Playlist

Recorded

December 23, 2013
Banned Section 16 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 1985

Once again, Wild Thing appears just about the time we give up on our collective imagination, sealing the fate of the session.

December 26, 2013
You Can See The Bottom - Triptet

It was the hat that did it.

Karen and I won this CD (and many more!) for best costume at the release party at Egans.

(phases into and from):

 

1 landing arrival stops

2 uh oh nervous helicopters - hide!

3 on that other planet (the plumbing leaks)

4 straight up no apology

5 keening homophony slower than

6 tune in alien airwaves - jazznoir slinky number ends in back alley knife to throat

7 thrashjazz striving to be becoming conscious of self

8 weeks later same session self fully formed looking back

Sonata in E-flat K.282 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

Such sensitive touch! Now I want to try playing this on my clavichord.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 23, 2013
Mitchell 1312230
Keith Eisenbrey

While Karen and Neal were rehearsing YMSK I tried out the freshly batteried pickup of the guitar that walked over the other day, in four track glory. This may be my best route to learning to play the thing.

Playlist

Live

December 14, 2013
Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler
Neal Kosaly-Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Imagine your quest is to learn our solar system and everything in it one particle at a time. The number of particles, or in this case of combinations of the 88 keys of the piano, is the quantity expressed in base 2 by a sequence of 88 ones. A very large quantity indeed. It is so large, in fact, that this piece, this quest, in its entirety, can't be heard. It is, as an entirety, or even as a significant enough portion to grasp as a portion, completely and essentially inaudible - as absolute a silence as can be imagined.

 

Recorded

 

December 17, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 53 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - October 1985

 

We start with some rhythm modules that ease into sudden songs: Under the Stars, and Can't Play th'Trumpet. But by the end, between Neal's blown-out speaker (dubbed 'the speaker of the house') and craziness with the microphones, the session sounds like the machinery of civilization recording itself being chewed to pieces by a planet sized troll.

 

Banned Rehearsal 781 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 2010

 

25 years later, subtle shifts of flora map a forest floor.

 

December 19, 2013

Keyboard Sonata (Divertimento) in D Hob.XVI:4 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

I was put in mind of J.K. Randall's bias against "Perfunctory Propulsion". These phrases don't interleave in graceful subversion of meter (like Bach), or balance in delightful conversation (like Mozart). They whip like pennants in a stiff breeze. Until suddenly they don't and they are fountains frozen solid. Until suddenly they are filigree or crickets or calculus.

 

Children's Choir Christmas Pageant - Bellevue First United Methodist Church 1965

 

I was six, so I must have been in one of these choirs.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary November 25, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 849 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer



Playlist

Live


Triptet unplugged

December 12, 2013
Triptet
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle








sequence theater

simultaneity complexes

of textures with or without

vector sequences

of note-isms or textures

of simultaneities or quasi-simultaneities

offset not simultaneous quite

but not because not vertically aligned

or not because not possibly

vertically aligned

but arising

with in

or with from

distinctions

of persons

 

encrusted

colonized

imagined inaudible

layers beneath

remove process

remove power

beneath that

what

Recorded

December 8, 2013
Banned Sectional 15 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, October 1985

Workhorse

This tape ended up being a distillation and summary of several strategies that had been worked out in previous sessions. We started with sudden songs, notably Neal's first cover of Aaron Keyt's This Bus Won't Stop For Me, immediately preceded by the instructions "Enthusiasm, idealism, and a forthright approach". After we did that for a while we found ourselves in channel separation mode, Neal in the left speaker making tiny sounds and me in the right speaker with a guiro. Moving then to spoken word play (" . . .  think  slowly  stop  between  each   word  . . . "), high birdlike feedback intrudes, at first masquerading as whistling then boldly chirping. We take a high banking trajectory into a crazy, off place. Neal ends in self-referential mode, softly repeating "this is what I call a quiet tape" over and over to the cut. It certainly has some lame moments, but is mostly quite listenable.

December 10, 2013
Snohomish Piece 2 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, S. Eric Scribner, Neal Meyer

In the battle for cognitive awareness, order trumps chaos. We latch on with biological fierceness to what we can make sense of, leaving the rest to be understood in terms of that what that we can make sense of. Or: why steady beats are so poisonous to free improvisation,

Keyboard Sonata (Partita) in C Hob. XVI:3 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

Performed on what I believe is a small harpsichord: not one of those orchestral multi-manual behemoths, but a private, residential sized instrument.

The Messiah (Christmas Portion) - Handel - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey, conducting (1965)

For many, it just isn't Christmas without The Messiah. O what a difference italics make! The theological thrust of the work is focused on Christ the King, as one would expect when royal hierarchies were the only show in town. At our historical remove this comes across as far more flattering to kings than illuminative of Christ.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 9, 2013
Your Mother Should Know
Demo for an upcoming album project.

Playlist

Recorded

December 3, 2013
Banned Sectional 14 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, October 1985

The sectionals, especially those that Neal and I did during this period, were not so much sessions of free-improvisation as they were freely-improvised workings out of ideas of things to do with which to fill up sides of tape. On the plate for this was a continuation of the sudden song project. Texts used include a Heine poem and coin-toss-chosen phonemes from John Rahn's Lines Of And About Music. In the middle Neal launches into a spirited acoustic rendition of Wild Thing, which gesture in subsequent sessions became a reflex go-to subject changer. In this case I can't say that the subject changed from was all that spectacular - we were once again driving lameness firmly into the dirt - but it was never about being spectacular, and working steadfastly at sticking points often leads to amazing places otherwise unreachable. Changing the subject comes across as a defense mechanism for avoiding discomfort, and veering into a groove, specifically, approaches social manipulation. You can join the fun or you can be a grump. But if neither fun nor grump is where you're at you're stuck. There is no room to maneuver into elsewhere. You just have to wait it out.

December 5, 2013
Snohomish Piece 1 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner
Sonata (Partita) in B-flat Hob.XVI:2 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim, clavichord

Haydn is so gracious with the what of where he is, and with the spaces between. He does not move along to satisfy moving, but to provide a vantage of a new what, at a precise remove.

Grande Piece Symphonique - Franck - David Di Fiore

our humble abode

 

A sprawling mansion

too big to inhabit

our host uncanny

shows us around

each time

sunken more

Chorale from Seven Last Words - Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church, Betty Eisenbrey, cond. - April 1965
Go Girl Crazy - The Dictators

They'd fit in quite well here in Seattle. Surf-rock self-parody. You'd almost think Kurt Bloch was involved. I have to say their cover of I Got You Babe made my jaw drop.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 2, 2013
Gradus 238 - Neal Meyer

In anticipation of the impending 2-hour public performance of Gradus on December 14th, (Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 8pm) Gavin Borchert came over to hear a 1:3 scale model preview. Of the three rungs to be performed, the first two differ sharply in the quantity of pitches present. I was struck, hearing them in such close proximity, by how perversely bereft the more pitch loaded rung was in timbral richness, as though the sharp point of palpable sound was obscured by a haystack of figuration, however attenuated that figuration might be. It made me wonder to what extent we compose in order to hide the actual in favor of the conceptual.

Playlist

Live

November 27, 2013
Dead Bars

Swearin'

Waxahatchee
Chop-Suey, Seattle

If each band's set were successive acts of a chamber opera the evening's dramatic arc would be distinctly Schumannesque, Florestan to Eusebius, centering focus to a single point, to a single low thwung on guitar, to a single attitude of neck, to a single sung note carrying all.

Or, as root context trajectory: From (Dead Bars) street music doo wop girl group deep ground punk, similar ur-milieu to the Ramones, but from longer back now and un-admixed with keep-your-distance up-yours attitude, all joy and hopping, the sheer noise a naked mask to bare confession behind; through (Swearin') a mid-ground to brake the tempo down, twisting chromatic bass lines (you know, for us music nerds), filling the dragon with fire of ride and crash, as though Velvet Underground were jamming with Red Ribbon; to (Waxahatchee) where it all boils in the end, blues at its most minimal, somewhere far out near Star Anna's constellation, in the nebulae of Whitney Ballen and Jonathan Richman, at the edge of, as we leap.

Recorded

November 24, 2013
Sonata (Partita) in C, Hob. XVI:1 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

The spirit of the age is scholarly and impatient of the performance practices of our Romantic forbears. For better or worse, it is no longer the time to blithely play old music on modern instruments in the assumption that, the new instruments being improvements upon the old, all the music played upon them is improved thereby. I'm not a baby-and-bathwater idealist in this regard - I will cling to Milstein playing the Sonatas & Partitas and Richter's WTC and much beside - but there is plenty to be said for the clarifying decrustification possible on replica instruments, and for the imaginative delights unleashed by impromptu embellishment. Ms. Schornsheim plays this early Sonata on a harpsichord, taking every repeat as an opportunity for gloriously transformational ornament.

Me, ca. 1965

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey, conducting - ca. 1965

November 26, 2013
Rapper's Delight: The Best of the Sugarhill Gang

Old tracks: power retrieval by nostalgia engine

Affirmative self-promotion: Not I hope you love me or even You will love me if you buy me, but You do love me and you are beautiful therefore and you are here therefore and you exist therefore

 

The only possibility is this party

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 25, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 848 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

November 30, 2013
Interview 131130 BGE CRE KEE KEE - Betty Eisenbrey, Dick Eisenbrey, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

Playlist

Live

November 22, 2013
Seattle Modern Orchestra, Julia Tai and Jeremy Jolley, conductors; Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Open Form
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Coeur pour Batteur - Sylvano Bussotti
Zyklus No. 9 - Karlheinz Stockhausen
Event: Synergy II - Earle Brown
Shendos No. 12 for Nine Instruments - Tom Baker
Event: Synergy II (reprise) - Earle Brown

Disclaimer notice: I was the lucky raffle winner of two tickets to their next concert, and Karen's name was picked for a second set of tickets, which we declined. Heads up to concert makers: bribing me in this manner is completely unnecessary, as is loading the concert with works written in my birth year. To the modest extent that what I'm doing here constitutes a concert review I'm usually pretty kind, and, I hope, mostly constructive. But thanks for the tickets. I'm looking forward to it.

Bussotti and Baker and Brown. O My! The patterner in me wondered how Stockhausen was included in this set of B names. Tom opined that perhaps there is an invisible B in front and we ought properly to say "B'stockhausen".

According to Ben Boretz, a score is a stimulus. It can also be a reproducible, portable, marketable artifact, culturally coded to stimulate, in a prescribed practice, a certain acceptable range of event outcomes. The musical work, then, is a complex set containing the score, the cultural coding, the practice, the desired event outcome of the score maker, the actual and postulated score-stimulated event outcomes, and the various webs of discourse, public and private, proto- and post-, pertaining. What is (or was) overtly new in these (mostly) historically significant open form works is a concern with the mechanics of scores as such and with the specific content of the individual score maker's desired event outcomes, but the resulting discursive churn focuses much more uncomfortably on cultural coding and practice. As musical works they function as questions about us, about what we do when we do music.

And what of the event-outcomes themselves? Bussotti, performed in Bonnie's riveting stage dialect, was a sharply delineated universe, vigorously explored, bravely lit. Stockhausen, splayed out and pinned down carefully across an 18 minute or so span came across as surprisingly rational and thorough. Interestingly though, there was nothing particularly unusual about the gestural or figurational content in either work that seemed to be tied specifically to their relative open-ness of form. I could imagine those gestures and figurations arising in through-composed percussion music with no loss of eloquence. This may stem from the fact that, at least in this performance, all that is open about their form was worked out by the performer in advance. She had many substantive choices to make, but they were all made by the time she began.

Not so with Synergy II. It is a box of parts and a set of instructions allowing multiple results. No two performances are likely to be the same (and these two were quite wonderfully distinct), and none of the perpetrators really know what exactly is going to happen until it does. This is by design, and Mr. Brown took a great deal of care crafting his material so that no part or set of parts could be complete in itself beyond the bare minimum individuation necessary to be considered as a part of this piece only and not as some interloper from music as usual. The care taken shows.

Tom Baker (on the right) with Stu Dempster (on the left)
 in traditional Seattle costume

Tom's (beautiful) piece struck me as much more like the Stockhausen, in the sense of being a thorough and careful exploration of something, but with a sense of lyrical wonder replacing the rational display. Where Stockhausen indicates salient points as though wearing a lab coat and expecting us to take notes, Tom's gaze pans slowly across a landscape, which would be blinding to see all at once, and which must be constructed in memory over time to be seen as the whole that it was conceived to be. It is shown little by little in a band tall and narrow. Once again the locally produced holds up quite well next to the more broadly established brands, thank you very much.

Recorded

November 17, 2013
Sonata (Partita) in C Hob.XVI:1 - Haydn - Keith Eisenbrey

Confirming - still needs some work.

Selections from Wizard of Oz - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Ensemble (?) ca. 1965

Another selection from the trove of tapes my mom shared with me.

Banned Sectional 13 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 1985

Neal reads from Genesis, then skips ahead to Revelations. I read from Brecht.

Gradus 89 - Neal Meyer - December 2005

Among the more pianissimo of sessions, its patient attenuation expressing an impatience with music as usually expressed.

November 21, 2013
Gradus 182 - Neal Meyer - October 2010

Each widely separated (in register) pitch is its own theater, and each of their jointures also. Memory and regret.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 19, 2013
Gradus 237 - Neal Meyer

Lots of Gradus this week.

Playlist

Live

November 10, 2013
Octava Chamber Orchestra, Johan Louwersheimer, cond.
Maple Park Church, Lynnwood

Divertissement for Double Woodwind Quintet Op. 36 - J.E.A. Bernard - (Dan Schmidt, cond.)

Domestic activity contained within the possibility of its own unhinging - like a picnic.

Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun - Debussy

There is nothing impressionist about it. Corporeal, warm with pulse, glowing with stench.

Concerto for Clarinet and Strings - Gavin Borchert - Sean Osborn, clarinet

Gavin Borchert

As music it begins, or always begins :: from music it veers, or always veers :: subsiding slowly into autonomous alt-conscious selves :: selves of each other's self each autonomously alt-veering :: beginning again to veer again so as to glimpse again, over the shoulder.

Selections from the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 - J.S. Bach

The clunky mal-shaped peasant core inextricably embraced within the ornate regularizing societal gloss.

Recorded

November 10, 2013
Christmas Carol Service (1969) - Bellevue First United Methodist Church combined choirs, Betty Eisenbrey, cond.

A tape recently copied from my mom's collection. She directed the choral activities at BFUMC for most of my childhood. This is one of the earliest recordings I have in which I play a part (a 10 year-old in one of the children's choirs). It ends with an arrangement for combined choirs of the over-wrought quasi-hymn O Holy Night. Ben Boretz often asks us to recall those moments in our musical lives that sent us, willy-nilly, into music as a calling, those moments to which nothing outside of music can compare. Being a part of this performance was unquestionably such a moment for me. I suppose I was naïve for having my buttons pushed by this, but hey, I was only 10.  And to be honest it still gives me a thrill - always a sucker for a great entrance.

Piano Music - Aaron Keyt

Improvising on solo piano, an essay on phrase length/shape/balance/note-count. The effect is part Satie, part Broadway, part antique dance. Pitch is so not the point.

November 12, 2013
Assembly Rechoired 48 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy - December 2005

Getting somewhere, but not by our own effort - more as though being ballooned.

Snohomish Concert (Steve's Mix) - S. Eric Scribner

In October of 2010 Steve Scribner produced this concert at a little theater in Snohomish. The event itself was pretty informal, with lots of banter between the audience and performers. The music was a hodge-podge of compositions (by Scribner, Neal Meyer, Wayne Lovecraft, and me) and various collaborative improvisations, making a low-key evening out of some pretty far-out music (far-out per se and far-out from its accustomed locale). But what Steve did, through judicious cuts and inspired overdubbing, is utterly transforming. All the low-key has been expunged, and all the sprawl has been made thrumming taut. What was informal and chatty has become sharply focused, a model of formal balance and precise contrast.

Sonata in B-flat K. 281 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

Now we know what was inside that opening trill.

Little Liza - Men's Quartet from Bellevue First United Methodist Church (?), ca. 1965 (?)

Always a bit off-kilter

As I child I knew this song (mistakenly) as "Little Eyes". It was one of my favorites when I was 6 or so, and I had no idea my mom still had a tape.

November 14, 2013
Banned Sectional 12 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - September 1985

In the left channel is an attempt (surprisingly successful) to duplicate the right channel (recorded earlier that day) without being able to hear it. Some sudden songs, including I Want a Girl From Venice California, (twice of course, once on the right and once on the left) - and the audio guest list from our first concert (the previous January) - including cameo appearances by Neal's family of origin and the Chez Sleaze Reserve Section.

Banned Rehearsal 693 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Meyer - December 2005

Xylophone provides context while we attempt to squeeze radio noise out of a balloon. One of the major arguments of which Banned Rehearsal consists is that between "making a tape" and "recording an improvisation". In practice this often comes down to how cognizant we are of the microphone in our midst, or of the other mechanical aspects of recording sound, or of the mere fact that a sound we make now will be a recorded trace later (See BS 12 KEE NWM, above). Here we come down decidedly on the side of "recording an improvisation", working out a soundscape communally until each constituent is precise and distinct.

November 15, 2013
Reflektionen mit Christine Schornsheim und Clemens Goldberg

My German is only good enough to gather the topic of conversation (the various keyboards used in Ms Schornsheim's omnibus recording of Haydn keyboard works), and the patina of articulate consideration, but not the gist of it.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 11, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 847 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt

November 12, 2013
Silvertone 131112 - Keith Eisenbrey

An experiment - overdubbing a Silvertone hollow-body directly through a Fostex MR8.

November 14, 2013
Mitchell 131114 - Keith Eisenbrey

Last weekend an acoustic guitar walked itself over to my house. I think it has a bad pickup, so my attempt to record directly to the MR8 resulted in some heavily distorted noises that I rather liked. The link will take you to one of three quick riffs I made with them.

Sonata in C (Partita) Hob.XVI:1 - Haydn - Keith Eisenbrey

I still have some work to do.