Playlist

Tonight!

Saturday, July 6, 2013 - 9 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch, Old Man Williamson
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle

Live

July 5, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Two Piano Pieces - Carson Farley
Four Piano Pieces and Two Montana Songs - Kam Morrill
Songs Your Mother Should Know - Neal Meyer

I pulled host duty at this bi-month's salon, so I'm sure I was somewhat distracted. Nobody can replace Tom Baker. I was however both surprised and pleased (but mostly pleased) by the large turnout, and by the lively discussion that followed each performance. Carson explored a unification of musical parameters in a personal, transparent, intriguingly flat-footed, non-Stockhausenish way. Kam brought four delightful piano pieces written for a puppet show that never materialized, and two ambitious songs for bass and piano whose poems concern the interaction of man and animal - moose and magpie, respectively. Neal's musical comedy pastiche songs are familiar to me, as his chanteuse is none other than my lovely spouse Karen, who was fab. For what it's worth, here is my theory of musical comedy: the more the songs are ascendant, the better; the more the book is ascendant, the worse. Best possible solution: all songs, no book.

Recorded

July 2, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 41 - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

On the 4th of July weekend of 1984 the three then extant members of the band - Aaron, Neal, and me - utterly failed to make a tape that came to be known as Banned Rehearsal 5. The tape was in the recorder, and the plan was to walk out into the ebb tide mudflats at the end of Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island, to record our squeechy squoochy footsteps, the lapping waves, the wind, and the birds. Unfortunately, either the batteries were dead or they fell out at the outset, so there was no trace on magnetic tape of what we all remember as the spectacular one that got away.

So the next year the band was once again assembled at my folks' cabin near Freeland, and we carefully checked our equipment before setting out down the road and into the mud. Listening to the result at this distance of time, I am reminded that those mudflats constitute a primal personal landscape, an extreme-scape, for me, and so the varying reactions of my fellows, from simple child-glee to erotic ecstasy arrived at by way of ecstatic anxiety, are fitting.

The compressed omnipresent rumble of wind in the microphones is like the sound of boulders in a swift river, complicating water.



Banned Mixer 7

July 4, 2013
Banned Mixer 6

Detail phantasms by, not yet sunk into the tarry mass that waits. Not a wall of sound, but rather a thicket, emerging from ground into which we succumb.






Banned Mixer 7

Accumulate

Amalgamate

Concatenate

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 1, 2013
Gradus 229 - Neal Meyer



Neal plays the first E-natural

Another milestone, or the other side of the same milestone as last session. Having finished all the combinations of the A-naturals, Neal plays the first E-natural. The moment was captured visually as well as in sound-file format. Since he has been treating each 40 minute recording session as two 20 minute rungs, the second half was a perhaps even more momentous occasion: the first Gradus in which two pitch-classes appear.