Playlist

Live

April 6, 2013
The Holy
Red Ribbon
Acapulco Lips
No Rey
The Josephine, Seattle

The recorded literature that is rock & roll now stretches back many decades, and encompasses a huge variety of styles and attitudes. There are, consequently, myriad paths by which current celebrants can trace their self-inventions, and many stylistic locales in which to set up shop. It's great to go to a show like this and hear four very different thoughts about what a worthy endeavor might be.  

The Holy is a stripped down trio of drums, bass, and guitar/vocal driving down the center of hard and fast. It's all about gut-punch and tight corners. Between them, as a collective, they convene a remarkable drummer.

Red Ribbon steadfastly declines to round-off their songs. When it is over it is over and it stops without a fuss. If the paint drips, so it does. This isn't the artful fragmentation of a Schumann song-cycle - it doesn't spin your head into the next song so much as it allows the interior of the song into conversation with the house.

Acapulco Lips, aside from having a great name, is a lively power-pop group that sounded to me like what a sock-hop would be like if we had those now.  Loads of fun.


No Rey is a polished ensemble with a set of intricately arranged, perfectly balanced songs. As befits their apparent maturity (they were the only band of whom I could be reasonably confident that the sum of any two of their ages would be greater than mine) they are finding their way into a larger world, reaching back a little further into their roots.

April 12, 2013
Save as . . . new electronic music by Tom Baker
Poncho Theater, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

Tom Baker: theremin, fretless guitar, live-electronics
Corrie Befort: dancer and filmmaker
Julio Lopez: violin
William Smith: cello
Natalie Lerch: soprano
Gretchen Conrad: soprano
Michael Monhart: saxophone, electronics
Greg Campbell: percussion, french horn, electronics

Prelude Music
Imaginary Aphorisms
Traces: Nellie
Holos
Sagamihara
Triptet

Years ago Sarah Johnson wrote in News of Music, concerning Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."), "not inside a bordered thing and not itself with borders, but the universe without suggestion of an outside". And it is exactly the senses in which there is an outside, an other, and where that outside, that other, is, that makes these musics so fascinating. It is tapped into, as one might find a realm of radio signals. It is extracted with painstaking care, as one might search for a particle in a bubble chamber. It is created from within itself, as though the inside's idea of the outside bore fruit. This music makes spaces. They invade, open up, slide in, descend upon, leak through, permeate.

This concert was too full of riches to call out each here, but special mention must be made of the costume Corrie wore in the second of the Imaginary Aphorisms. It was hilarious, obscene, terrifying, completely alien and absolutely human all at once - morbid self-consciousness embodied. Completely brilliant.

Recorded
April 9, 2013
Banned Couple 9 - Banned Rehearsal

In Session At The Tintinabulary

April 8, 2013
Gradus 223 - Neal Meyer

April 11, 2013
Boundary
Your Mother Should Know

Upcoming

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.

Toward the contemplation of a pitch stereoscope: two frameworks, joined at the source, phased (in specious increments), mutually warped, rounding space.

Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano