Playlist

Preface

"Meaning and sound, as Nancy describes them, both share the same 'form, structure or movement': they are comprised of a series of infinite referrals, a sending-away which returns, only to be sent away again, ever anew. The return penetrates the sending, 'all simultaneously,' producing a dispersal of bounds and rebounds without end. This applies, for Nancy, equally to the actual physics of sonorous reverberation as well as to the infinite circulation of meaning and reference. Meaning and sound share the 'form, structure, or movement' of resonance." Brian Kane "On Reading Listening" - Open Space Magazine Issue 12/13 fall 2010/winter 2011

Texts

Live

Mud On My Bra!

February 24, 2017

Café Racer, Seattle

Mud On My Bra!

Merchant Mariner

The Snubs

What a great evening all around.

MOMB!'s jawdropping togetherness was a masterclass in perfect ensemble. It's more than technique, it requires a personal sympathy that can't be bought. I was seated around a corner from the stage so I couldn't see the whole band, but had a wonderful view of the drummer's expressively intelligent face, totally in it. MM spilled off the stage (seven people in a space that three makes tight). We were surprised and delighted to recognize an old friend from another part of our life playing violin. Hey there small world! TS wore masks like bandits and ripped out Black Flag-like song bursts. Good feeling all night. Thank you!

Recorded

February 19, 2017

Way Down Old Plank Road - Uncle Dave Macon [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

Attempting to answer the age old question: how many times can whoop-diddle-iddle-iddle-oo-bedop-day come up on a 3 minute banjo scrub?

Merchant Mariner - the electric ukelele player

I'll Be Satisfied - Bryant's Jubilee Quartet [from Goodbye Babylon]

An easily gracious a cappella phraseology, breath-based. The singers don't blend so much as give up just enough of themselves to allow the others space to do likewise.

Satisfied - J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers
[from Goodbye Babylon]

Same song slightly different feel. This one adds banjo and fiddle to provide a table for the singing to stand, and a commentary like wine to pace it.

The Star Spangled Banner - arranged by Stravinsky - London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas

MTT takes a broader tempo than Stravinsky's recording does, and eschews the chorus. Revealing of some truly sweet voice leading.

A Hundred Years From Today - Sarah Vaughan, Georgie Auld and His Orchestra [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

Suave take on a Shakespearean ploy (why wait? no one will care what you did). You can hear the expression of her eyes in the tang of her voice.

My Heart Belongs To Daddy - Charlie Parker [from Cole Porter Songbook]

And here you can hear the words CP is singing with his axe. He plays like a singer. Must have been listening to Sarah.

Lonely Avenue - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Arranged wth a capital A. RC sings like an instrument, articulating time spans with pitch-words.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) - The Tokens [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock &

The Snubs in masked action

Soul]

So close to yodeling you can smell the cowpoke camp smoke.

(I Know) I'm Losing You - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Putting it all together, strands wound strong as rope.

Baba O'Riley - the Who [from Who's Next]

New toys! Not just the synths but also the whole stadium filling hugeness of it. And yet the final instrumental could be a hoedown from anytime.

Frankie and Johnnie, Twenty Froggies Go To School - Margaret Kummett [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

Which is the more accurate memory device? Recordings or brains? When an elder pulls out songs sung in childhood the memory has been ripened, fermented, purified.

I Fall Down - U2 [from October]

A confessional. There is a hint of Ray Charles (see above) in the way he fits words to a note-y tune, almost like a mallet instrument here and there.

Note to reader: Cue up all of the above on whatever song performing software you have. You won't be sorry.

Banned Sectional 20 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer, January 1986

Using cheap consumer stereo gear to turn half the little house in Greenwood into a mailbox. Neal, still relatively new to Finnegans Wake, reads from it lickety split, on psalm tones. (Joyce: comic vocabulist, propounds an Eruditerad.) I am playing the mailbox room, at the end making a train with windups and feedback whistle. One of my finer moments if I do say so myself.

February 20, 2017

Fired Up - Moe Tucker, Lou Reed, Daniel Hutchens, Sonny Vincent, Brian Ritchie [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

What's left of the bare outline of song structure is pounded into submission, a massy pulp.

Banned Rehearsal 419 (Speakeasy Set #) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, March 1996

A roar gathers slowly in the high places. Bit of a blast fest at the sound-work shop. Hammering a plate of noise into shape (see MT, above). Big fat blobular trio of sax cornet electric guitar naked obesity || shh it's almost sleeping || Armor On! Now hold still! War Drums. Overpower the recording equipment (not a bad plan of attack). The pluckystrings help clean up what's left of the oily mess. Alarms sound, they're marching back to ecstatic dance village. It goes on too long several times over, each time worth the effort of going on too long again.

Jeremiah 17:5-8 (050517A) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

Recorded by Doug Haire at Jack Straw as part of the 2005 sessions in which we recorded all of my then existing Gathered Songs. This one seems stronger to me every time I hear it. A set of double variations, or perhaps of angled adumbrations on a lyrical habitat.

February 21, 2017

Roll Call - Aaron Keyt

Lift the rocks, show all that lurks there. Kick-ass untamable acidspitting malevolent staring glimeyes and unearthly Tierschrei. A curated bestiary. What DIY can lead to, given an actual aural sensibility. This is about as fabulously raw an hour of sound as I can remember.

Too Slow - Newton Armstrong - Mark Knoop [from Milton Babbitt, a Composers' Memorial]

A solid body called into presence by the gentlest of indications. here. here. and here.

Ivan Arteaga & Keith Eisenbrey 160202 A - Ivan Arteaga, Keith Eisenbrey, February 2016

We tell tales at each other.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 20, 2017

Gradus 307 170220 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

What if there were a way, equally methodical, of working through all the rhythmic/metric/dynamic/agogic combinations as well?

February 23, 2017

Your Mother Should Know Acoustic Demos - Karen Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Although they haven't been out and about for a while they have been working on songs old and new. Time to set up some microphones and record an acoustic demo of a bunch of songs. For the big boxed set.

Playlist

Recorded

February 12, 2017
Morris Clyfford - Arthur Margolin, J. K. Randall [from Inter/Play]

Two voices, call them Plain and Fancy, make attitudinal micro-adjustments to each other, each chomping at the bit to engage, but neither desiring the other to give up an inch of what they are. Dog bark in the next room joins the rhythm, and suddenly the co-agonists find themselves occupying a mutual corner. That's just about when the tape ran out.

Who We Hatin' Now, Mr. Reagan?- The Center for Disease Control Boys

Broad political comedy, mostly for each other.

One7 - John Cage - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Muttered in secret || DECLAIMED!

February 14, 2017
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

I love the quick-echo between the vocalists. Grooving on the texture of close-packed material.

Banned Rehearsal 608 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Spiral up incline slow vista shift toward intimate familiar || radio fog dissipates, as the.

Do the Stomp and Drag - Glorious Day [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

In punk-face: If you are treated like a zombie you may as well dance the dance.

Isaiah 6:1-5 - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [recorded at University Temple United Methodist Church, on December 21, 2014]

The recording linked above was done in the studio. The live version was recorded during the Offering, which adds a great deal of extraneous noise.

High Plains Drifter - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

The pages of this hand-scrawled book, a bit narrow for the lines, are full and generously so. The letters give each other room to sing.

February 16, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus 6 - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Two fugues crammed so tightly together that stray bits extrude suddenly into oddly contoured voids. Quartz in schist.

Menuet in D Major I and II Wq. 116/3 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Lighter than air, the glance into minor thrills, a mutual stillness.

Symphony in D Major (#96) - Haydn - Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer

What might break out into the open from within the polite.

Quartet in B-flat op. 130 - Beethoven - Amadeus Quartet

Gets going by never quite having been got going so that each :: place from which :: never is a place deflected || from this we persist || systemic flaws and their extensions

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 12, 2017

Ghosting Doubles (first) (after Amy Denio's "Ghosting") - midi realization

I had been working since late last year on the next part of a long project, an extension of my Etudes

d'execution imminent, and had gotten pretty far along on a hunk of sound generated by a pretty ferocious chart. When I heard Amy Denio's fabulous solo accordion piece, Ghosting, recently I immediately thought that I would use that as the basis, in some way, for the next part. But on Saturday I had, as Ben put it once, "a better idea", and the above is the first of three (?) sets of doubles upon her tune. For those with a quick ear, the middle voice in the above is a simple transcription of Amy's original. ("Ghosting", copyright Spoot Music, ASCAP, is used by kind permission of the composer.)

I rather like the bald, frill-less, un-finessed midi sound of this version, though I do plan on learning to play it myself as well.

February 13, 2017

Banned Telepath 54 Seattle 170213 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

February 15, 2017

Banned Telepath 54 Anchorage 170215 - Aaron Keyt

Banned Rehearsal 929 (170213-15) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Aaron's bit is a wonderful 19-second long Moog-App twiddle. Neal speaks of cabbages and death. Steve and I find a new way to torture the atomatone. Karen rings bells.

February 17, 2017

Partita - Benjamin Boretz - Keith Eisenbrey

Kingston Bridge, New York, ca 1982

I have been attempting to learn this piece of Ben's, composed in 1955, for decades now, on and off. This version, recorded yesterday morning, is a pretty good picture of how well I'm doing this time around. I think I could still fix some of the more egregious bits of rushing, and clean up a not-quite-together attack or two here and there, but beyond that I'm not sure I'll ever play it much better. It always has been just a bit past the limits of my available technique.

Playlist

Recorded

February 5, 2017
Der Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus V - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

Strenuous clarification: like ripping out brush.

Menuet I & II in C Wq. 116/15 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Exact.

Symphony in D Hob I:96 - Haydn - Academy of St. Martin-In-The-Fields, Neville Marriner

How very like a concerto this is, playing orchestral configurations off each other, punctuated by big tuttis that wipe the slate clean. Or: as asides, the tuttis act as interlinear translations of what is more politely said in the smaller ensembles. Or: How very like a machine of men Haydn's orchestra is!

February 7, 2017
Grosse Fuge in B-flat Op. 133 - Beethoven - Quartetto Italiano

Cramming the entire universe into a fugal frameworkspace, but the second subjects will have none of it. Dissonance flickers throughout like old movie aperture instability. Has anything ever sounded so busted up?

Brother Low Down - Bert Williams [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Occupying a middle ground between comedy act and musical act. Certainly leaning toward the music, but just as certainly not letting go of the shtick.

The Bible's True - Uncle Dave Macon [from Goodbye Babylon]

Bunny Berigan

Elbow room between voice and guitar. Unhurried whooping.

Wild Man Stomp - State Street Ramblers [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The tune ascends stepwise just only so far before whumping back in line.

Mama Don't Allow - Bunny Berigan [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Such a soft touch!

The Star Spangled Banner - arr. Stravinsky - CBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Fesitival Singers, Stravinsky [from The Original Jacket Collection]

Square shouldered and muscular. Clean lines and sturdy feet.

Something to Remember You By - Benny Carter [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The figuration is subservient to following the melody whither-so-ever it goes, breathed seamlessly from player to player.

February 9, 2017
Ezz-Thetic - Miles Davis, Lee Konitz [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Independently tethered to the same anchor. An arbitrary aesthetic completely worked out, the ultimate 'screw you'.

Jesse Belvin

Goodnight My Love- Jesse Belvin [from Original Oldies from the 50's vol. 13]

Fancier than it lets on to be, the voice is as controlled as Billie Stewart, but doesn't whip out the flash. Jesse is on top of the song's every twitch.

What'd I Say - Jerry Lee Lewis [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

I love the authoritative sound of the piano at the opening. Sitting tightly wadded at torso's end. Nothing gets out.

Ain't Too Proud to Beg - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Spacious enough to imagine that it goes on much longer than it does, as though it were merely a sample or advertisement for an experience we might have.

Fearless (Interpolating You'll Never Walk Alone) - Pink Floyd [from Meddle]

Sprawling, relaxed, whole.

An Alice Symphony - David Del Tredici - Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Oliver Knussen, Phyllis Bryn-Julson

(the orchestra tunes) (the singer says words) (the orchestra blats scenes) (we hear of cruelties) || the argument duly announced and duly made present. A hint of Peter and the Wolf in its film-cue characterizations. What is salutary: instruments playing their notes never transcend their actualities - until they do - and until they evaporate back into  (the orchestra tunes) (we understand absurdity as a form of cruelty) (we witness integrity violated).

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 6, 2017
Gradus 306 170206 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Stars blink on as though night appeared as dawn. Some constellations are habitations, distant or near. || the flooding waves ripple closer || dikes and levees permeate the ripples || reflexive co-infusion

Playlist

Live

January 28, 2017

Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

La Traviata - Verdi - Stefano Ranzani, conductor

My puzzlement at Verdi, and indeed at Italian opera in general, is of long-standing. Looking back at my attitude now that I am finally finding something interesting going on, I think I was simply misapprehending, or possibly not apprehending at all, the particular point of view of the musical material, as an aspect of the drama, that is in play. Here there is neither Wagner's Romantic embedding of the drama within a symphonic structure, nor Mozart's Enlightenment era arch-ironical puppet master as a musical narrator. Instead the orchestra serves as a kind of scaffolding to support a close first-person that exists almost entirely within the sung melody. Nothing exists for the music except the expression of the line as it unfolds.

There was some discussion bandied about concerning the stripped down production. Apparently the orchestra was reduced from Verdi's scoring, and perhaps there were some cuts made. Any of these can be easily remedied (for my own purposes) by simply finding a reasonable recording for later study. For my part I have no musical complaints at all about what I heard that night. The set consisted of lighting and several layers of curtains. There might have been a chair or two, but I may be confusing that with the chairs and tables at Seattle Shakespeare Company's two-evening, production of the Henry VI plays (with an all female cast), Bring Down the House, which we saw on the Thursday before and the Thursday after. I thought the curtains were attractive, thoughtfully used, and ambiguous enough to evoke all sorts of pertinent things. Mostly they didn't get in the way of or distract from the music, for which I am personally grateful.

Recorded

January 31, 2017

beneath the ground - Infamous Menagerie

industrial lasers cutting

blocks of mineral

as light

on film

Banned Rehearsal 418 (Speakeasy Set 1) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, March 1996

morning after the May 2001 fire

Just shy of 12 years into our shared history we played two sets at the Speakeasy Café in Belltown. This is the first of them. It has never been about playing well, but that if we were invested enough in our listening, then making any sound would speak true.








February 2, 2017

Aku (aged tape) - Keith Eisenbrey

Oh the memories! In 1980/81 at the University of Washington I was studying with John Rahn, who, at that time, had just produced a piece on the Department of Experimental Musicology's new Synclavier. I'm not sure how it was all worked out, but somehow I managed to get quite a bit of time on it during Winter Quarter. I devised an elaborate chart, based on a series of eight digits, and wound up with a 30 minute, 8 part monstrosity of an electronic piece. I remember that it was while I was transferring the charts to notation, pages strewn all over the room, that my brother came upstairs to tell me that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

In order to realize it exactly I had calculated the timing of each "take" so that it could be recorded separately, at a slow tempo, and could be played easily without error. My friend Christopher Mehrens, whom I had met in middle school at various city-wide piano competitions, helped with this process. I don't remember how many hours it took, but I do remember we often had to wait 20 minutes or more for the first note to be played. I also remember going to a computer store, which was quite the novelty back then, in order to purchase a "floppy disk", my very first. At the end of the process I ended up with a reel-to-reel tape which was my clean master.

Pete Comley instructing a camel

I made a cassette copy right away, and then kept the master tape. As the years went by, and digital recording at home began to exist, I became acquainted with Pete Comley, who had both a working reel-to-reel tape deck and a DAT. In May of 2001, with high hopes of once again having a pristine image of the sound, we pushed play and record and waited for vintage synclavier sound to emerge. It is difficult for me to describe the combination of delight and dismay when I heard what time's deterioration had worked on that tape. Apparently tape stock from that era was notoriously unstable. It was partly stuck to itself, causing the 30 minute piece to stretch out to almost 40. The wobble is woozily wonderful. Most of one track didn't make it over the record head, and my intricately designed digital patches were converted to awesome shrieks. Later I overdubbed a version of my text-sound composition Confessions of a Polyphonist, and called the result Ms. Found in a Bottle, after Poe, of course.

Even later I transcribed the whole thing in midi. Not synclavier to be sure, but looking back on it, my particular patches were no great shakes to begin with, at least not compared to what time and neglect could accomplish with a physical medium. Analog takes revenge, and how sweet it is.

Banned Rehearsal 694 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer, January 2006

Early on we invented a word for sessions like this: 'sedatory'. Snorish, trajectorizing away from energy increase. Gentle, domestic - crib play. Time-biding. It takes a long time settling, and settling is all it does. Could be a long preamble to set up the wicked xylophone entrance about 20 minutes in. This requires patience.

in memoriam M. B. - Andrew Mead - Maria Sampen, violin [from Milton Babbitt, a composers' memorial]

Golly. This is truly, truly lovely.

Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 B - Ivan Arteaga, Keith Eisenbrey

Playfully poking, right up to the end, where some quiet place, gracefully turned, is revealed.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 30, 2017

Gradus 305 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Rich Trove struggling to cross Vast Emptiness. Pushing, spreading, expanding, more inexorably than the possibility of measuring. // Delving, pushing down against buoyancy.

Unfortunately the recording device ran out of memory 28 minutes into this 40 minute session. Bother!

Playlist

Recorded

January 21, 2017
Carolina Shout- James P. Johnson [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

James P. Johnson

the dancer and the bard
the arms and the legs
earth's bind and weightlessness

Sail Away Lady - "Uncle Bunt" Stephens [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

A fiddle tune doing that check in with the open string thing fiddle tunes do.

I'll Lead a Christian Life - Elder Golden P. Harris [from Goodbye Babylon]

Fiddlevoice: holding it in the mask exactly static, high in the sinuses, even when at the bottom of the tune.

Romeo and Juliet (supplement) - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juraitis

I guess these might be the parts of the project that wouldn't fit back in the box. A melody is a piece of magic. How could one not believe in magic, given melody?

Rockin' Chair - Roy Eldridge, Graham Young, Torg Halten, Norman Murphy, Babe Wagner, Jay Kelliher, John Grassi, Mascagni Ruffo, Sam Listengart, Sam Musiker, Walter Bates, Milton Raskin, Ray Biondi, Buddy Bistien, Gene Krupa [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

Snare drum finds a place to sidle in.

(I Wanna Go Where You Go) - Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra

Clarinet, with a long pointy finger, picking at the spots just after the moments where the realization of a moment occurs.

Bud Powell

Dusky and Sandy - Bud Powell - [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

If one imagines a stepped dynamic universe (pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff) as an even metric, like a steady beat of increase, the dynamics in this are in a syncopated relation to those steps.

Etudes for String Orchestra - Frank Martin - L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet

Lights are on all over the house. What is thought but the play of lights on all over the house? Europe's rowdiest orchestra at the top of their form.

Gypsy Woman - The Impressions [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Rising repeatedly from narrative to rhapsody.

January 24, 2017
I Can't Turn You Loose - Otis Redding [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

A slow harmonic rhythm with intricately fiddly internal articulative rhythms. The instrumentals define a solid long sequence, ellipsing around the big motions in orbital metrical flow.

Clarinet Solo - [unknown concert waltz recorded ca. 1971] - Paul Eisenbrey, JoAnne Deacon

From my mom's archives, a tape of my brother playing a solo concert waltz (with cadenza!) in about 1971.

Hambone - The Phillips Wonders [from The Art of Field Recording, volume 1]

that ol' bo' diddly, all done by hand clapping, collapsing in laughter.

Lover's Walk - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

Narrow bounds. Nothing will escape.

Banned Sectional 05 KEE AK 860103 - Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, January 1986

Eschewing anything flagrant. Notes played regular, lists spoken as decided. Hanging in there, unflamboyant.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 23, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 928 170123 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


January 26, 2017
Entracte (170126) - Keith Eisenbrey

I wrote this little (17 bars of 4/4) piano duet in about 2000. My idea was that others could write
independent but equally sized duets so that the parts could be mixed and matched. Neal bit, sort of, but playing his "Piano Fore-Heads" with anything else was perversely impossible. Gavin Borchert came through and we played the various combinations toward the latter part of Polestar's presence. The recording of our performance is, alas, not in my collection. I made this dubbed recording yesterday.

Playlist

Recorded

January 14, 2017
I Fought The Law - Bobby Fuller Four [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Nice triplets in there. I love the dipthong on "law", curling back on itself as though hitting resistance. Almost appropriate: Karen and I recently watched "I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", which has some truly amazing sound events in it, as well as a fascinating view of the connection between the penal system and slavery.

Samuel Barber

Prayers of Kierkegaard - Samuel Barber - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Schenck

The solid tonal sensibility loses grip in places, it works to break free, struggling slowly, manages to unsettle the more settled.

John, I'm Only Dancing - David Bowie [from Changes One]

Technically perfect song-writing. The voice pushes at the instrumentals, as though it were trapped in their cage.

You Better You Bet - The Who [from Face Dances]

Postural pullback, only to return to full frontal, hiding the low point of tenderness from prying eyes. Or letting it hang.

Violin Concerto - Henri Lazarof - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Yukiko Kamei

Icy spreads its arms and twists 

acrobatique 

aerialesque 

orchestral circus stage 

big top fire breathing peril 

here come the clowns sardonic 

self regarding self 

chatty nervous

Janaury 16, 2017
Adagio (3rd Movement from 11th Symphony) - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

Triumphal weariness, as settling to the ocean floor's deepest trench, through its subtle gradations of dark.

Good Things - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Held close, stiffly still, simmering under pressure.

Work Architecture Unity And The ("17 Crags" 010511) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Second go at it. A sense of enforced singularity of event, severing any particular participant's interest or curiosity. Salutary to the extent we find a way to do what we always do but spread over thinner space. Or: an exercise in leaving space so that we can't always fall into the always-going-on-ness, leaving space for sharper corners?

Judith Shatin

Homemade Music - Judith Shatin [from Open Space 21]

Intervals Between Events: A Study.
Intersections of sets of distances between events as motivic cells. Clearly, so as to index the sets.

The Dancer - Patrick Marland [from Hendrix Uncovered]

Easily lovely. the bass is subtly amped, close the fingerboard.

January 17, 2017
Finnegans Wake Chapter 1.3 - Steve Gregoropoulos [from Waywords and Meansigns]

Spoken with attitude. 'scuse, with AttiTude. The music allowed to attempt to overpower, the vocal imitating the lingo of partisan journalism. Drunken sbrawling squalities. Text just one ring of a circus co-occupied by dueling Captain Beefheart Impersonators, infiltrated by multiple iterations of the Chaotic Noise Marching Corps. Babble of neverending political speech. Each music change: to enter a new room.

January 19, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus V - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

How they do crowd upon each other! At the end (and this is frequent in these fugues) there is the sense of "OK, now we're ready to really dive in, now that the preliminaries are over."

Alla Polacca in C Major Wq. 116/4 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

The purpose of ornamentation is to skew counting, to turn tables on the concept of number. These little pieces are about meter in a way that little else is again until Chopin's Mazurkas.

Symphony in E-flat Major (#76) - Haydn - Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

It is not simply that he moves in the unexpected way (surprise!) but that he gauges each unexpectedness so carefully, veering just so far along the circle of fifths, just so much further at the structural hingepoints: Where we have gotten to determines the depth and yaw of the veer. The slow movement has a focus that allows a huge dynamic range (a model for Schubert's late sonatas?) Then an extra fancy last movement.

Ave Verum Corpus - Mozart - University Temple Chancel Choir, Keith Eisenbrey, director, Howard Wolvington, organ

Last Fall our choir director, Chris Vincent, was in Italy and kindly allowed me to take the choir for a few weeks. He even let me conduct this justly famed anthem from late in Mozart's short life, for which I remain ever so thankful. What a pleasure! Listening one becomes so rapt that it is not until it winds down into the cadential trill that one realizes what a ride one has been on. A bit like life that way.

Sonata in A-flat Major Op. 110 - Beethoven - Rudolf Serkin

An earnest attempt to clearly play what is clearly there. He makes some interesting connections among the tempi in the fugal bits.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 16, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 927 170116 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Aaron is back from the far north for a few weeks. Hurrah!

Playlist

Preface

"And lady stardust sang his songs
Of darkness and disgrace"

David Bowie, "Lady Stardust" The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Texts

Live

January 8, 2017

Star Anna & Synergia NW Orchestra perform Ziggy Stardust

Neptune Theatre, Seattle

My introduction to David Bowie was his amazing performance of "Life on Mars" and "Ashes to Ashes" on The Tonight Show in 1980. Scary Monsters is still, for me, the gold standard of all things Bowie. As I write these words I had to find the clip online to listen. 37 years ago. Still a knockout.

Star takes back orange hair

Being somewhat obsessive about collecting music, under the general theory that if I like one thing somebody does I'll probably like everything, I quickly amassed most of the existing vinyl releases. Ziggy, of course, came up early on, and its iconic status is easy to understand on several levels. The song writing is strong throughout, and though the musicianship is as superb as one expects from DB he hasn't yet got to the point where the image of hyper-professionalism is so upfront as to be a smokescreen. This, as intricately thought out as it is, is personal. My interest, at the time, was mostly in the clockwork of his performance - in how each line is sung as though from an entirely different persona, the lyrics not spelling out a clear narrative but acting more like a scrapbook, each song being a page of scattered thoughts / quotes / comments / overheard conversations and the like. There is no single voice that talks to us, but a multitude of voices, most of them, it would seem, not Bowie's, but ours.

Until, that is, at the end of "Rock and Roll Suicide", he reaches out his hand to those voices, most of them ours, in what may be pop music's most sincere attempt at rescue.

Star Anna's voice sits a little lower than DB's, and she chose not to take some of the higher full power notes, but on a few remarkable occasions she moved to a light high falsetto that took my gasp away. (More please.) She also chose to use her prodigious vocal charisma to bind all the disparate voices that Bowie commanded into single, extraordinarily rich and supple presence. By her own admission she had been working toward this performance for the last 24 years. It showed. This was personal. This was for family. For all of us in the road of salvation, we have each other.

She gathered a fine orchestra, warmed us up with a short set of her own, and followed the album's tracks with encores, including "Changes" and "Rebel Rebel". The costumes were great. My phone pictures from the Neptune's balcony only capture the glow.

Recorded

January 10, 2017

I Guess I'll Have to Dream the Rest- Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra

Sleep and dream as a stand-in for sexual surrender, played from the outside. Teasing by accusing the teased of teasing. Kind of a dicky move Frank.

Hollywood Hi Hat - Tommy Dorsey [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In its light tight staccato, a precursor to James Brown.

Early Spring - Miles Davis, The Metronome All Stars [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Everybody checks in with a quick solo. Is it just me or had Miles heard a little Tommy Dorsey in his day?

January 12, 2017

Ooby Dooby - Roy Orbison [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

A question for my sound engineer friends: Was the fingerboard of the upright bass mic'd separately? Is that the clicky sound I'm hearing that more or less tracks the rhythm section? What is that?

Rotate the Body in All Its Planes - Harry Partch - Freda Pierce, John Garvey

No effort is made to obscure the fact of its assemblage, in production, from individually recorded snippets, discrete sets of moments. I am reminded of J. K. Randall's recording of his some old troubador songs collected from around 1200 with interludes, including his in your face low-fi announcements of the titles.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 9, 2017

Banned Telepath 53 In Flight 010917

Banned Telepath 53 Seattle 010917

Banned Telepath 53 Tucson 010917

Banned Rehearsal 926 010917 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer (Seattle); Steve Kennedy (Tucson); Aaron Keyt (In Flight)

A first! Sound from midair!