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The last time I went record shopping — hole-in-the-wall record stores still proliferate in New York City, thank goodness — I walked out with an armload of film soundtracks: Le Grand Bleu, Taxi Driver, and a French SACD edition of Terminator 2 that I found in someone’s cut-out bin for $4. It’s not as if I have it in for actual albums from actual bands; there’s plenty of those to be talked about in time. It’s just that film soundtracks seize my attention in a way that most “regular “ albums don’t, and in a way can’t. They’re not just things unto themselves, but part of something larger that demands one’s full attention.

In most cases the film soundtracks I love are for films I know, but Music for Films is the exact opposite, and all the more fascinating for it. It’s a compilation of film music where the music preceded the films: Eno created the music in 1976, and then sent copies of a limited edition of the album to filmmakers so they could consider using it in their movies. In time, some of the music ended up in films as diverse as John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Then again, Eno composed the classic Windows 95 startup and shutdown themes, so I’m used to him popping up in places where his name wouldn’t normally appear.

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1.

There is no such thing as perfection. It’s an idea, and not even a particularly useful one at that: all it does is tell you what you are not. It’s even misleading as a goal or a direction to move in, because all it will do is dog you at every step and remind you of how you fall short.

This is what I tell myself most every day, as a way to keep my expectations from being hijacked by the impossible. Impossible is nothing, or so the Adidas ads tell us — and while I do admit every day there is a little bit less of the impossible all around us, there is never any more of the perfect. The only time there’s perfection is when we let ourselves dream, when we freely drop into a space where what’s possible takes precedence over what actually is. Sometimes the best way to get there is with the right music, and if the soundtrack to such a thing is not Kind of Blue then I don’t want another one.

Kind of Blue is the only jazz album I would recommend to someone who has never listened to jazz, whether in a conscientious way or in any way at all. That is only because it’s also one of the few albums I would recommend to anyone no matter what music they already listen to, or even if they listen to no particular music, period. It seems not “educational” but necessary: a world without Kind of Blue is missing at least one major constellation in its sky. You can play it in most any environment without directly noticing what is so special about it, and in a way that is part of what makes it so important. If someone has Kind of Blue in their collection and not a single other jazz record, they are not all that deprived.

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The press notes for Offering claim the album was inspired by the writings of Juran Hisao, a Japanese author not yet translated into English — in particular his mystery/noir novel Golden Wolf (the text of which is available through the public-domain archive Aozora Bunko). As with other Merzbow albums where the influences are worn openly on Masami Akita’s sleeve — A Taste Of... was allegedly inspired by various types of sushi — it’s something of a toss-up to see whether or not one can establish a connection between the music and the source material. I wasn’t able to figure out how this Amlux-like collection of rhythm loops and shearing layers of sound hooks back into Hisao’s tale, and I doubt it has anything to do with my translation skills not being quite up to snuff. The two tracks are titled “Deep Sea” and “The Light”, and you could sink into each of them as deeply as their real-world counterparts. This only makes me wonder all the more what album would spring from Akita’s encounters with Dogura Magura.

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A second take on George Russell’s masterwork, recorded eleven years later with a different lineup (Victor Comer, Keith Copeland, Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark, Robert Moore, Lew Soloff) and a markedly dissimilar orchestration. This version switches the piano for organ, slows down the tempo of the opening movement to a funky amble, and makes many other changes. Many passages have the same electric thrill as the 1969 performance, although the brass sounds a touch sloppy and flatulent (particularly in the first movements). I still prefer the original, but this one — and the Essence of George Russell version — are fascinating to compare, both in terms of details and the overall sweep and execution of the piece.

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“A screaming comes across the sky,” begins Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — a description which could well apply to the female primal scream that opens Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s 1979 debut album. Given that the side-long title track translates to “Mt. Fear” — a volcanic mountain reputed in Shinto mythology to be the entrance to the underworld — it comes off less as some avant-garde indulgence, and more as The Beast That Shouted “I” at the Heart of the World.

For a long time Geinoh Yamashirogumi existed in my mind as the quintessential cult band. They were mysterious to a fault; even other hard-core underground music fans didn’t know a thing about them apart from being the folks (singular? plural?) who created the soundtrack for the animated film Akira. They had a relatively small number of releases; after 1992 or so they put out no new recordings at all, but continue to have live performances. They specialized in synthesizing musical traditions from every corner of the world, from Japan on outwards, and using modern technology (synthesizers, cutting-edge recording studio systems) to bring it to a global audience. And they were from Japan, another major magnet of fascination for me personally — not just because of the cultural aura that provided, but because that made them all the more remote and difficult to learn anything about in a practical way.

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It was only through George Russell’s obituary that I ever learned about him in the first place. He was not as household a name as Duke or Miles or ‘Trane, but he mattered in a way that is only now becoming clearer to me the more I delve into his catalog. Better late than never, I suppose, but maybe there is no “late” when you are dealing with someone who has become effectively immortal through their work.

Russell was not just a composer, performer and bandleader, but one of jazz’s major theoreticians — someone who took what jazz was about and codified it in a scholastic way. Most people immediately wrinkle their noses at the words music theory and I know I did at first, but on getting closer to his work I realized he used that perspective to tunnel into jazz and build outwards from inside it to create new things. His theory was meant to be practice, and the recordings that exist of his work are testaments to the ways that could be done.

Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, for me, stands as the best example of this incarnate theorizing. It has been recorded at least three different times, each version enough unlike the others that it becomes clear even to someone without a copy of the score how much the work was meant to be interpreted in each performance. Originally released on the tiny Flying Dutchman and Strata-East labels, it became a favorite not only of jazz fans but prog-rock and experimental music lovers thanks to its scope (it’s one long composition broken over two sides of an LP), long modal passages, use of tapes and electronics, and its general atmosphere of striving, surpassing and transcending. It went out of print for nearly a decade or more, became a collector’s item, and has since returned on CD and as an MP3 download. The latter is easily the best way to spend $2 burning a hole in your pocket.

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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.

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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.

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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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.