Playlist

Preface

". . . what is the 'music-ontological core' of musical experience, and how do we reach it? The answer resists discursive felicity; it is a multiplicity, always in motion, involving flows of intensities between experiencer and experienced object—as experienced, but in a way that is sensitive both to the kinds of meaning-generative flows from the object (as both a temporally-constituted and -constituting musical reality), and to the knowledge that one's experience is situated and incomplete, that every effort to contact the music in its putative wholeness only reveals new transcendental lines and new epistemological possibilities."
- Chris Stover "Walking Up and Over, Approaching Boretz's Qixingshan" Open Space Magazine issue 19/20 fall 2015/spring 2016

Texts

Recorded

Maryhill Stonehenge

March 30, 2019
Cheyenne's Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

from under the warm snug blanket
release tension release ease
tummy full

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from a home recording of 3/1/2007]

my bits (added to Ben's now withdrawn solo piano piece Liebeslied (for a pianist alone))
schematically interlaced with his bits
in order to underline the schematic image within his bits as my bits unlace them

for me: it gave me a performance version (for a pianist among others)
this was a pretty strong performance, one of the last I made on the 6' Yamaha my folks bought for me when I was in high school
necessary time is given
but it doesn't lag either

Light It Up - High Class Wreckage [from a pre-release copy of High Class Wreckage]


pumped for mayhem

Loser - St. Rage [June 2016]


St. Rage is a fictional band in my wife's novel The Gospel According to St. Rage (soon to be re-published by Not A Pipe Publishing). They are played here, as always, by Your Mother Should Know, which is my wife, Karen Eisenbrey, and her brother, Neal Kosály-Meyer. I did the honors behind the recording device and final mix.

nice job guys!

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Taxman - The Beatles [from Anthology Vol. 2]

once each track could be recorded clean the parts could be treated as replaceable, optional, swappable. ultimately, it swaps the compositional focus from an arrangement of chords and tunes performed by folks to an arrangement of tracks laid atop chords and tunes

Nutty (take 2) - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

loose and playful

Some Other Time - X [from Wild Gift]

expression on face: grim, stiff, determined

Radio Head - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

toy orchestra in lego land

Make You Come - Kicking Giants [from Kill Rock Stars]

we do love our guitar players round these here parts

Track 3 - Seattle Chamber Music Festival [July 2001]

artifacts of nasty splatters
nothing like digital to point out its own flaws
made me jump every time

No Condemnation - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]

just the blues
the blues almighty
and with a bonus song as part of the track

Sow Took The Measles (A Reverb) - Train Case [June 2011]

If I did put any reverb in there it is nicely minimal
Train Case is also Karen and Neal, in a more acoustic homegrown idiom

Wave, Beach, Pebbles Large, Close Extreme, Surf, Storm, Foam, Ocean Roar, Intense, Sizzle, Crash, Impact Puff - Pete Comley [from Ocean Ambience Rocky Coastline Vol 1_1]

This was all of 2" long. I'll need to rethink how to listen to this album so that I actually have time to sit down after pushing play.

March 31, 2019
Little Lamb Who Made Thee - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [April 1966]

Baker City, Oregon

a really nice setting of Blake's poem
it captures some of its divine innocence
even in its Hollywood style

Ruby My Dear - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

superb brushwork back there on the skins and pans Mr. Blakey!

Planet Earth - Duran Duran [from Duran Duran]

the eighties
when they manufactured a sound
to be an image of blatantly manufactured sound
robotics

Banned Rehearsal 99 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]

Petrushka country fair in the Horse Heaven Hills
we are recording on a boom box at the Bickleton Pioneer Picnic and Rodeo
mostly, in intent, to memorialize the calliope of Meyer family legend, the calliope reborn from recalcitrant scrap, its erstwhile melodies having been re- and re- permuted into a gleeful quilt of melody parts set free of their prior moorings

tape is running
you have been immortalized

Carousel of the Calliope of Legend

that calliope, it explains so much

oh no, we're staying in Seattle for ever
giddy with penultimatricidal tendencies
Carny Vater of the Prankmaker
shacks and bunkers
but honestly, what gender is any of this?

to correct the calliope
is to silence the oracle
chaos divine incipit
how it Klings and Klangs
Kling Klang
(I guess this fits, do as well as any)
getting some pie on tape
by laws
in the sense that there are none

April 4, 2019
My Red Self - Heavens to Betsy [from Kill Rock Stars]

flipside or formerside or pastside or stillinside
of Kaley Lynn Eaton's Poem in Praise of Menstruation as heard recently at Salon
attitudes surrounding the cultural taboo received slapback into culture's face
strong and straight with a no nonsense blatancy to it like my friend Jill Borner's My Baby Left Me

Cedar Flute Love Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

It is required that it be muddied by loop echo and smudged with bird song.
Do they make flutes with cedar? Wouldn't it be splintery? Dunno.

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from Preludes in Seattle Part 2, March 2007]

see above and elsewhere for what this is
I didn't manage to improve it (nor play it very well for that matter) so much as point out some if its, and my, problems. A project far more essential to me to have done than to do for any else

Hendrixesque - Henry Guiazda - Nathan Davis, cello [from Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

more loops for repeating with
mirrored halls
distant doors
hidden
(locked anyway)

The Drink I Didn't Have Last Night - St. Rage [June 2016]


Here they are again.
late night rough
wrinkled plenty

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 31, 2019
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." - Keith Eisenbrey " [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

I wrote Mrs. Ramsay, its title taken from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (I liked how she framed

your blogger ca 2001

Lily with roses), in 2001. It was my first large-scale composition since Slow Blues. Slow Blues was structured like a set of variations, each iteration exactly 12 bars long in a slow 4/4 meter, and each successive variation based on the same sequence of mod-17 pitch sets arcanely related to the bare-bones blues sequence I I I I | IV IV I I | V V I I, cycling through the 17 M-transforms available in mod-17. For Mrs. Ramsay I played a similar game, but the structural segments aren't all the same size or shape, vary more widely in affect, and, if I recall correctly, the various M-transforms are re-ordered according to some rule I have long since forgotten. I performed this just once, at an early Seattle Composers' Salon back when they were held at the Mennonite Church in Lake City. Tom Baker may have a dub of that performance, but until I recorded it last Friday I did not have any recording of it for my own reference. In practice this means that I really didn't know how it went from outside of playing it. And so I am ever so glad to finally make its acquaintance.

Frankie and Johnny - Keith Eisenbrey [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

Karen under Jail

For several years now, and interrupted by a self-imposed indifferently observed sabbatical, I have been working on a sequence of etudes. Big surprise: there will probably be 17 of them all together, if I should be so fortunate as to finish. Frankie and Johnny is the 13th and most recently completed. I think of it as an opera, an opera in which the main character is the traditional song itself, which is written in the score with approximate, unstaved, pitches. The piano part is a sequence of 3-note groups written as, but not intended to be played as, whole-note simultaneities. I had been practicing for about a month, trying on all sorts of voices to sing with and tinkering with various schemes of approaching the projection into figuration space of the 3-note groups. In the end I sang it in a nearly straight folk style, and improvised the figuration in the real time of the recording. Since I stopped to shuffle pages between each verse I had to piece together the takes of them, but even with that, first take best take.

April 1, 2019
Gradus 345 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

development, as a received notion, is a sequence or group of varied but related ideas
related by repetition of some kind of some aspect or set of aspects

we pick up a thought and turn it over in our ears :: of as many aspects as can be held in mind, while following the variations
it is where our focus shrinks to the immediate

Playlist

Preface

"So an activist doesn't transcend time, it invents a new time, in each new now. If each present is an expression of its past - of its histories - then opening-onto-future, as a radical reinscription of the past, is exactly what marks the end of history. Music, for Sun Ra, takes on a heuristic value here. My role as a music scholar as well: there is a great deal of research on Sun Ra, from the perspectives of literary theory, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and more, but little of it touches Sun Ra's music. Music theory and analysis, conversely, continue to privilege things like coherence and connection and what we might call 'hearing-as' as its disciplinary/disciplining projects. I'm interested in what can we learn specifically from Sun Ra's music; its materiality, its matter(ing) - or from the activist now of any improvised musical expression, or from the relations between musicking human subjects and post-or trans-human sonorous bodies - that can be of value beyond the hermetic world of music analysis. I'm interested, in short, in the ways that music theory - and the ways that it can imagine or reveal relationships between musicking human and sonorous bodies, relationships that, necessarily, transform those bodies through the very acts of relating - might matter."
Chris Stover "Sun Ra's Mystical Time" Open Space Magazine Issue 21 spring 2018

Texts

Recorded

August 11, 2018

For Unto Us A Child Is Born - Handel - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Richard Condi, cond. [from Handel's Greatest Hits]

royal triumphalism
utterly misses the insurrectionary tone implied by the list of and he shall be called

Serenata Notturna - Mozart - Capella Istropolitania, Wolfgang Sobotka

a certain amount of bombast must be necessary to wake them up
graciousness propped on sturdy stilts
playful sequence of tempi in the final

Aria "A un dotter della mia sorte" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

the expression is always clearly drawn
the comic stance allows anything to get thrown into the stewpot

I'll Be Rested - Roosevelt Graves and Brother [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

great recorded sound of tambourine for 1926

You Ain't Nothing But A Hound Dog - Elvis Presley [from First Live Recordings]

drumbreak biddabiddabiddabiddabidda
stops
returns in stripper tempo
twice
thrice
shrieks are loving it

Big John - The Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology]

lots of airspace
you could walk around in there
an actual stage sized sound

Summertime - Billy Stewart [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

extra syllables pile in through the rhythm section and Billy offers no resistance
ends with a lullaby holler

Pacific High Studio Mantras - Alan Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]

to have been Ginsberg
having become Ginsberg
required playing Ginsberg
as Ginsberg
at all moments

The Quiet One - The Who [from Face Dances]

something in the engineering is off
heavy on the bass strangely thin everything else
they play energetically but some edge of it is blunted

Banned Rehearsal 80 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

a session of Sudden Songs: This Time of Night (Kosály-Meyer), Hey Hey Hey (Eisenbrey) - robust guitar tunin' pretty lick -  I Believe I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee Sir (Kosály-Meyer) - then playing with self narration of intention as subjunctive suggestions taunt - also the string's a might loose - mighty stirrin' sound though - This Here Tunin' Mechanism's All Busted (Eisenbrey), I Was Sittin' In The Car (Kosály-Meyer) - thoughts about strummy type rhythms and plucks 3 clear sounds steadying each other - Hollywood, here I come! - If I Were To Learn (Kosály-Meyer) - the reason BR never resolved in a rock & roll band or jazz band or ought other genre band that plays songs is because when we started to put together songs seriously, that is right away, we already had each one down in all its perfection of momenthood. There was nowhere further to go to resolve. Can't get better than perfect. Wild Thing (a cover of course), Amazing Grace to a Louie Louie beat (we had some discussion the other night about the difference between a cover and a performance - theory: one covers a recording, one performs a chart), Tell Me Lord (Eisenbrey), If You Find an Alligator In Your Bed Tonight (Kosály-Meyer), I Got Dust In My Nose (Meyer) - that is, Karen before we got hitched. This string's beginnin' to peel a bit here.

August 12, 2018

On a Plain - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

short feet face each other
across a break
a list of them with
bits that repeat

(intro and outro thingies are wrong)

Sonata in D Major - Bocherini - Philharmonia Virtuosi

violin and cello duetting demonstrating cooperation to demonstrate how pleasant a thing it is
domestic intimate for family public
not every household could afford Haydn so there was a market for fully realized home sized music

Sunshine Music - Love Princess (Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K-M [May 2006])

some question as to whether the personnel is listed correctly in my index

in which: the young'n age 6 is given an electric guitar to strum
we should get
a taiko drum
refrain boomboom boomboom boomboom BASH!
alto horn and trombone on one set of lips

Monday Boy - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain]

expensive sounding sound
haute couture construction
music as a kind of clothing self presentation
then there is another song after the song

Banned Rehearsal 909 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2016]

we do the things that make the sounds
not expensive sounding at all
not expensive but occasionally puzzling in the sense of how are we making that sound?
what are we doing as we do those things that make those sounds?
drumming cooperative
low piano crossroads ahead
train whistle sucked into synthesizer

August 15, 2018
Hallelujah Chorus - Handel - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Richard Condi, cond. [from Handel's Greatest Hits]

excessively beat-y
as a break from beating us over the head
more beating us over the head

Divertimento in F K247 - Mozart - Capella Istropolitania, Wolfgang Sobotka

dreary lackluster
he could churn out reams of this
statement answer
statement non seq
answer

though the moment between statement and non is lively

all about phrase balance
fails to get anywhere in the operatic way he can have
in short the balance between balanced and unbalanced is skewed too heavily toward the balanced

but overnight I had second thoughts

long static stretches of balanced thinking
come in anywhere leave any time
rewards attention without drama
very like high-toned background music
ambient music of another time long past

August 16, 2018
Act I Finale "Fredda ed immobile" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

rolled R's answered by vocal rrrrruns
go!
farce allows a wide range of affectual granularity
effective piccolo use
triangle glitter to close

Le Vieux Soulard et sa Femme - Blind Lemon Jefferson [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

strumbox and squeezebox
free reeds now!

You'll Wonder Where the Yellow Went - The Jumpin' Jacks [a Rescued Record]

mustard in your chili pie
crazy man slang as many as can be got
like patter, man

Telemusik - Karlheinz Stockhausen

a poly-layered list
everything in its order
a study or chamber version of Hymnen
directionality metaphorized into leftrightness
doesn't come across as all that subtle in the end
though: in '66 stereo  play was relatively a new face
tuple channels
the play of filters and presence is better
music for loudspeakers

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 13, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 964 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Once again on the porch, features a new ukelele and an old autoharp