Playlist

Live

January 17, 2015
Tosca - Puccini - Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

My new working theory of listening to Puccini: everything you hear is a cinematic close-up, hence the hothouse claustrophilia.

January 23, 2015

Karen in rock'n style

Dead Bars
Your Mother Should Know
Can You Imagine
Tom Price Desert Classic
Highline, Seattle

We'll start with the self descriptions:
Dead Bars: "distortion, melody, and playing fast"
Your Mother Should Know: "rock & roll dreamtime"
Can You Imagine: "anachronistic  new wave, girl-group pop and punk"
Tom Price Desert Classic: "pretty loud, w/yelling"

Aside from being a great line-up, this was the album release party for Your Mother Should Know's debut album Rocks and Glass ($7 to download at Bandcamp), and so a bit of history is in order. YMSK consists of my long-time collaborator and brother-in-law Neal Kosály-Meyer and his sister (and my spouse) Karen Eisenbrey. Neal met Steve Fisk (now the keyboard player of Can You Imagine, and well known in the music business as a producer) during his stint at Central many decades ago, at some point even convincing his other sister, Yvonne, to hire Steve's band to play the Bickleton HS prom. In the early '80s, at about the time I met Neal, he had joined forces with Karen and Yvonne to form a band, The PK's, that was all the rage of their living room (famous for sofas around!). Yes Neal, I have the recordings.

This is the second time that YMSK has followed Dead Bars on a bill. The first time being DB's first show at the Comet in March of 2013. This is also the second time they have been on a bill with Tom Price Desert Classic, having previously joined them at the High Dive last April.

Recorded

January 17, 2015
Night Music - Stan Brakhage

Each go-round, and it does go round, this 35 second film is a bit longer, a bit deeper, a bit more lovely. I watched it about six times.

Study 50 - Conlon Nancarrow [from Lost Works Last Works]

More and more I find that Nancarrow is less and less about sheer play-ability than about precision - about the exact color of when.

The juxtaposition of Brakhage and Nancarrow highlights a common element of their work. Each of them has endeavored to scrape the barnacles of collaboration from their respective medium, accepting a tedious work process as the price of liberation from compromise.

January 22, 2015
Wabi - Robert Morris - Margaret Kampmeier [from Open Space 14]

Waves of shifting and out-of-phase senses of momentum create interference patterns in a realm of perception otherwise unimagined. It is as though we are discovering a form of cognitive sub-harmonics. Any moment is believable as start, or midst, or end.

I had listened to this piece back in 2002, at which time I wrote in my journal: "texture is complex - as to rhythm and accent dynamic - but fairly uniform as to depth - i.e. - 1 to 4 or so notes at once - as simultaneity - or 0 to 4 - very clear pedalling - attack characteristics are echt Stravinskian - percussive, very clear as to - what? fingery rather than fisty. Treating piano as a tone(note?) producing body, rather than as a soundboard. articulate clarity."

Banned Rehearsal 596 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer - January 2001

In the film Little Big Man, Old Lodge Skins, upon finding himself still in this world, groans "Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't." For my money, the magic was working the night we made this tape. Sax, cornet, and piano, neither quite duking it out. Percussion is the forest in which piano is the damp. Slipping easily from transparent sound to transparent sound, exploring the public of itself, dis-staged. Contiguities linger, but don't overstay. We enter of thickety meadow of ukuleles and zither.

Second Time Around - The Mexican Blackbirds [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Song form subtly inflecting a noise thing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 19, 2015
Deagan 150119
Deagan 150119 folded
Deagan 150119 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

This week I improvised on xylophone.

Banned Telepath 27 150119 Seattle
Banned Telepath 27 150119 Somerville
Banned Rehearsal 877 150119 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (in Seattle); Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)

Aaron sent us his wash cycle.