Playlist

Live

March 22, 2018
The Magpie's Shadow - Peter Nelson-King, piano
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

a well tuned selection of four different ways to be impressionist:

Five Sketches in Sepia - Ernst Bloch

evokes the visual through imitation of poetry's line by line image rhythm

Kubiniana - Hans Erich Apostel

same basic idea, but with stage sets and costumes

Iblis Suite, op. 3a - Fulvio Caldini

very tiny things disappearing into a whole (I'd like to hear this again, it went by so quickly)

The Magpie's Shadow - Peter Nelson-King

aphorisms sharply drawn - inside and outside the piano sounds both playful and exact

sing whistle slap

Peter's playing is clear and strong. His compositional voice is sophisticated and wide ranging. I look forward eagerly to hearing much more.

Recorded

March 17, 2018
A Lesson of Voluntarie - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

This is not program music, some quaint picture of times of yore. This is deep teaching - the Great-Great-Grandfather of Die Kunst der Fuge.

The Birth of the Blues - Francis Carter [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

irrepressible invention chomping at the bit as it works through the simple part of the tune in order to get to the breaks so that it can cut loose and rip

Picture of Health - Chet Baker and Art Pepper [from Playboys]

and light on their feet
no corner as can't be turned
no twist so tight as can't be nimbled

My Foolish Heart - Bill Evans Trio [from Waltz for Debby]

centered on the line between the downbeats
where we pivot from remembering the last to anticipating the next

24 Tonal Preludes 17-20 - Greg Short - Keith Eisenbrey [from my recital of February 22, 2018]

17 - could even up the rhythm
18 - could slow it down to avoid the stumbles
19 - pretty much nailed the hard bit
20 - kept the layers clear and the momentum steady

March 18, 2018
Unnamed Track 6 - Tillicum Junior High School Band - Bob Runyan, director [from my mom's tape of a concert given March 3, 1971]

a slinky number

Impromptu - Walt Wagner [from Caprice]

swims in keyboard sound

Walt Wagner, known in Seattle for his long-standing gig at Canlis, is the older brother of a fellow pupil of mine in the studio of my childhood piano teacher, Victor Smiley. I sat next to Walt to hear Horowitz when he came to Seattle in 1976 or thereabouts.

Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded January 6, 2010]

I love how, after the first few very quick numbers, the first slow manages to be really quite small and tight, but still sound vast. Somewhere between moving from cassette tape to CD to hard drive I wound up with an extra index slot for this, so it has come up recently twice now, sandwiching my live performance of it this last February - a month ago today, in fact.

March 20, 2018
Jersey Girl - Bruce Springsteen [from a dub tape of 6 B-sides]

mariachi of the northlands
echo of calliope in the breeze

Banned Rehearsal 261 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [July 1991]

once again at Toad Hall

on the 40th anniversary of the death of Arnold Schönberg in Hollywood California

gloriously mal-intoned organ of TH

low tones of weary desult(edness)ory

as though it were happening

if happening at all

in another state just above the edge of audibility

a throbbing hum machinery

no upper partials to speak of

the gravity being heavy that day
the acoustic effect these sounds are recorded as having been making

vis a vis

the acoustic effect these sound have now in this room

in distant rooms

brass right there imaging through the spiral storage
valiantly throwing energies around to get things going

modest success

brooks conflue

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 19, 2018
Gradus 330 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

gradations of perceived intention rhythm, from rhythm of wind-blowing-stuff-around to is-someone-out-there?
partly tracking the dynamics
partly tracking arm motion structure - finger hand wrist elbow shoulder back hip leg stance of feet - posture as a whole in motion
how the body enters

March 24, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 954 180311-14 - Karen Eisenbrey (Seattle), Keith Eisenbrey (Seattle), Steve Kennedy (Seattle), Aaron Keyt (Chignik Lake School and Port Haiden), and Neal Kosály-Meyer (Seattle)

I finally got this put together. Aaron had to return closer to civilization in order to get ping enough to transfer the sound file made at Chignik Lake School.

Playlist

Recorded

March 10, 2018
Large Cortical Areas - Robert Pearson [from Sonicabal Volume 2]

newness, as in what we would expect to be an entrance of a new idea, comes across here as opening a door in order to hear what has been going along already, but from a different room, reverberated against other walls

Assembly Rechoired 49 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Kelly W, Allen Welch, Suzanne Winter-Welch [April 2006]

What is this activity we do, as experienced by some who beforehand have only a verbal description

that time cool people came by - photo by Allen Welch

of it, and who, then, are asked to experience it, first, by joining into it, and thus creating uniquely what they experience as the experience of the activity, that what that we do? It is a test. Everybody supplies their own hurdles. 10 minutes in more or less a groove is achieved.
a valid entry to a larger scope for the question of what sound sounds like

Prelude - Paul Kikuchi - Jesse Olsen Bay, Stuart Dempster, Bill Horist, Paul Kikuchi, Alex Vittum [from Portable Sanctuary]

sleep drizzle still pacific shore
what wakes us

Banned Rehearsal 907 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

missing from my experience of listening back, which was omnipresent in my experience of doing, is the internal monologue of decision making - what one is thinking about what one is doing while one is doing it, an experience unavailable to memory and thus to the recording, which itself is a memory, a trace

we do not play our toy instruments as though they were less than instruments

Wallace, do we hear thee?

as Neal said, we don't know what we are doing, but (as I add) we are listening very carefully as we do it

In the old days the session was over when the cassette tape ran out. In a concession to getting to bed eventually, and especially now that the recording device we use could keep recording for hours and hours, we give ourselves 30 minutes or so, at which point I move toward the device and wait for a spot to push "stop." Once the participants realize that is what is going on, a game ensues. Each sound made is both dare and question. Do you think we're done (punk)? now? now? now? how about - no wait - how about now? or . . . ? If I am patient (which I occasionally am) it can lead to a lengthy improvised-out fade as everybody get smaller and smaller, and smaller and yet smaller.

March 13, 2018
Ariel - Greg Sinibaldi - Greg Sinibaldi, ewi/electronics; Ryan Ferriera, guitar; Ted Poor, drums

For my third pass, in anticipation of a more formal review, I listened to each the tracks one at a time. It's surprising how much difference simply standing up and opening each file separately can make. Oddly, as a whole it seemed shorter, or rather, it was over more quickly than I expected.
1. Arrival of the Bee Box - specific pitch focus is present but not crucial, or not so crucial as touch or breath. tripartite. answered by drumguitar power pounds giant boot stomps Godzilla shrieks stomping giddy giant ewi, airborn, drifts off seeps into undergrounds
2. Lady Lazarus - fancy echo/reverb effect grappling the sound lovingly if not quite gently. interlude.
3. Cut - settling into a groove but just off center, keeping its distance. dropped into the droid factory
4. Lady Lazarus Part II - signals rhythm radio dial short wave chatter insects and bones tiny lizards dismantling machinery hulk radio signals from the underworld as Cocteau's Eurydice into which pours saturate flesh
5. Black Sweet Blood Mouthfuls - reverie massive dance strenuates to ascend falls back weightful impressive craters deep traces a long moody dragon passed by here
6. The Atrocity of Sunsets - drumrattle solo begins, ewi poking at the flesh it cracks open the beast's wings are spread to dry
7. Wintering In the Dark - in a room alone imagining the demimonde as imagination bitters and dries
8. Elm - working down a terraced grade, finger mirror child's play itsy bitsy spider twisting down ponderous grace whales or stone kites overgrown in dense woody talons

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 11, 2018
Maple Leaf 180311 - Keith Eisenbrey

Neal borrows a bass

a noisy bird at sunrise, and traffic

Banned Telepath 61 Chignik Lagoon School - Aaron Keyt

So far, just rumored to exist. fingers crossed. Intended for what will eventually be Banned Rehearsal 954.

March 12, 2018
Banned Telepath 61 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Our local go at it

March 14, 2018
Banned Telepath 61 Port Haiden - Aaron Keyt

And a supplement from parts in the far away  northwest

March 15, 2018
Bass Tracks for Fish Distributor and Ruined It - Your Mother Should Know - Neal Kosály-Meyer, bass

Playlist

Preface

"The mind can't help trying to say something true. Nothing wrong with that, unless it believes in what it says. We become fundamentalists of our own constructions. Perhaps poetry is what saves us from ourselves, from our continuous surrender to the siren of our own voice claiming to tell the truth. The will of the poem to continue, to keep coming back, to leave behind the already said -- a rescue mission from a part of the mind that knows better. But this too is uncertain."
George Quasha "Uncertainties" Open Space Magazine issue 17/18 spring 2015/fall 2015

Texts

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 5, 2018
Gradus 329 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

full to the brim of proceeding or of not proceeding
what of what we have heard can we discover in what we are hearing now?

2nd part opens with entrances
the expanse of it isn't necessary for the bare presentation of the combinations
it is though for the enduring of it, the exploring of it, the surviving of it

repeat a pattern
vary a pattern
go elsewhere from a pattern
go elsewhere from places in it
gambits of mind-making

progressions draw lines or dig ruts

March 6, 2018
Ruined It - Your Mother Should Know - Karen Eisenbrey, drums and vocals; Neal Kosály-Meyer, acoustic guitar and vocals

March 8, 2018
Ruined It - Your Mother Should Know - Karen Eisenbrey, tambourine and maracas; Neal Kosály-Meyer, electric guitar, piano, and glockenspiel

I spent two evenings recording a bunch of tracks for YMSK.

Playlist

Live

February 24, 2018
Preludes in Seattle Part 5 - Keith Eisenbrey
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Kam Morrill   Puppet Pieces (2013)

     Make Way for Puppets
     Fanfare for the Common Puppet
     Puppet Heartstrings
     The Puppets Have Left the Building
Benjamin Boretz   Partita (1955)
     Prelude
     Govotte
     Allemande
     Capriccio
Keith Eisenbrey   Two Pomes Play (2000)
Ken Benshoof   Patti's Parlour Pieces (2000)
     17 Reflective
     18 Intimate, freely
     19 Waltz
     20 Dark
Keith Eisenbrey   Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes (1981)
Lockrem Johnson (1924-77) 24 Preludes, op. 50 (1965)
     XVII
     XVIII Pesante e drammatico
     XIX
     XX
Ken Benshoof   24 Preludes (2003)
     17 free, like dandelion seeds
     18 reflective, questioning
     19 relentless
     20 narrative
Keith Eisenbrey   24 Preludes (2011)
     XVII Lacustrine
     XVIII Mirrored
     XIX Occluded
     XX Amber
Greg Short (1938-99)  24 Tonal Preludes (1966)
     XVII "Arctic Wind"
     XVII "Nocturne"
     XIX "Sonorities"
     XX "Nebula"

For the most part I think I kept this all pretty well together, with the exception, alas, of Ben's Partita, whose contrapuntal parkour leaps got the better of me several times. Miss one rooftop and b'bye. I think I forgot to breathe here and and there.

March 1, 2018
second utterances - Bonnie Whiting & James Falzone
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
with <abc> - Afroditi Psarra, Bonnie Whiting, Cameron Perry Fraser
and Radix Ensemble - Robin Holcomb, Ha-Yang Kim, James Falzone, Paul Kikuchi

Prelude - Bonnie Whiting & James Falzone
Null a - <abc>
New York Counterpoint - Steve Reich
Null b - <abc>
The Collect - James Falzone
Lament on Ash Wednesday - James Falzone
Control/Resist - Bonnie Whiting
Null c - <abc>
Postlude - Bonnie Whiting & James Falzone

Professional correctness (these cats know how it's done) in the service of time-line structured sound lists. Post-Experimental Minimalism? I do try to keep an open mind, but, as well played as it was, and it was, I wondered why the sounds were kept so severely in chains. For me, time is not the immutable slate upon which music is writ, the screen upon which it is projected, it is the clay that music shapes, the body with which music dances. I really love how well these folks were playing (damn they're good!) and I honor their fierce engagement (laser eyed), but I felt like I wanted to unlock their cages. Fly free, little bird!

March 2, 2018
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Sarah Bassingthwaighte - Ecco Ensemble - H20

Sarah used an attractive game-spinner score as a lens through which her trio (Stacey Mastrian, Mark Hilliard Wilson, and the composer) concentrated their awareness on the sound of how their sounds were sounding, so as to evoke, in their corporate intent, the sounds of water in several of its forms. For me their intent, and the score's conceit, was drowned by their own intense awareness of the sounds they were hearing themselves make. The ear wins!

S. Eric Scribner - Convergence

"What would happen if" - always a good place to start. My people! Steve putters around with sound files, piling different performances of the same piece on top of each other. The results were full of wafting billows floating free, canons at the willy nilly.

Brooke Richey - Paradox (for string quartet) and Two Nocturnes (for solo piano) [I didn't catch the names of the performers]

Paradox proceeds as a packed series of tightly wadded cylinders. Dense both top bottom and side side. No space for anything but clarity.

Alas, I was not so enamored of the piano pieces. Brooke is just starting out, and all of us, to a certain extent, begin by imitating models. I know I did. I would only suggest that imitating anything in the standard repertoire, and in particular this overpopulated swath of it, should be ventured with great circumspection. It has acquired an odor. It infests everything. There are so many odd-ball chambers of keyboard music to explore! Rope up! Fresh batteries in the headlamps! Spelunk!

Doug Palmer - Doors

He says he's just dinking around with files he found on his computer, but in doing so Doug has created a video/audio piece that starts where Tati left off and creates a dizzyingly surreal conceptual space between ear-world and eye-world. "I stopped just short of melting clocks." DIY for the win.

Recorded

February 25, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 626 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [December 2001]

shiver rattle ice shiv cymbal

northern dawn slow and low
temple bell speech
emptiness ghostless shaker
rhythm in the wrist
fresh wound
careful of our sounds
setting for a song from the other side of the pond
distance alienation loss antique
O rupture!
heartfelt washboard eloquence modulated to the rattlesnake desert
picking pieces up we move on by invention here:
washtub bass washboard potlids
moving to hand drum pentatonic marimba drums
gentle comfort
big frame reminder drum of deeper than that
tambourine rolls flutish fanfare bowed washtub bass
lidalong spoken here
drum and birdcall
amplify! testify!
(testate. amplate.)

Jacob's Ladder - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

great snare drum sound
we get Bruce and snare drum
everything else is mooshed into the mass of phony gospel sound
is a great snare drum though

Banned Rehearsal 790 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 2011]

reedy buzz and electric guitar and zither and drum (low) could loop aye-ever

Heading Home - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

standing stanzas which we cobble to our stance
or
travel through past

February 27, 2018

The Maydens Song - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

extending the span of notes' speaking
not resolving into its pitch immediately unadorned
time is taken for grace
opens moments up to multiple vectors
as sung tunes are graced with words and words' articulations

Smoke House Blues - Jelly Roll Morton [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

multiple thumb to nose endings fingers wiggling
exaggerated heaviness

One Night of Love - The Voices of Walter Schumann [a Rescued Record]

Advert from the back of the above

just what are you suggesting, you cad?

My Bonnie - The Beatles with Tony Sheridan [from The Beatles Anthology Volume 1]

the boys are having a good time back there

The Weather Forecast - The Master Singers

sodden with syllables and vowels

Unnamed Track 5 - Tillicum Junior High School Band, Bob Runyan, director [from my mom's tape of a concert given March 3, 1971)

there is some jazzy big band music back there somewhere beyond the boomed out bulldozer bass

Hot On The Heels of Love - Throbbing Gristle [from Greatest Hits]

cyclic (cyclified?) elements without much doing with each other
until the vocal seems to turn them into a backing texture of cyclic elements doing with each other
one of TG's smarter compositions and one of Cosi's strongest vocal statements

Banned Rehearsal 72 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, and Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 1986]

feedback systems can deprive or corrupt the agency of others, limiting choice
sizes of sounds and sizes of places in which to cram them
a blunt object music
heavy lifting
the everpresent heaterhum
hollow inside
spinning disks like a DJ
the sort of session we allowed ourselves
to allow ourselves to be stuck
to inhabit crud
electroshock dis-therapeutic
some membranes are exceeding tough

February 28, 2018
Drain You - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

the interval pattern, at the open, the Brahms of the E minor symphony in mind
moving to the Pink Floyd of Corporal Clegg
not because of that, necessarily, but rather a sophisticated tune in fact

Banned Rehearsal 438 from DAT - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 1996]

Among the earliest digital recordings of BR. It wasn't long after this that we acquired our own DAT and left cassette tapes behind us. Now that I think about, our next live show after this (Banned Rehearsal 440) was recorded digitally, and featured a bank of cassette tape players with mixed outputs from our past coming from speakers that were literally behind us.

ghost voices on the etherwaves
what is a single time?
chimney magnificent
heady brew of backing noise
hindsight to history
not that any path, including ours, was inevitible
but that this was the path we happened to take to get where we got to
prepping for the last live gig of the century

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 25, 2018
Hail - Keith Eisenbrey
A hailstorm drummed on our metal chimney for a few minutes Sunday afternoon.

Banned Telepath 60 St. Paul Island - Aaron Keyt

St. Paul Island, Alaska, is not near anything much except the chilly expanse of the Bering Sea and vast herds of king crabs. Aaron sent some wind.

February 26, 2018
Banned Telepath 60 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

We were not near the Bering Sea.

Banned Rehearsal 953 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt