Cucamonga

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The second in a series curated and produced by Rudy VanderLans, described as "impressionistic portraits of Southern California inspired by and intersected with the lives of people whose histories are inseparable from the story of California" (phew). This edition, Cucamonga, addresses Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart (the first, Palm Desert, was based around Van Dyke Parks).

Like several recent reissues (Revenant's Anthology of American Folk Music Vol.4; Basta's Manhattan Research Inc.), it illustrates the potential for combining book-based forms (written word, photography, graphic design) with music. Emanating from the legendary Emigre design/type foundry, this is perhaps the most beautiful of the lot (though for the record, Revenant win the prize for integrating a CD into the book's cover most elegantly!). Text and design by VanderLans, with typefaces by Zuzana Licko and John Downer, the book principally features VanderLan's breathtaking photography of So Cal. Across a rich array of natural terrain, the images are abstract, stunningly barren. In the oasis-like towns the photos are bereft of people, although there are many shots of human endeavour (cars, signs, drive-ins, housing estates) caught uninhabited, as if recently post-apocalypse. Pure contemporary Americana, they're simultaneously other-wordly and down-to-earth. Just the kind of endearingly shaky foundations and juxtapositions Van Vliet's music thrived on - akin to a crude wooden shack on stilts straddling a freeway and the San Andreas fault. Not unlike the famous house Trout Mask Replica emerged from, as it happens, in an overgrown Ensenada Drive photographed here. Where the blues and free jazz co-habited with abstract expressionism and suburban America.

VanderLans' project seems to be to somehow preserve the sense of place that, in ways effectively unknowable, inspired magical art. Seeing the bland suburban reality behind these impossibly exotic names (Tarzana, Cucamonga, San Bernadino) interests VanderLans - how can such 'nonplace' places inspire greatness and become mythic? There's also palpable dismay at witnessing their continual decay and redevelopment into soulless condos and science parks, as if caught in some spiral of homogeneity, in which things become increasingly nondescript. Thankfully, this is more than just simplistic nostalgia, as his photos are supremely evocative. Even when viewing an antiseptically pristine development rolled out on sun-seared scrubland in San Bernardino, the good Captain's music is still there, a psychic echo riven through the liminal zones where the patchy desert stubble butts up against white picket fence; where tarpits become tarmac. Again, where the blues and free jazz meet abstract expressionism and suburbia.

These "portraits" are given voice on the accompanying CD, in which two short field recordings sandwich new musical work from former Magic Band members, Gary Lucas, John French and Zoot Horn Rollo. The recordings are made in Lancaster and outside the Trout Mask Replica house in Woodland Hills, and, aside from the occasional swoosh of cars, are wonderfully spacy, aural equivalents of VanderLans' desert shots. Lucas contributes a brilliant virtuoso slide piece, recorded live at the Knitting Factory; French a new piece called "Vienna Sausage Waltz", which sounds like late-period Zappa, given its smart faux-jazz modernism and marimba-led motifs; and Zoot Horn Rollo donates a bass and baritone guitar piece, augmented by violin and drums, which sounds like, well, only a Magic Band member would. As John French says, "the music was seldom conventionally 'beautiful', yet it was a million other things all passionately and boldly stated with no apology whatsoever".

I've never physically been to where Gertrude Stein said there was "no there, there", but taken with a dose of Polanski/Towne's "Chinatown", Mike Davis' "City Of Quartz", and a chaser of Beefheart and Parks, these beautiful releases have given me My Own Private California.