Playlist

Live

January 25, 2019
Mike Marlin and Friends: Purging Demons Through Sonic Oversight
Jesse Canterbury, Eric Dahlman, Keith Eisenbrey, Carl Juarez, Jim Knodle, Mike Marlin, Moonshadow, Deb Scott, Tari Nelson Zagar, Vivaldi
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Oh my.

tools of the trade

Mike was in Seattle for a welcome visit, and I was delighted to receive an invitation to join in this re-union show. I met Mike back in the days of The Tentacle, a local new music newspaper he helped found that had a glorious few years back in the last decade. I had joined him and Deb in a couple of free-improv events back then, one at the Odd-Fellows Hall, and one at Gallery 1412 at which Jim had also participated. Jesse, (back in town!) I have known for a while, but had never had the pleasure of playing together with him until last night. Eric was known to me only through sound (as Mike's cohort in Dubious Duo), but both Tari and Carl were newly met with. Moonshadow and Vivaldi are Mike and Deb's service dogs, and they joined us both as singers and leash shakers. ("the rest of you just rattle your jewelry.")

Equipped with a handwritten set list and a few quick words of instruction, we gathered in sub-committees of three or four to hash out introductions, swap yarns, and to enjoy the necessary preliminaries and hobnobberations, upon which being accomplished we gathered in plenary session to bring the powers that be to naught. A highlight was Aria 45, based on a sequence of words spewed by Old Orange Hair in Montana sometime last year. I have no organ. Indeed.

Demons duly purged. Ya coulda been there.

Recorded

January 20, 2019
Girl You Should Have Known - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]

hazing ritual, front lines, songs of the

The Field of Arbol I Winds of the Sun - S. Eric Scribner - Dale Speicher, percussion [from Storm

Jim Knodle

Sound Cycle, May 2011]

Dale made thunderrumble in the space of thunderrumble in space
distant
crackless
massive

Finnegans Wake Part 3 Chapter 3 - James Joyce - Hinson Calabrese [from Waywords and Meansigns]

question of: which interests in music might be intrigued by such a sprawling text: ambientists? (why?) || if true, might it be?

the text is focused on the present moment, no glaring trajectory of drama
long looping jammers
each statement made by a different voice
(statement quantity equals voice quantity)
in each case no matter where one enters nor where one leaves
carrying my dragon man

Stand Back! It's ProgRog!

We hear this language go by as though we did not understand a word of it, but as though the fabric of the thought containing our least understanding of where it is at is in familiar-like words

collector of plain language parts transcribed through a filter (Prog!!)
a steady stream of Irishness inscribed upon battlefelled parchmeant

January 22, 2019
Der ander Mascharada - William Brade - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

middlest of three
riddle me this

Fétes galantes (Set 1) - Claude Debussy - Frederica von Stade, Martin Katz [from Voyage a Paris]

impersonation of the poem's speaker
the someone who sings this thus
song and singer conspire to emerge as an unstable unity
an appearing person
a vanishing person

Ben Boretz

A Question, A Rose - Benjamin Boretz - Scot Moore

a matter of nearness
two (or more) violin parts played by solo violin

nearness of co-emergence
or between the actual duet (or x-tet) and us

a quartet for G, D, A, and E strings, played solo for keeps, all humming the same box
finishes with not ending, after not ending

as though parts had spilled out onto the not ever ending
after not ever after

Ben was kind enough to share this hot-off-the-press recording of this hot-off-the-press solo violin piece. When he shared a midi version recently I surmised to myself that hearing the parts played on real strings, with a real bow, resonating a single soundbox, and performed by a human person, would lift the image from fascinating to lively. I had no idea.

January 24, 2019
He's Waitin' - The Sonics [from Boom]

(for you)
more threats
was the idea this: that men thought women would like men who were pathologically jealous?
was the idea this: that men needed to express their deepest and ugliest as an antidote to it? (spurious)
was the idea this: that men thought men needed to threaten their women, in order for women to be their women, in order themselves to be men?
was the idea this: that no thought was involved?

The Sonics are a fabulous band, but the prevailing public ethos of the era (mid 60's) is more than worth unpacking in order to examine our own selves and ethos.

Evidence (take 1) - Thelonius Monk [from The London Collection]

a random-ish sequence of Monk-ish bits is all there is for what there is for what to work with
transparent pitchwork can play unfenced

I admire TM's articulative manner, in that it allows what could be an overbearing piano part to float among his fellows. It respects.

Track 6 - Empire Brass Quintet [from American Brass Band Journal Revisited]

polka oom pah done to a crisp

Banned Rehearsal 88 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Doug Haire, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Wally Shoup [June 1986]

This was the first of six sessions we made on June 7, 1986. We were intent on getting to 100 before Neal left for San Diego later that month. Doug and Wally had come over and we set off from the Greenwood Half House toward and partly around Green Lake. Any theory of what we think we are or were doing or might or could be about is quickly outrun by the practice of doing whatever it is we were doing or just did do. The conversation of ducks is passed by but lingered at. Toy piano plucks and bird calls.

duckkind, the tugboat nature of

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 21, 2019
Gradus 344 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

My recording failed due to user error, but I made a picture.

Playlist

Recorded

January 13, 2019

Jenny Jenny - The Sonics [from Boom]

at their raucous best
it is itself
straight ahead
no flinching

Criss Cross - Thelonius Monk [from The London Sessions]

number (or quantity) theory
he's laying all this stuff out there folks
listen up
take notes
it's on the board

Luxembourg - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

derives from the same era as Jenny Jenny above
the bridge gives it away

I love the song, but I'm not sure I'm as enamored of the echo on his voice as he was.

Banned Rehearsal 86 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]

cans and shakers,
cornet,
then
then
YES! The Obo Roi!

Cornet & obo roi make a fine distortion on the tape

lively, but gets a bit stuck in a music trap,
that is, we play music, which is a trap, a habit, a known
Neal finds a pretty little lick on ukulele
a Waltz from Karen on the Funmaker
just like practicing but without any pesky sense of trying to get better
nothing like highminded commercial free improvisation
nothing like

the didgeridoo says didgeridoo
the game we play is to bump each other off our respective kicks

Bierhall badge achieved!
"I Love Baseball" a sudden song
I have a phone call you'll have to get all quiet to which request compliance is partial

We all join in a rousing rendearment of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" in a slightly less creepy shade of the Mack The Knife tempo, my obligato line to which is perhaps my finest moment on toy piano ever

American Patrol - Canadian Brass [from Red, White & Brass]

a polite swing
bandstand ready bandleader arrangement
even pokes La Marseillaise in there a la Faschingschwank aus Wien

Liebeslied - Benjamin Boretz - Keith Eisenbrey [from my recital: Preludes in Seattle, June 2006]

An unfinished and now withdrawn mid-70's composition, the pencil score to which Ben presented to me as a gift in 1984 when I came back to Seattle. I have performed it many times, and I have also modestly altered it (Liebeslied, Amended), and less than modestly utterly and completely re-composed it at Ben's prodding (Sonata Liebeslied).

What it is about is the particular intervals between chord changes, as they go on, going on within other ongoing musics.

The Last Jubilee - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

"don't be blue
if you don't wake up today"
- a kind of subjunctive, as though sung from sleep
"just pick up your harp and play"

Banned Telepath 48 Somerville [Aibell, Jennifer Chung, Aaron Keyt, May 2016]

Assembled (by me) from several sound files hurled across the intersphere from Somerville MA
sound boundaries :: intervals gaps joints adjacencies gores
g'bye kiss me quick to Wallace (a spinet/player cyborg)
vacuuming
If the parts are indestructible the joints can be haphazard
BIG FUNMAKER
what pipe organ music could be if given half a chance

advice for listening: let go of your morbid abstemiosity
don't just live a little live a lot go to the outer

part of what Wallace is, for me, is the mediated Wallace, the recorded sound of it, as it actually landed on this side of the Rockies

Courante I & Courante II - Johann Grabbe - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

a gracefully balanced wit dancing on the points of pins

January 15, 2019
Go Joe Go - Phil Napoleon [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

a big orchestra
the 1926 recordist/tech was not quite up to the task
too few microphones, not enough multitrack capability
but its all there if you listen for it
and the dynamic range is real

What's New - Art Pepper [from The Way It Was]

Did the more subtle degrees of nuance become part of the point of this music because the technology made it possible?

You Hurt Me - Wayne Storm [a Rescued Record]

I'm still loving you-ooo-ooo-ooo
hurt me

The spoken verse
Is anything worse?

Spoken word
Poetry's turd?

Darn That Dream - Thelonius Monk [from The London Sessions]

all the extremes of dynamic differentiation in play between mezzo forte and forte
and degrees of forwardness to the back of the hall

Eliza Act 3 - Keith Eisenbrey, Dave Jones, Aaron Keyt [December 1981]

. . . is hushed
twins
two twins
echo

sophomoric in big chunks
not yet awake to the concept that there is a possibility of much more than the clever
best when we leave the wordplay out of it
even better when the musicplay is left out of it too
ceremonial irreverence - a necessary preparation
we exit
fading
on hisses

January 17, 2019
Johnny Bye Bye - Bruce Springsteen [from a collection of 6 B-sides]

barely comes on before it goes out
like a bonus quarter track

Banned Rehearsal 279 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [December 1991]

your blogger, ca 1983 - Red Hook, NY

the hats 500
because of the feather
a mighty view

Dr. Seuss's "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" is a touchstone of my own intellectual awakening
(structures of the tale revealing structures of knowledge)

hats and crowns and fathers
very serious nonsense
the father of the father of Nad
the magicians from the southwest tower

Karen remembers hearing the story as told by Captain Kangaroo

nursery songs if songs we do
sounds
guiro overdrive
drum guiro dialogue as conversational composition

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 14, 2019
Banned Rehearsal 973 - Pete Comley, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Not rehearsing for our upcoming gig at the Seattle Improvisation Festival on February 7, 8pm at Hollow Earth Radio, we crowd six into the Tintinabulary

Playlist

Live

January 11, 2019

Shelby Earl, Songs for Singing 2,
Matty Gervais
The Triple Door, Seattle

Matty - currently with The Head and The Heart and with Mikey and Matty, formerly with Curtains For You and The True Bugs, and I do not know with what all else even more formerly - was joined after a few solo songs by his spouse Charity Rose Theilen (also of The Head and The Heart), by his brother Mikey Gervais (also of Mikey and Matty, etc. etc.), and later by the Passenger String Quartet. His voice is a light tenor joy, effortless to hear solo and effortless in its blending with others - later in the evening he joined Shelby for a number. The blood harmony between him and Mikey is a Seattle miracle. The evening's set basked in the clear glowing comforts of home life facing itself bravely, young adulthood fading into the near past.

Shelby, in what she announced was her last calendared performance before she has her baby, was accompanied by Billy Brush on piano, and the Passenger String Quartet. The ping of her voice is set a bit higher than, but, in spite of any dissimilarities of repertoire or technical glitter, is quite similar to Liza Minelli's. And like hers, its strength is not really in its sheer volume, but rather in its graciously rapturous embrace. When she sings in a room she sings to you, to us. Her voice shines, enfolds, fills - as though in shining from her it shines from us. 

Recorded

January 5, 2019
Three Strathspeys (1979) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded live on June 10, 2006]

Something about these, my second-ever set of piano pieces, brought Rameau, whose keyboard music I have been sight-reading recently, to mind. Uncluttered textures, clear phrases, and most of all, exuberantly enjoyed sonorities in all the registers. The finals of the first two are a tad clever I suppose, but the third one holds its focus out to the bitter.

Soundform IV Spaces - S. Eric Scribner - [from Storm Sound Cycle, May 2011]

whispered conspiracies
a windscape with none there to hear it
counsels are kept
the traffic without knows nary aught

You tell me.

January 5-6, 2019
Finnegans Wake Part 3 Chapter 2 - James Joyce - Kio Griffith [from Waywords and Meansigns]

patiently sotto vociferated time kept magnetically
multiple concurrent renditions (none hurried) cross-fade joints
ham broadcast Polonius reborn bloviating as of old

narrow range of frequency recorded: the principals of the pitch if low and pristine would not be heard unless they interfered with higher frequency waves, and then they would be re-constructed principals, reconstituted on the mind's side out of its effects on those higher sounds - ghostlike.

prose sodden with poetic rhythm thinking
fond of sharp corners and rhyme games that veer away absolutely

setting: bandwidths and echo spans
sound recordings of sounds recorded: particular bandwidthprints evolve other-eon-ly, extraplanetoidenal cultural sourcing

ambient in that it is not addressed to anyone in particular
as the text of a book on a shelf not being read, not talking, applesauce
once upon a drunk and a very fine drunk it was
the scorch house putting all space in a nutshell
a damn good cup of skald you could trot a mouse on it

a compositional game: pulling the text back and back and down and down just to disappearance's nearing
o bother I must tell a troth
love's young fizz on a matter poetic

January 8, 2019
Canzon XVI - William Brade - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

That it is in fact highly refined is of less import than that it projects refinement, im- or op- presses with its refinement.

Sam the Accordion Man - Williams Sisters [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

the low voice slipping off in secret to become an instrumental part

Tickle Toe - Art Pepper [from The Way It Was]

selling a brand of refinement also, distinctly expensive


In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 7, 2019
Gradus 343 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

notes
not played
not posited
not proposed
not even queried
not tried, for want of any way about it

bunches at once

In what sense could these coalesce into a collection, or combination? how combined?
by use of, or by sounding, within a timespan?

Playlist

Recorded

Baker City, Oregon

December 28, 2018
Brick (sound excerpt from the film) - Shelley Roden, Foley artist

school bell drumming of ball footfall cross rhythms
echo play piano from score shows up as the run runs by the practice rooms
DONG! . . .
crows and bells

I was so taken by this bit of sound design, Foley art, and cues of music, that I went to the trouble of figuring out how to extract the sound track

cross-rhythms generated by the footfalls of two actors chasing through a school ground.

Soundform III Wind - S. Eric Scribner - [from Storm Sound Cycle, May 2011]

mallet work explosives

Finnegans Wake Part 3, Chapter 1 - James Joyce - Simon Ross [from Waywords and Meansigns]

guitar, kalimba
unmoored

music sound shifting as marker of section, otherwise inaudible disunderstandable
as though ordinary, phrases decrescendo and drop in pitch
Ironesia

The parts don't hear themselves together with the other parts, but only themselves alone, oblivious of their proximitousness.

Ondt and Gracehoper
a poem in rhyme

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

December 30, 2018
Canzon - Thomas Grabbe - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

fitting fitness
appropriate attire
as the be all of all of it

Meanwhile
they develop further the science of polyphony and variation
and of ornaments to grace them

Serenade for Strings in C, op. 48 - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Berliner Philharmoniker, Semyon Bychkov

display
bigger and more glorious empire than any

such lights
more than any others

such dresses
more splendid than any other empire's lights and dresses

the self-grandiosifizing Nobility that rose back against the wicked upstart's troops
those troops from their beloved French cousins now dead

and all they do with the knowledge is dance
a carefully prescribed portion only of grit life gets through

the romanticized serf life
counterpart to the antebellum South

such gentility
in the bloody claws of legitimacy

that same dress that same face
new rooms

write any story on top
a One Act Opera Without Words

Look! The light sky! Hark!
The Lark! Twitter bird!

our hopelessly generous attitudes about our past oppressors
we are nostalgic for our kings

barf
his derivations are in the winding up for all to see

January 1, 2019

the past

Grandpa's Spells - Jelly Roll Morton, George Mitchell, Edward 'Kid' Ory, Omer Simeon, Johnny St. Cyr, John Lindsay, Andrew Hilaire [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

horns blaring to all corners
the center holds tight

I Can't Believe You're In Love With Me - Art Pepper [from The Way It Was]

alto and tenor share a fancy version of the tune
then a series of alternating quick bits with the drum

Don't You Just Know It - The Sonics [from Boom]

drunk sloppy, immovable

Crepuscle with Nellie (take 4) - Thelonious Monk, Al McKibbon, Art Blakey [from The London Sessions]

palpable heft
it moves but it is an effort
until it lifts of its own
and back

Did You Steal My Money - The Who [from Face Dances]

the too smooth, too distant, sound has a blanket over it. my money my entitlement

Banned Rehearsal 87 - Karen (Meyer) Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]

your blogger and soon to be spouse, 1986

a valiant stab
I just turned the level all the way up

Book of Windows (select panes)
Ideas should be run with, unlike scissors.

preacher voice production, not quite sprechstimme, but like it, lifted

Trance Butchered Knight at revolution's height
hard core earlyish Banned Rehearsal
Funmaker set to Rend

must have been working on the songs I wrote for my nuptials soon to be
there's the text auf Deutsch

Anna and Aaron arrive
brought in on a past cassette

the ancient Italian fighting art for the family
we don't know what we're doing anymore
than you do

TV gun shots derived from cyclic noise flange or the boofing of balloons
soggy of the green great lake monster in my bathroom

hunted

gathered

Hard To Mention - The Young Fresh Fellows [from Electric Bird Digest]

whatever it is
drive right through it
don't look, (but it does)

24 Preludes 1 through 4 - Lockrem Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey [June 2006]

once an idea is in hand
he does not let go

nicely played, past me!

Let Me Sleep In Your Arms Tonight - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

sung at a tempo that is only available in the big sky night of western stars

Banned Rehearsal 910  - Aibell, Jennifer Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 2016]

metal, wood
substance that sounds :: things appear in sounds, in their sounds

if one is not talking one feels one is not existing
the piano tunes of Wallace drift across the bells and potlids
milk can and shakers various
magnificent metal squeal as mega music

now pitch hangs in space as a concretion of a physical object into time
a glow
even a special bit, as after the credit roll

Canzon XIV and Galliarde XIV - William Brade - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

style: a cooperatively created object of thought inhabited by its creators
intersection of what we collect in our closets and what we don from them

He's the Last Word - Ben Pollack [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

nice duet vocal, soprano and alto, neither quite the lead
also, an excellent tuba

I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me (alternate take) - Art Pepper [from The Way It Was]

my how they jump off the beat
rebound
hot potato

Such A Lovin' Appetite - Wayne Storm [a Rescued Record]

a songwritten song
could set the tone for a Watersic satirio-comic film
I'm glad it goes away

September on Jessore Road - Allen Ginsberg - Allen Ginsberg, David Amram, Bob Dylan, Jon Sholle, Steven Taylor [from Holy Soul, Jelly Roll]

thousands
and millions
with bread from the state
malnutrition skulls
border trucks flooded
ambassador bunker alone in the rain
what shall we buy without food stamps on Mars?
how many daughters with nothing to eat? to go.

January 2, 2019

Eliza Act II - Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [December 1981]

perplexed by Beckett
with dij(eridoo)
at the same time one is obliged to speak
oblivious of apriori self-defeat

music is alarmingly simple to imitate
to make it, actually, is also simple
but also easy to miss completely
the slightest pretense wilds the aim

January 3, 2019
Prelude by the "C" - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975-1985]

introducing his band with a filler sort of song full of effects with nothing in the behind of it
trapped by its need to have a particular energy throughout
like a workout in a gym
nothing is accomplished

Banned Rehearsal 278 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [December 1991]

J greets you

Toad Hall Outpost
microphonic misbalance is a problem || or is salutary || in that it is distracting
it removes transparency
forces a retreat from suspended disbelief
can't forget we are listening to what microphones hear in a space
we are amused that J turns a page
J is amused that we are amused

Kierkegaardically Dock

the geese were in a flock

and Keith read Donne

and Down John ran

Kierkegaardically Dock

Aaronsbundler in Ivesian wads of notes
devolving into Mahlerian kitsch drift off
becoming a careful study of bounce rhythms
drum head color clicks and sticks on tight head skin

whisper monsters