Playlist

Recorded

July 1, 2018

Cavatina "Ecco, ridento in ciedo" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

a distance traveled before we get off the ride

Rainy Night - Duke Ellington [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

say a thing (twice) (or two things) then comment or overturn
the back ends of the melodies invite consideration

The Goodnight Waltz - The Voices of Walter Schumann [Rescued Record]

The Age of Sentimentality's Last Gasp

Walk, Little Julie - Chester Hanchell [from Anthology of American Folk Music Vol. 1]

jaw harp in the raw

Requiem Canticles - Stravinsky - London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen

pitch plates microadjust their relative altitude
planar placards plastered on the pitch plate walls
icons

Track 6 - Tillicum Junior High School Orchestra [from my mom's tape of a concert give March 3, 1971]

with vibraphone solo

Subhuman - Throbbing Gristle [from Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits]

inverted accentuation becomes name classification

July 4, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 77 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

vacuum cleaner vacuuming floor clacking sticks and ocarina or flute
we have a hum on the tape from something
it wanders

Neal & Anna's Outpost on Brooklyn Ave, as they were packing it up

typing tap tap tap tap ding! szzzhook!

persistent lack of focus, phoning it in, not present
weary and wearying the hum does not help
this tape has ennui
impervious time

Don't Mix The Colors - Courtney Love [from Kill Rock Stars]

words on a good enough rhythm track
half a song or less

Gradus 99 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 2006]

single tones allowed to linger
turn their predilections for proliferation inward upon themselves
become sets of parts independently spinning
fulfilling the compositional imperatives
which notes to play
is so simple to accomplish that the notion of necessity in the short term
or of form at all as a specious trajectory
is left far below

Front Door - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain EP]

circling insistence (a worry stone)

Banned Telepath 47 Somerville - Aaron Keyt [April 2016]

the new note nears quickly
improvisation composing itself as a composition composing improvisationality

July 5, 2018
Cavatina "Largo al factotum della città" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

intricate prestissimo blah blah blah
tour de articulation

Irish Black Bottom - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

wide open window to another celebration
when it is over
feels empty

Tweedledy Dee - Elvis Presley [from First Live Recordings]

clearly worked over before release
with vinyl surface noise just as clearly audible
no-one was, apparently, thinking history and collecting quality data

(He's) The Great Imposter - The Fleetwoods [from The Very Best of the Fleetwoods - Come Softly To Me]

Requiem Cantlicles - Stravinsky - Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Stravinsky

categorically disparate rhythms
though coordinate
choral sound disblending as instruments perfectly
ceremony
voices instruments solos chorus - all treated emphatically impersonally
each is there to function just so
not anybody's show really
as though these were sound samples pulled from hammer space

July 10, 2018

Jascha Horenstein reminisces with Alan Blyth

". . . nineteen tzwolve . . . Webern and Berg were the ushers who controlled the membership cards . . . enowmously tense and inhibited . . . Vienna is the only place in the world . . . a closed shop . . . icy cold every inch the emperor of music . . . "

Well I Just Might Do That - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [July 1981]

barbasol theater
it's got lemon in it
an historic moment for proto Banned Rehearsal
in that we were beginning to spill out of academic oversight
into sessions which we then inflated into legend out of all proportion to the actual results
good thing most of the sound is lost
come inside you'll catch your
keith
mind your mother
clump clump clomp clomp
done

4th of July, Asbury Park - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen Live 1975-1985]

full blown legend domain see your life as mythic grandeur
your face here

July 11, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 267 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [September 1991]

in the past I have made errors in that regard
moan tube scolding big red bag of fun
soft skinned rattle of rattles
semi independent double reeds
finger independent righty lefty
breath dependent if each speaks or in turn
jalopy rattle get it firing tambourine
this sounds like Aaron's now defunct electric organ
rather than the funmaker
30 minutes in not a dud moment really
terrainish
concerns itself with another subject than the terrain we experience
much as geology arose from metallurgy and mining
Mr. Punch you are a bad bad man
diabolic plotting encrustations of narratives' remains
realms are missing
music is an abstraction of activity
informing our future selves of the past reporting back truly what we say
common pulse theory

DX7 - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

probes in substance with danger traps beacons left behind
creatures that feed on geyser's edge in pitch darkness

July 12, 2018

Day Signals Sonic Nebula - S. Eric Scribner [from Stormsound Cycle, live at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, on May 21, 2011]

slow circle
drawn
dug
stethoscope to deeper tunnel
clanging cagebars
rain drops what zooms by cares not
performance as self preservation
face of impervious
the slowly drawn circle nears, lurking, respiring
a membrane within the sound
cessation without conclusion

July 17, 2018
Finnegans Wake Chapter 4 - Rio Matchett [from Waywords and Meansigns]

immediate: as though related over morning breakfast finger thump on table
scifi traffic medievaly chanting past on the interstar
repletely misoverheard
leaning close over the cafe table
not fussy about the jointures
color not corrected as gossip passed
then report per radio tv with background
journalismus

July 18, 2018
Duetto "All'idea di quel metallo"- Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

light orchestral touch
the air they breathe

You Made Me Love You - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

not much space on these old tracks, timewise or dynamical
best to fill it completely

Tynan Tyme - Chet Baker, Art Pepper [from Playboys]

now we got us some elbow room

A Thing Of The Past - The Shirelles [from Shirelles Anthology]

such subtlety of vocal pressure
just exactly the right weight given to each part of each syllable

no slop

Secret Agent Man - Johnny Rivers [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

something in the sound is often repressed

July 19, 2018
Selections from Finian's Rainbow - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of a concert given May 4, 1971]

extended medley or truncated show
Irish as ethnic quaint (harmless) lesser European pastoral
LA < > NY
Hollywood < > Broadway
good enough modulations (not to write home about)

Universal Corner - X [from Wild Gift]

measures measuring measuring measures

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 2, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 962 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


July 16, 2018
Assembly Rechoired 57 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

Playlist

Recorded

June 24, 2018
Symphony in B-flat, op. 60 - Beethoven - Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan

Tonality as practiced here is not a set of keys and their relationships. It is, rather, constructed from the dynamic ambiguity of scale-degree functions within contrapuntal web-works: how each pitch within the object of discourse relates to all the others as a polyvalent set of latent scale-degree functions :: as an expressive tool or a box thereof :: here's the power-up: an interval pattern is a thing but it can be set willy nilly within any particular portion of the key.

I appreciate how well this recording is engineered to sound like it is being played in an exquisite place. I'm sure it was, but it even sounds like it was. Great timp sound in the 4th movement.

Skid-Dat-De-Dat - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

Was his slow vibrato an imitation of old recording instability / spindle speed variability?

Stranded In The Jungle - The Cadets [from Original Oldies From The 50's Volume Thirteen]

silly? check.
fully realized? check.
variety show comic skit song
vaudeville :: minstrel show
place and history
Jungle :: Town
played as
Primitive :: Sophisticated
equally treacherous

Guitar Pete's Blues - Guitar Pete Franklin [from The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1]

His guitar playing is mostly a right-handed strummy picky sort of affair. A robust relation between his right hand and his singing.

voice: diaphragm | vocal cavity
guitar: lh pitch mix | rh articulation

7 O'Clock News - Silent Night - Simon and Garfunkel [from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme]

the mistake was in presuming our own innocence
personal note: I was 7 when this came out. It came into my consciousness not long after, probably through the older kids at choir camp. Howsoever faux profound it is, I succumbed to it hook line and sinker.

Track 4 - Tillicum Junior High School Orchestra [from my mom's tape of a concert given March 3, 1971]

Sounds Haydnish, perhaps Weberish.

Discipline - King Crimson [from Discipline]

guitar strings are drums
long thin drums
long thin drumheads
pitch is a change in the shape of the drumbody
Learn to Play Guitar with Fripp!

Banned Rehearsal 76 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

perhaps we made a pact

tiny sounds only and yet tape machine conglomerate of sounds
piano as recorded intermezzo in the wild
my how they talk
a very Keytian play
part 2
must have been just before the Ben and Jim concert that Neal and I did
circular texts we laugh less controllably
bells and strums Leiermann BOW reference from the old days mash up Leiermann and Hidden Damage overdriven guitar lobs laser blasts at Elvis back carnival game stack-o-decks at its craziest made possible and limited by the Realistic mixer (it was cheap) the spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find there's that Stranded In the Jungle guy to where we began again at the end

pop pop
dada
thubbup
thubbup
thubbup

pronounced
pronouncement
snort
pronounced

Blue All The Way to Canada - Moe Tucker [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

caboodle convoy chrysler after chrysler to Canada

Yaburebukero (reduction mix) - inBoil [from Sonicabal 2001]

some uncertainty as to origins
all electro I suppose
makes a wicked rattle of it
to vibrate your whole skeletal
really shake it

June 25, 2018

"...woe my road is spoken..." (midi draft 1 060522) - Keith Eisenbrey

my string quartet in an early finished version
unlike some I have the ability to forget details of my own composition
so that though I know this changed considerably I can't recall precisely at which point it veers
sudden nonsequiturs of harmony-timbre, clearly made segments
all there rudely

You Don't Know - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

about as perfect a thing as can be
just guitarplucking, singing, and a wee bit'o'harp blowin' here and there.

Banned Telepath 47 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy [April 2016]

for 908 so long ago
a common aspect of BR has become the easy way we can move around the room, with happy dis-regard, or with focused regard, of where we are in relation to the microphones. I have skewed this somewhat in my current setup: 2 stereo channels, one aimed LR, the other UD (Up Down). It rounds it, but the sounds still move scitter scatter playing squeaky mouse nose right up the camera there restless jitters quick and that is all

June 26, 2018
Overture to The Barber of Seville - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

pre-highlights highlights
something is about to happen kids
pay mind

Sunset Cafe Stomp - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five (with May Alix) [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

Is the sense of what was meant by "Stomp" in this context derived at all from the Southeastern Native American "Stomp Dancing?" If so, how?

That's All Right Mama - Elvis Presley [from First Live Recordings]

false starts for laughs
takin' care of business
beatnik nerves

Scarlet Purple Robe - Georgia Jean Eversole [from The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1]

immediacy inescapable
punk gospel
you've been preached to up close

Psychotic Reaction - Count 5 [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

somebody is playing with dials at the board
makes it sounds like rubber bands

June 27, 2018
Track 5 - Tillicum Junior High School Orchestra [from my mom's tape of a concert given March 3, 1971]

neoclassical, and pretty classy too.

Son of Manhasset - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [from a private tape of a concert given at the Seattle Concert Theater in July 1981]

Does anybody remember where exactly the Seattle Concert Theater was?
me on piano I think
it is a mistake to demonstrate, by what we play, that we have heard what another has played.
hear and do, it is enough

Ferryboat Bill - The Velvet Underground [from Another View]

pencil sketch collective

Banned Rehearsal 266 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [August 1991]

some appliance hums and tocks in the back behind guitar mbira ocarina cymbal toy piano (fan in

August?)
disresonantly metalictocky
something vanished
drum shaker vocal like an official whisking compounds to make drum corps
funmaker duly introduced
Aaronsbundler tattered away into old radio land
advanced dance calls for rhomboid dancing
empty brain rattle can
where does the sound come from
did he we mean it to sound like that
behind that drum beat beat beat bidi beat beat beat a moil resolving to their drums at tether length
there's that clavichord consorting with toy piano
tuning the last piece he wrote
we filled those cassettes
crammed them

June 28, 2018
Pay Me My Money Down - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

hitchin' a ride on another starshine
so that no voice other 'cep'n' his can be heard as an individual

Desert Bloom - S. Eric Scribner - Ivan Arteaga [from Storm Sound Cycle, The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, on May 21, 2006]

music like weather
and the ground

ample time for an interval to be a slough

Falling On Your Face - Ravenna Woods [from Alleyways and Animals]

accelerating subtly then de-accelerating ratchet-like through broad but delineated space
four ways to fill the same space altered

Playlist

Live

November 18, 2017

Finnegans Wake Chapter 3 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer
Gallery 1412, Seattle

Neal performs this in the dark. It is difficult to take notes in the dark. The dark in which Neal performs this is as much a temporal, Joycean darkness, as a literal, nocturnal darkness. The text itself is so tightly focused on the most immediate statement that the past disappears more quickly than it does in more standard practice prose. We can't see where we've been, and by this we realize that we can't see where we are headed either.

Recorded

November 19, 2017
The Firste Pavian and The Galliarde to the Firste Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Jeweled rings bedeck the downbeats, ornaments that expand their durations. It is an old way of mediating the vertical and the horizontal realms, curving their axis points.

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus XVIII (alio modo Fuga a 2 clav.) - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

A two-piano rendition of the upside-down-ready fugue.

Two Tight Blues - Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

This language of hyperaware body movement flies under the social radar, where much can be said. Tunes mime a dancer. Puppetry.

Ramblin' Blues - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

The verses are single statements, or simple question and answer pairs, repetitious, with no explicit narrative. And yet the narrative is clear, peopled, conversational.

Frantic Antic - The Jumpin' Jacks [a Rescued Record]

Commercial happy fifties kid music from when Rock and Roll was as yet unknowable. Beatnik beach blanket bingo lingo. Tight playing though!

Three Highland Airs - The Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of a concert on April 11, 1961]

I listen to these the way I would look at an old snapshot, a personally fascinating generational artifact.

I Don't Believe You - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

The power of story telling is the power of persuasion over memory. There's Bob hogging the narrative, betrayed again, or so he says.

My Wife - The Who [from Who's Next]

Bar talk stories men tell each other.

November 21, 2017
String Trio in 2 Movements - Elaine Barkin - Davis Trio [from Open Space 34]

Vaporless, frozen, drifting, weightless, flash-lit, a chorale only audible a few notes in any direction || a stillness moving by partial illumination.

Ein Hundenleben - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improv Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape 5/22/1981]

Starts with a high quiet whistling

Maple Leaf 1991

all enter plucking or intoning
(a slow)
(frantic)
or quick response

enter clowns

Suffers I think from too much me on the piano.

Puzzlin' Evidence - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

Tight, clean, controlled. At a remove from us. To hear the song clearly it must be held out at an exact distance. Do not enter! Observe. That drum sound there: the space it is in is too big for you. Squint at it through this crack.

November 22, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 255 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, and Aaron Keyt [May 1991]

There is no beginning to this. There is where the tape starts to record full of vigorous scribbling. The funmaker with its blank stare tone colonizes the sound - a hippo on an anthill. Don G plays in the background (with tootmentary). The various strengths with which the signal comes through making the stage more strangely real for a while. Multiple Don Gs threaded through. Banned Giovanni. Envelopes of drum resonance striking the room drum bursts of radiated sound. We are, in part, and rudely, a form of music criticism. Having actual musics intrude is, if anything, overplaying that role. It becomes too obvious. Small: 'viva la liberta?'

Playlist

Recorded

November 4, 2017

The picture I made

Gradus 94 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Uses dampers as filters to extract partials
silence is resilient
behind me Karen purees pumpkin
time out of grid
a car stereo drives by outside
sidebar tea ceremony
that a sound could seem to happen Now is a demonstration of how wide a span is the apprehension of Now

Thursday After - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

adding elements one after another in stepped sequence
within song structure serious phrase length rhythm play
blood harmony could almost be the Fleetwoods at the end (just a hint)

Gradus 285 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

I made a picture.

November 5, 2017
The Hunts Upp - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

ringing echoes
signals passed on hills
familial tales
courtly tales

Der Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XVII Rectus / Inversus - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

strong vertical leaps up? down? contribute to the effect of utter duplication
is it the direction of the leap or its mere distance that tells?

Gatemouth - Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

sliding around the pitch, glisswise
a dance of them


this music is not dance music
this music is dance

Roll Columbia, Roll - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

Progress celebrated, collective progress, progress to benefit us'n'all.

For Miles and Miles - Art Pepper, Chet Baker [from Playboys]

phenomenal playing full of subtleties to be sure but something bluesy has been buffed out if it, refined in an almost pretentious way, if they weren't getting away with it pretty bossly

Echo Song - Orlando di Lasso - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from A Musical Souvenir: The Lake Washington Singers Spring Concert (April 11, 1961)]

humored up? or just oddly translated, odderly arranged? or maybe that's just the way it is

Hold On I'm Comin' - Sam and Dave [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

thought: jazz is about its rhythm; rock is about its song structure; blues is the glue
these boys have heard some church singin' and how

The Song Is Over - The Who [from Who's Next]

praise chorus
testimony
psalm

November 7, 2017

Song of Fifty Cents - Jack Bean [from The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

another function of demotic music
actual advice in humorous guise
(not that, but like dirty jokes as ad hoc sex ed)
how it is learned: those life lessons
quite the accent, one needs to pay more than fifty cents of close attention

Improvisation - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape]

Conversation wordlessly, as musical exercise.

You Get What You Want - Julian Lennon [from The Secret Value of Daydreaming]

this tries so hard, but I have trouble giving it the benefit of the doubt. The problem is not his singing voice, but something like a lack of roots.

November 9, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 254 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 1991]


testing 1 2 3
now we have begun
at Toad Hall some crud in it
John 'plains, but 4 weeks old
strenuously lame we thus arrange the possibility of brief moments unlike any others
drill bit into bedrock inexorant
on my wall
there hangs a purple trout
continues on through
metabolism enhanced
be- words auf Deutsch
bell rings for train coming in

Hail Hail - Pearl Jam [from Rearviewmirror]

propelled
engined
til the fuel runs out
the ride is over

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 6, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 946 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Aaron and Neal duet on trumpet and cornet, Karen drums an ocean, Steve tunes in, and there is me with banjo on my knee

Playlist

Live

September 23, 2017

Sahba Sizdahkhani

Ivan Arteaga
Sahba Sizdahkhani
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Strings and Pulleys - Ivan Arteaga with Allison Burke
parsing the holding into vacant space
touch weight sax fuss distance
scooted
decision tongue and seamless finger flutter

A thoughtful and intriguing tweezing out of aspects of playing saxophone in public, it was already well underway when Allison, incapable it seems of walking without aesthetic deliberation, adjusted the furniture on the stage.

Sahba Sizdahkhani
his amp says Oahu on it slant
with an eighth-note flag on the "a"

how is repetition accomplished, exactly?

Luscious layered builds, on 104-string santour and percussion played in sequence but kept alive with long loops.

Recorded

September 24, 2017
The Battell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Figures on tapestry
music portrays other music
how lifelike!

Die Kunst Der Fuge, Contrapunctus XVI (Rectus) - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

It ties the ear into knots keeping track of it all, but in such a whistle-y carefree way.

Tommy Dorsey

Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

And it starts with a whistle. Ultra-musicianship being pushed into lightweight shoes. Something has got to give.

After You've Gone - Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, Sy Oliver and The Sentimentalists

The arrangement is as hierarchical as movie credits. Leader, Soloists, Rhythm, Choirs.



Oregon Trail - Woody Guthrie [from The Columbia River Collection]

A list of complaints, Whitmanesque, celebratory. How bad they was doin' was why they came.

September Song - Sarah Vaughan [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

She inhabits ever millimeter of those long notes. At the coda phrases are handed down through the ranks, Byrd-ish.

With A Song - Sonny Rollins [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Horn playing, here, is an expression of the shaping of the mouth's cavity, where sound is rounded.

Der Song from Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon - Paul Dessau - uncertain about performers due to poor indexing on the CD

Ein Bierhallsingspielslied.

Sing Ye A Joyful Song - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey [from concert of April 11, 1961]

My mom, as a teen

Rescued from my mom's tape.

Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa (Sad Song)- Otis Redding [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Fifth item in a row with "Song" in it, not planned. OR carves his vocal into the mix with a deepgrooved chisel. Barely a narration beyond the song structure itself.

Track 1 - Tillicum Jr. High School Band [from concert of March 3, 1971]

Another rescue from one of my mom's tapes. I believe this is a band arrangement of a von Weber concert piece for solo clarinet, played by my brother Paul, who would have been 14.

Cock In My Pocket - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

Aestheticizing sophomoric crudity.

Track 2 - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improv Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape, May 22, 1981]

Otherwise known as Undifferentiated Functions. Neal starts center stage, playing the Bickleton Fight Song. I'm in the closet with another piano. When I eventually make my appearance it may have been the first time Karen ever saw me. We were not introduced at that time.

Pink Cadillac - Bruce Springsteen

A riff on original sin, and how the lengths of lines falling into line roll around to find the rhythm of the hook.

September 26, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 253 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 1991]


Our first born, a few week old, makes his taped debut. A distant radio signal finds itself somewhere in the wiring. Frogs and dogs. We pick up an activity and carry it with us to unknown parts, the thread of thought. Wastelands? Burned bare. Dischord wouldn't fit, much like life.

September 28, 2017
Sonic Brilliance 19 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Holden K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Kia M [July 1996]

Jumps into the thick of it. You're supposed to be a dragon. Lizard of Oz. Sounds flow right in, undirected. Why do we have all these buttons? A crowded aviary compressed into the space of sound smaller than the studio. Ringing and rattling.

Assembly Rechoired 46 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [September 2001]

Trumpet, piano, percussion. Buzzy.

Come Out And Play - Dead Vampires [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Close packed mass physicality. The subject matter is the mosh pit.

Banned Rehearsal 786 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

Shaker crickets
bell traffic
mist snake glides
occupy kalimba
finding the lower limit of audibility
ritual of not disorder not entropy
the chosen moment unyieldingly placid

Along The Path (Dreams of Emptiness) - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

Tuning in time and timing in pitch
The vocal entrance kills
Every time

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 25, 2017

Banned Rehearsal 943 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Preface

"First (1.0) 'a pitch' is stipulated to be 'atomic' - that is, indivisible into components not equivalent to the whole of itself. This designates the 'basic' vocabulary of entities for music, i.e., 'pitches'.

Next (Df. 1.0) two pitches are designated as distinct if there is any third pitch such that one of the two, but not the other, matches it, or if the two do not match each other.

If there is no such third pitch, and the two pitches do match each other, they are equivalent pitches, and are assigned to membership in the same pitch-identity class (1.1 and Df. 1.1; note again that 'pitch identity' is, properly speaking, a relation, not a 'property' - the latter, insofar as it is applicable here, as a notion, is only so in the 'property' of 'being a pitch')."

Benjamin Boretz Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought 1969

Texts

Live

September 1, 2017

Seattle Composers' Salon

Chapel Performance Space

Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Steve Scribner - Untitled Tondish Music

Folk music of a fictional culture, but a real fictional culture, in that there is actual solid fiction (books!) in which that culture arises. Karen and I got to play squiggly percussion in the second one.

Patrick O'Keefe - Sonata for Piano

Like listening to familiar musics through someone else's ears. I hear 30's Stravinsky, some Debussy, some Shostakovich, but not quite the SD&S's with which I am acquainted. Someone else's, and at other slants.

Cole Bratcher - Transit Maps

We visit graphic aspects of San Francisco and Copenhagen. Work in progress on a fascinating project that hits squarely on two of my geek-outs: music and maps. We are all waiting eagerly for Tokyo.

Blake DeGraw - Diler, for strings

Four string players, each playing a single string, attempt to match the pitches of a track heard only by them. See Preface above. Theory hits the pavement. Damn!

Recorded

Charlie Rich

August 26, 2017

Who Will The Next Fool Be - Charlie Rich [from Sun Records The Definitive Hits]

Relies on vocal charisma to hypnotize. Circles around twice, no more, needs nothing so fancy as a bridge. About a girl or about music? Always a tricky question.

City Midnight Junk Strains (for Frank O'Hara) - Alan Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]

Bumps around drunk in an empty room.

I Shall Be Released - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

Trapped by wordmeaning, more interested in rhythmplay, ripples in a pebble pinged pond.

Miama 2017 - Billy Joel [from The Essential Billy Joel]

Prog Joel. Imagines he has more range of personae than he really does.

Music with Or Without 12 Chairs - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [May 1981]

The class of clowns.

Breakout - Swing Out Sister [a Rescued Record]

A totally Vegas ambitious arrangement over funky bass and tight brass.

Banned Rehearsal 251 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [March 1991]

tossing noises into a bucket of noises the cats are concerned. Amnehitabel? Concerned. Anarchy: concerned. we must be picking up from something old ugly floral drapes are mentioned 3 bags full

::] city truck outside as I listen beeping clearing sewers? [::

funmaker staccato hits magnetic ghost reel tape

Thought experiment for sound engineers: imagine the worst, the at all costs to be avoided horror of a soundquality, not just unmarketable but quick turn it off before you vomit bad soundquality. Now, imagine the most sophisticated transparent playback apparatus that money can buy reproducing exactly that same worst horror. Is there a difference? Where, exactly, would the difference lie?

improvisational composition designing with readily apparent qualities cumulating funmaker drone reminds of Frippertronics ah that Wurlitzer button that pulls the pitch down almost but not quite a half step

improvisation: the art of redeeming one's, and each other's, sudden decisions. Falling, a la Buzz L, with style

August 27, 2017

Sonic Brilliance 18- John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, John H, Aaron Keyt, Holden K, Kia M [June 1996]

intents made together in a room to hear how it goes. A theory of the man in the oat box. Must be hiding.

Banned Rehearsal 614 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]

etched with care || a percussion sequence arises
what if we go with it, without regard for redemption?
deep dynamic registers linger languorously

August 29, 2017

Class Notes - Michael Dellaira [from Open Space 21]

Although: barely a minute long
Although: figuration could be any midcentury bebop wannabe piano player in late evening lounge mode
Although: all that and more or less
Rich in: melodic twists of chords
And: Nothing here is quite just one thing

Gradus 187 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

3rd A-nat from the bottom behaving as a point of reference, the high notes, all A-nats, nestled or floating in its active or imagined or remembered partials. Parent floating child; I rattle a rattle! I had forgotten. Are these hiatuses Cage silence or something else? division markers? resets? reminder? absences?

Each A-nat, being itself unhooked from pitch class inclusion renders each of its aspects unhooked to an extent from any sort of class inclusion, i.e. staccato notes don't form a class with other staccato notes, nor quiet ones with quiet ones, nor loud with loud.

2nd rung: it centers a bit higher on a still low mid A-nat.

#2Pretty4Jail - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

seething writhes around an electrohummy spacefilling wad that squeezes the vocals off to the sides. Immobile, constrained, plea though they plea.

August 30, 2017

Qui Passe for My Ladye Nevell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Upon these inflections of tetrachordal-metrical correlatives, the ear dances rice on drum.

Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XV - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Playful puppy. Weary hound.

How Do You Like It Blues - Art Sims and His Creole Band [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Mid 20s, getting sound into the grooves was work, or the sound makes it seem so, striving to be recorded, to achieve groove.

I'll Be A Friend to Jesus - Wade Mainer [from Goodbye Babylon]

Formulae stubbornly adhered to. The barest of variance tells.

Save It Pretty Mama - Frank Signorelli [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In a similar spirit to Art Sims above, but more chill and relaxed about getting it into groove. And yet, very conscious of that 3' deadline at the end of the record.

Signal - Stan Getz [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Stan Getz

Precisely beveled throughout. Every join tight as tight can make it.

Chorale Variations - Stravinsky - CBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Festival Singers, Stravinsky [from The Original Jacket Collection]

The big magic picture book of Chorale Preludes. Each page turn renews.

Little Miss Sad One - The Fleetwoods [from The Very Best of the Fleetwoods - Come Softly To Me]

Weakened by a weak bridge, with a little cliché riff at the end of it (said bridge) as much as to say at last that's over.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 28, 2017

Banned Rehearsal 942  - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

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.)