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