Results tagged “music”

On the face of the evidence, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra is that composer's most widely-recorded and -performed piece. There's the Bevan/Mikashoff recording which I reviewed; the Kontarsky version issued through Deutsche Grammophon / Stockhausen Verlag; the Corver/Grotenhuis version (Stockhausen's alleged favorite, which is not in print); a version by Janka and Jurg Wyttenbach; and the Schumacher/Grau version on Wergo, which I now also have and admire quite a lot.

And now we have yet another one, by Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer, which substitutes the analog electronics called for in the score with an all-digital, computer-driven setup. They used Max/MSP, the same suite that Merzbow now uses on his Mac for his laptop-based compositions. You can even download the same patches and wiring diagrams they used, if you've got three pairs of hands and want to give the piece a shot yourself.

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Categories are devilish things. They seem to exist solely for the purpose of being defied. This goes doubly so when it comes to music, where the albums I find most fascinating and personally resonant resist having a single, easy label applied to them. They say: Just listen for yourself. Months of trying to explain this album to others gave way to me simply pointing to the audio samples. Even a collage of thirty-second snippets speaks louder than any label, and most descriptions too.

I have the equivalent of a whole shelf of music that has nominally been labeled “jazz”, but which could easily sport any of a dozen other categories. Onze Danses has been variously lumped into “jazz”, “world”, “avant-garde”, or that lazy big-box-store catchall “rock”, and while it easily touches down in every single one of those categories it never stays in any one of them long enough to set up housekeeping, or be mistaken for a resident. When writing an earlier draft of this review I came up with the term “gypsy music”, and it stuck.

Earlier in the year I accepted a gig writing music reviews for the MusiqueMachine.com site. After some messing around, I've finally started adding links back to those reviews, which will appear here in much the same manner as the AMN links did.

I still plan on looking at albums on my own, since there's a lot of stuff they may not cover which I'm still interested in talking about on my own.

Noise and junk sonic collage that never rises above being a mere collision.

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Rousing and energetic folk that extends on where Current 93 and its ilk leave off.

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One example of how indie music’s past may be classical music’s future.

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Music in "just intonation" that's more than fusty academic exercises.

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Invigorating sonic fog with a lot more to it than just pure volume.

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This was the first record by Kaoru Abe I ever heard, and from what I can tell it was among the very last recordings he ever made. Barely ten days after this concert, Abe was dead at the age of twenty-nine, a drug casualty — and by all accounts the fact he’d overdosed himself into an early grave was no surprise to anyone who knew him. I don’t hold to the theory that everyone possessed of a fierce creative energy is simultaneously practicing a form of slow self-immolation that may eventually turn out to be a rehearsal for the real thing, but the exceptions, like Abe, cloud our senses to any other possibility if only because they burned so very brightly indeed.

I listened to Last Date for the first time in the middle of the night, at a time when I was in poor spirits and felt like any human contact would only make things worse. Last Date had ended up in my collection after one of my forays through JustTheDisc.com, since the name “Kaoru Abe” was peripherally familiar from my other forays into both free jazz and Japan’s noise underground. Funny how his name turned up in both circles, but at the same time not odd at all: I’ve written before how the distance between something like Coltrane’s “Ascension” and your average Merzbow track is not that far. So I threw the album on, and before long I found myself gripping the sides of my chair and being overwhelmed with a sense of intimacy that I think only Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing has also been able to evoke. Listening to the album was like getting a letter from a dead friend and knowing you could never, ever write back.

An heir to William Basinski’s throne creates his own crumbling loops.

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A microphone in a fault line? — Much more than that on close listening.

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Gentle pulses in the vein of Apex Twin's early “Ambient Works”.

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First off. Ebert, as usual, nails it.

The gathering storm - Roger Ebert's Journal

We need to pull in our belts, pay more taxes, demand more value for our taxes, and say no to an ideology that requires converting our health money into corporate profits. We should to raise the lowest wages, and lower the highest ones. We have to return to the saying my father quoted to me a hundred times: "A fair day's work for fair day's pay." No, I don't think everyone should be paid the same wage. If you earn a lot of money, you have a right to a lot of money. If you earn it. But when Wall Street bosses are paid millions in bonuses for bankrupting their firms, and their political tools in Congress oppose a better minimum wage, that's plain wrong. It's rotten. People who defend it with ideology are strapped to a cruel ideology.

There's some other good notes in there about how Chicago really screwed itself to the wall when they privatized parking meters. How did they not think that would simply allow the company that controlled them to raise prices through the roof, with the city getting nothing but some chump change upfront? Why do we insist on, as Crass put it, bailing out the basement when there's holes in the roof?

As Paul Krugman also put it, it's time to make banking "boring" again and stop trying to create money out of nothing — with its concomitant consequences of taking blood from stones. (I like how one commentator tried to slap back at this by insisting that bubbles are nothing new. Well, sure, so is war and famine; that doesn't mean we should sit around and let them happen.)

Second, some insight into why things like this might be happening: people tend to focus on the messenger (are they like me?) and how closely the message matches their own existing beliefs than what the evidence itself suggests. The article itself is about climate change, but you could apply this to most any debate where there's evidence to be bandied about. Yes, that major snow- and rain-fall we've had on the East Coast actually confirms what's going on: a hotter overall climate = more evaporation = more precipitation in places that get it and less in places that don't.

Third, a truly amazing story about composer David Cope — wait, he's actually a music professor with a side gig in teaching computer science. He writes programs that compose music — and his compositions are startlingly, well, human. Play the samples in the article. That said, giving credit to anyone — or anything — other than Cope seems premature.

Odd, this. I’ve had Toshiyuki Sasagawa’s AQUA=MIZU in my daily playlists for almost two years now without ever eking out a coherent statement about it. I suspect that’s because it’s become such a familiar presence that it’s a little like describing the air. I also suspect talking about it will seem strange because it is so radically out of phase with the other music I tend to write about. What’s a guy who likes Merzbow and Fushitsusha doing writing about an album of soft solo piano that might easily have come from the Windham Hill label?

Well, I have my reasons — and if they seem more like excuses, then excuses they are. It was through folks like the noise-mongers described above that I backtracked into folks like John Cage, and then from Cage into Erik Satie. And from Satie into Harold Budd and Brian Eno, whose The Pearl I managed to listen to for hours on end without ever feeling like I knew where any one song really began or ended, or knowing where the whole record itself was meant to begin or end. It somehow in time became a part of the very environment of the room I was in, as did AQUA=MIZU when I played it. That said, I have to accept the possibility that what I hear in the record is only what I’ve chosen to hear, and that other people are going to simply compare it to all the other piano albums they’ve heard with a picture on the cover of some curtains blowing in the breeze.

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Academic and abstract, but not actually all that interesting.

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Lively and colorful work from an indie band that puts musicianship first.

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Workouts from a diverse crew that includes Merzbow and Croatian herky-jerk art-rockers peach Pit.

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So, on a totally different note (pun very intended) ... Seiji Ozawa will be leading a Japanese cultural festival later this year at Carnegie Hall.

The Japan festival is set for December, with a second round to follow in March and April. It will feature dance, Noh theater, taiko drumming, art exhibitions, manga and jazz, as well as performances by orchestras partly founded by Mr. Ozawa: the Saito Kinen Orchestra and the Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-juku, part of an academy established by the conductor.

There's more in the article about Carnegie Hall's financial situation, and about Ozawa's health: he has cancer of the esophagus, but his doctors are confident he'll make a full recovery. Here's hoping.

I'll have to see how much tickets are going to run for. I've never seen Ozawa conduct live, and I haven't been to Carnegie Hall itself in several dog's ages.

The other day in a conversation elsewhere, I asserted: If you have a choice between bootlegging something and buying it used for a reasonable price, buy it used. There may be benefits that you don't immediately see.

1. Buying a used copy of something removes it from the general pool of available copies. That creates, in the long run, an incentive for the item to be reissued. If it's that much harder to find in any form, it becomes that much more desirable overall.
2. Buying a used copy puts money back in the hands of a merchant who can then bring that many more things to other people, you included.
3. Buying a used copy puts money back in the hands of an individual who can then buy that much more product, new or used, and further stimulate the general market for such things — of which you're a customer.

Now, to draw a distinction or three. I know some folks who are fans of things that are really hard to find in any form, and have resorted to bootlegging to get those things. Am I going to consign their soul to the lower planes for that? No, it's just not something I feel I can opt for myself.

I suspect at least part of this attitude comes from me having modulated my intake of a lot of things, and finding better ways to (legally) satisfy my interest in them. There's NetFlix for movies, Just The Disc and other such stores for music ... but underneath all that, there's also the understanding on my part that behavior which amounts to hoarding is not good for you. (It's something I've touched on before.)

I don't believe for a moment that my behavior is going to have any effect on the net consumption behaviors of the vast majority of people out there, who are rapidly growing accustomed to getting everything for free (free to them, that is). But that doesn't mean I'm obliged to follow their example, and kneel at the same trough.

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Do you remember Godflesh? I remember Godflesh.

I remember Pure. I still speak of it, without irony, as an album that changed my life. I remember the relentless grinding of the first self-titled album, the utter despondency of Streetcleaner, the uneasy paranoia of Slavestate, and the ups and downs of the rest of the catalog. I also remember grabbing every other project I could find that had Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick credited somewhere on the jacket: Final, Jesu, Techno Animal, God, all of it.Broadrick eventually killed Godflesh and replaced it with Jesu, but the side projects continued to roll along.

Enter Greymachine, which is worth getting excited about due to the presence of a few other people of note: Aaron Turner, of Isis (another metalloid band that someone else once described as “a happier Godflesh”); Diarmuid Dalton, of ‘Flesh and Jesu and Final, as well as the underrated Cable Regime; and Dave Cochrane, most notably of the also-underappreciated Head of David (where Broadrick served as drummer for a time). The end result is a filthy mess of twisted wreckage that brings to mind everything from Broadrick’s early outfit Fall of Because — they existed in parallel with Napalm Death, where Broadrick also briefly appeared, and that alone should tell you what level of ferocity is at play here.