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!