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

Recorded

February 4, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 437 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 1996]

waiting for the right door to come around

Neal, ca 1996

so that we can step in and do that dance

Neal Sax Keith Guitar Aaron Violin or Anna Violin
big squeeeeeek toy wailing and shredding (shredding in our own way)
big sax sound we hack at and scrape at

rather a battlefield of standing waves
(more a working-at-things session than a presentation-ready session)

First: ascertain the exact contours of our present argument
Next: compose together a chord - for want of a better word - a harmony perhaps - precisely in the
temperament of the contours of our present argument

gets quiet down to the hiss
and moving about put the baby on the back
barely whistling

Banned Rehearsal 625 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [December 2001]

the differences in distance between the senses of presence is a thicket
frog marimba wash tub bass piano tiny plunk
discuss in prose paragraphs amidst all these drums

but because it was a thicket of distances these new ones enfold the old ones
layered pasts layered in layered presence

zither drone drumming AM radio am speaking to you from a great distance
FM radio am here with you in your room

drum beating makes a name for itself in this rather hot playback

Isabel protospeaks

Hypernova - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

an opera or the entracte for the Hyperprog Band of LEGEND!
wanders close to Nancarrow through the basement watercloset back of a famous minimalist's seedy beginnings

Gradus 191 - Neal Kosály-Meyer - Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2011]

dynamic range and its echoes
watch your fingers
might get chopped

Arsenic & Lace - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

Mixed thick with snarl and c'mere baby
freak flag freakflagfly freak flag freakflagfly (repeat)

February 6, 2018

A Voluntarie, "For My Ladye Nevell" - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Ornamentfarbenmelodien

each and every element of texture both homogeneous - to easily fit together - and granular, specific, high-definition - to curve just so
on multiple scales

Partita in B-flat Major - J. S. Bach - Gunther Hasselmann

proceeds in a series of direct lines
only wending with friction or drag of mode and dissonance
living to break free

offset lines drag each other
but still direct
looking ahead

the Sarabande's stumbling ornaments balance perfectly

O Death Where Is Thy Sting - Rev. J. M. Gates [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

near to singing in tongues
cooperating independencies

Pastures of Plenty - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

us migrants. US migrants.
must always be free (not the migrants, the pastures)
more land reform propoganda
yowza!

Mine - The Voices of Walter Schumann [a Rescued Record]

for choreographed singing
as for Broadway, or as a demo for a Variety TV Spectacular


Ain't She Sweet - The Beatles [from Beatles Anthology Volume 1]

eyes on the prize burning bright

Ninety-Nine And A Half Won't Do - Wilson Pickett [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

the pitch qualia of the bass line is obscured, or given a specific index, by the kick drum (which is huge)

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

pretty sweet horn solo. cornet, trumpet, flugel?

February 8, 2018

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (#3) - Gorecki - Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Antoni Wit

count to 3
nest it
slow and fugueish

A.H. in the dark
or a clownless Shostakovitch
Pachelbel's Canon with depression

narrow, bound
the voice enters singing what might be, might as well be, partitions of the identical close stepwise counterpointing texture stuff

all frame
no mona lisa

why do I so mistrust the politics of this?
Is it possible to hire people to put themselves through this?

interminabularity to the max, man
grinding to an eternal halt

oh boy a coda

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 5, 2018
Gradus 257 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

distances unbridged
left distant
drift off

singular light source
like morning

Playlist

Live

January 19, 2018
Triptet - with guest Stuart Dempster
Gallery 1412, Seattle
Greg Campbell, Michael Monhart, Tom Baker

Grows from the center out

Triptet with Stuart in carefully matched tops

and a rhythm of beards

successively shedding each past against chronospheric abrasian inexorably
seasonal dormancy
alien body antibodies
Stuart joins! late night FM station sea shore sea shell show
bouy bell
kalimba magma man
electronic squeezy wormhole to outer sci fi
Punch (sans Judy) in space toy time

Recorded

January 13, 2018
Jacob's Ladder - arr. Ernest Kenwal - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Each verse is arranged to do exactly the same thing in a slightly differently arranged way. He could do this all day. To anything.

Hastings River, New South Wales

Just Like A Woman - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

A song all scrubbed up and shiny for public consumption, just rightly arranged. Syllables are not set to notes, but to pitch vectors, pitch curves.

Behind Blue Eyes - The Who [from Who's Next]

The Romantic imagination mythologizes itself in order to imagine growing up. No Drums! (til later). The songwriting is blatant in the songwriting.

Stay - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

A careful slicing into a funky rhythm hoping to find whom? James Brown? His solo vocal is a collection of overlays, each complete, each integral to itself and complete. Together they form a composite reading of how the song might be sung. Bowie thinking.

You'll Never Be a Man - Elvis Costello [from Trust]

A simpler version of the same (Bowie) idea. Simpler not in the bad stupid sense, but in the clarified pointy sense. Or, how a single song can render Billy Joel entirely unnecessary.

Banned Rehearsal 69 Part 2 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

starts out somewhere in Late Beethoven Slow Movement Serious Mode, until it gets just out of sight around the corner. An internal psychic anatomy. Back to LBSMSM, i.e. sustained harmony with inner energy that feels as though at any moment it is about to become . . . [never complete] [refrains from] [rather, it slowly deconstructs] its sense of self into another and runneth then over [repeat ] drumming does a number on the clock chime - oh that Bickleton clock chime! - long dim.
My Sweet Euchabibilla Baboo, Electric Garbage, then the Aaronsbundler March in all its pomp triumphal and glory grandiose

nobody, but nobody
pomps triumphally and grandiosally like we does

Territorial Pissings - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

slides knife into its groove

Banned Rehearsal 435 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Kosály-Meyer [September 1996]

Even in the decade of chaos we make a remarkable sound. Keeping the rhythm lively - and all while

Karen was nursing the baby right there. Familial. Banned Rehearsal lullaby.

January 15, 2018
Embryonic in the Same Traditions - Dale Lloyd [from Sonicabal 2001]

the human mouth is the cavernmyth of language, dragon's lair.

Banned Rehearsal 699 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2006]

Incongruities joined by a near-common pitch
or by cooperative winding entwining
on the down low barest smallest of sounds
muttering with exactness into the big space around small sounds
guitar (neal) kicking the sound around on the floor
into hot spots where it glows in feedbacklight
improvisation: helping each other's sounds out.

The Chronicles of Dirty Dick Part 2 - Antique Scream [from The Chronicles of Dirty Dick]

Beat invention. Beat elaboration. Part 2 is in Two Movements.

Selections from Music for Wallace - Aaron Keyt [from my recording - Seattle Composers' Salon, January 5, 2018]

I'm coming at these pieces, in part, in my guise as pianist who has read through them often and who plans to work them all up in the next year or so. Clearly they are music. Just as clearly they are poems, thorny poems. Think a Dada Ezra Pound. thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada thinkadada POUND!

January 16, 2018

The Seventh Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

How many voices can be got to be seeming to be doing exactly the same thing, while all the while always doing entirely different things actually?

Birth of the Blues - Paul Whiteman, Ray Henderson, B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

The Official Whiteman Tour Guide to Rhapsody in Blue, with favorite bits!

Grand Coulee Dam - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

In celebration of the industrialization of the West. "prancin' dancin' stallion". poet he was at that.

Jezebel: Overture - Benjamin Boretz [midi realization]

intimations of repetitions
that never
quite
get repeating
right
before
they make
you wonder
if you
heard it right
the first time

Great Day - Vincent Youmans - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of April 11, 1961]

Intricate rhythms nearly obscured by the boomy old tape sound.

Let Her Dance - The Bobby Fuller 4 [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Wisely does not make the song much more than a vehicle for the rhythm. In which the guitar riff neatly invokes a subtle cross-meter in 3.

Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who [from Who's Next]

There are some words in there inside the emphatic locution. How the words are spoken, not what the words speak.

Wild Is The Wind - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

Picture an awful movie, just dreadful
the credits roll disconsolate
past the first credit roll song
everybody leaves
just then is where this song belongs
brilliant unexpected brilliance
"you touch me I hear the sound of mandolins" barfy song lyric lifted into incandescence.
I know he's just showing off, but this is one of my favorites.

Undifferentiated Functions - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [live at Brechemin Auditorium May 1981]

Now with tape wobble! Me, in closet, gaveling.

January 18, 2018
I Know What I Know - Paul Simon [from Graceland]

Third verse wraps the first around crazy high backup singers.

Banned Rehearsal 258 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

All tapes begin with fuss
quite thin the sound of rattling big red bag of fun
with pre-recorded music layered in: My Chart, my Sonatina, Cantus
gentle sounds then the rhythm band cymbals
an apparent harmonic tendency upwards or not downwards
Toad Hall? probably. We'll say so.
my Sonata in 2 Movements
Such Words (must have been Neal's)
we all sing to baby

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 15, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 950 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Recorded

January 7, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 623 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 2001]

intoned among the reverb a keening tale
wholly indecipherable resolving into small talk (enlarged!)
percussion feedback washtub piano
in avante jazz dreamscape mode
an opera twisted sense of compositional response
episodes, with screams certainly wandering
out of chamber symphony territory
upon which could be inscribed temple rooms
no longer regular passing of time
at multiple rates
dissimultaneously, ritualistic, a grim march into future's moil
excerpts of architecture inserted
transparent and lucid utterance stick with it to the end
Someone to Watch Over Me and other Gershwin Favorites

Cotopoxi - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

Perfect intervals and ray guns
static as the speed would seem to increase

Gradus 190 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2011]

in order to follow the thought precisely

in
order

to catch a glimpse of thinking happening

the long silences are evidence of a larger idea overshadowing, or holding, cupped
{stray inappropriate thought: punitive silence}

free improvisation is a strict method of being particular

I am playing back a sound in this room that is a sound that had been made in this room. Their various acoustical spaces share similarities across a medium.

purposeful silence

placing a tone so as to thread the needle's eye
the eye between the partials of other tones

split them like kindling whack!

patience testing silence

January 9, 2018
Mind The Gap - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

hollow shell
the center not empty so much as gone, never was.
(arthouse punk)?

Pavana the Sixte "Kinbrugh Goodd" and The Galliarde to the Sixte Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from Ladye Nevells Booke]

Here the independence of voices is achieved largely by other means than current voice-leading practice would suggest.

What is the role of the extraneous noise of virginal playing, essential to its charm, the effect of its image on how its music hangs in space?

first voice, then second voice, then a conjointure of voices, folded in continually
dough making

Senegalese Stomp - Savoy Bearcats [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In loving imitation of keyboard figurational shenanigans.

Song of the Coulee Dam - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

He kept trying to get the same song right: retry, re-write, re-use.

In The Middle of the House - Vaughn Monroe [a Rescued Record]

a 50's pop novelty song with great train sound effect. I learn this actually reached number 11 on the Billboard magazine's Most Played by Jockeys chart, and 21 in the Top 100. Imagine that. I wonder if Dr. Demento ever spun it?

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 8, 2018
Gradus 325 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

circumambulates

gazes
up and down

it does not move
things in it
do

some of them

a vast
combination lock

a long way around
to clear

Playlist

Live

December 16, 2017
Neal Kosály-Meyer recites Finnegans Wake Chapter 4
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Karen and I had small parts to play (Karen on bodhrán, me on a venerable complex of lighting equipment). Neal proceeded, in this fourth chapter, to, as the book says, murder all the English he knows.

Recorded

December 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 788 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2011]

First a Visitor Services Song sung by Neal

then a delicately clackety sound with bell kit

we have wandered together into a huge dark chamber
our soundlights don't reach the roof or walls

long loose strings shine zither and washtubbass

loverly piano tune

apparitional abidingness
repetitionness

poking the imperturbable

poke

poke

Mirzya - Daler Mehndi, Sain Zahoor, Akhtar Chanl Zahri [from BollyGood Volume 1]

multi-voiced like hip hop collabs
made of parts with cleverly revealed seams

The Fourth Pavian and The Galliarde to The Fourth Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Not a polyphony of voices but of time planes
polytemporalplanar

immense pieces despite appearances

String Band Blues - Kansas City Blues Strummers [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

low overhead for a travelling crew
some folks and their easily transportable instruments
and of course some singin'

The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

The Great Historical Bum,
Woody's nom de plume,
his actorly persona
his literary conceit

Jerry Lee Lewis

Hound Dog - Jerry Lee Lewis [from Sun Record's Definitive Hits]

Those words those near nonsense barely an excuse for a rhythm and a rhyme of improvisatory lyric emphasis

December 19, 2017
Breakers Off Baranquilla - Joseph W. Clokey [?] - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's private tape]

suitably plangent
drifts away

I'm Your Puppet - James and Bobby Purify [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul]

on a virtual stage constructed out of reverb
also, in the mechanically presented herky jerky, a hint of Devo

Bernard Purdie - Aretha's master drummer

Rock Steady - Aretha Franklin [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul]

The drummer here is not "a drummer" in the Keith Moon Animal take it all over sense, but only an essential part of the percussion portion of the rhythm track.

The bass player is killing it.

Word on a Wing - David Bowie [from Station to Station]

open: synth tone || piano finger drawing
new || old

pacing vocal affect
pacing arrangement affect
his scheme of things
his own vocals standing in his own light

Don't Let Go The Coat - The Who [from Face Dances]

light on its feet: a bit earlier than, but of a piece with Graceland, or True Stories.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 18, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 948 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Playlist

Live

November 18, 2017

Finnegans Wake Chapter 3 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer
Gallery 1412, Seattle

Neal performs this in the dark. It is difficult to take notes in the dark. The dark in which Neal performs this is as much a temporal, Joycean darkness, as a literal, nocturnal darkness. The text itself is so tightly focused on the most immediate statement that the past disappears more quickly than it does in more standard practice prose. We can't see where we've been, and by this we realize that we can't see where we are headed either.

Recorded

November 19, 2017
The Firste Pavian and The Galliarde to the Firste Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Jeweled rings bedeck the downbeats, ornaments that expand their durations. It is an old way of mediating the vertical and the horizontal realms, curving their axis points.

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus XVIII (alio modo Fuga a 2 clav.) - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

A two-piano rendition of the upside-down-ready fugue.

Two Tight Blues - Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

This language of hyperaware body movement flies under the social radar, where much can be said. Tunes mime a dancer. Puppetry.

Ramblin' Blues - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

The verses are single statements, or simple question and answer pairs, repetitious, with no explicit narrative. And yet the narrative is clear, peopled, conversational.

Frantic Antic - The Jumpin' Jacks [a Rescued Record]

Commercial happy fifties kid music from when Rock and Roll was as yet unknowable. Beatnik beach blanket bingo lingo. Tight playing though!

Three Highland Airs - The Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from my mom's tape of a concert on April 11, 1961]

I listen to these the way I would look at an old snapshot, a personally fascinating generational artifact.

I Don't Believe You - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

The power of story telling is the power of persuasion over memory. There's Bob hogging the narrative, betrayed again, or so he says.

My Wife - The Who [from Who's Next]

Bar talk stories men tell each other.

November 21, 2017
String Trio in 2 Movements - Elaine Barkin - Davis Trio [from Open Space 34]

Vaporless, frozen, drifting, weightless, flash-lit, a chorale only audible a few notes in any direction || a stillness moving by partial illumination.

Ein Hundenleben - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improv Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape 5/22/1981]

Starts with a high quiet whistling

Maple Leaf 1991

all enter plucking or intoning
(a slow)
(frantic)
or quick response

enter clowns

Suffers I think from too much me on the piano.

Puzzlin' Evidence - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

Tight, clean, controlled. At a remove from us. To hear the song clearly it must be held out at an exact distance. Do not enter! Observe. That drum sound there: the space it is in is too big for you. Squint at it through this crack.

November 22, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 255 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, and Aaron Keyt [May 1991]

There is no beginning to this. There is where the tape starts to record full of vigorous scribbling. The funmaker with its blank stare tone colonizes the sound - a hippo on an anthill. Don G plays in the background (with tootmentary). The various strengths with which the signal comes through making the stage more strangely real for a while. Multiple Don Gs threaded through. Banned Giovanni. Envelopes of drum resonance striking the room drum bursts of radiated sound. We are, in part, and rudely, a form of music criticism. Having actual musics intrude is, if anything, overplaying that role. It becomes too obvious. Small: 'viva la liberta?'

Playlist

Live

November 11, 2017

Amy Denio
Truth is Up for Grabs
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Pre: Neal tells us that 2/3 of Neal's & Anna's wedding brass ensemble is participating. Packed! All the chairs are brought out. Big enough to be a murmuring, luscious in this space.

The governing vibe is of a pit orchestra, rather than an art orchestra. That is, there is no concerted attempt on the part of the performers to transcend themselves and become else than a group of musicians playing this music.

Full tilt expression, nothing held back, nor humor nor sorrow nor low nor high nor ought nor else.

How they end (the songs): not quite abrupt(ly).

Recorded

November 11, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 620 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [October 2001]


Snare drum springs soften the sax. I revisit an old thought. Weighty massive thoughts dimple the ground. Tattered banners bothered in a chilly wind. Dampers off the strings prolong sax bleats room eloquence. Frivolity kept away. Every thought is a palpable mass.

O Mary Don't You Weep - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

As (though) recorded live in a big living room.

Banned Rehearsal 787 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2011]

bits of sound barnacle the border
hints of vastness in the near distance
held back
drums guitar and bass a rock band
in the same sense we were ever a jazz band
"banned rehearsal" pronounced "scribble scribble"
eloquence feeds back has been trying to escape into glory
irreproducible results Neal sings!
It Was a Monday Evening
narrative church rhythm thank you very much
done found some groove we never found before and never will again
pure

Bulleya - Amit Mishra, Shipa Rao [from Bollygood Volume 2]

Values production value. What is this without its bells and whistles? Full throttle is the base line setting.

November 12, 2017

Your blogger, ca 2001

Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Recorded so that, or is it always that, harpsichord sound is more specifically localized than piano. It is lighter, pointier. Immense intellectual heft, lightly borne, tales within tales within could finish and be done several times but then continue on, again, into ravishing beauty.

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

To be inside this fuguescape fuguemare fugeuedral aware of the granular harmony of the spirit.

2nd fugue like a chapel echoes the cathedral and looook! we can open up this wall and create a third midsize space - and finally 3rd fugue here's the choir with our Orgelmeister Kappelmeister - an architectural tour, all the sites singing. Surely if this had gone on JSB had a grander weirder place for it to get to than any such place as it had already been.

Karen and me, 1986

November 13, 2017
Lazy Drag - Thomas Morris [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Light touch on the beat at the start, allowing them to fatten it up or thin it out as needed. Patterns of same.

Columbia's Waters - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

Conceit: this song is a job application in which many of WG's stock phrases are trotted out again. A window into a process of making.

For Minors Only - Chet Baker, Art Pepper [from Playboys]

Clearly, this track is a product, an object, quintessentially commercial.

Far and Wide - Brahms - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from A Musical Souvenir: The Lake Washington Singers Spring Concert (April 11, 1961)]

Some fine piano playing there, Joanne!

Hymnen - Stockhausen

Karen and Isaac, 1996

What is a theme within such a thicket?! A prop, a focus, a thread to follow, a placeholder: NOT THE SHOW.

I think to myself "this is the Stockhausen that got on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's." Extreme Ivesian quote festival. (I started composing about 10 years after this was made, and it only took me about 4 years to find it, for it to find me.) I spent a lot of time with it back in the day.

Sounds we follow as they variously incarnate and morph toward other veering incarnations.

Electronic music was what it is now, a bunch of folks playing with new toys. What sounds can we get on this? What are its sounds? Its voice? As it concerns radio: radio waves, invisible light, dark light, another dark, another sleep, another night, another wake. Front loaded: an active eventful texture, signals in transit, the harrowing descent, breathing human sleeping.

". . . nur eine Erinnerung": What does that actually do as an excuse for the böses Blut es gibt?

Some events are discrete moments, note-like - hard edged short events. Others are episodes of flange and sweep - long events. Flange-y buzz-hum-y waves rhythmed syllabically. We hear the timbre shift as a quasi-vowel shift. Thuds of war episode in third region where whistlers imitate the whole of what they are of in mimicry, in mimicry as a kind of abstraction. A full range of immediacy(ies) articulating murk.

November 14, 2017
Trust Me - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

The plea goes on and on circling inside around the instrumentals, pleading never ending changes.

Still Crazy After All These Years - Paul Simon [from The Essential Paul Simon]

In a warm keyboard bath. Is it just me or did I really catch a partial quote of Bridge Over Troubled Water in the strings?

We're Desperate - X [from Wild Gift]

Structural density of the guitar/bass complex: leave space in the verse for the words, leave none in the chorus.

Banned Rehearsal 67 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

In the little Greenwood half house, sneezing, heater, hooting: slide show? Conversational, sort of, in that we are doing activities and also being with each other as just folks a little bit. Bumping around is up front, music as such, in deep background. Woozy but not unpleasantly so. Making spaghetti, it sticks good. Slow swing dinner in B-flat minor. This is our trademark DING! from a junkshop in Kingston NY. The tape machine has an eraserhead button (still does, long unpushed). "I hope that was intentional or not." My dad shows up, must have been something to do with my passport. Karen may have moved up to live with Neal & Anna while interviewing. Tri-doxology, para-para-doxology (hindsight) a hindsight. It is very nice it just slips underneath the skin. Berry-ness is discussed. Wild sound on acoustic guitar.

Polly- Nirvana [from NevermindWordblurbs in exact syllabic count fitted into soundblurb segments with pitch trajectories, a partial song. (Schumann's inescapable ghost.)

Banned Rehearsal 432 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 1986]

Paradise

We try to get something to work. Got those wah-wah tech blues. Aaron's synth, I believe, we struggle with the extent of our tech-savvy: this has an "in" that fits the guitar patch cord, therefore if we plug in the guitar to it we will automatically get magnificence. At the time it seemed, oddly, that nothing was happening, that the guitar strumming had no effect on what was coming out of the synth. The jury is still out on it, but the sounds of us struggling with it are fabulous. "It is my firm belief that with five more synthesizers we could achieve total silence." And yet, between the synth, the Mighty Wurzlitzer, and our direct to cassette mastering, I wonder if any prog rock band has ever sounded as good? the Tintinabulary at its finest. We don't do nicety.

Banned Rehearsal 621 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 2001]


Nothing to hear but you. You make the sound. In our digitally produced era there is more air between the sounds, which allows more expanse of surface with which to mess, more coast to invade. Plunks and hums tiny sounds of extreme interhearing. Down to pianississimo violin tremolo and small frame drum, ocarina moving between their soundboxes' resonances, articulating a shiver whistling in the dark.

November 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 698 -Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2006]


Testing the waters. It generally doesn't take much to get it going, inert as it is, (though it be), just takes the right gentle push prolonged just so long. After several false-like leads: snare drum, flute and buzz, but that also falters . . or wait, now it's moving. Reasons to hang in there. Seeping into other sounds groundwater invisible under cover of underground it sneaks past the carousel skimming the feedback fence, flirting with skimming it under cover of skimming past it we flirt under darkness with the broad light of it, of past days.

Goodbye Amsterdam - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

Relations among people occur in landscapes. How much we leave - its expanse of sorrow - when we leave each other. Gentle stutters in the guitar figures.

Banned Rehearsal 906 -Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2016]


Neal learns himself speaking. Tiny construction workers hammering miniature hammerings. Wallace watches o'er, duets across the continent with cowbell. Lightweight sphere rolls the texture of the drumskinhead amplified by circular tension applied. Copperpipe in syntheticfoam insulationtube squeak like balloons.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 12, 2017
Rain Traffic Crabby Crows - Keith Eisenbrey


Our best guess is that the crows were complaining about the rain.

November 14, 2017
Kitchen - Keith Eisenbrey


For the record: I didn't break anything.

November 15, 2017
Second Thoughts - Keith Eisenbrey

I finished composing the first eight Études d'exécution imminent in May of 2014. In terms of the original chart this was the half-way point, but I needed a break to re-think myself, to consider where the composition of these had gotten me, so I took a self-imposed sabbatical from composition - indifferently observed: news of the death of J. K. Randall brought forth a response in the form of J, (September 2014), I was asked to contribute to Ben Boretz's Festschrift (Another, December 2014) and I arranged a traditional hymn tune for Karen to sing just after Christmas (Hail the Blest Morn) - altogether a fairly productive sabbatical. In the spring of 2015 I started working on these disassembled piece parts, which together constitute the 9th Etude, finishing in August, 16 months later. That was a long time for just a few notes, but I flatter myself they are densely packed. Arranged as in this (not quite perfect) performance, one after the other, the piece parts play out the re-writing of memory as it is remembered and its eventual, inevitable, loss.

Playlist

Recorded

November 4, 2017

The picture I made

Gradus 94 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Uses dampers as filters to extract partials
silence is resilient
behind me Karen purees pumpkin
time out of grid
a car stereo drives by outside
sidebar tea ceremony
that a sound could seem to happen Now is a demonstration of how wide a span is the apprehension of Now

Thursday After - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

adding elements one after another in stepped sequence
within song structure serious phrase length rhythm play
blood harmony could almost be the Fleetwoods at the end (just a hint)

Gradus 285 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

I made a picture.

November 5, 2017
The Hunts Upp - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

ringing echoes
signals passed on hills
familial tales
courtly tales

Der Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XVII Rectus / Inversus - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

strong vertical leaps up? down? contribute to the effect of utter duplication
is it the direction of the leap or its mere distance that tells?

Gatemouth - Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

sliding around the pitch, glisswise
a dance of them


this music is not dance music
this music is dance

Roll Columbia, Roll - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

Progress celebrated, collective progress, progress to benefit us'n'all.

For Miles and Miles - Art Pepper, Chet Baker [from Playboys]

phenomenal playing full of subtleties to be sure but something bluesy has been buffed out if it, refined in an almost pretentious way, if they weren't getting away with it pretty bossly

Echo Song - Orlando di Lasso - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from A Musical Souvenir: The Lake Washington Singers Spring Concert (April 11, 1961)]

humored up? or just oddly translated, odderly arranged? or maybe that's just the way it is

Hold On I'm Comin' - Sam and Dave [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

thought: jazz is about its rhythm; rock is about its song structure; blues is the glue
these boys have heard some church singin' and how

The Song Is Over - The Who [from Who's Next]

praise chorus
testimony
psalm

November 7, 2017

Song of Fifty Cents - Jack Bean [from The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

another function of demotic music
actual advice in humorous guise
(not that, but like dirty jokes as ad hoc sex ed)
how it is learned: those life lessons
quite the accent, one needs to pay more than fifty cents of close attention

Improvisation - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape]

Conversation wordlessly, as musical exercise.

You Get What You Want - Julian Lennon [from The Secret Value of Daydreaming]

this tries so hard, but I have trouble giving it the benefit of the doubt. The problem is not his singing voice, but something like a lack of roots.

November 9, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 254 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 1991]


testing 1 2 3
now we have begun
at Toad Hall some crud in it
John 'plains, but 4 weeks old
strenuously lame we thus arrange the possibility of brief moments unlike any others
drill bit into bedrock inexorant
on my wall
there hangs a purple trout
continues on through
metabolism enhanced
be- words auf Deutsch
bell rings for train coming in

Hail Hail - Pearl Jam [from Rearviewmirror]

propelled
engined
til the fuel runs out
the ride is over

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 6, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 946 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Aaron and Neal duet on trumpet and cornet, Karen drums an ocean, Steve tunes in, and there is me with banjo on my knee

Playlist

Recorded

October 8, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 617 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [September 2001]

toy boats bobbing in the bay

steady state

low organ throb
indicator measures and creates hidden pulse

(great spring sound!)
intersocial anacrusis

agogic peoples
rhythm is a social event

what shifts in the ear when pitches change
the soil the wind the orbit

bell and drum ritual
lightly touched

October 9, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 697 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2006]

several species of guitar
bucket brigade messages
a triangular circle

or tuning to each other in a fluid sense
lovely how it refrains from shredding
even when louder

protracted

(long long protracted)

end
fade

wanders into the casing

October 12, 2017
The Chronicles of Dirty Dick Part 1 - Antique Scream [from The Chronicles of Dirty Dick]

Pink Floyd fade
up to wide
vibrato capable vocal
seriously uptight brings
the forces together
doesn't
let go
but slowly piece
by piece relax
to allow full
weight to be
thrown around stops
to start again
Preening Bad Boy.

We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder (Autoheterophony) - Keith Eisenbrey
Like a chorus o' angles! (Karen's comment).

The Barelye Breake - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Finely tuned adjustments over the phrase, section, and movement breaks. Far more category shifts than simple butt joints would intimate. Early sense of variations, or changes: the theme is not a structure but a thread within possibilities.

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

The fugue is an analytical tool for composers, it is used to pry tunes apart. Surgeon: "Stretto! Inversion! Diminution! Sponge! Suction!"

Sweet Little Papa - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

lipwork ornamentation
big music shaped by minute attitudes of the mouth

On The Sunny Side - Don Albert [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Don Albert

Lovely glow in his voice as it tails off at phrase ends. Pretty mean trumpet player too.

New Found Land - Woody Guthrie [from The Columbia River Collection]

Living in the light of the morning. One of his better poems.

Don't Be Cruel - Elvis Presley [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

A ploy or a plea?
from a genre of personal fictions.

The 95th Psalm - Powell Weaver - The Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from Lake Washington Singers, April 11, 1961]

This features my mom's long-time accompanist and friend, Joanne Deacon, and a fine solo by soprano Kathleen Richards.

Good Lovin' - The Little Rascals [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

A rhythmic schema
arising from a lively bed
begets variations

Love Ain't For Keeping - The Who [from Who's Next]

This is quite a fine little song, whose impact is diminished by the commercial necessity of bloating it out to stadium size.

Louie Louie - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

Garbage rock in the sense that it doesn't take much technique to make it happen (compare with the fancy guitar playing of the Ventures, for instance). Nearly indestructible, Iggy makes a go at it.

Intermezzi, op. 117 #1 and #2 - Brahms - Neal Kosály-Meyer [from Neal's Recital Tape May 1981]

One among many distinguishing characteristics of European repertoire music: a complexity in the

Screaming Trees

way it proceeds through a phrase. Everything can be broken into parts. How do you break yours?

You Tell Me All These Things - Screaming Trees [from Clairvoyance]

No padded seat on this old bike, just tractor metal cold in the morning.

(A connection here: Steve Fisk, who produced this record, is a friend of Neal's (my brother in-law) from his days at Central Washington University, before I knew him. Small world of local music.)

October 13, 2017
Frogs 910415 - Keith Eisenbrey

(and dogs)

one mass of frog sound shifted toward the right
one soloist closer, to the left
dog is in the distance or several dogs or distances

a tape hiss
and occasional traffic
very faint with hint of pitch
emerging from the noise as proto-hum

(I recorded this from an upstairs window at my folks house near Coupeville, WA, the morning of April 15, 1991.)

distant howl
world guiro
waves of phasing rhythms in soft focus

kitchen talk downstairs
action on the edge of the sound
tink of flatware clock chime

morning breaks pulsing bulbous
flange of air prop traffic
phasing with frog croak waves
a quivering air

frogquiversphere

we apes converse in clusters of apeclatter
even from upstairs faint as it is
the room resonance of mom & dad's Coupeville kitchen

one could imagine the frogcroaksound as single oraganism's respiration
or the ripply surface of a pond
a jet's hissy roar goes on a long time
making wavelets in the quiversphere

wind roar
an event in the deep deep bass
(big frog!)

Banned Rehearsal 430 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [July 1996]

ominous biding banshee

raucus and magnificent wail

dire
D I R E
dire

the longer the held organ tones persist
the more questionable becomes their intonation

squeaky balloon violin stylings
elephant seal bellow soulfulness electric guitar

whatever this is
it is seriously pissed

drops into conversation mood
just cranky
tarzanyell grim march

off again to wander ferocious

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 9, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 944 - Jennifer Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


We were in a bit of noisy mood I think.

October 11, 2017
October 12, 2017
Focus tracks - St. Rage
Distracted Driver tracks - St. Rage - Karen Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer

We did the basics on the 11th, and filled in some extras on the 12th.

Playlist

Recorded

September 13, 2015

Instamatic photo by me, ca 1969

Grand Canyon Suite - Ferde Grofé - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

The image of the west he is selling is idyllic, peaceful, effortless, without history or blood. The orchestration is impeccable.

Symphony #1 - Samuel Barber - St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin

It grasps our attention with both hands, holding our faces forward, never letting go. Noir, nearly square format for the screen, wide range of shadow to black. Love the gooey stuff at the end.

A Child of Our Time - Michael Tippett - BBC Singers, Choral Society, & Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis, Jessye Norman, Janet Baker, Richad Cassilly, John Shirley-Quirk

This one is wide screen, a deeply old-fashioned dramatic oratorio, every square inch of screen space worked out to the nth. This guy really likes old-school contrapuntal maneuvers.

September 16, 2015
You've Got To Move - Two Gospel Keys [from Goodbye, Babylon]

Within a motoric grid a framework is expressed by variations upon an inexplicit norm. Missing beats here and there propel us forward.

Birk's Works - John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

As much or more than the sheer bebop bravado of it all is an ecstatic togetherness, everybody focussed, tight.

Songs To Grow On for Mother and Child - Woody Guthrie

Like looking at somebody's family pictures. Unfancy arrangements of guitar (often as a drum), spoons, and harmonica.

Brook's Blues - Brooks Berry, Scrapper Blackwell [from The Art of Field Recording vol. 1]

Blues as competition, like break dancing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 2, 2015
Banned Sectional 36 150902 Somerville - Aaron Keyt

Aaron sent along 36 seconds of sound as his contribution to Banned Rehearsal 894, recorded several weeks ago on Georges Island, Boston Harbor Island National Park. Bird song and weirdness.

September 14, 2015
Banned Sectional 36 150914 Seattle - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer
Banned Rehearsal 894 150914 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer