Playlist

Recorded

 

February 9, 2014

The Loft - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer, and the kids and staff of The Loft - December 1985

 

In 1985 Anna was working at a residence for middle-school age boys suffering various social displacements, and she arranged for us to visit with our two sturdy microphones, a tape player, and a selection of noise makers. We gave a brief spiel, handed out the goods, and let'r rip. And rip it certainly did. Banging, pounding, shrieking, yelling, singing - all manner of adolescent unleashment. I was so excited by the whole experience that when I got home I wrote a rather giddy letter about it to Ben Boretz, which was eventually published in News of Music (Fall 1985 Spring 1986). Among the details I had forgotten was, oddly enough, a full-throated beer-hall-exuberant rendition of O Holy Night.

Maple Leaf - 2013

 

Banned Rehearsal 783 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Adrien Kosaly-Meyer, Neal Meyer - December 2010

 

An aurally rich holding pattern: drums, rolling tinies, clarinet, Wurlitzer, guitar. Assertions and fallings back. Sounds are chosen, but not chosen as to each other, their as-to-each-other is discovered, attempted, ventured on the fly. A delicate place finds the end.

 

Banned Sectional 19  KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - December 1985

 

Recorded (I believe) in Neal & Anna's apartment on Brooklyn Avenue. Small percussion and an electro-hum that varies. Rhythm: one strand steady-ish, in regions; the other more varied; though each will stop for times. I spoke a text from my Intermezzo V - later Neal singsongs a text like looking at the water :: tiled acoustics :: making song bubbles. The funkiness of the recording quality is a predominant qualifier of the received sound, rendering what we actually do (the lost sound of the actual live session itself) unimportant except in so far as it changes the sound the recording mechanism is making of it. Neal: "I'm gonna go lookin' / somewhere else than here / can't find my nose / can't find my head / ain't gonna need them / when I'm dead / so I'm gonna go lookin' / somewhere else than here"

 

Chemical Clock - Ray Larsen, Cameron Sharif, Mark Hunter, Evan Woodle

 

vidgame synth quick progjazz angular tunes: what sticks is the texture of the melody, rather than it's specific pitch-contour.

 

February 10, 2014

Banned Telepath 5 Berkeley - Aaron Keyt - December 1985

 

pencil drumming on microphone

all space is squished up close

weight and elasticity in your face

now fingers-slap wrist drumming

immediate surmise of mechanism of production

shifting position and placement of objects

where in relation to the microphone

is the impact zone

turns the page - studying? suddenly clearly off-hand

about face

a voice! "Hi" whispered

pitched sound rubber band?

a shoving across a surface :: weight and texture

set on a machinery (a heater?) whirring like a fan with an overlay of flying saucer hum

layered with finger drumming (for context)

lasts long enough to find the limn between the prosaic and the mysterious

as though it were a ship's engine in midocean from belowdecks churning us who knows where

water sounds intrude through the image of a distant hull or:

a sound in four layers: deep steady hum, low but higher thrumming, surface rattle, and a far distant helicopteric flange

a sneeze and a furniture bump

the machine is turned off

"good night."

 

February 11, 2014

Duopoly - Bruce Hamilton and friends

 

Each track is insular, enclosed, tight to the ear, roiling in place, moving only slightly. Shifting body weight counts as major transformation - or a static camera captures a corner of a storm-shaken bough. Atmosphere is the message. Explicit. A sound is itself and never an implication.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

February 10, 2014

Figure Study 8 140210 - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

 

Neal couldn't make it for Gradus, but the piano needed playing anyway.

 

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

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 19, 2014

 

Keyboard Sonata in C-sharp minor Hob.XVI:36 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

As though cut into pieces and jumbled back together. Blown away by the tricky metrical scansion in the 3rd movement, we are knocked off our balance and led to the edge, where we remain.

 

Banned Rehearsal 56 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - November 1985

In my Greenwood cottage, 1985

 

On occasion one of our less formally improvised sessions manages to succeed in some pretty amazing ways. The instant example is occupied mostly with a slide show and its attendant conversation. At that level it manages to be among our least smart-ass talky-tapes, and as a consequence is quite a fine snapshot of who we were and what we were like back in the day. On a family-business note this is particularly fun because it was made just a month or so before Karen and I made clear to each other our mutual smittenhood, and you can certainly sense more than a little flirtation in the air. But as Neal begins to layer in several other sessions, including the internally infamous Banned Rehearsal 12 and the less infamous Banned Rehearsal 44, with its own slide show and commentary, it becomes a wonderful study in the dynamics of recorded presence. In the end the dinosaurs swallow us all.

 

January 20, 2014

Foliage (live recording of playback) - Aaron Keyt

 

This electronic work opened our concert at the Chapel in November of 2010. The sound of it, as recorded in the space, is a pointedly immediate image of the tiny, the delicate, the close-focused, measured in millimeters from our ear. A tam-tam-y interlude at a great distance, across a chasm, marks out an extraordinarily specific stance of relative points in space. It is as though, with ear alone, we directly perceive the vector between them: concrete, immutable, impossibly precise.

 

Keyboard Sonata in D Major Hob.XVI:37 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

Eethoven - Tom Jajdu, Andrew Milburn, J. K. Randall - (from InterPlay)

 

big circles

muttered musical analysis clipped space radio chatter

freefloating atmosphog

back earthly metamorphosed

discourse :: continuity

moving alongness

stuckness

sight-seeing examples pasted SPLAT!

 

"you can't put those next to a fughetta with an H in it!" (JKR)

 

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 19, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 851 - Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, 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

Herocat



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 11, 2014

The Promise - Bruce Springsteen

 

Santa Barbara, CA - January 2014

I was out of town on business most of the week, so I didn't get much listening in, and this long album of also-rans doesn't provide much to work with. For the most part the arrangements fall back on Bruce's perfunctory trademark sound - every thinning of texture is a setup for the next goose of energy. The songs that stood out for me were the one's in which he stepped out of his usual mold: the surfer-rock Candy's Boy, the Elvis-impersonator version of Fire, and Ain't Good Enough For You.

You're welcome.

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?