Playlist

Recorded

March 10, 2018
Large Cortical Areas - Robert Pearson [from Sonicabal Volume 2]

newness, as in what we would expect to be an entrance of a new idea, comes across here as opening a door in order to hear what has been going along already, but from a different room, reverberated against other walls

Assembly Rechoired 49 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Kelly W, Allen Welch, Suzanne Winter-Welch [April 2006]

What is this activity we do, as experienced by some who beforehand have only a verbal description

that time cool people came by - photo by Allen Welch

of it, and who, then, are asked to experience it, first, by joining into it, and thus creating uniquely what they experience as the experience of the activity, that what that we do? It is a test. Everybody supplies their own hurdles. 10 minutes in more or less a groove is achieved.
a valid entry to a larger scope for the question of what sound sounds like

Prelude - Paul Kikuchi - Jesse Olsen Bay, Stuart Dempster, Bill Horist, Paul Kikuchi, Alex Vittum [from Portable Sanctuary]

sleep drizzle still pacific shore
what wakes us

Banned Rehearsal 907 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

missing from my experience of listening back, which was omnipresent in my experience of doing, is the internal monologue of decision making - what one is thinking about what one is doing while one is doing it, an experience unavailable to memory and thus to the recording, which itself is a memory, a trace

we do not play our toy instruments as though they were less than instruments

Wallace, do we hear thee?

as Neal said, we don't know what we are doing, but (as I add) we are listening very carefully as we do it

In the old days the session was over when the cassette tape ran out. In a concession to getting to bed eventually, and especially now that the recording device we use could keep recording for hours and hours, we give ourselves 30 minutes or so, at which point I move toward the device and wait for a spot to push "stop." Once the participants realize that is what is going on, a game ensues. Each sound made is both dare and question. Do you think we're done (punk)? now? now? now? how about - no wait - how about now? or . . . ? If I am patient (which I occasionally am) it can lead to a lengthy improvised-out fade as everybody get smaller and smaller, and smaller and yet smaller.

March 13, 2018
Ariel - Greg Sinibaldi - Greg Sinibaldi, ewi/electronics; Ryan Ferriera, guitar; Ted Poor, drums

For my third pass, in anticipation of a more formal review, I listened to each of the tracks one at a time. It's surprising how much difference simply standing up and opening each file separately can make. Oddly, as a whole it seemed shorter, or rather, it was over more quickly than I expected.
1. Arrival of the Bee Box - specific pitch focus is present but not crucial, or not so crucial as touch or breath. tripartite. answered by drumguitar power pounds giant boot stomps Godzilla shrieks stomping giddy giant ewi, airborn, drifts off seeps into undergrounds
2. Lady Lazarus - fancy echo/reverb effect grappling the sound lovingly if not quite gently. interlude.
3. Cut - settling into a groove but just off center, keeping its distance. dropped into the droid factory
4. Lady Lazarus Part II - signals rhythm radio dial short wave chatter insects and bones tiny lizards dismantling machinery hulk radio signals from the underworld as Cocteau's Eurydice into which pours saturate flesh
5. Black Sweet Blood Mouthfuls - reverie massive dance strenuates to ascend falls back weightful impressive craters deep traces a long moody dragon passed by here
6. The Atrocity of Sunsets - drumrattle solo begins, ewi poking at the flesh it cracks open the beast's wings are spread to dry
7. Wintering In the Dark - in a room alone imagining the demimonde as imagination bitters and dries
8. Elm - working down a terraced grade, finger mirror child's play itsy bitsy spider twisting down ponderous grace whales or stone kites overgrown in dense woody talons

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 11, 2018
Maple Leaf 180311 - Keith Eisenbrey

Neal borrows a bass

a noisy bird at sunrise, and traffic

Banned Telepath 61 Chignik Lagoon School - Aaron Keyt

So far, just rumored to exist. fingers crossed. Intended for what will eventually be Banned Rehearsal 954.

March 12, 2018
Banned Telepath 61 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Our local go at it

March 14, 2018
Banned Telepath 61 Port Haiden - Aaron Keyt

And a supplement from parts in the far away  northwest

March 15, 2018
Bass Tracks for Fish Distributor and Ruined It - Your Mother Should Know - Neal Kosály-Meyer, bass

Playlist

Recorded

February 17, 2018
You'll Do - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

a hook
upon which to hang lines
lines that point to the hook
that point to the hook and riff around it
that's what

Gradus 286 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2016]

particular qualities of otherness
not that other
but how other

an interval set is a set of ways that two pitches can sound when compared

odd how suddenly it now sounds like parts of triads
as though a new layer had appeared from where?

applying precise oomph to these notes can effect a sense of modulation
one key sense to another among just only these 3 or 4 pitch classes

merged voices: played voice / space voice

February 18, 2018
Will Yow Walke the Woods Soe Wylde - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

the keyboard setting of a song becomes a staged dialogue of the song it sets
virginal: lute simulator

Black Bottom Stomp - Jelly Roll Morton [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

circus clown juggle act

End of My Line - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

a scene from the electrification of the rural West (recent then and not yet 100 years done)

Mine Or Yours - Chet Baker and Art Pepper [from Playboys]

selling cool elegance
up-to-the-minute expertise

Cry For a Shadow - The Beatles [from The Beatles Anthology Volume 1]

an audition tape instrumental
would you hire this band behind your singer?

Lake Hills ca 1971

Scarborough Fair - Canticle - Simon & Garfunkle [from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme]

How very English! To what extent was folk rock's influence on rock in general a bulwark against African-American culture, and to what extent was it an implicit, but near silent, acknowledgement of it? I suppose it would take some subtle tweezers to determine.

Unnamed Track 4 - Tillicum Junior High School Band, Bob Runyan, director [from my mom's tape of a concert given on March 3, 1971]

the muscular West
triumphalist tales we teach our teens

The Sheltering Sky - King Crimson [from Discipline]

a silent journey into the wilderness
a soundtrack
as it passes over the horizon the drum remains last seen
the tallest mast

Spirit In The Night - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen Live 1975-1985]

Mock Myth Romantic Days of Freedom
but sincere, as though everyone was exactly there
sharing shared experience exactly
each desiring so strenuously to be larger than life could be

February 19, 2018

Banned Rehearsal 260 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

at Toad Hall, an echo place

reading from On The Road (Ezekiel vision of Wrath to the West)
cosplaying literarily as angels

Aaron at Toad Hall ca 1991

make sounds like snoring

plunk plunk mbira plunk

not energetic
importing sounds doesn't change that - still not energetic

drunken spouting
each on their own bar stool
into feedback coda

Happy Happy Happy We!

Handel and Shakespeare duel it out powerless
exit clown into my grave
Kerouac returns to close

Gonna Have Fun - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

neo Sun Records sound

February 20, 2018
Ariel - Greg Sinibaldi - Greg Sinibaldi, ewi/electronics; Ryan Ferriera, guitar; Ted Poor, drums

I'll be writing a review of this album soon I hope. These are from my notes of a second listen.

breathing in dense atmosphere or liquisphere deep ocean saturn exhalation bubbles rise irretrievable The Monster caged rattles something in the room [did the first time around too, the shades?] 1st cut has lots of power rock vibe to it downbeats seem clear until you try to latch on

roles: of ewi || of drums || of guitar

or: when it does resolve into power repetitions it doesn't last, it dissolves or just falls apart glueless

chopped sound like dicing attitude-challenging fleas

the stage moves around us to a different room
not moving forward through time from then to now and beyond
sense of looping back without repeating cyclic drones notwithstanding
GS has come stuck in untime

what remains unprocessed the substrate of real life or the encrustation of it upon

certainly nothing light about it nor glib

cats are going a bit bonkers

Ruggles monumentality? hm.

a homogeneity: same? amp system; same? guitar; same? drums? for each cut
has always seemed an alien mindset (my problem though I guess)
or rather: the space is so repletely filled at all moments that we are thrown upon variations in viscosity as a lifeline

ends with gentle quiet

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 19, 2018
Gradus 328 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

quite the list of notes to begin with, taking up a considerable time in telling them

first sounds all thick close
close wound ivy vines
thick and woody

each either new or a reference or mathematically postulated
folded into the crumple of crumpling time
the exactly knife edged →there←

a compositional stance earnedly arising within a weberberance of further indextualization

Playlist

Live

Talon at the Royal Room

October 11, 2016
Talon
The Royal Room, Seattle
Greg Sinibaldi - EWI (Electric Wind Instrument) and electronics, Ryan Ferreira - guitar, Ted Poor - drums

Salmon, Eagle, and Raven walk into a bar and pick up instruments.

I got to thinking about what sort of theater this music is. Masked dancers acting out ritual type-stories. The instruments and their accoutrements are very like ornate masks or puppets, allowing the musician freedom to inhabit their mythic parts, and to speak in tongues.

The drumstick died in a good cause.

Recorded

October 10, 2016
The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars - Tom Baker - Seattle EXperimental Opera, Julia Tai, Maria Mannisto, Paul Karaitis, Liz O'Donoghue, Alissa Rupp, Will Dean, Mark Johnson, Tom Swafford, Jesse Canterbury, Chris Stover, Tom Baker, Brian Cobb, Greg Campbell

from a single wick

slowly caldering plates of color and gesture

isolation

background radiation of the chamber of wilderness walls

the paper sky against which it plays

Tapes - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

A short audio collage poem: biography?

Banned Rehearsal 903 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (January 2016)

the man in the closet giving an interminably circling sermon

piano turning it to comic opera or a comedy of an opera

matching rhythm to phrase spoken

percussion and small pans

the creaks and squeaks of the machinery behind it all

October 13, 2016
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus II - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Exploring something eelish, elusive: a meta-tonality wrung from combinations of scale-degree function as they twist and writhe.

Keyboard Sonata in G Hob. XVI:27 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

Unmediated contrast. Tonal slippage. Haydn here is a storyteller, comfortable within a social framework.

Concerto in B-flat K. 595 - Mozart - English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, Malcolm Bilson

Mozart tells tales also, but paints the scenery with such magic that we are immersed. The original Virtual Reality.

Fidelio-Ouverture op. 72b - Beethoven - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

Ideas shape us.

3 Mazurkas Op. 63 - Chopin - Vladimir Ashkenazy

What is being invented here is a sense of music as a literature (rather than being a service), the immediate model being lyric poetry.

Fantasiestücke Op. 111 - Schumann - Peter Frankl

ladders to no where

shifting centers and spinning compasses

we gather to ourselves what we can

Wild Cherries Rag - Ed Morton [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Ragtime, american minstrelsy, jazz: sadly, each as much a ghetto as a genre, but also an open line of communication to the outside.

Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues - Ladd's Black Aces [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Continuing that line of thought, one presumes there was, even in the heyday of ragtime, american minstrelsy, and jazz, a music that was played within the community that possessed a similar sophistication to everything else that was going on at the time, but which wasn't picked up in the recorded sample.

Muskrat Ramble - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five - Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Lil Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr

Conflicted grace.

Travelin' Blues - Jimmy Rogers [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Those ghettos, and let's add country, cowboy, western, and blues, all had direct links to each other, and as they entered the recorded sample those links strengthened. Nice subtly structural use of yodeling, too.

Romeo et Juliette Troisième Tableaux - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juraitis

The violin tunes high in the register are a lyric equivalent of the texture of bow on string. Or: these tunes are designed with fret board in ear, leaping from string to string. I kept getting the sense that Prokofiev is playing charades with us, and we're not getting close. The best part of Prokofiev is the interior patterning of meter as rhythm, i.e. what is happening is a pattern of what happens within single beats and their tightly bound neighbors. The balalaika number is a dynamite stand-alone thing.

Lullaby To A Dream - Benny Carter [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

That 1940's microphone warmth, as though we are hearing through scrim of cigarette smoke in black and white.

52nd Street Theme - Dizzy Gillespie [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Tired of being sophisticated. Let's just amaze each other.

Bitten der Kinder - Paul Dessau

I'm still not sure what this is. Some fragment of a theater piece? The info on the CD is less than helpful.

Dancing In The Dark - Sarah Vaughan [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

Every note is a lovemaking.

Like, Long Hair - Paul Revere and the Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

Long hair referring, I suppose, to the Tchaikovskonzert opening salvo - and the tail-end "so there" cadence.

I Wanna Meet You - The Cryan Shames [a Rescued Record]

hokey, but OK about it.

October 14, 2016
Buried Alive In The Blues - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

instrumental vamp

The Montreux/Berlin Concerts Cut 4 - Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul

Circus clown music (or a rethinking of the Stravinsky of Renard or L'Histoire.) But these clowns are not portrayed, we are placed within their thinking.

Rivals - The Heats [a Rescued Record]

Distinctly Beatlesish, except that neither verse nor chorus is remarkable.















Stepping Stone - Sun Sect [a Rescued Record]

Demo quality post-punk (not quite ready to let go) - or rather aiming at a mid 60's vibe: Neo Proto Punk.

One(5) 1991 - John Cage - Stephen Drury

I scribbled a whole load of words about intervals - but nothing worth sharing. Is there any kind of equivalence between two consecutive pitches and two simultaneous pitches in the 'kind of two-ness' they exhibit? That is, to what extent are their respective intervals the same cognitive thing at all?

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

Multi-stranded. Poetically perhaps too heavy a reliance on the rhetorical "they" and "you", the language of conspiracy theories, coercively displacing, alienating us from the big bad out there.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 9, 2016
Corollaries Omnibus - Keith Eisenbrey

Late at night along the Interspace, thinking about intervals: just what kind of animal they are.

October 10, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 920 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

I think Steve nailed it, just after I pressed stop. "What just happened?"