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.