Playlist

Live

November 19, 2016
Finnegans Wake Project
Gallery 1412, Seattle

Chapters 1 and 2 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In case we had forgotten, Neal brings us up to date on the story so far. The body laid to rest and the crime rumored about. Chapter 3 will be performed at the Chapel on December 17, 2016.

Recorded

November 20,2016

I did not pay the price on the label

The Best Of Times - Styx [a Rescued Record]

A full Las Vegas style production. Strangely timely.

Guess I'm Falling In Love - Jad Fair, Moe Tucker, Kate Messe, Barry Stock [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

Focus guaranteed. That firehose is, in fact, directed at your face.

Self Portrait in 69 Shades of Grey - Michael Leese - Burning Dog Music Ensemble

Nothing whatsoever to do with the recent infamous book and movie: this predates all that by nearly 25 years. This begins in late 20th century chamber music territory, flute, harp, some brass. An electric bass enters and some cages are rattled and it wanders into jazz band land. ML was a composer I became acquainted with back on CompuServe, when that was a thing. This was one of several tracks on a cassette - transportable medium of choice at the time. We lost track of each other at some point. I was sorry to discover that he had passed away several years ago at the age of 49.

Little Mouth - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Lust and Disgust shout each other blue in the face.

Doomsome Otherings (reading session unedited) - Keith Eisenbrey - Seattle Creative Orchestra, Roger Nelson

Freefloating passages in a partly clogged rehearsal bay. The music's parts, set adrift, have jostled loose. What comes through, even early on, is the orchestral palette, and a sense of how the colors shift.

Get Daddy A Chicken Sandwich - The Trashies [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

A screenplay written as a prank or novelty song. Self-parody in the mold of Black Flag or The Dictators, perhaps even leaning toward the full-on satire of Full Toilet.

Xtet: Last Dance for Milton - Elaine Barkin [from Open Space volume 29]

The space between the notes is full of mischief or tenderness. A music of teasing affection.

November 25, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C


A conversation in pantomime, aiming at what just eludes text.

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus III - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

A typical sequence might be expected to climb up or down a ladder. These spin on tilted axes. Organ sounds tend to take up residence within architectural space, in a way that nothing else does that I can think of. Among other things this separates the voices of the fugue along different lines than implied by the score.

Alla Polacca in D Wq. 116/6 - C. P. E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Ostensibly in 3, but I was hearing the meter as a sequence of 4-beat measures overlapping like fish-scales so that beat four and beat one occupy the same temporal location.

Sonata in E Major (#31) - Haydn - Anton Nel

Once again, the sonata that my friend and collaborator Aaron Keyt reworked into a thorny and thoroughly modern semi-pastiche, and once again it wasn't until the opening of the middle movement that I recognized it.

Concerto in A K. 622 - Mozart - Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Mariner, Jack Brymer

A Mozartean imitation is never direct, he delights in subtle differentiation - a narrower ambitus here, a modal shift there, ornaments full of attitude sprinkled liberally. He fully inhabits the means of his own expression, much as Ken Griffey Jr. fully inhabited his home run swing. This more than anything was probably the achievement that left the Romantics gasping for breath.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 21, 2016
Gradus 303 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Among the poking around are frequent bouts of pretty sweet timbral composition.

November 25, 2016
Ravenna Park 161125 A - Keith Eisenbrey

The sun was out yesterday morning so Karen and I took a walk down to Ravenna Park. I recorded two stretches. This first started at the top of the ravine, at 20th Avenue Northeast, and proceeded east along the North Trail as far as the ball field (where there was a game of Kick Ball in progress, what fun!) We heard and saw several winter wrens, and crows, gurgling brooks, and a conversation among our footfalls. I still need to find a good way to silence the microphone handle I'm using, but the extra noise isn't too distracting.

Ravenna Park 161125 B - Keith Eisenbrey


Once we got above the ball field, heading back along the South Trail, we heard a squeaky swing in the playground. I turned the recording back on and we marched up the damp concrete steps (a really nice sound!) and recorded a little bit of the swing in its weary complaint.

Playlist

Preface

"But every action is determinate, when it happens. and every experience is determinate, as it happens. And yet the connection between action and experience is as ambiguous as the connection between intention and perception. It seems that experiential transactions are plagued with ambiguity and indefinitiveness at every level, seem to have ambiguity and indefinitiveness written into the very core of their being. Which is to say, they are precisely what marks the aesthetic, what gives the aesthetic its edge of epiphanic content, what keeps an aesthetic phenomenonon in play within our psychic universe. Not problems, that is, but distinguishing features; not be be overcome with devices enabling claims of greater objective authority but to be cultivated as treasured properties of the imaginative life of music." Benjamin Boretz  "inside in, outside out", The Open Space Magazine Issue 10 Fall 2008

Texts

Recorded

September 5, 2016

The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes - Stan Brakhage [from by brakhage: an anthology]

Death as an abstraction, that is, the physical remainder of death is an abstraction of us. Abstraction as a death, that is, the psychic remainder of abstraction is evidence of sublime loss. This is not an easy film to watch.

Starbright - Chocolate Milk

This was a rescued record, but only barely rescued - what remains of the signal hints, suggests, an elaborate soul arrangement made with modest means.

Gloria - U2 [from October]

Finding a way to stand in a strong wind: the rhythms with which the various parts resist the implacable lift forward, the free flowing propulsion.

Away In A Manger - London Symphony Orchestra [from Listen To The Joy]

From a corporate Christmas album. The accent of the vocal group (some boy choir or other) is oddly, uncomfortably, off - as though they had been taught the English vowels by someone who had read about them in a book.

I'm Not- Moe Tucker [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

Inertia unleashed.

Sonic Brilliance 15 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Holden K, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Johanna M

Guitar and Sax discuss the close dance of sustained sound with decaying sound. The stratification of activities echoes the stratification of the social group, each inaccessible to the others.

September 6, 2016

Banned Rehearsal 604 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Full of declaimed text: In Those Days the Ostinati Shall Lie . . . Music can exist because our ear brain is a superpower, but there is a feature of that ear brain that from the point of view of music is an unintended unfortunate result. The superpower ear brain tracks for language events, locks on, turns them up, and turns everything else down. The consequence is that if language events are present, especially language events that seem to be speaking to us directly, such as declamation, those language events suck all attention to themselves. Song, in all its myriad forms, are a workaround. Without those hard won regimentations, all those straightjackets that song puts on language events, any other audible expression in the room may as well pack up and go home.

Mrs. McGrath - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

The symphonic arrangement, as fun as it may have been to put together, varnishes away the power of the song.

I'm Terribly Sorry But We Seem To Be Getting Quite A Bit Of Distortion & Feedback & Can't Seem To Correct It - Cappone D'Angelo [from Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

Like a long vehement raspberry of robust reedy harmony.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 5, 2016

Gradus 297 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In the deep inaudible the distant engines of the sky retreat and advance, dopplerly, in a cloud of indeterminable directionalities. We are past the surface tissues here, we are in deep cave's cathedrals. The inaudible texture of silence feeds music's incandescence. Stillness of an evening sky. A language within a cryptology. Shape of sound intruding on our attention. Lyric green pools. Vegetation. Lush.

Playlist

Special

I was recently invited to submit a piece for consideration on an album review website. The writing prompt was "20 years ago today". I chose not to rework my essay to fit their mission, so I offer it here instead.

Sleater-Kinney (1995) by Sleater-Kinney

the clytemnestri

Sleater-Kinney's 1995 album Sleater-Kinney clocks in at just over 20 minutes, a good solid set for a dive bar, welcome not overstayed, time to break a string or two if necessary. The engineering of the whole is echt mid-'90s garage band, allowing in aspects of live performance sound - the band always essentially the same, amps have hum, the snare drum responds to feedback, count-offs are left in, session sounds intrude. It transpires in a believable place, a room one could imagine being in, restrooms in the back, plastered with band stickers and graffiti. So far, so good; it could be many another album by many another local outfit of the time. It has refreshingly strident feminist politics going for it, but the words don’t account for the punch. It’s a structure first, message and narrative a distant second. It isn’t a haunted house – it’s a house, haunted.

The first song, "Don't Think You Wanna," establishes the vocabulary and the procedure. In each of the first three segments the voice increases intensity and lifts its placement in pitch, staking out three carefully calibrated modes of vocal projection. The first, ‘A’, is a seething simmer, close to the microphone, the second ‘B’, full boil, belted to the back of the hall, the third, ‘C’, a stiletto scream. This is then repeated in a simple 'A B C A B C' pattern. The song ends, truncated, with the 'A' segment, as though it could repeat as many times as wished, while leaving a space open for the next song, "The Day I Went Away," which picks up in a similar 'A'-type vocal space. But here each 4-bar phrase is divided into two parts, with the higher, more intense, 'B'-type vocal joining with ‘A’ on the second half. This doubling functions as an acceleration of the pattern of increasing intensity in the context of the song as a whole, and could be regarded as a new, synthetic, vocal space in its own right. When the chorus arrives, predictably, at 'C'-type levels, the empty spaces between each two-syllable cheer ("So far! . . . So good! . . .") bifurcate the time-span similarly. The lingering effect, in each song, is of a static orbit of vocal modes. The singer is caught in an inescapable loop.

Moving through the album, the stylistic range remains quite narrow. One could, with some ease, group the songs into just a few categories, based on how many vocal modes each contains, and which they are. The first two begin with the close simmer, and increase intensity in steps - we'll call it the 'A-B-C' type. The third song, "A Real Man," is already a bit manic at the start, and has only two vocal projections - a 'B-C' type. "Her Again" is 'A-B-C', but the 'B' is just a hair's breadth above the 'A'. "How To Play Dead" I'll call 'B-C', but things begin to get even more interesting here, with the 'C' a similar interval above the 'B' as ‘B’ was above ‘A’ in the previous song – one could regard it as a long ‘A-B-C’ spread over two songs. "Be Yr Mama" over on what I would presume to be the flip side, if this were vinyl, is 'C-B'. "Sold Out" is essentially 'C-C', with a dip into 'B'. It can be seen that through this point the lean has been toward 'C'.

The next two songs, "Slow Song" ('B-B') and "Lora's Song" ('A?-B'), are easily the most interesting as individual songs, and in the context they act as a retrenchment, as the last bits of near sanity before all mythic hell breaks loose. The tunes are recognizably tunes, even exhibiting some show-off vocal moves, such as the fragment of yodel in "Lora's Song."

ABC, ABC, BC, ABC, BC, CB, CC, BB, AB - each successive song feeds on the types that came before. Each song precisely patterned, each mode of ever so exact a grade. It is the slow circling of subtle variations of these modes among the gathering songs that set the stage for the raw, hot-blooded evisceration of the last song, "The Last Song," the vocal types reduced to just two, the first song’s trajectory telescoped here to 'A-C'; 'A' is teeth clenched, heavy with violence, threatening, close to the mic, and 'C' is a murderous blind rage, Clytemnestra bloodying up Agamemnon across the street in a parking lot at 2 AM.

Tick Tally (by Elaine B)

Recorded

November 19, 2015

Out Back - Elaine Barkin [from Open Space 3]

Clear and sane. Nothing in this comes up to shake your hand to say hey there hi there I'm here to please. There are some things that might not be things on some walls that may or not form a room or space to be. It's up to you. Even its sense of its own openness is open to alternate thought.

Fired Up - Moe Tucker [from Moe Tucker I Feel So Far Away Anthology 1977-1998]

Keeping it in line. in line. in line.

Banned Rehearsal 413 - February 1996 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Dynamite opening, as though hovering over a downbeat forestalled past possibility. If we talk at each other long enough we won't notice that we have been left behind by our ground. As it moves along it remains focused all on a center of sound, pressing it together for maximum density at the core. When the center is lost, as they all are eventually, we flail to find a new one. Now we occupy a narrow space, each considering aloud for one's each own self what melody might be. It ends more relaxed, after 46 minutes transpire, but the relaxing is exactly gradual.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 15, 2015

Trio 151115 - Keith Eisenbrey

Xylophone, washtub bass, radio. Who could ask for a better ensemble?

November 16, 2015

Gradus 279 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Pulling at an infinite tangle of weedchoke.

Playlist

Live

November 15, 2014
Electro-Colors
Seattle Modern Orchestra
Julia Tai, conductor
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Dérive / for six instruments - Boulez
Zeremonie for computer-realized sound - Huck Hodge
Treize couleurs du soleil couchant for five instruments - Tristan Murail
Alêtheia for ensemble - Huck Hodge

I don't like being grumpy about local music, but in spite of magnificent performances all around, and the very welcome opportunity to hear Huck's music again (easily the highlight of the evening), I found myself troubled, oppressed by what I admit is my longstanding and increasing prejudice against certain social modes that cling to concert music in general, and which, as larger performance organizations attempt to juice their image for the hipper set, increasingly pervade our thinking about what counts as worthwhile in new music. For want of a better label these are the modes of professionalism - music as career rather than adventure. Here's the thing: professionalism in musical performance practice demands music with professional qualities. It must be difficult to play. It must be significant. It must be explainable. The risks that such music is allowed are limited. Most importantly it can't risk its own subversion. And so it cranks up the volume of its own pretense until we, and it, are deafened.

November 18, 2014

A Sun Ra Centenary Special Event!
Sun Ra Tribute Band
Jones Playhouse, Seattle

The music seeps in from above and behind. It sets up shop for us, with us, as much a social entity in action as a music. When the visitation is over it seeps back out, into the surroundings among us.

Recorded

November 17, 2014
Then He Kissed Me - Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison, Sonny Vincent, Don Fleming, John Cale

The best part of this is the intensely weird hollow-in-the-gut left-in-the-lurch emptiness that lingers after the last sound.

The Sentient Insect Variations - Island of Lost Plants - Pete Comley and Dave Fuglewicz

A film from which the visual has been leached away. The plants, or their alien chemistry, are responsible.

November 20, 2014
Namu-Amida-Butsu - Artur Avanesov - Paul Taub and Artur Avanesov

The piano, as a tam-tam, is not, at first, an accompaniment, but a geography in which flute lives.

Talking To A Wall - The Gropers - [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Just under two minutes long, it is absolutely magnificent for the first minute-and-a-half, then, unfortunately, deflates.

Eco Slab Gong - S. Eric Scribner

A horde of land barnacles on the move. Be very afraid.

Inside the Stinger

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 16, 2014
Silvertone 141116 - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvisation on hollow-body electric guitar, through an amp with spring reverb.