Arthur Doyle

Hidden among mountain shadows, the A.C. Temple resides in Birmingham’s oldest neighborhoods. On an awkward slant, the house boasts a huge front porch for drunken revelry and a seemingly permanent yard sale, which touring musicians are offered free miscellaneous from a pile that seems larger then it really is. A.C. Temple, a house venue, revolves as the center of Birmingham’s most eccentric artists and musicians. This is no rock club with an attitude, just a nice messy communal house whose inhabitants defy easy classification. At least three bands are centered here including Hollow Bush, Them Natives and Silver Reich.

Though most are not aware of this talent because of obscurity’s fog, Arthur Doyle creates free jazz and free improvisation with haunting supernatural ability. Born in Birmingham, the elderly Doyle still lives with his even more elderly mother who has to be in her late eighties or early nineties. Growing up his parents became involved with the civil rights while he became involved in jazz scenes in Nashville, New York and even France. In New York, he played with Sun Ra while also being involved in the ESP label’s jazz releases. Doyle released his own real debut in New York in 1978 called Alabama Feeling to critical acclaim. He was “falsely” arrested in the early ’90s in France, yet still proclaims his innocence. While in jail, he composed over 150 songs. Today he is having something of a resurgence playing with non-jazz noise musicians.

What has set Doyle apart from his contemporaries can simply be called raw, undiluted honesty. He takes Albert Ayler’s intensive free emotionality to the red while infusing these with folk-like vocals back home in Alabama. Shaman-like, Doyle ecstatically traverses invisible spirit worlds while performing a very personal, yet arcane music vocabulary. The word “perform” misleads with connotations of entertaining or even acting. Instead this fierce musician embodies a priest who grapples with time’s omniscient ghosts, sinister as well as profoundly holy!

Doyle played with harsh noisemongers Hollow Bush, a duo which features one member from pioneering noise static onslaught Macronympha. Hollow Bush, who used a junk shop and inventor’s assortment of tangled weird electronic effects, took unfortunately an hour to set up, yet the wait was worthwhile. The duo’s music can be summed up by taking industrial factory noise slamming into ambient music made unpleasant from gasoline dousing by a crazed cult of dope fiends.

The skinny, weathered man took a seat in a worn chair picking up a shiny silver microphone off the floor in the dimly lit room. He began by muttering the building blocks of language by emitting guttural and misplaced vocal syllables, until forming a new yet ancient language. He pulled and twisted abstracted word sounds creating a rhythmic rough chant, which chilled to the bone. With such a strange unexpected start, the elderly man held captive the audience (mostly under the age of thirty) while even enticing straight-laced college students to wander in.

Without a detectable trace, Hollow Bush began their slow sonic manipulation arch. At first, the duo simply added reverb to Doyle’s mystical improvisational vocalizations. While in the dark behind him, the two were also heavily sampling his vocals. Impulsively like a shouting din of a postmodern country church congregation, they began relaying Doyle’s vocals back at him. For a brief moment this awkward set transition seemed like disoriented comedy, as one could not be sure how Doyle would react. He did not betray any hesitation, morphing into a shape shifter, and began shouting back marauding with a different language against his previous incarnation.

Hollow Bush slowly added static electronic drones ’til unleashing louder more chaotic overlapping tones. Doyle calmly put his microphone down and picked up a saxophone unleashing furious energy through blistering straight jazz and dissonant freak-out skronk mashing. The three created a musical environment similar to a brimstone thunderstorm’s unrelenting warpath. Underneath the so-called noise, Doyle’s vocals still lingered while Doyle’s Saxophone seemed divinely ordered to obliterate those voices in a perplexing alchemy of notes.

After a good half hour of such visceral playing, Doyle sat down in his chair once again and laid his saxophone down enjoying Hollow Bush’s last rumblings. The show amazingly testified to the transcendent power wrought from two different generations of sonic experimenters. For a brief mystical time window, Arthur Doyle and Hollow Bush created the impression that anything was absolutely possible.

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