Playlist

Recorded

December 29, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 54 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - November 1985



Naches River, Washington - October 2013

Any sound is allowed. We choose sounds not usually associated with musical expression: conversation, body movement. Since these sounds are so strongly associated, both socially and biologically, with our quotidian living, it requires a significant mental stretch to hear them as anything but what they usually are. On the recording I hear a conversation, hear the sound of bodies moving, and their specificities as conversation and motion bring to mind, unbidden, an image of the speakers and an image of their bodies in a remembered space. In order to hear those recorded sounds as musical sounds, or as sounds-as-sounds, they must be shorn of these specificities and new specificities must be abstracted from what remains, or the old specificities must be actively and creatively transformed, literally beyond recognition. Until the ligature is crossed the quotidian deafens us.

Snohomish Piece 3 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, S. Eric Scribner

Visual perception, for me, whether direct, remembered, or imagined, obscures the musical. One of the strengths of recorded sound, as a medium, is its abstraction from the visual, however variously overpowering might be the mechanism of its own production. Nothing is, after all, purely abstract. Ritualized performance practice can offer a similar function. It has this worth precisely due to its familiarity. We've seen it before. We can ignore it now. And so it disappears. One only hopes the residue is music.

Sonata in G K.283 - Mozart - Alicia de Larrocha

Tempo and tone production are geared to a large space. Does this piece really live here?

January 1, 2014
Banned Sectional 17 KEENWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 1985

"To whatever extent the concept of a cutting edge is still relevant, it must be reserved for truly experimental ideas: those that run the risk of failure." - David Dunn: New Music America 1985, (News of Music, March 1986).



Naches River, Washington - October 2013

Once again I attempt to read and find no voice with which to read. Inflection doesn't help. Makes it worse, actually. Sinks the words deeper into their wordiness. The bare speaking voice is bland and thin. It is only in those moments when what Neal is doing to the reverberant and mechanically regurgitated sound space teases out unique inflections of my syllabic rhythm - against the walls or slamwhap up against its own past - that anything like a gratifying sound emerges. But for those few moments all else is forgotten. Failure in and of itself is no guarantee, but without its imminent threat there are no possibilities other than the prosaic.

January 2, 2013
Snohomish Piece 4 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner
Sonata in G K.283 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

With Mozart one could almost believe there is a precedent underlying harmonic text to it all, that both elegant Ursatz and multi-layered, densely cross-referenced prolongation sprang at once, fully formed and perfect, to his imagination. But it is more difficult to believe that he would have cared. The stronger image is of lyric flux from moment to moment: all parts balance, all parts are shapely, their balance as shapely as their shape is balanced. Part answers to part and segment to segment. The goal is to delight, not to arrive.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

Naches River, Washington - October 2013

December 30, 2013
Gradus 239 - Neal Meyer

Is 2, in sequence, the same manner of 2 as is 2 together? Is the difference of the different manner of 2 they could be the same manner of difference as the different manners of 2 persisting among sequences of 2 within groups of 3 or 4 or more and sequences of 2 alone? Is 2 2 ever? Or is 2 2 only accidentally, ephemerally?