.

The CD concludes with two long tracks, one of which could very well be a recording of werewolf whales, if there were such a thing. Its sonorous moans straddle ecstasy and agony so effectively that you don't know whether to be comforted or deeply troubled. Williwaw's entire CD is like that. I'm so stunned by the versatility, beauty and ugliness unleashed by this little chunk of aluminum that I took for granted that I don't know whether to love it or fear it. Perhaps that's just the way Williwaw -- and maybe even Tiny Tim -- would have it.

Man, He's Loud

Williwaw's thang is to pump out his tiny uke's plinkaplinkaplinka noise as loud as the PA guy will let him. "Most people who've ever run a PA are partially deaf, so they let me go wild." His music is grinding, non-linear and unapologetically loud. "I think the volume may be an ego thing. Or maybe it's my deeply subliminated evil interior seeping out. Whatever-I just hope that when I get really loud it sounds like Slayer in their heyday."

Bill Whitmer, Champaign resident and UI grad student in ethnomusicology, became Williwaw in 1994 when he opened for local band Lonely Trailer. "Yeah, I was a big hit right away - the three people there loved it." He has continued to play around town, often including other local musicians as special guests. On stage he sticks to the uke, though he's been known to play a mean (and did I mention "loud"?) electric Barney jack-in-the-box.

Bill's self-entitled cassette, recorded at Poster Kid Rick Valentin's house studio, earned him recognition by the national press as a "forerunner of avant garde ukulele music." Like the stage show, the sounds on his tape are hard to describe. "It's basically a long thing, broken up by several shorter things. And then some medium things follow," Bill clarifies.

Young Bill played trumpet in his school band, but later switched to the ukulele when he found a plastic one in the band room garage can. He took to it right off. "With the trumpet, the sky's the limit. But I actually like the fact that the ukulele is kind of constraining. There are only four strings, 12 frets. You either have to work within those limits or explode them. I usually end up imploding all over the place."

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BIOBITS