Saturday, January 30, 2021

Playlist

 Preface

"What I want to suggest about this kind of music experience is that it might plausibly be consequent on, and ultimately ontologized with respect to, a series of previous life-events speaking exclusively in the suigeneric language of music. 'Suigeneric' does not signify 'isolated', or even insulated, just relatively discrete in the total cosmology of consciousness. Floating independently within the global consciousness-bubble along with, in some loosely determinate relative configuration, everything else in your momentary mind-world. Of course the interdependence of everything is not in doubt, but it probably isn't designable in any one intracoherent language; although everything has to do with everything, and everything is affected by everything, not everything is intercommensurable with everything."

- Benjamin Boretz "Music, as a Music" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"

Texts

Streaming

Wayward in Limbo

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series now moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is curating and commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of exclusive material. Many of these will be essentially “live” performances recorded at home for this occasion. Others may create a mix of pre-recorded material that has not been previously released elsewhere.

- from the Wayward Music Series website at https://www.waywardmusic.org/.

January 23, 2021

Amy Rubin 

Introductory Remarks

How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (French #1)

Jamaican Sunset

How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (English)

Beneath My Hand And Eye The Distant Hills, Your Body

The Sigh (English)

Better Times Ahead

1980: Letting Go

The Sigh (German)

Winter Solstice Improvisation

January 24, 2021

Kaori Suzuki

rose flames dance on a spiral staircase

an aside:

the shift in new music performance practice
from when live digital manipulation
was rare
and suspect

to being absolutely the norm
transpired in my lifetime 

for me at the UW in the late 70s
to hear a synthesized piece on a program
was weird
a genuine curiosity
from the province of specialized computer labs
and expensive equipment
at that time
electronic music meant
analog synthesizers
magnetic tape
and soul numbing tedium 

amped up free reeds
source sound
fed
into a fine grained manipulation device
bending
extracting stress rhythms
vowel flange
these are like shapes our mouth can make
for singing 

Randallian
as in
Compose Yourself

Recorded

January 23, 2021

Elite Syncopations - Scott Jopin - William Albright

pleasant sunny simplicities
go nowhere
certainly not to dark places

Frieden auf Erden - Arnold Schoenberg - Robert Shaw Festival Singers, Robert Shaw

all are found
wherever hidden
however it must
contort to achieve 

octopus clever 

desperately seeking cathedral

January 24, 2021

Evocations - Albert Roussel - Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, Michel Plasson, Jose Van Dam, Nicolai Gedda, Nathalie Stutzmann, Antxon Ayestaran

from whence Grofé cribbed
so is it second order Debussy
or something else 

but such opulance
something else I think
more grandiose and pathetique
a different accent to it
French equivalent to Zemlinsky perhaps 

pre-war decadence (1912)
wide screen
showcase Western
open sky
steppe 

chorus in the last one
sad echoes of Beethoven's 9th 

the diaphony is voluptuating
pretty fancy choral writing
back there in the voluptuary
diaphonizing 

Holst could be a kindred spirit also

Sonatine Bureaucratique - Erik Satie - Frank Glazer

stamped in triplicate
deft

Fantasia and Fuge in C minor - Johann Sebastian Bach, orchestrated Edward Elgar - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

the impulse to opulance
and the safety
of the safely
dead masters
pound it home 

takes a martial turn there

En fantasirejse til Faerone - Carl Nielsen - Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Herbert Blomstedt

how it sounds
in the dark north
travelogue
here's the dance hall

I'm Leaning on the Lord - Famous Blue Jay Singers [from Goodbye, Babylon]

barbershop neighborhood
men's quartet
a particular culture trope
think the Beatles
4 guys

Diga Diga Doo - Duke Ellington [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

the frame is square
black
greys
and white
maybe 16 fps
aspirational line

motion transfers
in the space
within clock time
and metrical time 

Circus Polka - Igor Stravinsky - New York Philharmonic, Igor Stravinsky

the tempos are remarkably exact

Cherokee - Art Tatum [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

how crazy it gets
(pretty crazy) 

is only to measure
how closely
(pretty closely) 

he adheres
to the center of singing 

the tune
straight in the middle of his sound

Schlagtrio - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky, Jean Batigne, Georges van Gucht

the high notes
descending
the low
ascending
the Schlag
playing ref
between them

I'm Waiting Just For You - Pat Boone [a Rescued Record]

or so he says

do what we used to do

I Love You - The Volumes [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

back to your friendly neighborhood barbershop
naively brilliant arrangement
all the sounds in a little clump
low to the right
(shaker) 

pop songs
no one cares how they end

24 Preludes, 17-20 - Lockrem Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey [from my recital Preludes in Seattle Part 5, February 2018]

it is ominous
18 is scary 

as well as I know these
they are never what I expect
they remain sharply distinct
from any idea I have
of how they go
while I am playing them

January 26, 2021

A Simple Song - Paul Revere and The Raiders

funk all over

("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") - Benjamin Boretz - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded at home June 2010]

the question for me is
can I divest myself
of classical music habits
thoroughly enough
to play this
to keep its focus
rather than
my prevenient long line
or attempt
at a long line 



about as well as I've ever played it
always room for improvement
I sure wish I would
consistently
play the dyads exactly together


Peek-a-Boo
- Devo [a Rescued Record]

the American mechanical sensibility
automatic music
like the carnival calliope mechanical orchestra devices
of the late 19th and early 20th 

in this sense only
in that it evokes a machine

Seeds - Keith Eisenbrey [midi realization February 2006]

without breaks between
and mechanical
as above
as though it were a single piece
rather than a set of 6
works that way too
brings out something at its core
concerning the size
the heft
of these ideas
and how
the weight and balance
shifts
as it moves on

After The Reign - Michael Leese - Cleveland Chamber Symphony

film score reticence
attractive without calling attention to its doings
its own logic is not any point at all
free floating atmospheres in search of a planet

from my journal entry of August 23, 1996:
block sounds supplanting each other
occasional parodistic element
(chinoiserie)
motoric masses
like traffic
Ivesian leftovers
but they don't get the last word

January 27, 2021

Banned Rehearsal 441 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [January 1997]

begin with din
fill the media with signal

Wurlitzer
Silvertone
Ludwig 

chimney
violin 

socializing for a long journey
each copes
separately together 

we don't know what we're doing
Aaron spells it out
the obo roi
scrawl of the 90s
our intent
even when spelled out
is hard to make out
above the noise
all for the best 

in full ear scour mode
settling into a feedback hum drone

the ground is treacherous slick
devious within
dubious support
we crowd and press 

nothing about this is
good
professional
public spirited
it's all crud 

from among the last of the analog cassette tape sessions

soon we would move to digital audio tape

from my journal entry of September 19, 2004:
opens with something of an energy release
cornet guitar over percussion
sounds like a lot of chimney and banging on metal
high pitch bells
baby mutter
rattles-word and guitar
tiny fingery sounds
all sharing a rhythmic space
runs too
slowing
calming
a violin works its way in
back in our enclosed space
we wrestle
Ya! Yahaa!
see Isaac
some energy dispensing itself outward
feeding back into itself
and the organ
funmaker
Isaac complains
rather especially
as it gets going 

this sounds pretty good
sounds like perhaps Neal on the guitar
me on organ?
winds down
loses some energy
though the sound is pretty reasonable
Aaron begins to spell things
and the obo roi comes out
sounds very much like a crying baby
Isaac demonstrates
Aaron continues to spell
a fascinating way to make what is written nearly unintelligible
especially when we only get a bit of it
still much engaged with tension release
Isaac's contribution is fine
as it calms down
it could close or not
these guitar feedback sounds are pretty nice
may be better to cut the first bit if we need to cut (or perhaps as this bad drumming takes over but then here it is being pretty interesting again [NB at that time we may have begun to think about putting out a compact disk]

January 28, 2021

superfly - The Humidiflyers [from Blue Ducky EP]

here we come to save the world
all the boys and
all the girls 

this year I can't wait for Halloween
a million little kids all dressed to look like me

Banned Rehearsal 713 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [January 2007]

we do not cram the signal
but scratch
and occasionally bong on it
tune in
or not quite
in tune
near 

an older sound comes to visit
in a can 

animal human hybrids 

we allow and comment on the past
creating a seminar live 

big feedback squeal
we have to stand for life
but is it a codeword?

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 25, 2021

Banned Telepath 69 Toad Hall - Aaron Keyt

Banned Telepath 69 Tintinabulary - Keith Eisenbrey, Karen Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Banned Rehearsal 1018 - Keith Eisenbrey, Karen Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

once again the banned gathers along the telepath

Postscripts

::Consult the Oracle

upon the sun-blind frames outside the

druggists' appear to have been just turned out of

the united states' mint and when I saw a

Reality Check::

remove quantification

focus on reality

for a change

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