Playlist

Recorded

April 2, 2017
(I'm A) Road Runner - Junior Walker and The All Stars [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

A giant tambourine fronts a precisely on the beat rhythm bunch, around which JW slips.

10538 Overture - The Electric Light Orchestra [a Rescued Record]

Half trying to be artsy, half trying to be dancy. Pseudo-Prog-Pop. I may be wrong, but I imagine it was mostly the backing sound for some kind of stage spectacular.

Anarchy in the U.K. - The Sex Pistols [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

The best part of this is the huge massed sound of the band. As for the preening edge lord, he's best taken in small doses.

(I'm A) TV Savage - Bow Wow Wow [from Love, Peace & Harmony - The Best of Bow Wow Wow]

Begging for an MTV type video. Why else would it be at all?

Banned Sectional 6 KEE AK - Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [January 1986]

train whistle high rustling springiness moves to frontal attack pushing hard in magnificent rolling time spans

some Tibetans hang out next door

obo roi

we were never shy about pinning the needles

unrecoverable synth patches

a break :: they return (the Tibetans)

slower mood relaxed, intimate

tune accidentally extracted from music box innards (just the tones that happen to over-resonate)

the Tibetans utterly transformed into another species of other entirely

funmaker in top form

takes its time getting into any spot, but once there it is well and truly in that spot

another break :: for a moaningsoftly drone solo

we re-enter the regular world

Drunken Boat - Infamous Menagerie

Rubberband guitar sound matches the pots&pans drums. An effect akin to that of a toy symphony, but here without any sense of archness or spoof.

April 4, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 420 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 1996]

Image: tuning up, but nothing like actually tuning up.

Neal and Karen, Bickleton, WA 1996

Image: climbing a rocky snow-blown pitch at high-altitude, footing treacherous, air thin, inches gained in triumph. Each sound without tincture of technique. We hunker into camp while the storm rides us out. Something profoundly heavy about how we feel. The earth pulls in sodden gusts. Morning dawns oppressively, but struggle on we must with Mighty Wurlitzer Hero to pull us on and break us through. We feel lighter somehow, the atmosphere fresh and clear, the scene of troubles fades from beneath us.

April 6, 2017
Jeremiah 17:5-8 (midi) - Keith Eisenbrey

The keyboard part taken by midi harphsichord, the voice by midi flute. It is fascinating how midi de-mediates sounds. The layers are not softened by our mutual bodies' compassions.

Gradus 90 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

After a long wait, a few pokes poke. (twice). Quietly responded to, then conjoined. A hint now and then of presence in silence. 3 notes! Such a richness! Low notes fade into the upper partials echoing the quiet iteration of the higher. It doesn't fade into nothing. It is nothing. Then it is not.

Joys of the Trail - Brian Cobb [from Campfire Songs]

A Rhythm Fight Club. Ends with laughter but not happy. Into the future comrades!

Jesus Loves Me (Autoheterophony) - Keith Eisenbrey

Eight of me singing around an old hymn tune/text. I love the play of sibilance, undulating harmony, and the substrate of breath. Stacking the same voice over itself, here, allows the parts of the voice sound to precipitate - or operates like a centrifuge to separate factors.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 3, 2017

Gradus 309 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Bright lights (just a few) across the moggy gloom.
Rung 2 takes time to put things together, but by the end it is clear that it, time that is, was not together before it got put there.

Playlist

Recorded

October 4, 2016

The Montreux/Berlin Concerts Track 3 "84 Deg. -Kelvin -6" - Anthony Braxton, Kenny Wheeler,

Anthony Braxton

Dave Holland, Barry Altschul

Morse code rhythms and seabirds. Trumpet provocateur, How did that chorus rhythm get signaled, and still sound like it was invented on the spot?

Chihuahua - Bow Wow Wow

Chi Wow Wow :: Bowhuahua

I Wonder As I Wander - London Symphony Orchestra, Placido Domingo [from Hallmark Listen to the Joy]

Secularization by star-power over-dramatization.

Come As You Are - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

An altar call (Just As I Am, Without One Plea)

Banned Rehearsal 417 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

roll call

pressure cooker

heap bag

agitate pulverize grind chip (at) forge anew (forge(t)) press and squeeze stipple and stroke fiddle and fuss step back cock a head prop up hoist twist whack and flatten let sit let weather look away see from distances pick up shake each which way plug in set to rolling.

October 6, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 605 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

gentle bell(y)

|| within this mix recognized improvisational attitudes :: recognized faces though some surprise or perplex as to whom? My own thoughts in particular are obvious to me as my own, others I guess at, as do each we all

||nursery sounds infant babble and cry primitive of improvisation :: bodily, innocent of edits, nearly innocent of language (though are we, ever?)

||transparently lives in the room resonance and baseline noise, the way print lives on the surface of paper

twisted place(s)

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 3, 2016
Gradus 299 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

As the collection increases in count its thingness, as a whole to be grasped, closes, while its thingness, as a space to explore, opens.

Playlist

Recorded

November 9, 2015
Homesickness Blues - Nora Bayes [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Orchestrated and arranged, done-up all proper, but not so tightly bolted together that it doesn't allow lots of give.

Marche Triomphale du Centenaire de Napoleon I - Louis Vierne - Auburn Symphony Orchestra,

Albert Dieudonné

Stewart Kershaw, David Di Fiore

I kept thinking of the scene in Abel Gance's Napoleon where Napoleon (Albert Dieudonné) visits, at midnight, the assembly room where the great figures of the revolution argued. Their ghosts appear one after the other bidding Napoleon to take up the mantel of the revolution for them - the spectral-heroic.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra - Copland - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Lorin Hollander

Lorin Hollander

This is among my favorite recordings of Copland, right up there with Bernstein's Billy The Kid. What takes it over the top is Lorin Hollander's unhinged swing, as though Robert Johnson's poly-tempi had been wound up way too tight. The piano could shatter at any moment.

Bacchus et Ariane - Albert Roussel - Orchestre National de France, Georges Pretre

Program music has become illustration, in the sense that the style of the music is more important to the sense of what is happening than the story - you buy this book for the pictures, not the words.

November 10, 2015
Variations for Piano, op. 27 - Webern - Peter Serkin

A blank, a void of perception, every tune an attempt to enlighten, but the void is always just to the side, inaudible.

Suite 8 - Artie Shaw [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Movie credit music, after which we find ourselves in a hoppin' joint for the first scene.

Dodo's Bounce - Dodo Marmarosa [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The piano solo has a swing that's like steady eighths swerving wide in a fast turn, just this side of disaster.

Music of Changes - Cage - Herbert Henck

Herbert Henck

Narrow focus, nose to the page, a feat of concentration. The relations among what is within the immediate juxtapositional neighborhood of gesture are so complex as to make larger frame structures extremely problematic - hard to see the jungle as an organism when we can only see three or four leaves at a time. Large structures, if there are any, become objects of statistical perception. Come in anywhere. Leave any time. Or: stick it out, hang in there, participate in its feat-ness. Aside: writing music that only an expert could play, one assures oneself of being limited to only those sounds that an expert would play. One can not unlearn how to play piano. There will be no sound that doesn't project precisely, because expertise can make one incapable of anything less (and reinforces the notion that anything other than precise is less, rather than simply other.)

(I'll Remember) In the Still of the Nite - The Five Satins [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Floating a tune around a circulating pattern.

Crying - Roy Orbison [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

An object lesson in vocal production - he can float that high falsetto D out there perfectly in tune, but the last A, being pushed in full voice, is way out of whack.

November 12, 2015
Revolver - The Beatles

If I had to pick a favorite Beatles album this would probably be it. It isn't that my favorite songs are on it (they're not), but that the songs are so varied, that they don't do each other any harm moving from one to the next, and that it doesn't try to be anything other than a bunch of songs. I love that the last sung word is "beginning."

Hunky Dory - David Bowie

Tries on every hat he can find. Some of them are genuinely icky-creepy. Ever the arch-projectionist, he veers just away from the pastiche-play of Billy Joel and into something more like a critical memoir. He doesn't just 'do' Cat Stevens, for instance, his performance is a commentary from within the persona.

Darlin' Corey - Shorty Ralph Reynolds [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

Fancy banjo time, after which he explains his tuning. Art asks him if there are any other songs that use that tuning. Apparently not. That tuning and that tune are one and the same.

Prince of Darkness (Sinner, Sinner) - Bow Wow Wow

Spawn of Thriller.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 8, 2015
Trio 151108 - Keith Eisenbrey

Back to the trio project after several busy weekends, this comprises three tracks on a suspended plow disk, two gears from a tractor clutch (hanging from a two-by-four A-frame), and a tenor banjo.

Banned Telepath 40 Somerville 151108 - Aaron Keyt

November 9, 2015
Banned Telepath 40 Seattle 151109 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer
Banned Rehearsal 898 151109 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Tambourines across the continent! Shake it!

Playlist

Recorded

June 6, 2015

Preludes and Fugues (selections) - Shostakovich - Shostakovich

Rather than being at one with, and ever-creating, the tonal world in which they exist and persist, these float precariously, as on a boat perched on an obliquely gravitic tide. The sea lists around us, emptier now than in the ever-referenced past.

Blue Suede Shoes - Carl Perkins [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Each part alike aware of its balance and bounce.

Come On - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]

Rock solid everything but guitar, which blows like the wind all over wheresoever.

When a Man Loves a Woman - Percy Sledge [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

How he wished he never loved thee, let him count the ways.

String Quartet #3 - Elliott Carter - Julliard String Quartet

A rain forest seen in all its particulars, from all frames of reference, at all removes, in each scale of magnitude.

Night Moves - Bob Seger [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

One of those cleverly disruptive lexical shifts that is more effective than it ought to be, as moves moves from noun to verb, as night moves from adjective to noun, the syntax of each word lurching to the left, as the song's voice moves from active ("working on my night moves") to lyric imagery ("the night moves").

Go Wild In The Country - Bow Wow Wow

a calibrated whine/tantrum.

Word Up - Cameo [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Clarity preserved by tying up all the resonances in tight little bunches, shrink-wrapped.

June 9, 2015
Syrens - St. Elmo's Choir

An album of sea-shanties (mostly I think of English origin) arranged for female voices. Reminiscent in a way of the more famous Bulgarian folk songs that made such a splash a few decades back.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 7, 2015
Duet 150607 - Keith Eisenbrey

I improvised on toy steel drum and then on wooden transverse flute.

June 8, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 887 - Pete Comley, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Our first porch session of the summer, recorded using a four-track zoom, two channels aimed at the porch, the others aimed into the neighborhood.

Playlist

Live

October 17, 2014
Sun Giants, Power Skeleton, Ancient Warlocks
Darrell's Tavern, Shoreline

plastic glow skull - and it makes noise!

The tiny hollow moment just before the heavy downbeat determines its exact character - its bounce, heft, and chutzpah. Sun Giants (bass, drums, and guitar/vocals) aims the rest of the rhythm at getting that hollow moment exactly right.

There are quite a few more little effects devices in Power Skeleton than people. They are also distinguished by having two drummers and by their assertion that they never play the same song twice. They use rock rhythm centered improvisation as an alternative method of determining time with amplified particulars.

I think my ears have finally recovered from Ancient Warlock's massive sound. Inside the collisions of feedbacks twisting through the space a further music emerges - as ephemeral and lyrical as the explicit music is granitic. The guys on stage, playing their instruments through their stacks of amps, create a sound, and that sound plays a music on the shape and substance of the space. We're in the thick.

Recorded

October 13, 2014
Imagine - John Lennon

Essentially an album of slightly tidied demos (just add some strings and it will sound OK) with one strong song (I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Wanna Die), otherwise populated by an uncomfortable mix of idealism, bitterness, alienation, and the bad taste to air dirty laundry in public. 

Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion - Paul Lansky

The smooth gradations of the early 17th Century pulled apart fantasy by fantasy. A concerto for modified voice and its pre- and re- verberations.

October 14, 2014
See Jungle! (Jungle Boy) - Bow Wow Wow

Part of the '80's reset of rock&roll: back to fun, back to competence, back to the self-obsessed myopia of teendom.

Eye Music - Stuart Dempster and William O. Smith [from Perspectives of New Music, vol. 24 #2]

Stu and Bill seem to be playing the audience response as much as trombone and clarinet, the sound and rhythm of collective laughter being an integral part of how the episode goes as music.

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse - Stan Brakhage

What is seen only when eyes are closed: inverted color schemes, oddly drifting weightless formations. Flashes (we blink) - flow (our eyes attempt to track what moves with our tracking). Not dreamlike, but the visual matrix from which dreams are configured.

Guitar Hell - Fragmented Brain Solos - Pete Comley

The sound is squeezed out through filters like pastry dough. The lyricism is reminiscent of Fripp, but with a distinct narrative flow. No objects are created, instead trajectories are followed.

Mike Marlin

Banjoology - Mike Marlin

A scrapbook of sounds without any pretense of song-hood. Completely endearing. I had the distinct pleasure of improvising with Mike several times. Here's hoping he comes back to Seattle someday!

The Kinks Say Fuck You - Pulses [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

A tightly packed and weighty solid, fit for throwing.

Four Songs - Spinning Whips

This was a small-issue CD I picked up when we heard them play at the Columbia City Theater several years ago. Their fat guitar sounds have more than a proggy hint of King Crimson.

October 16, 2014
Correte, amanti, a prova - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Conversational flow, from glib and quick of wit to focused and precise. One moment we are listening to three or four sides of a conversation. Suddenly we are the object of singular attention.

Konzert in F Major, BWV 1046 - J. S. Bach - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan

The placid and broad are played up to such an extent that the whole thing falls asleep.

Sonata in D Major, Wq. 137 - C. P. E. Bach - Charles Medlam, William Hunt, Richard Eggar
Quartet in C Major, Op. 1 #6 Hob.III:6 - Haydn

They sure loved their Menuets back then.

Symphony in F Major K112(112) - Mozart
Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 26 - Beethoven

Part of what distinguished Beethoven's piano writing is the degree to which the accompanimental figurations take on a life of their own, demanding their own resolutions and workings out - as though they are musical material as much as the tune is. In this early work the relations among the parts are still relatively polite.

October 17, 2014
Symphony in C minor (String Symphony #4) - Mendelssohn

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 13, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 871 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosàly-Meyer

October 16, 2014

As Yet Unnamed Song - Keith Eisenbrey

Recorded drums, bass, guitar, and vocal tracks. Discarded the guitar and vocals.

October 17, 2014

As Yet Unnamed Song - Keith Eisenbrey

Tried again for guitar and vocals. I'm happier with it but want to sit on it for a few weeks.

Fox Spit 141017 - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvisation on acoustic steel string guitar.