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.
