Moving to another technology

Hi all,

Thanks for following this blog, for those who have followed it over its sporadic existence. I realized that the kind of writing/linking/paying attention that I wanted to do wasn't being supported by the technology used in this particular blog.

So I moved.

All the old posts from this blog have been migrated to the new location, and I'll hopefully be posting more regularly from there than here. Join in the fun.

radio show 2010 Feb 23

Brief brief commentary on the pieces I played this week...

The Backyard ---- Robert Ashley ---- Private Parts - The Record

The 1977 or 1978 version that would later show up in the TV opera Private Lives. This one comes with tablas rather than piano, in case that matters
Law of Octaves ---- David Seidel ----

A very amusing moment happened as a listener called to ask if the radio station was broken. "Something's wrong with the tower, I think." Uh, no. That's the drone piece slowly building a chord that resolves in the last 20 seconds of a 9 minute drone. The resolution is incredible, because of the long build-up, but the in-between does kind of sound like there's just electronic noise being broadcast by the tower.

Marimba Phase ---- So Percussion ---- Steve Reich at the Whitney 2006

Steve Reich was at this concert. He commented that he couldn't believe that these guys were playing these pieces live, with no notes. His own ensemble, he says, still needs the notes. The piece is a phase piece (hence the title, duh) in which different marimbas play at different tempos and their note patterns cycle against each other to create new structures out of chaos. It's really incredible to listen to - some days I like the chaotic middle sections better, other days I like the resolution into structured patterns better. But it's all the same thing, that's what fascinates me.

antidepressants2006 ---- Corey Dargel ---- Red White and Blue Pills

Act II ---- Robert Ashley ---- Improvement: Don Leaves Linda

A really long Robert Ashley piece, and I wish I had the full recording. My god, what a weird, weird piece of music. Totally freaking bizarre.

02:14:57 ---- Simultaneous Translation ---- April 15, 2007

Spanish and English spoken word like a field recording, none of it making sense.

Bruma ---- Sepulcrum Spei ---- Algor

What?! a FLUTE??! How could I?!??!??! Ah, well, it's lovely. There's rumbling noise in the background, so the feel good native flute sound is really not as feel good as one would think.

Radio show 2010 Feb 9

Another radio show put together at the last second, on the fly, simply seeking songs from my existing library of "hey, this might work." Some old favorites, some new things.

Herald of Air --- mysterybear --- Elementals --- 16:05

A long drone abstract piece.

Sonores Aus Kugeln v.04 - Seetyca --- Seetyca --- Eternal Ice Melts - Voice Sphere Remixes --- 7:47

This is really powerful sounding, sustained voices while a groaning low dark sound and roaring echo-y noises permeate the background. This fits my emotions right now, though. I'm tired and grumpy. This is gets remarkably close to a kind of dark metal sound, without the drums and guitar and bass, but in its darkness and growling. Crazy.

The Sinking of the Titanic (Live Bourges 13-14 1990) (excerpt starting at 6 min mark) --- Gavin Bryars Ensemble --- The Sinking of the Titanic (Live) --- 1:00:19

It's not often you can say that this is positive and hopeful, but compared to the last piece, it is. It continues the theme of drones and undermixed spoken voices, though, so it's thematically similar. I love this piece, majestic and thickly textured and a repetitive drone that goes nowhere except down down down into the water's echo. Popping hull noises, the hymn Autumn played over and over, and a sense that time ends as the chamber music disappears into the depth. It's incredibly powerful. I like this recording of it because of the prominence of some instruments (Bryars himself is on bass, and a bit heavy handed, I think).

Homage to Jack Vanarsky --- Garth Knox --- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox --- 7:52

Like the title says, this is solo viola. There's a lot of scraping and

Where All The Frozen Things Went/Remix (Overdub) --- Mick Harris aka Lull & Franziska Baumann --- Eternal Ice Melts - Voice Sphere Remixes --- 15:32

This reminds me of the rumbling darkness that is in the late Swans albums. Mick Harris (of Napalm Death and Painkiller?) is working with Franziska Baumann, whose vocal work I featured last week. This is a remix, and her vocals are pretty strongly processed. It starts really rough on the ears. (The custodian just came in to the studio and said "when I first came in, I thought there was a water leak or something." Great line.) Later into the piece, the vocals are more clear, but the underground unsettled rumble continues, and the chirps and blips of noise still skitter across the speakers.

In C --- Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble --- In C Remixed --- 20:43

After an hour of dark music, I'm trying to change moods. The short GVSU version of "In C" might fit that ticket. Who knows.

Terry Riley --- The Last Camel in Paris (excerpts from sections 5 - 8)

Organs interweaving and building huge walls of sound... not much to add, losing myself in the sound. Later on: wow, totally lost myself for a loooong time in this. Total surprise when suddenly it was ending. Eyes closed, swirling organs, slow bass pedal, and my breathing is in rhythm with it, my body sways with it, it's pretty intense.

In a Room --- John Luther Adams --- The Place We Began --- 8:35

This is a quieter drone, something to take the body back down after a long immersion in Terry Riley's late 70s ecstatic eastern meditation music. Lovely ending to a show...

Radio show 2010 Feb 2

This is a spiraling show, starting with a wonderful Steve Roden piece and then starting a spiral through Joan La Barbara doing Kenny G's 73 poems, Terry Riley doing the Last Camel in Paris, Garth Knox from the great Shsk'h label, and a mix of others.

Though I planned this show at the last possible second, I have really enjoyed listening to every part of it. It's a nice spiral, old thoughts returned to and revised.

• Winter Couplet -- Steve Roden -- Winter Couplet -- 25:17



• Track 04 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:40



• Track 05 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:48



• Microclimate - Iv. Wet Face - Natasha Barrett -- Natasha Barrett -- Sleppet -- 6:53



• 1 -- Terry Riley -- The Last Camel in Paris -- 4:43



• Track 06 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:45



• Track 07 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:44



• Microclimate - V. Water Fall - Natasha Barrett -- Natasha Barrett -- Sleppet -- 5:12



• Fabula Fantasy -- Garth Knox -- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox -- 5:08



• Gossamer -- Franziska Baumann -- Vocal Suite -- 4:43



• 2 -- Terry Riley -- The Last Camel in Paris -- 3:05



• Track 08 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:13



• Track 09 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:15



• Track 10 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:15



• Track 11 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:19



• Track 12 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:29



• Celestrograph I -- Jeff Harrington -- Celestographs -- 10:09



• Drop'n Roll -- Franziska Baumann -- Vocal Suite -- 2:25



• Sympathetic spheres II -- Garth Knox -- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox -- 6:58



• 3 -- Terry Riley -- The Last Camel in Paris -- 3:19



• Track 13 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:43



• Track 14 -- Joan La Barbara + Kenneth Goldsmith -- 73 Poems -- 0:45



• Tuner -- Takeo Toyama -- Etudes -- 4:56



• Other colour -- Garth Knox -- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox -- 6:30



• Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet -- The Vienna Wind Soloists -- The Vienna Wind Soloists -- 12:52



• 4 -- Terry Riley -- The Last Camel in Paris -- 7:11

Radio show 2010 Jan 26

Posted without much commentary. I'm really enjoying Shsk'h as a record label, the Raag Megh had audio issues, Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood is the unknown precursor to the Who's Baba O'Riley, and Steve Roden continues to be awesome.

• Salzburg Bells Multiple -- live recording -- Herrnau Kirche Aufnahmen


• With Paul (Bluehouse Edit) -- Dot Tape Dot -- Tomavistas: (Selected Rarities 2002-2007)


• 08 'Not Just More Idle Chatter -- Paul Lansky -- Tellus #22 'False Phonemes'


• Raag Megh -- Kamalesh Maitra -- Tarang


• Knee Play 2 -- Philip Glass Ensemble -- Einstein on the Beach (1979)


• Sympathetic spheres I -- Garth Knox -- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox


• camino -- Murcof -- Remembranza


• Dear Thunder - Ione, Pauline Oliveros -- Ione, Pauline Oliveros -- Nile Night


• I -- Terry Riley -- Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band "All Night Flight" Vol. 1


• Bottleneck bow scan -- Garth Knox -- Shsk'h Vol.05 - Solo Viola d'Amore : Garth Knox


• retrato -- Murcof -- Remembranza


• Ancient Bridge Part 1 -- Tange -- Complex Silence 2 [tmth05A]


• My Dog Is a Yufo - Steve Roden -- Steve Roden -- Cosmic Debris Vol. II


• Vermont Counterpoint -- Hans Balmer -- Minimal Flute


• Lettres à des amies-enfants - To Marion Richards -- Jody Pou -- Lettres à des amies-enfants (Silverman version)


• Lettres à des amies-enfants - To Ethel Arnold -- Jody Pou -- Lettres à des amies-enfants (Silverman version)


• Lettres à des amies-enfants - To Dolly Argles -- Jody Pou -- Lettres à des amies-enfants (Silverman version)


• Lettres à des amies-enfants - To Jessie Sinclair -- Jody Pou -- Lettres à des amies-enfants (Silverman version)


• Lettres à des amies-enfants - The mad gardener's song -- Jody Pou -- Lettres à des amies-enfants (Silverman version)

Flamingo Flamango Flamingus

In case you're not reading the other blog...

Reboot radio show - 2010 -1 - 12

A new year, a new radio show. This is my 20th year of doing radio. Just sayin'.

2010 Jan 12

Salzburg Bells Multiple --- Michael Wittmann --- Herrnau Kirche Aufnahmen

This is the traditional start to my radio show, ever since we got back from Austria in 2008. It's a recording of the bells in the Herrnau church tolling noon. They're all at different rhythms of course. Natural meta-metric music. Ha.

Drumming: --- Ictus --- Reich: Drumming

I'm playing the full piece - gotta love college radio. As usual, when I write my commentary, I'm not a musician, so I'm going to use all the wrong words here. Anyway, the "point" of this piece is phasing, and I love listening to it slowly roll into chaos and back out. Totally awesome. This new recording (new? I forget how new, but I think it's 2009) has a different sound to it than previous versions. The drumming sounds more brittle, drumheads much more taut. There's more bounce in the heads, if that makes sense. Hell, I don't even know if they're playing real drums or not, this is just my ears interpreting. Anyway, it's a fabulous piece, and I'm excited to have a new version to play. There are several reviews where you can find out more.

Part 1 hits this point around 10:40 where - man o man o man - things just take OFF. It's fabulous.

The transition to marimbas in Part 2 is smooth, beautiful, and rich. As the voices rise into the piece, it continues to have the crisp precision that is by now normal. Moving to new instruments, though, changes the timbre completely, and the resonance in the marimbas keeps notes sustained that were previously cut off almost as soon as they were played. Rather than being muddy, it's rich and clean. And then, briefly at 6:40, things drop out out of phase, the rhythms take over again, and there's the transition at 7:09 to the new pattern. I'm loving this piece.

Ah, silly me, I ordered them wrong and played Part 4 before Part 3. Grrrar. Part 4 ends with a wild romp, totally great, and part 3 is a chiming glockenspiel dance with another beautiful lilting pattern high up above. This is a truly great recording

Atemtango --- Franziska Baumann --- Vocal Suite

Freaky! Interesting! It gets more and more harsh as time goes on, but always interesting. The overlapping, dubbed vocals are vaguely phase-like, meaning there's some connection to the previous piece.

In A Landscape --- Gamelan Pacifica --- Trance Gong

Excellent gamelan version of John Cage's "In a Landscape," which is weird to contemplate until you listen to it. It works. I like it.

Three Landscapes, Part Ii A Waterfall For Bjørnstjerne Bjørn --- Steve Roden --- Sleppet

Sound art, quiet, good, excellent as always. Steve Roden is not only a great sound artist, but he's a totally friendly guy. I wrote to him a few times a few years ago, and he was not only so kind as to reply, but he sent me music, for free! Holy cow! So, since then, I've bought music of his (including the pieces he sent me, if I could find them - some are out of print), and I try to play him on my show. Really good stuff.

Sleppet - Chris Watson --- Chris Watson --- Sleppet

More from the Sleppet CD, a compilation of sound art, basically. This sounds really good, the water and the noise, the textures coming together. I used to find this stuff so freaking weird, when I began. I would think to myself, listening to the slightly grey-haired DJ who'd been doing this for 20 years, "Why not play, y'know, SONGS, buddy?!" And now, 20 years later, here I am, slightly grey-haired, and playing sound art. I mean, I've done whole shows dedicated to sound art, over the years (ah, the WMUC days of spoken word and noise played at once, several turntables spinning in random, creating insane and accidental, coincidental synergies), and I still love it. This piece is great, as it moves from water to birds, with... oh, never mind. It's impossible to describe, like dancing about architecture.

Trance Gong --- Gamelan Pacifica --- Trance Gong

Another good piece by the Gamelan Pacifica group.

E-bows and Rainbows - Steve Roden --- Steve Roden --- Cosmic Debris Vol. II

Electronic blips and bleeps start this off, and with this piece I end the show. Rich sounds, almost like we're listening in on radio transmissions of some 50s majestic space kingdom drifting further and further out into space - sadness and remorse, loss and hope, all buried in one set of sounds. Seriously, how the hell did he do that in the first minute of an electronic piece?! What a fabulous story line. Incredible.

New uses for this blog

This blog started out as a place for me to write about the music that I listen to. I ran out of time. I don't spend enough time on music, other than my radio show, and though I wish I could write more about all the other music I listen to (the blogs where I can download out-of-print music, the songs I buy from my emusic monthly download contract, and so on), I just don't get around to it.

Another issues I'm going through is that, outside of work things, I read a lot of random crap on the web. I love it. Who doesn't? But it sucks me in, and I end up not spending enough time paying attention to writing while I consume what others wrote. Somehow, up to now, this blog has felt like a place I had set up only for music, and that's going to change. So, from now on, I'll start posting about anything that's on my mind that's not exactly work or family related - just random things I come across on the web. I'll reblog other people's good articles if I think it's something worth sharing. I'll comment on whatever I find, even if I'm totally off base. And yes, on a weekly basis (when I'm not out of town or skipping a show for some reason or other), I will continue to have short postings on my radio show. I think it's worth it to share the music I play on my show, and I think it's worth it for people who read here to find out more about music that they wouldn't otherwise find out about. So, for those who have this on their blogroll and haven't had anything show up in a while - thanks for tuning in. I hope I'm interesting enough for you to keep me around.

Finally posting again

After a month of not posting, here I am, back on the air. I've been doing shows all September, but haven't really bothered to put them up online. Mostly, I've been running on a theme: In C and Robert Ashley's Private Lives. I have many many versions of In C, so why not play one per week? This all came because of the minimalism conference which happened earlier this month in Kansas City. I've been reading various things about the conference and playing music by those artists as well. Charlemagne Palestine, John Luther Adams, a recording of Dennis Johnson's November (as recreated by Kyle Gann), and so on.

So, today I've got SMCQ's version of In C playing, and I have a plan to play "The Bar (Differences)" from Robert Ashley's Private Lives, and otherwise, I haven't decided what I really want to be doing with my time. I'll post this for now, and add updates as the music flows around me.

===================

An hour later, and damn, I'm having a great time with the music. "What can an old fart like you do with all this money?" Robert Ashley is goddamn hilarious, and the rhythm of his language is just great (in his post 1980 phase of composing, I guess - I don't really like the earlier stuff all that much...). How many great ways are there to say "AND!" as a multi-syllabic word? He covers a lot of the bases in "The Bar (Differences)." Great piece.

The last hour had the long version of In C, followed by the Karlheinz Miklin Trio doing "Echoes of Illyria." One of the "Illyria" themes sounds an awful like one of the 53 motifs of Riley's In C, so it seemed like a natural fit to me. I don't know if I'm right or not (I really should study music more, and learn to train my ear, rather than winging it and going with what intuitively feels right), but it was a nice transition. From there, I moved on to Betsy Bobenhouse and Christy Banks doing a flute and clarinet piece, "Elaphe." The shift from "Illyria's" bass clarinet to the clarinet in "Elaphe" was pretty slick. Then a John Luther Adams piece, a remix of some of his tape loops from the 70s. I do like my weird tape loop pieces.

But still, right now, I'm caught up in the wacky piano playing by Blue Gene behind Robert Ashley's rant-mumbles (seriously, that's what it feels like). Awesome stuff. I think I have some Kyle Gann to play later on, and I don't have anything picked for the last half hour of the show. But I'm having a blast.

===================

Okay, I moved from the Robert Ashley through a Kyle Gann piece that really didn't grab me and was faded out into a long drone piece. God, I love a good drone. This is Ancient Bridge Part 2, by Tange. This takes the FM3 Buddha Box and samples it into something totally amazingly different and beautiful. What a gorgeous piece. And it was a free download , woo hoo! Gotta love free downloads.

WMEB radio show, 20090512

Here are the songs I plan to play today - at the moment out of order. Who knows if I will put them in order during the show. Commentary may or may not arrive. Times may or may not be listed. We'll see if I pay attention to the blog while immersing my head in the music.

• Serenade for Six German Sirens Op. 43 --- Hallgrímur Valjálmsson --- Serenade for Six German Sirens Op. 43
  12.04
  Only played the first 9 minutes, the "first movement." It's a set of sirens (duh) at different frequencies and tempos, and they play against each other like the best and most classic of minimalist phase music. Very very cool.
  
• Das Mecklenburger Pferd --- Hans-Karsten Raecke --- Sound Sculptures
  12.16
  Play a sculpture, go ahead. Add a badly played saxophone. Go ahead, enjoy it. It's pretty fun. Then the skronking starts. Is this postclassical music, free jazz, both? Who cares. It's fun.
  
• Procession / Peregrinacion --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  Dude, this is weird.
  
• Greetings / Saludos --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
  12.39
  And this is hysterical. A wiggly accordion plays crazily, the bass end honks away, the treble/keyboard end noodles away, and hysterical Spanish and English voices say stupid greetings to each other. I'm giggling.
  
• Ghosting / Relaciones --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• Fragments / Fragmentos --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
  
• In The Houses Of My Families / En Las Casas De Mis Familias --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  12.49
  these three flow into each other, washes and waves of sound reverberating louder and louder. Beautiful.
  
• Reverberations / Reverberaciones --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  12.50
  From a drone to percussion, now there are gongs and triangles and bells making this awesome racket. This is not an easy piece, but it is totally captivating.
  
• Duet / Dueto --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• Body Stories / Historias Del Cuerpo --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  By now, this has gotten kind of disturbing. Still utterly captivating, as well.
  
• Monkey / Chango --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  13.00
  And here, suddenly, the disturbing shifts into something more pleasant. Yes, the uncomfortable vocal continues, but the accordion hits a much nicer chord, and the looping is not as frantic, and more beautiful.
  
• Wolf / Loba --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• Private Journies / Viajes Privados --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• River Of Folk Dance / Rios Folkloricos --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• The Last Time / Ultima Vez --- Pauline Oliveros --- Ghost Dance
  
• 03 Phonetische Etüde --- Wolfgang Roscher --- Sound Sculptures
  
• Igor Ballereau : Noctis Labyrinthus --- Kenneth Kirschner/Aaron Siegel/Igor Ballereau/Giuliano D'Angiolini --- Shsk'h Vol.03 - Kenneth Kirschner/Aaron Siegel/Igor Ballereau/ Giuliano D'Angiolini
  
• I Am Sitting In A Room --- Alvin Lucier --- I am sitting in a room
  Like I thought, i stopped typing. Whoops. I did like the last few songs. And now, with Alvin Lucier, I'm closing out on a classic piece of conceptual art. More on Lucier can be found in this Nate Aldrich interview. Enjoy!
  

Radio show 2009 April 28

Today's show is full of lovely skittery music, snippets of sound. Totally gorgeous. Wow.

In one song, that violin sound high up the bridge comes out, fucking gorgeous and perfect. Gidon Kremer introduced me to that, Kronos Quartet does it really well, and I just downloaded an album from the Shsk'h netlabel where they NAIL the sound. Perfect.

So I'm losing myself in sounds for the next little bit... and not writing many comments. Meaning, none. But here is the most important link in this show:

Shsk'h. The downloads are free (I donated!), and absolutely worth it. More about the netlabel can be found at Disquiet.

Here are songs I plan to play during the show:

Variation VII -- William Basinski -- Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive

Frottola -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Maritime Rites: From Center of Rainbow, Sounding - Malcolm G -- Malcolm Goldstein -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites

Sequenza III -- Luciano Berio -- Differences/Sequenza III/Sequenza VII/Due pezzi/Chamber Music

Omoigawa -- Etsuko Chida -- Shsk'h Vol.02 - Koto Kumiuta : Etsuko Chida

Più vicino ai morti -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Death hath deprived me -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Kenneth Kirschner : January 21, 2009 -- Kenneth Kirschner/Aaron Siegel/Igor Ballereau/Giuliano D'Angiolini -- Shsk'h Vol.03 - Kenneth Kirschner/Aaron Siegel/Igor Ballereau/ Giuliano D'Angiolini

Limbus Puerorum -- Akashic Crow's Nest -- Hawk of an Uncanny Nest [Webbed Hand wh078]

venice-beach -- Robert Henke --

Chamber Music -- Luciano Berio -- Differences/Sequenza III/Sequenza VII/Due pezzi/Chamber Music

Inscapes - I. They are -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Inscapes - II. Distance -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Inscapes - III. A noise of falls -- Igor Ballereau -- Shsk'h Vol.01 - Igor Ballereau

Whittling -- Daniel Goode -- Clarinet Songs

2009 April 7 radio show liveblog

Found sounds and layers of music at odds with each other.

The usual: song title - band - album, and my comments.

• Lion In A Coma -- Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
  12.01h This song really isn't postclassical or minimalist or anything like that, but it IS in a 19 beat pattern, as far as I can tell. When I count it out, it's in a 4-5-4-6 pattern. I haven't even bothered to listen to the lyrics, until now, but they're kind of funny. Point of information: trying to bike in tempo to this song is wacky, because the downbeat shifts from left leg to right leg in weird ways. Nineteen beats is a long beat sequence.
  
• Kepler -- Nobukazu Takemura -- Scope
  12.06h A lovely swirl of sound. There's a sense of it being phase music in the Steve Reich meaning of the word, but really, it seems to be only lovely overlapping arpeggios and chimes. Oh, and the patterns start breaking apart with a bit of glitch noise. It's really pretty to my ears, perhaps because of (rather than in spite of) the noises skittering behind the chime arpeggio. You can read more about the album here and here , if you wish.
  
• 14-ruido_blanco -- Bosques de mi Mente -- Ruido Blanco
  It starts off with straight up drone electronic noise and a repeated piano pattern - kind of light, trite fare - but then drops into a street recording of some street musicians, and a feedback drone building up slowly in the middle of it. The tonal quality is a big shift from the previous section, almost like the two aren't related at all. The street recording maxes out the audio line, the drone noise starts to cover it up. Then, in the "third movement," the drone drops out, and we move from a street music scene to some Spanish language radio/TV recording, with a sad piano line buried behind the radio/TV feed. There's something incredibly isolating and sad about this performance. Like you're not connected to anything, like you're isolated more and more from the society in which you walk, invisible to the world.
  
• For English Horn, 2 Clarinets, Bass Clarinet and Timpani -- The Barton Workshop -- The Fives (X)
  Fabulous transition into John Cage, one of his number pieces. This grouping matches nicely to the previous piece - where that was isolation from the world, these instruments leave all sorts of open space, so that the isolation starts to exist from instrument to instrument. Even as they play together, they do things that make no sense, that don't fit together. But they do, anyway, we can't help but hear them that way. It's my favorite recording on this album.
  
• Witchita Vortex Sutra -- ?University Group? -- Witchita Vortex Sutra
  12.32h
  A student group is performing this - the audio isn't as professional (hell, it's a live recording taken from a YouTube file) and the voice isn't Allen Ginsburg like in the full recording. The piano playing is fine, not terribly perfect, who cares. This is my chance to do a live performance of a concert, right? So it sounds like a group of really good non-professionals. Why not?
  
• Absolutego -- Boris -- Absolutego - Special Low Frequency Version
  What does one say about this track?! Seriously, it's like metal slowed down to ... well, riffs are gone, this is just whomping hard noise. There's a hint of singing, somewhere. Not really. The one thing it does remind me of is Leng T'che, the Naked City scream fest. I suppose you could call this minimal in the metal way.
  
• Apple Electronics -- The Modernist -- Köln Kompakt 1
  What the?! I'm playing this song, with its ridiculously dull beat (what did George Clinton say about disco? look it up), and yet it appeals to me. It's utterly precise, machine-like. Motorik. Again, it's minimal in a specific kind of way. Not the genre of minimalism, but the framework of it, expressed in other musical areas. Part of me wishes, though, that I'd spent more time on the Boris. God, what a sludge fest.
  
• 13-la_calle_solitaria -- Bosques de mi Mente -- Ruido Blanco
  Earlier, I played this group, and it was sad and isolated. This is a piano lament, but processed sounds so that it doesn't sound trite. Something is wrong, is what the production conveys. The melody line is overprocessed, the input is maxed so that there's a distortion and feedback, a sustain that makes it unpleasant, this sadness. Fabulous production, in other words, an instrument to itself, where the music alone isn't sufficient to convey what's going on in the composer's head.
  
• Maritime Rites-- Alvin Curran -- Maritime Rites
  13.01h This is the long song to end the album - I think, by now, I've played nearly the whole album on my show. The music consists of the buoys and foghorns, and I'm sure later on more things will come in. The text is from previous pieces, in part, but also contains weird spoken snippets. I can't possibly put into words how this piece of music tells its story. It's grand, though, just utterly grand.
  
• Beneath the Forest Floor -- Hildegard Westerkamp -- Transformations
  This is a great processed field recording, really interesting to listen to - long, meditative, neither abrasive nor particularly beautiful, but interesting throughout.
  
• Maritime Rites: Improvisation - George Lewis -- George Lewis -- Alvin Curran: Maritime Rites
  Yet another Maritime Rites album - the mix of foghorns, spoken word interviews describing the role of buoys, and the music in the background is a "what the hell?!" kind of noise, squelches and farts, for all practical purposes. Really really odd vocal noise. (You know, this again reminds me of Naked City, like the Boris track did - except this time, I'm thinking of Yamatsuka Eye's vocal acrobatics.)
  
  

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!
  
  

Why the name?

Yeah, so you're wondering where the name "Das Internationale Elektron" comes from, aren't you? You weren't. Well, now you are. Listen up, here's a story 'bout a man named Jed... sorry, wrong story.

Okay, so there is this group from Vienna that I know next to nothing about, except they are called "Mäuse" and they had an album called Teen-Riot Günther-Strackture. The album is pretty fucking awesome, and nobody has ever heard of it. I have no idea why Sepp and Niccy (friends in Austria, perhaps reading this blog, but I doubt it, so they can't answer) knew about or gave me the CD about a decade ago. They did. I loved it. The music is whimsical, distorted, stupid, hysterical, and meaningful. It's hard to explain how that can be, and I can't play it for you, so there. Trust me. Track 10 is a song called "Das Internationale Elektron." It's a dubby kind of electronic DIY thing, tripping over itself as it flows along.

Now, when I heard that, I was amused by the joke of it all. Electrons are fermions, they obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, meaning they can't all be in the same quantum state at once. (Bosons, obeying Bose-Einstein stats, can, which is why identical photons can all heap onto the same place, making bright spots). So to say something is an international electron, well, that's just funny. I mean, that international traveler, that electron. But you still need a nation (quantum state), because you can't be like any other electron. We're all individuals! But are international electrons? What does it even mean?

One more thing about electrons - they are indistinguishable. One electron is just like another (except its quantum state, but that can be manipulated). So, again, what does it mean to have an international electron?

The show name was perfect for a physicist doing a show based on international music of all sorts. I don't play that anymore, but still feel that I live up to the dilemmas in the name. Postminimalism as a genre, seemingly identical pieces used to construct the pieces, but always somehow different (Riley's In C is always different, even when the 53 musical leptons remain the same). I can't explain it. But it still makes sense.

Plus, now you know just a little more about the dorky mental connections I make when listening to music. Perhaps a future entry will go into postminimalism as punk music, the connections between Sonic Youth and feedback and John Luther Adams, and so on. Who knows when.

How I found to this music

Kyle Gann, in the middle of an old post found here, explains a bit of how I ended up listening to all the music that I now play on my show. I ended up liking the 20 second intros and outtros of songs more than the songs themselves. I liked it when artists goofed off just as the volume faded out. I loved hearing the weird chord to end the song, the odd drumming pattern that started off just as you thought they'd repeat the chorus one more time, etc. I loved the crazy starts to songs that finally wrapped into the more usual rock song format. And, like I said, i started liking them more than the actual songs that came in between the intro and outro.

So I started looking for new sounds in music. This started in about 1992. This was right when I started missing musical movements, like, oh, My Blood Valentine (whose Loveless I now love, but didn't hear for roughly 7 years) or Radiohead (a group I only liked again after Kid A, mainly because I hadn't even heard OK Computer for the first 3 years it was out) . First I veered into free jazz, lots of Coltrane, and John Zorn, including Naked City and Masada. Some time in 1993, I heard Crumb's Black Angels and Reich's Come Out and in my first year of grad school, for no good reason that I can recall, I bought Glass's Einstein on the Beach. I'd had some other Glass, old records and such, but that opera blew me away. I didn't know how to find more of the music until years later. I was just kind of ignorant until roughly 2001 or 2002, to be honest. I spent the late 90s listening to international music of all flavors, anyway.

Anyway, it's amusing to have Gann describe the problem of a listener like me before the switch to listening to minimalism. As Gann writes, "For many of us, the large-scale course of the piece is precisely the point, even (or especially) if it goes nowhere." I love that line of his, and steal it all the time: music that ends up going nowhere. I seem to play a lot of that on my show.

Dec 16, 2008 playlist

Next week, I'll be doing a show of crazy German and US new wave music, the ultimate in synth-dressed punk DIY music (man, some of that stuff is crap, but GOOD crap). This week, I'm doing really long songs. I don't even know how many I'll play. I'd planned to do the whole Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach, but realized that my mood wasn't in it. Plus, who wants to study to that material? (It's finals week at UMaine, for those not at UMaine.) I have my serious emotional attachment to the piece, and it flips my brains around every time I immerse in it as fully as during a radio show in which nothing else gets played. The piece is 3+ hours, and I have a 2 hour show. So, perhaps another reason I'm not playing it is that I showed up at the station too late.

So what I'm playing instead is:

Constant Mix mp3 from C. Reider

The link takes you to the place where I first found out about this piece (this morning!), and links from there take you further to the download at archive.org. (Irony moment: I am late to this show because of futzing about trying and failing to submit a paper to arxiv.org, pronounced the same way.) Read up on the music at both locations, because it's interesting. The music is a collection of drones, with the drones removed, in essence. What's left at that point? Fascinating sound, accidental blips and blops, arhythmic material, and an incredibly dense, interesting listen.

Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich

This is the 1996 recording, a bit longer than the 1978 ECM recording, a bit smoother and more richly textured. I don't know which I like better. Much like with the 1970s recordings of Music in 12 Parts and Einstein on the Beach compared to the 90s recordings, there's a certain amount of sound harshness to the original recordings. I think it's an artifact of the recording style from the 70s but also I have a sense that they wanted to sound more lush in the 90s. Most of the time, I like the harsher DIY sounds of the 70s, from back in the day before these were hugely supported artists.

Anyway, the music is just plain beautiful. It is one of my favorite pieces ever, and has been for the past 6 years or so. It's just amazing to listen to. So many elements of it are memorized and familiar to me, and yet each time I listen to it I get this thrill as something happens that I hadn't heard before. It's a piece that makes me LISTEN. It's a thorough pleasure, every time.

There's a ton on Reich online. I'm curious when Kyle Gann will have more to say about the piece. His response to Galen H. Brown in this thread was interesting - I'm not a composer, though, so a lot of it is way beyond my understanding. Sigh. Anyway, the whole article is a great read even for an ignoramus like me.

Not that it matters, but my favorite interview with Reich happens to be at the indie rock online mag, Pitchfork .

Music in 12 Parts - Philip Glass

I like many of these 12 pieces immensely and can't stand others just as strongly. Go figure. I'll be playing parts 1, 9, and 6, I think. (There's a numerical reason for that, but I'm still playing with it.)

If you're interested in the guy, check out this long article on Philip Glass. There is a ton more on the web about him, and you can listen to nearly his entire catalog up to 2001 with the IBM Glass-engine, here. Pretty slick, that.

Grand Unified Theory of Band Suckage

I've been listening to Pandora, the funky Music Genome Project radio station (I have no better name for it), and have enjoyed occasionally coming across good new songs that I didn't know. I have my Terry Riley playlist, my Steve Reich playlist, and today, for the hell of it, I put in Radiohead. Sure sure, a few songs of Radiohead, Beck, Coldplay (ack! skip that), as well as Muse, Modest Mouse, and a few others.

This brings me to my Grand Unified Theory of Band Suckage. Good bands go bad when their drummers go boring. Imagine a band with a creative drummer, a fabulously interesting rhythm section, a drummer who dances over the beat, a drummer who cares to stay off the typical rock 2-4 rhythm (boom-CHACK-boom-boom- CHACK, every damn measure). This is an interesting band. Think of historical examples, the Police (Stewart Copeland) or Radiohead (who only got interesting to me when Phil Selway stopped being an indie rock formula drummer). Ah, but it's the Police who make my point. By the time the Police made it huge, they weren't as interesting. Honestly, go back and listen to Synchronicity. It's not as interesting as Ghost in the Machine or Regatta de Blanc, and it certainly doesn't have the musically creative desperation of Zenyatta Mondatta (which I find a brilliant album, by the way). And that travesty, Don't Stand So Close to Me '86, well hell, that's just shit. And one reason it's shit is because of the stupid 2-and-4-beat drumming. What was Copeland thinking? (For those who care, the excellent New Yorker writer and author Alex Ross actually answered an email from little old me, not at all related to this topic, and pointed out that Phil Selway's drumming on the last Radiohead album was the actual strength of the recording. Huh. Proof of my Grand Theory? or just a chance to name Alex Ross in a blog post?)

So here I am, back in the present day, listening to Modest Mouse. And it's that song that was kinda popular (forget the name, don't care to remember it), the one where they sound like the Talking Heads. High voice like David Byrne, a certain kind of guitar, blah blah blah. But the reason it's NOT the Talking Heads is that ... the drums suck. I mean, maybe they don't suck, but they sure are boring. There's no there there. They don't do anything at all for me. It ain't Chris Frantz playing, let's put it that way.

So. If ever a band you've loved suddenly isn't as interesting as before, listen to the drums. If they're boring, it's a sure sign that the songwriter has taken over in the studio and the band itself is kinda dead. And, usually, this means that the band is no longer interesting to listen to.

PS: Lesser known variant of theory: bassist suddenly stops doing interesting things. Overarching theme of theory: rhythm section matters.

PPS: Further applications of this theory are the Cure, when you look at their albums up to Pornography and compare them to the albums since, oh, say Mixed Up (which reworked old rhythms, good choice!), Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists, Liz Phair, and Einstürzende Neubauten. I wouldn't call it a Grand Unified Theory if it only applied to a few genres of indie rock. It's an across the board kind of thing... at least in my present mood.

UPDATE 20081216: Talking to my brother-in-law, he mentioned a band I'd meant to write about but hadn't. When REM's drummer left, what happened? That's right: years of suckage. They seem to have grown closer to their present drummer over the years, which helped their last album be quite good in comparison to the dreary years.