Playlist

Live

 

February 16, 2014

Canals of Venice

Hoax Foot

Pouch

Skylark Café, Seattle

 

Oh what a difference an excellent sound system and engineer can make! The last time we heard Pouch the vocals were completely buried. Liberated by the transparent balance at Skylark, it is especially gratifying to at last be able to hear how strong Sean's vocals have become (or always were for all I know). The sine qua non is still a shredding scream, but a whole range of more moderate techniques now anchor that in supple perspective.

 

Hoax Foot was playing their first show, and they were properly stoked. Excellent stage chemistry and rousing Ramones-y drive. Eager to hear more from these two.

 

This time around Canals of Venice, due to their odd-ball instrumental mix (no drums, viola, cello, upright bass, guitar, and a guest trumpet), struck me as a kind of chamber music or theater pit version of Fairport Convention - but hailing from some backwater European province that is somehow exactly like here. The lead singer, with his huge tenor voice and superb technique is a Seattle gem.

 

Thanks for the cupcakes!

 

February 21, 2014

21st Century Cello!

Seattle Modern Orchestra, with Séverine Ballon, cello; Julia Tai, conductor

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

Chant for solo cello - Jonathan Harvey

Musique pour Séverine - Jeremy Jolley

Petals for solo cello - Kaija Saariaho

Ricercare una melodia for solo cello and electronics - Jonathan Harvey

IRE, concerto for cello, strings and percussion - Rebecca Saunders

 

The cult of virtuosity values what is difficult. Progress values what is new. At their intersection within musical culture they amplify each other, giving rise to a music emphatically un-doable-ourselves and narrowly explorative of so-called extended techniques. Now I admit to digging the music on this show - in IRE  I heard the wild highways of an alien future, gizmos and contraptions whizzing by at speeds unimaginably various, every moment a new propellant - but I can't help wondering if the newness of it is a veneer over concert music tried and true, and if the performers take too much of the difficulty of it upon themselves, leaving us with little to do but drop our jaws and envy.

 

Recorded

 

February 15, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 58  - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

We were preparing for a concert in January of 1986, and this was a run-through of the 'Sudden Song' portion. That's right. This was one of the few BR sessions that was an actual rehearsal.

 

Gradus 185 - Neal Meyer - December 2010

 

The first part (A-naturals 2, 4, 6, and 8) has a built-in constraint: without contortions it isn't possible to play more than two notes at the same time. The second part (A-naturals 2, 4, 7, and 8) emphasizes the big gap between 2-4 and 7-8.

 

February 17, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 59 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - December 22, 1985

We meet Aaron at the airport and drive to Lake City. Later Karen and I admit to having fallen for each other.

Extracts 10 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

February 20, 2014

Banned Sectional 4 AKNWM - Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

No matter how much noise is made, the system noise rules.

 

Extracts 11 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

A common trope of musical analysis is to draw circles around groups of notes. "These go together in the same way that these others go together." One can then trace the path of whatever has been selected through the passage in question. This project started with just the sort of analytical idea that might have spawned such an activity. I opined that Scriabin's Prelude op. 74 #4 might be profitably considered as based on the (0,3,4,7) type tetrachord. But I wondered what it would sound like if, first of all, only a specific transposition of that tetrachord were audible. In other words, instead of drawing circles around groups of notes I simply eliminated all the notes that weren't part of that tetrachord and played all the notes that were. Since there are twelve unique transpositions this could be done twelve times. Then I wondered what two such tetrachordal extractions would sound like conjoined. Midi made this possible without much fuss. There are twelve Extracts altogether - one for each transpositional relation of two tetrachords.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 17, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 853 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Meyer

 

Upcoming

 

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 



Herocat

Playlist

Recorded

 

February 9, 2014

The Loft - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer, and the kids and staff of The Loft - December 1985

 

In 1985 Anna was working at a residence for middle-school age boys suffering various social displacements, and she arranged for us to visit with our two sturdy microphones, a tape player, and a selection of noise makers. We gave a brief spiel, handed out the goods, and let'r rip. And rip it certainly did. Banging, pounding, shrieking, yelling, singing - all manner of adolescent unleashment. I was so excited by the whole experience that when I got home I wrote a rather giddy letter about it to Ben Boretz, which was eventually published in News of Music (Fall 1985 Spring 1986). Among the details I had forgotten was, oddly enough, a full-throated beer-hall-exuberant rendition of O Holy Night.

Maple Leaf - 2013

 

Banned Rehearsal 783 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Adrien Kosaly-Meyer, Neal Meyer - December 2010

 

An aurally rich holding pattern: drums, rolling tinies, clarinet, Wurlitzer, guitar. Assertions and fallings back. Sounds are chosen, but not chosen as to each other, their as-to-each-other is discovered, attempted, ventured on the fly. A delicate place finds the end.

 

Banned Sectional 19  KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

Recorded (I believe) in Neal & Anna's apartment on Brooklyn Avenue. Small percussion and an electro-hum that varies. Rhythm: one strand steady-ish, in regions; the other more varied; though each will stop for times. I spoke a text from my Intermezzo V - later Neal singsongs a text like looking at the water :: tiled acoustics :: making song bubbles. The funkiness of the recording quality is a predominant qualifier of the received sound, rendering what we actually do (the lost sound of the actual live session itself) unimportant except in so far as it changes the sound the recording mechanism is making of it. Neal: "I'm gonna go lookin' / somewhere else than here / can't find my nose / can't find my head / ain't gonna need them / when I'm dead / so I'm gonna go lookin' / somewhere else than here"

 

Chemical Clock - Ray Larsen, Cameron Sharif, Mark Hunter, Evan Woodle

 

vidgame synth quick progjazz angular tunes: what sticks is the texture of the melody, rather than it's specific pitch-contour.

 

February 10, 2014

Banned Telepath 5 Berkeley - Aaron Keyt - December 1985

 

pencil drumming on microphone

all space is squished up close

weight and elasticity in your face

now fingers-slap wrist drumming

immediate surmise of mechanism of production

shifting position and placement of objects

where in relation to the microphone

is the impact zone

turns the page - studying? suddenly clearly off-hand

about face

a voice! "Hi" whispered

pitched sound rubber band?

a shoving across a surface :: weight and texture

set on a machinery (a heater?) whirring like a fan with an overlay of flying saucer hum

layered with finger drumming (for context)

lasts long enough to find the limn between the prosaic and the mysterious

as though it were a ship's engine in midocean from belowdecks churning us who knows where

water sounds intrude through the image of a distant hull or:

a sound in four layers: deep steady hum, low but higher thrumming, surface rattle, and a far distant helicopteric flange

a sneeze and a furniture bump

the machine is turned off

"good night."

 

February 11, 2014

Duopoly - Bruce Hamilton and friends

 

Each track is insular, enclosed, tight to the ear, roiling in place, moving only slightly. Shifting body weight counts as major transformation - or a static camera captures a corner of a storm-shaken bough. Atmosphere is the message. Explicit. A sound is itself and never an implication.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 10, 2014

Figure Study 8 140210 - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

 

Neal couldn't make it for Gradus, but the piano needed playing anyway.

 

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Playlist

Live

February 6, 2014

Seattle Improvised Music Festival

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

Matt Ingalls, clarinet

 

Flatfooted figurations gradually gouged pounded beaten scraped squeezed throttled and elsewise desperately distressed into outer stratosphere. It comes across like manic tone and tonguing medicine: play this twice every morning and call me in a week.

 

Joe Morris, Bill Horist, Jeffrey Taylor, guitars

 

Deference to each other's distinct approach.

 

Matt Ingalls, Paul Hoskin, Beth Fleenor, Jenny Ziefel, clarinets

 

By the time we got to this set I was so zapped out my notes are nearly blank: machine-y creaks out.

 

There is a shared assumption here that the purpose of Improvised Music is to display or demonstrate individual virtuosity, not just as the raw skill of producing amazing sounds but also as the imaginative invention of technique and as the profoundly sensitive listening required to play happily with others. I have no complaints on that score - everybody on stage was fabulous - but I do note that this isn't the only way to think about what one might do with an improvisational mind-set, and that this approach fits more comfortably into the concert-music world or club-music world than it might care to admit. I'm not pointing fingers here, the vast bulk of my own musical work has imbedded within it similar assumptions.

Recorded

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 782 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 2010

 

one draws a constant line

one seeks a change

one works a thing

February 4, 2014

Seven Last Words - Thedore Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

 

From my mom's archive. A motorcycle roars by outside a different past than that of the music.

 

Sudden Songs Rehearsal - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

Neal's got new shoes and three songs: The Picture On My Wall, I Can't Get Out, and It Hurts.

 

Greenwood 1985

Gradus 184 - Neal Meyer

 

The game is to keep the resonance afloat, aloft, like a balloon chase. The treble is a signal through fog or interplanetary void. The activity here is so completely absorbed in its own doing as to be utterly unrelated to music as a projected image. In exactly the sense that otherwise any other music positions itself rhetorically as music, this music doesn't.

February 5, 2014

O Holy Night - unknown arrangement - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

Flying Upside Down - Ken Medema

 

Among the many problems with this music is that it tries to be so many things without managing to really hit any of them. As a pastiche of particular pop-styles it comes across as phoned-in and lame, and as the theatrical projection of a preacher it is distinctly substandard. Bob Dylan has the hellfireandbrimstone shtick locked up tight, and Springsteen's channeling of Sister Amy can't be touched. Ken doesn't stand a chance.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 852 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Playlist

Live

 

January 25, 2014

Rigoletto - Verdi - Seattle Opera

McCaw Hall, Seattle

 

In Wagner the particulars of drama unfold within a globally applied expressive affect. There is not a moment in which the musical material does not reflect and deepen the mythical import of the whole story, beginning middle and end, in all its interleaved and cross-woven layers, as if viewed from a godlike perch on high. From the first note it is clear what it always has been and always will be.

 

In Verdi the affect of the music is entirely inside the singing characters. The music (except for the marvelous brief prelude) only knows what the characters know, only feels what the characters feel. It's taken me more than 30 years, but I think I'm finally beginning to get it.

 

Recorded

 

January 27, 2014

Blood and Fire, Hallelujah - Keith Eisenbrey

 

Recorded live at a concert Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and I presented at The Chapel Performance Space in November of 2010. This composition project was a long time in progress and changed a great deal from the original conception to this performance. One aspect of it that I like a great deal is how problematic it still is for me - especially in terms of what exactly it is. It behaves a bit like a concerto for piano and electronic orchestra, except the piano and the canned part don't interact so much as beat each other up. In that sense it becomes a forum in which I work out a personal struggle between sound-board sound and speaker sound, between mechanically amplified personal energy and an electronically amplified sound file. It also comes across, I think, as an allegory of disintegration, war, and grace.

 

Keyboard Sonata in E-flat Major Hob.XVI:38 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

The first movement is the best vaudeville drunk act ever.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Greenwood - Keith Eisenbrey - November 1985

 

Discipline: fill an expanse of time with sound. Use guitar, singing, talking, and chanting.

 

ain't no way to walk in the city

snow on the ground

 

walk down the street

by the river that you meet

 

green fingers on the floor

 

that part of what I still see

when my eyes are closed

 

 

January 28, 2014

Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler - Neal Meyer

 

Also recorded live at the same show mentioned above.

 

Keyboard Sonata in G Major Hob.XVI:39 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

Starts like Polonius giving advice. But what it keeps coming back to are intricate preparations to arrive somewhere, sets of arrows deflected, reflected, and inflected, punctuated by astonishingly rare moments of stasis, moments of actually being somewhere.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Bickleton - Anna K, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - November 1985

 

We start in a house, a radio is playing in a distant room. We take a walk in the snow to an even quieter room where there is a great deal of typing and a space-heater.

 

Figure Study 5 - Keith Eisenbrey - November 2010

 

A solo piano improvisation. While keeping one ear firmly planted at the center, slowly and methodically twisting myself around.

 

January 30, 2014

Fantasia in c minor K.475 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

 

An interesting performance. I remain unconvinced. The forte / piano contrast at the opening is understated, in order (I suppose) to make the slow / fast contrast more effective by making it also about forte and piano. The effect in the end just oversimplifies the dramatic dialogue. The tempo during the slow bits is very slow indeed - hyper-romanticized, as though profundity were being inflicted upon it. Surely there is plenty there already. Pretending it's late Schubert doesn't really help.

 

Recorder Studies - Keith Eisenbrey - December 1985

 

I have always been fascinated by the music made in the midst of working out music. Not improvisation in the performance sense, but rather the sound of the work shop. One evening in early December of 1985 I was writing a recorder quintet and wanted to work out fingerings and tunes and such. I turned on the tape machine and worked at it for an hour and a half. Then I put the two 45' sides on top of each other and pretty much forgot about it until it came up for listening this week. 

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 28, 2014

Fox Spit 140128 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

I improvised for a few minutes on this beautiful guitar that my brother Paul made.

 

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle