Playlist

Recorded

July 31, 2013
Banned Thology 2 - Banned Rehearsal

Focus or float? Either is active.

August 1, 2013
Hidden Damage - Keith Eisenbrey

bug guitar

July of 1985 was a busy time for me. Not only did I participate in nine separate improvisation sessions (including a live show) and build the Banned Day, but I also started a solo project called Summer Songs. Inspired both by Aaron Keyt's Bickleton Burger and by some work I had done in Barrytown with Jill Borner and Dan Sedia, the idea was to explore the compositional idea of self accompanied song. I would pick an instrument, sit down in front of microphones, and improvise a song. Hidden Damage was my first foray. I like how both the text and melody build themselves gradually, and how the accompaniment is both clearly periodic and vehemently fluid in tempo. The instrument used is a little 8-string kora known affectionately as the 'bug guitar'. In 2003, as a way of teaching myself how to use the sound editing capabilities of a new computer, I remixed all the summer songs. You can listen to both versions on my soundcloud site: Original - Winter Mix.

Banned Day - Banned Rehearsal

This is a mix of the first 32 session sides of Banned Rehearsal, being numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (2 sides), 11, 12, 13, 14 (2 sides), 15, 16, 17, 18 (2 sides), 19, 20, 21 (3 sides), 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 28. There is no Banned Rehearsal number 5, due to a technical problem with the recording device. I made the original mix using multiple cassette decks and splitter cables. I redid the whole thing a year or so ago using a digital mixer. The result is no less crudful, as you can hear here.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 29, 2013
Gradus 230 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

Live

July 27, 2013
Red Ribbon
Vermillion, Seattle

After a spectacular dinner in the garden at Poppy, Karen and I spiral skirted the Capital Hill Block Party (just keep the boomboom in one ear at a constant volume) to a narrow high-ceilinged space with graphics on the walls and a bar in the back. We caught just the end of the last song by the previous band, whose name I didn't hear clearly.

Red Ribbon at Vermillion

There were some unfortunate technical problems - a bad hum persisted right up to the last couple of songs, and the vocal amplification was apparently not up to the task at hand - but I suppose that is the danger of electronic gear piled higher & deeper coupled with limited time to get it all working properly. Nevertheless, the close walls and the long spaces overhead and behind gave the drum sound a lively tunnel reverb, warping the higher frequency amplified sounds quite nicely into the cymbals splashy woof, and though the vocals were not optimally up front there was something unnerving about their presence beneath the tapestral sough - as though a dragon moved unseen.

Recorded

July 23, 2013
Banned Seminar 3
Banned Seminar 4

I was thinking about the pre-conscious or liminal-conscious psychoacoustic faculties by which we integrate and segregate and otherwise sort out signal into distinct singularities or sets or complexes of sounds, and how we then project or reify or otherwise create agents and instruments to have made them.

July 24, 2013
Banned Thology 1

Sixteen sessions together.

July 25, 2013
Banned Sectional 3 AK NWM - (July 1985, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Neal and Aaron slam each other against the wall with pianos.

In Session at the TintinabularyJuly 22, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 841 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Playlist - dateline Prosser, WA

Live

July 13, 2013
Courtney Marie Andrews
Mikey and Mattie
Shelby Earl - CD release party for Swift Arrows
Columbia City Theater, Seattle

And Are We Yet Alive?, the hymn sung every year at annual conference by the assembled United Methodist clergyfolk, speaks to those times in life when you realize that an ordeal has been survived and that you are wounded but healing, stronger and aware. For many, their 20s are such an ordeal, and finding yourself at the other end more completely adult is a grace and a glory. The stage this night was crowded with superb musicians, sharing with each other and with us their triumphs and tales.

Courtney Marie Andrews

I'm a sucker for finger-picking she-minstrels, and Courtney delivers all the musts of the type: wise, ingenuous, vulnerable, shy but comfortable enough in her own skin and voice to rival the presence of her awfully pretty guitar.

Mike and Matt Gervais are well known as the manic-happy front men of Curtains For You, and in previous guise as the engine behind True Bugs. It isn't surprising that they have now ventured off on their own with a superbly able crew lifted partly from the Seattle Rock Orchestra, and held in place by Faustine Hudson, perhaps the most melodically capable of Seattle rock drummers. One band is just not enough to hold this volume of creative energy.

Shelby pulls out all the stops - a perfectly attuned band, a wonderful venue, charismatic charm - and tries every trick in the book - songwriting chops beyond comparison and a jazz chanteuse's knack for hanging off unsuspected corners and lingering in newly discovered crannies of the beat - but there is really no hope. That voice will win.

Recorded

July 15, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 42 - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

A rehearsal for that very evening's concert. Opacity of a howling blizzard. Neal's sister Karen was our test audience, before she and I became an item.

July 16, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 43- A Short and Simple Concert - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Our second live performance, at Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music, University of Washington, Seattle. Neal was a TA at the time, and the audience was beefed up with students from his theory classes.

July 17, 2013
Banned Seminar 1 - Banned Rehearsal

Eight tapes combined. A texture of textures shifting at a texture of shifting rates.

July 18, 2013
Banned Seminar 2 - Banned Rehearsal

An overabundant overlay of Funmaker fills the nooks and clogs the crannies. Un-poke-able.

In Session at the TintinabularyJuly 15, 2013
Fox Spit 1 - Keith Eisenbrey

Neal couldn't come over for Gradus, so I decided to practice tuning the guitar that my brother gave me - his first successful hand-made Fox Spit. Then I made this recording.

Playlist

Live

July 6, 2013

Your Mother Should Know at Victory Lounge

Old Man Williamson
Pouch
Your Mother Should Know
Peterman
Victory Lounge, Seattle

I will never accustom myself to the waiting for a dive-bar show to begin. I know that when the start time is 8pm they really mean "sometime after 9 but probably before 10", but since I'm the kind of guy who always gets places early I end up with a lot of time to observe.

Everybody nods in exactly the same way when asked to present their ID. No matter the quantity of leather goods, studs, piercings, or tattoos, the vast majority of folks are polite and courteous. Being in a place with constant loud sound is a little bit, I imagine, like being temporarily deaf.

Rock music is a music of and for people in transition. Youth to adult, single to connected, connected one-wise to connected (or un-) another-wise, there to here, then to now. Its energy is overlarge because the feeling of living in or through transition is over-wrought, juiced. It wants to be heard on both sides of the boundary, but it also wants to expand and prolong its own moment - as reluctant to move forward as it is desperate to efface its past. Hyperphoria can blind and paralyze, but it is essential for self-aware growth.

Ian "Old Man" Williamson played a short, spirited, acoustic set just a notch louder than the general din. Pouch gets more solid each time out, though the PA system for the vocals wasn't up to their rip-it-up instrumental wallop. YMSK mixed up their sound, with Neal and Karen sharing vocals, and Neal switching from keyboard to 6-string to 12-string. Their set is defiantly varied in affect. But of course it was Peterman's show and they are ripening into a high energy, roots-punk, feel-good act. My favorite moment of the whole evening was during their cover of I Can't Help Falling In Love With You watching two burly logger types giving each other an exuberant and heartfelt bro-bear-hug.

Recorded

July 9, 2013
Banned Mixer 8

fold over and in, like kneading bread, or forging sword

dissociation of conjointure

etched upon

a gouged surface through a scribbled screen

not softened

removed

July 10, 2013
Banned Sectional 9 KEE NWM - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

When an improvisation is just not working the best option is usually to stick with it. The point is not to redeem the session as a session, but rather the hope that eventually things will fall into an interesting place, even if just for a moment. This tape is a case in point. Mostly horrible, but now and then pretty amazing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 8, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 840 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

I put this one up on my soundcloud site because it was as lovely throughout as the evening was pleasant. We played on the porch for the passersby on the street. Enjoy!

Playlist

Tonight!

Saturday, July 6, 2013 - 9 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch, Old Man Williamson
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle

Live

July 5, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Two Piano Pieces - Carson Farley
Four Piano Pieces and Two Montana Songs - Kam Morrill
Songs Your Mother Should Know - Neal Meyer

I pulled host duty at this bi-month's salon, so I'm sure I was somewhat distracted. Nobody can replace Tom Baker. I was however both surprised and pleased (but mostly pleased) by the large turnout, and by the lively discussion that followed each performance. Carson explored a unification of musical parameters in a personal, transparent, intriguingly flat-footed, non-Stockhausenish way. Kam brought four delightful piano pieces written for a puppet show that never materialized, and two ambitious songs for bass and piano whose poems concern the interaction of man and animal - moose and magpie, respectively. Neal's musical comedy pastiche songs are familiar to me, as his chanteuse is none other than my lovely spouse Karen, who was fab. For what it's worth, here is my theory of musical comedy: the more the songs are ascendant, the better; the more the book is ascendant, the worse. Best possible solution: all songs, no book.

Recorded

July 2, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 41 - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

On the 4th of July weekend of 1984 the three then extant members of the band - Aaron, Neal, and me - utterly failed to make a tape that came to be known as Banned Rehearsal 5. The tape was in the recorder, and the plan was to walk out into the ebb tide mudflats at the end of Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island, to record our squeechy squoochy footsteps, the lapping waves, the wind, and the birds. Unfortunately, either the batteries were dead or they fell out at the outset, so there was no trace on magnetic tape of what we all remember as the spectacular one that got away.

So the next year the band was once again assembled at my folks' cabin near Freeland, and we carefully checked our equipment before setting out down the road and into the mud. Listening to the result at this distance of time, I am reminded that those mudflats constitute a primal personal landscape, an extreme-scape, for me, and so the varying reactions of my fellows, from simple child-glee to erotic ecstasy arrived at by way of ecstatic anxiety, are fitting.

The compressed omnipresent rumble of wind in the microphones is like the sound of boulders in a swift river, complicating water.



Banned Mixer 7

July 4, 2013
Banned Mixer 6

Detail phantasms by, not yet sunk into the tarry mass that waits. Not a wall of sound, but rather a thicket, emerging from ground into which we succumb.






Banned Mixer 7

Accumulate

Amalgamate

Concatenate

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 1, 2013
Gradus 229 - Neal Meyer



Neal plays the first E-natural

Another milestone, or the other side of the same milestone as last session. Having finished all the combinations of the A-naturals, Neal plays the first E-natural. The moment was captured visually as well as in sound-file format. Since he has been treating each 40 minute recording session as two 20 minute rungs, the second half was a perhaps even more momentous occasion: the first Gradus in which two pitch-classes appear.

Playlist

Recorded

June 23, 2013
Blue Suede Shoes - Carl Perkins

Carefully balanced and tautly stacked. Every aspect of this mix is a drum except the drums, which are nearly non-present.

Banned Mixer 3 - Banned Rehearsal

An aspect of our early sessions that pushes forward in these four-ply mixers is the heavy inclusion of pre-recorded and captured sound: phonographs, radio, other session tapes, and separately recorded snippets of the current session. One five minute stretch of Banned Rehearsal 7, a "sudden song" improvised by Aaron, is fed back in so often that by the time four tapes are stacked together 10 minutes hardly go by in which Bickleton Burger isn't heard. Somewhat random selections from my phonograph collection attempt both to borrow masterpiece glory and draw rude mustachios. The conflict between these desires comes through loud and clear.

Holmes Harbor near Freeland, Washington, ca. 1985

June 25, 2013
Banned Mixer 4 - Banned Rehearsal

Din run amurk.

June 26, 2013
Banned Mixer 5 - Banned Rehearsal

Distance, residue, attempts at possibilities.

June 27, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 40 - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

It was the 4th of July and the band was at my folks' cabin on Whidbey Island. I had not a clue that 15 months later I would be there with Karen on our honeymoon. Much of the session is given to spirited readings of my childhood books: Hop on Pop, Are You My Mother,  and a mid-sixties book about space-flight. There is a brassy strummy blatty march featuring, every now and then, some truly fabulous power beats - for a pulse or three: interstitial dynamite. But the overriding sense is theatrical and infantile. A useful bonding activity, perhaps, but not a tape I'd be comfortable sharing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 24, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 839 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Steve Kennedy, Neal Meyer

We celebrated the 29th Bannediversary. We hope to make the 30th a public performance.

Upcoming

Saturday, July 6, 2013 - 8:30 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle

Playlist

Live

June 15, 2013
Forest Show
Ravenna Park, Seattle
works by Neil Welch, John Teske, Nat Evans
with Natalie Mai Hall, Evan Smith, Christian Pincock


Soundboards in their former habitat

Not an audience, a congregation. Not a draw, an apse. Not a ravine, a cathedral. Not a music, a sermon. Gospel according to Braxton. Long deep draughts of communal prayer. Candles. Reascension into the still light crepuscle to home.

Recorded

June 18, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 39 "Hunting and Gathering" - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Last week's post regarding Banned Rehearsal 38 explained the process behind Neal's score Hunting and Gathering. For this session we let her rip for 47 minutes. The result displays our early sound in all its cruddy glory. I'll leave the link up for a few weeks.

June 20, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 692 - (November 2005, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A journey into the far.

Snoho Piece 3 - Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Scribner

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 17, 2013
Gradus 228 - Neal Meyer



Neal playing an A-natural

A milestone in the project known as Gradus for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler: all the combinations of the eight A-naturals on the piano keyboard have now been worked. And so a little history. Neal made the first 10 Gradus recordings (45' cassette sides) in January of 1987. He was living in San Diego at the time and the opportunity to continue the project dried up. Fast forward to January of 2002. I offered the use of my piano (a 1976 Six-foot Yamaha) and DAT. He started over, and I re-started the numbered sessions. These new sessions began as 30 minute sessions, each devoted to a single combination. The last several years, in order to make some headway to other pitch-classes, he has been doing 40 minute sessions, each devoted to two combinations. Along the way the recording equipment has changed (direct to computer) and I got a new piano (an 1890 eight-foot Chickering). There have been several public performances over the years, including several short samplings at the Seattle Composers' Salon. The first full length performance was at Brechemin Auditorium in December of 2004. This outing set the standard: Three "Rungs" over 2 hours without break.

Next session: E-natural!

UpcomingSaturday, July 6, 2013 - 8:30 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle