WEEK OF 080818: ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS // HAYDN SONATAS
Ashtray Navigations: A Mayflower Garland
This music is like a curtain; klanging, billowing. It's one of those teleportational incantations that whirrs as you float around the globe. What's-his-name is getting better and better at combining aloof noise with incomparable beauty. This creates a splendid environment, if one can hear past the high pitched plinks and fuzzy glaze. There's one track that's incredibly annoying, however.
Haydn: Piano Sonata 60 (Hob50)
Haydn: Piano Sonata 62 (Hob52)
My friend Ore reccommended these along with last week's symphonies. The numbering of Haydn's piano sonatas are very confusing, but I double-checked with Ore and these are masterpieces which he finds to be amongst the best music he knows. He said he also likes #61, but said it was weird (up my alley!); however I have not found it yet. #60 starts out adorably cute and bouncy. I wasn't affected so much by it, but the playing is superb; I love the dynamics. It's quite fast and has some exuberances that people tend to attribute to Beethoven. I like the slow languor of the second movement. The third movement seems to resume the exuberances of the first movement.
Haydn: String Quartet Op.20 No.5 (F-minor)
When I learned of Haydn's "Sturm und drang" period ("storm and stress") while reading about last week's "Farewell Symphony", I sought out more of this music that signals the end of the enlightenment and birth of romanticism. These cusps of grandeur meeting tragedy elate me. I think this is life; beautiful and beyond words, but damnable and frightening for its finality. Some pieces of this quartet are a bit too lighthearted for me, but around every corner there is a bent tone of seriousness and reality.

WEEK OF 080811: HAYDN SYMPHONIES (FAREWELL & DRUMROLL)
Haydn: Symphony 45 (Farewell)
While walking down the stone stairs to go home one evening, I chanced upon Ore, a friend who formerly was a hallmate in my workplace. Upon our cordial catching up, I slipped to Ore that I had been listening to Schubert. I have often slipped casual comments to him about my growing interest and experiments with listening to classical music, for Ore had formerly played piano at Julliard. Ore often would ignore my nods to his past, for I surmise he (besides shy) is distancing himself from the world of classical music. Nevertheless, on this night, Ore's face lit up when I explained how I'd been listening to these works of art and emotion with diligence, and allowed me to extract his opinions. These two Haydn symphonies came out, and I am quite glad. I had overlooked Haydn, primarily because the classical composers had seemed to invoke emotion less often in their work. On the contrary, Haydn led a particular life apart from the critical society of the cities, instead spending a few decades composing for a rich Hungarian prince at his estate, with some freedom thus to explore the possibilities of music. This farewell symphony came during a time when the composer wrote many minor key pieces in parallel with a literary movement called "Sturm und drang" (Storm and stress), which emphasized bleak emotions in contrast to rationalism. This symphony begins with a frantic flight, perfect for working during, imparting my scattered mind with a focus on what is important. I admit that the slow Adagio movement had not sunk in by the end of the week's listening, but it is sublime and stately, avoiding sadness but wavers with its calm struggle.
Haydn: Symphony 103 (Drumroll)
This symphony begins with a ferocious warlike drumroll. I hate it. I spent some moments this week explaining to friends my hatred for the western trapkit (the rock drum set) and its violence and masculinity. Thankfully the drum only invokes the symphony and does not play so ferociously throughout. Admittedly, I was bored by much of this symphony. It's got some interesting challenging waves of sound, for the ordinarily dainty music of the classical period, but it still seems quite aristocratic for my tastes. The real reason Ore had recommended it was because it has, as its second movement, a set of variations -- an interest of mine. Unfortunately, these variations (although suitably peculiar, in that they originated from a folk tune, I believe) are not so varied at all. Was Beethoven the first to explode the variation form? Bach's Goldberg variations are quite revolutionary... So why were these so stiff? Perhaps because a wildly variant set of exercises would not have a place within a symphony? I do not know, but I'm a bit sad that I wasted my time listening to this, when I might have selected another symphony from the Sturm und drang period of Haydn's works.

WEEK OF 080804: SCHUBERT // LUCKY DRAGONS
Schubert: String Quintet (D.956)
Two months have flown by, this summer, and again at the Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP) I saw Classical Revolution play some pieces. I again was the only patron to inquire the names of the pieces performed, and a violinist anxiously amended the given explications with some syrup that the next piece that they were about to play was her favorite piece of music. Indeed, it was ferociously good, and it swiftly was selected by me for this week's "record" of the week. The piece is Schubert's final composition, and vascillates between major and minor. A contemporary of my boy, Beethoven, Schubert's work is very similar but without the outbursts. Of course musicologists might scoff at my smearing two different colors together, but what I mean is that both composers are bold enough to inject emotion (and often tortuous ones) amongst the pretty splendor that the world and our silly society performs for us in our cordial feats. This music totters from moment to moment (perhaps even note to note) on the edge of being something to tremble about, but remains measured. There are many repetitive, rhythmic phrases, which I rather liked, when paired with the postrock record reviewed below.
Lucky Dragons: Dream Island Laughing Language
It's important for me, as a dreamer, and a poet, to keep up with post-rock. I once wailed that I would consume only this sort of instrumental music, as it is probably the best and most beautiful sort of our times, which I would characterize as sparkling and defiant of the gloom that looms over us, environmentally and economically. What I mean to say is that, with such a large wealthy class here in America, things are glorious and beautiful. You can see that in the pop music, today, but that sort of frivolity is narrowminded. What really can be acclaimed about an artist is their foresight -- their ability to conjure the future, or the movements of parallel moments in our era.
What this music captures, for me, with its repetitive gongs and hums, clomps and scrapes, taps and hoots, and sundry other pseudo-sino sinewaves, is the sun shining on a hustling earth, too fast to bask in its fleeting splendor. I will always recall, in this music, the memory of awakening from a friend, Brent's, birthday bonfire at the Albany landfill, and heading out back from the artificial peninsula (dream island, indeed... I once saw a free performance of Shakespeare's "the tempest" at the landfill!) towards the mainland, with the recently risen sun sparkling up from the bay at me and the strange wave of dog-walkers peppering my heady morning with their sad ridiculousness, as this music bubbled and gleefully stuttered back, affirming that the world still brews.

WEEK OF 080728: ARCHDUKE TRIO // EMERALDS
Beethoven: Archduke Piano Trio, No.7 (Op.97)
I'm listening to several versions, with Previn, Ashkenazy, Barenboim, or Kempff as the pianist. So far I can't tell any difference, and all of them are unfortunately softening Ludwig's outbursts (which I cherish). I must find a version of this that is true to the composer's idiosyncrasy. This was written a year after the 5th Symphony, so we know Ludwig was not all clear in the head, including his struggle with accepting his deafness. Supposedly at the premiere of this piece (Beethoven's last performance as a pianist), he banged so hard the strings jangled in the loud spots, and so soft in the quiet spots that entire notes were omitted.
Emeralds: Golden Swirl, and Planetarium
I've never heard of this band, but they were recently recommended by Volcanic Tongue. It's quite lovely, quiet space drone. One record is a bit more substantial than the other. I think I like this group and will try to find out more about them.

WEEK OF 080721: SCHUMANN
Schumann: Symphony 4 (Op.120)
Bravo! I like it a lot. This final symphony of his ("Zwickau" is incomplete) is the only one that touches on Schumann's anguish. I listened to a few different versions -- a fast one, and a slow one, and one in between. I can't decide which I like best, but I see how important it is to listen to multiple versions. The version with the in-between tempo was actually the "revised" version (Brahms said he preferred the original version, though). I didn't sit and scrutinize the two versions, and so I can't really tell the difference.
Schumann: ABEGG Variations (Op.1)
These piano variations are lighthearted and not too complicated. I'll take what I can get. It's nice to hear the seeds of the style that will later characterize Schumann's excellent sweep of grandiose and morose. It's there in these pieces, but it is barely there.

WEEK OF 080714: RV PAINTINGS // LISZT
RV Paintings: Trinity Rivers
Back to some good space drone. This is a side-project of the Starving Weirdos, who make incredible cricket summer night hot heat drone artifacts, but RV Paintings is more full and velvety, with overt loops and tinkling and shimmer. This is really quite good, and is getting better as the week progresses. Good for sleeping or studying or walking or thinking.
Liszt: Transcendental Etudes (S.139)
These piano pieces are supposedly some of the most difficult pieces of music to play. While how it makes one feel is arguably the most important aspect of a piece of music, such radicalism seems like it might be able to offer something that cannot be found elsewhere. I've always, all my life, been in favor of esoterica and the deviation from the norm -- the jewels that are rare and irreproducible. These pieces have their moments, but they don't evoke as much as some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies had done for me. I'm sure Liszt has some other incendiary pieces, but I wouldn't say these etudes are such. I'd love to hear someone re-interpret these pieces for some other instrument. No, not transcribe, reinterpret. Or maybe flesh out with multiple instruments. They are very colorful, indeed.

WEEK OF 080707: DVORAK // TCHAIKOVSKY // (VxPxC)
Dvorak: Dumky Piano Trio (Op. 90)
I was searching for some more composers that incorporate non-Western music into their orchestral or chamber pieces. Dvorak was, of course, well known for including eastern European melodies, which of course were often sour-sounding, because rural life can be tough.
Tchaikovsky: Dumka (Op. 59)
I ought to try out all of the latter Tchaikovsky pieces that lack vocals.
(VxPxC): Porchmass
These guys hosted the Bottling Smoke festival that I went to last spring, in LA. I quite enjoyed their languorous instrumental set, as I have also enjoyed some of their other albums. This is a bit more percussive than the other things I've heard. Their music makes me think of high heat in summer, but that's perhaps because I first heard it in LA, and we don't get much heat here in SF, so the music has nestled into my sensory emotions.

WEEK OF 080630: SCHUMANN // BRAHMS // ILYAS AHMED
Schumann: Symphonic Etudes (Op. 13)
Wow, this solo piano set of etudes (studies) is nice, and mostly frantic. I think I'll be returning to this one, and greatly recommend it. It's actually a set of variations, but there isn't anything overtly academic to my ears, as some sets of variations tend to be. It is really more evocative. Whenever I listen to Schumann, I can't help but think "this man threw himself off a bridge". That really puts this strangled music in perspective. It's similar to how "emo" relates to the rest of rock and roll. I listened to the version by Pollini, which includes the posthumous variations. I don't really understand the "etude" form and how it's different from some of the other categories of solo piano music.
Brahms: Tragic Overture (Op. 81)
I listened to two different versions, and it really mattered. Unfortunately I don't know who conducted either of them, but one lasts 11:55, the other 13:26, thus one is fast and the other is slow. I much preferred the fast one, as the slow one made it sound too pretty, and not "tragic" at all!!!
Ilyas Ahmed: The Vertigo of Dawn
It's been a while since I listened to guitar spacy music, including Ilyas Ahmed. Sounds like crooning prayers for the suffocation of the future skies, to me. Love his stuff, and the percussion that has come aboard for a song reminds me a lot of early Six Organs of Admittance.

WEEK OF 080623: BRAHMS // BEETHOVEN
Brahms: Symphony 4 (Op.98)
I suppose I should be listening to Brahms more often, since I like Beethoven so much. I enjoyed the first Brahms symphony, so I decided to see where his last one would take me. Brahms is really an extension of Beethoven, but I feel like the turmoil is a bit forced. It's like how so many rock musicians sang like Kurt Cobain even though they weren't really going through the same kind of pain. Anyway, the movements are actually quite coherent with each other, which is nice. Supposedly this piece quotes many other works by other composers, and thus is a bit scholastic, but none of that matters to me. I can't quite pick a favorite movement, the whole thing is good. I listened to Solti. I also grabbed Bernstein and Ormandy, but didn't find much difference.
Beethoven: Piano Trio 6 (Op.70, no.2)
I originally selected the first Piano Trio because I saw it performed last year, but I had to reject it after a few listens because, despite glimpsing the mania later to come in Beethoven's work, the piece is too light for me, especially to go alongside the Brahms. This piece is a bit exuberant, too, it also got on my nerves. The third movement is like a pop tune (you'll want to hum it), and the fourth is jolly and fast, but the first two movements are more typical of the Beethoven I enjoy -- sweet and sour, with a couple of hot chili peppers hiding in there, waiting to knock you around...

WEEK OF 080616: PHILIP JECK // R.STRAUSS // BEETHOVEN
Philip Jeck: Sand
I haven't listened to any experimental music in a while. I don't really know much about this person. I think the drones he makes are more electronic-based, but he apparently is indeed doing knob-twiddling and looping. I just wonder how much of it is analog. Maybe it doesn't really matter. These are nice shimmering soundscapes, not too sleepy, even a bit melodic at times. They are even dynamic enough to keep you interested, were you to sit and listen to them in an active way, unlike the passive way I tend to use drone music. They really struck an emotion in me during the week in rotation because of the heatwave we encountered late in the week. These pieces made me feel as though the air was thick and there was some sort of majesty to the Earth's extreme environments.
R. Strauss: Don Quixote, Op.35
I haven't listened to anything by Strauss prior to this, mainly because everyone says he was complicit with the Nazis, and that weighs in on my Holocaust-surviving heritage. But music is only what we make of it, and I must admit that I'm intrigued to hear what other non-opera music was made by the composer of the well-known "Also Sprach Zarathustra" tone poem. This tone poem about Don Quixote, a set of variations, is from around the period he wrote the famous "2001" piece. In high school I was obsessed with Don Quixote and the symbol of individuality; I wrote about him in my college entrance essay, in fact. But to be honest, I really don't enjoy the musical programs that get attached to wordless pieces of music; it's a bit limiting to the experience of the music. I don't think the program gets in the way of this piece. There are some fine moments, but unfortunately they are too brief, and are mixed in with a lot of ordinary music that likely has been a strong influence on film scores -- boring. I also don't see how these pieces are variations. There are definitely themes that come back, but the work as a whole is very scattered. I think it will be a while before I try another piece by R.Strauss.
Beethoven: Kakadu Variations, Op.121a
I'm trying to fit in a short piece by Beethoven each week, just because I love him so much. But in searching for the piece this week, I realized that his happy major-key pieces are representative of the high society that was supporting him. The Beethoven that most people know (regarding his frantic slashes, or desperate low and slow movements) is quite a different category than the music that I enjoy most. These variations sound great, but are not as arousing as the Eroica Variations nor as circuitous as the Diabelli Variations. I was tempted to remove the fluffy variations, but I think they serve as a nice contrast to the poles of grandeur and depression from which Beethoven vacillated.

WEEK OF 080609 PLAYLIST: RACHMANINOV / TCHAIKOVSKY / SCHUMANN / BRAHMS
Rachmaninov: Trio Elegiaque 2
(written, as a young adult, in response to the death of Tchaikovsky)
I think I prefer the first trio elegiaque, but this one is quite nice too. I feel like I need to listen to them both side by side again, for another week, but I have so many things to try out before I can start repeating pieces!!
Tchaikovsky: Op.50, Piano Trio in A minor
The first movement is quite sad, sinister, frantic; typical late-Tchaikovsky, and suits my major interest in classical music. The second movement is lighter, but a set of variations, which is largely my only other interest in classical music. This is a nice piece, but it's a bit triumphant at times, and that breaks up the mood of imminence of death that surrounds the concept of the work, "In Memory of a Great Artist" (Nikolai Rubinstein).
Brahms: Op.34, Piano Quintet
(I heard this played by Classical Revolution for free, in some person's living room, this past weekend, as a part of MAPP.) Someone on Wikipedia said that this is one of the three most excellent piano quintets by any composer, which is an opinion and also a statement that means little (for I cannot accept, in our postmodern age, that there is anything particular about a title such as "piano quintet" that merits the measure of one quintet versus another). I think the piece is a joy to listen to, but I found myself skipping over it to hear the Trio Elegiaque and Tchaikovsky trios more often.

WEEK OF 080602 PLAYLIST: RACHMANINOV
Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme from Paganini.
(two versions, a recent one and another that is quite old, where the strings sound like wind instruments!) These are variations, and quite fun to listen to and compare, and hum. But skip the 18th variation. It has been overplayed in Hollywood movies, and is quite sentimental and fluffy.
Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances.
(the orchestral version, and the adaptation for two pianos). I thought I'd like this, but it's not so enveloping. It probably merits its own weeklong study, but it was too complex to sink in this week. The two versions seem very different from each other; I prefer the orchestra version, but there is a lot to pay attention to in the piano version too. This is the last thing that Rachmaninov wrote.
Rachmaninov: Trio Elegiaque 1.
Can't get the theme out of my head. The arrangement of the parts is symmetrical. This goes along with my "sinister symphonies" original interest in classical music, it's a keeper.

WEEK OF 080526 PLAYLIST: VOLCANO THE BEAR // ZELENKA // BEETHOVEN
Volcano the Bear: Amidst the Noise and Twigs
At the first few listens, I thought, "oh jolly! this falls immediately into my 'essential space folk' list!", but after a week of listens (and aggravation to my housemates), I noticed that it suffers from the same problems that the latest One Ensemble (an offshoot) albums are fouled by: dishonest weirdness and unattractive singing. There is a holiness to certain moments, as with the first two One Ensemble of Daniel Padden albums, but there aren't any songs that are so sublime that they would get placed on a mix, for they frequently fall into the realm of being annoying, from writhing, squawking, shrieking, etc.
Zelenka: Symphonia A-moll
This should have received its own weeklong study. It's very nice. Fans of Bach, check it out. It's interesting to hear early concepts of the symphony form, as I have otherwise exclusively been listening to things from Beethoven on. To me, the symphony is a cathartic experience of emotion and development and travel. This, on the contrary, was like eating a really good piece of dessert.
Beethoven: Op.44: Variations in Eb

WEEK OF 080519 PLAYLIST: SCHUMANN, NIN, BEETHOVEN
Schumann: Violin Concerto
Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts III
Beethoven: Op.46, Variations (Bei mannern..)

WEEK OF 080512 PLAYLIST: NIN // BEETHOVEN
Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I, Ghosts II
Wow! This is the Trent Reznor that I've been waiting for!! I'd always suspected that he would have been making this sort of music, perhaps secretly under another name. I love the places where his piston-pumping factory imagery (particular to "industrial" music) coalesces with the sparse and beautiful Eno ambient soundscapes. I only wish the pieces were a bit more intricate, but I suppose he wants people to mix the tracks and add the intricacies in a collaborative sort of way. This album (so far, I'm taking it a little at a time) is just wonderful. I played it for my eldest housemate (who eschews all rock/post-rock music) while scraping glue off of used slats of oak flooring (for a new library we're constructing), and he actually liked it, even the hyena hissing/screaming in the background, which is more subdued than on the early NIN albums.
Beethoven: Woo.80, 32 Variations in C minor

WEEK OF 080505 PLAYLIST: LISZT // ZELENKA // BACH
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor (S.178)
I'm curious to hear more Liszt, since he was quite a frantic piano player. He tends to stab all over the keyboard, in an impressionistic way. Sometimes I wonder what his flourishes have to do with the general program of the pieces he plays; it's almost as though he becomes distracted by his own flamboyance. It's not my favorite type of music, but it is certainly idiosyncratic. Artists should always push the boundaries of what distinguishes them from all else.
Zelenka: Sonata No.2, Sonata No. 5
I recently went out to lunch with a Biochemist, Chikashi Toyoshima, the Hitchcock Lecturer last week, invited by my mentor. While walking back from the faculty club, I said to Toyoshima, "Sydney tells me that you enjoy going to the symphony. I know it's an unfair question to ask someone to narrow their favorites down to a single composer, so perhaps instead let me ask if you have anything you enjoy so much that you might recommend?" He chuckled and paused a bit, as we tarried amongst the oaks along the creek, and upon reaching the Campanile, said that he tends to enjoy the composers that haven't had as much publicity (oh, he's after my heart!), and thus wanted to recommend the composer, Zelenka, a contemporary of Bach, who is particularly cherished by oboe players. I later went to go look him up. Zelenka wrote a lot of music with vocals, which I simply cannot endure, but I found these sonatas to be quite splendid.
Bach: Flute Sonata in B minor (BWV1030)
I haven't listened to Bach much. I don't know why I selected this; I acquired a bunch of pieces randomly, and then selected this one out of them, for not being too fluffy. The lighthearted pre-Beethoven music annoys me with its splendor; it's largely a music for rich society. Beethoven was remarkable for his wagging the rich society that supported him with his desperation and melancholia, often imperceptibly placed amidst the same splendor of the Classical and Baroque period, although sometimes as spasms of violence, as if to be a gesture (like we moderns raise the "middle finger") of derision to his frivolous patrons. This Bach piece didn't move me much, and I found myself preferring the Zelenka.

WEEK OF 080428 PLAYLIST: LUCKY DRAGONS // SIR RICHARD BISHOP
Lucky Dragons: Widows
Larkin Grimm had recommended this artist to me two years ago, after she played a free show at my former warehouse loft in Oakland. The artist's brother, an Oaklander, was also at the show -- a friendly chap. It should have been apt for me to have put Lucky Dragons on one of my weekly playlists shortly after the show, then. However, after acquiring all the albums, and cursorily clicking on their diverse portions, I had decided that it was more noisy and cut-up than sublime. Somehow, I recently gave it another glance, and am so pleased that I listened long enough to allow it to be played over and over all week. Even my housemates enjoyed hearing it. There are some pretty moments. It instantly goes in the "sublime post-rock" pile (you know, along with the second Four-tet album, Do Make Say Think, The third Tortoise album, etc)
Sir Richard Bishop: All Strung Out.
I don't think SRB belongs in the post-Fahey pantheon of bottom-up open-tuning spiritual acoustic guitarists. He is arguably talented, he possesses an impeccable attractiveness for his love of foreign cultures, particularly from Asia. But I just don't find his pieces to be heady enough. For that we go to Jack Rose, to Ben Chasny (his early work, mind you).

WEEK OF 080421 PLAYLIST: PETTERSSON // MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS
Gustaf Allan Pettersson: Symphony 9
Monopoly Child Star Searchers: Gitchii Manitou

WEEK OF 080414 PLAYLIST: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS // BEN REYNOLDS
Vaughan Williams: Symphony 4
Ben Reynolds: Many Straight Creation

WEEK OF 080407 PLAYLIST: MVEE // BEETHOVEN
MV&EE Medicine Show: Zone of Domes
Beethoven: Piano Sonata 27

WEEK OF 080311 PLAYLIST: TONY SCOTT
Tony Scott: Music for Zen Meditation
The jazz musician's incredible clarinet album playing traditional Japanese music. I am in love with koto music, and much other traditional Japanese music, particularly the slow stuff. When I learnt about this album last week, from a guy who makes shakuhachi flutes out of PVC pipes, I was very upset that I hadn't heard of it before.

WEEK OF 080324 PLAYLIST: MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS // PACIFIC RAT TEMPLE BAND
Monopoly Child Star Searchers: Infant Spirituality Rates Coconut Percent
Pacific Rat Temple Band: Tan Kim (Boa Paradise)
These are both new solo projects from Spencer from the Skaters. It's indescribable. It's splendid. It is a new angle on the holy noise drone that the Skaters made their mark with. Everything Spencer touches is golden. This is rhythmic, a bit like some sort of southeast Asian cultural music. But it does indeed have a "temple band" feel to it. The two projects are slightly different, but more or less in the same direction away from the love drone syrup of the Skaters and Vodka Soap.

080317:
Xenis Emputae Travelling Band: The Suffolk Workings

080310
Mark Dagley & Stephen Connolly: Benedictions From the Eternal
Stephen Connolly is from Pothole Skinny. This is two pieces of slow, slinky space dronerock eastern plinky magnificence.

Dead White, Eye Myths, Scriptures I Have Loathed, Robot Dick

Lowell Loft “E”

Success! Two nights ago (Aug 2), I hosted and performed in my first show, held at my neglected warehouse space.

My sloppy roommate had recently usurped the energy of our big room with his junk and video games, and I had spent a week cleaning, discarding, hiding his litter. I covered up the walls with tapestries and scraps of fabric I’ve been collecting from the street and from free piles over the past two years. My more artistic housemate was impressed and thinks this is a good impetus to host events more often. He even took out his camera and took shots of the performances, which made the event feel more legitimate (I'll post photos when I obtain them). Easing out of my strange tradition of no one ever showing up to things I announce, a small handful of my friends attended, and a somewhat larger handful (maybe 18 people?) arrived from invitations from the other bands. I had baked vegan zucchini bread (with dumpstered zucchinis!) the night previously and this was a supreme hit. My cohort, Fletch, and I tended three teapots all night, which is unusual for social gatherings (and shows!) but generally more well-received than I’d expected… We brewed a medium-low quality gunpowder green tea, my signature Mumtaz Arabic black tea with rose petals, and a spearmint/peppermint/licorice herbal mix. People also visited the liquor store across the street for their alcohol needs. I felt odd not providing any alcohol, but I remarked that I would like to get people to experience social settings when tea is excessively consumed, a much more interesting, subtle, and earnest high than alcohol drunkenness.

But the music! That’s why you’re reading this!! Fletch and I performed first. This is the first time I’ve ever performed (if you don’t count alterna-crapola I did in high school). I was very nervous about the performance aspect, despite that Fletch and I had two reasonably satisfying practices at his home. We didn’t have a good opportunity to soundcheck, and I knew there were a number of problems (a faulty cable, feedback, a different microphone than the one I’d practiced with). The nervousness inserted a desire to just get it over with so I could stop worrying and enjoy the other bands. Fletch was playing “laptop” types of gurgles and drones, and also has a new oscillator box, but I have yet to pay attention to what he is doing, since I am usually worrying about myself. I have a microphone going into an overdrive pedal going into a looper pedal, and that’s it. So the problem was that the looper pedal wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing (it was acting like a sampler, and not looping the phrases that I was sampling). Regardless of my attempts to figure out what was happening once the performance had begun (with people feeding my paranoia by hovering and observing what I was doing), I felt trapped. All I could do was sing, and I don’t like to sing. I’d rather make loops with voice and disguise it all so that it is no longer “singing”… But that’s all I could do. After about five minutes of this, I gave up and turned my shit off. Surprisingly, everyone clapped, which just stained my perception of anticlimax. I blathered and blushed, muttering “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing…” and apologizing to Fletch. Soon the next three bands went on and my friends left a bit disappointed.

Eye Myths was great. They essentially did what I’d like to be doing – disguised vocals looping, creating “new space drones” or should I call them pseudodrones? (I always hated the prefix pseudo-). But there were four of them (Mark, Parker, Paul, and Whitney), and some of them additionally played ethnic percussion (some gong-like overturned bowls, Tibetan bowls, some proper hand drums, etc. They cut out short after only about 6 minutes. Talking to them afterwards, I discovered that it was a bit out of confusion and lack of communication (when one person stops what they’re doing, the bottom falls out and then everyone turns off and then the audience claps. I feel like this is a splendid opportunity for people to start up again, playing a second “movement” if you will.)

Dead White is just a young scruffy fellow named Andy. He actually even has some records released. (The people in Eye Myths, also his friends, later told me that Andy records everything he does, even when he’s screwing around, and “releases” it all, which probably is not done through official label outfits but as DIY CDRs and tapes, although the name Jyrk came up in conversation). Dead White was great, a bit noisier, but great (fun!) loops, also heavy on vocal origin, but a bit of guitar origin too. I wasn’t watching what he was doing (I probably should so I might learn a bit, but it’s not my style to do that). Apparently, he usually does things even louder. It was just the right loudness for me. When he was done (he also played a brief 8-10 minute set), all five collaborated, under the spontaneous name “Robot Dick” This was great, and developed into a percussive electric jam session, rivaling Vibracathedral’s most toe-tappable strum-alongs. I could see this becoming very popular if they recorded it. (The use of ethnic non-rock drums was also very pleasing and textural and less testosterone-soaked than most other drumming. Fuck rock drums).

Finally, after nearly everyone had left, Fletch and I were sorting out what happened with my cord and my pedal. He fiddled around with the inside of the cord, applied some duct tape, and it seemed to work. I fixed the looper by unplugging the power, apparently resetting whatever had been preventing it from looping (I really ought to read the whole manual, eh?) Fletch and I then organically developed what was a “testing loop” (which I had originally left running for about ten minutes to everyone’s annoyance-developing-into-intrigue) into a real set performance. Now this was what I had been intending to elicit!! Making loops, I felt more freedom to hide among the layers, creating more “false drones”. (It also helped that Andy gave me a lesson in feedback-avoidance, and some pointers about looping). Surprisingly, about fiteen minutes into it, Mark from Eye Myths interrupts me, tapping me on the shoulder to ask “Can we all jam?” My face lit up in a grin, “yes!!! please!!!” I hadn’t realized that anyone was actually in the room listening. But being that it was only the other musicians that were left at that point, the pressure of audience vs. spectator was eliminated. What proceeded was my final fulfillment of the evening: the four Eye Myths people (Andy had left by that point) and Fletch and I all “jamming” for about an hour….

I remarked to Fletch, “we need to find more friends like these to play around with in the Bay Area” (because all the other musicians are from San Diego, many moving to other parts of the country, but not SF.

So, despite my disappointment at the official “Scriptures I Have Loathed” performance (loathed, indeed!) I still had a successful, satisfying, and encouraging “first performance”. It’s a pity that no one else got to hear it besides the participants, but that is likely why it reached a level that could satisfy me.

[051105]

Thuja // Axolotl // Skaters – Jewelled Antler Greenhouse - Berkeley, CA

Arriving at Rob Reger’s (Thuja) house, on time at 9 pm sharp (I’d once missed some of the first set for arriving in “California space-cadet time”, ie 30-40 minutes late) I stepped into the backyard where the garden and greenhouse seemed more tidy than usual (mind you Rob put up the greenhouse under a year ago). Various young hipsters were drinking beer and chattering, none I knew. For this performance, I invited everyone I knew that might like the music (I wondered if I’d gone overboard) and surprisingly none of them showed up. A person actually recognized me from a previous show and said hello; it was Spencer from the Skaters and I apologized for not recognizing him because I had never gotten to see his face when he performed. There’s a running joke about the Skaters that you end up watching their undulating asses when they perform, crouched over boxes of electronic thingies. I opened my bottle of wine, sat strategically in a corner, and shortly the first set began.

Thuja did not sound out-of-ordinary this night, but their manner of playing was different from usual. The last time I’d seen them play, they did something interesting where each member started out from a different part of the garden, creating a quadraphonic stereo effect. However, they had shortly converged to the greenhouse and played the rest of the set from a central location. This time, Rob and Glenn were set up and remained on opposite sides of the yard with separate amps (although this was also plugged into a soundboard, a first for them I later discovered). Steven and Loren played inside the greenhouse. Rob and Glenn had each threaded a guitar string between the branches of trees, with a contact mike to serve as pickup. I couldn’t see much of what Glenn had been doing because he was far away, but near me I saw that Rob used various techniques like bowing the string, plucking it, and using a giant plastic gag comb, all the while utilizing the fact that the tree’s stature was limiting the length and hence pitch of the guitar string. Pushing the tree caused the pitch to wind and unwind like the grumbling of a stomach. He even shook the tree at one point, softly capturing the rustling of falling leaves. He had other peripheral instruments like a guitar and an oil drum nearby that he also utilized. Glenn seemed to be doing something quite similar but I think he was causing the tree-violin sound to sustain for a bit longer, creating a modest drone. I couldn’t see a thing of what Steven was doing except when he appeared from behind an amp to play a thumb-piano (one of those African gourd things, a Mbira?). I suspect that Steven was also contributing to a sparse drone that fed in and out, almost like the electronic hiss of the amplifiers. Meanwhile, Loren was using various instruments including rubbing two bricks together and matching the nearby train whistle with a harmonica. Overall, this was a sparse Thuja landscape, unlike the fuller opaque drones sometimes made by the Blithe Sons or Of, and not necessarily traveling to any particular musical destination. It was almost like an exercise for their cultivation as avant garde musicians; I have yet to hear tones by Thuja that make me weep or well up with joy. Nevertheless, their music does alight a world of truth inhabited by the majority of life, excepting the civilized human and its fabrications and myths. The music was quite similar to their latest records, but I felt that in synthesis they had progressed as a team with their approach. Another thought I wondered about was whether some electronic musician would remix Thuja – there were various unique sounds and very little of it (none?) manipulated by effects boxes, perfect for sampling.

After a break, where I remained in my lonely corner, blond-mop-headed Axolotl came to play a solo performance. Unfortunately his set only lasted about 7 minutes before he gave up at a pause. He commented that he was having problems. Perhaps if it wasn’t a free show he would have felt inclined to figure the problems out. Should we have persuaded him to keep going onwards? One of the interesting things about artist performances is that the artist is attempting to channel something that emanates from their mind or desires. However this latency rarely comes out in pure form, especially for improvised musics, and often the artist is dissatisfied. On the contrary, the listeners have no fore-knowledge about the source of the emanations, and thus the audience is often satisfied despite the artist’s shame. I wish there was a way we as listeners could encourage and embolden the artist to walk forth strongly, perhaps blindly, and trust their instinct and be proud of what they are currently capable of. My experience of the short Axolotl piece, I will humbly admit, closely approached tears. He had created a buzz, static white noise, perhaps a drone but I wouldn’t go that far. All the while he was humming or playing violin and manipulating that too on top of the buzz. The static crackled as he adjusted it, and one could discern gaps and that it was not a continuous drone. This made me think that our lives are not some flowing lifeblood but rather the result of the stepped pumping of our hearts, the synapse-jumping or our circuitry. The music was both sad and triumphant; I thought to myself that this is not the music in the minds of babies being born, but rather the soundtrack to our recollections of being born. As a couple affectionately snuggled one another beside me, I thought to myself how sad it is to walk the earth alone.

After another break, sound came from inside the basement as the Skaters began their set. People hobbled into the dark room, lit only by a candle beside the amplifiers. With the swelling and moaning music made by the Skaters, the sound felt as it must have when ancient humans performed rituals in caves. The music bordered on haunting, never was appalling or annoying, but still consisted of amplified and manipulated reverberating moans, with minimal percussion such as a conga prostrate like a cannon. I likened the music in my mind to a male version of Fursaxa. The music ballooned until its crest subsided and then the set was over. Because the set was so short and consisted of only one such excursion into the holy territory of the mind, I was a bit disappointed. Not because their albums are so dynamic and this performance had a clear trajectory, but rather because I wondered if they had anything else in them. Could they produce diverse soundscapes or was their voice so haphazard that it would always sound the same way. Another parallel drone would have made their performance phenomenal.

Jack Rose Dream.

Perhaps this dream is derived from having seen Jack Rose perform the night before, but the context of the dream is irrelevant. It contained a wonderful idea I think friendly musicians ought to consider.

In the dream, Jack played a show in a very comfortable barn-like room. At the close of the show, instead of an encore, he brought up nine musicians well-known in the space folk scene (I remember one was Matt Valentine, whose music was playing at the time of the dream). Jack announced that they would jam for five minutes. Then, for the following five minutes, the band would sit silent, the lights would come on, and the audience was asked to talk amongst themselves for five minutes. After this, the ensemble of musicians began playing again for five minutes, then five minutes of talking, then a final round of five minutes of playing.

Space Folk Manifesto.

I have been using the phrase “space folk” ever since I first discovered the album, “Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles” by the Tower Recordings. It seemed logical to grab these words in an attempt to describe the meeting of electric feedback and post-psychedelia noise with acoustic folk instrumentation and Eastern dissonant harmonies. Later delving into other groups in a recent wave of experimental music, my listening attuned to a trend of post-rock electric takes on traditional folk styles or rhythms (eg, noise jamborees, tribal beat accompaniment, and colorful stabs at eastern and near-eastern folk instrumentation). However, it seemed that there were a handful of groups focused more on the ambient-noise free/space element of modern experimentalism than borrowing from traditional folk styles. I had an intuition that there was some sort of confluence of mental-wiring that evoked similar emotions in these diverse styles, (before I came across any propaganda tying these groups together; mind you, in my lonely adventure towards counter-culturalism I still have yet to meet a person independently in the flesh that enjoys the same music as I). My favorite in silico music files are heaped into three folders: post-rock, space, and space folk. While I consider the genre “post-rock” to be nebulous in definition, I keep musics there that are highly evocative and use rock instrumentation compositionally, more in the manner of painters and poets. Yet, the boundary between “space” and “space folk” is quite arbitrary.

I intend with this plate of words not to categorize music, but instead to sharpen the blades of readers by encouraging them to embark on an adventure in music. This is not to say that any genre of music is superior, and I am well aware that experimentalism is esoteric. What is uniting about folk music – and much of experimentalism – is that it is latent in every person. Experimentalism breaks the rails of directionality and convention, but folk music dampens the need for proficiency and technical skill. For some, folk music is just past-time (in which case, quality of performance is unimportant so long as the musician is sufficiently amusing theirself), and for others it is a community event. For many, all music is folk music because they are not concerned with the outcome but solely with the act of releasing the swirls of passion (that is, the artistic act). So you see, much of non-erudite experimental music is indeed folk music. And because there are no traditions nor rules in this field, no one need fear they might perform poorly. Surely, the great American folk singers had terrible voices, and rock was more about sex appeal than ingenuity.

Now, what is troubling to me is that we still treat experimental music like rock music. Records are released as items to covet and collect, with spontaneous melodies we might memorize. I often wonder how I would nourish my spirit if the power went out for days, and I am befallen by woe when the batteries end on my portable music player as I ride upon my twenty-minute bicycle commute (the perfect length for the ebb-and-flow of a long, developing jam). It is these moments without our technology that embark me on the cultivation of my personal muse, who has sat huddled in my toychest ever since I first learned about embarassment. I tend to hum a repetitive melody to myself and slowly embellish on the theme. What is lacking is contrast and external input to respond to, and also community. I still lack the confidence to go out and seek musical rendezvous, but I no longer think I’m incompetent. (On the contrary, I feel my outlet to evoke my passions is fragile, and I fear expectations of audience may rupture the delicate flow).

The other great tragedy of modern folk music is the lack of community involvement. I recently was at a musical gathering in the backyard of a fellow, opened freely to strangers to share a certain musical moment. What was remarkable was the first intonations of the performance: scattered throughout the corners of the yard, each musician invoked the quadrophonic toppling of place-sensation, with the tones mingling like musk and fog. Okay, no poetry – the music surrounded you in every direction but you could not tell where it was coming from, nor who was playing what. No longer did it matter in what direction the stage was, nor the countenance/identity of the musicians. Music was an envelope for your mind at that moment, incontrovertibly. I felt faint as an individual person, attacked in the most splendid way. Unfortunately, this did not last long and the musicians soon converged upon an edifice containing amplifiers and troves of instruments, commencing a standard posture of musician performing towards audience (rather than around them). In the end, the audience dealt the final blow and applauded.

I always imagined that the great hippy drum-circles that hide among dim firelight (where no one could identify you anyway if you played a foul note) would lend a hand to modern artistic music (which still behaves similar to rock with its merchandise tables and situations in pub establishments). How glorious it will be to rid ourselves of the lingering stench of John Cage, finally settling the problem of reflexivity in performance art (artist is influenced by beholders who are influenced by the art). We must strive to gather in dynamic, musical activity as a transcendent community act, rather than passively allow ourselves to be molded by only what some unreachable, external person plays for us. While the current paradigm of performance and artistry crystallizes scenes and new genres, it deepens the mote between human beings by carving insular monuments of artistic preference. (Conspiracy Theory: In such a fractured world, “experimentalism” will always remain fringe and thus pop music can maintain its role as a method of sociopolitical control).

May we tear down the walls to music, or must we learn to scale them?

Blithe Sons.

Hristina and i went to the rx gallery on 040227 for matt d'avignon's jiffy scuttler music series, to see Blithe Sons. The Blithe Sons are Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson, 1/2 of Thuja and the principal evocateurs of SF's Jewelled Antler Collective. While Thuja is more dense and has rhythm, Blithe Sons is similar to the sparse, ambient found-sound collages of electronic compositional art, only played with real instruments. The duo had a large setup with about 30 different instruments ranging from guitar and banjo to chimes and whistles and pipes and harmonicas, keyboards. They also relied on handheld taperecorders that played samples of birds and brooks and wind and other nature sounds. They created minimal whining drones with effects boxes/microphones (does this count as electronics?) and also a keyboard/accordian unit I've seen used by Cerberus Shoal (what's it called?) The music was slowly developing, and more like improv soundscape art. The collective likes to focus on nature and plant life but the bar setting quite diminished that.

Hristina and I have found that it is now impossible to enjoy hearing experimental music in a bar setting or anywhere other than a comfortable audience setting such as the loft at 964 Natoma that Quiet American's Field Effects Series takes place at. Drunk people were talking, there were vintage video games as part of an art installation that were making bleeping and ding-ding noises, people applauded at one of the lulls in the music, as if they were playing songs (it was soundscape rather). This last occurrence quite irked me as it forced the musicians to cut off the performance, as Loren rolled his eyes in disdain...

i hate to be all avant-snobbish, but the appreciants of experimental music really need to stick together in underground venues rather than public streetfront establishments in order to fully appreciate the experience of the performance. I've heard that the Jewelled Antler collective plays sporadically in gardens and warehouse spaces. Of course, then it becomes quite difficult for us to find out about these "special" events. The whole conundrum makes me rather sick, so perhaps listening to the cd's will have to suffice until the straights convert to hear the luscious tones of vibrating atmospheres.

Tarentel, Explosions in the Sky, & Lazarus at the Bottom of the Hill on December 7.

This show was both good and bad. I walked in just as Lazarus was beginning and the performance was very very poor. I wanted my money back immediately and thought to myself "why am I wasting my time listening to this wannabe artist, concomitantly supporting him?" He had all these self-deprecating lyrics that had the audacity to rub the word "poets" in your face many times. It was similar to really bad teenage "I hate the place I live in" poetry that was probably embellished in order to evoke pity. I dont know why so many females applauded with drool to this indie loser alt-folkster. To boot, his voice was whiny and the accompaniment was sparse. I think it's horrible when artists put their personal lives on the stage without something unique to comment about it. There are plenty of sad, boring people with nothing of consequence to say, and I really dont think it benefits anyone to see these people on a stage. Nevertheless, I furrowed my brow in amazement at how many people flockishly clapped and cheered. I pondered discarding manners and giving the thumbs-down; performers need to know when they are not reaching out to anyone, and mediocrity should not be tolerated. Of course the caveat to all this is that I personally did not like it, and subjectivity is just a boat but not the river.

Next was Explosions in the Sky. Their new material sounds great, but something was missing. The guys did have a lot of energy and seemed to enjoy fleshing out the crescendos and builds and plateaus. Nevertheless, I thought to myself, 'I could listen to this in my bedroom and save my money and time.' I did eagerly want to see this band perform, but i did not have a high-quality live experience, as that provided by Tom Carter or Bardo Pond (see below).

I soon realized what was missing upon Tarentel's set. What was responsible for a weak set by Explosions in the Sky was the lack of multimedia (which unbinds the imagination). Tarentel showed a film and it was incredible and inspirational. It was the clearest quality film that I have seen in a concert setting (sorry, Rachels, Godspeed, Subarachnoid, Sonic Youth). The film was somber and evoked lonliness, it showed waste and industrial ruin. Yet, there was beauty and order and stillness and serenity. This balance was played out even more with the rockdrums/avant instrumentation of the band. Tarentel used more loud, rock drums than usual (I have previously commented on the violence of rock drumming and my distaste for it), but there was a great balance as most postrock drums provide, paving the trail while the guitars and electronics fleshed out the vegetation all around it. There was a sense of hope (as their music always provides) and i felt like there was a real live experience there: thoughts going through my head, emotions brimming, ideas emerging for projects or things I wanted to write about. Overall, I loved it.

Now, I just want to see a band like Surface of Eceyon do something like that. All artists whose music evokes emotion should have film at their live performances. Oh, it was so moving, endearing. Explosions (as I've often thought) could have a powerhouse performance on a parallel with GYBE if they played alongside images that showcased the destruction, hope, abandonment, terror, helplessness, and immediacy inside their music. Any way they did it would have been powerful. But without the extra media, I was left to apply those emotions to my imagination; I am certain that most audience members do not see snare-drummers cadencing a batallion of soldiers in the music, do not see people fleeting through a city ablaze urgently trying to find their families, do not see skies filled with darkness and children reading charred fairytale storybooks in dungeons under ruins of skyscrapers. The immensity of these ideas (highly relevant to today's struggles and fears, despite what dot-com all-Americans like to believe) ought to be conveyed as a vision to be shared (as we know exist from the song titles and album art and interviews associated with Explosions in the Sky). People just bop their heads like indie dorks and thrift-store faux-poor hipsters (waving their digital cameras and smoking superfluous cigarettes), without any countenance of being struck aside by the immensity of this postrock music.

Tom Carter (Charalambides) & Six Organs of Admittance at the Hemlock Tavern on November 6.

Music, to me, is an expression of the seemingly-magical property of holism (or synergy). Usually I would apply this phenomenon to the notion that members of bands do not make up the sum of the whole band… That is, when musicians from different dispositions and talents and styles and behaviors and characteristics come together and play together, the end result is much greater than just the layering of track upon track of each instrument. There is an interplay between the musicians and what they influence in each other's decision to play a certain part of the music. (Another application of the phenomenon of holism is the burn-in associated with emotion that is intrinsic to music and where you first heard it and how you felt at the time, but I won't discuss that here, as I'm constantly talking about it). But nevertheless, I'm not aiming to talk about holism at all today. Rather, I want to point out that there are certain exceptions to this phenomenon of holism/synergy for which I am zealous. Ordinarily, because of the wonder of multiple musicians and their group dynamics, I loathe solo musicians. Some of them can construct pretty tunes and tower above you with poetics, but for the most part, they represent stripped-down austere silhouettes of themes that could otherwise manifest in dazzling landscapes of transcendental proportions. Solo musicians bore me.

However, there are certain solo musicians that are rarities. Instead of being one singular voice that could be reinforced and elevated with complementary instrumentation and depth, these individuals are enigmas within one individual. Often, like some of contemporary electronic soloists, they are able to surpass the sparse limitations of solo performance through overdubs and multi-tracking in the studio, or through compositions. Jim O'rourke, Aphex Twin, etc. Yet there are certain musicians that, even in the live setting, can fill a space with incredible dynamics and color and texture without the aid of complementary musicianship. Roy Montgomery uses reverb and delay loops to augment his guitar and create vibrational, shimmering textures and washes of emotion. (Though Hash Jar Tempo takes this a step further with the synergy idea.) Bjork is able to sing (and perform) in emotional tones that are so individual that they surpass all the talent of bluesy jazz singers like Nina Simone and folkstresses with adorable voices like Victoria Williams (though both are still top-notch, they are even better with a band. If Bjork made an a capella album, I would listen to it all the time). And then there is Ben Chasny from Six Organs of Admittance.

I've seen Ben Chasny play with Comets on Fire (see below), and I compared him to Bjork even. Since making that comment, I went back to his records, and while they are superb, I started to wonder if Ben could really captivate an audience in the way that the Iceland sprite can. Ben sings with a passion, but perhaps it is a pseudo-passion. After all, he is a hipster. Eyes occluded by moppish bangs, accoutered with alcoholic-beverage-in-hand, doubletiming in a psychedelic garagerock band. The guy even brings a caravan of hipsters with him, and the audience certainly did not seem to be the bearded, flowery zensters you might imagine devouring his ragas and eastern spiritual folk meditations. I wondered, after seeing that he wasn't the Ewok I expected, if he was genuine. But after seeing an official Six Organs of Admittance show, I think he's for real. I have no idea what books he reads, but I really believe he taps into the existential force of fireside ruminations on the structures of the cosmos and of life. I don't think it's in mock of hippy culture. The music is too dark and foreboding to be so. It's schizophrenic in that instead of celebrating the trees and the forests and how wonderful they are, he is warning us that the trees are all we have to approach reality; the rest is superfluity and illusion. I often think Ben is at the forefront of the neo-hippy spacefolk movement (does it really exist or have I just created it in my head). In my view, this wave of musicians (Thuja, Tower Recordings, Charalambides, etc) touch on the boldest topic of musicianship: the depressing, yet enigmatic and laudatory peculiarity of life: that we live, see beautiful things, and then die. That Ben Chasny is able to (almost) singlehandedly create this atmosphere in his recordings as a solo artist astounds me. Yes, Steven Wray Lobdell gives his music and audio THC high, but his recordings before working with Lobdell are still superior. And even his new album, Compathia, which has surprisingly little drone and much more "song structure" (whatever that means), still evokes the depressing aspects of living and how modern life ignores this important fact, compelling you to run to the forest and experience the full moon, the willows, the damp moss. You won't find that magic in a domesticated puppy and you won't find it in a skyscraper.

I must add (this is a live review, after all), that Ben's live show was sparse, drunk, inferior in audio quality (get this boy an acoustic pickup!), and short, yet it was very fulfilling. He commented that he's going to play a medley (as he pulls from his dark-brown drink) because he can only remember the lyrics to the first verse of all his songs, so he's just going to string a bunch of those first verses together. It was humorous, but shocking. This is Ben Chasny? Also, his entourage included a drunk friend, Matthew (someone in the Bay Guardian wrote of the concert and this person as if we're all supposed to know who he was), who hardly seems like the sort to listen to space-folk. Matthew kept shouting obscenities and sharp embarassments out loud between the songs, and during the songs he barely paid attention, but Ben treated him endearingly. While Matthew wanted him to improvise a song about some ridiculous city or street or something, Ben rhymed about Matthew falling asleep, hoping it would come true.

And, the opening act, Tom Carter from Charalambides. Wow. I quite like his band with wife, Christina, but there's something sparse about their music that puts them closer to the bottom of my good-spacefolk list (they still make it onto it, mind you). Sometimes their songs are too repetitive, but not transcendent and minimalist enough to merit avant-garde status. They sometimes seem stale and misleading. (Don't get me wrong, I've heard some fine moments of theirs, but their track was my least favorite of the Harmony of the Spheres tracks). What I did actually enjoy immensely, however, was this solo performance by Tom Carter. He played three extended pieces, the two bookends were lapsteel slide guitar pieces, and the middle piece was a strapped-on electric guitar. His dexterity is mesmerizing. He was able to form natural delay with his fingers, defining a new way to play the guitar as if it was a game, using every centimeter of the guitar to produce sound. He had an assortment of slides and also used one of those e-bow devices in addition to some pedal effects. He filled the space with such dynamic sound. I felt like this man needs to spread his vision as far and wide as possible, to collaborate with every musician he can, to build custom instruments to play. He creates music in a very different sense and the pairing of the two performers for this evening could not have been more perfect.

Bardo Pond, Kinski, Subarachnoid Space at Bottom of the Hill.
18-July-2003

There is something macho about the humanity that I currently perceive. All three bands that I saw last night are incredible musicians with a beautiful view of the textures of collaboration and collectivism. No better than with a band can we see the holistic phenomenon -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When the drum kit fell apart for Subarachnoid Space, the music became nascent of an entirely different band. While many people scoffed, I thought the dynamic change was spectacular.

Kinski is a band that particularly aims to be dynamic. While I prefer the subtle crescendo and evolution of dynamic music from the Godspeed camp than the Mogwai camp (to which Kinski belongs), there is a wonderful eclipse in the shift from subtle to energetic, if used correctly. My one complaint about the "be gentle with the warm turtle" album is that the lows are too low. I call this the "Terminal Pharmacy" phenomenon, named after Jim O'rourke's experimental album on Tzadik, where the intricate music is so low in the mix that you have to turn the volume up ridiculously high to hear it; unfortunately O'rourke sporadically inserts blasts of above-normal sound so that, with your volume turned up, if you don't break your speakers you will at least have a heart attack or ruin your ears. While the case of Kinski is not quite as dramatic or fatalistic, the bind is there. Even in concert, the unsettling slashes from krautrock subdued textual rhythm to POW-POW-POW chugga-garage sprays of sonic ammunition are painful enough to stab. I wish they would split and become two bands, or release separate albums and go through phases. Kinski appears to be getting louder, although the first track they opened up with was incredibly beautiful, topographic, and spacy, with the right balance and build of hard drums. The flute was wonderful too, and I'd wished the fellow would play it more often. The mix on the sound levels was appropriate enough to hear the flute but not enough to say "this is flute rock"... it was effects-laden, played like their tweaked electric guitars. After the show I spoke with some band members and was surprised at how amiable they were, for playing such art-rock. I like that about a musician; none of this Andy Warhol, pretentious indie art-snob crap that we sometimes get from our musicians. The same went for Clint Takeda from Bardo Pond; incredibly friendly and willing to talk candidly about the music; little ego. I felt as if the music was not something the individual artists made but something the listeners have a part in to because of this communication.

Subarachnoid Space was much better than I expected. In fact, I thought they were Kinski until the end. The snobbery of "needing a bass drum" and thus not continuing until it was fixed was a little beyond me, though. If they had continued the jam all spacy and improvised (which they are clearly masterful at), they would have made the evening highly unique. The drummer got all emotional and red-in-the-face. I thought he hit the drums too hard anyway. This is the machismo I'm talking of. Do we really need such cockheads playing percussion? We will never get over the term "post-rock" so long as people play drums like that. Nevertheless, the music was so much more impressive than the album I have with is just a reiteration of the evil jams that hippy bands have had since the 70s, in the King Crimson vein. This music was a little more divine. I felt there wasn't as much a chasm between the loud and soft, as with Kinski. I welcome the fact that their music is fleshing out to a higher plateaux, still under the sun but cognizant of its own landscape. I think in a few years they will be doing something incredible, if they keep at it. I would have loved to add little micro-clickings above all the washes of spacy distortion and fuzz and trebled riffery.

Bardo Pond. Wow. They started off on a weak foot, reiterating the "watching it happen" track from Dilate. Once Isobel brought out the flute I was sold. I really loathe their straight blues-rock approach, rather harsh and unimaginative if you consider the construction of the tunes (Isobel's vocals excluded). What is fantastic about them is that they hold this air the entire time without ever dropping it. I don't think anyone can play spacy versions of bad songs so well without ever conceding that the songs are inherently bad. They're only bad because I'm overly analytical. I was a bid distraught that the crowd settled into the grooviness headspace of the fuzzscapes so easily but were unable to respond (physically at least) to the space forays of the other two bands. (I thought the other two bands did spacy interludes much more colorfully, but the damn rock drums and garagey chugga-trainwrecks ruin it all for me. Give me Charalambides, not Comets of Fire!) Nevertheless, there is something hidden and gracious about the music of Bardo Pond, and I'm not even referring to Isobel's body language or intonations. She is a whole separate part of the music and this is evident during the instrumental parts when she is doing nothing audible, and of course in Bardo Pond's marvelous side projects (give me Hash Jar Tempo and I'll give you an apple pie). The band achieves this effortless slow-churning whirlpool of desert sands. There is no better music to exemplify that the sun can burn you too. Isobel looked so pained, and I think it's an expression of how difficult life can be, how we all don't really know that the graciousness of beauty is just a silver lining to the excremental ordinary life.

I sure hope all those indie-rockers perceive the tightrope of beauty, rather than just the macho expression of liking sludge-rock because it's a more-listenable form of aggro-metal. Somehow, I think a lot of listeners (and musicians) think of alternate rock forms as favorable because of the challenge of enduring the hammering gunshots of the rock format (pow! pow! pow!). I notice this draw for wanting to appear extroverted with musical taste, for wanting people to think one is rebellious because they enjoy the dirt of life with the dilute glitter mixed in, rather than seeking to harvest the treasure and distill it all. As I approved before of Kinski's offstage friendliness, the ego and non-show-offness of these musicians gave more value to the music I heard last night because it certified that this was a take-it-or-leave-it expression of the passion that has built up inside them. (There! There's my disclaimer for the subjectivity of art criticism! I'm an opinionated fool, and you should be too!) Unfortunately some people do not realize that there are so many more options out there for good music (I was stumped when I first heard Eyvind Kang recently, for instance) that we shouldn't settle for things that only move us halfway.

Final statement: I thoroughly enjoyed myself last evening, but I was in no way captivated like I've been watching Rachel's, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Sonic Youth's "anagrama", Ida, or listening to Six Organs of Admittance, Jackie-o Motherfucker, or Bardo Pond's "Sangh Seriatim"-- harmony of the spheres compilation -- do they ever play this live?)

Text as Instrument?
PROJECT: Find or devise a computer program to be used on a laptop that can take text and display it in a visualization format that can also be customized in real time. Project this on a screen during performances of musicians. Before the performances, discuss with the musicians ideas that are important to them and type simultaneously the words that arise in one's head in response to the music.

I was pondering, as I always am for my zine, Future Wave, about what is beneath the music that musicians make. It is important to unify all of one's experiences as arts and all of one's arts as experience. It is all a holistic, cyclical process; what affinities the artist has are manifested in the art. An acknowledgement of the ideas can only nuance and accentuate this presence in the music.

I would hope that the projection of the text could be spontaneous and quick to register, yet easy to manage. The computer program would have to have different levels of user skill so that someone familiar with the program coul easily sit down and just worry about the words and not about the imagery (yet let the computer take this aspect over to be sure that the presentation was not dull). This way, during a performance, different idealists could tag each other out and switch off, just as two musicians often will exchange instruments, getting up from the drums to play guitar. There should also be capabilities, however, for the more advanced text artist to decide if the words should flash, pan, or linger, and what flashes of colors and effects can be shown at what times. I would imagine that it would be similar to the visualization plug-in modules that can be downloaded for the Winamp multimedia players...

Sunburned Hand of the Man & Comets on Fire at the Hemlock Tavern.

Last night I went to go see a concert, which I haven't done in a while due to the fact that the price of a performance is often the price of a record. While musicians need to support themselves, I am satisfied with the ability to listen to music in a more relaxed anti-capitalist setting. A record is something you can take with you. Sitting in the back-most corner of the small intimate venue (my favorite place to sit when I go by myself to a show) I recollected that even the details of my favorite live music experience I'd attented (Godspeed You Black Emperor!, see below) have receded. I can rarely remember the progression of a musical performance, only whether or not I had enjoyed it. Well, I will thus document the little portion of last night's performance that stands out in my mind.

Sunburned Hand of the Man, a neo-psychedelic collective from Boston, manifested itself last night as a ten-piece rhythmic freakout, much like a rosebush. so many thorns, but so much color. While I own some of their more abstract older music (Piff's Clicks and Mind of a Brother), this was mostly a dynamic, looping, eloping rhythm between the percussion section that was laced up in the electric meanderings of gadgetboxes, manipulated microphones, and guitars unwilling to obey any formalisms of chords and scales; and the acoustics of hand percussions like bells, chikka-chikka spools (whatever they're called), djembes, and chanting. there was an electrically enhanced violin but i couldn't find it in the swirling mix. Unlike most collective jamouts that exceed six persons, you could pick out every instrument (except for the enunciation of the words that were utilized as instrument tones). There were multiple sets of exploration, and each had a common thread to it, but the group halted and switched instruments often, perhaps to allow diversity to the performance. Some jams, while stellar, are a waste of time because they languish so much. (see Phish, Subarachnoid Space, Sunroof!) The music climaxed with a pile-on of all the musicians that were not playing large instruments. It was wonderful to see a female participating in the group, but I wished she had found more to contribute than her sideline inaudible chanting and percussion.

A splendid factor of the performance was that a good third of the musicians did not sit on the stage but instead in the crowd. While this could likely be on account of ten people never fitting on the tiny stage, I spoke with some of the group afterwards and they told me of their loft in Boston where they often play. Apparently at these loft parties, the band will be spread out throughout the entire loft. The effect produced was that I felt guilty as a spectator. For certain, any beholder of art is in essence a participant, but I find the spectator's reduction of feedback to be inhibitory. So, the random musicians littered throughout the non-stage area made me feel less as a spectator because someone in the crowd was participating. I regretted for a moment being so far away from the stage, on my perch in the back corner (but I wouldn't renounce my perfect vantage!). It was funny that afterwards, the fellows in the band said that they had noticed me getting into the groove. Unfortunately, the crowd was full of the indie-snob variety that likes to drink beer and inwardly feel the music without ever sharing their passions. This inwardness was an affliction I used to have; back in my teenage years of rocketing through space, stoned cold during "washing machine" (SY), I would stand and gape at the stage in secret, deadpanned awe. I believe myself to have come out of the closet to music reactionism, and when not showing my emotion through my body language (why does nobody dance?), I can be found interminably ranting of my experience with the music. In short, the show would have been most inredible, had the whole group of nonmusicians metamorphosed into a throbbing throng, like the hippies used to do in those acid-lodged days of the Grateful Dead, probably not too far from the Hemlock Tavern.

A high point of the evening was when, during Comets on Fire's mediocre set, I was sitting on my "perch" and randomly found myself accompanied by John Maloney (of Sunburned) on my left, and Steven Wray Lobdell on my right (I was too shy to say hello to this revered spectator). Perhaps the only true musical moment I relish from the set by the hyped-up Comets on Fire was when stand-in Ben Chasny (of our beloved Six Organs of Admittance), during a lull in the marsh of bluesy space madness, leaned over the microphone and emitted an equisite sinewy snippet of a dirge that was on a par with Bjork. I am enamored of his vision. I have yet to see a Six Organs show, but this fancy young Californian (Dr. Chasny, as someone from Sunburned awed him with) is perhaps one of the most enigmatic indie performers I've encountered. The big let-down, however, was that the other 95% of the show involved a careless-minimalist rhythm section supporting loud incomprehensible dual electirc guitar psychedelic hendrix-sprawl matched with whammy-bar like shocks of electronic gadgetbox dopplers. This band's record, "Field Recordings from the Sun" has been hyped up more strongly than Sigur Ros, but somehow the music was ordinary. (Maloney, during the set, answered my question of what makes the band unique with "I've never heard anyone do anything like this these days!" -- now that Hendrix is dead I guess he meant). Personally, I think I've heard the sprawling thunka-thunka-skreeeeeeee! that this band played in numerous places... For one, check the purported "Southern Rock" quotient of the jamband scene (like Gov't Mule and Widespread Panic). Only thing is, these mediocre jambands actually travel from one point to another... I'd be willing to give the band another chance, so long as it's not out of my pocket, but I hereby reject the band on three accounts: (1) it was a waste of Ben Chasny's talent. (2) Rock and Roll is a patriarchal testosterone-driven expression and is only relevant in cases like Explosions in the Sky (who are angry about capitalism and the tragedy of living) and the Boredoms (who feel the importance of epicurean living in a symbolic, divine world). There was a lot of energy expressed here, which is always powerful, but I'm convinced it had a lot to do with drugs and testicles. (3) I've heard this ordinary, unemotional music before.

Check out my post, "Four Views of Collaborative Art" on my other, multi-purpose blog, Future Wave. In it I describe more ideas of conceptual music composition. In brief, one is a collaboration where one composer builds half of a loose piece of music, the second composer layers on top of the piece and then continues the piece onward symmetrically, and then the extension is filled in by the original artist. Another idea is to have a project like the collaborative ep series of Cerberus Shoal, where a piece is written, handed to a second artist who then reinterprets the piece. The same would be done vice-versa, with switched roles. I would extend this concept by returning the interpretive response piece to the original artist and have them re-interpret it themselves. A third collaborative musical project would be something anyone could do: construct a mix tape with a friend, where each person selects a song in response to the song before it, handing the tape back and forth until the tape is filled.

I had an interesting idea tonight about music to create. I'm reading a Philip K. Dick novel (The Martian Time Slip) and a character encoded a secret message and then disguised it as a piece of electronic music. In a later book of Dick's, Radio Free Albemuth, Dick's characters encode hidden, subversive messages in the lyrical format of popular music. As long as America remains true to the spirit of Liberty and free speech (sometimes I think we totter on the edge), there would be no need to encode any sort of radical ideas. Yet, there may come a day when certain comrades may need to communicate in the dark; perhaps forming a new system of code through sampled electronic music may prove interesting. Another interesting application of this would be the elucidation of a more ubiquitous emotional and informational experiential content of wordless music.

I possess a large amount of music that I have not yet listened to, and I'm in the process of digging into it. However, I would not like to review music here as I listen to it, as then I would be forcing reactions in order to find something to say. Rather, I would like to allow the music to sink into my skin and bathe my experiences in it. I am convinced that there is something complex about the tones and arrangements of music and how the mind perceives them that is able to extract emotions from them. This is how music engraves itself upon the experiences we have at the time we first hear it, like a good strummy guitar ballad to remind us of a fleeted summer love, or the chill sombre reverb to resonate with the barrier of the windowpane between a heated apartment and the snow outside. Music takes us places, and I hope to uncover here some of the music that has been able to take me somewhere. Perhaps the music that doesn't produce this effect was first listened to at the inappropriate time, or perhaps some music doesn't move people because they lack certain perspectives to coincide with what a music contains. However, the burn-in effect of most musics is a beauty of life that, in my opinion, transcends the emotional effects of other arts because of the inescapability of music's grasp.

I once was at a Godspeed You Black Emperor! performance by myself at the height of my panic disorder; terrorized by the shrill blares of sound and the ineffectiveness of the medication I'd just imbibed, I oscillated between the back of the crowd and the exit, as I contemplated leaving the show altogether because the feeling of calamity in the music was too intense and I began to have a panic attack. I stayed because a woman took me by the hand and brought me all the way up to the front row where we held each other tightly to withstand the emotional force of the experience.

Welcome to ATROCITY JUKEBOX. This is my second blog, and it is an extension of my first, multipurpose blog, Future Wave. I hope to devote Atrocity Jukebox solely to my passion for music. The name Atrocity Jukebox, in addition to Future Wave, is also the name of a song by Tower Recordings. I will lead off by saying that, despite the subjectivities of music, this collective of musicians has created some of the more colored music of the day, and although they contain many regressions to hippy culture, Tower Recordings is foward-thinking (as I purport myself to be) in that they are the epitome of what I call "space folk". It is both an expression of the folk of forest and tribal cultures and the space of science fiction. It is not a shiny technological hi-fi space of lustrous qualities, as much of the nascent electronica is becoming. Rather, the electronics involved are fractured, dirty, psychedelic and schizophrenic, unclean as the tragedy of industrial existence. It does not proclaim "hooray we space cadets are here!" Instead if proffers the conundrum of what living in a tragic delusion of postindustry's diversions is like. Where it is not dirty in its avant-experimentalism (some drone and noise excursions), it retreats into spiritual caverns. Spirituality is, apart from community and progress, the solace for the soul that may effectively claim to grant salvation. So, it is without further ado that I grant to you ATROCITY JUKEBOX; a collection of ruminations on the atroticties of musical culture. It is not to claim that the music I listen to is atrocious, but rather the injustice of coralling neo-psychedelia into the underground is despicable. Let me remind you that I, a lover of psychedelic music, am drug-free. It is unneccessary to embark on these fast highways to get where we intend to go, and it is for this reason I am writing this blog: to show you all that music is my drug that expands my mind with color.