Sunday, April 30, 2006
Music Recommendations from the PLI #3
Sorry for the low profile, I'm back to blogging.
1) Fe-mail - Blixter Toad
Members of the fabulous band Spunk, (check out their latest on Rune Grammofon called En Aldeles Forferdelig Sykdom), Maja (don't call me the other crazy electronic lady from Iceland) Rathje and Hild Sofie Tafjord, release a volatile, kinetic, 2 disc potential masterpiece. This record bumps, bounces and squiggles more than it ever ends up in the all too common lately cloudy drone (I know I have been guilty of this in the past with my work). Maja Rathje is making some of the most creative and exciting work in the area of laptop music and just her work with her own voice is worthy of more attention beyond the experimental music press. When I first purchased this disc my initial fear was that it would be overlong, a common mistake among electronic musicians, (I know, I know) but Fe-mail really know how to keep it interesting. When the events are spare you have the opportunity to hear the scheer oddness of their material, when the events get dense, it builds a massive structure that feels like shards of something sharp buit into a house of cards. A great, great record.
2) Miles Davis - The Complete Cellar Door SessionsBy 1970 Mile Davis has made some of best music of this past century. I know that's a big statement, that is highly subjective, but keep in mind people said that Jerry Garcia would be revered like the Bach or Mozart of the 20th century. These people need either better drugs or a copy of Bitch's Brew. Anyway, getting back to Miles in the 70's, he had just come off of releasing In A Silent Way, Bitch's Brew and Big Fun and the sound he was developing here would later turn into On The Corner. With this set, we get to hear 6 sets from six nights at the Cellar Door. At this point Miles was recording every show. These performances are far from the misty nocturnal cool of In A Silent Way. These sets are aggressive, and funky. Miles' second great electric group are in top form and, this isn't even the full story, as they only choose one of the two sets performed each night for this boxset. You can never go wrong with any Miles Davis recording from this period and these boxsets are like finding that you favorite film was really 6 hours longer and just as good for those extra six hours.
3) Keith Fullerton Whitman - LisbonThis the first of KFW's records recorded under his own name that I can say is close to this level of greatness. I loved his work as Hrvatski,but I see that that work is fairly obselete now and that his direction under his own name is clearly were he wants to be heading. What makes Lisbon work so well is that he now seems to understand to give his work a much more interesting dynamic. The tonal workouts on Playthroughs felt so static, lacking the shifts that make work like his pal Greg Davis's Somnia so involving. I read in a review that he did not put this work through a long process of editing and gestation and I feel like that was an enormous help to him. This record is a triumph in that it's one long piece that is uplifting in both an emotional abd physical sense.. He achieves that "room is lifting" feeling like a live Double Leopards show. It's never hurried, and it's never dull. It at times reminds of what a long form electronic piece can do, like Le Legende D'Er. It's in one shot, the very best ideas he's had, collected into the very best piece he's done. Whatever this long process of editing is that you do, Keith, stop it!
Sunday, April 16, 2006
About The Painful Leg Injuries Podcast Series 10, Improvised Sensorlab
It was sometime in December and I was taking a lunch break. I wandered into the Radio Shack on 7th ave and 29th street. I had been thinking about adding more instruments to my growing collection, but I wanted something that would have a primitive electronic sound that I could manipulate into various different shapes. So I found this little home projects kit, for kids of nerds I imagine, or late twenties noise music geeks looking for the next weird little instrument to add to their collection. Oh, that brings me back to me. I bought it and brought it home. I read through the manual skipping all the magnet stuff and light bulbs and whatever until I found the section on oscillators.I built one that had a continous droning sound to it, but not the cavernous drones of most of my material, the sine wave type drones you'd hear the Improvised Music from Japan Players use. It sounds like test tone. This original oscillator is what used for the upcoming episodes 3, 4, and 5 of this series.
I reconfigured my sensorlab to make pulses, one dial would control the rate of the pulses and the other the pitch. These are episodes 1,2 and 6 and 7.
I have grown to love the music of the Improvised Music From Japan players. From reading the annual magazine/cd set of the same name, I have grown a pretty strong unerstanding of what they are after. Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura, the leaders of this scene, on their record Good Morning Good Night wanted to make electronic music that is pure abstraction, the simplest tones meeting, to find what is at the heart of music. They want us to appreciate the pureness of sound in it's most simple form. A form of music that's not dated by a production sound, a music that cannot be connected to a particular location by the instruments involved.
As much as I admire this view, I couldn't see using my Sensorlab to explore what they are already doing. I love the idea of taking the pure sine wave and sculpting into some primitive instrument. Like finding some weird old synthesizer.
I used some guitar pedals, and picked a sound for each piece, by reconfiguring it everytime. Then it was down to the two dials. I was limited in options plus, I didn't know what would happen when I turned the dials. With no compositional plan, I would just turn dials, when I found a sound I liked, I would try to repeat it, if I was successful, I kept going until I made a mistake, then the plan became to repeat the mistake. When I painted myslef into a corner, I would turn the dials the complete opposite direction and start again.
It seemed like only a few seconds would go by, but in some cases it was early a half hour. Oddly, it felt like I had become hypnotised in some way. I know, I'm starting to sound like some kind of new-age hippy. It was more like some kind of weird meditation, like I wasn't thinking about anything, just concentatrating on the sounds I heard and reacting. Maybe, I was simply relaxing, perhaps adding years to life. I fell out of any direct connection to any specific time or place. So breifly I lost my time and place, and I think experienced what the IMJ folks are chasing, losing myself and just imagining.
I guess this is abstract expressionism in the sound art realm, but the experience of making is better than experience of just observing. And who knows, maybe everyone will hate this noise except for me. There was just such an amazing feeling of transportation and other-worldliness, I felt extremely compelled to share.
But, the dogs will have to out. I have to write a lecture for tomorrow, that I've done before, numerous times, but never wrote down in a place where I could find it again. My life, my time and place inevitably returns.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Music Recommendations From The PLI #2
Hello again, I'm back with this week's crop of recommended music.1) K- Space - Going Up
K-Space is a trio made up of Tuvan singer Gendos Chamzyryn, lap guitarist, Tim Hodgkinson and percussionist Ken Hyder. On paper, this project sounds horrible. Two experimental sound art types team up with a Tuvan singer to integrate a world music bend. Ewww.
However, K-Space works and works extremely well. One, they avoid the pitfalls of over-doing the whole "it's weird because it's a foreign instrument" pitfall, so common among jazz and electronic acts that integrate world music styles. Their success lies in their ability to so closely integrate familiar tones with sounds that are extemely bizarre you can barely tell who is playing what. Rather than just make something that starts to sound ritualistic, which would be comical, they push the listener into the place they are coming from and take you into the comos.
2) The Liars - Drum's Not Dead
The Liars are my favorite band from the class of 2002 Billy-burg post punk revival.
When they first appeared they were a clever recycling of PIL, The Birthday Party, and The Pop Group three of my all time favorite bands. I could hear in their approach to this music that they would not be content to be a retro act. Flash foward to 2004, their second album, They Were Wrong So We Drowned. They had trimmed down their line-up and moved into a whol new sound. Noisier, more primal, and pretty experimental for a band that was once contextualized with likes of the M2 heroes the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and Interpol. Though I felt this record was as strong as their first, scenesters rejected this album possibly due to the witchcraft themed conceptual baggage.
It's 2006, and the post-punk revival's gone. Brooklyn's now been taken over by tech-savvy hippies. Even their freak folk scene is starting to show signs of the end of a shelf life.
What do you do when you were the best band from two scenes ago and you've now got prove yourselves all over again? Start by moving to Germany. Make an album, trash it and make another one. Trade in your copies of The Flowers of Romance and grab a copy Sung Tongs. Hook up some drums to some guitar effects pedals. Make a record that combines your acidic darkside with your contemporaries abstract sunnyside and you end up with the new Liars sound. The Liars are cut above their contemporaries and look like they will remain that way. 2002, we hardly knew 'ya.
3) Harry Bertoia - UnfoldingWhile for most of these recomendation lists I will stick to new releases, every so often I'm sure I'll be compelled to recommend something from the back catalog. This is a record I discovered last year from a email from volcanictongue.com. They're an excellent source for hard to find music BTW. Anyway, I read the description of this record, a sculptor/interior designer, playing his sounding sculptures. Anyone out there who appreciates long drone-y work, like Nurse With Wound's Solilquy for Lilith, or Hafler Trio's work, will be interested in this.
Bertoia's drones are so full of sonic details,that it takes on a gorgeous, space filling, three dimensional quality. Electronic drone music often ends up lacking in nuance, but Bertoia's music has a wonderful organic living pulse. This drone work is full of surprises, changes in direction and texture and he didn't even have Pro Tools. It sometimes takes someone who has a strong visual art sense to make music do things like this. Bertoia's world is fascinating place, this record is trully psychedelic, it has never sounded the same twice..
I can't urge you to buy this disc enough. Or if you find any of the Sonambient series on LP, don't fret over it just get it, but since they are highly rare, and they'll set you back about 50 bucks at least, you'll have an easier time finding Unfolding (kindly priced at around 15 bucks and it coveres four of the ten records in the Sonambient series). It's the most inspiring collection of music I discovered last year.
