Playlist

Coming Up This Week

Banned Rehearsal Reduced to Essence

Friday February 22, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Banned Rehearsal at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

"Let's try a session playing instruments we don't know how to play." This simple suggestion in June of 1984 among three newly re-united musicians wrought an improvisational project of uncommon longevity and abundance. Nearly 29 years along, and with 829 recorded and numbered sessions behind us, we are still not entirely sure what we are doing. Charter members Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer will be joined by long-time collaborator Karen Eisenbrey, and by our recent adoptee Steve Kennedy in an evening of noise and exploration. Having persisted these several decades happily in private workshop mode, the February 22 event will be the group's first public performance since 1997.

Recorded

February 10, 2013
PC KEE 001111 "Bells for Lost City" - Pete Comley, Keith Eisenbrey - (November 2000)

The Kingsbury in its natural environment

Pete wanted to use some of the sounds available at the Tintinabulary in a composition project, so he came over and recorded while we half improvised half demonstrated various items. Pete divvied up his recording into 7 tracks, each featuring certain groups of sounds. The first couple of tracks were mostly bells, gongs, and tam tams. After that there were some rattles and janglies, a flute with clang and taptik, a drum, and a penny whistle with a host of toys. A challenge for me in this project, and one which I overcame only fitfully, is my disinclination to leave sounds be. My background in improvisation is to regard the process as another mode of composition and so if I play a sound I am immediately thinking how to skew and transform it. But here, to a certain extent, the idea was to record a sample track that would be malleable to composition at a later time rather than to create a unique and solid timespan.

But for the last track Pete let me loose on the piano, and the result is quite nice. There are a couple of audio issues resulting from Pete's risky improvised microphone placement running afoul of a sudden dynamic accent, but other than that he made the old Kingsbury sound pretty amazing. I am about as pleased with my compositional/improvisational thought as I have ever been.

February 11, 2013
Gradus 85 - Neal Meyer - (September 2005)

Silence generously applied confounds ratio and number.

February 12, 2013
Gradus 181 - Neal Meyer - (August 2010)

A huge dynamic range, the correspondence among which are not just those of impact to impact, but also envelope to impact and envelope to envelope.

Prelude in E-flat Major - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

A sudden staccato passage, crazy chromatics, dissonances voiced inimitably. The more I hear of Weiss the more ecstatic I am to have found him.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 11, 2013
Gradus 221 - Neal Meyer

The substance into which these pebbles are dropped and poked and fired can be pulled into various tautnesses by the dampers: now a liquid, now a gel, now a sheet of iron. The hissy halo of sound co-opted the whorling roar of a jet - distance and trajectory united in a luscious noise.

Upcoming

Friday February 22, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Banned Rehearsal at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
See top of post.

Saturday May 4, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey and Neal Meyer at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Music for solo piano:
Eisenbrey: Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano