by Max Freedman (@anticlimaxwell)
It’s a lie. Do Pas O’s debut album isn’t just an LP-length barrage of percussion, though anyone expecting exactly that from Peter Negroponte, best known as the beastly drummer of Guerilla Toss, can’t be blamed. Instead, Join the Fucking Drum Circle, released via Chicago label Hausu Mountain, is a 40-minute psychedelic squawk from the inner depths of Negroponte’s strange and beautiful mind. It’s a jungle of synthetic excitement, like Jane and Tarzan swinging through trees of hallucinogenic guitars, bass, and of course, drums; most exciting is that Negroponte has created the entire forest from scratch, with the help of no bandmates at all.
Guerilla Toss has proven Negroponte’s weight in a band setting; Join the Fucking Drum Circle makes a strong case for him as a standalone talent. In Do Pas O, he plays every role. Even on tracks with titles like “Fucking Drum Circle,” which does indeed begin with an imposing drum circle, he’s the mastermind behind scratchy, wacky guitars and synth lines as clown-car as they are It-style demon-clown. Especially notable is that this song’s transitions between segments and relationships among instruments feel shockingly natural, which may be entirely because no one else is there to tell Negroponte what to do.
He can even make his weird, trippy formula compelling over the course of double-digit song lengths. The aptly named “Drums Space”—there are both plenty of drums and plenty of space, here and throughout Join The Fucking Drum Circle—stretches the Do Pas O formula to its outer limits, making limber passages of optimistic but droning synth sound continuous with sections that center on wah-drenched, palm-muted swaths of guitar plucking. It’s the Do Pas O thesis statement, Negroponte’s pet project taken to its logical extreme: reimagine the jam band as a computerized, synthetic mind trip, but instead of a jam band, it’s just one person’s magic.
Yet beneath all the complexities of the music and all the off-color sounds, Negroponte actually doesn’t sound that different when he’s away from Guerilla Toss. As the sixteenth-note guitar shake of “Six in the Dark” begins to box out the percussion that pokes into the song’s intro and the synth that marks its path forward, Guerilla Toss very strongly comes to mind. The opening to “The Perfect Sandwich” especially sounds cut from the same cloth as Eraser Stargazer, although with an even stronger percussive focus. The parallels between Negroponte’s solo work and his better known project feel important to point out, since art as spectacularly strange as Do Pas O’s benefits from a connection to something familiar. Both existent fans and newcomers will find ways towards a state between a trance and a dance on Join the Fucking Drum Circle, a striking document that opens both Negroponte’s mind and soul to whoever dares enter them.