Radio show 2009 March 31

Less commentary today, for whatever reason. As ever, liveblogging the show, as best possible. I'll be late with some posts, and have an entire opera planned, so there will be little commentary at times.

• Maritime Rites: World Music - Wadada Leo Smith -- Wadada Leo Smith -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites
  Splatted trumpet on top of the foghorns that characterize and form the basis (anchor? bad pun) of Alvin Curran's fabulous and phenomenal album. I just love the way the trumpet comes in to complete foghorn chords, which are more chord-like in this track than on any other of the tracks on the album. I played a bunch of this last week - Read up on that show if you want to hear about other Alvin Curran collaborations.
  
• The Cave - Act 1 (Part I) -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995
  
• The Cave - Act 1 (Part II)
  
• The Cave - Act 2 (Part II)
  
• The Cave - Act 3 (Part I)
  Four parts of Steve Reich's "The Cave," all on the topic of "Who is Abraham?" The interesting point for this western ear is the emphasis of the Islamic story on Abraham being Muslim. Well, of course, I can see that, and I can see how conflicts can arise out of that... and that's what makes it interesting. Right? I'm not sure if I like the way the music matches the speaking of the various people. I find it a bit of a gimmick, in the long run, though there are funny examples of it (someone gave Sarah Palin the treatment during the election, from her Katie Couric interview inanities). In this case, it's consistent with other works Reich has done (Different Trains has a lot of this, too), but it still isn't my favorite method of conveying voice. Now, when he starts sampling it a bit, building chords out of it, bridging chords from one speech to the next, it does get more interesting...
  
• Bye Bye Butterfly - Pauline Oliveros -- Pauline Oliveros -- New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women In Electr
  What the fuck?! This is both hideous sine wave generated electronic screeching noise sitting right where it's uncomfortable and some opera playing in the background being distorted and overplayed, so that the high tones are feeding back and it's almost grating on the ears. Totally bizarre. I have typically liked Oliveros on accordion and less on electronics. This is getting close to being too much.
  
• Drumming (Part IV) -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995
  This is blissful joy, rhythms pumping along, metametric material at its best. A great ending to a great piece.
  
• New York Social Life -- Laurie Anderson -- New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women In Electronic Music
  What the?! This is a totally weird, early Laurie Anderson piece. It's a stupid story, banal, with her using a little vocoder material to fake other people calling her on the phone. It's all about loneliness and not listening to each other and the distance between people. Being conceptual music, it has a section about people not talking, not listening, the distance between people. The subject of the piece is, circularly, the subject of the piece.
  
• Instruments: III. Whole Steps - Rik Albani -- Rik Albani, Arthur Russell, Bill Ruyle, Peter Zummo -- Peter Zummo: Zummo With An X
  Boy, this is almost annoying, and I like it a lot. (Written much later, after the piece is over... not much detail left.)
  
• Elodie Lauten -- The Death of Don Juan
  I'm playing the whole opera. Read more about it here and there and at Pitchfork (!! but it's a great review). Arthur Russel (who was on the Peter Zummo earlier) sings and plays cello, and Kyle Gann wrote liner notes and has been praising it for decades. Elodie Lauten's own website has more information.
  
  
  

Radio show 2009 March 24

Keeping to the usual format, I'm listing songs -- artist -- album and giving commentary on my show as it happens.

• Maritime Rites: Coastline - Steve Lacy -- Steve Lacy -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites
  12.00h. The opening piece on Alvin Curran's great album. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between Lacy's playing and the various sea horns that come in, as well. The solo playing is pretty impressive. And when it's not solo playing, who is playing? I honestly can't tell how many people it is. The spoken word segments make no sense whatsoever within the piece, either. The sum makes for a piece that I want to keep listening to, even as I can't build a framework within which to put the sounds. Chamber music jazz with found sounds? Who cares, it sounds good. Link on eMusic.
  
• Variation I -- William Basinski -- Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive
  12.11h What a GREAT shift! From the sounds of horns and fog lights from light houses (as well as phrases like "if I were out there in the fog, I'd be relieved to hear it" in a nice southern accent) we move into sounds as if from a sonar under murky water. (Makes me want to play some of the Bryars "Sinking of the Titanic," though it takes too long to get to that point). After a few sonar pings, we get a piano playing through mud, thick echo as if inside a submarine. Okay, I'm taking the under water metaphor too far, but now something like feedback is coming in, a humming right on the edge of high pitched noise, nearly uncomfortable, nearly pure noise. The piano is still looping away. It IS William Basinski, after all. Loops and all that. Link on eMusic.
  
• Sym. No. 1, Movement 2 -- Glenn Branca -- Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus)
  12.25h. A slow start to the song, and it's too long for me to do it justice here on the show. The sound is a lot like in early Sonic Youth, their debut album and all, with these chiming guitar patterns holding one chord for a really really really really (really) long time until finally some change happens and a single note is changed to create some other chord. This fits nicely into one realm of music common to the show: music where seemingly nothing happens. Except, rather than some John Luther Adams, this is some guitar orchestra, a drum set with cymbal crashes deep back in the mix, with perhaps a bass to be found (still can't tell as I write this). The repetitive noise builds and builds - but first you get odd chord arpeggios and overtones from the guitars. The instrumentation may be different, but how exactly is this not minimalism? Pretty cool stuff, straddling No Wave and minimalism and all that. That Sonic Youth (whose Thurston and Lee played with Branca, back in the day) would later record Goodbye 20th Century (Oliveros, Cage, Paik, Ono, etc.) seems totally natural. Link on eMusic.
  
• Maritime Rites: Rattlesnake Mountain - Pauline Oliveros -- Pauline Oliveros -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites
  12.41h This much calmer piece goes back to Alvin Curran's Maritime Rites, using more of the sound of buoys than Lacy's piece which used the foghorns. Oh, sure, there are still foghorns, but mostly you get these pseudo-melodies playing out in the buoys. On top and below and behind that (wrapped all around, depending on how they are mixed) are the accordion sounds played by Oliveros. Yeah, accordion. Every radio show needs accordion. The interviewed voices are talking about fog signals, about how you get information on the sea. Trust. And the music is this complicated set of bells, horns, and accordion sustains (or runs), along with an occasional bird song, as if what you're longing for while on the sea is a return to land where songbirds live. Link on eMusic.
  
• The Cave - Act 1 (Part VIII) -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995
  
• The Cave - Act 1 (Part IX) -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995
  Though the genre is entirely different - a call to prayer perhaps? - the sound is somehow very similar in style to the sound of the buoys in Oliveros's collaboration with Curran. Why not? Rites and prayers. Reich's Cave is a complicated piece, which I can't do justice to in my description here. You can find more here. The piece itself is the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael, as well as the religions of the middle east (Islam and Judaism). and someday I'll play the whole thing rather than just parts. More at Wikipedia, though all you really get is the track titles.
  
• Variation VIII -- William Basinski -- Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive
  13.01h. Another drone loop piece from William Basinski, similar to the last one but utterly different in its emotion. Sure, it's got the same piano looping, the same echoed sound as if you're listening underwater and tons of reverb. It just feels totally different. This is where words fail on a blog about music. I'm not a musician, I don't know what he's doing, and I can only describe it so much. Dancing about architecture might be more effective, in the long run. Link on eMusic.
  
• Maritime Rites: Soft Shoulder - Jon Gibson -- Jon Gibson -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites
  Jon Gibson is the multi-instrumentalist composer who also happens to have been part of the Philip Glass Ensemble through the years. Pretty cool, that. It also explains why his particular tone of sax playing seems so familiar, after all the PGE that I've listened to. This Maritime Rites recording brings a new sound to the mix - Oliveros had buoys, Lacy started with foghorns. Well, Gibson loses the buoys and gets water lapping up against the side of a boat, instead. I have no idea. It's just what's there - you can't say anything else. Again, it's a mesmerizing flow of sounds winding about themselves, just like with Oliveros's accordions earlier. Link on eMusic.
  
• Do While -- Oval -- 94 Diskont -- 24:05
  
  Some glitch music, repeating patterns with tones constantly breaking flat. It just keeps rolling and flowing, the patterns not quite in synch with each other all the time, the tinkly noises and the deeper sounds constantly jittering around each other. Every now and then, something larger seems to change, but somehow you always end up where you started. For all that it contains flat tones, repeated noise, and seemingly nothing changes, it's actually quite pretty. But you get used to the intonation, get used to tones going flat over and over (someone is really fucking with the pitch shifter, you know?), slowly everything seems normal, and then you get into the rhythm of it. Some tones aren't shifted, some are, and over the top of it all comes the glitchy sound that fills the space of a high hat in jazz and rock.
  
• Nagoya Marimbas -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995 -- 4:36
  13.33h. Additive patterns define this one - a set of marimbas always doing the same thing, but adding little pieces to their lines until whole new patterns arise in fascinating interweaving patterns. Every now and then new melodies pop in, then they drop out again - what a playful fun piece! Very different from the previous tone quality, different chord from before, and it's just a calm way to shake things up.
  
• Maritime Rites: Mine: The One That Enters The Stories - Clar -- Clark Coolidge -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites -- 11:18
  13.40h This is mostly speaking, not composing. Some of the voices are from Maine, some are ... huh? It's as if the sentences aren't connected to each other. It's like someone mixed and matched paragraphs from different stories. Then suddenly a new voice comes in "Gear!" in one channel and "Stuff!" in the other. What was that?! The buoys are gone, the water is missing, and the foghorns are still there. What exactly is going on here? I have no clue whatsoever. Link on eMusic.
  
• The Cave - Act 2 (Part I) -- Steve Reich -- Steve Reich: Works: 1965-1995 -- 4:41
  This one is titled "Surah 3 (chanted in Arabic from the Koran by Sheikh Dahoud Atalah, Muqri of Al-Aksa Mosque)," and the title pretty much says everything that needs to be said.
  
  
  

Fascinated interrupt

I went crazy on my monthly eMusic download sequence, gathering music by William Basinski, Glenn Branca, and Alvin Curran (working with a bunch of others). Elodie Lauten (finally got her "Death of Don Juan"), blah blah blah.

I'm listening to the Alvin Curran right now, Maritime Rites, a collection of "songs" about the eastern seaboard of the US. Collaborators include Steve Lacy (blowing conchs? perhaps), Pauline Oliveros (who redefines what an accordion should do), Jon Gibson (saxophone, composer), and others. I'm trying to work, I'm trying to read a chapter that one of my students has written for her masters thesis, and I. Keep. Getting. Interrupted.

The music is fascinating. Simply sounds of lighthouses and buoys, and somehow these chords build up. Oliveros has created an accordion piece behind all this, Lacy has created a set of horn sounds over the top, and it's all just totally utterly mesmerizing. I can't but recommend it to people. Alvin Curran's "Maritime Rites." Wow.

Two other musical pieces worth pointing out, since I'm writing about my newest eMusic haul. Boris's album "Absolutego" is just brutal slow grindcore minimal sludge rock, I have no words for it. It kind of does what Zorn's Naked City behemoth, Leng T'che, does. There might be the same screaming agony in the Boris piece, I don't even know. (I was listening last night while working on taxes - how fitting is THAT?!) Rockists refer to this kind of music as "heavy," but that word doesn't do it justice. Slow, agonizingly slow riffage, just walls and walls of distorted sound. Fucking incredible noise.

In a similar vein, Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 1 is like a baseline of what Sonic Youth would grow out of. I just watched the documentary "Kill Yr Idols" (got it from Pitchfork.tv, and for those who don't know, it's a Sonic Youth song name from the early 80s during their No Wave phase). Branca is in there, talking about his No Wave moment. (What's no wave? If you don't know, don't worry about it. If you do, then I'm talking about the DNA, Lydia Lunch, early SY phase of No Wave. Raw punk deconstructing three chords toward something almost unmusical.) When I realized Branca was on eMusic, I had to grab it. The chords, the sounds, the production have so much in common with various phases of Sonic Youth (one of my favorite groups) that it's hard to listen to it without thinking of them ripping off the music. Then again, they played with Branca (as did members of the Swans, a band that kind of connects Branca to the Boris album I just mentioned). That's how they met. So the "stealing" is actually a natural progression.

What brings together Boris, Brnaca, and songs about the eastern seaboard? That they utterly distract me, and fascinate me. I love new sounds, curious sounds, interesting structures, unexpected moments. I love that the Clark Coolidge piece I'm listening to right now contains all sorts of Maine voices talking about the ocean, along with unrelated spoken words, honking lighthouse horns, and wave sounds. It makes no sense - it fascinates me - it makes me pay attention. That's it: I pay attention.

I'll be playing a lot of these on my show on Tuesday, I think. And I haven't even gotten to all the music I got from the Masada song book, Zorn's project from the 90s. Or the new Luciano Berio. Or The Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry and Fela Kuti. So much good music! Woo hoo!

radio show 2009 March 17, Oscillating a bit

Today's radio show, my first posting in 2009. Sorry about not being around, folks.

I'll be liveblogging during the show as new songs get played...

• Rothko Chapel 05 -- Morton Feldman -- Rothko Chapel / Why Patterns?
  12.00h. One of my favorite endings to any piece - the overall performance is too quiet, sadly, which is a shame. The best description of the whole Rothko Chapel piece is here, accurately describing the sense of WTF and wonder wrapped in one.
  
• music is math -- Boards of Canada -- geogaddi
  "The past inside the present." I think that is the only lyric in this beat driven Boards of Canada tune, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Rothko Chapel piece that preceded it, though it has something to do with the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX. Not that I can explain what, but to me, there's a connection, and I'll leave it at that.
  
• Electric Counterpoint-Fast(4) -- Pat Metheny -- Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint
  12.11h. This should be familiar to the dub folks as the guitar which sat underneath The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" (which is a fabulous song, isn't it?), but it's also Pat Metheny reaching into Steve Reich's composition and doing something fabulous and meditative with it. The transition from BoC to this track is exactly what I strive for in the show - on the boundary between minimalism, noise, abstract, electronic, mashup, whatever. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
  
• It Would Have Happened Anyway -- Mogwai -- Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
  I love this album. The transition was a bit slow, I began the Mogwai too late for the volume to flow smoothly from one to the other piece. Oops. The song itself is a long drone, lots of noises buried in the thick sludge, perhaps feet running, perhaps hints of crowds. I like, I like.
  
• Only -- Joan La Barbara -- Only
  A single voice. I'm swinging back and forth like mad, I feel, which is shaking up the show. It's not one zone, it's a variety of styles and sounds. It's where I am today. Oh, well. Also, the text of this piece (a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke) is really beautiful. La Barbara has sung with Steve Reich and Robert Ashley, done poems by WFMU's Kenny G, and is all around an amazing performer. And Feldman's piece, well, it's unlike anything else he did that I know of. Short, melodic, Feldman? Those don't go into the same sentence.
  
• Konstant -- Kammerflimmer Kollektief -- Maeander
  Another wild shift in style, this time from a capella voice to drum driven, beat driven electronic free jazz. The drums and percussion drive along, and on top comes this solo instrument wailing away. Free jazz sax in electronica, right after an early Feldman piece? Why not! Oh, and toward the end, the sludgy noises return as everything gets mixed heavier and heavier. The drum keeps going, but the piano comes in more and more. It's a different kind of minimalism, I guess.
  
• Fratres -- Kronos Quartet -- Winter Was hard
  Back to something quieter. But the lyrics are really funny here (winter was so hard, we could only celebrate Saturday every other Saturday... something like that). The sound transition from the one piece to the other was good, but suddenly we move from free jazz sax and drums as processed sludge to a choir singing over a string quartet. This song ended at 12.30h, for those keeping track of time.
  
• The Sea Organ of Zadar, Croatia -- City of Zadar field recording
  I found this online, and enjoy it immensely. I know the area in Croatia, though not Zadar itself. It's fabulous to think that they created this sea organ, pumping sounds onto the boardwalk for pedestrians on their evening stroll.
  
• I -- Terry Riley -- Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band "All Night Flight" Vol. 1
  It's got the same droning quality and looping set of sounds as the Zadar sea organ, but this is composed, the other was coincidence. I enjoy those kinds of connections. This is one of Riley's great saxophone driven drones, and I don't really know what else to say about it right now, because I'm listening and want to pay more attention to the swirling sounds.
  
• windchimes -- cantaloup -- tonight it shows
  12.41h. This song has a snippet from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is a beautiful movie. The song drifts between noisy melancholy and hopeful beauty, with the chords doing one thing and the chiming guitar and the bells doing another. Reminds me of Cocteau Twins, but slowed down. When the tripping drum beat enters, it makes for a lovely little repeated mantra. Mantras and minimalisms, that's what today's show is evolving toward, I guess.
  
• mykologics -- Mouse on Mars -- The only blip hop record you will evver need vol. 1
  This is one of my favorite albums of the past few years, Luaka Bop once again inventing a name for a musical genre (blip hop, just like Afrolusian music about a decade ago). The song is a little bouncy thing, bleeping and bopping along. Little glitches, a horn section as if we're in some weird electronic funk realm, and a light little groove sitting on top of ... what? Sitting on top of nothing, all high end sounds as the anchor, even as the bass and beat roll along. I totally love this song. "You really got me running," whatever that means.
  
• Ghost And Grey -- Jatun -- Jatun
  12.52h. So today isn't really a classical music show, is it? I guess not. That's what happens sometimes. I hope it's got enough drones and sludge and repetition for the average listener. This song is much more a shoegaze piece than anything else. Processed synth drums over a feedback laden guitar and synth sound, something requiring really loud volume (to quote the Cure on Disintegration, "this music has been mixed to be played loud, so turn it up"). The lyrics are buried in sludge (my favorite word for this show, it seems), and if I weren't saving my ears (for what, marriage?!) I'd have headphones on and would blow them out. The lyrics have something about meet you and greet you, reach you and complete you and see through. Can't quite figure it out. Not important, really, not to me, at least.
  
• Lazy Calm -- Cocteau Twins -- Victorialand
  12.59h. I had to do it, Cocteau Twins is much calmer than the previous song, but it still fits in with the mood I'm in. Also, it does a nice job of oscillating, from energetic sludge noise to calm beauty. The first time I heard these folks, someone had recorded one of their 45 RPM 12" records at 33 RPM. It was slow, heavy, with a bass voice singing. I LOVED that tape, even after I figured out that they were actually nothing like it. What a gas, hearing Elizabeth Frasier as a bass voice, singing dreary songs. (This was the Love's Easy Tears EP, and the year was 1987.) Victorialand and Lazy Calm have a long history in my ears. I love the moment when the bass drops in and the voice follows and everything starts shimmering.
  
• Ghost And Grey 2 -- Jatun -- Jatun
  13.05h Okay, so it's not fair to go to version 2 of Ghost and Grey after playing the first one, but this one fits into the thread of music here, and it's louder and sludgier and better and heavier and noisier and I like it, so that's why I'm playing it.
  
• Los Hongos de Marosa -- Juana Molina -- Un Día
  A request! Thanks for calling in. This song is one of the faster ones on the album, starts off with a repeated guitar part that kind of fits into what the show has had so far, and later on gets to some dissonance and such. Just trying to get the songs played to match up to the styles that have been here before, that's all. Juana Molina is really great - I'd play a lot more of her, if my show weren't "fixed" in the genre that I usually fix it to (not today, of course).
  
• Implodiert -- Kammerflimmer Kollektief -- Maeander
  Whoops! Forgot to comment on this. A repetitive drone that gets heavier and heavier until everything collapses.... long pause... then the drum beat starts up again, and we end where we began. More on that in a little...
  
• to moauf -- Tarwater -- The only blip hop record you will evver need vol. 1
  13.27h Another blip hop track, all jitters and splitters, splinters of sound until you get the long, lush synth coming in - then the drum beat returns with a minor key in the low tones, and we've gone darker for a moment.
  
• Forty-Two for Henry Flynt -- Peter Winkler -- Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965
  Yes, that's right, 42 beats on a gong. I have no idea why, I know nearly nothing about the story behind this piece. But, I do hear all the other noises (think 4'33" for inspiration), and I do hear the tape hiss from a recording, and I do hear all the other elements that exist in this live recording, giving it more than just the meditative mantra of 42 hits on a gong in honor of Henry Flynt. Perhaps someone from San Francisco, that time, that era, that place, can inform me about the details. I could google, of course, but why, when I'm listening to the music, instead? I mean, just LISTEN to those resonance overtones slowly growing out of the gong, whole new patterns and rhythms existing inside the single massive beat. Awesome, and better the more you listen to it.
  
• The Harp of New Albion: IV. Cadence on the Wind -- Terry Riley -- The Harp of New Albion
  13.47h. Just intonation in a piano, and oddly enough, it works as a bridge from the gongs. The overtones, the beats in dissonant vibrations, it's all there.
  
• eiweiß -- schneider tm -- The only blip hop record you will evver need vol. 1
  Whoops - forgot to write commentary about this...
  
• Synchrony No. 2 -- Kronos Quartet -- Early Music
  And here ends the show. The piece is by Moondog, and I totally love the interplay of the various instruments. The light touch, back and forth, the interweaving story lines, the softness... just lovely. Nice way to end the show, I guess. And next up is the Kashmir Hour, all Indian music, woo hoo!