Saturday, January 31, 2004
Last night, checked out the first night of this year’s CEAIT Festival (now in it’s seventh year!). It was my first time going down to RedCat, which is part of Frank Gehry’s new crazy Disney Concert Hall downtown, but just sort of the small room around the back for the more arty shit. This years festival (like always?) is showcasing a variety of approaches to creating music mostly involving electronics. The pure laptop pieces were probably the hardest to get into, as I find the sounds were generally too impersonal and too unemotional, especially for a concert setting. Varieties of static washing through the room, beatless shards of sound, whines and whirs, glitches and throbs. The laptop music had an anonymous quality that leads me to think this is approach has hit a dead road - it’s hard to find new territory in computer generated sounds - I heard little different here than when I first heard purely laptop generated music/sound in the mid-90s. More interesting were definitely the performances that combined traditional acoustic instruments (that human touch!) with electronic real time manipulations of the sounds created and/or straight up duo collaborations between electronic and acoustic performers. Glen Whitehead’s trumpet was manipulated by Michael Theodore’s laptop to create fields of sound that recalled the strange harmonics produced by the chanting of the Gyoto Monks. In a solo performance Monique Buzzarte played trombone to various loops and gurgles generated on computer, as well as with an interesting, impossible to figure out video of slow motion dancers apparently in a zero gravity-esque environment. The best set for my ears was from the duo of Xavier Charles on clarinet and Marc Pichelin on some kind of amped up thrum sound generators. Pichelin’s electronics were very physical and very in tune with Charles’s lowercase approach to clarinet, using a lot of breath and sound and circular breathing and various microphones at different heights, that not only changed the sound, but helped to make the performance more visually interesting than most of the others (face it, a person sitting behind a laptop computer for fifteen minutes, staring with glazed eyes at the screen doesn’t make a very interesting visual experience - especially because I do that myself all day long at work). I also enjoyed a set by Tom Recchion that used tape loops and CDs to create a bed of sound that recalled Philip Jeck to my ears. A very nice piece, however, when it ended I noticed the older fellow sitting closest to me had begun to snore rather loudly. The one set I really hated though was unfortunately the last, by Paul DeMarinis. While a CD of looped and fading Nazi propaganda speeches and bleeps and beats played quietly in the dark, he stood holding two large circular screens on which video of a candle slowly burning down was projected, while the background behind the candle slowly filled up with static over fifteen minutes - yawn.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
I’d heard quite a lot of good things about Flann O’Brien’s “classic” novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, but after finally reading it myself over the last week, all I can say is “huh?” Really, I’m surprised I stuck with it to the end - I guess it helped that it was only a little over three hundred pages long - I kept hoping to get into it, but I just kept growing more bored. Perhaps I might have connected with it if I was a little more familiar with the Irish literature it’s supposedly sending-up, but I didn’t find it to be anything but a mess. The “story” cuts back and forth and around and all over the place and nowhere, boring pages of lists run up against whimsy, bad poetry, etc. Seems to me a little like one of those things that might have been ground-breaking back in the day, possible helping to bust open the form of the novel, but doesn’t actually say much all these years on. But I find it frustrating to read a book and to not be able even to see in it what others have, and apparently still do.
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Finally made it out to line space line @ the Salvation Theater (in Silverlake) for the first time. I’ve been meaning to go out there for months and months, and I guess they’ve actually been having this Monday night series of new and improvised music for over a year and a half - I’m ashamed that it took me this long to finally make it. It’s actually a pretty nice place to go to listen to some music. A very small room, seats for about fifty, very intimate setting - which if I bother to go out, is one of the things I’m definitely looking for. Sitting right up there feeling the air inside ya vibrate.
Tonight started off with a solo clarinet and tenor set that I really enjoyed - I’m really into getting to listen to just one instrument, one performer at a time lately - for whatever reason. I know some people find that kind of boring, but for my ears, I really like that clean, pure sound. Just one thing to focus the attention on. Unfortunately the performers name escapes me (and the website has the wrong listing). The second set featured an unusual flute, bassoon, clarinet and electric contrabass guitar quartet, playing compositions by Steuart Liebig. They had their moments, but overall didn’t make the strongest impression. Most of the time the tunes just kind of burbled along, which isn’t my favorite approach. I think I enjoyed the clarinetist the most, I believe it was Andrew Pask.
Now that I know how easy it is to get there and back (even though it‘s pretty far and sometimes hard to get motivated to go out on a Monday night), I’ll definitely be making some return trips. Maybe even next week. Definitely February 9th, for the Vinny Golia / Nels Cline duo.
Tonight started off with a solo clarinet and tenor set that I really enjoyed - I’m really into getting to listen to just one instrument, one performer at a time lately - for whatever reason. I know some people find that kind of boring, but for my ears, I really like that clean, pure sound. Just one thing to focus the attention on. Unfortunately the performers name escapes me (and the website has the wrong listing). The second set featured an unusual flute, bassoon, clarinet and electric contrabass guitar quartet, playing compositions by Steuart Liebig. They had their moments, but overall didn’t make the strongest impression. Most of the time the tunes just kind of burbled along, which isn’t my favorite approach. I think I enjoyed the clarinetist the most, I believe it was Andrew Pask.
Now that I know how easy it is to get there and back (even though it‘s pretty far and sometimes hard to get motivated to go out on a Monday night), I’ll definitely be making some return trips. Maybe even next week. Definitely February 9th, for the Vinny Golia / Nels Cline duo.
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Been listening to Erans this weekend, the new duo studio recording from Yoshida Tatsuya (drums) and Satoko Fujii (piano), and have been REALLY enjoying it. There’s a great energy coming off this one. It’s strange, it doesn’t feel like a duo recording - there’s enough music pounding through the speakers for me to believe it’s actually a quartet. A very intense, dense meeting that combines the strengths of rock and free jazz at their most exciting. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to such continuously energetic playing, and it’s starting to make me think I’ve maybe been spending too much time with the wrong music. This is definitely a good way to start off a new year, thinking twice.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
This Friday's Guardian has a nice article on the American composer Elliot Carter, who is still going strong at 95(!), some say stronger than ever. I'm not too familiar with his music (I've got & like the DG20/21 Symphonia & Clarinet Concerto that came out a few years back), but it's really inspiring to read about somebody at 95 who still seems to have it together. Even though I don't exactly agree with him, I thought his quote on John Cage is pretty funny too, "I think his non-music wears thin very fast. Cage said that all noise is music - well, we've known that from the beginning, except we didn't want to hear it much."
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
I really love this chapter ending paragraph from Stephen Crane’s novella George’s Mother...
“But then his nearer dreams were a multitude. He had begun to look at the great world revolving near to his nose. He had a vast curiosity concerning this city in whose complexities he was buried. It was an impenetrable mystery, this city. It was a blend of many enticing colors. He longed to comprehend it completely, that he might walk understandingly in its greatest marvels, its mightiest march of life, its sin. He dreamed of a comprehension whose pay was the admirable attitude of a man of a man of knowledge. He remembered Jones. He could not help but admire a man who knew so many bartenders.”
“But then his nearer dreams were a multitude. He had begun to look at the great world revolving near to his nose. He had a vast curiosity concerning this city in whose complexities he was buried. It was an impenetrable mystery, this city. It was a blend of many enticing colors. He longed to comprehend it completely, that he might walk understandingly in its greatest marvels, its mightiest march of life, its sin. He dreamed of a comprehension whose pay was the admirable attitude of a man of a man of knowledge. He remembered Jones. He could not help but admire a man who knew so many bartenders.”
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
The NYRB Classics forthcoming list has finally been updated. Some interesting looking titles, especially Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn by Harvey Swados, Envy by Yuri Olesha, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties by Murray Kempton, The Diary of a Rapist by Evan S. Connell and Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon.
To follow up Luc Sante's Low Life I've been reading Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets - and other New York writings, which is a lot of fun. Two books that go good together. Take me back to the 1890's!
To follow up Luc Sante's Low Life I've been reading Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets - and other New York writings, which is a lot of fun. Two books that go good together. Take me back to the 1890's!
Sunday, January 18, 2004
I received the mailer for the SFJazz Spring Season on Friday and it’s a great schedule. Like I needed one more reason to be frustrated I don’t live in San Francisco anymore. I’ll be flying up though to at least catch Ornette Coleman’s new quartet on March 20th. Other great looking shows on the schedule include Sam Rivers, Reggie Workman, Jason Moran and the William Parker Quartet on April 9th. Paul Bley and Satoko Fujii on April 10th. Wayne Shorter and Brad Mehldau on April 17th. Orchestra Baobab on May 1st. Matthew Shipp on June 13th. Sonny Rollins on June 18th (I’m trying to find a way to fit Rollins into my already blown budget). And João Gilberto on June 25th. You lucky bastards!
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Originally released in 1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s semi-masterpiece, Cure, has finally made it out on R1 DVD this month, thanks to HVE. Cure at it’s most basic is the story of a detective trying to solve a series of seemingly unsolvable murders, but the mood and style transcends all the typical suspense clichés the basic plot elements would imply. Like David Lynch at his best, Kurosawa isn’t interested in explaining exactly what is going on, but instead spends his energy on atmosphere and leaving things open for the viewer to put the pieces together themselves. This style creates a much more active (and suspenseful) experience - which is a lot of fun, though someone looking for a more structured 1 2 3 approach (beginning middle and end) might find confusing. The scenes are always short. The action is strange and deadpan. Music and sound are extremely well used. And Koji Yakusho, who has also played the lead in several other of Kurosawa’s great films, like Charisma and Kairo, as well as in Shinji Aoyama’s masterpiece, Eureka is typically perfect. Hopefully we won’t have to wait seven more years for Kurosawa’s latest film, Doppelganger, to make it to these shores.
Friday, January 16, 2004
There's an interesting and funny article/tribute to John Cage in today's Guardian. Some recommended reading via Sandow.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
I finally started reading Luc Sante’s Low Life tonight (it had been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months) and am really into it. It’s sort of a history of underground New York from 1840 to 1919. I want to take the day off from work tomorrow just to stay home and read, though I probably won’t. My mind is racing trying to figure out a way to fit in at least a quick trip back to NYC this spring. Just tonight I’m thinking about adding on to April’s travels by taking the bus up from Athens after the ACME festival, then flying home from JFK, instead of the more reasonable Atlanta or Jacksonville. Maybe that’s stretching myself a bit thin - but damn - there’s just so much I want to do, it’s painful to make a decision about what to do.
Also picked up a thin book about Max Beckman and a thicker one about the Mexican mularists, Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros - wanting to know more as they kept coming up in the biography I read a couple weeks back on Philip Guston. In 2004, I want to read more art history books. I want to read more about contemporary art, and look at more contemporary art. I want to look at more photography.
Four CDs I’ve enjoyed hearing for the first time in the last week...
Benjamin Biolay Négatif
Günter Müller Eight Landscapes
Toby Twining Chrysalid Requiem
Ami Yoshida Spiritual Voice
Also picked up a thin book about Max Beckman and a thicker one about the Mexican mularists, Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros - wanting to know more as they kept coming up in the biography I read a couple weeks back on Philip Guston. In 2004, I want to read more art history books. I want to read more about contemporary art, and look at more contemporary art. I want to look at more photography.
Four CDs I’ve enjoyed hearing for the first time in the last week...
Benjamin Biolay Négatif
Günter Müller Eight Landscapes
Toby Twining Chrysalid Requiem
Ami Yoshida Spiritual Voice
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World by Donald Antrim is one of the stranger books I've read in some time. It's set in a suburbia slightly worse off than our own. The town's ex-mayor has just been drawn and quartered (by four cars) and the latest craze in home decoration involves creating deadly pit traps around your house. The book follows a few weeks in the life of Pete Robinson as he tries to bury the various pieces of the ex-mayor around town, start a home school and deal with his wife's preference for living her life in a trance state in which she believes she is a coelacanth (fish). The language is subtle, precise and often quite funny. Definitely in it's own way, a perfect 185 pages.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Geoff Dyer, author of the GREAT But Beautiful, writes up his favorite photography books of 2003 for the LA Weekly. You might not want to read the article if one of your new year's resolutions had anything to do with living on a budget.
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Today's listening was strange. I started with Archie Shepp Live in San Francisco. I picked this one up after seeing the Vandermark 5 last year, covering "Wherever the June Bugs Go." A great record - though the 32 minute(!) bonus track, "Three For a Quarter, One for a Dime," dragged on a bit long for me today. I mean, the two bonus tracks are longer than the entire original release of the album. I followed that up with the pleasant French pop of Keren Ann La Disparition. I've stupidly been on the fence about picking up her latest release because supposedly it's sung all in English and a little more folky - gotta get it tho. After lunch things got darker and darker. Kyuss Blues For The Red Sun led to Slayer Reign in Blood which led to sunn0))) 3: Flight of The Behemoth which is about as heavy as I wanted to get. After work I went out for coffee, and felt better watching the sun go down and reading the middle sections of Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus. Back home, I'm finishing the day off to the tune of Phil Niblock's latest 2CD drone, Touch Food. I picked it up a couple weeks ago and am just now giving it a listen, and so far I'm really liking it. It's so fucking solid.
Monday, January 05, 2004
Favorite new music - 2003 edition...
It's almost impossible for me to make up my mind about what records I really liked the most over the last year, but it's easy to pick the release I think was by far the most important - the seven CD Amplify 2002 Balance boxset (on Erstwhile). Documenting the 2002 Amplify festival in Tokyo and some related events - the set showcases the most challenging music in the most inviting way. The stellar list of improvisors include Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Günter Müller, Sachiko M, Ami Yoshida and more. The companion DVD adds a lot, by showing how the music is made, watching the performances up close and getting the details that you couldn't even get if you were in the audience - I think I was able to find my way a lot further inside this strange world of music and sound. An expensive purchase, but one I was very glad to even have the opportunity to make.
Other favorites include...
Kenny Wheeler Dream Sequence (on PSI). Beautiful recording, beautiful band. Sublime but never dull. Recorded over seven years with amazing focus and consistency.
Brotzmann, Parker & Drake Never Too Late but Always Too Early (on Eremite). Intense as music can be - a great trio. Exactly what you'd expect from these guys - but that's a good thing.
Petra Haden and Bill Frisell s/t (on Songline/Tonefield). Listen closely and get lost in the strange, but beautiful layers of music here. Frisell's guitar work is more alive than it's been in years. Haden's lovely voice and violin weave through this great set of covers (and two originals).
William Parker & The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra Spontaneous (on Splasc(H)). Recording from their great set at the 2002 Vision Fest, which I was lucky enough to catch live. True big band energy that recalls the spirit of Ellington and Mingus at their most wild (or maybe wilder than that).
Viktor Vaughn Vaudeville Villain (on Sound-Ink). Can't resist the impact of the hard beats, incredible lyrics, and goofy cartoon humor of Mf. Doom's latest alter ego. Also see: King Geedorah Take Me To Your Leader for giant monster evil.
Paul Westerberg Come Feel Me Tremble (on Vagrant). Grandpa's best album since 1987. Who'da thunk it?
Hiyashi, Otomo, Toyozumi The Crushed Pellet (on Studio Wee). Double CD of incredible studio improvisations. Very fire. Japanese free jazz - not much can be better.
John Fahey Red Cross (on Revenant). Fahey's final album is one of his most haunting. Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today is the most incredible, atmospheric song I heard all year - masterpiece.
It's almost impossible for me to make up my mind about what records I really liked the most over the last year, but it's easy to pick the release I think was by far the most important - the seven CD Amplify 2002 Balance boxset (on Erstwhile). Documenting the 2002 Amplify festival in Tokyo and some related events - the set showcases the most challenging music in the most inviting way. The stellar list of improvisors include Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Günter Müller, Sachiko M, Ami Yoshida and more. The companion DVD adds a lot, by showing how the music is made, watching the performances up close and getting the details that you couldn't even get if you were in the audience - I think I was able to find my way a lot further inside this strange world of music and sound. An expensive purchase, but one I was very glad to even have the opportunity to make.
Other favorites include...
Kenny Wheeler Dream Sequence (on PSI). Beautiful recording, beautiful band. Sublime but never dull. Recorded over seven years with amazing focus and consistency.
Brotzmann, Parker & Drake Never Too Late but Always Too Early (on Eremite). Intense as music can be - a great trio. Exactly what you'd expect from these guys - but that's a good thing.
Petra Haden and Bill Frisell s/t (on Songline/Tonefield). Listen closely and get lost in the strange, but beautiful layers of music here. Frisell's guitar work is more alive than it's been in years. Haden's lovely voice and violin weave through this great set of covers (and two originals).
William Parker & The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra Spontaneous (on Splasc(H)). Recording from their great set at the 2002 Vision Fest, which I was lucky enough to catch live. True big band energy that recalls the spirit of Ellington and Mingus at their most wild (or maybe wilder than that).
Viktor Vaughn Vaudeville Villain (on Sound-Ink). Can't resist the impact of the hard beats, incredible lyrics, and goofy cartoon humor of Mf. Doom's latest alter ego. Also see: King Geedorah Take Me To Your Leader for giant monster evil.
Paul Westerberg Come Feel Me Tremble (on Vagrant). Grandpa's best album since 1987. Who'da thunk it?
Hiyashi, Otomo, Toyozumi The Crushed Pellet (on Studio Wee). Double CD of incredible studio improvisations. Very fire. Japanese free jazz - not much can be better.
John Fahey Red Cross (on Revenant). Fahey's final album is one of his most haunting. Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today is the most incredible, atmospheric song I heard all year - masterpiece.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
I finally read Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road after coming across one too many glowing references to it over the last few years. And I agree Yates has a way with words, but unfortunately, I found the story he used those words to tell on the boring side. Perhaps when this book was written, a critique of middle class values was very much in need, but today it reads like same old shit - I've heard all this a million times before. Some can write about a stifling, boring environment and make it interesting (for instance, Thomas Bernhard's Concrete which I recently enjoyed), but Yates seem content to write about boring things in an almost insufferably boring way. Actually Revolutionary Road reminds me a bit of John Updike's Rabbit, Run which was written in the same era. Both examine couples stuck in lives they never thought they'd be leading and both basically follow the same pattern. And while I don't think Updike actually writes as well, he writes with more interest in living and is therefore still much more engaging and just plain much more fun to read. In my ideal world, when Rabbit takes off early in the book in his car headed nowhere, he would have just kept on driving forever, but what Frank Wheeler (the main character of Revolutionary Road) is missing is even the ability to imagine that kind of escape. He whines on and on, his bland middle class critique in long endless soliloquy, and one wonders is it satire or does Wheeler give mouth to Yates view of the world. As either it's tiresome. Reading Yates made me realize one of the great things about Kerouac, whose best books were coming out at the same time, was his ability to write about the contemporary world with enthusiasm. I much prefer his approach to criticizing the middle class values of the day, by writing about (and living) a life outside of the life he was supposed to live - instead of sitting around and crying in his soup.
