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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2001
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12:25a - Yes
Tadaima. I'm back. Back from my latest escapades, back from the Flatirons, back again from the Black Hills, back again from miles in the air. Back, from under an orange moon. All those tales and more, perhaps, I will spin later. For now, three things I meant to post before I left last week, but did not.
First off, without further ado:
There follows the review of the fourth and final disc of the Ciphered Mix 5 set, AKA "Gaaaanz, Gaaanz Slowly".
Ciphered Mix 5.4: "Gaaaanz, Gaaanz Slowly" (78:10).
1.Phil: “Like Thunder in the Early Morning, Set Into This Winter Velvet” (6:25) -
A perfectly descriptive title. This is reminiscent of another piece of Phil’s which he played for me not too long ago: "A Long Dark Bounce". In a similar vein as the Datacide piece from the earlier-reviewed Ciphered Mix 5.3, this track is a very subtle one, with a lot of changes taking place on slow curves and at the threshold of audibility. It isn’t a sort of music that lends itself to being amplified much beyond a ‘natural’ volume; I mean that although it may seem lower in volume than you’re used to from a particular setting on your CD player, cranking the volume up to eleven is not the way to properly appreciate the piece. For me, I feel I’ve been able to get the most from the piece either with headphones or from a good stereo in a quiet room. P. and I talked just a little about the piece when I was last in his area, and he told me how he went about making it. I liked that after hearing the explanation of the music’s very origins, it lost none of its mystery. It reminded me of hearing another fellow sound designer / sculptor type tell about setting a large block of ice out on the concrete and beating it with a sledgehammer as he recorded the sounds. Through alchemical means he then transmuted the sounds of impact and of shattering ice into a bear roaring, which was subsequently used in a production of A Winter’s Tale. (And I still think that that age-old play has one of the best stage directions written: ‘Exit, pursued by bear.’) This piece, now, has a powerful and brooding feel to it, and as I said before, the title is a particularly apt and well-thought-out one. The sound of the music is like an ominous and singular thunderstorm building in the distance as the light just begins to build on a frigid winter morning. It conveys a sense of passage, to me, and the sense of a single event observed in the act of taking place. The progression is something like this, for me: (supposed) stillness. Wind raising from all directions in the distance. The arrival of the elements, and the confluence. An open ending. The piece also possesses a downright eerie sense of containment. The first time or two I heard it, I was poised for some sort of disruption that never happens. I think the resultant tension is due to the mystery of the piece, and the sense that it could at any moment tear apart in a swirl of freezing rain, phantom refractions of the light on the snow, and bats made out of smoke. There’s a principle of physics that states that the act of observation changes the event being observed. Somehow, the sense of some event taking place here makes me think of that. But this is one of the better tracks on the disc, in my opinion, and I’m glad to have been a witness to its onset. (Later note: Thinking more about this piece, and about this type of music and soundscaping, I have an idea for what could be a very fun project. More on that later.)
2.Piano Magic: “Halloween Boat” (19:00) -
Another of the stand-out tracks, this song is an enchanting spoken word story set to a long and meditative piece of music. I like this one quite a lot; the lyrics read like poetry, but are a(nother) perfect example of Push’s “heightened language”, and are not at all the saccharine or affected variety. The song has a beautiful build which I quite like – especially the sound of water in the beginning, and the faint and distant bells. And, though it isn’t ever explained and I have only an intuition of what it must be, I love the notion of a Hallowe’en Boat. It must have come from a dream, I think. The image, the concept, makes me think of surreal dreams of mine where I’ve driven away on a transmogrified Cranberry car, have been a Root Man, have met the Book-cats, and have encountered my twin in a strange place and looked him smiling in the eye. The images in this song are things fresh out of sleep, but (for me, anyway) they have a recurring ability to become what they’re describing – I mean to say, they take me there. I know the shape of the hole in the boat; I know the lay of the stars. It would take some doing, since this ‘band’ (really something of a collective, apparently) is kind of obscure, but to all reading this, I would recommend that you find a copy of this song. I would suggest that you put it on at a volume loud enough to be present and to fill the space but soft enough that it doesn’t seem invasive, and I would advise you to lie down and go into the song. Do you know what I mean, there? Surely you must. Perhaps you’d like to have the windows open, if there’s a chill in the air outside; I, for one, like it that way. At any rate, listen to the story. Feel the sensations for yourself – they’re vivid. Notice the environment of the song, its entire milieu – feel the variance of things near and far. Contraction, expansion, microcosm, macrocosm, fractals and koans. Wu wei. Musically, this song is largely very simple, but it has an essence that supersedes its means of conveyance. Months earlier, in the same entry as when I spoke of “heightened language,” I spoke of “embody(ing) the entire essence of language.” (And if you like, you can pause and review that entry.) To paraphrase, though, that concept and this one are very similar, in that both speak to the feeling (or fact) that it is entirely possible to express something grand within something very small. Whether the example is aspirations for conveyance and communion to be achieved in an open reading (old entry) or the potential within a given piece of music (this entry), I think that a part of what you’re going for is a duality, or a sense of pluralism: a commensalistic relationship where the ideas of ‘large’ and ‘small’ are interwoven, equalised. For me, a part of what I’m going for in my own art, and a large part of what I appreciate in other art, is a sense of universal relevance. And I believe that if a work of art achieves that meld with even one other person, then on that level, it can be said to be successful. Certainly, one thing that is of crucial importance is communication, and that’s true on the macrocosmic scale of existence and the microcosmic scale of art - whether you’re communicating with an audience, or fellow performers / creators, or a deep part of yourself. What you’re going for is a shared consciousness, a shared superawareness. That’s how a two-syllable string of nonsense can embody the entire essence of language. That’s how, after hearing this, I’d have only to raise my brow to you, and with your nod, we’d each of us know just what the other meant. Lastly, another particularly acute joy in this song: the fade-in of the tinkling bell-like arpeggios after the words cease.
3. Biosphere with Pete Namlook: “Gebirge” (21:30) –
This is more good than bad, for sure. It is more interesting than boring, absolutely. But for me, it’s neither good nor interesting enough to carry on for so long. Over the course of these writings, I’ve certainly evidenced a fondness for so-called (and I don’t mean for ‘so-called’ to be at all derogatory, mind you) “ambient” music. I like drones, and I like the trancey stuff. But it needs to have some energy in it (even if potential, as opposed to kinetic) if I’m to feel anything much for it. Here, I feel like there’s simply too much filler, and if the song was cut to, say, eight minutes, it would be much more effective. I do like the first echoed hint of the voice, which comes in at around seven minutes, and the terribly or blessedly brief instant when the music all falls away at just after eleven minutes. And overall, the elements of the piece are unsettling, but nicely so: the rich drone, the haunted metallophone, the remote string sound of the distant synths. But there isn’t enough to sustain it for more than twenty-one minutes. Here’s another applicable Sifuism, something he will occasionally remind the class of when we’re working on strikes: “Force pushes; shock kills.” Right now, this is a slow, insistent push that could have a much greater impact if it had a little snap to it. The piece, I think, would be more chilling and more precise (and thus, to spell it out, more powerful and affective) if it came as a shock. One specifically negative point: the last few seconds of the coda stands out in contrast to the otherwise tapered ending, and it echoes the beginning of the track. That’s a common device, and quite often it works just find as a conclusion, by serving to provide some continuity and tie everything nicely together. Here, though, it seems redundant. There was a B-side on the single for Morphine’s “Cure for Pain” which was entitled “Down Love’s Tributaries.” This song, in places, reminds me of that other one quite a lot. The Morphine tune eventually begins lyrically with Mark Sandman slowly enunciating “Meanwhile - ” into the mic, and his word echoes many times before dissipating. Initially, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised to hear that same careful intonation somewhere over the course of this one, either.
4. Pink Floyd: “Echoes” (26:34) –
Here, on the other hand, is an even longer song which never once gets tiresome. “Echoes” is one of my favourite Pink Floyd tunes, and in my opinion, some of Floyd’s best music. The lyrics can stand up to any of their more ‘accessible’ songs that you’ve heard to death on the radio, but the music, though less intricate than a large part of their catalogue, just plain shakes you. I can only imagine what a live performance of this song would be like – on either side of the stage. This one has a build in it that draws you in to itself and carries you along for a while – and not the initial build at the song’s beginning, tho’ that one is nice, too. No, the part of this song that really gets me is much closer to its end. The ominous silence and piercing shrieks at the middle of the tune give way to a gradual, aching crescendo that climaxes at around twenty-one minutes. That crescendo: that’s it. That’s the sweet spot. After that point, the lyrics resume for the last verse, and the music resumes a more mellow bent, which is pleasant – it allows you to ‘come down’ from the song, as it were. The song makes my hands buzz, and it’s a welcome feeling to have that sensation brought about by music that is certainly and quintessentially more rock music than any other sort.
5. Deep Chill Network: “Stage 1 (CS1)” (4:51) –
A bookend, but a bookend askew. It does hearken back in some ways to the opening “Like Thunder in the Early Morning, Set Into This Winter Velvet,” but rather than perfectly containing or encapsulating the disc, which might be too tidy a thing to do, it presents itself as a bit off-kilter, and is a fine way to leave this fine set of fine music: wide open. (Later note: despite the name, this song, this rich series of tones, strikes me as much more warm than Chill.)
Lastly, shout-outs and obrigados once again go out to Phil himself for gifting me with still more fantastic music.
current music: Scenic: Acquatica (1 louche | share your thoughts)
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12:46a - Við Lifðum Í Öðrum Heimi
(written on 26 September)
Last night I caught one of the greatest live performances I’ve seen in a long time. Ever, really. By ‘greatest,’ I mean not only most musically interesting, but most stirring and most intense.
Last night I saw The Album Leaf and Sigur Rós play at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC. I wasn’t sure if I’d been to the 9:30 Club before or not; I get the names of all the DC clubs mixed up. I hadn’t, as it turned out, and I’ll briefly say that the 9:30 Club is a disconcerting hybrid of Very Good and Rather Tasteless. True, it has high ceilings and good acoustics. The house equipment is quality - there was none of the omnipresent hiss of the sort that marred the performance of The American Analog Set last weekend, for example. The stage is spacious, and the (stage) lighting is tasteful and well-done for the most part. But the club is also very pretentious. They’re all about merchandising, for one – in the back of the club there was more 9:30 schwag by two or three times over than there was merchandise for the two bands put together; silly froufrou T-shirts with eye-rollingly quasi-chic slogans like “NIGHTCLUB NINE THIRTY”. The bloody ATM machine downstairs charges a $3 fee, too. And this, this is rich: on my way out, the bouncer at the door looked at my pants and said suspiciously ”Is that a bottle in your pocket?” Uhm…no. Sorry. I should’ve told him, “No, laddie, I’m just happy to see you.”
But ambiance aside, the performances were stellar. The Album Leaf was a great choice for an opening act, and it was cool to watch them perform. It’s neat to see such a different style of music coming out of San Diego these days; back in the day it was heavier stuff, more rock-oriented. There was the Headhunter / Cargo label, with acts like Truman’s Water, Heavy Vegetable, and Three Mile Pilot; there was Sister Double Happiness before that. The music of The Album Leaf is lumped in the ‘ambient’ classification a lot of the time, but that isn’t a just assessment. It’s ambient, sure, but it’s got more soul than that. The opening and closing songs featured just two players alternating on keyboards and a guitar; the six or seven tunes in between were played as a four-piece, and the players sat in a tight cluster and ceaselessly glanced around from one to another, occasionally smiling or giving a brief nod. It was a subtle conspiracy to an unknown end; I wasn’t familiar with most of the material they played, so I couldn’t tell to what degree they were lengthening or changing up their tunes, but I liked, and very much respected, seeing that level of communication in the band. Everyone around me seemed to enjoy their music (though plenty of people hadn’t heard any of it before), but it was perplexing to me that no one was moving. It isn’t funk, or any sort of music that you can disco dance to, but some of the songs had a solid groove; the drummer was great, really attuned to the melodies, and the melodies, most often played on a vintage Rhodes, were choice. Moving, dancing, seemed to me to be a much more intuitive choice than remaining rooted to the floor with locked knees. I danced alone, for the most part, but people made a bit of space.
It took an awfully long time for Sigur Rós to come onstage after The Album Leaf wrapped up. I’ve never understood that – if someone else is setting up your equipment and tuning your instruments for you, and then, they finish, what are you waiting for? It was forgivable, though, for the performance they put on. The belated entrance might have smacked of pretense or convention, but nothing about their music does. That’s (seemingly) hard enough to accomplish for a lot of bands, of itself; you could argue that that’s doubly the case for Sigur Rós, because of the nature of their music; it’s intense, it’s very unusual, it’s often simply beautiful; there’s some power there. And I think a lot of people are afraid of it. (Then again, I have freely admitted many a time in the past my belief that a good many people are morbidly afraid of a good many things, not the least of which can be broadly generalised as ‘intensity’.) The unusual textures of the music, the bowed guitar, the beguiling vocals, the sampled sounds of wind and water, and even the fact that Jon Thor Birgisson sings in Icelandic have all served to make critics make snide comments about the band. I’ve heard the songs called boring, the stage presence called completely lacklustre, and the music and / or approach of the band dismissed as pretentious. The accolades being heaped upon the band far supersede the stonethrowing, though, and rightly so. I’ve liked this band from the moment I heard their music, and I’ve felt like they’re on to something – something special, something real, something vital. And after last night, I have to say that the nays of the critics sound especially shrill, and all the more ridiculous. I am further inclined to suppose that people are afraid of this music. What I saw last night was lush, musically, but in its essence it wide open. I thought it was completely devoid of pretentiousness, and some of the most torn-open, bare-bones honesty out there. People call a particular offshoot of punk rock or hardcore emo, because of the emotional content of the music and the performance. Most bands don’t like being called “emo”. In my own opinion, a lot of the music made by a lot of the bands that get called “emo” anyway is anything but that; it’s precious, it’s whiny, it’s often boring. Then again, that’s a style of music I don’t appreciate very much (for those very reasons), so perhaps I’m not qualified to discuss it. I bring it up to say that to me, Sigur Rós is more emo than any of those so-called “emo” bands, if the supposedly defining characteristic of calling a type of music “emo” is to denote emotional intensity. There is emotion in the words, and in the music, and in the performance. They played “Ny Batteri” (New Batteries), which I’ve heard called the ‘single’ of the album, although I don’t know that any singles were actually specifically released for radio airplay when the album was released (over two years ago, now – it’s been pretty big in Europe, and stellar in Iceland this whole time). Other standouts of the night included several tracks from their first album, Von, as well as “Flugufrelsarinn” (a song with some of the most singular subject matter I’ve heard in a good while. The title translates to “The Fly Freer,” and the song is about that very act), the peculiar but wonderful “Staralfur” (“Staring Elf”), and “Olsen Olsen,” which the band maintains is not in Icelandic at all, but is actually sung in a made-up language which they call “Hopelandic”. I was hoping to hear “Hjartao Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)” (“The Heart Pounds, Boom Boom Boom”), which to me is the most divergent song on the Ágætis Byrjun album, being a jaunty number with harmonica and a chunky Hammondesque organ; I was curious to see how they would have treated the song in a live performance. All told, though, my favourite song of the night was “Svefn-G-Englar” (“Sleepwalkers”). This song…wow. First off, it has one of the most elegant, joyous beginnings of any piece of music I can think of. Secondly, when that bowed guitar lands on that low register, with that heavy, resonant chord like a velvet curtain (I hear it as a Dbm with a Gb as the bass) – that just makes me melt. I love it; it’s a gorgeous moment. And then there’s Jonsi’s voice. I’ll go on record as saying that he has one of the most amazing voices I’ve heard this time around. In one review, his voice was described as (and I’m paraphrasing here, as best as I can remember) “…gender-defying. It sounds somewhere between a mermaid and a child and a bird.” (Later note: This past weekend, in Boulder, I played the song for a friend, and talked about the performance, and gave him that quote re. Birgisson’s voice. “No,” he said. “His voice would give a child nightmares about mermaids and birds.”) When Jonsi first came to that bit in the song where he sings “Tjú…” I in all honesty half-expected myself to weep. No joke. Instead, I grinned like a simpleton at everything around me. The lights, the band, the ceiling, the audience: I grinned at everything, and my belly rumbled and I laughed a low, rich belly-laugh, because what came out wasn’t any sort of sorrow or fear or feeling of smallness or isolation, it was a deep joy, and a profound sense of gratefulness for things like music and people and human emotion and the way we reach out to and for one another and the ways we’re able to touch, to achieve a point of genuine contact. There I stood, grinning broadly in the midst of a crowd of people who had already started to faint from the stuffiness (that would be the lock-kneed among us, those who didn’t move with the sound). Earlier, I had helped raise up and steady one guy about my age who had collapsed straight down on his face. When we got him upright again, he gave everyone this look of incredulity, like he was reacting to beauty and terror at the same time, like he no longer knew where he was going but would follow any of us nonetheless, if he could. We helped him to the door, and some folks went outside to watch out for him while he sat and breathed and got some air. And there I stood, feeling positively giddy, feeling positively enlightened, even. For a moment I was as clairvoyant as I ever wanted to be. In the press of people, I felt spaciousness; in the heat, I felt a welcome shiver. I understood why I liken some of the most beautiful music to a thermal sensation, to feeling cold or chill to me. It’s because in warm environments, we often pay less attention. It’s easier to fall asleep. We feel safer, and more secure. In a cold environment, there’s a sense of impermanence; beyond that, there’s a sense of fragility. The moment might not last, the feeling might not last, even we ourselves may not last. Everything becomes more acute, more urgent. We are in the moment, and we are well aware of our surroundings and the sensations on our skin.
The trick, loves, is to never become numb to this. We must never lose our sensitivity to the cold, or else, our very hearts will stop.
current music: Scenic: Acquatica (10 louches | share your thoughts)
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1:04a - Final Thoughts for the Evening
This was very interesting to me. It looks very good, and in terms of its layout and orientation, it's very different from the instrument lessons I took in college. I like this a lot, though. I'm going to review it, and probably modify it a little bit, and then I'm going to take this class. I'll be my own professor for this one.
current music: Scenic: Acquatica (share your thoughts)
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