Playlist

Live

September 29, 2018
Free Improvisation: The Quartets Project
S. Eric Scribner presiding, September 29, 2018, Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Aaron Keyt, piano, objects, melodica
Bruce Greeley, bass clarinet
Carol J Levin, harp, electric harp
Ha-Yang Kim, ‘cello
Jim Knodle, trumpet
Karen Eisenbrey, piano, objects, drums (?)
Keith Eisenbrey, piano, objects
Neal Kosály-Meyer, piano, guitar, voice
S. Eric Scribner, piano, percussion, field recordings
Amelia Love Clearheart, bringing what she brought, doing what she does

Mr. Scribner gathered this cohort of 10 to improvise variously arranged quartets while carefully avoiding having too many Banned Rehearsal members all together until the very end when we were all there anyway. Good feelings all around.

Recorded

September 30, 2018
Twenty-Four Tonal Preludes: 5 through 8 - Greg Short - Keith Eisenbrey [March 2007 at University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle]

5. lively but a bit rushed; 6. crazy man; 7. tender, lovely, childlike, lullaby waltz (delicate piano writing!); 8. tells a whole story complete with corporate lament refrain, a ballad, that is, is what it is

Where Do We Go From Here - Oscar Peterson [from The Great Connection]

a show-off but
o what glory!

a tour through his colleagues' manners
a tip 'o hat to Bill
a say hi to Sphere

Track 5 - Empire Brass Quartet [from American Brass Band Journal Revisited]

brass fandom
another enclave
with its enclave pleasures

Banned Rehearsal 82 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, and Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

blowing pipes
rattle laugh
third body
imaging itself
as bumblebug balloon rub
elastikissing sticky kiss
rainbow plane
pass over
dog barks
twangchord talks
balloon talks
pipe blows
still guitar strums a while
and also another bell bongs
pipe blows
pluckdrone pipes blow (two of them)
we retreat back to sounds just made before that what
that will now new be made
guitar close in
each
but specific close
not equal
so drumbody
guitarbodydrum
boxword
an utterly other sense of playing well
giving it your voice
in doing so
it allows others
to give theirs their voice
the world is our axe
and laughing box
return to rattle again
sleepy as they are
focus remains

October 4, 2018
Something In The Way - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

interval: between acousticish sound and electroreverberated sound drives it
or
driven: by 2ish note tune then 3ish note tune
intriguing that it doesn't go on because it could

Sonata in G - Pietro Locatelli - Philharmonia Virtuosi [from Musical Evenings With The Captain]

never finish a thought unless thy finish be to pick up another thought
never finish a balanced thought
music before Beethoven killed it dead
two violins and cellopiano continuo
movements arranged not for drama but for social function presumed
else why?
better than whist by far

Ballad of the Whitman Greeks - Wes Weddell [from My Northwest Home]

the city they named twice made famous by a cartoon a story heard having been told to
but unverified
micro-urban myth?

"...woe my road is spoken..." draft 060604A - Keith Eisenbrey

another midi go at my variations for string quartet
playing with just so variation flowing through just so continuity
room to breathe
finding foil and echo in a pitch pattern

Bury Me Close - Rachel Harrington [Celilo Falls]

wrapping words around a place in the voice
the place that lies above and the place that lies below
waters upper and lower
should have seen her dance

Lincoln Beach Park Walking North - Keith Eisenbrey [May 2016]

I accidentally recorded this
pushed record unintentionally

so wasn't careful

saw a seal

latter day dinosaur sound (microphone bump bump) overlays sound of walk and sounds along walk

right left
left right left
he had a good job
and he left right left

rhythm between the relations among the sound from outside our mechanism of walking
the sound of our walking the sound of our talking while walking and the sound of the device hitting and rubbing

sexy flange of wave sough

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 1, 2018
Gradus 340 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

does the quantity of simultaneously played notes count beyond 1, (2) (many) (lots)? and is that importance commensurate with horizontal quantity?
possibility: composition can resolve or confuse that issue or mediate that resolution and confusion

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

Playlist

Recorded

July 22, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 78 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]


the legendary push to 100 begins in earnest

Anna had decamped to San Diego, Neal to follow in a few weeks
we figured we could fill 23 sides if we got together as often as possible and made several sessions every time

with dulcimerian strum and guitar and funmaker
distinct presences playing pitches
vaguely downhome funmaker bend button to imitate saw or bee swarm

the relation between the metaphor of steady beat and the metaphor of click track clock time
each is a kind of virtual reality

Neal sings a sudden song Strange Animal interrupted by a wicked great funmaker effect
Sprite in punkissimo overdrive

clocktime is a metaphor of objectivity and reproducible results
beat is a metaphor of inner time - heartbeat breathing sleep
to conflate them is to sell beat short
to measure the rightness of a beat by its adherence or not to a click track clock time timepoint is to utterly mistake its subjective essence
trading image for fact

clavichord even gets in there most sinister of sounds

disproportionality is our speciality
does it go on too long?
experiments should not halt upon receipt of desired result
desiring a result is an ur-error

Stay Away - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

ferocious bass playing back there
sure like that fuzz box

Downtown Hangaround - Blank Its [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

minimalist patterning
nice focus
power suit

"...woe my road is spoken..." (first midi draft of May 29, 2006) - Keith Eisenbrey

another in a series of drafts of a set of variations for string quartet

affect is carrier wave for pitch set transformation

Life in a Marble - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

just a young man and his strummer joined by kin on cello and voice

Gradus 288 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2016]

the highest G

if the acoustic machine that is the piano
strings soundboard hammers frame harp dampers
could be adequately modeled algorithmically

then one could design interfaces for the dampers
on a gimble or as independently operated as the keys themselves

one to play the hammers
one to play the dampers

could virtual strings break?
algorithmic modeling of the sound of a string breaking?
virtually?

if it doesn't then the model is inadequate
limitations are important

the E comes in as though it hadn't really

July 24, 2018

Cavatina "una voce poco fa" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

how exactly weight is adjusted to articulation

Don't Fish In My Sea - May Rainey, Jimmie Blythe [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

celebration within complaint
irrepressible right hand comments

Ubangi Stomp - Warren Smith [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

copping to racial thievery (N word trigger warning)

What A Sweet Thing That Was - The Shirelles [from Shirelles Anthology]

as crowded as the words are
there is lots of time for spare my my my my to spill out

Septet - Arthur Berger - The Contemporary Players [from Form]

long tones doled out sparingly
to tell
we search them out where they cling
past woods edge
a guide will be wanted
to return

Barefoot School - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Children's Choirs [from my Mom's tape of May 6, 1971]

I shared narration duties on this, and so it becomes one of the very earliest instance of recorded sound recognizable as me

our charming pious tale of spreading the benefits of civilization

July 25, 2018
I've Never Been In Love - The PK's [from a private tape]

history: the night before Karen went off to UPS at the end of the 1981 Summer in which we (she and I) happened to have both been in the same room at the same time for the first time Karen and Neal and Yvonne made this recording of their (really proto-PK's) collaboration. It was supposed to be a good tape.

Shut Out The Light - Bruce Springsteen [from Neal's mix-tape Six B-Sides]

story ballad family retrieval

Banned Rehearsal 268 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Paul Eisenbrey, and Aaron Keyt [September 1991]

clams up
big honk speaks across the spiral tape as it lies on its reel
J clears his throat
nervous sort of explosiveness
chatter
all the doo dah day yes sirree doo dah
buddha baby
imitates squeaky violin squeal
failure to incandesce but many many colorful bits
bug call

July 26, 2018
Haunted House - Fall-Outs [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

politely overdrawn accusation
gaslighted
never trust a breakup song

Song From The Storms and Winds - S. Eric Scribner [from Storm Sound Cycle, live at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, on May 21, 2011]

tone held through thundernuk place
within place within place

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 27 - July 6, 2018
Two Pomes Play - Keith Eisenbrey


Most of June and into July I was working on getting an adequate recording of these short two-voice

piano pieces. The first is one of my takes from June 27. I finally got the last one pretty well on July 6. These began their lives in the mid 90's as duets for clarinet and bassoon. In 2000 I transcribed them for piano solo.

July 23, 2018
Gradus 336 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

. . . and the fifth B
perihelion swerves of many kinds
lit up the bubble of now in etheric mind nowhere hidden

Playlist

Recorded

April 21, 2018
She's Creepy - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

Imagine if The Sonics' ur-proto-punk The Witch had been written by Paul Revere and performed, by The Raiders, as though they were The Ventures. How Northwest can you get?

Play Station Central - Orion O'Malley Hughes & Lightnin' John Daley Three Turtles [from Sonicabal Vol. 2]

noise not reduced
mega chalkboard skqqqueeeel

microphone held right up to the crater's edge

Caldero del Diablo - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

bare figurations from the fount of bare figurations

battle ray guns and shields zip zap zzzzingggg

Banned Rehearsal 792 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 2011]

music box joplin picks up where it left off in the last episode

we take pine cone turns to speak until distinction is presumed to talk at once

follow each thought pattern as it puts itself together
center on the most difficult
maintain incongruity in a leveling world

rhythm generation
low tones on electric piano
frame drum wash board suspended cymbal
xylophone various gongs and what nots
tasteful use of the pitchbend on the midikeys

The Humma Song from OK Janu - A. R. Rahman, Badshah, Tanishk Bagchi, Shashaa Tirupati & Jibin Nautyal [from Bollygood Vol. 1]

appropriating cultural appropriation
lots of characters to keep track of

April 22, 2018
The Carmans Whistle - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Imagine the englishy words: "Heare the carmans whistle blowe" or the like, in the likeness of the children's round Hear the Lively Sounds of the Frogs in Yonder Pond, which now I imagine one could use as the basis of a Byrd pastiche.

That last simultaneity is a killer.

Graysom Street Blues - Margaret Johnson [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

following each vocal line find the instrumental commentary

Rock and Roll Ruby - Warren Smith [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

hold tight to the formula
be sure the brand name is clearly visible at all times

My Romance (take 1) - Bill Evans Trio [from Waltz for Debby]

magical dance of consideration among the trio members

Homeward Bound - Simon & Garfunkel [from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme]

This is about as tightly written a song as any they produced back in the day. Up there with The Boxer.

April 24, 2018
Unnamed Track 11 - Tillicum Junior High School Band, Bob Runyan [from my mom's tape of a concert on March 3, 1971]

One of those tunes ubiquitous on UHF commercials 100 Favorite Classical Melodies (none of that boring stuff in between)

A Song for Cynthia - Walt Wagner [from Caprice]

off the shelf tune-smithery, pre casio pre-set

Cache Cache - The Who [from Face Dances]

I'm honestly not sure why anyone bothered with this.

Dulcimer Tunes and Anti-Muffins - Karen Eisenbrey [April 1986]

She could have been out partying (I was in Australia) but instead she made this tape. First some tunes then she reads a L'Engle story. Almost finishes it too!

April 26, 2018
Lounge Act - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

It starts with a second or so of Lurchish groan. At the very end is a similarly brief electroid fade-out. These post-production idea bits come across as being distinctly outside the songness of the song (which song I rather like by the by). They are production decisions, or electronic music compositional decisions - in that they force us to take this recording as a recorded object, in contra-distinction to allowing us to accept it as a song that happens to have been recorded for distribution. They echo each other bookend-ishly: a framing device, an Apology, in the old sense, much in the same vein as the arch title. Interesting, but I'm not convinced it does the song any particular favors.

Evil Martian - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

Same pre-ambular idea as LA above, but this time straight out of the novelty song grab bag: a sci-fi sound of yore around which a pastiche of yore is woven.

Sphygmomanometer - Mabuse [from Sonicabal Vol. 2]

The opening hit is allowed to inhabit and breathe, inadvertently highlighting the problem with inserts from outside the song such as in LA and EM above: they tend to either outshine or distract, as though the song were not convinced of its own entityhood. Here the insert is the show, with no song to photobomb its glory.

Banned Rehearsal 701 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 2006]
we are waiting for Neal to arrive (he does about 10 minutes in)
me on electric guitar
Karen an various crude bells, whiny wind, washtubbass
there he is, through the door in the left speaker
another guitar amplified, amply modified
lifts Karen back to crude tractor clutch bells
we shred after our fashion
recede to dry bones
scratchy throat
done

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 23, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 957 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Ominous

Playlist

Live

January 19, 2018
Triptet - with guest Stuart Dempster
Gallery 1412, Seattle
Greg Campbell, Michael Monhart, Tom Baker

Grows from the center out

Triptet with Stuart in carefully matched tops

and a rhythm of beards

successively shedding each past against chronospheric abrasian inexorably
seasonal dormancy
alien body antibodies
Stuart joins! late night FM station sea shore sea shell show
bouy bell
kalimba magma man
electronic squeezy wormhole to outer sci fi
Punch (sans Judy) in space toy time

Recorded

January 13, 2018
Jacob's Ladder - arr. Ernest Kenwal - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Each verse is arranged to do exactly the same thing in a slightly differently arranged way. He could do this all day. To anything.

Hastings River, New South Wales

Just Like A Woman - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

A song all scrubbed up and shiny for public consumption, just rightly arranged. Syllables are not set to notes, but to pitch vectors, pitch curves.

Behind Blue Eyes - The Who [from Who's Next]

The Romantic imagination mythologizes itself in order to imagine growing up. No Drums! (til later). The songwriting is blatant in the songwriting.

Stay - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

A careful slicing into a funky rhythm hoping to find whom? James Brown? His solo vocal is a collection of overlays, each complete, each integral to itself and complete. Together they form a composite reading of how the song might be sung. Bowie thinking.

You'll Never Be a Man - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

A simpler version of the same (Bowie) idea. Simpler not in the bad stupid sense, but in the clarified pointy sense. Or, how a single song can render Billy Joel entirely unnecessary.

Banned Rehearsal 69 Part 2 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

starts out somewhere in Late Beethoven Slow Movement Serious Mode, until it gets just out of sight around the corner. An internal psychic anatomy. Back to LBSMSM, i.e. sustained harmony with inner energy that feels as though at any moment it is about to become . . . [never complete] [refrains from] [rather, it slowly deconstructs] its sense of self into another and runneth then over [repeat ] drumming does a number on the clock chime - oh that Bickleton clock chime! - long dim.
My Sweet Euchabibilla Baboo, Electric Garbage, then the Aaronsbundler March in all its pomp triumphal and glory grandiose

nobody, but nobody
pomps triumphally and grandiosally like we does

Territorial Pissings - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

slides knife into its groove

Banned Rehearsal 435 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Kosály-Meyer [September 1996]

Even in the decade of chaos we make a remarkable sound. Keeping the rhythm lively - and all while

Karen was nursing the baby right there. Familial. Banned Rehearsal lullaby.

January 15, 2018
Embryonic in the Same Traditions - Dale Lloyd [from Sonicabal 2001]

the human mouth is the cavernmyth of language, dragon's lair.

Banned Rehearsal 699 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2006]

Incongruities joined by a near-common pitch
or by cooperative winding entwining
on the down low barest smallest of sounds
muttering with exactness into the big space around small sounds
guitar (neal) kicking the sound around on the floor
into hot spots where it glows in feedbacklight
improvisation: helping each other's sounds out.

The Chronicles of Dirty Dick Part 2 - Antique Scream [from The Chronicles of Dirty Dick]

Beat invention. Beat elaboration. Part 2 is in Two Movements.

Selections from Music for Wallace - Aaron Keyt [from my recording - Seattle Composers' Salon, January 5, 2018]

I'm coming at these pieces, in part, in my guise as pianist who has read through them often and who plans to work them all up in the next year or so. Clearly they are music. Just as clearly they are poems, thorny poems. Think a Dada Ezra Pound. thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada POUND!

January 16, 2018

The Seventh Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

How many voices can be got to be seeming to be doing exactly the same thing, while all the while always doing entirely different things actually?

Birth of the Blues - Paul Whiteman, Ray Henderson, B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

The Official Whiteman Tour Guide to Rhapsody in Blue, with favorite bits!

Grand Coulee Dam - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

In celebration of the industrialization of the West. "prancin' dancin' stallion". poet he was at that.

Jezebel: Overture - Benjamin Boretz [midi realization]

intimations of repetitions
that never
quite
get repeating
right
before
they make
you wonder
if you
heard it right
the first time

Great Day - Vincent Youmans - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Intricate rhythms nearly obscured by the boomy old tape sound.

Let Her Dance - The Bobby Fuller 4 [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Wisely does not make the song much more than a vehicle for the rhythm. In which the guitar riff neatly invokes a subtle cross-meter in 3.

Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who [from Who's Next]

There are some words in there inside the emphatic locution. How the words are spoken, not what the words speak.

Wild Is The Wind - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

Picture an awful movie, just dreadful
the credits roll disconsolate
past the first credit roll song
everybody leaves
just then is where this song belongs
brilliant unexpected brilliance
"you touch me I hear the sound of mandolins" barfy song lyric lifted into incandescence.
I know he's just showing off, but this is one of my favorites.

Undifferentiated Functions - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [live at Brechemin Auditorium May 1981]

Now with tape wobble! Me, in closet, gaveling.

January 18, 2018
I Know What I Know - Paul Simon [from Graceland]

Third verse wraps the first around crazy high backup singers.

Banned Rehearsal 258 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

All tapes begin with fuss
quite thin the sound of rattling big red bag of fun
with pre-recorded music layered in: My Chart, my Sonatina, Cantus
gentle sounds then the rhythm band cymbals
an apparent harmonic tendency upwards or not downwards
Toad Hall? probably. We'll say so.
my Sonata in 2 Movements
Such Words (must have been Neal's)
we all sing to baby

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 15, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 950 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Recorded

September 2, 2017

Cello Concerto - Frank Martin - Concertgebouworkest, Amsterdam, Bernard Haitink, Jean Decroos

Don Quixote in a strange land, in which he may not be harmless. A metaphor has wandered into the future.

My Baby - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

Deep feedback growlings in the lower strings.

Gimme Danger - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

An altar call.

Advice from Christmas Past - Dead Kennedys [from Plastic Surgery Disasters / In God We Trust Inc.]

The second page of this poem didn't make it, never had a chance.

September 4, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 65 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Doug Henderson, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 1986]

Doug Henderson was in town touring with Resistance, so he sat in. A feedback box is created, becoming a limiter, a cage around everything, inescapable, remanding agency, active global control. Into the warzone. Electric Garbage brings us down to dreamstate. Never is not something going on. There's a story about that one.

Lithium - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

Guess which song just now, as I blog, came up in the big random mix of everything. Yep. Spooky. The end is not its beginning nor its beginning its end, rather it sets up a time loop in which one is always.

Banned Rehearsal 428 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Anna S [July 1996]

Somewhere between a simultaneity and a timbre, we construct a music around the soundsystem that will play it back. Wild Thing psychedelic. A break in the middle, a long silence that wakes up on the weird side, in a loud mood. Direct to cassette mastering.

September 5, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 615 - Isaac E, John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]

Yet another fabulous group performance of my evolving score "Work Architecture Unity And The" begins this, with infant Isabel providing perfect babbling. Eventually the clowns arrive (as threatened). Thickness ensues, relaxes into play of aloof o'er-arch. Try again. Full Stop.

High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded live in Snohomish, October 2010]


I still think of this as being a fairly recent piece of mine, though it's now over 11. A rock solid thought, in spite of its outdated minimalism.

Paul Kikuchi

September 7, 2017
Faster/Still - Paul Kikuchi [from Portable Sanctuary Vol. 1]

Strikes upon the bellgong are not the point of the sound, but are nudges to their singing pitch bend. A delicate distant rustle more and more nearly withdraws: come in, come in, come in, come in, come in. Was that what about it was?

Banned Telepath 44 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2016]


Each agenda a micro-layer revolving cyclic or shifting big-cyclic-like. Lots of no solos at all. (nearly if not perfect).

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 4, 2017

Gradus 320 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Register grouping reinforced by pattern/figuration rhythmic/dynamic composition. Each rung is a key, making possible the notion of transfiguration into the wildly distant.

Playlist

Preface

"Permission to entertain alternative experiences is neither granted nor denied."
J. K. Randall "Concerning Birds by JKR and AM:" - Open Space Magazine Issue 11 Fall 2009

Texts

Live

November 5, 2016

Darrell's Tavern, Shoreline

Deadrones

strangely joyless, as though playing for their own heads

Power Skeleton

How can you not have fun if you wear a cat mask?

The Sun Giants

Has all the parts of a standard 4-piece, drums, bass, lead and rhythm guitars w/vocals. But here it's all about the bass and her wicked quick fingers.

Recorded

November 5, 2016
Variations for Piano op. 27 - Webern - Charles Rosen

It stands right up to your eyeballs, studying your every blink.

Melancholy Baby - Earl Hines [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Something about the sforzando pokes into new registers that comes across as distinctly Webernian. Well yes, see above. By the end he's got that tune dancing quickstep backwards across the tables in 8-inch heels.

'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do - George Lewis and The Original Zenith Brass Band [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Here's the shot: a circular bar, the camera aimed inward on an extracircumferential track whipping around, projected several frames per second too fast, multiple bartenders mixing drinks rapid fire, all the while juggling flaming swords.

November 6, 2016
The Rake's Progress Act I - Stravinsky - Orchestra of St. Luke's, Robert Craft, Jayne West, Jon Garrison, Arthur Woodley, John Cheek, Shirley Love, Wendy White, Melvin Lowery, Jeffrey Johnson, Gregg Smith Singers

Each ointment has its particular fly in't. Technicolor sound and stage apparatus plainly in view. It almost wears a neon sign: Caution! Ironic Remove At Work!

November 8, 2016
I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent - Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Rides happily through the clumsy engineering on stupid charm alone. I love the variations played on where exactly in the measure "No I'm not a juvenile" enters. All those "no no no no no no no's" were oddly timely.

Stand By Me - Ben E. King [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

As was this. But: Triangle! Sandblock!

Adieu - Karlheinz Stockhausen - London Sinfonietta

I still remember Benjamin Boretz's comment about this: "when he runs out of ideas he lets Krenek write a measure" (paraphrase from a conversation in about 1983) - both funny and dead on as to how the affective disjuncture feels going down.

November 10, 2016
Evil Woman - The Electric Light Orchestra [Rescued Record]

Since the hook is pretty much all one can hear clearly as words, the song comes across as, effectively, a pure expression of misogyny. Yes I can look up the lyrics (I did), and yes it falls in a long tradition of vindictive breakup songs from all skews of gender and orientation, but really, the only thing that gets through is the bald brainwashing repetition: "Evil Woman Evil Woman Evil Woman . . ." Sorry guys, it's just icky.

The Montreux Berlin Concerts Cuts 5 and 6 - Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul

Partly a celebration of flights of improvisatory fancy, partly an indulgence of collective intricacy - precisely executed fugal scribbling.

Indiscipline - King Crimson [from Discipline]

A music reporting back on the reaction of its perpetrator. "I like it! I wish you were here to see it!"

Live To Tell - Madonna - [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

I was amused to discover that I could sing along with her in her own register - and my upper range isn't all that high.

Breed - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

Love the way KC's vocals imitate the guitar's downstrokes in a kind of record stuck record stuck power play. Stravinskian, perhaps.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 7, 2016
Gradus 302 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

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.