Two of the people playing on Malefactor, Ade are professional painters, not musicians drafted in for colour. Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, both fixtures of the Cologne art scene that also produced Martin Kippenberger, turn up across the record's first side, alongside Mayo Thompson, the man who has run The Red Krayola, on and off, since 1966.
Thompson started the band in Houston that July with Frederick Barthelme on drums and Steve Cunningham on bass, and called it Red Crayola until February 1968, when the crayon company sent a cease-and-desist and a K went in to keep the lawyers away. The Parable of Arable Land, their 1967 debut for International Artists, brought in Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators and buried pop songs under a crowd of amateur non-musicians the band called the Familiar Ugly, making chaos on cue; a year later, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It fared little better commercially, and the label folded not long after.
Thompson didn't so much quit music as redirect it.
In 1971 he began working with Art & Language, the British conceptual art collective, co-producing their album Corrected Slogans and later scoring an opera for them; by the end of the decade he was producing records for Rough Trade — the Raincoats, the Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, Stiff Little Fingers — while keeping a version of the band going that had never really stopped existing, just stopped needing an audience.
Malefactor, Ade came out in 1989 on Glass Records, by which point Red Krayola had become less a band than a method: take rock's basic units, verse, chorus, guitar solo, and hand them to people who don't especially trust those units, then see what still stands up. Oehlen and Büttner's contributions don't sound like guest spots so much as interference, which is the point.
Reviews split hard enough to make the point for it: Spin's Alternative Record Guide gave the album an 8 out of 10 and praised its lovely, scrambled warmth, while other outlets savaged it outright. Both readings are correct. The Red Krayola was never trying to be liked; it was trying to find out how far a pop song could be taken apart before the pieces stopped being a pop song, and Malefactor, Ade pushes further than most of what came before it.
Thompson, now in his eighties, still leads the band when the mood strikes: last November, Red Krayola played its first show in a decade, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, opening for Cap'n Jazz with a line-up that included guitarist Tom Watson and, on pedal steel, Connor Gallaher. The method hadn't changed.
