Playlist

Recorded

August 5, 2017
Gambler's Dream - Hociel Thomas [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Hociel Thomas

The measured trill that opens this slows, as though feeling the resistance of muscle and tendon. A truly amazing pronunciation of "Ruin", with a complex diphthong and an extra R sound, almost like "rühren".

All The Things You Are - Hampton Hawes [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

A tip of the hat to Art "now-which-song-was-I-playing-anyway" Tatum. Probably up there on Cecil Taylor's playlist as well.

Brown Eyed Handsome Man - Chuck Berry [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Just how many complete short stories can be told in 2 minutes 30, with no hurry?

Visage - Luciano Berio

The body's struggle to speak, tell, mean, sing. After each "parole" a variety of laughter, separating lexicon from unconscious response. Classic analog synth sounds bring warm feelings to my heart.



Obviously 5 Believers - Bob Dylan [from Blonde on Blonde]

This is what I wrote in my journal though I'm not sure now what I meant: "deflection use is reflection use :: a trick, but he writes so well as a voice."

Seamus - Pink Floyd [from Meddle]

Impeccably recorded swamp blues with full on virtuoso hound solo. Riffing on The Beatles' Hey Bulldog perhaps.

Heartless - Heart [from Greatest Hits]

These folks like analog synth as much as Berio did. Ann's voice powers up in unexpected corners of her range.

Manhasset - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble

Recorded live at Brechemin Hall, University of Washington, School of Music, as part of Neal's recital on May 22, 1981. As I was listening our smoke alarm went off (something baking) as an outside surprise that worked well inside what we were doing.

August 8, 2017
Guess I'm Falling In Love - The Velvet Underground [from Another View]

Yet another stranded instrumental track.

Banned Rehearsal 250 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [March 1991]

Picks up in mid-scribble. Overdriven jingle bells. Tape, and it was tape then, is an object upon which to inscribe sounds, getting as many on there as possible, outcome as a music not so important as chucking it all in there so that any moment might flame. Waddayaknow! Bob Priest, on the radio, gets into Banned Rehearsal history. We do not hold the niceties of sound engineering in regard at all.

Sonic Brilliance 17 -Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Holden K, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Kia M [June 1996]

In which it is demonstrated once again that the ability to speak can become an attractive nuisance.

August 10, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 612 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]

I was working on a piece that, by this time, was known as "Work Architecture Unity And The",

hoping that it would be a thing that the banned could play as an ensemble. This was a go at one version of it in which I had stipulated categories of sounds to be piled on top of the scraps I had composed for solo piano. At the time I ended up being frustrated that the sense of spacious time I had envisioned as the distinguishing feature seemed to be unreachable as a group project. Looking back on it now, I probably should have let the collaboration run its course and see what happened. Each scrap/soundglob, though misbalanced, was quite nice.

Birthday - The Shackles [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Mildly amusing in a sophomoric way.

The Memory of All That - Benjamin Boretz - Karen Eisenbrey, voice; Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Early in 2011 Ben emailed this score to us - a memorial to Milton Babbitt based on Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" - hoping that we could quickly manage a recording for a symposium he was attending in February. I'm usually up early so I woke Karen with the news that Ben had sent us a song that would ruin our marriage. It didn't, though it was a struggle for both of us to learn it so quickly. We ended up recording it one page at a time, stitching it together later. The balance is horrible (I only had one good mic), I couldn't get the quick bits quiet enough, and the vocal part is at the absolute bottom of Karen's range, but the recording still gets much right on - notably the fraught struggle to leap half-steps in the first few pages. Never did such narrow intervals seem so impossible a venture, like passage to the moon, irreversible.

If I'd Been Born In Another Place - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

A loving toast to how it turned out, with string band balanced to perfection.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 7, 2017
Gradus 317 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

A path not taken: Retro-Gradus (start with all the notes.)

Playlist

Preface

"When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature.To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music's ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Yet they probably bring us closer to the true function of music in the evolution of human civilization." Alex Ross - "The Sound of Hate", The New Yorker, July 4, 2016.

Texts

Live

July 8, 2016
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jeremiah Lawson
Studies in Harmonics 7 - 12 for Solo Guitar

What remains after all music else has been leached away.

S. Eric Scribner
Phase Canon #1
Eco Slab Gong / Sound Scroll #1 for Inside Piano

Evocation, in the old sense of calling forth, like a nonbullshit seance.

Jay Hamilton
Grief: for Houdini, who did not believe but wanted to (solo cello)

Brazenly unprettified, brutally clear, desperately heartfelt.

Susan Maughlin Wood
Spectratta

A film (mechanisms, locomotions, bees, blossoms, garden snails) set against three movements for piano and violin. Like books leaning against each other not commenting but sharing ideas.

July 9, 2016

Swarm + Stew | in honor of Stuart Dempster on his 80th birthday
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Loren Kiyoshi Dempster, Ione, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Pauline Oliveros, Margaret Sunghe Paek, Greg Powers

Swarm + Stew - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Beginning before it began some stayed and gathered in the space humming and buzzing some buzzed to the garden to hum. Pete Comley sat next to me with his gear and discovered some minutes into the humbuzz that a bee (sluggish) had come to join us. Sitting quietly humming finding my humming tone occasionally separating from how I was making it. Opening my eyes as the garden buzzhummers regathered in the space 30 minutes or so later I was delighted to discover how many there were to join us. Stories told, sounds shared. What gathered in the peaceful summer night that night erupted in ecstatic glee. Shoes were removed. Rooms skipped around. Whoops whooped dancer back lifting Stu to whoop whoops.

A high water mark in my Seattle music memory.

Recorded

July 2, 2016
Lullaby of the Leaves - The Ventures [from Walk Don't Run: The Best of The Ventures]

Every strum exactly
in place no
surprises exactly
counted-out-to
four nothing slops
from phrase into next
phrase these boys
have practiced

Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know) - Bob Dylan [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Bobvoice bounds in arcing leaps sometimes with effort, like pumping a swing, sometimes riding like a volleyball on the bounce of his band.

7 Pieces - Paul Simon, J.S. Bach - Keith Eisenbrey ca. 1971

My mom kept this little tape of me playing the piano when I was 11 or 12 or thereabouts - possibly earlier. I certainly was given to anthemic grandiosity - and to a flagrant disregard of steady beats. Molto rubato swing is probably not a good idea.

Coro - Berio - Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester

eases slowly from art song into an accumulating fugue
but the sphere turns or
the sphere is
numerating
transparent onionlayers
spheres spinning locking
independent glinting blades of sound
sets
poses
each layer passing in and out independently

all of the above

As an 'ART PIECE'
(in the sense that: if Les Noces were an armchair
this would be the overstuffed archie bunker version
presented 'as an ART PIECE')

Transcription of dialtwisting

The dissonances are hinged low in the mix.

July 5, 2016
Matte Kudasai - King Crimson [from Discipline]

Between gullkeen song and guitarwail
wheeling over the beach in the rainy-soon afternoon

Orange Airplane - Screaming Trees [from Clairvoyance]

Very arty. Collected from a soggy gutter where hiphopsample and 60spsychedelia are studiolaraly indistinguished.

Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

A stuttery spread precursing beat three.

My Spaceman - Motorhome [from Rescued Records]

When in stride a sempiternal drift. Turn left to go right toujour et toujour.

July 7, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 602 [March 2001, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer]

Our history extruded in a thick paste. We used to have years of boredom, clockwise currents of sound. carrier waves, messages, translations, comments, surface of paper, stuff of ink, atmospherics, foils: a bestiary of what we used to got.

Wot U Got - Armitage Shanks [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Aggressive articulation of male sexual entitlement (reveals terror).

Waiting - Shaprece

Dressed to the nines.

Ivan Arteaga at Seattle Composers' Salon January 8, 2016

Jump cuts from coast to coast and time to time accomplished by the shift of a single finger or the slightest adjustment of either tongue.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 4, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 913 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Playlist

Recorded

April 28, 2015
You Don't Know Like I Know - Sam and Dave - [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock and Soul]

The sound most upfront in the mix is tambourine. Vocals aren't buried, but they're within the sound, and seem to drift a little further back by the end.

Recital - Luciano Berio - Cathy Berberian

hiding behind not hiding behind, or how we forget the puppeteer.

Concerto for String Quartet, Brass, Winds & Percussion - Walter Piston - Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz [recorded from a radio broadcast]

A nice enough piece, by the book.

She's Got A Way - Billy Joel [from The Essential Billy Joel]
Under African Skies - Paul Simon [from The Essential Paul Simon]

I guess I'm a sucker for essentials.

Michael Leese

WYSIWYG - Michael Leese - Trinity Chamber Players

Ages ago, it seems, I was active on the classical music forum on CompuServe and got acquainted with Micheal. He and I shared some sounds and then lost track of each other as the internet morphed under us. I was saddened to learn, as I looked him up this afternoon, that he passed away a few years ago, far too soon, at the age of 49.

The whole stays put.
Through it details flow, either pitchvertical or pointblankhorizontal.

Distance, Dance, Discern - Ryan Hare [from Intrada]

The relation between what is electronic-produced and what is acoustic-recorded is here uneasy. the EP is in a big space or makes a miniature me. AR is practice-room flat. Each pushes the other to be the real, neither vanquishes.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 26, 2015
Duet 150426 - Keith Eisenbrey

This Sunday's improvised solo duet was on a child-sized solid body electric guitar and a softball sized ocarina.

April 27, 2015
Banned Telepath 33 150427 Seattle
Banned Telepath 33 150427 Somerville
Banned Rehearsal 884 150427 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (in Seattle); Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)


Aaron's portion was delivered with a warning that MIT Press publishes some interesting lists.

Playlist

Live

March 7, 2015
Semele - Handel
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

Tricked out like a check-out line bodice ripper, chins and pecs and heaving embonpoint blazoned full screen in old-school cinematic glory, a full frontal demonstration of how to sell a museum piece as hip and happening. Behind all that, some gaudily fancy singing and an ably paced mix of ensemble and solo spin a demoralizing tale. Best to keep to your place, don't get uppity. Not generally being a big fan of Handel, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy the music quite a bit. All that coloratura filigree was strangely enthralling.

Recorded

March 9, 2015
Quartet #1 - Elliott Carter - Composers Quartet

fibrous, tough, entwined
to reach where the ancient sky endures

March 10, 2015
Honky Tonk - Bill Doggett [collected from Dave Marsh's the Heart of Rock & Soul]

A lesson. Over a circular pattern Mr. Doggett shows how it is done.

Structures 2 pour deux piano - Pierre Boulez - Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky

It starts as a perverse study in the sound of piano tone as it decays - perverse because it is almost entirely staccato for the first long stretch. Long tones are allowed only at the edges, as it were, on the inside curves of tightly bound pages, where the ink accidentally runs. The subject is more overt toward the end, though I suspect I could hear the end as a complimentary perverse study in the cutting short of sound.

Sequenza 3 - Luciano Berio - Cathy Berberian

De-texting, de-syllable-izing, de-lexicon-izing language, voice, presence. Odd echoes of Handel (see above).


In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 8, 2015
Takemine 150308
Takemine 150308 folded
Takemine 150308 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvisation on acoustic steel string guitar, with computer assisted manipulations.

March 9, 2015
Gradus 261 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

illumination limited
cavern immense
muted, not feeble
delicately pending
sounding the tie-rods driven into the heart of the rock

So quickly we have climbed far past the point at which the explication of all possible sub-rungs within a rung has become impossible within the time allowed. The deeper in we go the more quickly we accelerate, the smaller we become.

March 12, 2015
Half a Bus Closer to Home - Karen Eisenbrey and Neal Kosály-Meyer

As part of Karen's St. Rage fiction project her fictional band wrote fictional songs, some of which have been actually written. Her actual garage rock band, Your Mother Should Know, in disguise, recorded this one.