Playlist

Preface

". . . what is the 'music-ontological core' of musical experience, and how do we reach it? The answer resists discursive felicity; it is a multiplicity, always in motion, involving flows of intensities between experiencer and experienced object—as experienced, but in a way that is sensitive both to the kinds of meaning-generative flows from the object (as both a temporally-constituted and -constituting musical reality), and to the knowledge that one's experience is situated and incomplete, that every effort to contact the music in its putative wholeness only reveals new transcendental lines and new epistemological possibilities."
- Chris Stover "Walking Up and Over, Approaching Boretz's Qixingshan" Open Space Magazine issue 19/20 fall 2015/spring 2016

Texts

Recorded

Maryhill Stonehenge

March 30, 2019
Cheyenne's Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

from under the warm snug blanket
release tension release ease
tummy full

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from a home recording of 3/1/2007]

my bits (added to Ben's now withdrawn solo piano piece Liebeslied (for a pianist alone))
schematically interlaced with his bits
in order to underline the schematic image within his bits as my bits unlace them

for me: it gave me a performance version (for a pianist among others)
this was a pretty strong performance, one of the last I made on the 6' Yamaha my folks bought for me when I was in high school
necessary time is given
but it doesn't lag either

Light It Up - High Class Wreckage [from a pre-release copy of High Class Wreckage]


pumped for mayhem

Loser - St. Rage [June 2016]


St. Rage is a fictional band in my wife's novel The Gospel According to St. Rage (soon to be re-published by Not A Pipe Publishing). They are played here, as always, by Your Mother Should Know, which is my wife, Karen Eisenbrey, and her brother, Neal Kosály-Meyer. I did the honors behind the recording device and final mix.

nice job guys!

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Taxman - The Beatles [from Anthology Vol. 2]

once each track could be recorded clean the parts could be treated as replaceable, optional, swappable. ultimately, it swaps the compositional focus from an arrangement of chords and tunes performed by folks to an arrangement of tracks laid atop chords and tunes

Nutty (take 2) - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

loose and playful

Some Other Time - X [from Wild Gift]

expression on face: grim, stiff, determined

Radio Head - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

toy orchestra in lego land

Make You Come - Kicking Giants [from Kill Rock Stars]

we do love our guitar players round these here parts

Track 3 - Seattle Chamber Music Festival [July 2001]

artifacts of nasty splatters
nothing like digital to point out its own flaws
made me jump every time

No Condemnation - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]

just the blues
the blues almighty
and with a bonus song as part of the track

Sow Took The Measles (A Reverb) - Train Case [June 2011]

If I did put any reverb in there it is nicely minimal
Train Case is also Karen and Neal, in a more acoustic homegrown idiom

Wave, Beach, Pebbles Large, Close Extreme, Surf, Storm, Foam, Ocean Roar, Intense, Sizzle, Crash, Impact Puff - Pete Comley [from Ocean Ambience Rocky Coastline Vol 1_1]

This was all of 2" long. I'll need to rethink how to listen to this album so that I actually have time to sit down after pushing play.

March 31, 2019
Little Lamb Who Made Thee - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [April 1966]

Baker City, Oregon

a really nice setting of Blake's poem
it captures some of its divine innocence
even in its Hollywood style

Ruby My Dear - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

superb brushwork back there on the skins and pans Mr. Blakey!

Planet Earth - Duran Duran [from Duran Duran]

the eighties
when they manufactured a sound
to be an image of blatantly manufactured sound
robotics

Banned Rehearsal 99 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]

Petrushka country fair in the Horse Heaven Hills
we are recording on a boom box at the Bickleton Pioneer Picnic and Rodeo
mostly, in intent, to memorialize the calliope of Meyer family legend, the calliope reborn from recalcitrant scrap, its erstwhile melodies having been re- and re- permuted into a gleeful quilt of melody parts set free of their prior moorings

tape is running
you have been immortalized

Carousel of the Calliope of Legend

that calliope, it explains so much

oh no, we're staying in Seattle for ever
giddy with penultimatricidal tendencies
Carny Vater of the Prankmaker
shacks and bunkers
but honestly, what gender is any of this?

to correct the calliope
is to silence the oracle
chaos divine incipit
how it Klings and Klangs
Kling Klang
(I guess this fits, do as well as any)
getting some pie on tape
by laws
in the sense that there are none

April 4, 2019
My Red Self - Heavens to Betsy [from Kill Rock Stars]

flipside or formerside or pastside or stillinside
of Kaley Lynn Eaton's Poem in Praise of Menstruation as heard recently at Salon
attitudes surrounding the cultural taboo received slapback into culture's face
strong and straight with a no nonsense blatancy to it like my friend Jill Borner's My Baby Left Me

Cedar Flute Love Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

It is required that it be muddied by loop echo and smudged with bird song.
Do they make flutes with cedar? Wouldn't it be splintery? Dunno.

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from Preludes in Seattle Part 2, March 2007]

see above and elsewhere for what this is
I didn't manage to improve it (nor play it very well for that matter) so much as point out some if its, and my, problems. A project far more essential to me to have done than to do for any else

Hendrixesque - Henry Guiazda - Nathan Davis, cello [from Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

more loops for repeating with
mirrored halls
distant doors
hidden
(locked anyway)

The Drink I Didn't Have Last Night - St. Rage [June 2016]


Here they are again.
late night rough
wrinkled plenty

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 31, 2019
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." - Keith Eisenbrey " [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

I wrote Mrs. Ramsay, its title taken from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (I liked how she framed

your blogger ca 2001

Lily with roses), in 2001. It was my first large-scale composition since Slow Blues. Slow Blues was structured like a set of variations, each iteration exactly 12 bars long in a slow 4/4 meter, and each successive variation based on the same sequence of mod-17 pitch sets arcanely related to the bare-bones blues sequence I I I I | IV IV I I | V V I I, cycling through the 17 M-transforms available in mod-17. For Mrs. Ramsay I played a similar game, but the structural segments aren't all the same size or shape, vary more widely in affect, and, if I recall correctly, the various M-transforms are re-ordered according to some rule I have long since forgotten. I performed this just once, at an early Seattle Composers' Salon back when they were held at the Mennonite Church in Lake City. Tom Baker may have a dub of that performance, but until I recorded it last Friday I did not have any recording of it for my own reference. In practice this means that I really didn't know how it went from outside of playing it. And so I am ever so glad to finally make its acquaintance.

Frankie and Johnny - Keith Eisenbrey [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

Karen under Jail

For several years now, and interrupted by a self-imposed indifferently observed sabbatical, I have been working on a sequence of etudes. Big surprise: there will probably be 17 of them all together, if I should be so fortunate as to finish. Frankie and Johnny is the 13th and most recently completed. I think of it as an opera, an opera in which the main character is the traditional song itself, which is written in the score with approximate, unstaved, pitches. The piano part is a sequence of 3-note groups written as, but not intended to be played as, whole-note simultaneities. I had been practicing for about a month, trying on all sorts of voices to sing with and tinkering with various schemes of approaching the projection into figuration space of the 3-note groups. In the end I sang it in a nearly straight folk style, and improvised the figuration in the real time of the recording. Since I stopped to shuffle pages between each verse I had to piece together the takes of them, but even with that, first take best take.

April 1, 2019
Gradus 345 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

development, as a received notion, is a sequence or group of varied but related ideas
related by repetition of some kind of some aspect or set of aspects

we pick up a thought and turn it over in our ears :: of as many aspects as can be held in mind, while following the variations
it is where our focus shrinks to the immediate