Playlist

Live

 

February 16, 2014

Canals of Venice

Hoax Foot

Pouch

Skylark Café, Seattle

 

Oh what a difference an excellent sound system and engineer can make! The last time we heard Pouch the vocals were completely buried. Liberated by the transparent balance at Skylark, it is especially gratifying to at last be able to hear how strong Sean's vocals have become (or always were for all I know). The sine qua non is still a shredding scream, but a whole range of more moderate techniques now anchor that in supple perspective.

 

Hoax Foot was playing their first show, and they were properly stoked. Excellent stage chemistry and rousing Ramones-y drive. Eager to hear more from these two.

 

This time around Canals of Venice, due to their odd-ball instrumental mix (no drums, viola, cello, upright bass, guitar, and a guest trumpet), struck me as a kind of chamber music or theater pit version of Fairport Convention - but hailing from some backwater European province that is somehow exactly like here. The lead singer, with his huge tenor voice and superb technique is a Seattle gem.

 

Thanks for the cupcakes!

 

February 21, 2014

21st Century Cello!

Seattle Modern Orchestra, with Séverine Ballon, cello; Julia Tai, conductor

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

Chant for solo cello - Jonathan Harvey

Musique pour Séverine - Jeremy Jolley

Petals for solo cello - Kaija Saariaho

Ricercare una melodia for solo cello and electronics - Jonathan Harvey

IRE, concerto for cello, strings and percussion - Rebecca Saunders

 

The cult of virtuosity values what is difficult. Progress values what is new. At their intersection within musical culture they amplify each other, giving rise to a music emphatically un-doable-ourselves and narrowly explorative of so-called extended techniques. Now I admit to digging the music on this show - in IRE  I heard the wild highways of an alien future, gizmos and contraptions whizzing by at speeds unimaginably various, every moment a new propellant - but I can't help wondering if the newness of it is a veneer over concert music tried and true, and if the performers take too much of the difficulty of it upon themselves, leaving us with little to do but drop our jaws and envy.

 

Recorded

 

February 15, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 58  - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

We were preparing for a concert in January of 1986, and this was a run-through of the 'Sudden Song' portion. That's right. This was one of the few BR sessions that was an actual rehearsal.

 

Gradus 185 - Neal Meyer - December 2010

 

The first part (A-naturals 2, 4, 6, and 8) has a built-in constraint: without contortions it isn't possible to play more than two notes at the same time. The second part (A-naturals 2, 4, 7, and 8) emphasizes the big gap between 2-4 and 7-8.

 

February 17, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 59 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - December 22, 1985

We meet Aaron at the airport and drive to Lake City. Later Karen and I admit to having fallen for each other.

Extracts 10 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

February 20, 2014

Banned Sectional 4 AKNWM - Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

No matter how much noise is made, the system noise rules.

 

Extracts 11 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

A common trope of musical analysis is to draw circles around groups of notes. "These go together in the same way that these others go together." One can then trace the path of whatever has been selected through the passage in question. This project started with just the sort of analytical idea that might have spawned such an activity. I opined that Scriabin's Prelude op. 74 #4 might be profitably considered as based on the (0,3,4,7) type tetrachord. But I wondered what it would sound like if, first of all, only a specific transposition of that tetrachord were audible. In other words, instead of drawing circles around groups of notes I simply eliminated all the notes that weren't part of that tetrachord and played all the notes that were. Since there are twelve unique transpositions this could be done twelve times. Then I wondered what two such tetrachordal extractions would sound like conjoined. Midi made this possible without much fuss. There are twelve Extracts altogether - one for each transpositional relation of two tetrachords.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 17, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 853 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Meyer

 

Upcoming

 

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 



Herocat

Playlist

Live

February 6, 2014

Seattle Improvised Music Festival

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

Matt Ingalls, clarinet

 

Flatfooted figurations gradually gouged pounded beaten scraped squeezed throttled and elsewise desperately distressed into outer stratosphere. It comes across like manic tone and tonguing medicine: play this twice every morning and call me in a week.

 

Joe Morris, Bill Horist, Jeffrey Taylor, guitars

 

Deference to each other's distinct approach.

 

Matt Ingalls, Paul Hoskin, Beth Fleenor, Jenny Ziefel, clarinets

 

By the time we got to this set I was so zapped out my notes are nearly blank: machine-y creaks out.

 

There is a shared assumption here that the purpose of Improvised Music is to display or demonstrate individual virtuosity, not just as the raw skill of producing amazing sounds but also as the imaginative invention of technique and as the profoundly sensitive listening required to play happily with others. I have no complaints on that score - everybody on stage was fabulous - but I do note that this isn't the only way to think about what one might do with an improvisational mind-set, and that this approach fits more comfortably into the concert-music world or club-music world than it might care to admit. I'm not pointing fingers here, the vast bulk of my own musical work has imbedded within it similar assumptions.

Recorded

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 782 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 2010

 

one draws a constant line

one seeks a change

one works a thing

February 4, 2014

Seven Last Words - Thedore Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

 

From my mom's archive. A motorcycle roars by outside a different past than that of the music.

 

Sudden Songs Rehearsal - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

Neal's got new shoes and three songs: The Picture On My Wall, I Can't Get Out, and It Hurts.

 

Greenwood 1985

Gradus 184 - Neal Meyer

 

The game is to keep the resonance afloat, aloft, like a balloon chase. The treble is a signal through fog or interplanetary void. The activity here is so completely absorbed in its own doing as to be utterly unrelated to music as a projected image. In exactly the sense that otherwise any other music positions itself rhetorically as music, this music doesn't.

February 5, 2014

O Holy Night - unknown arrangement - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey conducting, ca. 1965

Flying Upside Down - Ken Medema

 

Among the many problems with this music is that it tries to be so many things without managing to really hit any of them. As a pastiche of particular pop-styles it comes across as phoned-in and lame, and as the theatrical projection of a preacher it is distinctly substandard. Bob Dylan has the hellfireandbrimstone shtick locked up tight, and Springsteen's channeling of Sister Amy can't be touched. Ken doesn't stand a chance.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 3, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 852 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Playlist

Live

 

January 25, 2014

Rigoletto - Verdi - Seattle Opera

McCaw Hall, Seattle

 

In Wagner the particulars of drama unfold within a globally applied expressive affect. There is not a moment in which the musical material does not reflect and deepen the mythical import of the whole story, beginning middle and end, in all its interleaved and cross-woven layers, as if viewed from a godlike perch on high. From the first note it is clear what it always has been and always will be.

 

In Verdi the affect of the music is entirely inside the singing characters. The music (except for the marvelous brief prelude) only knows what the characters know, only feels what the characters feel. It's taken me more than 30 years, but I think I'm finally beginning to get it.

 

Recorded

 

January 27, 2014

Blood and Fire, Hallelujah - Keith Eisenbrey

 

Recorded live at a concert Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and I presented at The Chapel Performance Space in November of 2010. This composition project was a long time in progress and changed a great deal from the original conception to this performance. One aspect of it that I like a great deal is how problematic it still is for me - especially in terms of what exactly it is. It behaves a bit like a concerto for piano and electronic orchestra, except the piano and the canned part don't interact so much as beat each other up. In that sense it becomes a forum in which I work out a personal struggle between sound-board sound and speaker sound, between mechanically amplified personal energy and an electronically amplified sound file. It also comes across, I think, as an allegory of disintegration, war, and grace.

 

Keyboard Sonata in E-flat Major Hob.XVI:38 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

The first movement is the best vaudeville drunk act ever.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Greenwood - Keith Eisenbrey - November 1985

 

Discipline: fill an expanse of time with sound. Use guitar, singing, talking, and chanting.

 

ain't no way to walk in the city

snow on the ground

 

walk down the street

by the river that you meet

 

green fingers on the floor

 

that part of what I still see

when my eyes are closed

 

 

January 28, 2014

Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler - Neal Meyer

 

Also recorded live at the same show mentioned above.

 

Keyboard Sonata in G Major Hob.XVI:39 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

Starts like Polonius giving advice. But what it keeps coming back to are intricate preparations to arrive somewhere, sets of arrows deflected, reflected, and inflected, punctuated by astonishingly rare moments of stasis, moments of actually being somewhere.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Bickleton - Anna K, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - November 1985

 

We start in a house, a radio is playing in a distant room. We take a walk in the snow to an even quieter room where there is a great deal of typing and a space-heater.

 

Figure Study 5 - Keith Eisenbrey - November 2010

 

A solo piano improvisation. While keeping one ear firmly planted at the center, slowly and methodically twisting myself around.

 

January 30, 2014

Fantasia in c minor K.475 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

 

An interesting performance. I remain unconvinced. The forte / piano contrast at the opening is understated, in order (I suppose) to make the slow / fast contrast more effective by making it also about forte and piano. The effect in the end just oversimplifies the dramatic dialogue. The tempo during the slow bits is very slow indeed - hyper-romanticized, as though profundity were being inflicted upon it. Surely there is plenty there already. Pretending it's late Schubert doesn't really help.

 

Recorder Studies - Keith Eisenbrey - December 1985

 

I have always been fascinated by the music made in the midst of working out music. Not improvisation in the performance sense, but rather the sound of the work shop. One evening in early December of 1985 I was writing a recorder quintet and wanted to work out fingerings and tunes and such. I turned on the tape machine and worked at it for an hour and a half. Then I put the two 45' sides on top of each other and pretty much forgot about it until it came up for listening this week. 

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 28, 2014

Fox Spit 140128 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

I improvised for a few minutes on this beautiful guitar that my brother Paul made.

 

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Playlist

Recorded

January 4, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 55 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - November 1985

 

tuning or just plucking - talking - moving microphones

heater expanding sliding down onto a Steady Rhythmic Texture

(problematic because SRT is hard to stop - SRT precludes a choice)

lo and behold the whole becomes more invested the moment SRT does finally stop

but Wild Thing (Neal) intrudes again - De Imitatione Troggi

once that is over the sound in progress re-emerges

then Anna gives Wild Thing a come-hither slant - probably the best performance of them all, if that is what we wanted

at the end we construct a din, whew!

 

Cape Alava trail, Olympic National Park, Washington

January 5, 2014

Gradus 183 - Neal Meyer - November 2010

 

Gradus concerns itself, through the entire expanse of its conceptual scope, with a dialogue about identities. At it's root end, the tokens of identity are individual key strokes, conversing in series and in conjunction. Each sequent decision builds, over time, a field of variations, and, over bigger time, larger-scale fields of variations of fields of variations. But all is seen from the inside, the shape of its experience forming itself like the trace line of single starling in flock.

 

Sonata in D K.284 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

January 7, 2014

KEE JR 851114 - Keith Eisenbrey, John Rahn - November 1985

 

I remembered making this tape at John's house but I had forgotten, or didn't realize then, how fabulous it is. Admirably minimal and transparent, with a lovely soft hum that morphs as we move about - a commentary on the shape of the space. It is really two separate sessions, the first and longest with small instruments (monochord? ocarina?), and the second on bassoon (John) and cello or bass (me). If my memory serves me correctly it is also the first time I heard a CD. I believe the music was by Janacek.

 

Agogic - Andrew N. D'Angelo, Cuong Vu, Luke Bergman, Evan Woodle

 

A crack team.

Mission: to instantiate through independent cooperation complex environments in which individuality can emerge, but never as the whole of the whole.

Some notes as it went along:

1. bass drum heavy parallel play short hockety interlocks

2. quick hyper

3. slow reverbery

4. crack team, see above

5. lyric (drumming mirrors amplifies comments textures

6. starts like R&R but trips, trips, trippingly - like an extended Buster Keaton riff

7. receding back into the past

 

Keyboard Sonata in C Hob.XVI:35 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

figurations distracted to find themselves of a sudden wearing new clothes.

 

January 8, 2014

Banned Sectional 18 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 1985

 

Starts with some texts: If I Am A Fishy Thinker (with commentary), then some freeform, and then we rehearse Neal's Three Songs, finishing up with yet another Wild Thing.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 6, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 850 - Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

 

We welcome a new face.

Playlist

Recorded

December 29, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 54 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - November 1985



Naches River, Washington - October 2013

Any sound is allowed. We choose sounds not usually associated with musical expression: conversation, body movement. Since these sounds are so strongly associated, both socially and biologically, with our quotidian living, it requires a significant mental stretch to hear them as anything but what they usually are. On the recording I hear a conversation, hear the sound of bodies moving, and their specificities as conversation and motion bring to mind, unbidden, an image of the speakers and an image of their bodies in a remembered space. In order to hear those recorded sounds as musical sounds, or as sounds-as-sounds, they must be shorn of these specificities and new specificities must be abstracted from what remains, or the old specificities must be actively and creatively transformed, literally beyond recognition. Until the ligature is crossed the quotidian deafens us.

Snohomish Piece 3 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, S. Eric Scribner

Visual perception, for me, whether direct, remembered, or imagined, obscures the musical. One of the strengths of recorded sound, as a medium, is its abstraction from the visual, however variously overpowering might be the mechanism of its own production. Nothing is, after all, purely abstract. Ritualized performance practice can offer a similar function. It has this worth precisely due to its familiarity. We've seen it before. We can ignore it now. And so it disappears. One only hopes the residue is music.

Sonata in G K.283 - Mozart - Alicia de Larrocha

Tempo and tone production are geared to a large space. Does this piece really live here?

January 1, 2014
Banned Sectional 17 KEENWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - November 1985

"To whatever extent the concept of a cutting edge is still relevant, it must be reserved for truly experimental ideas: those that run the risk of failure." - David Dunn: New Music America 1985, (News of Music, March 1986).



Naches River, Washington - October 2013

Once again I attempt to read and find no voice with which to read. Inflection doesn't help. Makes it worse, actually. Sinks the words deeper into their wordiness. The bare speaking voice is bland and thin. It is only in those moments when what Neal is doing to the reverberant and mechanically regurgitated sound space teases out unique inflections of my syllabic rhythm - against the walls or slamwhap up against its own past - that anything like a gratifying sound emerges. But for those few moments all else is forgotten. Failure in and of itself is no guarantee, but without its imminent threat there are no possibilities other than the prosaic.

January 2, 2013
Snohomish Piece 4 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner
Sonata in G K.283 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

With Mozart one could almost believe there is a precedent underlying harmonic text to it all, that both elegant Ursatz and multi-layered, densely cross-referenced prolongation sprang at once, fully formed and perfect, to his imagination. But it is more difficult to believe that he would have cared. The stronger image is of lyric flux from moment to moment: all parts balance, all parts are shapely, their balance as shapely as their shape is balanced. Part answers to part and segment to segment. The goal is to delight, not to arrive.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

Naches River, Washington - October 2013

December 30, 2013
Gradus 239 - Neal Meyer

Is 2, in sequence, the same manner of 2 as is 2 together? Is the difference of the different manner of 2 they could be the same manner of difference as the different manners of 2 persisting among sequences of 2 within groups of 3 or 4 or more and sequences of 2 alone? Is 2 2 ever? Or is 2 2 only accidentally, ephemerally?

Playlist

Live

December 14, 2013
Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler
Neal Kosaly-Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Imagine your quest is to learn our solar system and everything in it one particle at a time. The number of particles, or in this case of combinations of the 88 keys of the piano, is the quantity expressed in base 2 by a sequence of 88 ones. A very large quantity indeed. It is so large, in fact, that this piece, this quest, in its entirety, can't be heard. It is, as an entirety, or even as a significant enough portion to grasp as a portion, completely and essentially inaudible - as absolute a silence as can be imagined.

 

Recorded

 

December 17, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 53 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - October 1985

 

We start with some rhythm modules that ease into sudden songs: Under the Stars, and Can't Play th'Trumpet. But by the end, between Neal's blown-out speaker (dubbed 'the speaker of the house') and craziness with the microphones, the session sounds like the machinery of civilization recording itself being chewed to pieces by a planet sized troll.

 

Banned Rehearsal 781 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 2010

 

25 years later, subtle shifts of flora map a forest floor.

 

December 19, 2013

Keyboard Sonata (Divertimento) in D Hob.XVI:4 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

I was put in mind of J.K. Randall's bias against "Perfunctory Propulsion". These phrases don't interleave in graceful subversion of meter (like Bach), or balance in delightful conversation (like Mozart). They whip like pennants in a stiff breeze. Until suddenly they don't and they are fountains frozen solid. Until suddenly they are filigree or crickets or calculus.

 

Children's Choir Christmas Pageant - Bellevue First United Methodist Church 1965

 

I was six, so I must have been in one of these choirs.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary November 25, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 849 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer



Playlist

Recorded

December 3, 2013
Banned Sectional 14 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, October 1985

The sectionals, especially those that Neal and I did during this period, were not so much sessions of free-improvisation as they were freely-improvised workings out of ideas of things to do with which to fill up sides of tape. On the plate for this was a continuation of the sudden song project. Texts used include a Heine poem and coin-toss-chosen phonemes from John Rahn's Lines Of And About Music. In the middle Neal launches into a spirited acoustic rendition of Wild Thing, which gesture in subsequent sessions became a reflex go-to subject changer. In this case I can't say that the subject changed from was all that spectacular - we were once again driving lameness firmly into the dirt - but it was never about being spectacular, and working steadfastly at sticking points often leads to amazing places otherwise unreachable. Changing the subject comes across as a defense mechanism for avoiding discomfort, and veering into a groove, specifically, approaches social manipulation. You can join the fun or you can be a grump. But if neither fun nor grump is where you're at you're stuck. There is no room to maneuver into elsewhere. You just have to wait it out.

December 5, 2013
Snohomish Piece 1 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner
Sonata (Partita) in B-flat Hob.XVI:2 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim, clavichord

Haydn is so gracious with the what of where he is, and with the spaces between. He does not move along to satisfy moving, but to provide a vantage of a new what, at a precise remove.

Grande Piece Symphonique - Franck - David Di Fiore

our humble abode

 

A sprawling mansion

too big to inhabit

our host uncanny

shows us around

each time

sunken more

Chorale from Seven Last Words - Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church, Betty Eisenbrey, cond. - April 1965
Go Girl Crazy - The Dictators

They'd fit in quite well here in Seattle. Surf-rock self-parody. You'd almost think Kurt Bloch was involved. I have to say their cover of I Got You Babe made my jaw drop.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 2, 2013
Gradus 238 - Neal Meyer

In anticipation of the impending 2-hour public performance of Gradus on December 14th, (Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 8pm) Gavin Borchert came over to hear a 1:3 scale model preview. Of the three rungs to be performed, the first two differ sharply in the quantity of pitches present. I was struck, hearing them in such close proximity, by how perversely bereft the more pitch loaded rung was in timbral richness, as though the sharp point of palpable sound was obscured by a haystack of figuration, however attenuated that figuration might be. It made me wonder to what extent we compose in order to hide the actual in favor of the conceptual.

Playlist

Live

November 22, 2013
Seattle Modern Orchestra, Julia Tai and Jeremy Jolley, conductors; Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Open Form
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Coeur pour Batteur - Sylvano Bussotti
Zyklus No. 9 - Karlheinz Stockhausen
Event: Synergy II - Earle Brown
Shendos No. 12 for Nine Instruments - Tom Baker
Event: Synergy II (reprise) - Earle Brown

Disclaimer notice: I was the lucky raffle winner of two tickets to their next concert, and Karen's name was picked for a second set of tickets, which we declined. Heads up to concert makers: bribing me in this manner is completely unnecessary, as is loading the concert with works written in my birth year. To the modest extent that what I'm doing here constitutes a concert review I'm usually pretty kind, and, I hope, mostly constructive. But thanks for the tickets. I'm looking forward to it.

Bussotti and Baker and Brown. O My! The patterner in me wondered how Stockhausen was included in this set of B names. Tom opined that perhaps there is an invisible B in front and we ought properly to say "B'stockhausen".

According to Ben Boretz, a score is a stimulus. It can also be a reproducible, portable, marketable artifact, culturally coded to stimulate, in a prescribed practice, a certain acceptable range of event outcomes. The musical work, then, is a complex set containing the score, the cultural coding, the practice, the desired event outcome of the score maker, the actual and postulated score-stimulated event outcomes, and the various webs of discourse, public and private, proto- and post-, pertaining. What is (or was) overtly new in these (mostly) historically significant open form works is a concern with the mechanics of scores as such and with the specific content of the individual score maker's desired event outcomes, but the resulting discursive churn focuses much more uncomfortably on cultural coding and practice. As musical works they function as questions about us, about what we do when we do music.

And what of the event-outcomes themselves? Bussotti, performed in Bonnie's riveting stage dialect, was a sharply delineated universe, vigorously explored, bravely lit. Stockhausen, splayed out and pinned down carefully across an 18 minute or so span came across as surprisingly rational and thorough. Interestingly though, there was nothing particularly unusual about the gestural or figurational content in either work that seemed to be tied specifically to their relative open-ness of form. I could imagine those gestures and figurations arising in through-composed percussion music with no loss of eloquence. This may stem from the fact that, at least in this performance, all that is open about their form was worked out by the performer in advance. She had many substantive choices to make, but they were all made by the time she began.

Not so with Synergy II. It is a box of parts and a set of instructions allowing multiple results. No two performances are likely to be the same (and these two were quite wonderfully distinct), and none of the perpetrators really know what exactly is going to happen until it does. This is by design, and Mr. Brown took a great deal of care crafting his material so that no part or set of parts could be complete in itself beyond the bare minimum individuation necessary to be considered as a part of this piece only and not as some interloper from music as usual. The care taken shows.

Tom Baker (on the right) with Stu Dempster (on the left)
 in traditional Seattle costume

Tom's (beautiful) piece struck me as much more like the Stockhausen, in the sense of being a thorough and careful exploration of something, but with a sense of lyrical wonder replacing the rational display. Where Stockhausen indicates salient points as though wearing a lab coat and expecting us to take notes, Tom's gaze pans slowly across a landscape, which would be blinding to see all at once, and which must be constructed in memory over time to be seen as the whole that it was conceived to be. It is shown little by little in a band tall and narrow. Once again the locally produced holds up quite well next to the more broadly established brands, thank you very much.

Recorded

November 17, 2013
Sonata (Partita) in C Hob.XVI:1 - Haydn - Keith Eisenbrey

Confirming - still needs some work.

Selections from Wizard of Oz - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Ensemble (?) ca. 1965

Another selection from the trove of tapes my mom shared with me.

Banned Sectional 13 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 1985

Neal reads from Genesis, then skips ahead to Revelations. I read from Brecht.

Gradus 89 - Neal Meyer - December 2005

Among the more pianissimo of sessions, its patient attenuation expressing an impatience with music as usually expressed.

November 21, 2013
Gradus 182 - Neal Meyer - October 2010

Each widely separated (in register) pitch is its own theater, and each of their jointures also. Memory and regret.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 19, 2013
Gradus 237 - Neal Meyer

Lots of Gradus this week.

Playlist

Live

November 2, 2013
La fille du regiment - Donizetti
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

i.e. Gang of Four I Love a Man in Uniform

Recorded

November 5, 2013
Sonata in C, K. 279 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

The Lisztian virtuosic image is of a performer so completely in command of technique as to transcend the possibilities of production. The Mozartean equivalent is a virtuosity of imagination, quick and precise as swallows in chase.

Banned Sectional 11 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - September 1985

When I returned to the Seattle area from Barrytown in 1984 I didn't want to lose contact with all my east coast friends, so I decided to write at least one letter every day. If someone wrote back they were moved to the top of the list. When Neal's sister Karen was up from Tacoma visiting early in September of 1985 she noticed I was writing a letter. I told her that if she gave me her address she would get on the list. And so I wrote her a letter, while simultaneously reading what I was writing out loud, unperturbed by Neal's magnificently perturberant puttering. A few years later I published this first letter to my future wife - a riff on the time of writing, the time of reading, the time of recording, the time of playback, and the interlocking scopes of time-contingent truth statements - in News of Music, as Keith's First Epistle to the Tacoman. It starts "This is not a test."

November 7, 2013
The Abyss - Keith Eisenbrey
Here and There - Wayne Lovegrove - Wayne Lovegrove, Steve Scribner
Sonata in F, K. 280 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 4, 2013
Gradus 236 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

Live

October 24, 2013
Much Ado About Nothing - Seattle Shakespeare Company
Center Theatre at Seattle Center

Not just a fine production, but also some excellently integrated music. Credit to the composer Michael Brockman for a pitch-perfect 1953 Vegas pastiche, and to actor Justin Huertas's serial channeling of Frank and Dean. Hey Nonny Nonny!

October 26, 2013
Anything Goes - Cole Porter - Roundabout Theatre Company
The 5th Avenue Theatre, Seattle

A running gag has the woostersome Brit Lord Evelyn Oakleigh collecting American expressions in a book and consistently failing, in practice, either to get them straight or to apply them appropriately. This becomes an especially pointed barb because Cole Porter plays so adeptly at both the linguistic slang - twisting, punning, over-reaching for rhymes with joyous abandon - and at what might be a form of musical slang - a bubbly smooch of vaudeville, swing, latin, and more, integrated into a single unmistakable voice. Sorry, ALW, you haven't got a chance. Lord Evelyn opts for the genuine article.

Recorded

October 20, 2013
Sitting By My Window - The Five Tinos - [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

Doo Wop hooks into all the good feelings generated when people sing together. The fun they're having is more than half the pleasure of listening.

Abendslied - Aaron Keyt

spiraling down slow

to land at bottom

unjarring as possible

peering up

or out

The Abyss (draft) - Keith Eisenbrey (November 25, 2005)
Preconcert Spherics - S. Eric Scribner

The chatter preceding a concert in Snohomish in October of 2010, beneath which a subtle rumbly specter churns.

Lonely Weekends - Charlie Rich - [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

The backup singers are tricked out with massive reverb.

Dan Sedia, ca. 1984

Response - Dan Sedia et al - (September 1985)

I had completely forgotten, but it seems I had a part in this "pass along a tape" project. Dan recorded a solo guitar improvisation. This was followed by a piano solo by a collaborator whose name got lost somewhere, and then I added a short session on bug-guitar and ocarina. I must have then sent the original back to Dan.

The Abyss (draft) - Keith Eisenbrey (November 27, 2005)

I was working hard on getting the transition from the first to the second movement just right. This one was just about there.

Snohomish Piece 2 - Keith Eisenbrey, S. Eric Scribner, Neal Meyer

October 22, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 52 - (September 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer)

Heavy downstrum, then we pluck at each other. Culture Shock in America. Species of steady beats going each their own awry. Taped interloputions distract. Speck of voice. If not disciplined amplification becomes competitive.

October 23, 2013
Gradus 88 - Neal Meyer - (November 2005)

Homely - in the next room of the imaged sound tea is made. The kettle whistle, the clunk of cap on stove top, the disboarding of cups, the hissing pours.

Oceanic Music - S. Eric Scribner

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 21, 2013
Gradus 235 - Neal Meyer

illumination

reflection

creation

revelation

of a composing ear

 

illumination of reflection

creation of revelation

reflection of creation

revelation of illumination

 

in particular their particulars

the silence is Sabbath

Playlist

Live

September 26, 2013
Broken Bow Ensemble
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Mer - John Teske

Beethoven's Symphony in D minor begins in this place, or near to it, and awakes from within the face of these waters an heroic cosmogony. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen begins in this place, or near to it, and awakes from within the deeps of these waters a tragic mythogony. Mer abides in this place and recedes, here, from within us, here, revealing an image of our common us, together, here: a hope-glimmering sociogony.

Recorded

September 19, 2013
Group Variations (video) -  Russell Craig Richardson (vid), Benjamin Boretz (aud)  (from Open Space DVD 1)

I waited a week to write about this, and I'm still not sure what to say. Perhaps puzzlement is close to being a correct assessment. I have been familiar with Group Variations for decades, but a firm grasp of it persistently eludes. Richardson's video makes no particular attempt to track or mimic the music a la Fantasia, (thank you), but perhaps rather imagines a visual shifting in one's chair and a cocking of one's ears. We don't see the music, but the listener.

September 24, 2013
The Day I Heard Shelby Sing - Neal Meyer

A song can be just what one would say.

Three Noels - Jean-Francois Dandrieu - Marie-Claire Alain

My teacher Ken Benshoof once suggested that jazz musicians don't habitually play in keys so much as from them. Something like that is going on here, but the operative notion might be described as a nested metrical/phraseological norm, teasingly suggested precisely in order not to quite comfortably settle into.

Suite in G minor - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

I kept thinking of how this music would come across played on a keyboard rather than a lute. The primary distinction would be the relative loss of presence of the body of the performer. The modern keyboard, be it harpsichord, fortepiano, or piano, is designed in part to be transparent, to vanish with its operator as an object in the room, so as to allow an unmediated musical experience. In that sense it is designed with a systemic lack of candor. Of course it mostly fails at this, and often it is the dynamic subtleties of failure that provide the human scale with which we can wrestle with the musical experience. But the lute is a much older animal and these intricate contrapuntal musics don't set upon it with quite the same hard-wired ease. Here the performer is an inescapable bodily presence, tooth and claw.

Mass in G Major - Schubert - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Choruses, Robert Shaw

Transcends by expanding within.

September 25, 2013
Love Songs and Ballads of Stephen Foster - The New York Vocal Arts Ensemble
The Chicken - Rosco Gordon (from Sun Records Definitive Hits)

A salacious come-on so baldly disguised as to be more blatant than if it were straight out.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 22, 2013
Isaiah 60:1-5 - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, soprano, Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Enjoy! Link above to my soundcloud site.

September 23, 2013
Fox Spit 2 - Keith Eisenbrey

Neal was busy so I improvised on my brother Paul's handmade guitar.

Upcoming

Friday, October 4, 2013, 8pm
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle
SoundScroll IX Concert - Steven Eric Scribner

Playlist

Live

August 24, 2013
David Dunn
Chapel Performance Space - Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

How might one converse with a non-human other on its own terms? Straight mimicry is unilateral and generally unsatisfying - as Benjamin Boretz put it once, "imitation is the sincerest form of contempt." In general, the other does not converse one-to-one. It converses one to all or one-from-within-the-all to all. The idea then, as David has spent his career exploring, is not to learn the other's language (if there is such a thing) but to discover the structure of the sonic environment with which the other interacts in its life as itself, to manipulate the sonic tokens of that environment, and to move the other to interact with that new environment - in short, to invent an other imprinted with us, with which to address that other other as a part of the all. To that end, and in the hope that this end will be a means to a more whole understanding, computers, hyper-chaotic systems of oscillators, ultra-sonic microphones, and a host of other tools are brought to play.

The fruits of the field are ripe with wonder.

Recorded

August 27, 2013
Hello Jim - Keith Eisenbrey
Banned Rehearsal 47 - August 1985 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer

Aaron, then in Berkeley, sent each of us one-third of a letter, split every-other-other word. Not to be out-done, we read it out loud, but in perverse sequence.

JB - Keith Eisenbrey
Sweet Possession - Keith Eisenbrey

August 28, 2013
Bann I - August 1985 - Aaron Keyt

Vocal productions in a pianissimo realm - singing in secret.

Oh Ben - Keith Eisenbrey
Someday - Keith Eisenbrey

I was both fighting with and really getting into the cruddiness of the sound quality of the tapes I was making as much as I was simply recording a song. The anti-competence stance of this series was soaking down into the production process. Results varied. I have linked them to my soundcloud site for your enjoyment.

August 29, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 48 - August 1985 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer

A double-sided tape, the first of which consists of our writing and reading three letters to Aaron, switching papers every word. The second side is filled with sudden songs: I Wish I Were In Pakistan, Carolina, Such a Suspicious Thing To Do, It Hurts, The Serpents from the Mountains, You Make the Spaghetti (I'll Make the Sauce), What About String.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 26, 2013
Gradus 232 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

Tonight!

Saturday, July 6, 2013 - 9 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch, Old Man Williamson
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle

Live

July 5, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Two Piano Pieces - Carson Farley
Four Piano Pieces and Two Montana Songs - Kam Morrill
Songs Your Mother Should Know - Neal Meyer

I pulled host duty at this bi-month's salon, so I'm sure I was somewhat distracted. Nobody can replace Tom Baker. I was however both surprised and pleased (but mostly pleased) by the large turnout, and by the lively discussion that followed each performance. Carson explored a unification of musical parameters in a personal, transparent, intriguingly flat-footed, non-Stockhausenish way. Kam brought four delightful piano pieces written for a puppet show that never materialized, and two ambitious songs for bass and piano whose poems concern the interaction of man and animal - moose and magpie, respectively. Neal's musical comedy pastiche songs are familiar to me, as his chanteuse is none other than my lovely spouse Karen, who was fab. For what it's worth, here is my theory of musical comedy: the more the songs are ascendant, the better; the more the book is ascendant, the worse. Best possible solution: all songs, no book.

Recorded

July 2, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 41 - (July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

On the 4th of July weekend of 1984 the three then extant members of the band - Aaron, Neal, and me - utterly failed to make a tape that came to be known as Banned Rehearsal 5. The tape was in the recorder, and the plan was to walk out into the ebb tide mudflats at the end of Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island, to record our squeechy squoochy footsteps, the lapping waves, the wind, and the birds. Unfortunately, either the batteries were dead or they fell out at the outset, so there was no trace on magnetic tape of what we all remember as the spectacular one that got away.

So the next year the band was once again assembled at my folks' cabin near Freeland, and we carefully checked our equipment before setting out down the road and into the mud. Listening to the result at this distance of time, I am reminded that those mudflats constitute a primal personal landscape, an extreme-scape, for me, and so the varying reactions of my fellows, from simple child-glee to erotic ecstasy arrived at by way of ecstatic anxiety, are fitting.

The compressed omnipresent rumble of wind in the microphones is like the sound of boulders in a swift river, complicating water.



Banned Mixer 7

July 4, 2013
Banned Mixer 6

Detail phantasms by, not yet sunk into the tarry mass that waits. Not a wall of sound, but rather a thicket, emerging from ground into which we succumb.






Banned Mixer 7

Accumulate

Amalgamate

Concatenate

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 1, 2013
Gradus 229 - Neal Meyer



Neal plays the first E-natural

Another milestone, or the other side of the same milestone as last session. Having finished all the combinations of the A-naturals, Neal plays the first E-natural. The moment was captured visually as well as in sound-file format. Since he has been treating each 40 minute recording session as two 20 minute rungs, the second half was a perhaps even more momentous occasion: the first Gradus in which two pitch-classes appear.

Playlist

Live

June 15, 2013
Forest Show
Ravenna Park, Seattle
works by Neil Welch, John Teske, Nat Evans
with Natalie Mai Hall, Evan Smith, Christian Pincock


Soundboards in their former habitat

Not an audience, a congregation. Not a draw, an apse. Not a ravine, a cathedral. Not a music, a sermon. Gospel according to Braxton. Long deep draughts of communal prayer. Candles. Reascension into the still light crepuscle to home.

Recorded

June 18, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 39 "Hunting and Gathering" - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Last week's post regarding Banned Rehearsal 38 explained the process behind Neal's score Hunting and Gathering. For this session we let her rip for 47 minutes. The result displays our early sound in all its cruddy glory. I'll leave the link up for a few weeks.

June 20, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 692 - (November 2005, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A journey into the far.

Snoho Piece 3 - Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Scribner

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 17, 2013
Gradus 228 - Neal Meyer



Neal playing an A-natural

A milestone in the project known as Gradus for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler: all the combinations of the eight A-naturals on the piano keyboard have now been worked. And so a little history. Neal made the first 10 Gradus recordings (45' cassette sides) in January of 1987. He was living in San Diego at the time and the opportunity to continue the project dried up. Fast forward to January of 2002. I offered the use of my piano (a 1976 Six-foot Yamaha) and DAT. He started over, and I re-started the numbered sessions. These new sessions began as 30 minute sessions, each devoted to a single combination. The last several years, in order to make some headway to other pitch-classes, he has been doing 40 minute sessions, each devoted to two combinations. Along the way the recording equipment has changed (direct to computer) and I got a new piano (an 1890 eight-foot Chickering). There have been several public performances over the years, including several short samplings at the Seattle Composers' Salon. The first full length performance was at Brechemin Auditorium in December of 2004. This outing set the standard: Three "Rungs" over 2 hours without break.

Next session: E-natural!

UpcomingSaturday, July 6, 2013 - 8:30 PM
Peterman, Your Mother Should Know, Pouch
Victory Lounge, 433 Eastlake Avenue East, Seattle

Playlist

Recorded

May 19, 2013
Banned Couple 15 - Banned Rehearsal

May 21, 2013
Banned Couple 16 - Banned Rehearsal
Banned Rehearsal 595 - (December 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)



Cape Alava, Olympic National Park - Summer 2010

Washes and sloshes. We were riffing last night on the possibility that crows are not particles but waves, and that the crows we see are merely the results of creative interference patterns in otherwise invisible crow-waves. Likewise the calls of crows could be the audible residue of a separate set of such interference patterns among crow-call-waves. What fauna might arise from the joining of tamtam, ocean drum, spring drum, tingly bell, and autoharp strum?

In Session at the Tintinabulary

May 20, 2013
Gradus 226 - Neal Meyer

If music is a mode of social intercourse then in thinking of any particular music episode we can consider the dynamics of that intercourse as perceived from various pertinent points of view, or as to how that intercourse resolves in terms of those points of view. One dynamic is the creative postulation of an other (or set of others) by each participant, which postulation is only partly dependent on the imposed role of that participant within the normative social paradigm of the situation, as we might choose to view it. We can, for instance, postulate a being, an other, out of the particulars of the sound, which other might be wholly separate from, or partly or wholly integrated with, the identity of the other who is a fellow participant.

Playlist

Live

May 4, 2013
Music for Piano by John Cage and Keith Eisenbrey
Neal Meyer, piano; Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Solo for Piano - John Cage - Neal Meyer

Neal took John at his word that as much or as little as is desired of the score can be used in any given performance. Neal used just one piece of material, item AJ from pages 26 and 27. Eleven minutes of spare sound framed by 10 minutes of silence at one end and 9 minutes of silence at the other. The evening was extraordinarily beautiful with sounds of children playing wafting in.

Barrytown, New York, ca 1983

Welcome to my planet. I come in peace. - Keith Eisenbrey

My notes:

a duration of 5 followed by a duration of 7

the duration of 5 is always a set of durations 1 1 3

the duration of 7 alternates sets of durations of 4 3 and of 3 4 within the reiterations of each ordered pitch-class pair

the durations of 5 are trios of monads

the durations of 7 are duos of dyads

the trios of monads in durations of 5 occur in pairs

the first of each pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulls 2 pitch-classes from an ordered series of same into a higher register and 1 pitch-class from the inversely ordered series of same into a lower register

the second of each pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulls 1 pitch-class from that ordered series of same from which the first pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulled 2 pitch-classes and 2 pitch-classes from that ordered series of same from which the first pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulled 1 pitch-class

the pulling pattern switches for the next pair of trios of monads in durations of 5

the duos of dyads in durations of 7 occur in cycles of 4

the first dyad of the duos of dyads in durations of 7 pulls its first pitch-class from an ordered series of same and its second pitch-class is derived from an ordered cycle of intervals in a fixed arbitrary pattern above or below the first pitch-class and the second dyad of the duos of dyads in durations of 7 pulls its first pitch-class from an inversely ordered series of same and the second pitch-class is derived from an ordered cycle of intervals in a fixed arbitrary pattern above or below the first pitch-class

and so it goes a cycle of 4 duos of dyads of durations of 7

the durations of 7 presume upon the durations of 5 incrementally until the durations of 7 occur over the top of the durations of 5 then continue incrementally until the durations of 7 of duos of dyads precede the durations of 5 of trios of monads and then further incrementally until the durations of 7 presume upon the preceding durations of 5 so that the durations of 7 of duos of dyads pulling pitch-classes from inversely ordered series of same occur over the top of the previously preceding durations of 5 of trios of monads pulling pitch-classes from inversely ordered series of same

the ordered series of pitch-classes from which the pitch-class pulling pattern pull are all-interval tetrachords derived from ordered pairs of pitch-classes within the first of the all-interval tetrachords from which pitch-classes are pulled

and so it goes spirally

welcome to my planet

i come in peace

May 5, 2013


Freddie and the Screamers May 5, 2013

Jim Page, Freddie and the Screamers
Restaurante Michoacan, Seattle


We arrived just as Jim was finishing up his first set, but we got to hear him again later. It is always a pleasure to hear such fine guitar playing.

In a Crown Hill parking lot fronting on 15th Avenue Northwest Freddie and the Screamers played two sets full of classic rock and roll for a distinctly classic-aged crowd. Over the course of the evening a few people would get up to dance. At about quarter to 8 the police pulled up as there had been a noise complaint from several blocks away. Personally I thought they just managed to balance the traffic noise of 15th. They sang one quiet number and then lit gleefully into The Sonics' Cinderalla. At that even I had to dance, and that shut the show down mid song. Can't have a bunch of gray-hairs dancing in a parking lot, you never know what might happen next.

May 7, 2013
A Festival of Ives
Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington, Seattle
Cristina Valdés, piano; Donna Shin, flute; Melia Watras, viola; William Sharp, readings

Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass., 1840-1860") - Charles Ives

The Concord Sonata has become something of a rite of passage for American pianists staking a claim in the modern repertoire, and it is certainly impressive to hear it so valiantly and brilliantly performed. But Ives' harmonic language is distinctly viscous, and is helped neither by the enervating deadness of Brechemin's acoustics nor by his more-is-better writing for piano. The thinner and more transparent it gets the more I like it. The last few pages are magical. One wonders what this would have been like had he had a pianistic imagination on a par with Scriabin or Sorabji.

But it aspires to be more than just another big concert piece. William Sharp's dramatic readings from and concerning the sonata's attendant essays highlighted the work's extra-musical intellectual underpinnings. At this remove of time I could almost accept these as an artifact of a distant past, a nostalgia trip to a more innocent America, were it not for the fact that peeking out from behind Emerson's transcendentalisms I can't help but see not just self-centered New Age-y claptrap, but also the distant sound of goose-steps and the stink of gas.

Recorded

May 9, 2013
Banned Couple 11 - Banned Rehearsal
Banned Couple 12 - Banned Rehearsal

Direct contact with the microphone transforms into an image of a direct tapping on the speaker, as though the tapping had reached through time and space to touch the back of the speaker's scrim, or as though the speaker in the corner now is the flip side of the microphone then and the now and the then are joined. Generalized, the sound produced by the speaker is not only the trace of the sound that reached the microphone, but also the trace of the entire artifactual mechanism of microphone, tape, wires, electronics and time through which it passed.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

May 6, 2013
Gradus 225 - Neal Meyer