Playlist

Live

September 23, 2017

Sahba Sizdahkhani

Ivan Arteaga
Sahba Sizdahkhani
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Strings and Pulleys - Ivan Arteaga with Allison Burke
parsing the holding into vacant space
touch weight sax fuss distance
scooted
decision tongue and seamless finger flutter

A thoughtful and intriguing tweezing out of aspects of playing saxophone in public, it was already well underway when Allison, incapable it seems of walking without aesthetic deliberation, adjusted the furniture on the stage.

Sahba Sizdahkhani
his amp says Oahu on it slant
with an eighth-note flag on the "a"

how is repetition accomplished, exactly?

Luscious layered builds, on 104-string santour and percussion played in sequence but kept alive with long loops.

Recorded

September 24, 2017
The Battell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Figures on tapestry
music portrays other music
how lifelike!

Die Kunst Der Fuge, Contrapunctus XVI (Rectus) - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

It ties the ear into knots keeping track of it all, but in such a whistle-y carefree way.

Tommy Dorsey

Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

And it starts with a whistle. Ultra-musicianship being pushed into lightweight shoes. Something has got to give.

After You've Gone - Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, Sy Oliver and The Sentimentalists

The arrangement is as hierarchical as movie credits. Leader, Soloists, Rhythm, Choirs.



Oregon Trail - Woody Guthrie [from The Columbia River Collection]

A list of complaints, Whitmanesque, celebratory. How bad they was doin' was why they came.

September Song - Sarah Vaughan [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

She inhabits ever millimeter of those long notes. At the coda phrases are handed down through the ranks, Byrd-ish.

With A Song - Sonny Rollins [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Horn playing, here, is an expression of the shaping of the mouth's cavity, where sound is rounded.

Der Song from Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon - Paul Dessau - uncertain about performers due to poor indexing on the CD

Ein Bierhallsingspielslied.

Sing Ye A Joyful Song - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey [from concert of April 11, 1961]

My mom, as a teen

Rescued from my mom's tape.

Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa (Sad Song)- Otis Redding [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Fifth item in a row with "Song" in it, not planned. OR carves his vocal into the mix with a deepgrooved chisel. Barely a narration beyond the song structure itself.

Track 1 - Tillicum Jr. High School Band [from concert of March 3, 1971]

Another rescue from one of my mom's tapes. I believe this is a band arrangement of a von Weber concert piece for solo clarinet, played by my brother Paul, who would have been 14.

Cock In My Pocket - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

Aestheticizing sophomoric crudity.

Track 2 - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improv Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape, May 22, 1981]

Otherwise known as Undifferentiated Functions. Neal starts center stage, playing the Bickleton Fight Song. I'm in the closet with another piano. When I eventually make my appearance it may have been the first time Karen ever saw me. We were not introduced at that time.

Pink Cadillac - Bruce Springsteen

A riff on original sin, and how the lengths of lines falling into line roll around to find the rhythm of the hook.

September 26, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 253 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 1991]


Our first born, a few week old, makes his taped debut. A distant radio signal finds itself somewhere in the wiring. Frogs and dogs. We pick up an activity and carry it with us to unknown parts, the thread of thought. Wastelands? Burned bare. Dischord wouldn't fit, much like life.

September 28, 2017
Sonic Brilliance 19 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Holden K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Kia M [July 1996]

Jumps into the thick of it. You're supposed to be a dragon. Lizard of Oz. Sounds flow right in, undirected. Why do we have all these buttons? A crowded aviary compressed into the space of sound smaller than the studio. Ringing and rattling.

Assembly Rechoired 46 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [September 2001]

Trumpet, piano, percussion. Buzzy.

Come Out And Play - Dead Vampires [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Close packed mass physicality. The subject matter is the mosh pit.

Banned Rehearsal 786 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

Shaker crickets
bell traffic
mist snake glides
occupy kalimba
finding the lower limit of audibility
ritual of not disorder not entropy
the chosen moment unyieldingly placid

Along The Path (Dreams of Emptiness) - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

Tuning in time and timing in pitch
The vocal entrance kills
Every time

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 25, 2017

Banned Rehearsal 943 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Live

September 22, 2017

Fantastical Sounds: Music from Tond
Steve Scribner, author, composer
Tond Band: Phillip Arnautoff (sampled), Molly Bauckham Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Carol Levin, Linda Rio, Steve Scribner, and Waterbound (Mimi and Steve Akerman).
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Fyorian:
Prologue (Folk Dance)
Reading from Book One
Excerpt from the Song of Origins
Kitál (dulcimer) improvisation
Táluwaa (Dance-based classical piece)

Karjannic:
Reading from Book Two
Srakah (classical piece)
Reading from Book Three
Tsajkoo Chaebrwakak (Epic Poem with Music)

Sherványa:
Reading from Book Three
The Sherványa Nocturnal Music

As I understand it, this project arose 40 plus years ago as an invented language, followed by (order matters not) an invented culture, an invented continent (Tond), several other invented languages with invented cultures to match, a tale (in three volumes), and, these being humans, musics, and Steve being Steve, a concert of such.

The musics are constructed, it would seem, from a grab-bag of musicological attributes of the sort one might expect musics to possess, culled from here and there: a bit of Japan, a bit of India, a bit of Steve Reich, etc. - Steve (Scribner) being a consummate taxonomist of musics I can't begin to even hint at the range of bits one might find if one took the time to dig.

To me, the idea of inventing a language seems perverse, and that of composing music from general attributes inward equally if not more so, and I find myself, considering what Steve is proposing to do, wondering how it could possibly work, how it could avoid simply being, well, lame. However, it always does work, and it always astounds me just how blisteringly well it does.

We performed with almost no rehearsal, just a quickened run-through that ended moments before the doors opened. The scores are part instruction, part graphic notation, part (minimal) standard notation, and part quasi-musicological stage setting - incomplete: one is never quite certain that a train wreck isn't inevitable. Essentially it boils down to "Here is what I imagine happening. Make it so." As performers we are not so much given agency as we are forced to grasp it for dear life. It just can't work, and yet it does. Every time. It's kind of exciting.

Looked at another way, he is simply inventing possibilities and collecting collaborators. Does it matter whether that is composition or not? Given the enrapturing results, I guess not.

Whatever's next, I'm probably up for it.

Recorded

September 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 616 - Isaac E, John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [September 2001]



inchworm turn by inchworm turn
drum led
the action is in the side-confabulations
patchy and disjointed

September 21, 2017
High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Recorded live in June of 2006 at University Temple United Methodist Church, it projects the varieties of acoustically charged stance within reverb resonance that originally caught my ear and generated the piece in the first place || that caught my ear while reading through Benjamin Boretz's O, listening to that final (0,1) simultaneity ssshhhimmer || that final (0,1) arrived at via cycle of diminishing intervals climbing into the keytops || starting there and flipping the cycle but continuing the climb, hanging higher into the keytops || from each ssshhhimmer higher gazing back downward  briefly into the brachiate undergirdings [spoiler: undergirdings made of those notes below, which contain within them the individuals of the high dyadic simultaneity as acoustic partials]: an ad-hoc etude.

Shaprece

Love Emergency - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain]

The heady imperative of young lust.









Banned Rehearsal 905 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Melody is a structure built in memory, harmony is a structure built from analysis. Music in the wild proliferates dimensions, acting not in but upon our experience of time.

A poly-sentient rattle we pick up now and again and again to shake.
A radio orchestra :: twiddlydials of musical intentions
Shortwave consciousness
Musical thinking as it happens

(as it happens)

Piano plays at either end
Poetry plain as rocks

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 18, 2017

Gradus 321 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Sounding like a chord
is a choice not often made
a prolongation of arpeggiated arpeggiation
a line protracted into the abyss

Playlist

Live

September 11, 2017

Jim Hurst

Jim Hurst
Fireplace Room, University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

I was reminded of keyboard virtuosi: Jelly Roll Morton or Liszt, in the seeming ability to be all parts of an imaginary ensemble at once, and of Arthur Rubinstein in that miraculous efficiency to do it all without moving his fingers. But it isn't just the mind-blowing technique, it's the poetry with which that imaginary ensemble is evoked - Art Tatum quicksilver magic. Thank you Dave Campbell for inviting Jim out to Seattle!

Take-away line: "Edsel still runs but my turntable quit."

Recorded

Elizabeth Farr

September 10, 2017
The March Before the Battell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Phrase balancing balanced with energy release in overlapping sequences, each voice taking its turn to unwind.

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus XV - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

We do not dissipate energy, we exhaust it.

Messin' Around - Cookies' Ginger Snaps [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

More than a hint of that ol' razzle dazzle minstrel show showmanship. Theory: jazz landed in highbrow territory because it was so woke to its roots. Its aspirational trajectory had force behind it. So much of the old practice makes us uncomfortable (as it ought), but the musicianship is for real.

Echo In The Dark - Original St. Louis Crackerjacks [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Already (1936) moving toward becoming a meta-music, journeying toward the abstract. See Theory above, its roots are its subject matter.

Standing Outside - Wade Maines [from Goodbye Babylon]

The arrangement is absolutely professional showman, but here, where the verbal portion is the point (gospel before music), the music portion sticks more firmly to the demotic, doesn't push forward to become its own thing.

Crazy Arms - Ray Price [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Somewhere back there in time, a singing movie cowboy sensibility.

Tragedy - The Fleetwoods [from Come Softly To Me - The Very Best Of The Fleetwoods]

They nailed this one: overblown teen drama and their patented soft-porn harmonies. A heady mix.

Swingin' Medallions

Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love) - Swingin' Medallions [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Not a heady mix, just good drunk dumb fun.

Bargain - The Who [from Who's Next]

The parts of this song push against each other, far from working together they storm into separate rooms. But hey! they have a synth!

Rich Bitch - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

Using anger words to incite an angry energy then ride the wave. Sorry Iggy, this one just comes across as bad tempered.

Track 1 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [from Neal's Recital Tape]

Bach, Sinfonia from the C-minor Partita.

Adam Raised A Cain - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band Live 1975-1985]

Bad boy booster.

September 12, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 252 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [March 1991]
On a personal note, this was the last session before our first son was born. At Toad Hall, a pitchscape of surfaces. Metal. Drum. Bells. Folded. Hinged. Can-bottom Diaphragm. What might remain in that big red bag of fun? The rim of the brim can. Toot Chorus.


In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 15, 2017
Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 170915 A - Keith Eisenbrey
Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 170915 B - Keith Eisenbrey

We stopped by in the afternoon to reconnoiter. Mostly it was pretty quiet except for a tiny chipmunk that barked at us for several minutes. Its little tail would jerk out with each bitty bark. Not much got on the recording but general wind noise. I did another recording while we took a short walk but had some audio problems. I'm not sure the B session is salvageable.

September 16, 2017
Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 170916 A - Keith Eisenbrey
Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 170916 B - Keith Eisenbrey

Back again the next morning, the birds were slightly more active, and the breeze was less. The B session was also a walk and also has some audio problems here and there, but not as bad as the day before. I think I recorded too hot. Be that as it may, it sure was chilly at that hour! The site is not entirely quiet of traffic noise, but it's pretty darn remote.

Playlist

Recorded

September 2, 2017

Cello Concerto - Frank Martin - Concertgebouworkest, Amsterdam, Bernard Haitink, Jean Decroos

Don Quixote in a strange land, in which he may not be harmless. A metaphor has wandered into the future.

My Baby - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

Deep feedback growlings in the lower strings.

Gimme Danger - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

An altar call.

Advice from Christmas Past - Dead Kennedys [from Plastic Surgery Disasters / In God We Trust Inc.]

The second page of this poem didn't make it, never had a chance.

September 4, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 65 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Doug Henderson, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 1986]

Doug Henderson was in town touring with Resistance, so he sat in. A feedback box is created, becoming a limiter, a cage around everything, inescapable, remanding agency, active global control. Into the warzone. Electric Garbage brings us down to dreamstate. Never is not something going on. There's a story about that one.

Lithium - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

Guess which song just now, as I blog, came up in the big random mix of everything. Yep. Spooky. The end is not its beginning nor its beginning its end, rather it sets up a time loop in which one is always.

Banned Rehearsal 428 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Anna S [July 1996]

Somewhere between a simultaneity and a timbre, we construct a music around the soundsystem that will play it back. Wild Thing psychedelic. A break in the middle, a long silence that wakes up on the weird side, in a loud mood. Direct to cassette mastering.

September 5, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 615 - Isaac E, John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]

Yet another fabulous group performance of my evolving score "Work Architecture Unity And The" begins this, with infant Isabel providing perfect babbling. Eventually the clowns arrive (as threatened). Thickness ensues, relaxes into play of aloof o'er-arch. Try again. Full Stop.

High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded live in Snohomish, October 2010]


I still think of this as being a fairly recent piece of mine, though it's now over 11. A rock solid thought, in spite of its outdated minimalism.

Paul Kikuchi

September 7, 2017
Faster/Still - Paul Kikuchi [from Portable Sanctuary Vol. 1]

Strikes upon the bellgong are not the point of the sound, but are nudges to their singing pitch bend. A delicate distant rustle more and more nearly withdraws: come in, come in, come in, come in, come in. Was that what about it was?

Banned Telepath 44 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2016]


Each agenda a micro-layer revolving cyclic or shifting big-cyclic-like. Lots of no solos at all. (nearly if not perfect).

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 4, 2017

Gradus 320 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Register grouping reinforced by pattern/figuration rhythmic/dynamic composition. Each rung is a key, making possible the notion of transfiguration into the wildly distant.

Playlist

Preface

"First (1.0) 'a pitch' is stipulated to be 'atomic' - that is, indivisible into components not equivalent to the whole of itself. This designates the 'basic' vocabulary of entities for music, i.e., 'pitches'.

Next (Df. 1.0) two pitches are designated as distinct if there is any third pitch such that one of the two, but not the other, matches it, or if the two do not match each other.

If there is no such third pitch, and the two pitches do match each other, they are equivalent pitches, and are assigned to membership in the same pitch-identity class (1.1 and Df. 1.1; note again that 'pitch identity' is, properly speaking, a relation, not a 'property' - the latter, insofar as it is applicable here, as a notion, is only so in the 'property' of 'being a pitch')."

Benjamin Boretz Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought 1969

Texts

Live

September 1, 2017

Seattle Composers' Salon

Chapel Performance Space

Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Steve Scribner - Untitled Tondish Music

Folk music of a fictional culture, but a real fictional culture, in that there is actual solid fiction (books!) in which that culture arises. Karen and I got to play squiggly percussion in the second one.

Patrick O'Keefe - Sonata for Piano

Like listening to familiar musics through someone else's ears. I hear 30's Stravinsky, some Debussy, some Shostakovich, but not quite the SD&S's with which I am acquainted. Someone else's, and at other slants.

Cole Bratcher - Transit Maps

We visit graphic aspects of San Francisco and Copenhagen. Work in progress on a fascinating project that hits squarely on two of my geek-outs: music and maps. We are all waiting eagerly for Tokyo.

Blake DeGraw - Diler, for strings

Four string players, each playing a single string, attempt to match the pitches of a track heard only by them. See Preface above. Theory hits the pavement. Damn!

Recorded

Charlie Rich

August 26, 2017

Who Will The Next Fool Be - Charlie Rich [from Sun Records The Definitive Hits]

Relies on vocal charisma to hypnotize. Circles around twice, no more, needs nothing so fancy as a bridge. About a girl or about music? Always a tricky question.

City Midnight Junk Strains (for Frank O'Hara) - Alan Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]

Bumps around drunk in an empty room.

I Shall Be Released - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

Trapped by wordmeaning, more interested in rhythmplay, ripples in a pebble pinged pond.

Miama 2017 - Billy Joel [from The Essential Billy Joel]

Prog Joel. Imagines he has more range of personae than he really does.

Music with Or Without 12 Chairs - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [May 1981]

The class of clowns.

Breakout - Swing Out Sister [a Rescued Record]

A totally Vegas ambitious arrangement over funky bass and tight brass.

Banned Rehearsal 251 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [March 1991]

tossing noises into a bucket of noises the cats are concerned. Amnehitabel? Concerned. Anarchy: concerned. we must be picking up from something old ugly floral drapes are mentioned 3 bags full

::] city truck outside as I listen beeping clearing sewers? [::

funmaker staccato hits magnetic ghost reel tape

Thought experiment for sound engineers: imagine the worst, the at all costs to be avoided horror of a soundquality, not just unmarketable but quick turn it off before you vomit bad soundquality. Now, imagine the most sophisticated transparent playback apparatus that money can buy reproducing exactly that same worst horror. Is there a difference? Where, exactly, would the difference lie?

improvisational composition designing with readily apparent qualities cumulating funmaker drone reminds of Frippertronics ah that Wurlitzer button that pulls the pitch down almost but not quite a half step

improvisation: the art of redeeming one's, and each other's, sudden decisions. Falling, a la Buzz L, with style

August 27, 2017

Sonic Brilliance 18- John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, John H, Aaron Keyt, Holden K, Kia M [June 1996]

intents made together in a room to hear how it goes. A theory of the man in the oat box. Must be hiding.

Banned Rehearsal 614 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]

etched with care || a percussion sequence arises
what if we go with it, without regard for redemption?
deep dynamic registers linger languorously

August 29, 2017

Class Notes - Michael Dellaira [from Open Space 21]

Although: barely a minute long
Although: figuration could be any midcentury bebop wannabe piano player in late evening lounge mode
Although: all that and more or less
Rich in: melodic twists of chords
And: Nothing here is quite just one thing

Gradus 187 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

3rd A-nat from the bottom behaving as a point of reference, the high notes, all A-nats, nestled or floating in its active or imagined or remembered partials. Parent floating child; I rattle a rattle! I had forgotten. Are these hiatuses Cage silence or something else? division markers? resets? reminder? absences?

Each A-nat, being itself unhooked from pitch class inclusion renders each of its aspects unhooked to an extent from any sort of class inclusion, i.e. staccato notes don't form a class with other staccato notes, nor quiet ones with quiet ones, nor loud with loud.

2nd rung: it centers a bit higher on a still low mid A-nat.

#2Pretty4Jail - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

seething writhes around an electrohummy spacefilling wad that squeezes the vocals off to the sides. Immobile, constrained, plea though they plea.

August 30, 2017

Qui Passe for My Ladye Nevell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Upon these inflections of tetrachordal-metrical correlatives, the ear dances rice on drum.

Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XV - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Playful puppy. Weary hound.

How Do You Like It Blues - Art Sims and His Creole Band [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Mid 20s, getting sound into the grooves was work, or the sound makes it seem so, striving to be recorded, to achieve groove.

I'll Be A Friend to Jesus - Wade Mainer [from Goodbye Babylon]

Formulae stubbornly adhered to. The barest of variance tells.

Save It Pretty Mama - Frank Signorelli [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In a similar spirit to Art Sims above, but more chill and relaxed about getting it into groove. And yet, very conscious of that 3' deadline at the end of the record.

Signal - Stan Getz [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Stan Getz

Precisely beveled throughout. Every join tight as tight can make it.

Chorale Variations - Stravinsky - CBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Festival Singers, Stravinsky [from The Original Jacket Collection]

The big magic picture book of Chorale Preludes. Each page turn renews.

Little Miss Sad One - The Fleetwoods [from The Very Best of the Fleetwoods - Come Softly To Me]

Weakened by a weak bridge, with a little cliché riff at the end of it (said bridge) as much as to say at last that's over.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 28, 2017

Banned Rehearsal 942  - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer