Playlist

Recorded

January 20, 2018
Haywire! - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

Just like The Ventures, but with added Wailers ultra-fat B3 organ sound.

Banned Rehearsal 624 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 2001]

ringy metal sound catalyzes

loopy background hockets
(K's Vistalites sound great)
counterpoint for chimney solo
even with all the noise the trombone made me jump

sneeze patent pending

this is an instrument and I am playing it as though it were true

feedback is a structural component of these melodies
like a game with ground or pedaltone
hide and seek
dramatic focus
instant sympathy

comings and goings
who is here now?

we do not know how the room will tune the mix
play what is wonderful in any mix
that's how to get that Banned Rehearsal sound
simple

are we at the edge yet?

Erie Canal - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

gets to a big rousing chorus because everybody loves to sing this

Banned Rehearsal 789 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2011]

a very tiny drum roll is the basis for all aspects of this
percussion ensemble develops as a dissipation

bundle tightly bound by the weak magnetical-sonical-gravital force

gets weird

fluctuates real quiet-like

wide open uncompressed space

finally the fife

melody a game like chase
to follow

get out of the way of the really small

A Song for Firefighters - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

How does one treat of the personal sublime? Perhaps this.

January 22, 2018
The Eighte Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Long, elegantly long, elegantly long negotiated phrases with literal, flat-line, by the book, phrase end markers, as custom dictates, fits or not. Ta. Da.

The more central to the structure of the whole they are, the more plainly they are made. Clarity the watchword.

Christians Fight On Your Time Ain't Long - Sam Butler [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

steel on guitar spring-loads the song
winds up tight
squeezes

ready to bust out

Washington Talkin' Blues - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

"Lotsa good rain"

"Ain' no money changin' hands / just people changin' places".

(hard times)

Love's Old Sweet Song - The Voices of Walter Schumann [a Rescued Record]

Back in the way-back-when, when soft-jazz was blatantly advertised as seduction's soundtrack. Would you like to come up and see my etchings?

Mama Said - The Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology]

The first line turns around on itself every time, all wrapped up grammatically. This allows the verses to tell their stories. A well-played Chuck Berry trick.

Love Me - Billy Stewart [from The Best of Billy Stewart]

Recording contracts, labels, the star system: how the economics of the recording industry and the economies of touring musicians collided mid-century. No wonder the business is in such a mess.

Concertina - Weber - Tillicum Jr. High School Band, Bob Runyan, Paul Eisenbrey [from my mom's private tape]

How operatic! When that tutti comes in it by god COMES IN!

Walk Along The Heavenly Road / I Am A Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow - The Phillips Wonders [from The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1]

lean in to that portamento half step slide
so we know where we are
and a fussing baby in the back
music as what we are about when we are about doing what we do

Unnamed Track 3 - The Empire Brass Quintet [from American Brass Band Journal Revisited]

This one sounds vaguely Straussian (JS not RS). Trumpet imitates a violinish cross-string arpeggio.

Banned Rehearsal 70 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

three treatises
fallback position: parallel play planned and strayed from
the Oboe Roi makes its appearance blatant as blatant could be
throbbing heater throb
quiet quacker
squeaking the furniture

toy piano: how presciently up to fashion!

long sung tones tongue shaping mouth to elicit partials for flute long tones to intermessaround with

coming down from a high sort of tape
intent on hanging out near the floor

continues to be about exact intonation (yes I really mean that)

we play, Neal and I, the kazoos of eternal eloquence
Karen keeps us free of ground on ukulele string strung cat's cradle

we pause to readjust our positions and instruments

Anna sings a song with dulcimer appalachienne

we pause again to readjust and discuss

the clavichord when it was new and in the same room
soulful bass ocarina to ukulele choir
conversation among tempos

avante rhythm duel in dual microphony

speaks in the past pawntificate

big snake lumbers past

let the dead bury the || feedback has been summoned again || becomes magic

January 23, 2018

Hillbilly Drummer Girl - The Young Fresh Fellows [from Electric Bird Digest]

My wife has taken the name as an alter ego.
song: A character sketch with very little fat on it.

Banned Rehearsal 436 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [October 1996]

huge in your face not easy to fit in the alotted space box canyon then to deeper waters veggie choked

Karen with drummer girl grin - ca. 1996

rock slide panic mode twisted river cramped for space
industrialized
hardly lets up every few moments a new crazy enters tape
like a country slaughtered hog every part used e'en the oink
a heap of anything
acres of it
bits and scraps of old sounds and old agendas old activities crammed together shoved in clown car Tokyo subway no respite blot it blatt sax into cassette distortion far from easy listening commute music

and yet it is about sensibility, in the sense that an onslaught against all is a form of about-ness, of concerning itself with all

baby finally cries "enough!" or feed me more

we intone
to calm ourselves

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 22, 2018
Gradus 326 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

fluctuates in the partials like flowing whale fins
ocean tempo
heavy fluidity of waters' resistance
shift of body's weight is shift in thought's weight

gesture in metaphor

in action

Playlist

Live

January 19, 2018
Triptet - with guest Stuart Dempster
Gallery 1412, Seattle
Greg Campbell, Michael Monhart, Tom Baker

Grows from the center out

Triptet with Stuart in carefully matched tops

and a rhythm of beards

successively shedding each past against chronospheric abrasian inexorably
seasonal dormancy
alien body antibodies
Stuart joins! late night FM station sea shore sea shell show
bouy bell
kalimba magma man
electronic squeezy wormhole to outer sci fi
Punch (sans Judy) in space toy time

Recorded

January 13, 2018
Jacob's Ladder - arr. Ernest Kenwal - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Each verse is arranged to do exactly the same thing in a slightly differently arranged way. He could do this all day. To anything.

Hastings River, New South Wales

Just Like A Woman - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

A song all scrubbed up and shiny for public consumption, just rightly arranged. Syllables are not set to notes, but to pitch vectors, pitch curves.

Behind Blue Eyes - The Who [from Who's Next]

The Romantic imagination mythologizes itself in order to imagine growing up. No Drums! (til later). The songwriting is blatant in the songwriting.

Stay - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

A careful slicing into a funky rhythm hoping to find whom? James Brown? His solo vocal is a collection of overlays, each complete, each integral to itself and complete. Together they form a composite reading of how the song might be sung. Bowie thinking.

You'll Never Be a Man - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

A simpler version of the same (Bowie) idea. Simpler not in the bad stupid sense, but in the clarified pointy sense. Or, how a single song can render Billy Joel entirely unnecessary.

Banned Rehearsal 69 Part 2 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

starts out somewhere in Late Beethoven Slow Movement Serious Mode, until it gets just out of sight around the corner. An internal psychic anatomy. Back to LBSMSM, i.e. sustained harmony with inner energy that feels as though at any moment it is about to become . . . [never complete] [refrains from] [rather, it slowly deconstructs] its sense of self into another and runneth then over [repeat ] drumming does a number on the clock chime - oh that Bickleton clock chime! - long dim.
My Sweet Euchabibilla Baboo, Electric Garbage, then the Aaronsbundler March in all its pomp triumphal and glory grandiose

nobody, but nobody
pomps triumphally and grandiosally like we does

Territorial Pissings - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

slides knife into its groove

Banned Rehearsal 435 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Kosály-Meyer [September 1996]

Even in the decade of chaos we make a remarkable sound. Keeping the rhythm lively - and all while

Karen was nursing the baby right there. Familial. Banned Rehearsal lullaby.

January 15, 2018
Embryonic in the Same Traditions - Dale Lloyd [from Sonicabal 2001]

the human mouth is the cavernmyth of language, dragon's lair.

Banned Rehearsal 699 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2006]

Incongruities joined by a near-common pitch
or by cooperative winding entwining
on the down low barest smallest of sounds
muttering with exactness into the big space around small sounds
guitar (neal) kicking the sound around on the floor
into hot spots where it glows in feedbacklight
improvisation: helping each other's sounds out.

The Chronicles of Dirty Dick Part 2 - Antique Scream [from The Chronicles of Dirty Dick]

Beat invention. Beat elaboration. Part 2 is in Two Movements.

Selections from Music for Wallace - Aaron Keyt [from my recording - Seattle Composers' Salon, January 5, 2018]

I'm coming at these pieces, in part, in my guise as pianist who has read through them often and who plans to work them all up in the next year or so. Clearly they are music. Just as clearly they are poems, thorny poems. Think a Dada Ezra Pound. thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada POUND!

January 16, 2018

The Seventh Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

How many voices can be got to be seeming to be doing exactly the same thing, while all the while always doing entirely different things actually?

Birth of the Blues - Paul Whiteman, Ray Henderson, B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

The Official Whiteman Tour Guide to Rhapsody in Blue, with favorite bits!

Grand Coulee Dam - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

In celebration of the industrialization of the West. "prancin' dancin' stallion". poet he was at that.

Jezebel: Overture - Benjamin Boretz [midi realization]

intimations of repetitions
that never
quite
get repeating
right
before
they make
you wonder
if you
heard it right
the first time

Great Day - Vincent Youmans - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Intricate rhythms nearly obscured by the boomy old tape sound.

Let Her Dance - The Bobby Fuller 4 [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Wisely does not make the song much more than a vehicle for the rhythm. In which the guitar riff neatly invokes a subtle cross-meter in 3.

Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who [from Who's Next]

There are some words in there inside the emphatic locution. How the words are spoken, not what the words speak.

Wild Is The Wind - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

Picture an awful movie, just dreadful
the credits roll disconsolate
past the first credit roll song
everybody leaves
just then is where this song belongs
brilliant unexpected brilliance
"you touch me I hear the sound of mandolins" barfy song lyric lifted into incandescence.
I know he's just showing off, but this is one of my favorites.

Undifferentiated Functions - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [live at Brechemin Auditorium May 1981]

Now with tape wobble! Me, in closet, gaveling.

January 18, 2018
I Know What I Know - Paul Simon [from Graceland]

Third verse wraps the first around crazy high backup singers.

Banned Rehearsal 258 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

All tapes begin with fuss
quite thin the sound of rattling big red bag of fun
with pre-recorded music layered in: My Chart, my Sonatina, Cantus
gentle sounds then the rhythm band cymbals
an apparent harmonic tendency upwards or not downwards
Toad Hall? probably. We'll say so.
my Sonata in 2 Movements
Such Words (must have been Neal's)
we all sing to baby

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 15, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 950 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Recorded

January 7, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 623 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 2001]

intoned among the reverb a keening tale
wholly indecipherable resolving into small talk (enlarged!)
percussion feedback washtub piano
in avante jazz dreamscape mode
an opera twisted sense of compositional response
episodes, with screams certainly wandering
out of chamber symphony territory
upon which could be inscribed temple rooms
no longer regular passing of time
at multiple rates
dissimultaneously, ritualistic, a grim march into future's moil
excerpts of architecture inserted
transparent and lucid utterance stick with it to the end
Someone to Watch Over Me and other Gershwin Favorites

Cotopoxi - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

Perfect intervals and ray guns
static as the speed would seem to increase

Gradus 190 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2011]

in order to follow the thought precisely

in
order

to catch a glimpse of thinking happening

the long silences are evidence of a larger idea overshadowing, or holding, cupped
{stray inappropriate thought: punitive silence}

free improvisation is a strict method of being particular

I am playing back a sound in this room that is a sound that had been made in this room. Their various acoustical spaces share similarities across a medium.

purposeful silence

placing a tone so as to thread the needle's eye
the eye between the partials of other tones

split them like kindling whack!

patience testing silence

January 9, 2018
Mind The Gap - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

hollow shell
the center not empty so much as gone, never was.
(arthouse punk)?

Pavana the Sixte "Kinbrugh Goodd" and The Galliarde to the Sixte Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from Ladye Nevells Booke]

Here the independence of voices is achieved largely by other means than current voice-leading practice would suggest.

What is the role of the extraneous noise of virginal playing, essential to its charm, the effect of its image on how its music hangs in space?

first voice, then second voice, then a conjointure of voices, folded in continually
dough making

Senegalese Stomp - Savoy Bearcats [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In loving imitation of keyboard figurational shenanigans.

Song of the Coulee Dam - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

He kept trying to get the same song right: retry, re-write, re-use.

In The Middle of the House - Vaughn Monroe [a Rescued Record]

a 50's pop novelty song with great train sound effect. I learn this actually reached number 11 on the Billboard magazine's Most Played by Jockeys chart, and 21 in the Top 100. Imagine that. I wonder if Dr. Demento ever spun it?

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 8, 2018
Gradus 325 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

circumambulates

gazes
up and down

it does not move
things in it
do

some of them

a vast
combination lock

a long way around
to clear

Playlist

Preface

"What am I doing, mind in the concert hall like that? Maybe it's better to state things more generally: something happens, which will have had, quite inadvertently, any number of complex, variable, and unforeseen interactions with everything else, down to the molecular level. This immanent vitality is quite incidental, belying the notion that one ever does more or less than simply take part in it. Music situates parts -- gathering up bundles of messy connectivity, listening in; putting an ear to all that vast, tangled darkness, we draw close to the beating heart. The question of what we do in music is therefore revitalized by the exploration of incident."
Mark So "Music is Full of Incident (Christian Wolff at 80)" Open Space Magazine Issue 17/18 spring 2015/fall 2015

Texts

Live

December 31, 2017
Sheridan Riley (with 5-Track)
Red Ribbon
Ben von Wildenhaus (with Amanda (?) Blue (sp?))
Gainsbourg, Seattle

Decades ago I lived in an apartment that shared a long wall with Benjamin Boretz's basement music studio in Red Hook, NY. When improvisation sessions were happening in that next room I would often turn the television on without the sound and see what the crazy music next door did unto Barney Miller or baseball. It was more often than not the best thing that had ever happened to television. Gainsbourg is a 'French themed' bistro in Greenwood, Seattle, that, among other things (including excellent food), features (or at least did that night) old French films projected silently, with sub-titles, on the wall behind the tiny stage. These continued through the three musical presentations. I have seen many intentional multi-media works, strenuous juxtapositions of elements, curatorial and high-toned, but rarely have I been so ravished as by this haphazard mashup. Earnest late night conversations across the traveled years.

Red Ribbon at Gainsbourg, December 31, 2017

Sheridan Riley presented as a well-dressed drummer/guitarist/singer joined by 5-Track (or so I'm told), who is a local musician playing bass (or playing guitar as though it were a bass - memory fails). They came on so gently into the evening as to be a near ambience, inviting and warm. It was fabulous to see Red Ribbon again, this time as Emma Danner just herself, her guitar and a little keyboard. Freed from any need to rise over a full band, she was finding all sorts of wonderful spots in her upper register that I had not heard before. A marvelous voice with, I suspect, riches she hasn't discovered yet. More please. Ben von Wildenhaus, back to mostly guitar playing, but with occasional vocal-percussive interjections. A singer, costumed to the French nines, joined him on several numbers, or perhaps stepped forward out of the old time cinema wall, for sure at least playing along with the oldies act, hand gestures and vocal styling streaming from mid-20th century continental torch-song. Too bad she couldn't bring one of those old radio show microphones along with!

January 5, 2018
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Ian McKnight - The Trees Awaken

Story telling is a mode of experiencing time. Melody is another. The reticence with which many composers approach even the notion that they might be exploring the landscape created between them is due, in part, I think, to the unquestionable difficulty of, first: getting the story and melody modes right, and second: getting those modes to work together as a synthesis. Or rather, the issue may simply be one of trajectory. Is this a melody that tells or is it a tale told in melody? In this case, clearly the former. Unfortunately Ian was ill, but we experienced his piece as a projected video file of a live (situated in a lively Tacoma cafe) performance. The players were Ian on flute, Clement Reid on piano, and Carson Farley on cello.

Carson Farley - Film Music

Same set up, same ensemble, video from the same cafe performance, customers walking through the frame, coffee grinders grinding, espresso makers hissing. I must admit it is quite a mind bend to experience, on film, as it were, a performance of a music written for a different film than that which we were witnessing. Between the mind bend, the frozen-eye videography, and my increasing anxiety concerning my own impending performance, I admit to not being as focussed on the music as I would like to be.

Patrick O'Keefe - A Morning Stroll - Thornton Creek Clarinet Quartet

We heard an earlier version of this piece last year. Patrick has tightened it up considerably, and the ensemble of 3 regular sized clarinets (not sure if they were B-flats or A's) and one bass clarinet sounded great. An attractive and entertaining jaunt somewhat in the vein of Nielsen, but happier.

Aaron Keyt - Selections from Music for Wallace

Aaron and I go way back. Wayyy back. On top of that, these pieces are in my stack of "prepare these next" scores, so I wasn't hearing them cold. However, hearing them while playing them is quite different from hearing them while not also concerned with fingering and note reading. What shines, and it shines bright, is their knife-edge poetic focus. These pieces do not bludgeon, they incise.

Keith Eisenbrey - Selections from Second Thoughts

I'll refrain (this time) from commenting on my own pieces, other than to list their names: A a, B a, B b, C a, C b, C c, D a, D b, D c, D d. Since I only found out I was on this show at 1:30 that afternoon (at the time it was thought that Ian's illness might leave two spots open) I stopped before I got to any that were difficult to play. I mentioned during the Q&A a midi version of all the parts packed in the box. Here it is:


And here are all the parts spread out on the floor, performed on a real life piano:




Recorded

January 1, 2018
The Fifte Pavian and the Galliarde to the Fifte Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Phrases to savor in the mouth, ornamented with florid scholarly encrustations, glossed, commentaried, captioned, titled, moraled, glowing with all of text's accoutrements.

Black Cat Blues - Old Pal SmokeShop Four [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

Sitting close to that uncomfortable region where the blues veer near or into their own caricature.

Jackhammer Blues - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

Each line is short a beat, which is to say that they is some sevens in there snuck among the eights.

I Walk The Line - Johnny Cash [from Sun Records Essential Hits]

There is a quiet bowed tone just before JC enters, or is it hummed? It sounds like a cello to me.

My mom, seated in the middle, with me. 1959.

Elijah Rock - arr. by Jester Hairston - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape]

The Hollywood style counted then, in 1961 suburbia, as popular, modern, with it. It wasn't.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

Rhythmically aware accentuation of the verse in at least three independent modes of delineation -  pitch, duration, emphasis - all cooperating at different rates.

January 2, 2018
Going Mobile - The Who [from Who's Next]

beep beep. The lighter acoustic guitar arrangement upfront allows room for the electric to enter into the space opened up by the drums.

TVC 15 - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

What it's about (its words) is not the point. What it is is an excuse for rhythm games, how to accentuate the title as an ordered set of syllables.

Improvisation - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape, May 1981]

applause bravo author
goes rockish
heroic fanfare
count ONE!
the gavel bangs
(disapproval)
bravo
author.

In good humor I suppose. We tried.

January 4, 2018
Fall On Me - REM [from Life's Rich Pageant]

Even the drum track sounds strummed with subtle tambourine, softening the whole harmony.

Banned Rehearsal 257 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

Me and John, 1991

Oh that new parent yawn! I guess it had finally caught up with us. Reed organ (a toy) beset by radio on radio off. Shifting sounds, that is, the sound of us shifting ourselves, picking up instruments, moving about in the room. We have weight and bodies. We can be heard. These instruments do not magically appear. Sudden entrances, sudden blossoms.

Hot Foot - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

Sliding down the Ventures' side of Surf Mountain.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 1, 2018

Greenwood 180101 - Keith Eisenbrey
Waiting for a bus at Greenwood Avenue North and North 85th Street. Fireworks for a new year and a tow-truck. beep beep.

Banned Rehearsal 949 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt