Dada Drummer Almanach

Posted on July 6, 2018

Seventy years ago today, June 21 1948, Columbia Records introduced the LP with two releases - one 12″ (classical) and one 10″ (pop).

Did the “American Century”/”Pax Americana” begin and end with the LP? Not claiming causality, but…I wouldn’t rule it out either.

Tagged: records go round

Posted on June 21, 2018

In a 2013 documentary about the Eagles (”History of the Eagles”), Don Henley explains that they stopped recording with Glyn Johns so they could work with someone who would mic each drum individually. They went on to record some of the most annoying music in the world.

Posted on June 11, 2018

The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “Data Alchemist,” who looked at internal numbers and generously shared more info with me.

It seems the increase in streaming of “Strange” above all other Galaxie 500 songs started in January 2017 - the same time Spotify switched the “Autoplay” preset in every listener’s preference panel from off, to on (you can still turn it off but of course fewer people do). Autoplay selects “similar songs” when anything you have chosen to play - a playlist, an album, a song - finishes. At that point, Spotify’s recommendation algorithms take over and the system continues to provide music based on its resemblance to whatever you have been hearing. (Glenn explained that there are many, many acoustic categories involved in that calculation.)

In other words, it would seem that “Strange” started to be picked out by Spotify’s algorithms because they found it most similar to other bands’ songs than any other Galaxie 500 track.

Being more of a scientist than I am (though I would happily claim kinship with the alchemy bit), Glenn cautioned that this analysis was not conclusively causal - he would need to do more examination of data before going so far. But it makes intuitive sense to me. “Strange” is a touch faster, louder, with a more regular backbeat and a more predictable song structure than most Galaxie 500 songs. Compared to the singles from each of our three albums, for example - the songs that always had the most radio play - there’s no extended instrumental section like on “Tugboat” or “Fourth of July,” and no unusually slow tempo or quiet dynamics like on “Blue Thunder.”

Glenn confirmed that once “Strange” started to be played more than our other tracks, it became more likely that it would be recommended more frequently across the platform - the snowball effect I described in the previous post.

Might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most “normal” songs in each band’s catalogue…? Smart speakers will I imagine exaggerate this effect. As albums are increasingly supplanted by playlists, and intentional listening of all kinds is increasingly replaced by algorithmic recommendations, “Play Galaxie 500″ may really come to mean, “Play the song by Galaxie 500 that most resembles songs by others.”

Posted on June 9, 2018

Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018

Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its failures when it comes to streaming albums in their entirety - gaps between songs might be changed or absent (the famous “Judas!” cry is missing from Dylan’s live recording in Manchester 1966); single edits of tracks are substituted for album ones; entirely different performances (live, or an alternate take from a later remaster) pop up in sequence instead of the original…

This emphasis on track over album seems to be baked into Spotify’s algorithms, as well. A given track is picked up for recommendation to individual listeners; if the track is received well (however that is determined), it is seeded to more recommendations; and so on.

I believe I can see the net result on the cumulative plays for different Galaxie 500 songs (Spotify shows artists this particular chart of their own material, though very little other data). “Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs - roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (”Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).

What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks. Even Spotify’s own editors haven’t selected it for any of their curated playlists, the most popular of which uses the much more predictable choice, “Tugboat”:

Yet anyone using Spotify is much more likely to hear “Strange” than any other Galaxie 500 song - it is the most frequently streamed of our songs via “Discover Weekly,” “Your Daily Mix,” and Spotify’s “Radio” feature. And I assume this will only become more and more the case. Now that Spotify’s algorithms have separated “Strange” from the rest of our catalogue, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will be streamed more than others because it is frequent use of this track that causes it to be seeded it into more recommendations, which increases the frequency of its use…

Where, meanwhile, are the listeners to On Fire? Judging by the numbers of streams of its other tracks, there aren’t many on Spotify (”Plastic Bird” had fewer than 7k streams in the same period that “Strange” had 210,000). If we want to preserve the album format, we are going to have to work to preserve other means of listening.

Posted on June 2, 2018

Emma González’s silence at the March for Our Lives podium was almost precisely 4′33″.

Tagged: resist

Posted on March 25, 2018

All, formerly, bookstores in my neighborhood.

Posted on January 25, 2018

The most mind-blowing book I read this year is A Million Years of Music, by Gary Tomlinson. It was also the most difficult - I had to look up at least one word on every page. But then I got to ask the author all my questions! His answers make a good crib to his argument:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/prehistory-music

For the full vocab lesson though, get the book.

Posted on December 30, 2017

The Grateful Dead in front of their “Wall of Sound” PA system, 1974.

There’s an excellent new documentary about the Grateful Dead called (a bit predictably) Long Strange Trip, but were it an academic book a useful subtitle might have been: “Study of a Rock Band as a Function of Scale.” The Dead, like so many bands, started as a group of friends playing music together in a shared house. But unlike most everyone else, as they moved from the sitting room to the stage they refused to alter their techniques of working as a group. To the end they performed without set lists, without formal cues, without any of the usual trappings of a “show” that accompany professionalization in music.

It didn’t stop their audience from growing, however. And that increase in scale meant the band had to continually try and adapt to maintain their informality on stage. In the early 70s, it led them to construct a PA system they dubbed their “Wall of Sound” (pace Phil Spector). Placed behind each musician (instead of in front, as is usual) was a stack of speakers that projected only their individual instrument (instead of a mix, as is usual).

The idea was that each player’s sound would emanate from their particular position, just as it would around the sitting room of a Victorian in The Haight. But a lot louder. So loud that each could be heard a mile away in an open field.

It worked, after a fashion. It also weighed four tons, and took all day to assemble and all night to dismantle. And it required a unique, out-of-phase double vocal mic set-up to cancel sounds from the speakers behind each singer - not the most flattering way to amplify voices.

After a year, the “Wall of Sound” was scrapped. And the Dead went on hiatus. I wonder if, among other issues, they felt they had hit a limit of scale.

But when they returned a few years later - using more conventional PAs - the audiences got bigger again. So big that in the late 80s, as the band started playing stadiums, devoted Deadheads stopped buying tickets altogether and started gathering outside the arenas instead. There they could continue the community practices that had developed at a smaller scale.

“Has success spoiled the Dead?” Jerry Garcia was asked in a formal press conference during this period. “Yeah!” he answers - and laughs, along with everyone in the room, like they’re hanging out.

Posted on December 29, 2017

My book was recently translated and published in Spain, so the Madrid paper El Pais asked me for a list of albums best heard on LP. I had to rephrase the question a bit, but here’s my answer:

I have written a book called The New Analog, so It might surprise you that sound quality is not usually the main issue for me, in choosing an analog or digital format for music. But actually my book never takes up that old question of which is better, LP or CD… in fact I deliberately avoided it, because it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere very interesting! Some say one; some say the other; some (I would be in this camp) say it depends – could there be a duller answer? However, I am very interested in other, perhaps more fundamental aspects about the changes we are experiencing in the ways we share music. Here are a few LPs I am listening to now – as LPs – that might help illustrate some of those issues.

Morio Agata, Otome no hakana yume (Japan, 1972)

I just got home from a tour of Japan, where there are still a lot of great record and CD stores. And I brought this album back on LP because that is how I found it – the owner of a psychedelic specialty shop in Osaka, Forever Records, talked to me about what kind of music I am interested in, pulled a stack of used LPs for me to hear, and this one hit the mark. The musician, Morio Agata, is quite famous in Japan but was unknown to me. And this album – among his earliest – is gorgeous, emotional singer-songwriter recordings, on piano and guitar; I have played it nonstop since I got home. I am sure I will now hunt down more of Agata’s work – on LP or CD or even download, I might not care! But I would never have found any of it were it not the way a record store owner can share old LPs with an interested customer.

Jimmy Noone, That Amazing Soft World of (Italian compilation, date unknown; original US recordings 1928-1937)

One of my favorite shops in the town where I live, Cambridge Massachusetts, specializes in jazz. It is so specialized, in fact, that the owner is a collector of rare 78s, and isn’t very interested in later compilations of those recordings on LP – as a result, he puts albums like this one in the $1 bin. (This one is actually a double LP, and I see from the sticker still on it that I paid $1.99, accordingly.) I have made many discoveries of older music I love by taking chances on these cheap LPs – I might never have discovered how deeply Jimmy Noone’s playing could effect me, had I not had the opportunity to find it on such a cheap format! Favorite track: Sweet Lorraine. (I guess that would be the 78 I would own, were I collector…)

Pearls Before Swine, One Nation Underground (mono reissue on Drag City, 2017; original release on ESP, 1967)

Here is a favorite artist of mine, the American singer-songwriter Tom Rapp, on his first LP originally released by the great New York label ESP in 1967. I already have all of Tom’s records – but this one has a checkered release history which makes me grateful for a new LP reissue on Drag City. ESP was a brilliant but erratic record company, not very careful with their master tapes or formats (or contracts). In the case of this one, although the original was mixed by the band and its producer in mono, the record company altered the mix to make it a stereo release. And later CD reissues added insult to injury, swapping left and right channels from the original LP. So this is a case where I am very happy to hear a new reissue LP (and it’s only available on LP, as is often Drag City’s practice), even though I have the ESP original (and, yes, the CD). Is it about sound quality? In a way – but it’s really about wanting to hear the music the way the band intended. Which, in this case, was mono!

Milton Nascimento, Milagre dos Peixes (Brazil, 1973)

This is another instance where the intention of the artist feels tied to a particular version of the release – but here it is less about the audio than the fantastic packaging and presentation of the original LP. This album was recorded under a military dictatorship in Brazil, at a time when all lyrics had to be submitted to the government for approval. As I understand it, Milton Nascimento’s response to the situation was to make this largely wordless album – but such a lush, gorgeous one, lacking nothing but its notably absent lyrics. Milton is one of my favorite singers, and so I have sought out a copy of the original LP both to try and better understand this album, and for the pleasure of its presentation. And it really must be seen to be believed – the cover folds out into a giant, poster-sized photo of Milton as a child. The LP itself is housed inside a separate, beautifully colored set of pages, with a single page devoted to each song. These pages – nearly all of which lack lyrics, and are therefore largely blank – seem like Milton’s deliberate presentation of missing words. And… there is a 7” EP tucked inside, with three more songs. Because they didn’t fit on the LP? Because these have lyrics on them? Puzzles for the listener/critic. But how else to begin to solve them, without this LP package in hand?

Tagged: sad hits the case for analog records go round

Posted on December 28, 2017

“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (Irving Berlin), Billie Holiday and her Orchestra, 1937.

Among the miracles of 20th-century jazz was its ability to pluck a run-of-the-mill tune off the hit parade and turn it into high art. Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson (piano), Ben Webster (tenor sax), Jonah Jones (trumpet), Edgar Samson (clarinet), Allan Reuss (guitar), John Kirby (bass), and Cozy Cole (drums) made this landmark record the same year Irving Berlin’s song debuted in the film On the Avenue, where it’s a forced comedic number for Dick Powell and Alice Faye:

The film version is all clichés. Billie Holiday uses the same words - but you feel the cold, and the heat.

Tagged: sad hits poptimism

Posted on December 27, 2017

Marcel Proust, from Letters to His Neighbor, translated by Lydia Davis (New Directions, 2017)

Proust was so sensitive to noise, he lined his bedroom with cork. (You can see it reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet, in Paris.) I can’t claim that kind of delicacy - for one, I’m a musician. I make noise for a living. What’s more, this year I published a book and hosted a podcast, both of which expound on the need for more noise in this digital age, not less.

But, I didn’t mean banging! The irony of my 2017 was that all the while I preached a gospel of noise, I have been living underneath a gut renovation of the apartment upstairs. And as Proust put it, there is no “noise so discontinuous, so ‘noticeable’ as blows being struck.”

This might have led to a crisis of confidence in my own claims. However, the noises I feel we need more of in our digital lives are precisely those that aren’t so noticeable - the ones in the background that we tend to ignore in favor of louder, foregrounded information. I don’t just mean the surface noise on an LP - although I mean that too - but the source that doesn’t pop up at the top of a Google search. In other words: I believe we need to pay more attention to the smaller sounds in our lives. Not least because those include our own small thoughts - the very ones that Proust was so good at documenting.

Will I need a cork-lined room to hear them in the future?

When my New England neighborhood was filled with the sounds of rakes and shovels, rather than leaf- and snow-blowers, I certainly never thought so. My partner Naomi and I have always lived with our windows open, not only for the fresh air but for what John Cage taught us about sound. Be open to the noises around you. Don’t shut them out, lest all you end up hearing is the sound of your own voice. (Not all our voices are as absorbing as Proust’s, after all…)

A primary reason for the deafening work going on upstairs is that the apartment is being gutted for the sake of central air conditioning. Our future neighbors are determined to live with windows firmly shut.

And us? We’ll soon have the noise of their compressors to add to the leaf- and snow-blowers. Still I refuse to follow suit, and seal myself in like Proust. Even if it’s only between blows being struck by energy-wasting gut renovations, I’m determined to hear the quieter sounds out there.

Anyway, shutting out noise never really works. As Proust’s letters make clear, it only drove him more nuts…

“Madame,

“Since you have been so good as to ask me, you permit me to tell you very frankly. Yesterday at about 7:30am, today at about 8, I was a little bothered and you will understand why…I had promised myself to change my hours in order to be able to experience a little daylight. And to start with, not having slept for several days, I had granted myself four hours of sleep to quiet an attack. And at 10 o’clock in the morning I was supposed to get up. But at 8 o’clock, the light little knocks on the floorboards above me were so precise, that the veronal was useless and I woke only too early for my attack to have been quieted…”

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on December 22, 2017

Sunny Murray, 1936–2017

“Saw Sunny Murray with Sabir Mateen, at the Unitarian Church in Amherst: Sunny Murray played as light and free as his records – that skittery, constant, calming sound. But seeing his body language, I felt he was simultaneously playing traditional tunes in his head: ballads with breaks, turnarounds, solos. When he started a song on the brushes, alone, I was sure he was waiting for Ben Webster or Lester Young to join in. And he hummed – atonal humming, like the memory of a beautiful song without the melody or the changes. Just the space for its feeling.” (From Afterimage, 2011)

There’s a 2008 documentary film about drummer Sunny Murray that is, like a lot of improvised music, much too long yet nonetheless filled with moments that I’d be very sorry not to have witnessed. For just a couple highlights, see this trailer produced for The Wire, with apposite statements by both Sunny and Robert Wyatt.

Tagged: drummer hero

Posted on December 10, 2017

Hamza El Din, filmed by Robert Garfias, 1970.

Found this passage in a history of the guitar written by Tom and Mary Anne Evans:

“For years guitars were used in jazz solely as rhythm instruments, as six-string drums which provided a beat.” [my italics]

The quote is about New Orleans music, but Hamza El Din’s oud playing is to me the perfect example of strings as percussion - it’s no wonder that Mickey Hart became a champion of his work. On his first album, recorded by ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias for Nonesuch, Hamza El Din even included a song without oud at all - accompanying his voice just on the tar. Garfias documented that same tune on film, so we get to see the drum played as a stringless oud.

Tagged: egypt and nubia singing drummers

Posted on December 6, 2017

The website HiLoBrow has published 10 prose poems of mine about sound:

http://hilobrow.com/tag/never-sing/

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on December 1, 2017

Once upon a time in the 70s, Cambridge and Boston had not one but two weekly papers - they even had a feud with one another. Both grew out of the underground press movement of the 60s, and one (The Phoenix) survived into the “alt weekly” culture of the 80s and 90s.

Today, as even New York and Los Angeles weeklies are shuttered, the entire idea of an underground press seems no more than a colorful bit of the past, like newsboys selling papers on the street.

But having no “alternative” media - that same word my friends and I ridiculed when it was used as a marketing term in the 90s - turns out to be a serious problem. We’re stuck with the mainstream. And the mainstream still sucks.

Tagged: media as memory

Posted on November 30, 2017

Nirvana and Pulp: A Story of Scrapped CDs, by Jada Li (2013)

When Naomi and I toured China last year, musicians we met told us they first heard our music via “cut” media - CDs and cassettes traded on the down low in the 1990s. What we initially took to be black-market slang turned out to be literally true: the discs and tapes they were talking about had been physically cut at European and American warehouses to prevent them from being sold, then shipped to China for plastic recycling. Once there, enterprising people figured out ways to play as much of the media as survived this damage - and thereby gain access to music unavailable in China.

Younger Chinese musicians - those who come of age in the online era - will have a different story to tell about obtaining music, one that is still (unfortunately) engaged with censorship, but not with physical media. Might they someday feel “romantic” about VPNs, the way rock critic Hao Fang describes his feelings toward cut media in this documentary? Or does the end of physical media spell the end of this particular kind of music fan, the one who keeps their original cut cassette of Daydream Nation alongside five editions of the CD, a vinyl copy for listening, and another just “for the collection”…

Tagged: china media as memory

Posted on November 15, 2017

John Cohen, “The High Lonesome Sound,” 1963.

There’s a new documentary making the film festival rounds, “Linefork” by Vic Rawlings and Jeff Silva - it’s a portrait of elderly banjo player Lee Sexton, his wife Opal, and their community and environment in Eastern Kentucky.

The film is like an answer song to a folk revival classic: John Cohen’s “High Lonesome Sound,” from 1963. Cohen’s film is a portrait of Lee Sexton’s cousin, Roscoe Holcomb, who was about 50 years old at the time (Holcomb died in 1981). Roscoe Holcomb wasn’t a professional musician - Cohen had gone south looking for someone playing banjo on a porch, not a recording artist. But the process of Cohen’s documentation made one out of Holcomb. Cohen’s elegant black-and-white images were expensive to capture, and the preciousness of the medium reflected onto his subject. Everything in the film is presented as worthy of preservation - and if you miss that from the feel of the images, a narrative voiceover underscores their importance.

“Linefork” is a different kind of documentation, however. Co-produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, it is highly conscious of its own complications as a work of observational anthropology - a film by northerners about the south; a film by those with many options, about those with next to none; a film shot in a matter of days about lives measured in decades. And it makes brilliant use of that self-consciousness by giving its subjects time and space to speak for themselves. There is no editorializing voiceover, as in Cohen’s film, and there are no interviews per se. Lee and Opal Sexton simply go about their business with the filmmakers present - not absent, or pretending to be (there are a couple key moments of exchange from behind the camera), but not directing either. Instead, the filmmakers keep us alert to their position in the scene - and ours by extension - while letting the cameras roll.

And roll. “Linefork” relies on the light footprint of digital media - cheap hard drives and portable equipment. The camera and mics run endlessly, stockpiling hundreds of hours of material. All its images are carefully framed, but the action is not precious. None of it feels “important,” in the manner of Cohen’s voiceover. On the contrary, the actions are ordinary.

But isn’t that what an old guy playing banjo on a porch always was, and precisely what Cohen went to find? “Linefork” gives us a glimpse of Lee Sexton and his folk music without turning him into a recording artist. Maybe that’s possible now cause in the digital age, recording itself is no longer special. It’s become a folk art.

Tagged: analog ears digital eyes media as memory digital folk art

Posted on October 21, 2017

Ways of Hearing is a 6-episode podcast about listening in the digital era, written and hosted by yours truly. It’s free! And available wherever you get podcasts, by subscribing to Showcase from Radiotopia.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on August 8, 2017

The “vinyl revival” has made for some fantastic, borderline obsessive reissues of classic LPs - but one original detail they always get wrong is price. LPs were never so expensive as they are today. Which meant you could often afford to take a chance - as I routinely do in the $1 bin at my favorite local shop. Five of the LPs listed on this receipt were actually double albums, making it 24 discs for the price of one million-gram reissue. Thank you Stereo Jack!

Tagged: records go round

Posted on July 18, 2017

Graph of my bands’ digital income streams, broken down by source (excluding Bandcamp), September 2016-February 2017. The three long bars are, from top: Apple Music, iTunes, and Spotify. (Apple Music and iTunes account separately but are of course arms of the same corporation.)

Looking at this chart of our digital income sources feels very much like looking at charts of our book publishing income from Exact Change, c. 2000. Back then, two competing chainstores - Barnes & Noble, and Borders - were vying for US market dominance, expanding rapidly and putting many smaller booksellers out of business along the way. By the turn of the millennium, those two sources came to dominate our publishing income stream just as Apple and Spotify do in the graph above. And then, in fiscal year 2001 (before September 11, in other words), both crashed. The two chains not only took our principle sources of income down with them, they started returning unsold stock at such a furious clip that we actually went negative with Borders that year - we owed them money, at the end of the day, rather than the other way round.

Digital music would seem to be on equally unsteady ground. Apple isn’t in danger of going bankrupt, but they could change corporate strategy toward music tomorrow and there would be nothing any of us could do about it. And Spotify, for all its market dominance, is still losing money - they have never turned a profit.

I can’t look at this chart and see a future for our digital income. I look at it and see the danger of overreliance on corporations whose goals don’t match those of my own small part of the music business.

http://www.talkhouse.com/listen-listen-damon-krukowski-sounds-silence/

Posted on June 21, 2017

Hélio Oiticica, from “Neyrótica” (1973).

“Neyrótica” is a slide show with photos of friends and/or lovers posed in Oiticica’s New York apartment, set to a soundtrack of Quiet Storm programming taped off air from WBLS, 107.5 FM. Over the commercial breaks, Oiticica reads from the New Directions translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, in his heavily Brazilian-accented English. The slides repeat around a carousel, but the soundtrack is a single, continuous 46-minute piece (one side of a 90-minute cassette, no doubt).

Occasionally, a slide appears with Oiticica’s tools for making this soundtrack: radio, cassette recorder, paperback book. It’s like the shots of a band with their instruments in the midst of a music video. Or the cuts to the orchestra in Preston Sturges’s “Unfaithfully Yours,” or Disney’s “Fantasia.” The slides of friends and lovers continue, round and round, hinting at a narrative which is necessarily circular. The soundtrack is the measure of the piece, its one linear element.

Tagged: poets brazil media as memory analog ears digital eyes

Posted on June 1, 2017

Screenshot from the website for Triton Signal USA, “the Sole North American, Licensed Master Distributor of Backup Alarms Manufactured by Yamaguchi Electric Company (YEC) in Japan.”

I wrote a piece for Talkhouse that might have fit on this blog…

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on April 24, 2017

The category seems a bit obscure, but pretty sure this is my first #1 of any kind! A benefit to all is that Amazon is now discounting the book by 34%, making it just about the price of a record…

Posted on March 21, 2017

Photo by Joseph Eid, AFP.

Tagged: resist

Posted on March 15, 2017

“Make the drummer sound good!” - Thelonious Monk to Steve Lacy

Steve Lacy played in Monk’s quintet briefly in 1960. There’s a short CBS radio recording of the group playing what sounds like a routine festival gig in a Philadelphia park, complete with square interjections by master of ceremonies Mitch Miller - not the most inspired setting or performance. But Lacy’s close study of Monk is clear in his spare, angular solos (although one is drowned out by a Studebaker ad from Louis Armstrong, and Miller’s plea to buy US savings bonds). Decades later, Lacy recalled some of Monk’s instructions to him in the foreword to a book by Thomas Fitterling. (There’s a scan floating around the web purported to be pages from Lacy’s 1960 notebook, but its authenticity is doubted.) Here are Lacy’s published words:

Thelonious would not tell me what to play, but he would stop me if I got carried away: “Don’t play all that bullshit, play the melody! Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, or play off the rhythm of the melody, never mind the so-called chord changes.” Also, “Don’t pick up from me, I’m accompanying you!” Also: “Make the drummer sound good!” These tips are among the most valuable things anyone has ever told me.

Some of T.’s other bits of wisdom:

“The inside of the tune [the bridge] is what makes the outside sound good.”

“A genius is the one who is most like himself.”

“It’s always night, otherwise you wouldn’t need the light!”

“Whatever you think can’t be done, someone will come along and do it.”

“Monk = know = ‘Always Know’ (where you are).”

“When you’re swinging, swing some more!”

“You’ve got to know the importance of discrimination, also the value of what you don’t play, the use of space, and letting music go by, only picking out certain parts.”

“A note can be as big as a mountain, or small as a pin. It only depends on a musician’s imagination.”

Tagged: trad instruments in non trad music depressive geniuses wisdom

Posted on March 14, 2017

https://www.bbc.com/videos/cz48zjrgnz5o

Delia Derbyshire demonstrates her compositional technique for the television show “Tomorrow’s World,” 1965.

In this rare clip of tape music being created in the studio, English experimental composer Delia Derbyshire walks us through her purely analog work flow. Her touch on dials and switches, her tapping fingers and feet are the movements of a traditional musician - a physical reminder that electronic music is distinct from (and predates) the use of computers.

Tagged: the case for analog orphaned machines trad song form in non trad music

Posted on March 12, 2017

A red song for International Women’s Day, by Lal Waterson

Tagged: resist

Posted on March 8, 2017

Still from “Phenomenology of Zeitgeist” by Rikuro Miyai, 1967.

Japanese experimental director Rikuro Miyai employed a simple disorienting device for screenings of his 1967 work “Phenomenology of Zeitgeist“: two prints of the same film are projected on top of one another, offset by a slight time delay. The technique is well known to rock musicians, who routinely use delay to enhance sounds. But this visual equivalent is strikingly unfamiliar, even 50 years later. Consider the film’s last shot, a digital clock display as the hour clicks over from 8:59 to 9:00 - given the delay, the numbers change together but not at once. One hour melts into the next.

This feeling for time is more aural than visual, perhaps. Few gestures in music depend on the kind of unified time we expect from the most casual glance at a clock. Swing, rubato, feel, groove - there are any number of ways to describe the flexibility of musical time. Apply that to what we see and you get echt-60s psychedelia, however.

Which helps explain why the soundtrack to Rikuro Miyai‘s film locks so well to its smeared image. At the original screenings the director acted “like a DJ,” film scholar Go Hirasawa explained to me, playing favorite records to accompany his otherwise silent work. In the digitized version, assembled only recently, those choices have been codified: psychedelic tracks from 1966-68 by Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and (they were especially big in Japan) Deep Purple. The film wasn’t cut to these tracks, obviously; but every moment is in the pocket.

Tagged: listen listen analog ears digital eyes

Posted on March 4, 2017

Steve Jobs at home, 1982.

Streaming services are beginning to market access to “hi-res” or “hi-def” versions of their digital audio files, for a pricier subscription. This is not forward thinking, exactly; consider Steve Jobs’s home stereo c. 1982, which Wired magazine pieced together from the photographic evidence above. Nothing digital services provide can approach the audio reproduction of a system like that, nor would they pretend to - “hi-res” will forever be a cut below “hi-fi.”

More significantly, those initiated into audio technology by Steve Jobs’ own products are accustomed to listening on tiny little speakers attached to their computers, or stuck into their ears. And no amount of bits can improve those sounds. Garbage in, garbage out is the programmer’s mantra; in this case, whatever goes in comes out garbage, because the output of these devices is so severely limited.

It could be that hi-res streaming is aimed strictly at an older, wealthier portion of the market - Steve Jobs’ generation of listeners - as its use thus far would seem to indicate. But those people will be taking a big step backwards from the sounds they already had access to in the 80s. The future was then?

Posted on February 19, 2017

Posted on March 3, 2017

If truth makes us the enemy, then every song a barricade. Every declaration of love a brick.

Tagged: resist

Anger is an energy, anger is an energy, anger is an energy…

Tagged: resist

Posted on February 13, 2017

Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues

Tagged: resist

Posted on February 8, 2017

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The first virtual government provoked a virtual civil war, as predicted by many; what no one foresaw was that its successful opposition came not from those committed to remaining in real space and time, but from those craving an individual virtuality. This virtual underground – refusing control of their imagined world – was both impossible to organize and, for the same reason, impossible to defeat. Indeed, they were victorious instantaneously for those who joined. The virtual government, stymied in its efforts to convince the underground that it had been defeated, grew ever more real with its frustration, resorting at last to the ancient physical tool of violence. At which point, it too dissolved.

Posted on February 1, 2017

Which Side Are You On, which side are you on?

Tagged: resist

Posted on January 30, 2017

Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved get involved get involved!

Tagged: resist

Posted on January 29, 2017

Jaki Liebezeit interview, from the BBC documentary “Krautrock” (2009)

In this interview with the late great drummer Jaki Liebezeit (starting at 24:16), he tells an anecdote about the origin of his metronomic style. “A guy came to me and said, ‘You must play monotonous.’“

“I started thinking about it. To play monotonous, what did he mean? Monotonous. So I started to repeat things.”

Jaki Liebezeit’s repetitions may seem more easily imitated by machines than people - he has been called a human drum machine. But in truth his playing was critically distinct from the mechanical rhythms we are becoming more and more accustomed to through dance and pop music. He himself saw his playing not as pro- or anti-machine, but complementary; he liked to point out that one of the first tracks ever to combine human and machine rhythms was Can’s “Spoon.” In the latter part of his career, he even altered his drums to accommodate this new situation - these are the drums you see him play in the BBC documentary. As he explained to Modern Drummer in 2004:

“The drum kit was developed for jazz, which it was fantastic for. After jazz the kit was taken by rock musicians, and drum culture went downhill. Only a few players do it well. The way of listening has changed because of machines, so you have to play like a machine today.”

In response, Jaki redesigned his drums (according to Can biographer Rob Young, he also abandoned the term “kit” in favor of drum “set”):

“…So I’ve given up the foot pedals. I play standing up, using a modified 16″ floor tom for a ‘bass drum’ sound. By striking with my hand, I can make a much bigger impact. And with the sequencers we use, I don’t have to play a hi-hat rhythm all the time. I can play more tom-oriented beats. I also use timpani, gongs, a 10″ snare, and smaller toms, which cause less problems when recording. I’m really happy with this setup. It requires a different technique.”

A less machine-like technique, in other words, even though his monotonous approach never altered. Jaki was willing to cede to machines what machines could contribute to his work - the timekeeping traditionally kept by the drummer’s feet for example - and by doing so, emphasize the human element to his playing.

As he told interviewer Alan Meaney in 2014 (quoted by Brian Coney in his memorial piece for the Quietus):

“I can play a little bit like a machine but the difference between a machine and me is that I can listen, I can hear and I can react to the other musicians, which a machine cannot do.”

Tagged: the case for analog drummer hero

Posted on January 25, 2017

Trio of Doom playing Jaco Pastorius’s “Continuum” at the Teatro Karl Marx in Havana, Cuba, March 3rd 1979.

It’s hard to imagine after Reagan rewrote cold war history, but while Jimmy Carter was in office Columbia Records organized a three-day festival in Havana for a group of their recording artists. According to John McLaughlin, the musicians invited on this junket referred to it as the “Bay of Gigs.” Billy Joel and Kris Kristofferson, of all people, were there, alongside a slew of great jazz players associated with Columbia including the members of the so-called “Trio of Doom.” McLaughlin, Tony Williams and Jaco Pastorius played their one and only show together at the Teatro Karl Marx, and according to legend it was a disaster. Apparently Jaco’s personal unpredictability had led to friction both on stage and off, so when Columbia asked to use the live recording McLaughlin forbade it. As a compromise, Columbia put the trio in their New York studio and rerecorded the identical set under better conditions. They dubbed in the crowd from Cuba, and included three of those tracks on their “Havana Jam” compilation LPs.

In 2007, with both Jaco and Tony Williams gone, McLaughlin revisited the live tapes from Havana and decided to release them after all. Whatever went wrong that night turns out not to be audible. This live performance of Pastorius’s tune “Continuum” is I think more fragile, more poetic, and more moving than the fake live studio version or, for that matter, the original recording Pastorius had made with his own group in 1976. Pastorius’s playing here is restrained, almost minimal. And I love the rhythmic communication between McLaughlin and Williams - were those unison hits exaggerated in an effort to keep Pastorius in line with the group? They are much more muted, almost coy, on the later studio recording. But here they provide a continually surprising and lively underpinning to Jaco’s lyrical, gypsy-like solo line.

A doomed trio, perhaps. But full of life for these few minutes.

Tagged: sad hits instrumentals singing bass

Posted on January 19, 2017

Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, 2007.

Ten years ago this month the iPhone was introduced by Apple - there’s video of the event, of course, where you can witness Steve Jobs eerily peering into the future.

What’s striking in retrospect - given the coming dominance of social media, not foreseen in the launch - is how central music is to Jobs’s pitch. He points out that the one truly new, patentable feature of the iPhone is its navigation: the multi-touch screen. And the first thing he chooses to emphasize about that is what it does for music: “You can touch your music.”

Tangibility is the last thing we associate with digital music - mp3s are disembodied, lacking all the tactile experiences of an LP or any other physical media. Steve Jobs obviously knew that, but the way he describes the iPhone makes it sound like he felt that was a problem Apple had now solved. He shows off the “beautiful album art” that we might otherwise describe as “thumbnails.” He seems genuinely thrilled by “cover flow,” a feature I think we all tired of as soon as it was introduced. And he seems to go off script to gush about this one particular feature: “You can just touch your music - it’s so cool.”

Certainly we’ve been touching screens ever since. But are we making contact with our music through them, like Steve Jobs hoped?

Tagged: records go round synesthesia

Posted on January 13, 2017

Candid Records, 1961. Produced and with liner notes by Nat Hentoff.

Nat Hentoff, who recently passed away at age 91, produced my mother’s debut album for the great but short-lived jazz label Candid, and not long after had two sons around the same time I was born (one a bit older, one a bit younger). I grew up with Nick and Tom - we went to the same school, summer camp, our families even took vacations to the same summer community on Fire Island. We did whatever boys do, while our parents talked and talked (and smoked, it was the 60s) in the other room.

Meanwhile, all that time, Nat was writing. Writing a lot. He wrote columns, he wrote books, and not least he wrote liner notes. To this day, I regularly buy an album to find yet another set of liner notes I never knew he had written.

An Iranian jazz writer, Ehsan Khoshbakht, has been cataloguing Nat’s liner notes, and the list is already enormous though incomplete. Khoshbakht says he would need “a team of ten devoted researchers“ to locate them all.

Nat was a master of the form, and deserves those ten devoted researchers when they materialize. But the format as a whole is disappearing. There is a staggering amount of information on the backs of LPs and inside CD booklets, and precious little of it has made the transition to digital. We’re not only losing Nat’s generation of music critics, we’re losing a massive amount of their work.

Posted on January 9, 2017

The big reveal in the documentary 808 is the final scene, a full hour and a half into this fun but overly long paean to Roland’s early 80s analog drum machine. It’s only then that the filmmakers turn to the source of the machine, Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, to ask how it was made and why it was discontinued after three years production. He answers in vintage Japanese-English, which the film subtitles as follows (with a few small changes to help match his actual words):

I could only catch the character of a sound

Never reach the real drum sound

In that time memory was very expensive

Buying memory was not so easy

So we had to use another generator

A very special generator

A combination produced the generator

Then I created a new sound

Any electronic circuit just before the critical point

You give it a shock

Then electronically it starts a vibration

I used this

I used a defective transistor

In that time they’d make 10,000 transistors

Probably two percent to three percent were defective

This defective transistor made noise, it was rejected

Good ones were for sale, bad ones thrown away

I purchased these defective transistors

This was the source of the sizzling sound

Semiconductor technology got better and better

Finally we could no longer buy the defective transistor

There was no way to come back

Tagged: orphaned machines the case for analog

Posted on January 4, 2017

Jeff Ellis, LA sound engineer, explains his system for mixing in the current audio environment, November 2016. From a video for Sound on Sound, the UK audio magazine.

Ellis is best known for mixing Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. In the middle of this very open and generous interview, from 13:01-20:19, he details his use of three different speaker systems to judge his mixes: a pair of PMC “twotwo” professional monitors ($4k-$8k), a pair of Pyle home bookshelf speakers ($20-$30), and a MacBook Pro covered with stickers.

“A bad speaker now is your cellphone speaker, or a laptop or a computer speaker…”

Jeff Ellis has worked out a way to anticipate how his mixes will actually be heard by most - and judging by Channel Orange, I’d say he’s really good at it.

But is making music sound better on the worst possible speakers a service or disservice to listeners? Mix for the real world, or mix to keep it real?

UPDATE: Just ordered the Pyle speakers from Amazon. Would love to add the PMCs as well, but that will have to wait for our own Channel Orange.

Tagged: orphaned machines

Posted on January 2, 2017

Levon Helm and Rick Danko, “It Makes No Difference” live at the Starry Night Club, Portland OR, January 1983.

From Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top 10, December 20 2016:

“After Robbie Robertson left the Band following The Last Waltz in 1976, the rest of the group scrambled into solo projects. Here, from just before Helm, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson, broke and fading, went on the road again under their old name, letting it go only after Danko’s death in 1999, is an almost perfect night from two of them, with sound that makes you feel as if you’re sitting in: 16 songs, played on acoustic guitars, harmonica, and mandolin, from Levon’s leads on ‘The Girl I Left Behind’ and ‘Milk Cow Boogie’ to a thrillingly intricate rhythm inside of ‘Rag Mama Rag’ to a cover of Kenny Rogers’ ‘Blaze of Glory’ to Danko taking ‘It Makes No Difference’ to places you can imagine it never got to before, and never reached again. It’s careful, delicate, and afraid - the singing a harrowing warble. ‘Without your love, I have nothing at all’ - a trite pop song sentiment, and here Danko makes the nothing open up beneath his feet, and you are caught in his gravity. It’s the deepest thing I’ve been able to stand for six weeks.”

At the close of this fraught year, I caught the fever for this sad hit and have it on repeat now too. Even learned the chords so I could warble it myself, as harrowingly as I can manage. To Marcus’s vivid description I’d just add, in the spirit of a footnote, that for me this broken version repairs both the disastrous overproduction of the studio original on Northern Lights-Southern Cross, and the live version in The Last Waltz which is lovely but forever marred by Robbie Robertson self-consciously shaking his pick hand like a magician as a note sustains. Here, by contrast, Levon Helm doesn’t even sing his killer harmony from the record, opting instead for a mournful harmonica behind the chorus. Sometimes a sad song needs sad players.

Tagged: sad hits anglo bootleg rhythm section out front

Posted on December 31, 2016

Disc-o-mat was a NYC chain of discount record stores in the 1970s, this ghost sign still marks its 7th Ave and 36th Street location but my local was on the east side at Lexington and 58th. Saturdays in grade school I took my allowance there and chose one album for the magical price of $3.69.

That same price popped up again when I was in college, shopping at the Boston chain Newbury Comics. Records were a good deal more expensive by then unless they were on Dischord, the anti-capitalist DC label who printed their prices on the back cover to avoid overcharging by middlemen: “This record is $3.50 postpaid. Why pay more?”

A month ago, we lifted prices on Damon & Naomi downloads at Bandcamp, letting people choose whatever they want to pay. There has been a range of responses but the average is precisely $3.55. Is this the natural price for albums?

Tagged: records go round

Posted on December 27, 2016

Against the Paywall

“Fewer and fewer people are open to the best obtainable version of the truth,” Carl Bernstein said to Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post recently. But only subscribers to the Post would know, because their site is protected by a paywall. So wouldn’t the more accurate statement be, “The best obtainable version of the truth is open to fewer and fewer people”?

We recently removed prices from all our albums at Bandcamp. Downloads have skyrocketed. And what more could we want, as musicians, than for people to hear our music?

If you have something to say, share it.

Tagged: information wants to be free music is information

Posted on December 19, 2016

I have neglected this blog while completing a related book. The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World will be published by The New Press (New York) in April 2017, and Amazon is taking orders now!

The book takes up a number of concerns explored on International Sad Hits. If you follow some of the tags below through the archive, you’ll get something of a sneak preview…

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/listen-listen

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/the-case-for-analog

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/the-case-for-mono

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/media-as-memory

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/orphaned-machines

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/music-is-information

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/noisy-silence

http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/tagged/clocks

Tagged: the new analog

Posted on October 27, 2016

Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks on Austin City Limits, 1992. This was a reunion concert for the lineup that recorded “Canned Music” on the album Striking it Rich (1972).

In 1906, John Philip Sousa denounced audio recording as “canned music” (“The Menace of Mechanical Music”). He was picturing a Victrola in the woods at night:

“There was a time when the pine woods of the north were sacred to summer simplicity, when around the camp fire at night the stories were told and the songs were sung with a charm all their own. But even now the invasion of the north has begun, and the ingenious purveyor of canned music is urging the sportsman, on his way to the silent places with gun and rod, tent and canoe, to take with him some disks, cranks, and cogs to sing to him as he sits by the firelight, a thought as unhappy and incongruous as canned salmon by a trout brook.”

What’s striking today is the lack of electricity in this dystopian picture of modernity. The Victrola was a wind-up device closer in spirit to the opener for a can of stew than to a smartphone. The power chain for successfully streaming music in the woods, by contrast, stretches all the way to satellites orbiting the earth. If records were canned, streaming music is frozen: useless in a blackout, inaccessible from the pine woods of the north. It’s as much an artifact of our era of cheap oil and power as canning was of the mechanical age.

Posted on September 2, 2016

The Lisbon coffeehouse A Brasileira in 1911.

It was while writing my book Afterimage, which takes up questions of inheriting a war at one remove, that I realized with a jolt how my travels for music shadow my father’s childhood as a refugee. Happy Interdependence Day.

[from Afterimage:]

“Lisbon, some months prior to Korea: walking in the dawn because the bed was too uncomfortable for sleep. Bakeries unlocking their gates. Streets wet, whether from rain or from having been washed I do not know. Wandering, but taking care not to get lost - tracing the route seen from above, as on a map. I stumble on Pessoa’s favorite café, pointed out the day before. A coffee at the bar: ‘O melhor café é o d’A Brasileira.’

“I realize I have not been wandering. This back and forth across the map - does it not trace a familiar route? There is no war; on the contrary, our travels for music depend on peace, predictability - Spain and Portugal were only added to the itinerary once the Fascists were truly gone. But the refugee’s path is likewise an opportunistic zigzag. Looking for asylum. Longing for a coffee at the bar.

“The city awakening. Morning sounds of no fear.”

Posted on July 4, 2016

Starting an indie rock band doesn’t seem like an entry into global politics. But our experiences in music have been shaped by macroeconomics as much as any other transnational enterprise. When we first began touring in Galaxie 500, it was to a map determined by the Cold War. Europe for an American band like ours meant the UK and West Germany primarily, with stops in France, Switzerland, and what our record company called Benelux. Central and Eastern Europe were politically out of reach (though heavier-sounding groups included Vienna on their routes). And Southern Europe was economically remote: There’s no money there, booking agents told us again and again, as if we’d been looking to open a branch office rather than play a gig.

In the 1990s, the EU changed our touring map radically, more so even than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the East was now open to us politically, it lagged behind economically - and took the gravy train of West Germany with it. Meanwhile, Schengen and the Euro demolished the less obvious border to the south. Spain became a mainstay of our touring, with stops in Portugal, Italy, Greece, and that very southern-feeling bit of the North Atlantic, Ireland…

Through it all, despite its geographical location, the UK has been at the center of our European touring map - even, thanks to Heathrow, logistically. “Brexit,” like the fall of the wall and the introduction of the Euro, will undoubtedly reshape that map for us again. But for the first time, it may move England’s place.

I feel disoriented, though an ocean away.

And our next tour is to China.

Posted on June 25, 2016

Other Music, the influential New York City record store that opened in December 1995, has announced that June 2016 will be their last month in business. In place of their usual chart of current top sellers, they compiled the 100 best selling records in the shop over the last 20+ years.

Funny thing about the list: there’s nothing on it from the present decade. As music writer Andy Beta observed on Twitter, its newest release is Nite Jewel’s Good Evening, from early 2009. Which means, as WFMU DJ Jeff Conklin was quick to point out, the list is essentially frozen since the US launch of Spotify at the end of 2008.

Many have written about the impact of streaming on artists’ income - myself included. This chart is not just an illustration of falling album sales, however; it’s about the loss of a medium for communication. Record stores are no longer a hub of information for new music. The vinyl resurgence may well have helped Other Music’s balance sheet in recent years - the chart is not a profit-and-loss statement - but it hasn’t done anything to divert the flow of information away from stores.

It was information, not units, that put record stores at the center of our musical lives - think of the time spent in a visit to a shop like Other Music, regardless of whether or not you made a purchase. Streaming may provide access to music. But it isn’t a medium for sharing information - on the contrary, it delivers sound stripped of metadata. We’re all the poorer for that.

Tagged: records go round

Posted on June 20, 2016

Summer memory: Baby brother dragging A Hard Day’s Night across the sandy floor of our beach rental. Ocean sound of the LP afterwards.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on May 30, 2016

Shakti at the Pori Jazz Festival, Finland 1977.

There is more famous footage from Montreux of the remarkable, short-lived acoustic fusion band Shakti, but it is shot and edited to focus on the virtuosity of the individual musicians. This poorer-quality clip from the Finnish festival Pori highlights their interplay, and collective groove - at times, they could be mistaken for their contemporaries Can.

The tune is not represented on Shakti’s albums, and is referred to here as “Nata,” which is a Carnatic (South Indian) raga. Shakti was a fusion band not only east to west, but north to south - Zakir Hussain’s tabla come from the Hindustani (North Indian) tradition, while Vikku Vinayakram’s ghatam is from the South. Shankar, the violin virtuoso, was schooled initially in the Carnatic tradition as well, but is such a polymath (he holds a higher degree in physics, as well as a PhD in ethnomusicology) that he represents a kind of fusion on his own. As does guitarist John McLaughlin - and even his modified Gibson, with added drone strings, and scalloped frets to allow more flexibility in bending notes (as on a sitar or veena).

Citizens of the world travel widely but can also seem to have no home at all, as McLaughlin explained in a 1999 interview:

“When I formed Shakti, it was dimly viewed, I should say! After coming out of Mahavishnu—a very powerful electric band—here I was sitting on a carpet with Indian musicians. Everyone thought I flipped out. It was not well-received at all by the record company or my agent and manager. Artistically, I thought it was wonderful, but they all thought I was a little loopy. It was not good news to them…As far as Shakti’s influence on the Western ear, it’s difficult for me to estimate how and what kind of influence we had. We were very timely as far as we were concerned. And subsequently in the ‘80s, ethnic music and world music became much more popular. People began to seek out a new sound. The globalization of the world is part of the same process. The shrinking of the planet and increased intercommunication between countries and cultures has played a role too.“

Tagged: instrumentals subcontinent trad instruments in non trad music citizens of the world

Posted on May 24, 2016

Wolf Biermann, “Die Hab Ich Satt!” from Chausseestraße 131, 1968.

Too red for the West, Wolf Biermann escaped to East Berlin in the 1950s, working for Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and apprenticing himself to Hans Eisler. (There’s a colorful account of their relationship in an English-language interview with Biermann from 1983.) Despite - or because of? - his devotion to socialist ideals, by 1965 he was banned by DDR authorities from recording studios as well as public performance. And so his first full album of songs, Chauseestraße 131, was taped in his apartment at that address. The record was made with a single, omnidirectional mic - the initial sounds you hear are from the traffic outside his windows. Then he and his nylon-string guitar launch into the biting, “Die Hab Ich Satt!” (I’ve Had Enough!)

Die kalten Frauen, die mich streicheln
die falschen Freunde, die mir schmeicheln
Die scharf sind auf die scharfen Sachen
Und selber in die Hosen machen
In dieser durchgerissnen Stadt
- die hab ich satt!

Und sagt mir mal: Wozu ist gut
Die ganze Bürokratenbrut?
Sie wälzt mit Eifer und Geschick
Dem Volke über das Genick
Der Weltgeschichte großes Rad
- die hab ich satt!

Was haben wir denn an denen verloren:
An diesen deutschen Professoren
Die wirklich manches besser wüssten
Wenn sie nicht täglich fressen müssten
Beamte! Feige! Fett und platt!
- die hab ich satt!

Die Lehrer, die Rekrutenschinder
Sie brechen schon das Kreuz der Kinder
Sie pressen unter allen Fahnen
Die idealen Untertanen:
Gehorsam - fleißig - geistig matt
- die hab ich satt!

Der legendäre Kleine Mann
Der immer litt und nie gewann
Der sich gewöhnt an jeden Dreck
Kriegt er nur seinen Schweinespeck
Und träumt im Bett vom Attentat
- die hab ich satt!

Der Dichter mit der feuchten Hand
Dichten zugrunde das Vaterland
Das Ungereimte reimen sie
Die Wahrheitssucher leimen sie
Dies Pack ist käuflich und aalglatt
- die hab ich satt!

Tagged: sad hits germany singer songwriters poets revolutionaries the east is red

Posted on May 1, 2016

Seems Woody Guthrie already covered this election: “They say ‘America First,’ but they mean ‘America Next!’”

Tagged: antifascism

Posted on April 28, 2016

From 1950-52, Woody Guthrie’s landlord was none other than Fred Trump, Donald’s father. He inspired lyrics for a song:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project…

Tagged: revolutionaries antifascism

Posted on March 1, 2016

Jazz “Hot”, 1938.

There’s precious little visual documentation of virtuoso guitarist Django Reinhardt - the most extensive is in this short film, created by then-music promoter Lew Grade (later Baron Grade, television mogul) to promote the first UK tour by the landmark Quintet of the Hot Club of France.

The visit was ill-timed, and led indirectly to the dissolution of the group - they were still on tour in September 1939 when war broke out. Django returned to France, while violinist Stéphane Grappelli chose to stay in England. They both survived (in Django’s case, rather miraculously given that he was Roma in Nazi-occupied France), and their paths would cross again after the war - but only briefly, and under very changed circumstances.

In the film, the Quintet is pictured playing “J’attendrai,” a hit tune of the day. As it happened, this song became a patriotic standard during the occupation of France, its lyric reinterpreted as a longing for the return of more than an errant lover.

J’attendrai
Le jour et la nuit
J’attendrai toujours
Ton retour

I will wait / day and night / I will forever wait / your return

Tagged: sad hits instrumentals france roma depressive geniuses

Posted on February 22, 2016

In the early 1990s, Naomi and I got a phone call from guitarists Kate Biggar and Wayne Rogers, whom we knew from the band Crystalized Movements. They had recently moved from Connecticut to Boston, and their rhythm section hadn’t followed - they had a gig booked, and would we be interested in subbing?

No one had ever asked us anything like that before, so we said yes. It sounded fun to be a rhythm section on call, like Sly and Robbie.

We showed up at their address for rehearsal, and they led us downstairs from the kitchen to the basement. It was dank and dark, like a basement would be. This was also their recording studio, named (like their record label, and the record store they later opened) Twisted Village. They started to play, and we followed. They didn’t stop, so neither did we. At the end, they said that sounded nothing like Crystalized Movements cause we never stopped playing. So we formed the band Magic Hour.

All of Magic Hour’s albums were made at Twisted Village, which migrated wherever Kate and Wayne did - from basement to basement, or to a hired rehearsal space when the basement flooded/neighbors complained/between moves. The medium was Wayne’s Tascam 388, a 1/4″ reel-to-reel 8 track - a machine with a tape compression and basement murk that Wayne played like another instrument.

The only time Magic Hour recorded anywhere else - or to any other machine - was on the radio. During a tour of the UK in the spring of 1994, we were invited to the gorgeously appointed BBC studios in Maida Vale for a Peel Session. We were promoting our first album, No Excess Is Absurd, but we decided to play all new songs instead, including “Passing Words.” The engineers told us it was longest session track Peel had ever aired.

The version we taped at Twisted Village is longer. And murkier, as a basement would be. It’s on the second Magic Hour album, Will They Turn You On or Will They Turn On You.

All the Twisted Village recordings of Magic Hour are now available for streaming and download at Bandcamp. The complete Peel Session can be found online as well.

Tagged: compression the case for analog basement tapes

Posted on February 9, 2016

Baba Commandant & the Mandingo Band, Ouagadougou 2012.

The map we learn at school is already a psychogeography, but one determined by the state - with vast blank regions marked out as hostile territory, to be filled in later village by village on the TV news. No forest for the trees, until there are no trees left in the forest.

As an adult, my dérives are largely directed by music - whether my own, on tour - or others’, albeit often from my armchair. This way, when talking heads try and tell me about a place, musicians come to mind rather than territory.

Above, garage rock Ouagadougou style featuring Mamadou Sanou on vocals and the long-necked, 8-string ngoni (”kamale ngoni“). A studio album is available from Sublime Frequencies and can be streamed or downloaded on Bandcamp.

Tagged: west africa burkina faso trad instruments in non trad music psychogeography

Posted on January 17, 2016

2015 survey by a Boston-based marketing research firm.

A standard speaker used for mixing in recording studios is the Yamaha NS-10, a bookshelf speaker initially adopted by the industry for its representation of a “typical,” not-so-good home stereo. Why mix on audiophile speakers, the argument goes, if only a tiny fraction of listeners will ever hear the music that way?

In 2015, a majority of listeners reported using nothing more than their built-in computer speakers for music. Meanwhile, the percentage of listeners via hi-fi systems at all has dwindled to 12%… And I have to wonder how many of those are the same audiophiles dismissed as listening on the high-end margin in years past. My guess is a lot - since it’s the “typical” listener who has most likely migrated away from stereos altogether.

Which leaves the NS-10s on the margin of the margin. Yet looking at the chart above, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything to replace them. It’s not possible to mix on computer speakers, because it’s not possible to hear a full range of frequencies on them. It’s famously misleading to mix on headphones, because you can’t hear stereo accurately on them. Similarly, mixing on a standalone radio would mean mixing on a single speaker, or two so closely pushed together there is no separation between left and right channels. And mixing on built-in TV speakers would be as useless for frequency response as built-in computer speakers.

At this point, we’re already down in the small bars of the graph. There’s no viable way to mix for the majority of listeners at present, if the majority are not using viable devices for listening to mixes.

I’m sticking with my NS-10s - no longer because I imagine others are listening to music through speakers like them, but because they remain an ideal tool for making a stereo mix. That mix itself is now only an ideal, however.

Tagged: orphaned machines

Posted on January 12, 2016

When the spacecraft Voyager was launched in 1977, it carried with it a “Golden Record” - a 12″ 16.66rpm copper disc with a message to any aliens who might encounter it. In case the aliens weren’t audiophiles, the record is inscribed with a pictogram of how to construct a machine to play it (look at the upper left), along with the proper speed expressed in terms of the hydrogen atom. Also a cartridge was helpfully supplied on board - we all know how hard it can be to find the right one!

On the other hand just a pencil, pin, and sheet of paper might do, as the video above demonstrates for Earthlings already alien to LPs. (”These are records. They have sound encoded on them.”)

Tagged: orphaned machines records go round unique copy

Posted on January 5, 2016

“You should sing sadder” - Zen master (Roshi) Joshu Sasaki to Leonard Cohen

[from an interview in Les Inrockuptibles, 1991; quoted in Various Positions: a life of Leonard Cohen, by Ira B. Nadel]

Posted on December 24, 2015

Marvin the Martian, Looney Tunes 1948.

A friend in Hong Kong guided me through the electronics market to a small stall inside a gloomy mini-mall - a crowd of young men with large glasses and larger phones clustered around it, patiently waiting. Behind the counter, another young man moved quietly and efficiently, as he hacked each of their devices in turn.

I bought a box from that stall which promised to stream video from all over the world, for free. As companies or authorities catch up with this hack, the box self-updates its firmware to insure continued access.

It works - if you don’t mind Chinese subtitles on your movies, and dodgy video quality. I watched the new Ridley Scott film The Martian as a test run.

The Martian turns out to read neatly as allegory for an era of people patiently waiting to have their phones hacked. Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars, but with the entertainments of a smartphone to keep him company: recording selfies, playing music files…and eventually, texting his faraway fellow humans. He is alone on a planet, in analog space. But digitally, he seems about as connected as we all are to one another at present.

Which is to say, not much. He’s still the only living being on that planet. And yet, he’s patient. You might read that as heroically American, Gary-Cooperish patience. But he’s not a loner, and though strong he’s far from silent. He’s just patiently waiting for his devices to work better, like the young men in line for their phone hacks.

Tagged: digital borders hacks allegory

Posted on December 11, 2015

Crossing physical borders gives one access to different physical media. But when media is digital, its borders become digital too.

I flew halfway round the world from Boston and landed in Taipei. There was Taiwanese music playing everywhere, but no record stores in part because the streaming service KKBOX is so popular (10 million users in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan streaming 70-85% domestic music over Western imports).

My own access to KKBOX was blocked, however. Even while physically in Taipei, digitally my devices remained US-registered. Crossing geographic and political borders left my corporate “country” unchanged.

The net result is I came home from Taiwan without any new Taiwanese music.

We need a new kind of passport that permits us to cross digital borders - without it, we’ll all become corporate provincials.

Tagged: the case for analog digital borders

Posted on December 9, 2015

Paco De Lucia, “Cepa Andaluza” (Bulerias), 1973. From a television documentary filmed by RTVE for the series, “Rito y Georgrafía del Cante.”

This same year, the album Fuente y caudal would take Paco de Lucia’s music outside flamenco circles and into the larger music world, thanks in part to a decidedly nontraditional use of electric bass on its famous opening track, “Entre dos aguas.”

But here he plays the most local venue of them all, his family’s kitchen table. The singer is his brother Pepe. The percussionists are his father, his brother Antonio, and his friend the guitarist Carlos Rebato.

“Cepa Andaluza” also appears on Fuente y caudal, but like all tracks on that album it is presented as an instrumental - the better to showcase Paco’s incredible technique. Still, it’s the only track open to the air of the studio and a circle of flamenco handclaps and whoops; a hint of the kitchen, in a recording otherwise closely focused on virtuosity.

The entire documentary can be seen (in higher quality) on the RTVE site. There is also a version that can be found online with English subtitles.

Tagged: sad hits the iberian peninsula andalucia instrumentals tabletop acoustics

Posted on November 20, 2015

Ben Chasny playing “Journey Through Sankuan Pass,” “Lisboa,” and “Khidr and the Fountain,” 2015

Wonderful to see and hear three tunes from early Six Organs of Admittance albums, now burnished by years of touring and recorded with the fidelity one might expect of a guitar magazine. The detuned, wobbly bass knits these pieces together into a far-ranging journey: from Asia to Europe and back; or is it mountains to sea to desert; or motion-meditation-apotheosis…?

Al-Khidr, The Green Man

Tagged: instrumentals trad instruments in non trad music records and spiritualism

Posted on November 12, 2015

If the whole body an eye, where the hearing?

[I Corinthians 12:17, Young’s Literal Translation]

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on November 9, 2015

Harmonic series of a string

The 3rd string on a classical guitar is the softest in volume, and as a result can seem muted or choked. Many material strategies have been developed in response - strings of different tensions or construction are often substituted to make the 3rd string speak as loudly as the rest.

Or, the guitar can be played as softly as this weakest string demands.

Tagged: elective affinity compression instrument as utopia

Posted on November 8, 2015

The Shaggs, live at Fremont Town Hall NH c. 1972

Could it be the Shaggs were a proficient live band? This silent footage sees them moving comfortably to a groove together on stage. And the live bits of added audio are both in time, and in tune - unlike their entire recorded output (parts of which you also hear on this assembled soundtrack).

In today’s digital recording environment, it’s so easy to “fix it in the mix” - any sound can be manipulated as much as desired to make it “fit.” But with an analog recording what went down to tape stuck, for better and worse.

Maybe the Shaggs just had crummy headphones in the studio…?

Tagged: trad instruments in non trad music fix it in the mix

Posted on November 3, 2015

Was the click wheel (2001-2014) the last digital gesture that records go round?

One of the first batch of 7″ 45s, 1949. (RCA introduced the format using different colored vinyl for different genres. “Sky-blue” indicated “International Music.”)

Tagged: orphaned machines records go round

Posted on October 31, 2015

The iPod “classic” - a dedicated player capable of storing one’s entire CD collection - was discontinued by Apple in September 2014. Because the digital music revolution had ended?

Perhaps so. It’s a year and a day later, and my iPhone has stopped syncing with my iTunes collection of music files, thanks to conflicting operating systems (iOS 9.1 and OS 10.6.8, if you’re keeping score). Which means those “songs in my pocket” are no longer on my person - they are in the cloud, remote as heaven and under the equally mysterious control of Apple or Spotify or whatever other corporation is left to pay and manage music for me.

Welcome to the digital music counterrevolution.

Tagged: the case for analog orphaned machines counterrevolution

Posted on October 29, 2015

Each CD is both master and worthless copy. Today, when boxes of CDs are the cheapest object at the flea market, it’s hard to appreciate the value of the information they hold. But whenever we reissue our older albums, the mastering engineer asks for a commercial copy of the original CD, as well as any master tapes. And more than once the engineer has elected to work from that CD - identical to the copy you might find at a thrift store - because its uncompressed digital transfer proved a more reliable source than now-compromised master tape.

In his landmark study of sound recording, The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne argues that the ubiquity of early records led to their rapid disappearance - since each of the thousands of copies of pre-war 78s were merely one among so many, none was saved. By the 1950s, collectors like Harry Smith had to scour the country for even a single copy of what had been immensely popular recordings a couple of decades earlier.

As we can now stream seemingly any music to our smartphones or computers, it may seem that Harry Smith’s kind of physical search is as much a part of the twentieth-century past as the old-timey music he loved. But streaming music could never be used as a master recording. It is compressed, compromised sound - unfit for reproduction.

The Harry Smith of our day may well be browsing the local Goodwill, sorting through those worthless stacks of jewel cases.

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

[from “A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg, 1955]

Tagged: orphaned machines unique copy compression alchemy

Posted on October 27, 2015

“Thank you for taking time and action in doing your part to help planet Earth.” - CD Recycling Center of America

Tagged: orphaned machines compression

Posted on October 26, 2015

The Xerox Book, edited by Seth Siegelaub, 1968.

Thanks to a courteous gallery assistant, I recently had the opportunity to leaf through an original copy of the Xerox Book.

“Original” is perhaps a ludicrous term in the case of a work designed for a copy machine. But even dematerialized art can leave traces, which have aura. One of the thousand copies run off in 1968 has an historical authenticity that a printed pdf does not, though the content is the same. Still, what might I learn from this original copy that I could not see in my own copy of the original?

For one, it turns out the original is not xeroxed. It is offset printed, perfect bound with blank covers and a spine printed with the artists’ and publishers’ names. A blank page precedes the title - this is the “half-title” in standard book design - and there is a good deal of show-through to the paper, making each opening a “spread” more than a sequence of single pages. It is, in short, a book.

The Xerox Book might be dematerialized art, then; but it is not a dematerialized book. My copy of the original is, I find, art. Siegelaub’s concept - and the contributing artists’ works, each designed to be copied - appear there as I understand each intended. Nevertheless, my downloaded pdf - or the bundle of pages printed from it - are only a facsimile of a book.

In music, a digital file is similarly a true copy of the musicians’ work, as she intended. Indeed, if uncompressed, it is identical to the “master.” In this regard, it would seem to be an ideal example of Conceptualism’s dematerialized art object.

But much like my copy of the original Xerox Book, a digital music file has no cover, and no spine. Is it only a facsimile? Or is this art without aura?

Tagged: the case for analog sound art unique copy

Posted on October 19, 2015

On the cover of the Rolling Stone, 1992.

Selling out for a musician in the 90s meant, quite literally, selling records. The major labels were in control of mass market distribution for music, and no matter how popular an indie band might be, there was no physical way for their records to reach that many people in that short a time. The capital required to speculatively press hundreds of thousands of records and stock them in enough retail outlets to reach hundreds of thousands of buyers remained out of reach to all but a handful of large corporations. When they offered contracts to indie bands, or even entire indie labels, it was in exchange for plugging them into that system. Few thrived in the environment - though lots of money, and therefore lots of physical product, exchanged hands as a result.

In the virtual present, there’s no need for capital to make music widely and simultaneously available. Without physical product to manufacture and move about, there’s only money left to change hands. “Selling out” in the digital realm would seem to be pure financial speculation, then - like the IPO that has value so long as we agree that it does.

Is a hit today as ephemeral as a stock valuation? Without the physical evidence in thrift stores, how will we remember these names and titles in a few decades, when the money is gone. Or are we all invested now in maintaining the value of information.

Tagged: orphaned machines music is information virtual reality

Posted on October 17, 2015

I know nothing of high finance, nor offices in towers like the new One World Trade Center where Condé Nast is headquartered, nor the executives who work in them. But I have experience of their influence over the worlds I do know. In the early 1990s, phone calls and faxes from those kinds of offices ripped apart the indie music scene I was a part of by offering Golden Tickets to a few. In the early 2000s, emails and spreadsheets from those offices transformed the independent book world I had joined and left it a wasteland of big box stores. And now, digital strategies cooked up in those offices are trying to dam the mighty meandering internet into tidy streams of consumed, and consumer, information.

My own culture wars are not red state/blue - I’m so blue I’m a red - they are a struggle to keep culture clear of high finance. In this era of late capitalism, they’ve all been losses…so far.

Tagged: counterrevolution

Posted on October 13, 2015

Woke up in the night, counted clock chimes for the time. In the morning, found clock had stopped the evening before.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on October 12, 2015

Lawrence Weiner speaking at the unveiling of “A Translation From One Language To Another,” Dewey Square, Boston, Sep 24 2015

If we’re going to have public art, I’m all for the curators who chose to commission Lawrence Weiner for a work in downtown Boston. But the location casts a jaundiced light for me on his Mets-colored mural.

Since 2012, the south-facing wall of this windowless Transportation Department building has been used for successive murals, each remaining roughly a year. At Lawrence Weiner’s opening, his work was introduced several times as the fourth in a series.

In truth it’s the fifth. Before this wall was used for public art, it was used by the public for art. From Sep 30 - Dec 10 2011, Occupy Boston camped in Dewey Square, and used this same wall for messages. It was a bulletin board, postering space, meeting point, and the visual backdrop for every General Assembly held by the group. It also served as acoustic backdrop; like a bandshell, it amplified speeches and music by bouncing sound forward. At the first meeting of the group in Dewey Square, it was natural for speakers to stand against it for this reason - and thus the encampment grew stretched out before it, and oriented by it.

In the photo below taken at night, the wall is also used for projection: “You Can’t Evict An Idea,” it says, on one of the last evenings the camp battled with police for its space.

After the final physical eviction, Dewey Square was swept clean of all evidence of occupation. Its silence - following a months-long carnival of tents, people, sounds, and signs - bounced off the blank wall of this ugly building, echoing through downtown.

The public art program for the space started shortly thereafter. To translate from one language to another? Or to evict an idea…?

Tagged: revolutionaries noisy silence no need to use a pa counterrevolution

Posted on September 25, 2015

International Sad Hits IRL, Tokyo 9.11.15

Posted on September 16, 2015

“We intend to be the last cassette company operating, and right now we are the last cassette company operating.”

Tagged: the case for analog orphaned machines

Posted on September 3, 2015

Musicians of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your streams!

Tagged: information wants to be free music is information free the stream

Posted on September 1, 2015

This New York Times video gives brief but telling looks into the studios of two EDM hitmakers: Skrillex and Diplo. Each is filmed in a neutral location, but their studios are the computer screens they bring with them. There’s no physical space involved in making their music.

The virtual space of their portable studios would seem to be limitless - the opposite of a given room in which live instruments are recorded. Both producers seem to approach their work freed from the usual physical studio constraint of time, as well. As they explain, the four-minute track that is the focus of this video was the subject of four months of studio time…none of which was spent recording musicians or instruments. The only live sounds on the track were provided by Justin Bieber’s manager, sent by smartphone while the three were still in conversation about the idea at a cocktail party.

Those live sounds - a vocal by Bieber, and a looped keyboard accompaniment - are treated less as the main elements of the song to be supported by arrangement, and more as the initial tools handed to an avatar at the start of a video game. You have a Justin Bieber vocal, and a looped keyboard track - the rest is up to you as you enter this virtual world. Unlock enough levels and a few easter eggs to land a worldwide hit.

Studio work is play for these men, in other words - not only the type of play familiar to any musician from the analog world of space and time, but also the play of a gamer glued to a screen. Their work on this track evidently took a remarkable amount of this kind of play: exploring every variation of a scenario, seeking the combinations that lead to the next level, running into blind alleys and periodically emerging into new scenarios which need thorough exploration all over again.

When Skrillex says at the end of this clip (7:28ff), “We’re still in an era where people think that people have no talent if they make computer music…It just shows how young it still is [and] so rebellious in a lot of ways” - punctuating his statement with a gleeful run along the middle row of a (computer) keyboard - he sounds more like a champion gamer than like Varèse. Skill, youth, and attitude are points of pride for his practice. He’s making a case for the new, rather than New Music.

Which highlights the difference for me not only of this kind of virtual studio work, but its IRL musical results. From Skrillex and Diplo’s descriptions, EDM might be fun to make - assuming you’re into screens and software - but does that make it fun to listen to? This four-minute pop song is a monster hit yet remains, for me, hard to get through without any visual or physical accompaniment.

But as the video shows, that’s not the spirit in which the song was created in the studio. The visuals of the screen, and the activity of play, were a crucial part of Skrillex and Diplo’s world as they worked on the song in their virtual studios. Why close your eyes, then, and listen to the result? Better to hear the music in a physical environment that simulates these producers’ virtual one - with projected light, shifting shapes, and an open-ended field for play. Or failing that, perhaps not at all.

[mainstage for the EDM festival Mysteryland, designed by Nachtlab, 2013]

Tagged: music is information analog ears digital eyes

Posted on August 29, 2015

Before streaming, there was a battle in digital music over DRM - the practice of tagging mp3s in order to limit their use. Among the most articulate opponents of DRM was the American Library Association (ALA), who argued that “By embedding controls within the product, providers can prevent the public from use that is non-infringing under copyright law as well as enforce restrictions that extend far beyond those specific rights enumerated in the Copyright Act.” In other words, DRM operates under a corporate code for intellectual property, rather than our civic one. (It’s no coincidence that Occupy Wall Street included a library in its encampment.)

Opposition to DRM received an unexpected boost when Steve Jobs posted an open letter urging that the practice be discontinued, and that consumers pressure major labels to drop the requirement from Apple’s use of their music.

Jobs was no doubt maneuvering with Apple’s best interests at the time in mind. But in doing so he made what is still a convincing case for removing corporate restrictions on the use of digital music - streaming included.

His open letter has since been removed from Apple’s website, so I’m including the entire text here.

Thoughts on Music

by Steve Jobs
February 6, 2007

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

To prevent illegal copies, DRM systems must allow only authorized devices to play the protected music. If a copy of a DRM protected song is posted on the Internet, it should not be able to play on a downloader’s computer or portable music device. To achieve this, a DRM system employs secrets. There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.

With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Tagged: information wants to be free music is information

Posted on August 25, 2015

“World Music” was invented by a group of UK record company execs at the Empress of Russia pub, St. John Street, London, 29 June 1987. We know because we have minutes of their meeting:

“1. It was agreed that we should create a generic name under which our type of catalogue could be labelled in order to focus attention on what we do. We discussed various names for our type of music(s) and on a show of hands ‘World Music’ was agreed as the ‘banner’ under which we would work. Other suggestions were ‘World Beat’, ‘Hot…’, ‘Tropical…’ and various others. It was suggested that all of the labels present would use ‘World Music’ on their record sleeves (to give a clear indication of the ‘File Under…’ destination) and also on all publicity material etc.”

Today, the significance of a “’File Under…’ destination” has gone the way of most record shops. Yet the term “World Music” persists, often now applied indiscriminately to a jumble of music from the Third World: traditional, electronic, fusion… Even pop and rap that doesn’t originate in an industrialized nation can land in the category.

Via digital services, “World Music” would seem to have even less meaning. Searching the term on Apple Music returns a Pitchfork playlist of non-Anglo indie artists, and two collections of football chants. As for Apple Music’s curated “World” section, only one of its top five playlists (”Intro to Youssou N’Dour”) would have been acknowledged as such at the Empress of Russia.

Still, I found myself reaching for that creaky old “file under” tag on encountering the new music of two solo guitarists - Tashi Dorji and Chris Rainier.

Tashi is from Bhutan, lives in North Carolina, and plays a Spanish guitar. Chris is from Melbourne, lives in London, and plays Hawaiian steel. Both put these “folk” instruments to use in music that did not/could not exist prior to their personal amalgams of influences from around the musical globe.

Might this be World [Wide Web] Music?

Tashi Dorji and Chris Rainier, it’s interesting to note, have each chosen to make their music available largely through digital releases. No file under destinations needed:

https://tashidorji1.bandcamp.com/

https://chrisrainier.bandcamp.com/

Tagged: trad instruments in non trad music instrumentals

Posted on August 13, 2015

From the Sharky Bar, Phnom Penh, website:

“The Drakkar ’74 album was recorded at the Basey Cham Krong studio from late 1972 to the end of 1973 using a 4-track mixer. This meant that all tracks had to be recorded live with all musicians playing together in the studio at one time. It was released in late 1973 / early 1974 and was probably the most influential of any Cambodian Rock album of the period. Selling of the album was very slow up until mid-1974 as the band had bypassed all the large Chinese production companies to record, produce and distribute 20,000 copies of the album themselves. They had to deal with a level of stoicism and indifference as the incumbent distribution network was against trying anything new. They had only sold 100 cassettes by April, 1974. In the second half of 1974 Mr. Touch Tana [rhythm guitarist and co-founder of the band] had given up on the chances of the album ever becoming a hit and passed the responsibility of checking the album sales and collecting associated remuneration to his brother. Mr. Touch Tana then resigned from his job within the National Radio and moved to Pailin to start a new business. It was in late 1974 that his brother called him to say that all 20,000 cassettes had been sold – making it the biggest selling album of all time for Cambodia to this point. In shock and excitement they scrambled to produce another 20,000 to release into the market as soon as possible. This next batch subsequently sold out within a few months. They had planned to produce another 20,000 but by this time it was February, 1975 and by April, 1975 Cambodia would be in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

“During the Khmer Rouge period all western influence from the Cambodian culture was targeted for eradication. Nearly all photos and recordings of the band were lost. This included a master tape of a new album of 20 songs recorded by Drakkar in 1975.”

Tagged: sad hits southeast asia cambodia media as memory why why why

Posted on August 3, 2015

STEWART BRAND (author of “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” 1972): It seems like there’s a couple of interesting paradoxes that we’re working here… On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

STEVE WOZNIAK (designer of the Apple computer, cofounder of Apple Computer, Inc.): Information should be free but your time should not.

from Hackers’ Conference 1984: HOW THE INFORMATION ECONOMY IS BEING CREATED AND SHAPED BY THE HACKER ETHIC, Edited by Stewart Brand

Tagged: information wants to be free music is information

Posted on August 1, 2015

A page of ads for Boston independent venues, 1987

My local music community is losing two longstanding 300-capacity venues - T.T. the Bear’s, and Johnny D’s - which has prompted much nostalgic commentary in the Boston media about the passing of an era, passing of a torch, etc.

What I haven’t seen highlighted is that the surviving competition here for these size rooms - Great Scott, and Brighton Music Hall - are both owned by companies that also operate much bigger venues (Bowery Presents and the Mugar Group). Those organizations can absorb losses at one venue for the sake of profits at another, and often use smaller clubs to cultivate relationships with bands/agents/management “on the way up” to where the big money is made.

We still have 300-seat rooms for live music in Boston. What we have lost are the independently operated ones, designed to survive at a given level without plans or recourse for scaling up.

Not all music is meant to be scaled up, either. If you play or listen to music that isn’t a moving target, it’s best to have a room that stays put too.

Posted on July 25, 2015

My favorite AM radio station broadcasts from down my street - I pass the tower as I go to the supermarket. The reception is best at night, when there’s less interference in the air from all the noisy electrical devices we use like halogen lights, cell phones, plasma screens… It plays “beautiful music,” which sounds wonderful in mono because it was recorded to be heard that way.

A cassette deck has its particular mechanical sounds - clunks from the buttons, the straining of the spindles at the end of a side, the high-speed whirr of rewind and fast-forward. Hold those down at the same time as play and you hear the sounds on the tape in a new way. The noise I associate least with a cassette deck is music.

In grade school, I had a quick temper and came home with a black eye too often. I liked play dates with girls cause we never fought. One of them had a pink plastic 8-track player, and the soundtrack to “Hair.”

Tagged: the case for analog the case for mono media as memory

Posted on July 16, 2015

Venus and Neptune

Astrologists have long maintained that the planets each revealed themselves only when they were ready to be seen. Neptune, shrouded in mist and fog, was discovered in the 1840s, as Romanticism took its own damp form. Pluto, dark and stony, was first sighted in 1930, ushering in a cold age of Fascist evil. So perhaps it should not have come as such a surprise when the planets began to disappear. Pluto was the first to vanish, a blow to science but for many a great relief. Restored to its rotation of eight, the solar system seemed more elegant, Victorian, and high minded. But then Saturn, Uranus, Mars, Mercury, and finally the great Jupiter also vanished from the sky. Foggy Neptune and lovely Venus only remained. And so they shall, goes one popular theory, because many believe that Earth will be the next to go. Unobserved at last, Venus and Neptune will enjoy alone together the peace and ineffable beauty of the stars.

[from The Memory Theater Burned]

Posted on July 14, 2015

What if we take the watery image of streaming another step: might the multinational music corporations be guilty of overfishing?

One of the reasons I play Taylor guitars is their approach to sourcing materials - Bob Taylor travels to where the woods he uses come from, to make sure they are being harvested responsibly for the future. When he sensed we were heading toward a collapse of ebony trees from overharvesting, he bought a large supplier and mill in Cameroon in order to influence the supply chain from its start. Taylor guitars now use a streaked ebony - just as hard and sonically consistent a material, but not black in the way we have come to expect - in order to demonstrate that we needn’t decimate the remaining ebony forests for a decorative ideal. (The streaked wood is, naturally, gorgeous too.)

In a recent article about sources for the abalone shell used as a flourish on many Taylor guitars, their Director of Supply Chain, Charlie Redden, explained the philosophy behind visiting the fishing villages where the shell starts its path toward their factory:

“Some supply chain managers leave that up to their first tier supplier to do, and that supplier leaves it up to their first tier supplier, and before long you’re eight tiers back and nobody really knows where that stuff comes from.” (Wood & Steel, Summer 2015)

For the abalone shell, Taylor has chosen to buy from fishing cooperatives established in Baja California back in the 1940s, because, “Not only do the local communities have a deep understanding of the local marine habitat that they’ve been fishing for generations, they also have a vested interest in healthy management - if they overfish their concessions, they hurt their own economic livelihood.”

The alternative - the same one chosen by so many businesses in so many industries today - is to buy from international operations that bring machines and labor to wherever the material is plentiful, harvest till it’s gone, and move on.

But doesn’t this resemble the approach Apple, Spotify, and Pandora have taken toward musicians and their recordings? They are each many tiers back from production of the music they use. And they all seem intent on maximizing the harvest of that music now.

Tagged: ecology

Posted on July 7, 2015

Evolution of the iTunes icon over its first ten years, as it killed the CD.

Napster in its original, free-for-all form existed two years, 1999-2001. Apple then launched iTunes in 2001, and some people have been paying for downloads ever since. Until tomorrow, that is, when Apple Music relaunches as a streaming service.

Checking my own “purchased” folder, I see I have bought only a dozen tracks from iTunes in these 15 years. There are the four tracks written by Scott Walker for the Walker Brothers album Nite Flights; six of the now-official Basement Tapes that weren’t on any of my bootleg copies; and “My Sweet Lord” alongside “He’s So Fine,” which I purchased as teaching materials for a class on plagiarism I was required to hold once every semester I was employed by the Writing Program at Harvard. (My strategy was write on the blackboard: Property = Theft, Intellectual Property = Plagiarism, then play the tunes to initiate a conversation. I thought it worked ok but eventually I was disciplined by the department for not using their recommended vocabulary.)

However, other people have been buying many downloads from iTunes - so many that right now, as the era for these purchases comes to a close, iTunes accounts for 43% of the digital income I earn from my recorded music. That’s income I expect to stop seeing after tomorrow, replaced by an as-yet-unspecified but undoubtedly much smaller amount from streaming.

Thanks to our sort of fans, we still gross twice as much from sales of physical music than digital - although once that’s adjusted for expenses (there are none for downloads!), physical sales make up about 55% of our net.

That 55% won’t change after tomorrow. In fact, as a percentage it will surely go up! And digital sales will fast become a thing of the past.

Get with the future and buy an LP.

Tagged: the case for analog orphaned machines

Posted on June 29, 2015

Not trusting the cloud.

Tagged: the case for analog media as memory paranoia

Posted on June 25, 2015

Wrote about subwoofers, Earthquake, and touring with acoustic instruments in the era of EDM, for Pitchfork.

Posted on June 24, 2015

Apple has hired DJs and producers from London’s BBC Radio 1 to give their digital music service what “algorithms can’t do.”

But radio’s immediacy would seem to be something digital can’t do. The “now” of broadcast analog radio - a shared now, a living moment transmitted from one to many simultaneously - is elusive in a digital medium. Every digital device in the chain takes time to assemble its data, and thus each delivers that data at a slightly different “now.”

In digital recording studios, this shuffling sense of time is known as “latency.” It needs constant monitoring and adjusting - by both software and engineers - to keep everything in line.

Out in the world, there doesn’t seem to be a way to keep everyone’s digital streams timed together, much less synched with the true “now” of analog radio (“At the tone the time will be…”).

The result? If you open your window in Boston as the Red Sox hit a home run, you no longer hear a simultaneous cheer - except from those still tuned to local radio…

Tagged: the case for analog clocks latency

Posted on June 9, 2015

“What is the purpose of writing music? One is of course not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.” - John Cage, from his talk “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence.

It’s a Friday, and when I open Spotify it suggests I try one of these playlists: TGIF, Daily Lift, Feelin’ Good, Deep Focus.

Not that I’m not in need of one or more of these feelin’s - deep focus would particularly come in handy - but I rarely if ever find myself in the mood to treat music this way.

Maybe it’s because I can’t just feel calm from music the dentist puts on - I listen to it. Indeed, I often have experiences in the dentist chair like Pynchon’s character Mucho Maas does listening to Muzak in a pizzeria:

“‘It’s extraordinary…There are seventeen violins on that cut,’ Mucho said, ‘and one of them - I can’t tell where he was because it’s monaural here, damn…’” (The Crying of Lot 49)

If you listen to music, can it still have a purpose? Or do you need to stop listening - which neither Mucho Maas nor John Cage could do - for those Spotify mood-shifters to take effect?

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on June 5, 2015

The digital display clock was created for a fiction, commissioned by Stanley Kubrick from the Hamilton Watch Company as a prop for his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hamilton’s designers came up with a desktop version - featuring a count up and count down, as if all future time would be keyed to rocket launches - and a slick looking wristwatch for the space pilots.

Inspired by their own fantasies, the Hamilton Company went on to develop and market the first functional digital display watch, the Pulsar, in 1972. New York City private schools being what they were (and still are, even more so I hear), my friend Steve had one by 1974, when we were in the sixth grade.

Everyone was amazed by it. (Steve also had a steady girlfriend before anyone else.)

As a librarian pointed out to me years later, when her institution trashed their card catalogue and she was reaching for a metaphor to explain what the new electronic listings were like: A digital clock might tell you the precise time it is, but an analog clock face shows you all the times it is not.

Digital audio software makes use of the same kind of time displays dreamed up for Kubrick in 1968. Here is a sample window from the workstation I use, Digital Performer, taken from a review of the software in a magazine:

At the top is the clock, displayed in “real time” (minutes and seconds), and as a count of bars or frames. Any sound in the recording - represented by the blocks of wave forms in the window immediately below that display - is pinned to a reading of this clock. Slide the cursor across the recording and its sounds and time move together.

However, no sound in a digital recording is fixed to any particular place on the clock, or to the location of any other sound - each of those blocks can be individually dragged, nudged, stretched, cut-and-pasted or otherwise moved at will. Only the cursor remains locked to the clock, as it moves through time left to right across the screen.

That is, digital time in the audio workstation is absolute - where you are at any moment in the recording is precisely determined - but when any given sound occurs is not. All precise times are equally available to it.

Compare this to an analog recording on audio tape: the tape itself has no absolute time value. However, any moment on that length of tape is fixed in relation to all moments it is not. The sounds at the beginning are necessarily before the middle which precede the end.

Indeed, relative location is the only way to accurately locate a particular moment on a reel of tape - “punches” for overdubs in the analog studio are timed by listening to a section of tape until the sequence of sounds can be anticipated well enough to hit record at the precise moment needed - a moment distinguished solely by not being the moment before, and not being the moment after.

Analog tape, in this regard, is much like an analog clock. Each moment on it is defined in relation to all the moments it is not.

A digital recording uses time more in the manner dreamed up for Kubrick. Each moment on a digital recording has a unique place on an absolute time scale (12:06, not five past twelve), but it might just as well be any other moment on that scale (12:07). Sounds in digital audio are located precisely where they occur, which might be anywhere.

“Time” in the musical sense - a feeling for time in sequence, for where a sound is placed in relation to others - is the same time employed by analog audio tape.

“Time” on a Pulsar watch - or on a digital audio workstation clock - is absolute. And if you’ve ever played with a musician whose sense of time was driven not by the sounds around them but by a sense of the absolute, you know how unmusical that kind of time can be…

Tagged: the case for analog clocks daw

Posted on May 21, 2015

I’m in the midst of writing a book about the switch from analog to digital audio, and its implications for our communications at large… Topics taken up by this blog will likely increasingly reflect that in coming months.

Here is what seems to me a useful definition of analog I found in a simple explanation of how radio works, by educational science writer Chris Woodford:

“Sending information by changing the shapes of waves is an example of an analog process. This means the information you are trying to send is represented by a direct physical change.”

See the film clip above for an illustration of that process via AM radio, from the days when audio engineering was necessarily analog.

By contrast, here again is Chris Woodford sketching how digital radio operates:

“Switch on your digital radio and it…

“Collects fragments 1. of radio signals flying through the air.

“2. Sorts through and reassembles the fragments in order to make a complete radio signal—and thus the program you want to hear.”

Seems like the same result through other means, and Woodford explains how this digital process avoids problems faced by analog radio like atmospheric interference.

But then there’s a new problem faced by digital audio processes of all kinds… Latency. Times on digital devices seem so exact, thanks to digital displays. Yet synchronization between them is another matter. Here’s how Woodford illustrates that using analog and digital radio:

“It takes a digital radio some time to process incoming signals—and you can hear that for yourself! Put a digital radio and an ordinary analog radio next to one another and tune them both into the same station. You’ll find the sound from the digital radio lags noticeably behind the sound from the analog radio because of the time it takes to reassemble the digital signal. Give that some thought next time you set your watch by the time signal from a digital radio!”

…Or the next time you overdub live instruments on a digital recording.

Tagged: the case for analog clocks latency

Posted on May 19, 2015

This blog takes its name from a compilation released on our record label 20-20-20, International Sad Hits, Volume One: Altaic Language Group.

Rights problems stymied the release of Volume Two - one of the reasons I started using this online forum for sharing music.

But there is a Volume Two, put together by our friend Ibon Errazkin, and it suddenly occurred to me - why not share it online, too?

As it turns out, every track was already on YouTube.

Notes to this compilation of Iberian sad hits - and a second, Spain-only version - are posted at the 20-20-20 website.

Tagged: sad hits the iberian peninsula spain bootleg

Posted on February 6, 2015

While waiting for word about the fourth test pressing of our new LP, we prepared release of the digital version via Bandcamp.

The frictionless circulation of what is, essentially, the master recording (if you choose a “lossless” format for your download) is a marvel of direct address.

Meanwhile, the indirection of vinyl - an impression of a negative of an analogue of the master - continues to accrue meaning with time, like any metaphor.

Posted on January 28, 2015

From Audio magazine, March 1993:

Q: One thing that was striking to me about Nerve Net is that on almost every track you used live drummers…

Brian Eno: Yes. Now one of the things that this record is, I think, is a reaction against the tightly locked-together MIDI-sequencer type sound of ‘80s pop music. I just got so sick of that. I mean, I know I was one of the people who got it going [laughter], but that’s no reason to continue it. I got really fed up with the tightness and the kind of granite solidity of the way music sounded.

For people who aren’t into music, they might not know what kinds of revolutions have been going on. There were three things that I think mainly created the sound of ‘80s music. The first thing was MIDI, which enabled you to lock together a lot of instruments so that they all marched precisely in step. The second was computer mixing, which enabled you to finesse mixes by polishing very tiny details of the mixes. It was a deadly process and produced some of the worst music ever heard. And the third thing was the mass availability of quite cheap preprogrammed synthesizers. So, suddenly there was available to everyone a library of relatively exotic electronic sounds. And I think it’s those three things that made ‘80s music.

I enjoyed that sound in its time, but I just got completely fed up with how easy it had all become and how you switched the radio on and you’d hear another tightly locked piece of music: Clock-clock-clock. And you could just hear all the clocks ticking in it, you know.

Tagged: meter clocks counter-revolution

Posted on January 15, 2015

“The Harness,” by Brian Eno. From My Squelchy Life, 1991 (withdrawn, officially released 2014 as bonus disc to reissue of Nerve Net, 1992).

My favorite track off the withdrawn and widely bootlegged Eno album My Squelchy Life has no corollary on the album he reworked and released a year later as Nerve Net. “The Harness” is slow, mournful, and its lyrics (though opaque) center around images of struggle, failure, and death. Just the way I like it!

A recent official release finally brought this song into the light but without any additional information, not even instrumental credits about which Eno is usually meticulous. The mix linked to here is from the bootlegs; the official one adds an instrumental intro, and a longer solo after the first chorus. As Eno once said,

“I just didn’t feel convinced about it [The Harness] any more. It’s mainly a question of the form of it: it didn’t really excite me. The only thing I wish I could release somehow are the synthesizer solos in it, with that really really piercing sound, sets your teeth on edge.”

[from a 1992 interview on BBC radio 3, quoted by the fansite EnoWeb]

Those solos are quintessential Eno, so much so I assumed they were guitar by Robert Fripp. Perhaps they are Eno’s own synth lines? Regardless they mirror his melodies in the way they casually flow yet emphasize surprising moments in the meter. On vocals, this habit can lead Eno to stress the wrong syllable of a word - “Not to fail in the harNESS” - a practice that usually drives me to distraction but matches Eno’s instrumental style so well I can’t imagine his lyrics sung any other way.

Tagged: sad hits anglo bootleg meter

Posted on January 14, 2015

…Self Storage, cont.

K.’s sleep was even more rhythmici than usual - Frieda was reading aloud from the files, but whether this was during K’s dreaming or waking cycle was unclear. It remained dark, in any case; but perhaps Frieda could see more at night, like the cats she resembled.

“’G.I. Jo’ Stafford earned her nickname performing stateside for US troops bound for Asia during World War II. Her music became a favorite throughout the Pacific Theater, especially in military hospitals among the wounded. Aware of this association, Japanese troops took to playing her records on portable turntables in the field, to weaken the resolve of those Americans within earshot. However, many Japanese soldiers soon became enamored of her music as well; ultimately the records softened both sides of the battlefield, likely saving many from unnecessary combat and cruelty.

“There were numerous unofficial reports during the war of Japanese and American soldiers surrendering to one another after such joint listening sessions in the jungle. One incident proved of special concern to the military commands of both sides, after a coordinated laying down of arms in the midst of naval action off Mindanao in the Philippines. How Jo Stafford’s music had been broadcast simultaneously to the enemy ships at sea has remained a mystery to this day - classified files opened after the war revealed that investigations by each side concluded the other must have been responsible.”

Frieda was deep in K.’s unconscious now, whether he was awake or dreaming mattered little. The file on Jo Stafford was one of several investigations K. had started in response to the music he only recently became aware of at the storage facility. But this one connected to a series of files he had begun to gather long ago, after discovering a trove of documents about pacifism in the files of what he assumed to be a Quaker. These files were so voluminous, yet so interesting, K. had decided to leave them in the unit where he found them, taking only those sections he incorporated into his own research back to the office. The Pacifist Bureau – a label pasted onto one of the filing cabinets, which K. had adopted as a name for the entire collection – therefore remained locked, unlike the other units K. opened, since he never emptied it of more than those files that caught his particular attention.

Posted on January 13, 2015

Recorded music has no original - any experience of it is mediated by the technology used to play it back. In the studio sounds are fluid, then plastic, ultimately fixed in some form by the mix and finally the master. Yet that too must still have flex - it’s to be heard through different media, on different speakers, in different rooms. Hi-fi enthusiasts might chase it, but there is no platonic version of recorded sounds. They’re all shadow.

And that’s how the LP came to be black.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on January 9, 2015

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that its readers may enjoy the (not unrelated) Exact Change monthly for iPad and iPhone. With the latest number 14, monthly publication has been suspended but all of the 2014 issues are now available for free. Download the free app, and you’ll find that the issues can then be downloaded from inside it.

Here is a complete list of contributors to the 2014 Exact Change e-zine: Kim Gordon, Jim O’Rourke, Bill Knott, Hugo Ball, Marie Osmond, Scott Warmuth, the Versatorium group, Raymond Roussel, Kenneth Koch, Dan Visel, Aylin Güngör, TSU!, Anna Moschovakis, Gertrude Stein, Dominique Nabokov, Helen Mirra, Ernst Karel, Roland Wells Robbins, Keith Waldrop, Etel Adnan, Richard Youngs, Giorgio de Chirico, David Hockney, Stephin Merritt, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Liz Munsell, Fanny Howe, Daniel Wilson, Julia Holter, Bob Brown, James Hoff, Emmett Williams, Stephen Gardner, Catherine Corman, Cédrick Eymenier, Lawrence English, Amy Sillman, Lisa Robertson, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, @Discographies, Jeremy Sigler, Bernard Faucon, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jennifer Moxley, Lara Tomlin, Franz Kafka, Ian Svenonius, Kassin, and its editors Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang.

The table of contents for each issue is posted at the Exact Change website.

Posted on December 15, 2014

A panel of the Harvard Rothko murals in its original location, c. 1962.

Wrote about Rothko, CDs, and mortality for Pitchfork’s blog, The Pitch.

Posted on December 14, 2014

For the 40th anniversary of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, the album was reissued in a box with an image of a worn LP cover on the outside, and a pristine jacket on the inside produced from the original artwork. Similarly, buyers were given a choice of two kinds of digital downloads along with their purchase - pristine uncompressed FLAC files, or “DFD – Dubbed-From-Disc” files made by recording “Nick Drake’s own copy of Pink Moon played on a period record player for added authentication.” At the heart of this deluxe set was a third, ostensibly ideal way to hear the album: a new heavyweight vinyl pressing, remastered from the original tapes by the album’s brilliant engineer, John Wood.

The only way to hear the album that wasn’t included was whatever way you had heard it before. For me, that was a CD from Rykodisc in the 90s; not an audiophile option, to be sure, but the one I knew by heart. (Naomi and I listened to the CD so often it was inside our car’s stereo when that was stolen.)

The CD had always given me an impression of a thin-sounding, fragile recording, but the new, heavy vinyl had a hefty sound to match: mid-rangy, solid, weighty. Nick Drake’s voice sounded more sure; his guitar seemed to be plucked with surer strokes; even the silences between tracks seemed more deliberate.

This impression was so opposite to my feeling for the album, I wanted to find out what the original vinyl pressings sounded like. Scarcity (it famously sold poorly, so there were never very many) has always kept those out of reach. But determination combined with Discogs turned up a clean vinyl copy in a cover worn enough to bring the price within my stretched budget.

The old vinyl copy I got hold of is thin-sounding, though not tinny like the Ryko CD became at high volumes. It sounds wonderful to me. But I can hardly pretend it’s more “authentic” than any of the three versions presented by the recent reissue, with their impeccable pedigree. It’s not a first pressing (those were way too expensive), much less Nick Drake’s own copy; nor is it John Wood’s preferred transfer from the studio tapes, which he alone heard at the album’s creation.

Whose version is it, then?

It’s mine of course.

Tagged: sad hits anglo unique copy

Posted on November 17, 2014

The borders became indefensible once we realized how thin they were. No one remembers who started simply to stand at the line, rather than requesting entry. But soon there were many. And it was impossible to say, the guards quickly learned, which side of the line those standing were truly on; the border proved to be so thin it could be crossed by osmosis. Now we know there are no lines on the earth, at least none we can perceive with our limited locational abilities.

Posted on November 14, 2014

Mizutani Takashi, Solo Works 1970.

Les Rallizes Dénudés are a legendary Japanese band that exists only via bootleg and rumor. Most all tapes assigned to them - studio and/or live - are overdriven, psychedelic recordings of the same handful of riffs interpreted and reinterpreted in extreme performances; the strategy and sound you might imagine from the murky images of their shades, leather, and rumored connection to radical underground politics of the 60s.

But years ago, after a performance of our own in Japan, I was handed a CD-R labeled simply “MIZUTANI” - the family name of the leader of Les Rallizes. The first five tracks on it turned out to be sweet tunes, sung with an earnestness reminiscent of a favorite 60s Japanese band of mine, The Jacks (which may be why I was chosen for this gift, Naomi and I were covering a Jacks song at the time). The sixth was a long, low-volume version of what I later realized is a Les Rallizes standard, “The Last One” - something like the “Sweet Sister Ray” recording by the Velvet Underground. And the seventh was a full band freak-out that tagged the collection most clearly as another chapter in the Les Rallizes mystery…

That baby blue CD-R has been a cherished though confusing artifact in my music collection ever since. Online research now tells me these tracks were once bootlegged as “Mizutani Takashi Solo Works 1970,” with a note that the final track was recorded in 1973 by a slightly different line-up. They have also been released with the cover above, as a collection by Les Rallizes titled, “Mizutani.” The only physical copy I see for sale at the moment is advertised on Discogs for $1200. However, a twitter post by a listener whose taste I enjoy alerted me to this free YouTube stream.

Tagged: sad hits japan bootleg mysterious gift

Posted on November 13, 2014

In this box-set/limited-edition era, a number of classic bootlegs have been “officially” rereleased, typically with far superior sound than their illegal ancestors. I keep returning to my old bootlegs, however. One reason is they are shorter - an album’s worth of stolen tracks can make for more pleasurable listening than dozens of carefully catalogued takes, no matter how skillful the players and producers. Another reason I love my old bootlegs is the meaning they have accumulated through time - haphazard as they may have been originally, their track listings and cover iconography have worn, like a decrepit building in the landscape, into legitimacy. Tear it down now and you’ll miss it. You might even try and get a committee together to save it.

By far the most listened-to bootleg in my collection is, like I’m sure for so many others, Bob Dylan and the Band’s basement tapes - the original, 14-track demo circulated by Dylan’s publishers in 1967 so that other artists might play these songs and earn everyone some money while Dylan was on hiatus from recording and performing. This bootleg goes under many names - I like Trade Mark of Quality’s “Troubled Troubador” (sic), though my own copy is simply labeled “Bob Dylan and the Crackers: Demonstration Tape.” The songs on that demo - all Dylan originals, some with co-writers from the Band - make me laugh and make me cry, like a great Hollywood studio film. Some of the tunes are among my most favorite from our American tradition. So when Greil Marcus wrote eloquently about the larger collection these were drawn from, bootlegged in the 1990s on 5 CDs known as the Genuine Basement Tapes, I tracked down a set and immersed myself in their strange aura. My favorite songs - along with some other great ones I’d never heard before - cropped up like turns in the road you recognize, but the mass of material remained less knoweable than atmospheric. It was somewhere I went often, but it never became a place I could show you around.

Now an official, “Basement Tapes Complete” has made that atmosphere even denser - with 138 tracks across 6 CDs, and an entry price of well over a hundred dollars. As much as I love this music, I just can’t get myself to go there.

Instead, I’ve put together my own single CD of Dylan-authored songs included on the set, and which aren’t on the original bootleg - call it “Troubled Troubador Vol 2”. It cost me some time to puzzle out, but only about $25 - not much more than the price of an LP boot back in the day. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to age the right way.

Here’s the tracklist, if you want to assemble your own - the first 15 tracks can be found on the inexpensive 2-CD sampler, Basement Tapes Raw. The last six can only be had from the Basement Tapes Complete, so I downloaded them instead from iTunes for $1.29 each.

Troubled Troubador Vol 2

1 Odds and Ends 1:48
2 Dress It up, Better Have it All 2:53
3 I’m Not There 5:13
4 Get Your Rocks Off 3:46
5 Santa-Fe 2:08
6 Silent Weekend 3:01
7 Clothes Line Saga 2:59
8 Minstrel Boy 1:40
9 All You Have To Do Is Dream 3:23
10 Goin’ To Acapulco 5:37
11 One For The Road 4:50
12 I’m Alright 1:46
13 Apple Suckling Tree 2:50
14 Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby 2:53
15 Sign On The Cross 7:21
16 All American Boy 3:59
17 Bourbon Street 5:05
18 My Woman She’s A-Leavin’ 2:30
19 Mary Lou, I Love You Too 2:30
20 What’s It Gonna Be When It Comes Up 3:04
21 Wild Wolf 3:35

TRT: 72 min

PS By the umpteenth listen, I’ve found myself consistently skipping three tracks - “Clothes Line Saga” (a Bobbie Gentry parody), “All American Boy” (a Bobby Bare parody), and “What’s It Gonna Be When It Comes Up” (a Bobby D sings the blues parody) - so I’m axing them from my personal copy. This reduces the track list to 18 and the TRT to an hour.

Tagged: sad hits anglo bootleg diy

Posted on November 6, 2014

“Fortune” by Naomi Yang, 2014.

Our new album of sad hits was written as soundtrack for a silent film by Naomi. We are streaming it online - please enjoy!

Posted on October 5, 2014

ESP 1001: Ni Kantu En Esperanto, 1964.

Let’s not sing in Esperanto, gadewch i ni ganu yn Gymraeg! Wrote on linguistic diversity in song for The Wire.

Posted on October 4, 2014

Leonard Cohen in Portrait Intime, aka Spring 96, by Armelle Brusq (1997).

There are many surprising details in this “intimate portrait” of Leonard Cohen filmed at the Zen retreat on Mt Baldy, CA, where he spent much of the 1990s - perhaps the most unexpected is hearing the radio in his cabin tuned to Rush Limbaugh. But it’s the lack of silence altogether that is the biggest shock. Cohen’s years on the mountain clearly included a lot of sitting - which for obvious reasons is not the focus of the film - but also a lot of words. A period his fans widely thought of as fallow (he released no album between 1992 and 2001) turns out to have been quite active for his songwriting, as shown here not only by the impassioned semi-private performances of songs in progress, but the way Cohen reads his own poetry. Those poems are occasional - more so than the songs - but their cadences are very familiar. It seems to be a short step for Cohen to move from one form to the other.

It was also during this period that Cohen unexpectedly began sending personal documents to the Finnish fan site The Leonard Cohen Files, where they are now archived in a section called “Blackening Pages.” There’s only one song featured there - “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” the same he performs so memorably in this film - but it sits alongside dozens of poems.

Tagged: anglo singer songwriters poets noisy silence

Posted on August 5, 2014

Readers of this blog may enjoy the (not unrelated) Exact Change monthly for iPad and iPhone - the app is free, and the latest issue is a free sampler, “Exquisite Corpse.”

From the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, 1938:
“EXQUISITE CORPSE: A game of folded paper in which several people compose a phrase or a drawing collectively, none of them having any idea of the nature of the preceding contribution or contributions. The now classic example, which gave a name to the game, is the first phrase obtained in this manner: LE CADAVRE EXQUIS BOIRA LE VIN NOUVEAU [THE EXQUISITE CORPSE SHALL DRINK THE NEW WINE].”

The Exact Change e-zine thus far is by Keith Waldrop, Etel Adnan, Richard Youngs, Giorgio de Chirico, David Hockney, Stephin Merritt, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Liz Munsell, Fanny Howe, Daniel Wilson, Julia Holter, Bob Brown, James Hoff, Emmett Williams, Stephen Gardner, Catherine Corman, Cédrick Eymenier, Lawrence English, Amy Sillman, Lisa Robertson, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, @Discographies, Jeremy Sigler, Bernard Faucon, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jennifer Moxley, Lara Tomlin, Franz Kafka, Ian Svenonius, Kassin, and its editors Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang.

Posted on August 1, 2014

“Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes),” by Man Ray, 1920.

Wrote about LPs, dust, drum machines and cut-and-paste for The Wire.

Posted on July 11, 2014

Caetano Veloso singing “Asa Branca” (Luiz Gonzaga /
Humberto Teixeira) on the French television program Discorama, 1972.

“Asa Branca” is an iconic song in Brazil, written and made famous in 1947 by the northeastern baião musician Luiz Gonzaga. The original is characteristically uptempo, but the lyric is about a drought so severe that even the “white wing” bird of the title deserts the land, along with the singer. One day the rains will come and he will return to the land and to the woman he loves, he sings.

Caetano recorded a slow, sad, psychedelic-tinged reinterpretation of this song while living in exile in London, for his 1971 self-titled album (the one where he is wrapped in fur on the cover, presumably against the English cold he hated). This solo television performance from the following year is even more heartbroken.

The introduction by French presenter Denise Glaser mentions Caetano’s exile, but together with the camera work seems most interested in the singer as heartbreaker.

Tagged: sad hits brazil exile heartbreaker

Posted on June 16, 2014

…Self Storage, cont.

K.’s silence was of an indeterminate length. The sun went down; the room went dark. Frieda could not still have been reading, although she didn’t seem to have moved from her place by the files.

The situation invited sleep. K.’s sleep had always been more actual than conventional, however; it didn’t have a fixed duration, alternating with alertness, as no doubt the metrici experience. Sleep for K. was instead a flexible mix of waking and dreaming, and the self-storage facility, despite its tomb-like dark, had only exaggerated this habit of K.’s. His initial reluctance to doze at all in the building was, he now surmised, a resistance to this rhythmici pattern of sleep. And the plethora of objects in his dreams was the result of having collected them from both sides of this sleep divide - which was less porous to K. than simply accessible, like a storage unit from a hallway, or vice-versa.

The music Frieda had introduced to K. proved both an aid and a problem in this regard. K. soon realized that the quality of this music changed with the hour of day - even, it sometimes seemed to him, with his differing activities. Toward noon, when he would often find himself thinking of Frieda because of the timing of her initial visit, he heard a nostalgic tone creep into the songs. A mellow mix of woodwinds would introduce a World War II-era ballad, the crooner delivering his message with enough vibrato to establish sincerity, but not so much as to oversell the emotion in the lyric. The music at this hour was intended to contain feelings, rather than provoke them, and K. would find himself in a suspended state neither expecting Frieda nor forgetting her.

But in the evening the songs grew more agitated, even anxious about the next day. “I am hoping that tomorrow won’t come,” sang Jo Stafford, with unnerving calm, and a confusingly chipper male chorus.[1] “The party’s over,” said Willie Nelson, to a sprightly two-step; “Turn out the lights.”[2] The female chorus shimmies: “And tomorrow starts the same old thing again!”

Finally, just before midnight, horns and a Hammond organ announced the song that closed each day.[3] Sometimes it even played twice in a row, as if to draw the border more clearly:

Kiss me each morning for a million years
Hold me each evening at your side
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years
Then if it don’t work out
(Then if it don’t work out)
Then you can tell me - goodbye

K. was interested by the perfect rhyme in this first verse. He had read about words that rhyme with themselves, but he had never encountered one directly before. It’s just like the clock, he thought. A million years and a million years, in rhyme, do not sum to two but layer one over the other.

The timescale of the bridge was similarly vertiginous:

If you must go, oh no, I won’t grieve
If you wait a lifetime before you leave…

Acting after a lifetime is impossible, K. felt sure. But waiting a lifetime, while also acting, was for K. just like the rhyming million year spans - it made sense that a life can be waited through, and acted through, at once.

Which helped but didn’t fully explain the puzzling final verse:

But if you must go
Mmm, I won’t tell you no
Just so that we can say we tried
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years
Then if it don’t work out
(Then if it don’t work out)
Then you can tell me - goodbye

In the first verse, the timeline was expansive but clear: the lovers kiss in the morning, again in the evening, and this might continue for a million years before it doesn’t work out.

In the last verse, that timeline has shifted, or rather multiplied. The lovers are separating as it begins - at least we tried, says the singer. And then he repeats: tell me you’ll love me for a million years. Those million years are now both behind and ahead, it seemed to K.

This song, played at the same hour each night, signaled sleep for K. like a reverse alarm clock. However, it also ensured that he remained alert as he entered the first rhythmici alternation between waking and dream – alert, and troubled by the timing of goodbye in the last verse. If only I had a painting of this timespan, like the hands of a clock, he would think. And then he would dream.

[1] [Jo Stafford, “It’s Almost Tomorrow” (Gene Adkinson, Wade Buff)]

[2] [Willie Nelson, “The Party’s Over”]

[3] [The Casinos, “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” (John D. Loudermilk)]

Posted on February 14, 2014

Posted on May 30, 2014

Music producer and record label entrepreneur, Ibrahima Sylla (1956-2013):

“I am Senegalese, from the Diakanké people in the southeast. My mother is Bambara from Koulikoro. I also have both Malian and Guinean heritage. I speak Mandingo, Bambara, Wolof, and Fulani. In fact my father, Al Hassan Sylla, and his twin brother Al Houceyne Sylla, each had four wives, most of whom were Fulani. I am one of 63 children.

“My father and his twin brother were noble religious chiefs, originally associated with the Muslim Tidjaniyya brotherhood. Their Islam was tolerant and they were closely linked to the great Mourid chief Serigne Fallou Mbacké. In 1967, my father was Mbacké’s guest of honor at the last Grand Magal of Touba. People came from all over West Africa to pay homage to my father and his twin brother, and African heads of state would consult them before taking important decisions.

“When I was thirteen, my father took me out of school and brought me to Chad, where I spent a year improving my Koranic education. I was a rich young man from Dakar, quite full of himself, who was driven to school in a Mercedes. My father wanted to rid me of this pride and bring me back to reality. He taught me humility, sharing. He took me with him on trips to Cameroon, Zaire, Central Africa, Togo and Benin. In Senegal, I had only known Afro Cuban music and American soul, looking down on anyone who listened to other music. Traveling with my father those four years, I realized that there was much more than that, I discovered many cultures. It was after this period, in 1974, that my father sent me to France to study economy and management.

“While studying in France, I collected records of Cuban music. We were a group of enthusiasts who used to get together at Pasdeloup, the famous record shop near the Luxembourg. These friends were the ones behind my Africando idea. Another enthusiast started to make compilations out of my collection, and from that I began to take an interest in making records. By the time I returned to Senegal in 1979, I had decided to work in music production. I had to tell my father. But where I come from, you go through the griots for important decisions. So I explained to my father’s griot, Mamadou Kouyaté, master of the kora and father of Soryba Kouyaté, what I wanted to do, so that he could tell my father who would then help me start up. The old griot went to talk to my father, but his words were misunderstood. Thinking that I wanted to become a musician, my father ended up slapping the griot instead of me. I left the house immediately, and my father and I did not speak for three or four years. My sister, Bintou Sylla, was a tremendous support to me through those hard times. Eventually, my father acknowledged my status as a businessman.

“I started working at the Golden Baobab studio, run by Francis Arphan Senghor, where I made albums by Orchestre Baobab, Ouza, Guilewar and the Etoile de Dakar with the young Youssou N’Dour, for Jambaar (‘the valiant,’ ‘the warriors’) Productions, co-founded with Ibrahima Fall. When I started in this business, I said to myself: ‘My father gave everything to the griots, so I am going to work with them too.’ But unlike my father who enjoyed being praised in song, I have always asked artists not to mention my name on their records. If I hear it while mixing, I take it out. In 1981, I set up my own label, Syllart Productions, and produced new albums for it by both Baobab and Ismaël Lô. In 1983 I moved to Paris, where I opened a record shop called Kubaney Musique, on the rue de Rocroy in the 10th arrondissement. There I produced my first artists from Zaire, including Bopol Mansiamina, Empire Bakuba, Quatre Etoiles, and Nyboma; also the Cabo Verde Show from Cape Verde; the salsa singer from Benin, Gnonas Pedro; Nyanka Bell from the Ivory Coast…

“I have two rules as a producer: never sign a contract with an artist for more than one album; and let the music evolve, breaking habits so you don’t do what everyone else is already doing. Before recording an album, I want to understand the artistic idea behind it. During the recording, I don’t interfere. I arrive at the end and am there for the mix. In general the musicians like to see me involved. If they don’t, they worry - especially the arrangers. I am not a musician. I can’t read music, I can’t write it and I don’t play any instrument, but I think that maybe I have a gift. Whatever the type of music, or musician, I always understand and have some idea, however small, that makes a difference. Some think this is due to my father’s gris-gris, but I think it is simply from having listened to so much music. When the recording and mixing is done, my great satisfaction is to be the first to hear the album. I have invested my money and time, and it’s like I move into a house I just built. The sound is good. Everything is right, everything is clear: that’s music, a voyage…”

- in conversation with François Bensignor, published in the liner notes to the 5-CD set 20 Years History: The Very Best of Syllart Productions (2002). Those CDs are out of print, but there are dozens if not hundreds of Sylla productions to seek out. A fan has created a nearly five-hour compilation as a Spotify playlist:

Tribute Ibrahima Sylla

Tagged: west africa producers gris-gris

Posted on April 23, 2014

The Virtuoso

The guitar grew heavy, heavier each day. At first it was enough to shift my position while playing, but soon my legs began to ache from supporting its weight. When I couldn’t bear it any longer on my lap, I began placing it on a low bench covered in cloth to protect the wood. On the third night of this arrangement, the bench collapsed. The guitar was undamaged; its mass had changed and the wood was now a denser material than the floor. It had become impossible to lift the guitar without assistance, and as I travel alone, I had no choice but to leave it where it lay. The nightclub allowed me to extend my gig, for the time being, so the next day I set to work learning how to play the guitar as it lay on the stage. I found a rug, and performed cross-legged, with the guitar before me. I could no longer move its neck. As its weight increased, the guitar began to sink into the floor. The next evening, I lay prone on the rug and stretched out my arms, reaching over the top of the instrument rather than from below. Eventually the guitar sank level with the stage. I lay down beside it now, no longer plucking or strumming its strings but simply stroking its wood. I found that I too was growing heavy, perhaps from the immobility of this new position. The next evening, I did not get up after my performance. All night, I lay beside the guitar, as we sank together deeper into the ground. I could see the lights of the room above me, as far away as the stars on a clear night. When these lights faded, the guitar and I entered a world I had heard about in myth and song, but which I had never believed I would witness. I did not see it, exactly, but felt it seep around us, and then inside us, making us ever heavier. Once it had filled us both completely, I could no longer find any difference between myself and the guitar.

[from The Memory Theater Burned, 2004; photo by Mierswa Kluska, for an ad campaign of the Berlin Philharmonic]

Tagged: elective affinity

Posted on April 18, 2014

Mikami Kan singing the enka tune, “Yume wa yoru hiraku” (Dreams bloom at night), on Japanese television.

Enka is the sentimental pop music of Japan - it’s often compared to US country, but to me it seems more like what AM radio programmers used to call “beautiful music.” The women singers wear kimono, and the men wear tuxes.

Mikami Kan is no crooner in a tux, but he is a highly emotional singer, and when he chooses to, can put across the drama of enka like no other. In the early 70s, not long after bursting on the underground folk and protest scene in Tokyo, he recorded a number of enka standards. “Yume wa yoru hiraku” had been a massive hit for the truly pop enka singer Keiko Fuji - apparently it still holds the record for consecutive weeks at number one on the Oricon (that’s short for Original Confidence) charts. Mikami Kan recorded a version only two years after Keiko Fuji, but changed the lyrics enough that his single was banned from public broadcast.

This performance is staged at an enka-like setting, a fantasy building by the very real sea. The conceit is that popular singer Yōsui Inoue (aka Andre Candre) has requested the song, and the edit includes a snippet of their conversation, between verses. It also cuts to Yōsui Inoue’s reaction when Mikami Kan takes a particularly unexpected rhythmic detour right before the end.

Tagged: sad hits japan trad song form in non trad music

Posted on March 30, 2014

Atahualpa Yupanqui - “El Carrero” (The Carter)

Left-handed, left-wing Atahualpa Yupanqui (a pseudonym derived from two Inca kings, a bit like “Pink Floyd”) reputedly recorded over 12,000 tunes. But then again everything about Yupanqui is outsized, in a magical-realist fashion. His career began while delivering telegrams to remote parts of Argentina, traveling by mule. This led to ethnographic work collecting folk songs, and political work with the communist party - which in turn led to wider travels, first as a political exile, later as a “world” musician. Eventually he settled in France, having been invited there initially by Edith Piaf.

Despite his global reach and experience, Yupanqui seems to have always sung and played as if he were stopping in a village accessible only by mule. The subjects of his songs remained rooted in that tradition, as well. The lyrics to this one are by Romildo Risso, an Uruguayan “gaucho poet” who, according to Yupanqui, would hand him his latest work on a bit of paper, during games of chess.

Tagged: sad hits argentina uruguay exile gauchisme

Posted on March 20, 2014

“Spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first… Rather than describing music as a ‘universal language,’ we find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music.

“Many linguists and anthropologists emphasize that language as a symbolic system of expression is constrained by children’s ability to learn. Deacon writes: ‘The structure of a language is under intense selection pressure because in its reproduction from generation to generation, it must pass through a narrow bottleneck: children’s minds.’ Language is a compromise between what adults need to say and children’s ability to process and perform what they hear. And, crucially, what infants hear is… a form of music.” [italics added]

from “Music and Early Language Acquisition,” by Anthony Brandt, Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, Frontiers in Psychology (September 2012)

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on March 19, 2014

Excerpt from a documentary by Bruno Mercuri, From Arieto to Harry Bertoia. Produced for a retrospective of Bertoia’s work in Pordenone, Italy, 2009.

In this clip, Bertoia’s sister, Ave, describes her brother’s “discovery of music” while working on sculpture. Sounds happen - music is discovered. We can’t invent fire, or the wheel, but music - and language - maybe we have each participated in that ur-creation.

In a recent interview, Bertoia’s son Val describes how, “When Harry was alive, his sister Ave, who is now in her 90s, would use her voice to resonate with the sculptures. It sounded like angels.”

Val can be seen playing the sculptures in the latter half of this clip, as he walks through the barn where his father created them. The black and white film at the very end is rare footage of Harry Bertoia himself making music.

Tagged: instrumentals sound art creation myths

Posted on March 7, 2014

The choice of an instrument is an elective affinity - but is it Goethe’s chemical attraction, Weber’s conjunction of social forces, or Magritte’s magnificent error?

“One night I awoke in a room where a cage with a sleeping bird had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see that the bird had disappeared from the cage and been replaced by an egg. I then grasped an astounding poetic secret, for the shock I felt was caused precisely by the affinity of the two objects: the cage and the egg.” - René Magritte

Tagged: elective affinity

Aleksandr (Sasha) Kolpakov (right) and Vadim Kolpakov (left, Sasha’s nephew), filmed by the classical seven-string guitarist Oleg Timofeyev.

Soviet singer-songwriters such as the famous Vladimir Vysotsky are routinely referred to as “bards,” but an earlier, perhaps more descriptive term for their work was “amateur songs” [самодеятельная песня]. Their approach to song was as lyricists first, singers second, and guitarists a distant last. (In our North American tradition, think Leonard Cohen more than Bob Dylan.)

But those guitars they hardly played are curious! Many of the best-known bards - including Vystotsky, and Bulat Okudzhava - accompanied themselves on the “Russian guitar,” a seven-string instrument which reputedly developed in the East parallel to the Spanish guitar in the West. Its traditional tuning is to an open chord, typically G major, though the bards sometimes changed that to minor, or to an open tuning without major or minor (like our DADGAD).

“Professional” players of the seven-string guitar are not bards, however; they are either classical players, or players of gypsy music. Indeed, the gypsy player Sasha Kolpakov might lead one to question the instrument’s Russian roots altogether - it seems so well suited to Roma music, and his technique not unrelated to that virtuoso of the Western six-string, Django…

Tagged: instrumentals roma trad instruments in non trad music

Posted on February 11, 2014

Alexander Bashlachev [Александр Башлачев], aka SashBash, “Vremya Kolokol’chikov” [Время Колокольчиков] (The Time of Little Bells), Leningrad 1987.

The link is to a video of an entire concert, because the artifact is so expressive of its time and place: the malfunctioning PA, the switch in camera (or copy) from black-and-white to color, the reveal of the room and audience at the end (is it my imagination or are some covering their faces?).

And Bashlachev: his stare, out-of-tune 12-string, broken teeth, “Suffield” t-shirt (I can’t help but see “suffer” in the logo), gutteral voice, and (from what I can make out using translation programs and hints here and there online) beautiful lyrics.

The first tune he plays, after what must be soundcheck, is one of his most famous. The PA is a mess so he walks in front of it and sings directly to the audience and camera.

I can only find translation-machine versions of its lyric, so I include it here in Russian. It seems to be almost classical in its references to the Russian landscape, history, imagery. Given the singer’s incantatory performance, the written version surprised me in its regularity. But Bashlachev is known as a poet as well as singer, like so many Russian songwriters.

This performance is from the last full year of his life; Bashlachev died a suicide in February 1988. More information (in Russian) at http://bashlach.chat.ru/index.htm

Время Колокольчиков

Долго шли зноем и морозами,
Все снесли и остались вольными,
Жрали снег с кашею березовой
И росли вровень с колокольнями

Если плач — не жалели соли мы.
Если пир — сахарного пряника.
Звонари черными мозолями
Рвали нерв медного динамика.

Но с каждым днем времена меняются.
Купола растеряли золото.
Звонари по миру слоняются.
Колокола сбиты и расколоты.

Что ж теперь ходим круг да около
На своем поле как подпольщики?
Если нам не отлили колокол,
Значит, здесь время колокольчиков.

Ты звени, сердце, под рубашкою.
Второпях врассыпную вороны.
Эй! Выводи коренных с пристяжкою
И рванем на четыре сторны.

Но сколько лет лошади не кованы,
Ни одно колесо не мазано.
Плетки нет. Седла разворованы.
И давно все узлы развязаны.

A на дожде все дороги радугой!
Быть беде. Нынче нам до смеха ли?
Но если есть колокольчик под дугой,
Так, значит, все. Заряжай, поехали!

Загремим, засвистим, защелкаем,
Проберет до костей,до кончиков.
Эй,братва! Чуете печенками
Грозный смех русских колокольчиков?

Век жуем матюги с молитвами.
Век живем, хоть шары нам выколи.
Спим да пьем сутками и литрами.
И не поем. Петь уже отвыкли.

Долго ждем. Все ходили грязные,
От того сделались похожие,
А под дождем оказались разные.
Большинство-то честные, хорошие.

И пусть разбит батюшка Царь-колокол,
Мы пришли с черными гитарами.
Ведь биг-бит, блюз и рок-н-ролл
Околдовали нас первыми ударами.

И в груди искры электричества.
Шапки в снег — и рваните звонче.
Свистопляс — славное язычество.
Я люблю время колокольчиков.

Tagged: sad hits singer songwriters Russia poets why why why

Posted on February 10, 2014

Yanka Dyagileva [Янка], “Domoi!” [Домой!] (Home!). At a memorial concert for Alexander Bashlachev, aka SashBash, Leningrad 1990.

The Siberian singer-songwriter Yanka belonged to a group of Soviet rock musicians who made their mark through underground recordings and concerts in the late 1980s. These singers are my generation, but many are no longer living. Yanka’s slightly older friend Sasha Bashlachev - some say the initial inspiration for her songwriting - killed himself in 1988, age 27. Yanka herself died in 1991, at only 24 - possibly also a suicide. Her ex-lover and frequent musical collaborator, Yegor Letov, was by comparison an old man when he died of heart failure at 43, in 2008. By all accounts - including their songs - these lives were hard as well as short.

Yanka’s recorded legacy is 29 songs, most of which exist in multiple versions, and all of which would in the West be considered bootleg - there were no official releases in her lifetime. Some of the recordings are solo acoustic, some are electric with bands; some sound like what we would call “home recordings,” others are from makeshift studios. There’s much to discover in her discography, but nothing I have heard communicates her songwriting and singing as clearly to me as video of her solo performances.

This memorial concert to Bashlachev was one of her last public appearances. The emotion in the song needs no translation. But her lyrics are famously poetic, so I sought them out in English and found the following in a scan from a 1994 German/English pamphlet (I’ve changed it a bit here and there).

Much more information - and lyrics in Russian - are at

http://www.yanka.lenin.ru/.

Thanks to Alina Simone.

Home!

Absurd harmony of an empty ball will fill in the intervals with dead water. Through the snow-covered rooms and the smoke someone will point with a finger to show us the door away from here,

Home!

From these stone systems in swollen heads, theoretical prophets, printed gods, from twinking ringing and burning garbage

Home!

Only paper wind is blowing through the storeys and the corridors, hiding crumbled roubles in pockets, sweeping away dust and rags, laughter and tears, grief and joy, plus and minus. Let me free to go

Home!

Escaping hunger and wind, cold nightmare, electric laughter, absolute reflex of all these births, deaths, reincarnations

Home!

For what sins I ask, and why, why, why, why, why

Home!

Tagged: sad hits singer songwriters russia poets why why why

Posted on February 7, 2014

This blog has suffered from divided attention disorder while I prepared the launch of a new (not unrelated) monthly e-zine - the Exact Change app for iPad and iPhone is now available from the iTunes store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exact-change-e-zine-from-damon/id781858949?mt=8

Long live all forms of publishing!

Posted on January 7, 2014

Toute la mémoire du monde, directed by Alain Resnais, 1956.

Resnais’ film about the French national library has a narrative that bears the unmistakeable imprint of “Chris and Magic Marker,” as the credits put it. Not only does it meditate on the externalization of memory through media, and trace the arrival at the library of a (fictional) entry to Marker’s (real) travel book series La Petite Planète: a guide to Mars. But the film’s final phrase -

“These readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to end, perhaps a secret bearing the beautiful name of ‘happiness.’”

- concludes with a word crucial to so many of Chris Marker’s works: le bonheur.

The end of Letter from Siberia:

“I am writing you this letter from a distant land. Her charred trees and empty wastelands are as dear to me as her rivers and flowers. Her name is Siberia. She lies somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 21^st century, between the earth and the moon, between humiliation and happiness. After that, it’s straight ahead.”

The beginning of Sans Soleil:

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

It is at the core of the plot for La Jetée, the mechanism that allows the soldier to travel through time:

“Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different.”

And it is the title of a film by Alexandre Medvedkin, subject of Marker’s tribute The Last Bolshevik:

Cчастье - le Bonheur - Happiness.

Not “joy” - “happiness.” Joy would be in the present. Happiness is from the past, and possibly the future.

Tagged: poets media as memory happiness

Posted on October 21, 2013

“We are at the end of cinema, as in cinema as film. We have 120 years of cinema. It’s a memory of humanity on those strips of celluloid and we should not permit it to disappear. It’s our duty – every Ministry of Culture should maintain places where films can be screened as films. Just like we are able to see paintings. Film should be seen as film. 35mm should be seen as 35mm. You can’t transfer oils to watercolors. It can’t be transferred. It has to stay as is.” - Jonas Mekas, addressing the Festival du nouveau cinema, Montreal 2013.

Tagged: poets the case for analog media as memory

Posted on October 15, 2013

“What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this:

“The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has - let us assume - a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally - well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music…

“Feelings – which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe – which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world…

“Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

- Rilke, from “Primal Sound” (1919), translated by Gertrude Craig Houston

Tagged: poets trad instruments in non trad music the case for analog music unheard

Posted on September 29, 2013

“Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine’s riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman… After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day’s messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.”

- Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (2013), p. 439

In a book about pixels, a description of one of the analog screens I grew up staring at (and which stared back). Another was my 14th-floor - 13 if you second guessed the elevator button - window. Paranoia struck deep.

Tagged: evolution the case for analog screens

Posted on September 23, 2013

Zuccotti Park, NYC, September 17 2011 - first night of Occupy Wall Street

The “people’s mic” was used out of necessity when occupiers of Zuccotti Park were denied amplification by the New York City police. A clip of a daytime general assembly meeting 8 days later, on September 25, demonstrates how quickly it evolved for Occupy Wall Street:

At Boston’s parallel occupation of Dudley Square, the police allowed amplification but the group chose to use the people’s mic regardless. The collective involvement of the assembly, and the decentralized means of address (equal from anywhere in the space), proved more effective to the movement than a PA.

Tagged: no need to use a pa evolution revolutionaries

Posted on September 17, 2013

Visitors to MoMA sitting on Sergei Tcherepnin’s “Motor-Matter Bench,” part of the sound art exhibition Soundings: A Contemporary Score, 2013.

At Soundings, I saw more than one person go through the show wearing the museum’s audio guide headphones.

I found the show excellent. But is anyone listening?

Is the museum a place to listen? Tcherepnin’s bench, wired to conduct vibrations, is in a corridor by MoMA’s escalators that sounds like an airport. Can you blame people for doing what they can to shut it out?

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on September 9, 2013

A musician friend describes what is lost to streaming this way:

As a teen, he bought the Residents 7” EP Duck Stab without knowing anything about it. He brought it home, played it, and his hair stood on end. What the hell is this? he thought. He went to dinner, took a walk, came back home – and it was still in his room. He hid it in a corner, but there it remained, confronting him. Much later, he took it back out. This time, he played it again and again.

Posted on August 29, 2013

Hear someone play a song, remember bits and pieces (floating verses). Learn a song off record, learn it by heart (covers). Stream a song… Do we engage our memory then? Or leave it to the machine? (remixes)

Tagged: the case for analog listen listen

Posted on August 29, 2013

Spider John Koerner singing “Red Apple Juice” at McCabe’s, Santa Monica, February 2013.

This song is known also as “Red Rocking Chair,” and perhaps most famously - due to the Dock Boggs recording on the Harry Smith Anthology - “Sugar Baby.”

As riveting as the Dock Boggs version is, it’s Spider John who makes me hear the lyric. In his interpretation, the “floating verses” that make this such an archetypal folksong - those lines and rhymes familiar from other songs - seem to keep changing the meaning of what we’ve already heard, as well as what’s to come. Or maybe it’s simply the ambiguity of the opening image, which keeps me working right through to the tragic verses at the end about being a stranger here, everywhere - “I’d go home but I’m a stranger there.” After which, the reprise of the beginning doesn’t feel at all like a repeat.

Tagged: sad hits anglo floating verses evolution

Posted on August 28, 2013

I compiled a list of music apps from India, North Africa and the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America for Pitchfork’s blog, The Pitch. Thought it would make sense to doublepost here, but with my own title:

International Streaming Hits

The sad part will be up to you.

Posted on August 9, 2013

How about: to digitize = to put in the public domain. And we protect analog communications with the moral right of the artist, and the right to privacy for the individual.

That way placing something online becomes a deliberate act of surrendering ownership. Wouldn’t that help make clear what should stay analog?

The return of the post office and landlines - and their protection from surveillance. LPs and books as artworks, not formats…

Posted on August 8, 2013

Work on the building where I live in Cambridge, MA has revealed these bits of Victorian acoustic life, buried in the walls: a hollow brick, for sound insulation between rooms; and a speaking tube, for communicating between floors. (One filled with old silence, the other with old noise.)

Posted on August 6, 2013

Davy Graham performing “She Moved Through the Fair” on the UK television show “Hullabaloo,” c. 1963.

“Punctuated equilibrium” is a theory of evolution which maintains that changes in species don’t happen slowly and steadily over eons, but through sudden, discontinuous leaps, followed by stasis.

In the world of British folk rock, Davy Graham’s voicing of “She Moved Through the Fair” was a puncture in the equilibrium. Graham had traveled the hippie drug route to North Africa and the Middle East well before his compatriots, bringing back a detached view of life, as well as the guitar fingerboard. Exposure to the oud and other traditional stringed instruments also led him to fool with the tuning of his own - this song he plays in DADGAD, common now but so unusual at the time that fellow British guitarists were mystified.

Of course it’s more than the tuning on display here. Apologies for the poor sound (this must be the best available, cause even the BBC has used a snippet of the same footage with just as wobbly a soundtrack) - but to watch Graham perform this with his characteristic intensity (whether from concentration, drugs, the poor sight in his right eye, or simply genius), is like miraculously witnessing one of those rare instants of evolutionary change.

Tagged: anglo instrumentals trad instruments in non trad music evolution

Posted on June 8, 2013

…Self Storage, cont.

This adherence to the actual, K. went on to learn, aligned him with musical theorists in an ancient dispute with grammarians:

“At least some ancient grammarians held that certain vowels were long, others short; these metrists (metrici) held that the former were twice the length of the latter; they then devised a set of rules (including other criteria) for classifying syllables as ‘long’ vs. ‘short,’ and on this basis constructed a quantitative prosody (see CLASSICAL PROSODY).

“The ancient musical theorists (rhythmici), however, held that there were more distinctions than 2:1 and that some syllables were indeterminate. But over time, actual vowel (or even syllable) length quickly lost ground to conventional classification. Eventually, auditors no longer heard a long-short distinction at all. Nevertheless, the notion that syllables could be grouped into ‘long’ vs. ‘short’ persisted among grammarians and prosodists literally for millennia…”

Might not, thought K. as he pored over this text, the same have happened to images? Over time, the actual distinctions between them due to duration were lost, and images were left sorted into conventional, motionless heaps. The rhythmici, who saw such fine-grained distinctions in the duration of images that some even became indeterminate to them, disappeared. Did they die out, K. wondered, from their inability to fix on a given moment for their food, their shelter, their neighbors, perhaps even their mates…? Had the metrici, fat and procreating due to steady aim at static objects of desire, taken over?

Nevertheless, K. discovered, certain languages retained an imprint of the durational system argued over by the ancient metrici and rhythmici. And in at least two of these, “long” and “short” are not subtle enough to measure actual duration used by its speakers – for these, grammarians employ the term mora to identify a unit of time that might combine in ways other than 2:1.

“So what did you conclude, K.,” said Frieda, still looking at his files. “Is Barnabas an Estonian, or Japanese?”

http://www.surfermoon.com/essays/noises.html

Posted on May 30, 2013

Title sequence for Where the Green Ants Dream, Werner Herzog (1984). Music by Fauré (Requiem); Wandjuk Marika (didgeridoo); and Klause Wiese.

“As I moved along I knew it was me, and that I was singing…” - L. Cohen

The recent gap in this blog was the result of tour/travel - to Japan, and (for my first time) to Australia. To help sort out the experience, I’ve turned to the work of two allies in pursuit of “ecstatic truth,” Bruce Chatwin and Werner Herzog. Chatwin and Herzog met while each were in Australia working on projects relating to the Aboriginal Land Rights movement - Chatwin’s The Songlines, and Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream. They recognized one other immediately as fellow travelers, literally. Herzog later filmed Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah as Cobra Verde. And on his deathbed, Chatwin asked Herzog to carry his leather rucksack for him, now that he was too weak to lift it. (Herzog has said he carries it still.)

In the title sequence to his Australian film, Herzog makes his own songline, I think. It begins with a prayer for rest, in memory of his mother; moves with surprisingly little disruption to the industrial sounds of bauxite mining; the didgeridoo of land rights activist and artist Wandjuk Marika (cast in the film); and finally the psychedelic drones of Klaus Wiese, a sometime member of Popul Vuh. The links between would seem to be via rhymes of landscape, as well as sound. Or maybe, like Chatwin’s interpretation of songlines, there is a bond here between landscape and sound that makes any given path - however obscure - sensible.

Tagged: poets testimonial songlines

Posted on May 9, 2013

Recorded live in London, 1970.

“I thought it was them who were singing it, I thought it was they who were singing it, I thought it was the other who was singing it, I thought it was someone else. But as I moved along I knew it was me, and that I was singing it to myself…

“I promise you friends, that you’re going to be singing this song: it may not be tonight, it may not be tomorrow, but one day you’ll be on your knees and I want you to know the words when the time comes. Because you’re going to have to sing it to yourself, or to another, or to your brother. You’re going to have to learn to sing this song.”

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters testimonial

Posted on March 25, 2013

Bola Sete, “Guitar Lamento,” recorded 1972, released 1975.

John Fahey on Bola Sete, Guitar Player, 1976:

In order to write anything about Bola Sete I must descend from this altitude, this thin air of obscurity, of indirectness, deceit, and hiddenness. I must free myself from what I once considered a great virture - the demonic stance of Inwardness (vide early Kierkegaard). My reactions to Bola Sete and his music are so intense and so subjective that I cannot talk about him and be honest without talking a lot about myself. Please forgive me, Bola. Few living people have had such an enormous influence on my life, my music, my soul, my religion - you name it - as has Bola Sete.

I first saw him playing - solo - in early 1972 at David Allen’s Boarding House in San Francisco. That night, I was high on drugs as I had been for several years, and - as also had been the case for years - I felt that I was one isolated example of an experimental species that God had forgotten about (I was wrong there). I felt I had been - and was still - walking and talking among shadows: “People” who had no depth, who were not related to themselves, did not know anything about themselves - endless, phony, shadow-people. And I was one of them. Only when I played the guitar did I, to some extent, make contact with the real John Fahey and with other people (as yet, I was unable to make contact verbally or emotively).

Bola played for about 45 minutes and grimaced and grunted through the whole set. Something was wrong. He couldn’t “get it out.” I knew how he felt, and I understood. Something was wrong. I was intrigued by his obvious frustration having felt that way myself almost all my life. The performance had been mediocre so far. However, the audience gave him a long ovation, and he reluctantly got up and started to play an encore, still looking frustrated, impotent, mad, seething. I knew that feeling well. But then suddenly he got hot. He got so cooking, he played song after song for another 45 minutes, forgetting (or not caring) that he was doing an encore, playing many of the same songs he had just played. But there was life in this set. I couldn’t sit still. I’d never heard anything like it since Charley Patton, and this was better. This was the turning point in my life, though I didn’t know it until much later. I was transformed, purged - I was not the same. (This was only an aesthetic experience, I think, but it was almost as if it had religious overtones.) I was so “in touch” with life and reality that I was terrified of Bola, myself, of the whole creation. I could hardly speak. What could I say?

Oh, reader, please forgive me, if much of this sounds testimonial. I hate testimonials myself. I have only been a groupie or sycophant once or twice in my whole life, and I got over it very quickly. Sycophancy is a terrible crime - a symbiotic crime implying guilt of more than one person - a crime on the part of the groupie because he makes someone into an idol (commits idolatry), i.e. makes the one he worships into something other than what he, in his existence, really is. It is an act of bad faith and self-deception. But it even gets me sometimes.

I tell you, I’ve heard so much music and so many musicians, I am quite thoroughly jaded. It is extremely difficult to blow my mind in any medium. And yet here I was idolizing someone and his music while knowing that I myself hate idolization - especially of me by others. I am embarrassed when I even “like” someone, much less when I find that I love someone. But I am really embarrased when I idealize someone - and I should be, for that is simply a very, very wrong thing to do to anyone - if you do it for more than a short period. Fortunately, sycophancy is usually a disease of only short duration and will give way to love and friendship (or even hatred, which is better than staying a groupie). If it is only temporary, and one is fully aware of it, it’s okay. It will go away. We are all human beings; but that, I grant you is sometimes hard to remember. Nevertheless, I got over my groupie feelings, and now Bola and I are friends and love each other very much. Thank God.

My first impression that night, as I told a friend at the time, was this: Here is a man who has lived through hell and somehow miraculously got out of it. I went back to the Boarding House several times that week. I found that Bola’s sets have an interesting “plot.” They all begin and end with songs whose emotional contour is pretty, happy, light, peaceful, or ecstatic. But after the first two or three songs, the terrain gets rougher and darker, heavier and weirder. By the middle of his set, Bola is giving you pictures of hell, memories of perdition, demonic music. But then Bola gradually lightens up the spectrum of feeling and leads you out of the cave and into the sunlight, and life is paradise. Only now, one is so changed that one is temporarily aware that life really is paradise after all, the world is an ocean, etc. It is like a breath from the 19th Century or before; a breeze from times when people had passion and significance and were not mere shadows. It is as though something has finally changed.

I talked to Bola’s wife (I was too shaken to speak to him at the time). “How does he keep from going crazy,” I asked her, “when he has so much energy and tension? You can hear it in his music - a lot of passion and tension. How did he get out of hell?” (“How can I get out of hell?” That’s what I really wanted to know.) She told me he “meditates” a lot and does a lot of yoga.

So the next day, I went out and started taking lessons from various meditation teachers and groups and swamis, and later (remembering what my dear friend, Rev. Charles Mitchell had told me about meditating) I began meditating on the name of the deity or person or thing I loved and respected the most. (I went through three or four deities in the next few years until quite mysteriously I finally knew which “deity” had chosen me, and also knew that I had always known it but would not face this fact.) As soon as I started meditating, I forgot to want my previously perpetual supply of drugs.

Shortly thereafter, I listened to a record I had cut while on various drugs and was astounded to find that, although I had thought while cutting this album that I was playing fast songs fast, I had in fact been playing them very, very slowly and boringly. (That album had received reviews which all referred to my special “inner sense of space and peace” - it was nothing but drugs.) This record now sounded to me as though it were moving through thick glue. I wanted to play fast songs fast like Bola did. So I asked my friend Jolly to back me at the Boarding House for a week. I wanted to see if I could play straight, and I did it, I played so well I amazed myself, and - judging from their applause - the audience, too. I was so proud of myself that I told the opening night crowd: “That was the first time I ever played straight in public in my life.” They applauded again. I believe they actually found some joy in my achievement (even though it was not me that did the achieving). I started imitating Bola’s rhythms and letting myself play enharmonic chords and tunes on stage that I had never played anywhere except in my living room when I was alone. I thought, “If Bola can be that free, maybe I can get away with it, too.” If they understood Bola, they might understand me. And they did. Suddenly, I noticed I was gradually becoming free.

Later that summer, with a brand new girl friend (Marilyn), a brand new cat, and an almost brand new car, I chased swamis and yoga instructors all over the U.S. and Canada trying to learn about them and about what techniques were best for musicians and for me. I was playing the “ashram circuit.” With that girl, I owned the world that summer, conquered it - and not through mere aesthetics. It was conquered through the power of love, and although this ecstasy (this feeling that life is paradise if one will only walk into the garden, this ability to love, to get along with Marilyn to the extent that I did) was given to me, I still associate it all - in a way I don’t understand - with Bola Sete and his music.

I still didn’t (and don’t) know very much about Bola Sete except that he is in touch with himself, and in touch with his roots, which are not in this effeminate age, this passionless, unspirited generation. Life is paradise despite this, or maybe because things are getting worse and worse. I don’t understand these things with my head. But I do understand that the entire creation will be resurrected; not just people: Animals, rocks, trees, mountains, germs, clams, snails, turtles, rattlesnakes, hippos, spiders. I hear that in Bola’s music - something most people have forgotten how to even want.

Bola Sete? He’s kind of crazy, like me. He made a lot of jazz records with other people. But, he tells me (now that I have gotten over being a sycophant and gotten to know him a little - he’s a very complex character) nobody would ever let him be himself and play what he wanted to play, i.e. his own songs, solo. He says he saw me a couple of times playing in the San Francisco Bay Area and that I did exactly what he wanted to do. “Nobody else is as crazy as I am except you and your company,” he said. “They [the other companies] won’t let me do my own thing, man. But you understand, because you are as crazy as me. Ha, ha, ha. You have to be yourself. You can’t do anything else. May God have mercy on you. I record for you. You call my lawyer. I love you. Ha, ha, ha. You are crazy!”

Although it doesn’t sound like it at first, Bola, it turns out, speaks English. He looks like a demon and makes a lot of conversational flubs, but his feelings are so overt that the mistakes don’t matter - there is so much life in him. He says he gets up at 4:00 AM to meditate. He listens only to Indian (Asian) music (he’s another orientophile), which he plays while he does his yoga asanas. He chews ginseng. He tells stories about himself which have an Iberian, picaresque flavor (funny as hell).

The majority of Bola’s songs are in E major, standard tuning, a few in A (major and minor). Sometimes he plays in the key of D, with the low E string dropped down to a D. He plays in the ionian, dorian, mixolydian, and phrygian modes (especially E phrygian), and also in the harmonic minor and whole tone scales a la Debussy and Ravel. He loves dissonance, but always lets it resolve itself just in time - a breathtaking, daredevil stunt. He is somewhat reclusive (like me), but likes the beach (like me). He usually refuses to play where booze is served, though he sometimes does play such joints. He gets bored (like me) if asked technical or objective, biographical questions. He wears funny, Haight Ashbury-vintage clothing which his wife makes for him. His music is so good it’s eerie - eerie because it comes from a different time, a different place, when men felt different things that we can no longer love or experience except as an echo or phantom in the best of art works. Sete, a complex character whose roots are in a bygone era that now seems bizarre, though actually the reverse is true. Things, now, are bizarre, and getting more and more crazy every day. Bola’s music comes from a time long gone, when people were closer to themselves, God, and each other.

It is an honor for me to have my favorite guitar player on my label. Most of the songs on Ocean [Takoma, C-1049] were outtakes which we bought from another company that couldn’t figure out what to do with them, and therefore wasn’t going to issue them. We were most fortunate to rescue them.

Most of Bola’s music is eclectic and nongeneric. Take a song like “Black Mommy.” Now, if you didn’t know anything about Bola (and we still don’t know much; as with Anton Bruckner, we probably will never get the whole story), what musical tradition, period, or era would you guess this song came from? Tasmania? Easter Island? Next door? It comes from everywhere and nowhere. The subconscious really is universal. Bola Sete’s music is the best reminder of this that I have ever heard. He is a man of great spirit and great depth.

Objectivity again: Bola plays percussively, vertically, with a very heavy and insistent thumb. His playing is very masculine (the word is an anachronism). He plays erratically and restlessly like Boll Weavil Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Bill Monroe. But he also has inner peace and breadth (things I was once accused of having precisely when I did not). Rhythm and dynamics are constantly changing. Just before he has completed the elaboration of the first musical statement in a song, he is off into another tune fragment which is only suggested. Though not actually played, you hear it later in your head all the same.

Bola’s playing gives the impression (and like my playing it is a false impression) of being very improvisatory. His songs, on the other hand, tend to be very short and terse (unlike mine), without undue repetition. But like me, he tries to recreate each song each time he plays it, which is in effect to destroy it, as I have described elsewhere [see GP, Feb. ‘75]. The only elements of a song which change from one performance to the next are the number of repetitions of each idea. The order of the ideas stays pretty much the same. But the speed and intensity at which they are played may vary; if Bola doesn’t like the room he is playing in, or the people he is playing for, he tends to play lousy. I do the same. We both play the way we feel, but within a rigid structure. We play that way because we have to - we can’t do anything else. God help us.

Tagged: sad hits instrumentals trad instruments in non trad music testimonial

Posted on March 25, 2013

“Bloom cannot take part in the world in an inner way. He only ever goes into it in exception to himself. That’s why he has such a singular disposition towards distraction, towards deja-vus, towards clichés, and above all why he has such an atrophy of memory that confines him in an eternal present; it’s also why he’s so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer him abstract sensations…” Bloom Theory, Tiqqun (translation from the Anarchist Library)

Posted on March 25, 2013

“Revolver, Parlophone, PMC 7009, 08.05.1966, mono. Very Rare First pressing with mispressing! Side 2 matrix no.: XEX 606-1 has ‘Remix 11’ of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. When Revolver was initially mixed a different master for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was sent off to be pressed. This mix is known as ‘Remix 11’. Although subtle, it is different to the standard ‘Remix 8’ which was ultimately to replace it. The story goes that each group member was given the first copies from the production line and John went to listen to it. But, it turned out that he was unhappy with the mix or that the wrong one had been used and he informed George Martin. Production was then stopped as the new masters were cut and the pressing plates were replaced. First presses have a side 2 matrix number of XEX 606-1 whereas the standard presses have XEX 606-2 and beyond. Garrod & Lofthouse Ltd. or Ernest J.Day & Co. front laminated flipback cover. Black & Yellow label with ‘The Gramophone Co. Ltd.’ perimeter print and ‘Sold in U.K. subject…’ text. Plain white or sepia ‘LP advertising’ inner sleeves. Tax code ‘KT’ by spin-hole. Matrix numbers: Side 1: XEX 605-2; Side 2: XEX 606-1.”

Tagged: the case for mono

Posted on March 20, 2013

“Here Today,” from Pet Sounds, 1966. This track is notorious for the audible chatter in the background of the instrumental break (1:48ff) - proof to me not only of how closely people listen to this record, but of the depth and detail in Brian Wilson’s mono production.

Less well known is the complete catalog of noises on Beach Boys recordings. Thank you obsessive fans:

Tagged: the case for mono

Posted on March 19, 2013

If I read Jonathan Sterne’s argument correctly, the mp3 is about data compression - the elimination of information unnecessary to message.

An analog event contains unintended information; its compressed digital form has only the intended info. Hence the lack of mystery in mp3s.

What if we surrender ownership claims over intended meanings? Aren’t those shared in any case – aren’t they messages for others?

And what if we reassign intellectual property to what is unintended – the information that cannot be compressed – that cannot be translated…

In other words, we own our poetry – we do not own our ideas.

Posted on March 18, 2013

“River Deep - Mountain High,” 1966. Phil Spector paid Ike Turner to stay out of the studio while he produced what he believed was his greatest record. When it failed to chart, he retired. (It would take the Beatles to really get him back into the studio.) This version is even more concise than the 7”, dropping the second verse and cutting straight to the middle 8 and the frenzied conclusion. Was it a jukebox edit…? I haven’t been able to trace it, but maybe a record collector out there can help me out.

Tagged: the case for mono

Posted on March 18, 2013

“By every audiophiliac measure of performance, save one, mono recordings surprise us: frequency response extension; authority of bass; lack of treble clatter; size and depth of stage; correctness of timbres; and presence (where a good mono is often better than stereo): the palpable illusion of a musician playing right there before you. The harmonic structure from a mono LP is likely to be more coherently presented, resulting in a timbral purity and convincing focus and power that stereo rarely achieves without painstaking setup (which of course you should have anyhow). Vocals have the opportunity to bloom without strain or electronic resonance. In part, as in early stereo, this is because everything in the recording chain from microphone to tape recorder to disc cutter is tube amplified: the overload and distortion characteristics are more consistent with the dynamic expansiveness of live music. The sense of weight together with micro-dynamic resolution catches your average audiophile completely off guard; it’s so unexpected.

“The one area where stereo can be counted to improve on mono is instrumental placement, for obvious reasons. Locational cues, however, are not the only means to sort out what’s going on; neither are they the best means to understand the musical argument on its own terms. My audiophile visitors puzzle about how it can be easier to follow the inner voices in mono than in the corresponding stereo version. I believe this is related to the mono LPs superior harmonic and melodic integrity. It’s not that the principle of stereo is the problem. Far from it. It’s that recording engineers have too much of a good time experimenting with the delights of re-producing an event than in recreating it.”

- from “The Case for Collecting Monophonic LPs,” by Leonard Norwitz, enjoythemusic.com

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on March 17, 2013

Headspace

“There are large errors in sound position perception associated with headphones, especially for the most important visual direction, out in front…it is very difficult to externalize sounds and avoid the inside-the-head sensation.” (Kyriakakis, C., 1998, Fundamental and technological limitations of immersive audio systems, Proceedings of the IEEE)

“The position of the image is located to the left or right as expected…but the image seems to be within the listener’s head – it is not perceived to be in the real external world.” (Hartmann, W.M., 1999, How we localize sound, Physics Today)

[Both quotes found in a paper by Andria Poiarkoff, Changes in spatial perception through headphones, Sonic Arts Research Centre 2008]

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on March 16, 2013

I saw a woman fall from her bicycle in the middle of the street. What happened, I asked? She took her headphones off and said, “I was totally self absorbed. Suddenly I realized there was a car in the road. I braked and fell.” The car had not been very close to her - the driver was there, window down, he looked bewildered. She was ok.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on March 13, 2013

“When you listen to your stereo speakers, the right ear hears sound not just from the right channel, the sound intended for it, but also from the left channel, the sound intended for the left ear. The same thing happens when you look at a flat representation of a three-dimensional space: the right eye sees what the left eye is looking at. Cancelling the ‘crosstalk’ is the key to creating an illusion of depth. It’s easy to do with your eyes. ‘You just put a physical barrier between the two eyes, show each one a slightly different image, and, presto, you see in three dimensions,’ [Edgar] Choueiri explains.

“The same principle holds for sound, and the same solutions are in some ways possible. ‘To get binaural sound is not that hard,’ Choueiri says. ‘You can do crosstalk cancellation with a mattress! Really! Just place a mattress between your two speakers, press your nose against one end so that each ear has a different channel, and you get a very robust three-dimensional effect.’

”…You’d think headphones would do the trick, neatly dividing the aural feeds. But, Choueiri explains, in the real world, when you move your head, the sound signals change a little, and the brain knows where the sounds are coming from. That doesn’t happen with headphones, so the mind decides that the sound source can’t be ‘out there.’ Instead, as Choueiri says, ‘the sound image collapses into your head.’“

[From an interview published by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Jan 28 2013 - italics added. The premise behind engineer Edgar Choueiri’s quest for “ideal” sound is brilliantly taken to task by writer Jonathan Sterne toward the end of the article - Gopnik makes clear that he himself doesn’t accept Sterne’s argument, but to his credit represents it well enough that it is easy for others to, including me.]

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on March 13, 2013

…Self Storage, cont.

K. often indulged in research. He considered it an indulgence not because it interfered with his duties at the self-storage facility - there was little to do, he never felt remiss - but because he knew that like other indulgences, research led him down a path that threatened not to return, like the longest, dark hallways in the building. Each topic stretched beyond his vision.

Although materials in the facility were limited, K. had over time amassed an impressive library of abandoned books. Unlike the paintings he continually found in the hallways, books were almost never left out for the trash - those few that were, he tended to reject as well: beach novels with creased covers; outdated desk calendars; self-help books with broken spines that fell open to what K. took to be the first and last page ever consulted in them.

But more than a few of the units K. opened yielded carefully cared for, even alphabetized collections of books. These were largely hardcover, scholarly volumes - the detritus of academic careers. There were boxes of excess from overfilled bookcases, labeled for future possible use however unlikely; multiple copies of an author’s own works, still unpacked from the publisher; colleagues’ books, personally dedicated on the title pages but otherwise crisply unread; massive, fusty multi-volume sets later reprinted in more convenient but less charming editions; texts for courses long deleted from university offerings, larded with decaying bookmarks and notepapers.

It was in a reference book on literary terms that K. first found mention of mora. Puzzling over the problem of the clock with its two simultaneous times, K. stopped in this particular encyclopedia at the following:

“DURATION: One of the three intonational characteristics of spoken sound, the other two being stress (see ACCENT) and pitch (q.v.). In poetry, d. concerns the timing of syllables, words, and lines, such timing being either actual or conventional - much more so the latter than the former.”

This distinction felt immediately useful to K. – the conventional reading of the clock was one particular time. But the actual reading of the clock was two moments simultaneously, which corresponded to K.’s actual experience of time.

K. was elated at this newfound vocabulary. So much was explained! He thought of the paintings he had rescued: each depicted an image in conventional time. But the object of the painting itself - from its creation to its rejection to K.’s adoption of it to its present place in the building - this K. could see in actual time, like a slideshow whose frame kept changing, though the image at its center remained constant.

Posted on February 20, 2013

Posted on March 12, 2013

Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, Paris 1970. Footage shot for the French television show Pop Deux.

At the beginning of this clip, Kevin Ayers talks about how his favorite way to make music is at a cafe, with friends and a bottle of wine. Making music on stage is another matter - it’s often too serious, too heavy. He prefers to make music with jokes, music to communicate with one another rather than music with a “message.”

That itself is a kind of heavy message, in a pataphysical way. As Lol Coxhill once said to Ptolemaic Terrascope, “What we want to do is important, even if it’s not very important.”

The band illustrates this theory with “Clarence in Wonderland,” preceded by an instrumental improvisation, just as on the album Shooting at the Moon where the intro is called “Underwater.” That’s Lol Coxhill on sax, Mike Oldfield on bass, David Bedford on keyboard, and Mick Fincher on drums.

If the problem is the difference between music in the cafe, and music on stage, Kevin Ayers’ solution is to play music on stage as if it’s a cafe. But even that, as his biography attests, wasn’t always a solution.

Tagged: anglo france no need to use a pa music with friends

A Hawk and a Hacksaw, “I Am Not a Gambling Man,” 2009.

Naomi and I have toured to some very generic rock clubs together with Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, but wherever we were they made the room feel like it was made for music. And if the PA wasn’t… they stepped away from it. This film captures them in their home state of New Mexico, and has forever changed my understanding of the “fade-out.”

“Yes, we still play weddings, bar mitzvahs, circumcisions, quinceañeras, saints day feasts, general parties, etc.” -

http://ahawkandahacksaw.net/

Tagged: sad hits no need to use a pa singing drummers

Posted on February 19, 2013

“Summer Morning” is the track that Tony Wilson plays briefly in his interview with Jonathan Richman - Jonathan at his most Blakelike. From Rock n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers (1977), featuring the great D. Sharpe on drums.

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters no need to use a pa

Posted on February 18, 2013

Jonathan Richman interviewed by Tony Wilson on Grenada Television, June 1978.

A video archive’s catalogue listing explains:

Singer and songwriter Jonathan Richman (The Modern Lovers) interviewed by Tony Wilson (journalist and music entrepreneur) for ‘What’s On’ North West listings programme

Interview by Tony Wilson (journalist and music entrepreneur)

Jonathan Richman, singer and songwriter SOT
- Discusses William Blake and his own childlike attitude (gets emotional, sobbing slightly)
- says beginning to like England

Tagged: anglo singer songwriters poets no need to use a pa

Posted on February 18, 2013

…Self Storage, cont.

While Frieda continued to search the files, K.’s mind returned to his earlier days at the facility. The messengers that used to deliver his salary appeared before him, in their various outfits appropriate to motorcycle transport and the changing weather. In winter, one would appear bound into gear so tightly it seemed momentum alone kept him upright, as he stiffly entered the room, handed K. his envelope, and pivoted back out like a trolley turned round at the end of the line. In autumn, the rider always looked windswept even though he never removed his helmet, with leaves and dust following him in and out of the room. In summer, K. would take note of the various pads which slowly emerged from under heavier cover, a protective structure revealed more than the body itself. In spring the messenger often arrived wet or, worse yet for the office, covered in mud, sometimes with goggles splattered so thoroughly K. wondered if the rider even saw him, rising from his chair and accepting the envelope with a courteous nod that K. intended as a gesture of camaraderie between the two halves of this operation: one static (K.), the other in constant returning motion, like an asteroid.

“What do you remember of Barnabas?” asked Frieda, still flipping through files with a rhythm that seemed to have put K. into a trance. He looked up - though he did not know what he had been looking down at - and Frieda turned to meet his eyes.

“Barnabas?” he said, helplessly. “I don’t think I have ever known anyone by that name.”

“You may not have known his name, but you knew him,” said Frieda, matter-of-factly. Her confidence was contagious. K. immediately felt sure he had known a Barnabas. But that seemed to be all he knew about the matter. Frieda coached him:

“The messenger, the envelope…”

K. felt blinded for a moment, as he realized the messengers of those years might all have been one. He never spoke to them, so he could not distinguish their voices. He never saw their eyes, at least not clearly, due to their goggles. And what he took to be their various bodies might only have been their different costumes, as the seasons and weather changed. Barnabas? K. tried to match the name to all the messengers of his memory. He found no discordance – like the landlady, who appeared in K.’s mind as so many landladies, K. had multiplied the Barnabases, filing each of his appearances under a different heading: Messenger 1, Messenger 2, and so on, until the messengers stopped appearing.

“But what happened to Barnabas?” he asked Frieda, at the end of this internal adjustment.

Frieda’s eyes narrowed. “You keep secrets, don’t you, K.?”

K. could not tell if she was asking him to keep a secret, or if she was accusing him of having withheld information. He waited for her next statement, to clarify the situation.

But Frieda said nothing further, she returned to her files. K.’s mind returned to Barnabas. Had they never spoken to one another? In the very back of the drawer, K. found a single encounter - could it have been the first? - that included language. It was a messenger whose lower face had been visible, it must have been in fair weather. The beard was dark but thin. The lips were delicate, curled in what K. took to be a mean expression until he heard the voice they helped shape: sing-songy, lingering on tones in a flexible rhythm based neither on the syllable nor stress but on what K. later learned is called “mora.”

It was in fact the file of research that K. had done on mora which finally halted Frieda’s march of information.

Posted on January 15, 2013

“Sharing isn’t immoral - it’s a moral imperative.”

- Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Posted on January 13, 2013

“I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest. In Harpo’s pupils glows the same spectral light to be observed in Picasso’s.

“Harpo adores eating avocados, which are served to him with a sauce that is absolutely of the same color as his red wig (the films of the Marxes lose much by not being in color). He adores ‘soft’ watches. He adores those tiny and appealing furry ‘trombones’ that fly like cockchafers above flowers. He adores the vague forms of humidity stains on the walls of houses not yet finished. And he adores the landscapes of Watteau, to which he corresponds chronologically and poetically.

“Because Harpo is the least modern of contemporary figures, he brings with him always that relaxed light, the duet of all those imponderable moths of the past; and this to such a point that he succeeds miraculously in transforming any place where he may be into an astounding atmosphere of legend. Harpo makes an appearance, marvelously out of his element, in the most modern gleaming apartments, nickel tubing everywhere, carrying hitched behind him all the straw, the erotic hay, all that odor composed of lambs, butterflies and heliotrope with constitutes the secret of the troubling perfume of Watteau and his century. Harpo arrives, and there clings to his hallucinatory curly wig all the snuff, the songs of the nightingale and the swallows’ droppings of the shadowed parks of the Embarkment for Cythera - that painting astounding among all others because it is painted like a true opera, with music from all the invisible harps of light and from the plain chant of the landscape, all culminating in the deep chest tones that the sinking sun exhales over the disarranged tresses of the great trees; and these in their turn are lived in by a thousand passages of Harpo, which serve as a nest for the languorous, strident, passionate duets of the thousand couples of blackbirds, canaries, lambs and minute steaks (because for Harpo there exists no essential difference between a butterfly and a minute steak, anything which bleeds with truly poetic truculence is his prey - Harpo devours all with the aid of that corrosive saliva par excellence that is ‘imaginative phosphorescence’). Because one must say for once and for all: ‘HARPO IS A SPECTER’…

“If one were to turn out the light, Harpo, the specter, would continue to shine, one could in the blackest night continue to read a newspaper by the phosphorescent glow of his wig alone.”

- Salvador Dalí writing in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1937. His sketch of Harpo accompanied the article. The photo ran in the Los Angeles Examiner earlier that year; Harpo is playing a harp strung with barbed wire, a gift from the artist.

Posted on January 6, 2013

…Self Storage, cont.

When K. looked up, Frieda was in the doorway. His expression lagged behind his nervous system, so although he was feeling surprise to the point of shock, Frieda saw a blank stare. She stared back.

Frieda’s stare chased K.’s surprise back inward, the initial message never reached his muscles. His shock, driven beneath the skin and toward the heart, froze him to the core. After a few moments, he realized he could not move. Frieda continued to stare.

Never letting go of his eyes with hers, she moved toward one of the filing cabinets against the walls, and opened it deliberately. Only then did she release K.’s gaze, turning to look at the folders within.

“You dust the files?” she said, casually. Her tone had no relation to her body language, which was alert as an animal. But her speech was the lazy chat of a bored co-worker. “I have never seen such clean files. When did you last open this?”

The direct question freed K.’s tongue. He knew the answer. “Last week,” he said. “I dust all the files, in a rotating pattern that begins to the left of the door from your point of view - stage right, you might say. That case is the first I dust in the sequence, which began again last week.” K.’s thoroughness was automatic, and allowed him to speak fluently about such a topic even though his initial message of surprise at seeing Frieda was now finally reaching his extremities, which began to tremble slightly. He stammered his next remark, which wasn’t as automatic: “Do you keep files too?” he asked, in what he felt was an effort at personal engagement.

Frieda didn’t answer until she had flipped through the entire top drawer. She opened the next one down. “It’s a hobby,” she said over her shoulder. “To each his own.”

K. was startled again, this time by her words. As Frieda flipped through the rest of the first filing cabinet to the left of the door, K. felt his memory being fanned through as well. Was there a thumb tab with this phrase, he wondered? Was there a file with his name on it?

Posted on January 3, 2013

…Self Storage, cont.

K. felt unsettled after the encounter with Art and Jerry. Their brawl was unpleasant to witness, and at such close range could even have been dangerous. But more disturbing to K. was that it reminded him of his meeting with Frieda. She, too, had been looking for him in particular, though he could not imagine why.

It was near noon, an hour K. often found himself thinking of Frieda because of the timing of her singular visit. When he returned to the office, a nostalgic tune was playing. Lately K. had noticed that the quality of the music in his office changed with the hour of day - even, it sometimes seemed to him, with his differing activities. Now a mellow mix of woodwinds introduced a World War II-era crooner, delivering his ballad with enough vibrato to establish sincerity, but not so much as to sell the emotion in his words.

A rose must remain with the sun and the rain
Or its lovely promise won’t come true
To each his own, to each his own
And my own is you [1]

The logic, as well as the singer’s detached tone, gave K. pause. If my own were you, would each still have his or her own? Or is ownership of another a dissolution of both, a transformation where each and own are no longer distinguishable? Such a union brought Art and Jerry back to mind, but K. decided they were too distinct to illustrate it accurately. In their stead, he hit upon the idea of a snake that had swallowed its tail, coiling into an ever smaller point.

This mysterious image would apply only if the each and own were mutual, K. reasoned. If my own is you, but your own is not me, then the snake would be swallowing not itself but another. To an observer, that postprandial snake might be indistinguishable from before the encounter, there would be no transformation. Except, thought K. with a shudder, the own would have disappeared completely from the scene, consumed by the each.

The singer continued:

What good is a song if the words don’t belong
And a dream must be a dream for two

A surprisingly chipper male choir joined in for the refrain:

No good alone to each his own
For me there’s you

K. took note of the change this presented. The end of the first chorus - “My own is you,” with its promise of mystical transformation - had become a simple statement of desire: “For me there’s you.” In the surface noise of the old recording, K. now heard the hissing of the snake. The middle eight that followed belonged to its leathery voice, the voice of the each:

If a flame is to grow there must be a glow
To open each door there’s a key
I need you I know, I can’t let you go

The turnaround was a desperate last cry from the own:

Your touch means too much to me!

K. felt drained. As he slumped in his chair, the band took over the melody, bashing it out to give the dancers a boost until the solo sax reclaimed it for melancholy. The final chorus was epilogue, sung by the sated snake (with backing chorus):

Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they’ll never know what love can do
To each his own, I’ve found my own
One and only you

Loneliness had won the day, though not without a struggle.

[1] Eddy Howard and his Orchestra, “To Each His Own” (Ray Evans, Jay Livingstone)

Posted on December 28, 2012

Stuart Sherman performing “Eleventh Spectacle,” New York City 1978.

I learned about Stuart Sherman’s work from a retrospective called Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing, at NYU’s 80WSE gallery in 2009. But having grown up in New York in the 1970s, it seemed entirely familiar. Had I walked by him at some point, performing in Washington Square Park…? Had I flipped the channel and stumbled on him in one of those awkward, creepy local access shows…? Even if I hadn’t, it is easy to fit his performances into my existing memories of the time because they match - the colors, the clothes, the gestures, the irony and the tenderness. And the AIDS epidemic, which killed Stuart Sherman before those years could become nostalgia.

From a New York Times review by Holland Cotter, “A Tabletop Conjurer, Rediscovered”:

“Sherman’s signature pieces, which he called ‘spectacles,’ were evanescent and minute. They featured just one performer, himself, and were initially presented in his downtown Manhattan apartment for friends and in city parks for passers-by.

“His stage was a small folding table; his props everyday items: a pen, a light bulb, eyeglasses, a roll of tape, toys. The performance consisted of him rapidly, usually soundlessly, always precisely arranging and rearranging the objects, putting one on top of another, taping some down, tossing some away, creating the equivalent of still lifes seen in a flipbook.

“Each spectacle lasted just a few minutes.”

Tagged: poets tabletop acoustics songs without words

Posted on December 27, 2012

“Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed.”

- John Cage, A Year from Monday (1967)

Tagged: poets tabletop acoustics

Posted on December 26, 2012

Vinicius de Moraes and Toquinho performing “Tarde em Itapoã” in Milan, October 1978, for Musicalmente Dallo Studio 3 (a Swiss Radio 3 broadcast).

Toward the end of his life, poet/diplomat/lyricist/bon vivant Vinicius took to performing his songs seated at a table, accompanied by a bottle of whiskey and his favorite guitarist at the time, Toquinho. He told anecdotes and sang. I have never been to Itapuã, a beach town near Salvador, but Vinicius dreams of it for me in this song about nothing to do but watch the world go round: Bem devagar ir sentindo / A terra toda a rodar.

Vinicius called Toquinho, “The great successor to Baden Powell… Never, except at the beginning of my partnership with Baden, have I had such a creative link as with Toquinho.” High praise from a lyricist who worked also with Jobim, and nearly every other Brazilian songwriter of his era.

This song in particular was pivotal in establishing their collaboration. Here is Toquinho’s own anecdote about it, in a rough translation:

“We had done about three songs when Vinicius wrote these lyrics. He would have given them to Caymmi for the music, because he did not yet have confidence in me. That’s what I imagine at least, he never told me. But I wanted to set that lyric to music… So without telling Vinicius, I took it from his typewriter and with me to São Paulo. It took me a long time to complete the melody without moving a single syllable of the original text… I went back to Bahia, with the poem and the music. Vinicius listened to it, and said nothing. Then he called me and told me he was not going to give any more songs to Caymmi. This was how I earned the poet’s trust! A whole beautiful poem, so I did not move a comma, did not change a word. It’s hard to keep a whole lyric perfect like that.”

Tagged: sad hits brazil poets tabletop acoustics

Posted on December 25, 2012

Baden Powell performing “Samba do Avião” (Jobim) live in Paris, 1999. (The second song, cut off at the end, is “Naquele Tempo” by Pixinguinha.)

Baden Powell de Aquino - named, by his father, for the founder of the Boy Scouts - was a prodigy, an instrumentalist of such speed and skill that his talents could overshadow his art. By mid-career, he seemed to have burned himself out in every manner, and retreated into a kind of retirement. But near the end of his life, having abandoned the addictions that plagued him, he returned to public life. At this performance in Paris the year before his death, it’s as if he has slowed his playing to a human pace, so the rest of us can see the extraordinarily playful, inventive, nervy approach he always took toward his instrument. The song is by Tom Jobim, written about his fear of flying, and joy of landing in Rio after a bumpy ride.

Tagged: sad hits brazil instrumentals prodigies

Posted on December 8, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

It was in that very hallway that K. was startled one day by two young men - boys, perhaps, judging by their body language and constant nudging and pushing of one another. But if these were boys they had men’s faces: lined, careworn faces mismatched to their open-mouthed expressions.

K. never addressed the patrons he ran across - it was so rare in any case - because he felt they were there for private reasons, and as a representative of the facility he should act in a manner commensurate with that trust. His habit (one could hardly call it a habit, he had so little occasion to practice it, but it had been thoroughly worked out in advance) was to make his eyes available, though without seeking contact. If contact were made, he would acknowledge it directly and then avert his gaze, not in a manner that communicated actual aversion of course, but simply that he needed his eyes again to help direct him on his path. Above all, he decided, he would refrain from casual pleasantries like those he had heard his landlady use so often. “How are you?” seemed ridiculous in any case, given the anonymous nature of the storage business. “Nice weather” was equally inappropriate, since they would almost certainly be indoors, and largely in the dark. Other introductory phrases he rejected because they seemed to require a second exchange: a banal introductory remark such as, “Hello, I am the caretaker of this facility,” or a cheerful business inanity like, “Always glad to see the customers happy!” were gambits that might not lead directly to an exit. Safest, K. decided, was to say nothing, and follow the path of his eyes.

This time, the inanities came pouring out of the two men, however. “You are the caretaker!” said one, a bit taller than his compatriot, although the difference in height seemed to happen at the floor, since above the waist he was actually quite compact. His eyes stared at two points on either side of K.’s head, missing his form entirely. A cap was pushed back on his forehead, which like his body was quite short but sat above an elongated face punctuated by an open jaw, extending it even further down toward his gangly legs. His voice was loud, certainly much louder than necessary in the cavernous area of the building they found themselves in. And its echo was shrill, as if only the most grating tones managed to find the walls around them, the more mellow ones falling in a heap at K.’s feet.

K. looked to the other, not with surprise so much as curiosity. “You are the caretaker!” he said in turn, though with a different emphasis. This one was squat in the legs, but with a huge barrel chest that eventually swelled nearly to the height of his companion. His head was rounder than would allow for a cap. He had no hair, but this lent him the air of a baby more than an old man. Ears stuck out from this childish head at odd angles, which seemed to change as he rotated toward his companion to repeat, in a more concise variation: “The caretaker!”

“I am indeed, gentlemen,” said K., maintaining the formality he felt appropriate. He said nothing further, in the hope that this exchange would go only one round. Eyes back to the path, he leaned forward and was about to take his next step when both men slid in front of him, like a sliding door closing together. They were surprisingly adroit in this maneuver, K. noticed, as if out of long habit.

“Don’t you want to know our names?” said the taller one, sounding hurt. “We know yours!” added the shorter one, for which he received a swift kick in the shin from his companion. This was returned with a punch in the arm. Which led to a shoving match between the two so violent, K. was forced to step backwards, rather than ahead as he had planned. The scuffling subsided.

“Thank you for your kindness,” said K, trying to diffuse what he judged was becoming a difficult situation. “However, please be assured your anonymity is safe with me, as a professional representative of this self-storage facility.”

The two stared at K., the tall one’s eyes drifting further apart, the short one’s ears waving forward and back like feelers. A silent moment passed between the three, bonding them together in the atmosphere of the building. Dust disturbed by the pair’s scuffling began to settle back onto horizontal surfaces: latches, the tops of paintings, the toes of their shoes.

“So you know us?” said the tall one at last, pushing some of the floating dust toward K. with his breath. “Anonymous is what we are supposed to be, but you knew that too.”

“I bet he doesn’t know your real name, Art,” said the short one. The tall one punched him in the stomach. “That is my real name!” he said. “Just like yours is Jerry.”

Jerry returned the punch, but to the jaw. “Jeremiah!” he said in a strangled voice. “Arthur!” said Art, throwing Jerry to the dusty floor. The two rolled past K., who stepped aside and decided to pursue the original plan, averting his eyes and continuing his path.

Posted on November 30, 2012

Nina Simone and Emile Latimer performing “Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair,” U. Mass Amherst, June 1969.

A few months later, Simone and Latimer would record this same arrangement at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in New York, for her live Black Gold album. Latimer is a drummer who was touring with Richie Havens when Simone drafted him as a guitarist for her band. He remembered Simone telling him, about his version of “Black is the Color”: “You played and wrote what I wanted to write. You’ll sing that in my show.”

Tagged: anglo folk and soul trad song form in non trad music singing drummers

Posted on November 23, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

Eventually, all the available hallways were filled with images; there was hardly any wall space left. And yet the paintings kept appearing.

It was about this time that the messengers stopped arriving with his pay envelope, and K. started to open units he felt sure had been abandoned. The signs of abandonment were subtle: heavy dust on the latch; a rusty lock; hinges that showed no sign of having been separated recently. But the surest indication, K. found, was a lack of trash - paintings, specifically. While he could never be sure from which particular unit a given painting had come, K. felt confident that the paintings were not carried far within the building. A painting left at the end of an aisle was, he believed, almost certainly from that aisle, or at most one or two aisles away.

After a period of finding no trash in a given area, K. began more detailed examinations, such as placing bits of paper on latches, or tracing a line of chalk before doorways, to see if they were eventually disturbed. In time, K. became adept at detecting any sign of life that had made its way lately through a space. And he grew even better at the contrary: sensing a lack of life, not only in the present but projected backwards.

An abandoned unit presented this lifeless sensation from the outside; but from the inside, behind the closed door, K. could sometimes feel something else - lives embodied in objects. In the end, it was the contrast between these two - the abandoned exterior and the occupied interior - that determined which units K. would open. He thought of it as a ratio: the greater the difference in life, the more likely K. was to cut the lock.

Would an empty unit, visited regularly, possess this same ratio? K. worried about the potential miscalculation; but reasoned that in this case, the owner may not resent or even notice the intrusion, since there would be nothing inside to take.

The first unit K. opened - the one with camping supplies that had so helpfully sustained him - he converted into a place to keep the additional paintings that kept appearing in the halls. The camping equipment had been neatly stored on racks, which K. was able to repurpose for smaller, easel works. But there were a couple of larger images that had surfaced recently, which would not fit in any kind of rack; indeed, they were too big to hang in any of the hallways, even if there were still space on the walls. These he decided to hang in the unit itself.

The paintings inside this unit could not serve as signs, as they were invisible to K. on his daily rounds. Nevertheless, K. found that knowing they were in a particular unit changed his sense of that part of the building. His alternating sensations of occupation and abandonment - flipping back and forth like alternating current - stopped when he entered this hallway, which felt steady, or static. Was it because he himself was now occupying one of its spaces? he wondered. Or was it because that space no longer presented a binary choice, or a ratio, but was in a sense both wholly occupied and wholly abandoned - layered one over the other like the two times told by the clock.

Posted on November 16, 2012

Richie Havens improvising “Freedom” at Woodstock, 1969.

The first performer at Woodstock, Havens was asked to play as long as he could because the other acts hadn’t been able to get through the crush of traffic to the venue. He left the stage several times, but was told to go back and continue. At the end of 2 hours 45 minutes, he was out of songs, and improvised this on the spiritual, “Motherless Child” - linking the exuberance of the moment (“Freedom!”) to the weight of the past. He walks off mic, and then off stage, still playing…

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters folk and soul found language

Posted on November 6, 2012

My favorite Van Morrison album - and the only one I’m allowed play in the house, so long as it’s not too often - is his worst-selling, almost career-ending release Veedon Fleece (1974). What keeps me coming back to this track in particular is the improvisatory song structure overlaid with carefully planned orchestration. The strings are a surprise every time - they emerge unexpectedly (how could such a meandering, free-form arrangement include strings?), but by the end have completely taken over. I love the breakdown near the 7 minute mark, where it sounds like Van has simply stopped playing, and the strings just keep going, like a pianist vamping until the horn player continues his solo.

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters folk and soul

Posted on November 4, 2012

So sad to discover music through an obituary, but that’s what recently happened for me with Terry Callier… To be precise, discovered through the UK’s love for an American artist I’d never before heard. Grateful to his fans, and to him - in retrospect - for his music. This ambitious suite of a song is a showcase for the range of his references: folk, psychedelia, soul, jazz, orchestrated pop… I have a lot of listening to do.

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters folk and soul

Posted on November 2, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

The painted clock was placed in an inset that few would have occasion to enter, but which K. always checked during his rounds. Unlike the warehouse areas of the building, with their efficient rows of identical units under a high shared ceiling, this corner had a low ceiling and plaster walls which fully separated one room from the next. On the exterior, it filled one of the many angles and protrusions that made the building so difficult to map in one’s mind - its “footprint” more a series of steps, or perhaps missteps, as if one were looking for an eroded trail in the woods.

The clearest markers on the inside were the long hallways of the largest spaces, hallways one could look down 100 yards at a time. But these too took unexpected turns that sent them off another direction, like a fork in the trail. Even when these bends were at right angles, they didn’t necessarily return or connect to anywhere else, making the experience of the interior less chart than maze.

These long hallways, with their blocks of units placed end to end, offered little wall space for hanging pictures, so K. used instead the odd, leftover spaces for his increasingly large collection of paintings. As an unexpected consequence, the paintings helped orient him; the more images he hung on the walls, he discovered, the less often he found himself lost inside the building. This K. learned first from a topographic map of Alaska, which wasn’t a painting but whose tactile qualities made it not quite a piece of printing, either. The mountains and ravines of the map, like braille, stopped K. in his rounds when he first picked it up. What might be read here through touch, he thought, is similar to what I read in paintings through sight. The map seemed less schematic than a specific slice of time; or a compressed, unmoving representation of time. These glaciers, the shape of which K. could measure with his fingers, won’t melt or slide; they will remain in this form regardless of all the moments they have lived through since, or will live through to come.

K. pinned Alaska in a dark corner of the building, an area with a series of enclosed hallways that he always found particularly disorienting. But once he could see its white, icy profile emerging from the featureless brown of Canada and the USSR, picked out against the cold blue of the Bering Sea like a Northern Renaissance portrait of a pockmarked, bulbous face, he knew precisely where he was in the storage facility.

The map he treated like a painting, led to paintings treated as maps. Nearest the office, at the first confusing fork on his way toward the interior, K. placed a painting of an arid, mountainous landscape, with a stream in the foreground quickly bending out of sight. The angle of the water’s sharp turn was echoed by the angular hills rising above it, making clear the stream’s homely role of filling and flattening the lowest points of this view. Higher up, a low light - morning light, K. thought, since it came from the right and he had the distinct impression this view faced north - picked out irregular rock faces, and improbably a bright brown area on the near bank of the river. This area should have been in shadow, reasoned K., rising as it did toward the sun and a stand of trees, which should at minimum be casting their own shadows across it. A mistake; a liberty of the artist; or was it in fact lit by some second source of light, out of view to the west?

This pastoral image with confusingly multiple light sources K. chose as a marker for an important spot of confusion - with his back to the office, it warned him of the first unexpected branching of the corridor ahead, not unlike the quick turn of the stream in the painting. And coming from the interior of the building, it served as a sign that the office lay just ahead, to one side of this final doubling. (The other side of the split led, eventually, back to this same place, but in a loop that K. had more than once feared was perpetual.) Placing the painting close to this divide, K. found he could just make out that oddly bright brown patch before taking the turn he had so many times regretted. Was the field lit by his own office light, he wondered? He could no longer remember for sure whether it had appeared quite so bright, before he chose to hang it at this junction.

Posted on October 27, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

Images were another matter, however; K. collected them continually. Even his landlady, each day in the same flowered smock, each day leaning on her broom, was not one but many images for K. He strove to collapse them like those accordion postcard sets sold at tourist attractions, to pack them into one archetypal or perhaps composite image on the cover: Landlady in Morning Light. But the cover always hinged open, and inside he found the landlady in the bright sun; the landlady with her hair covered in plastic against the rain; the landlady with the neighbor’s dog; the landlady with the new broom of which she seemed proud; the landlady complaining of a headache to a neighbor; the landlady pointlessly flirting with the burly garbage man; and on, and on, until he reached the landlady reaching for his hand to say goodbye but not waiting for his to grasp it.

K.’s collections of images were all like this: he saw through time, in a sense. Or it might be said: he could not reconcile images with time, they seemed forever in conflict. Sometimes, to test this problem, he would stare at the clock in his office - an old school clock, with the two hands large and clear for lessons, and a third more delicate one leaping from second to second and trembling a bit after each landing, as if the gulf just crossed required recovery and a gathering of strength before setting off again. Oof, oof, oof, thought K., not tick, tick, tick. His test was to stare at this clock, and try to form one image of it. Not an image of each leap of the second hand. One unified image of the clock.

The only way, K. found, was to close his eyes and think not of this clock, but a painting of a clock.

The painted clock in K.’s mind was in fact hanging in one of the hallways of the storage facility. Among K.’s primary duties was removing unwanted objects from the hallways and entrances, where people often left them. From the very beginning, K. found paintings amid these discards: children’s paintings; Sunday paintings; family paintings; tourist paintings; paintings purchased in an antiques store on a whim; paintings deliberately collected but now rejected; paintings inherited but not understood; paintings beloved by one but not another; paintings treasured until they were not.

K. couldn’t bear to see these paintings in the trash, so he took to hanging them in the hallways instead - carefully placing them in a different part of the building than he had found them, lest their original owners be annoyed at this reuse. The clock had been one of the first objects rescued in this manner: it had a oversize, round black frame and a white face with only four Roman numerals at the cardinal points: XII, III, VI, and IX. The two hands were ribbon, emerging together from a hole in the center and each heading for an independent exit, where they permanently marked the hour at ten to midnight.

Why ribbons instead of painted hands was one of the curiosities that gave K. pause as he initially took hold of this work. The white face was brushily, even sloppily filled in - perhaps it was part of a stage set, he reasoned. Perhaps the dimension of the ribbon was enough to suggest solid hands in front of a clock face, when seen under bright lights.

But why K. always read this clock as ten to midnight, and not ten to noon, was a puzzle he didn’t consider until much later, long after placing the object in one of the most obscure bends in the building. It only fully occurred to him, truly, after Frieda’s visit, although he could not remember a time he did not know that each moment actually presents two clocks at once.

Posted on October 15, 2012

Takahashi Chikuzan performing tsugaru-jamisen, a genre of shamisen music from the north of Japan. Takahashi (1910-1998) was a blind, itinerant player in a tradition that stretches back centuries, but in the 1970s enjoyed something of a vogue in Tokyo, taking up residence in an avant-garde club in Shibuya called “Jean-Jean.” He was known for his storytelling, as well as virtuosity on his instrument - and for the long improvisations he called “Iwaki,” after the tallest mountain in his home region.

(thanks to Alan Cummings for helping me contextualize a surprising record store find!)

Tagged: japan instrumentals trad instruments in non trad music

Posted on October 8, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

It had been a long time since Frieda’s visit. The radio stayed on now in K.’s office. And K., too, had gradually spent more and more time there until he finally gave up his outside home, and moved in. There were numerous practical reasons for the move, which he had recounted to himself; but none explained the magnetic attraction he felt to the building, a pull that had become so strong he had to exert himself to pass its threshold. Once past, K. felt less free than untethered - his first steps out the door were like walking off the edge of a moving sidewalk, his body going forward but his feet still sliding back. The attraction must be strongest in his shoes, he reasoned; but examining their behavior on their own, off his feet, produced no similar results.

K.’s landlady was kind but clearly confused when he announced his departure. “I didn’t realize you still lived here!” she blurted out, evidently embarrassed. It had been months - possibly years - since they had spoken, it was true. But hadn’t he passed her on the street nearly every morning, on his walk to work? There she would be in her flowered smock, as she was on this particular day too, sweeping the sidewalk, watering the bony plants in front of the modest building, or leaning on her broom gossiping with another neighbor. K. had assumed that she too had seen him each morning, as he punctually exited the building. Perhaps his usual polite nod was too subtle to be noticed? he wondered. Or had he in some manner been camouflaged, as Frieda had explained?

The encounter with the landlady had been awkward, but uneventful; as she hadn’t realized he was still in the building, she was not put out by his leaving. Indeed, she revealed that she had also forgotten about the apartment he occupied - thinking of it now, she looked like someone reaching for details from a fleeting dream, or distant memory. “Does it have a red door?” she asked K. “Why yes, of course. I have never painted the door myself; I always thought it was your own choice of color,” he replied, meeting her eye in an effort not to similarly fade from view. “Yes yes of course it was,” she said, unconvincingly. But further conversation revealed that she could not clearly say where his apartment was located within the building. “Dear Landlady,” said K. - he had always been formal with her, out of respect for her age - “It is not a very large building. Have you lost other apartments in it?” he added, with what he judged was an appropriate tone of concern, although in truth it may have been more for himself than for her. “I have never lost an apartment!” she declared, defensively. And then: “Until now, I suppose. Well, goodbye K.,” she concluded, reaching for his hand but not waiting for him to grasp hers. She walked past to greet a different neighbor.

K. moved his belongings on a wet day, although he could have chosen any moment he wanted. He was, in a sense, his own boss in this regard: the landlady did not remember that he lived in her house, and there was no one to answer to at the office, other than himself.

And Frieda? K. felt wistful. Recently he had fixed on the idea that she too was living somewhere in the self-storage facility. Might her apartment be invisible to him, in the same way that his was to the landlady?

As K. packed a few possessions to move permanently to the office, he felt the irony - but at a distance, like his landlady thinking of the door to his missing apartment, which she had once painted such a loud red - that he was among the least likely ever to be in need of a storage unit. He had always avoided a claim over objects - this was in fact high on his list of conscious reasons for giving up the apartment. It seemed he didn’t even need one room.

Posted on October 1, 2012

Leonard Cohen singing “Who By Fire,” with Sonny Rollins on sax, from the short-lived US TV show Sunday Night, 1989.

This beautiful lyric plays with part of a traditional poem recited during the Jewish high holy days, Unetaneh Tokef:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by upheaval, who by plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Leonard Cohen takes these phrases outside their original context - or maybe further inside. It’s a peculiarly intense song from a period of his career (the mid-70s) I think of as marked more by irony and detachment, the “Field Commander Cohen” era.

It’s also a song that has aged with him. Here in the late 80s he sings it in the knowing, jaded, slightly bitter tone of his “comeback” album I’m Your Man, which he was touring when he taped this live television show. [The show put different artists together on a bill for an hour - pairings that could seem absurd (Harry Connick, Jr. and Lou Reed) or kind of brilliant (Harry Connick, Jr. and Lou Reed) - and allowed for impromptu collaborations like this.]

More recently, “Who By Fire” has been a staple of the unexpected, ongoing world tour which Cohen started in 2008, at age 74. As an old man, he sings it with the gravity I imagine he heard in the original text, as a child.

(thanks to @JohnRMulvey for tweeting a link to this video!)

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters found language

Posted on September 29, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

Frieda was gone, so K. had no one to ask why there was no other dial - if this was a radio, wouldn’t there be a tuner as well? - or where else this music could be coming from. As for why he hadn’t noticed it before, Frieda had already made clear: he had. There’s no missing a bug the size of an airplane. But including it in one’s view was another matter.

K. looked around at the familiar office, straining to see more objects hidden from him in plain sight. He examined the volume knob under the desk, and found it attached to a wire which snaked down a table leg to the floor, then ran like a rodent across the floor to the nearest wall, along that wall to the corner of the room, up the corner to the ceiling, and out the top. Dust fell in K.’s eye as he poked gingerly at the hole in the ceiling, and he scrambled off the chair he was standing on.

When he was able to open his eyes, he thought he could hear music again. This time it wasn’t emanating from the speaker that Frieda had pointed out - it was coming from the tiny hole in the ceiling.

K. stood once more on the chair, and stretched his ear toward the hole despite the dust. He could just faintly hear strings, swelling in what seemed like a patriotic tune. He jumped down - this was such an unusually athletic gesture for K., it gave him a rush of adrenalin - went straight to his desk and turned the volume knob. Strings swelled out of the speaker on the wall. Now that he could hear more clearly, he realized it wasn’t a patriotic tune; it was the “Can-Can,” played as if it were an anthem.

This time K. left the volume on, and fell back heavily in his chair. He sat there in a kind of stupor, listening as the music continued - from the nationalistic “Can-Can,” to a crooner smoothly singing:

Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on, and this old world will keep on turning
Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together
There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning [1]

K. waited for those opening lines to repeat, but the singer instead stretched like a cat and meandered off, repeating an anodyne chorus endlessly, humming it, handing it off to strings and taking it back, changing keys, even whispering over it at one point with reassuring but meaningless words - anything except returning to that distressing first image. Had K. heard the words correctly? Were these banal lovers in fact saboteurs, holding hands on some lofty perch as they watched the destruction they had wrought below…?

A voice interrupted the singer, bringing this puzzling plot to an end if not conclusion: “This is the memory station,” it said, with the mellifluous calm of a radio dj. And another song began.

[1] Andy Williams, “For the Good Times” (Kris Kristofferson)

Posted on September 26, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

When K. came to, there was music playing – a song he could not identify, but which felt nonetheless familiar. A phrase here and there he could anticipate; some of the melody as well. And yet when the middle eight modulated unexpectedly, K. knew for certain he had never before heard the tune:

Throughout the days
our true love ways
will bring us joy to share
with those who really care [1]

“But Friede means ‘peace’; joy is ‘Freude’” he said to Frieda, who was lying beside him. She looked at him with pity. The song ended and another immediately began – this one he knew for sure, it was “Unchained Melody.” But where was this music coming from?

Frieda stood up abruptly, drawing herself as tall and taught as he had first seen her in the doorway. It was like watching a sail hoisted on a mast.

K. meanwhile resembled more a heap of rope left on a dock. Had he been asleep? Had he experienced love? He wasn’t sure of these last moments – or how many there had been. The Righteous Brothers were singing:

And time goes by so slowly… [2]

in a way that made it self-evident.

When the drums entered big for the final verse, Frieda turned to the door. She pointed to a speaker mounted on the wall before she left. It was painted the same color as the rest of the office, and K. had never noticed it. “I’m leaving the music on,” she said. “There’s a dial under your desk.”

K. got up and reached for the dial, which he had also never noticed. He tried it gingerly, and found it changed the volume in the speaker. He turned it all the way in one direction, and it clicked off.

[1] Peter and Gordon, “True Love Ways” (Buddy Holly / Norman Petty)

[2] The Righteous Brothers, “Unchained Melody” (Alex North / Hy Zaret)

Posted on September 24, 2012

Pearls Before Swine, “Translucent Carriages” (Herodotus/Harley/Rapp), 1968.

Like Dylan, Tom Rapp is a singer/reader. But he lifts only from the best - here, he co-credits Herodotus on the opening song to his epic anti-war album, Balaklava. His own lines are so real, so clear, and so strange, I’ve never been sure what was Herodotus and what was Rapp in this lyric. The timeline (Herodotus, b. 484 BCE; Thomas Dale Rapp, b. 1947 CE) would indicate he came up with this:

Jesus / raised the dead / but who / will raise the living

…or it could be another brilliant détournement of his source text.

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters détournement

Posted on September 23, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

“Well K., I am glad to have found you,” said the woman finally, in a language he continued to understand. But “found” was so odd - no one could be looking for him, surely? - that he held on to the remote possibility that she too had switched languages, matching whichever one he had absorbed from the tapes. It seemed plausible that there could be a language where “found” was a synonym for “met.” Maybe more than one.

“I am glad to have found you, because this building - although large - is so oddly shaped that it is difficult to perceive from the outside. There is a type of camouflage that utilizes an unexpected change of scale - an airplane the size of a fly would be an obvious example, but it can be equally effective in the reverse: a fly the size of an airplane. If such an insect were in the sky, do you think you would notice it?”

K. was having trouble focusing on the meaning of her words, because he was finding it difficult in fact to continually perceive her form. Her stance, her manner when she spoke belonged to a much larger person. Was she camouflaged in just the way she was describing? Her shape seemed to dissolve in and out of the background. K. felt dizzy, and steadied himself with one hand on the back of a chair.

“I am positive that you would not notice a giant bug in the sky,” said the woman, definitively. It was clear that she was right. K. felt her drawing closer, although he was now nearly on the verge of blacking out. “What is your name?” he managed to stammer.

“Joy,” she said. “But that is too obvious, symbolically speaking. So I go by Frieda.“

Posted on September 21, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

It was with particular surprise, bordering on alarm, that K. felt his office door open from the outside one otherwise unremarkable morning. His back was to the entrance and he doubted the sensation so much that he did not turn around at first, thinking it a phantom feeling, or even a memory. A small presence soon made itself known, however. Its first sound was not speech, so much as a coo. K. turned expecting to find a bird that had somehow trapped itself in the room.

His eyes met instead a girl’s - perhaps a woman’s - small and frail as a child but with a clenched jaw and taught frame that indicated years spent resisting some force, like wind on a ship’s deck. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?” she asked, leaving K. with the distinct sensation of being himself the force she was now facing head on. Her hair was pulled back as taught as her body, her hands were on her hips, she was squared against him in a manner that made it clear above all that he could not possibly knock her down. He wondered if she might be an expert in some martial art.

“I am K., the caretaker of this self-storage facility,” said K., although it had been so long since he had spoken words aloud he couldn’t be sure they were intelligible. Language in the head is different than on the tongue, he thought, and made a mental note to practice speaking aloud more to keep his vocal chords active.

The woman looked at him without saying anything further. Could it be that he had spoken in a different language than he intended? Not too long ago he had opened a unit with Berlitz instruction tapes, and he had been playing them indiscriminately on a dictaphone he had found in a unit of office supplies. He didn’t care what language they were teaching, it was their cadence that pleased him - the repetition of phrases - the slow development of complex sentences out of tiny units, like a magnet attracting bits of metal and somehow turning itself into a machine. He had spoken aloud so little lately, and listened so much… could he have inadvertently adopted one of the languages from those tapes, even as his internal grammar remained unchanged?

Posted on September 18, 2012

There’s no doubt Dylan likes to read - witness the controversies stirred up by his use of texts by Junichi Saga and Henry Timrod (still hard to believe he didn’t make up that name) on recent albums. (Dylan to Rolling Stone: “If you think it’s so easy to quote [Timrod] and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.”)

So perhaps I can be forgiven for hearing “fairy queen” in this new song as, “faerie queene.” Maybe what’s keeping him up at night is Spenser?

I’m searching for phrases / To sing your praises / I need to tell someone / It’s soon after midnight / And my day has just begun

A gal named Honey / Took my money / She was passing by / It’s soon after midnight / And the moon is in my eye

My heart is cheerful / It’s never fearful / I’ve been down on the killing floors / I’m in no great hurry / I’m not afraid of your fury / I’ve faced stronger walls than yours

Charlotte’s a harlot / Dresses in scarlet / Mary dresses in green / It’s soon after midnight / And I’ve got a date with the fairy queen

They chirp and they chatter / What does it matter? / They’re lying and dying in their blood / Two-Timing Slim / Who’s ever heard of him? / I’ll drag his corpse through the mud

It’s now or never / More than ever / When I met you I didn’t think you’d do / It’s soon after midnight / And I don’t want nobody but you

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters poets

Posted on September 12, 2012

Dickinson and Rimbaud, age 17 - the iconic images.

Dickinson (on the left, with her recently widowed friend Kate Scott Turner) and Rimbaud (in Harar, Abyssinia), age 29.

[I turn 49 tomorrow.]

Posted on September 5, 2012

The Watersons singing “Hal-an-Tow,” from the BBC documentary Travelling for a Living, 1965.

In the Anglo-American folk revival of the 60s, cultural cannibalism extended to time, as well as geography and style - here, the Watersons bring a Cornish song to a Yorkshire pub, a May Day song to a dank night, a dance song to a static stage, a participatory song to a mute audience… Yet give this ancient music more life (and more lyrics) than its sole surviving traditional performance in the town of Helston each May 8.

The song itself is a cannibalistic organism, with words that morph, absorbing both dialect and imported language until no one group can lay claim to them any longer. The title and refrain - “Hal-an-Tow” - is evidently not proper Cornish or English. As the marvelously thorough website Mainly Norfolk documents, it may mean “calends [the Ancient Roman term for the beginning of the month] and garland,” as some scholars say. It may mean “heel and toe,” as Shirley Collins speculates in the notes to her own recording of the song. Or it may be the song about cuckoldry that Shakespeare calls for in Act 4, Scene 2 of As You Like It.

Or, as Shirley Collins also wrote, it may not mean a thing, other than the long span of time it has consumed between then and now:

I like the mystery of words that have been unconsciously altered and made strange in the process of being handed down by word of mouth over the centuries. Nobody really knows precisely what they mean, there’s an echo there of things past…

Tagged: anglo cultural anthropophagy found language

Posted on August 31, 2012

Os Mutantes performing two classic songs of tropicalismo by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, “Bat Macumba” and “Panis et Circensis”, live on French TV in 1969.

“Bat Macumba” is a song of addition - subtraction - and addition. Concrete poetry brought to popular music, through the enthusiasm Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso felt for modernist Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago (“Tupi, or not tupi that is the question”), and the Brazilian avant-garde writers of the 1950s, in particular Augusto de Campos.

Os Mutantes’ performance is cultural anthropophagy in action.

Bat Macumba = bat[man] + macumba +… +… +…

bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba oba
bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba o
bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba
bat macumba ê ê, bat macum
bat macumba ê ê, batman
bat macumba ê ê, bat
bat macumba ê ê, ba
bat macumba ê ê
bat macumba ê
bat macumba
bat macum
batman
bat
ba
bat
batman
bat macum
bat macumba
bat macumba ê
bat macumba ê ê
bat macumba ê ê, ba
bat macumba ê ê, bat
bat macumba ê ê, batman
bat macumba ê ê, bat macum
bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba
bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba o
bat macumba ê ê, bat macumba oba

“Panis et Circensis” is the equally eclectic but more conventionally lyrical title track from the landmark album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis (1968); there’s an excellent English translation at LyricalBrazil.com.

Tagged: sad hits brazil poets cultural anthropophagy

Posted on August 28, 2012

There is the metaphor of the end of song; and then there is the harsh reality that sometimes it comes to pass, not only through one person’s choice for themselves but through choices imposed on others. This week, in the north of Mali, a separatist government instituted a religious law that bans all secular music.

Malian singer-songwriter Habib Koité incorporates diverse traditions in his music - themes, melodies, and techniques from across the varied regions of his country, as well as instruments from abroad including his own, the acoustic guitar. He writes slowly and deliberately, in a process he described in an interview with Banning Eyre as a kind of accretion, adding bits of lyrical and musical ideas drawn from both inside and outside of himself.

There can be many different beginnings. There’s no rule. For example, someone might say to me, “Habib, you must sing about this…” That happens to me all the time. People call me over to them, and tell me about something that I must sing about. If this person is serious, I listen seriously, and decide how serious their idea is. I don’t say no. I just keep the idea within me, and life goes on.

On his last studio album, from 2007, he sings about Mali using the mythic image of a golden bull:

Abira said that the great Mali is like a bull / A bull with a golden coat / A bull that drinks only clean water / A bull that eats only noble sorghum / Like gold, red gold / Like a domestic bull / This bull will never be sacrificed for a Tabaski [Eid] feast / The bull that charges you has only one head, one horn / A firearm protects us from the enemy / This bull can be a frightening weapon / Look at this bull, he is like Mali / Like gold, red gold / Like a domestic animal / Take care / Son of this country / Take care of this bull / Take care / Good son of Mali / Take care of this bull / Take care of your great Mali

As he explained to Banning Eyre:

Why I’m telling you about this bull with one horn and golden fur is that it is like Mali. We say that the bull is very strong, and when he comes it is better to leave. It is better to leave the road because he can kill, and nobody can stop him. So I compare this bull to Mali. I ask the Malian population to think about this bull. And I ask them to take good care of Mali, because it is one country. We must not be divided. In fact, we must work hard to uplift it.

To Habib Koité, unity does not mean a single ideology; his songs are inhabited by other times, other places, other languages, even other people’s ideas, alongside his own. It is unification by addition.

Tagged: west africa mali singer songwriters trad instruments in non trad music

Posted on August 25, 2012

The end of song; an exhausted form; the novel turns in on itself; or settles for cliché; the movie might be sensational; or comforting; but “the dream is over” (John Lennon). Awake, alert, the form now looks fragile, unsafe, a receptacle for feeling without insurance against catastrophic embarrassment: “God” (John Lennon).

Tagged: sad hits anglo singer songwriters music degree zero

Posted on August 22, 2012

Henry Cow performing Phil Ochs’s “No More Songs,” 1976. Filmed for the Swiss TV program, Kaleidospop.

This performance took place just months after Ochs’s suicide, but already years after his own release of the song, as the last track on his last studio album. That recording - a Van Dyke Parks production - is beautiful, if maudlin. Here, in the hands of such skilled prog/art-rock musicians, the song seems less mournful than defiant. There are no more songs… here’s what we’re going to play, then.

Of course it is elegy too, as Tim Hodgkinson indicates in his broken French intro, and Dagmar Krause makes clear with every word she sings. In the last verse, she substitutes “my friend” for Ochs’s original image of a whale, dying on the beach:

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody home? / I’ve only called to say, I’m sorry / The drums are in the dawn and all the voices gone / And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a girl, she was a flower in a flame / I loved her as the sea sings sadly / Now the ashes of the dream can be found in the magazines / And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a sage, who sang upon the stage / He told about the world, his lover / A ghost without a name stands ragged in the rain / And it seems that there are no more songs

The rebels they were here, they came beside the door / They told me that the moon was bleeding / Then all to my surprise, they took away my eyes / And it seems that there are no more songs

A star is in the sky, it’s time to say goodbye / My friend is on the beach, he’s dying / A white flag in my hand and a white bone in the sand / And it seems that there are no more songs

Tagged: sad hits anglo trad song form in non trad music elegies

Posted on August 20, 2012

Matching Mole on the French TV program “Rockenstock”, 1972.

Posting this in solidarity with Pussy Riot. That’s Robert Wyatt - free speaker - in the balaclava.

Tagged: wordless vocals revolutionaries drummer hero

Posted on August 19, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

Few truly needed watching, however; rarer and rarer were the moments K. saw a figure flit across one of the video screens displaying all entrances and exits, on their way to or from a unit. These moments were so brief, the images so vague, K. was never sure they weren’t illusory. No one came in the office - although, K. knew, even someone using the building regularly would have little reason to, except perhaps in an emergency such as flood or power outage. In a flood, K. had further worked out, no one would come through water to the office, being more concerned with the safety of themselves and their possessions. And in a power outage, no one would be able to find it, at least not from the maze of corridors inside the building.

For this reason, K. felt almost confident that no one would visit the office, perhaps ever again. Even in the old days (as he now and again caught himself thinking of his earlier times working there), it was only the messengers with cash that ever opened his door.

Why not live here, then? K. shuddered, despite the comforting smell of coffee brewing. His dreams inside this building - they would surely be the most incoherent of all. The storage facility was haunted by objects. Even the empty units represented potential objects. And every object led to someone - the one who had placed it there, who was looking for it somewhere, who had forgotten it, who was thinking of it, who once owned and now regretted selling it, who had been searching but never did find it, who had made or fixed or faked or lost it.

Posted on August 11, 2012

Robbie Basho performing “Kowaka d’Amour” on KQED TV, 1971.

There seemed to be no surviving video footage of guitarist Robbie Basho, until a recent discovery through detective work by fans/archivists Glenn Jones, David Greenberger, “Tessaract3” from the robbiebasho_forum, and Kyle Fosburgh of robbiebasho.com. Basho played two songs on an episode of the Bay Area public television show Scan, one on 12-string, and this one on six.

Basho dedicates his performance to “Avatar Meher Baba,” the mystic who reputedly remained silent from 1925 until his death in 1969. The “Kowaka” of the title is an ancient Japanese theatrical form, related to Noh, but which is practiced today only on one day each year, in one remote town.

Everything about this tape - its fragility as a document, its connection to Japan and to an implied spiritual quest, even the rolling credits that casually mention Marcel Marceau, and the color bars at the end with their incongruous audio reminding us that there are always other moments, other documents, other tugs at our attention - makes me think of Chris Marker’s work.

Or perhaps anything fleetingly beautiful brings him to mind.

Tagged: sad hits instrumentals trad instruments in non trad music avatars

Posted on August 4, 2012

C. by N., N. by C.

C. suggests a café, but then complains that it is “full of disgusting Frenchmen, eating.” We go to the apartment where we are staying instead; I make him coffee and we share a galette des Rois (it is the season). N. finds the prize in the first slice, and wears the crown. Seeing her, C. says he regrets not bringing his camera - “This is the second opportunity I have missed this month,” explaining that the other was a fight that broke out in the streets between demonstrating firemen and the police.

N. shows him her digital camera and he uses that, taking her portrait with the crown from the galette. The encounter is uncannily like N. with her father.

C. refuses the pastry, explaining that he never eats in the middle of the day. The apartment is across the street from a camping store, and C. remarks that he used to buy his food there – a mix that provides all necessary vitamins and nutrients for the day, in one draught. “Don’t you eat raw meat, as well?” N. asks. “Just a little, at night,” he says. He truly is a cat.

[from Afterimage]

Posted on July 30, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

K.’s own particular function within this machine has, like those ells and side doors, dissolved with time. He had worked there so long he was now - with the help of closed-circuit cameras, automatic lights, and self-locking doors - the sole employee. It wasn’t clear who, if anyone, still owned the operation, as letters arrived addressed to multiple business names any or none of which might be current. K. had long since stopped expecting a salary, which used to arrive in cash delivered by a variety of messengers, none of whom he had seen in some time.

The missing salary wasn’t an issue, however; K. had found the contents of abandoned units more than enough to sustain him. Early in his tenure as sole employee, soon after the envelopes of cash stopped arriving, he had passed anxious days. But one of the first units he opened had been filled with camping supplies: boxes of dehydrated spinach, jerky, and a portable stove.

It was this same stove he lit to boil coffee this morning, with a gesture so automatic it brought an almost domestic tenderness to the fluorescent-lit office. Lately K. had been wondering whether to move into the storage facility, in fact. But there was something abhorrent to him about sleeping in the building - even his occasional involuntary nap always ended with a shudder. Being unconscious amid all these things felt wrong: he was watching over them, at least in spirit.

Posted on July 22, 2012

Bonga Kuenda, “Maiorais”, 2005.

Bonga - born José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho - is an Angolan singer who survived the chaos of the war years in his country while living abroad. Not that he wasn’t engaged: a record-setting track star, he was recruited to compete for the Portuguese, but used his professional travels to pass messages for the anti-colonial underground. When the authorities uncovered this double life, he gave up his athletic career and fled both Angola and Portugal for the Netherlands. It was there he recorded his first album Angola 72, a set of songs written in his native language, and quickly adopted by the revolutionary movement back home. The follow-up, Angola 74, also recorded while living underground in Europe, became another landmark album for the independence movement, appearing just as the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal ended the colonial wars.

But even with Angola’s independence, Bonga remained abroad - living first in Paris, and then in 1988 returning to Lisbon. It was from Europe that he witnessed the tragedies of the post-independence wars. “I began my career as a protest singer. I criticized the Portuguese first, and then my own people. The people lost out in the end.”

After a long international career of what became known as World Music (”In Paris, people are starting to impose music on us that has nothing to do with us,” he said in the 90s), he has pursued a more nostalgic sound in recent years. This video would seem to recreate an aspect of his youth in Angola, where his father was a fisherman and played accordion in a band on the Ilha do Cabo, by the sea in Luanda. For Bonga, both musical and political awakening took place in a similar setting:

“Every evening, I joined the others in the turma, a group of young people who got together to dance and sing. We criticized society, we blamed the living conditions and the colonists’ denial of our culture. This is why our songs are so full of nostalgia, because our identity had been ridiculed for a long time. Often, the turma looked like a virtual demonstration, with adults coming in from outside who spoke Kimbundu better than we did and who introduced us to the traditional forms of music. The old people, especially, took part in these meetings. They taught us the tales and proverbs which illustrate the ancestral morality and spirituality. Sometimes they interrupted to put things right, to correct us when there were errors in the interpretation of a song.”

Here Bonga is the old man of his memories.

Tagged: sad hits angola lusophone exile saudade revolutionaries

Posted on July 18, 2012

Wax cylinders, shellac discs, magnetic tape make sound plastic - but only the rudest gestures can then alter it: scratching, breaking, cutting.

If I think of a tender touch for sound - caress - it is through an instrument.

Do we make music with love, and preserve it with violence?

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on July 15, 2012

The horn on the Victrola looked inviting, so I jumped inside. It was cool, and smooth to the touch. I fell, but slowly, and so I was not afraid. I became very small, I believe the force of my fall influenced my shape, which began to conform to the inside of the horn. Eventually I became a single point. And I entered the groove of a record, which launched me as pure sound. A vibration. I carry no melody, not even a note. My transfiguring moment fell between beats, and so I am an aspect of that atmospheric scratch in the background. Before me, and after me, came the most beautiful trumpet solo.

[from Vexations, a chapbook published by the Impercipient Lecture Series, reprinted in The Memory Theater Burned]

Posted on July 14, 2012

In 1908 the Supreme Court ruled in White-Smith Music Pub. Co. v. Apollo Co. that music is not a “tangible thing” unless it can be perceived by the eye. “In no sense can musical sounds which reach us through the sense of hearing be said to be copies,” wrote Justice Day for the majority, reasoning that they were therefore not subject to copyright. “A musical composition is an intellectual creation which first exists in the mind of the composer; he may play it for the first time upon an instrument. It is not susceptible of being copied until it has been put in a form which others can see and read.” Piano rolls (the issue at hand in this case) can be seen, to be sure, and it might even be said that they can be read - but not as music, at least not by a person. The Apollo Co. could continue to manufacture their piano rolls of “Little Cotton Dolly” and “Kentucky Babe” with impunity, since “these perforated rolls are parts of a machine.”

The same would apply to the grooves of a record. In this regard Justice Day approvingly cites language already used by the court of appeals: “‘It is not pretended that the marks upon the wax cylinders can be made out by the eye or that they can be utilized in any other way than as parts of the mechanism of the phonograph. Conveying no meaning, then, to the eye of even an expert musician, and wholly incapable of use save in and as a part of a machine specially adapted to make them give up the records which they contain, these prepared wax cylinders can neither substitute the copyrighted sheets of music nor serve any purpose which is within their scope.’”

With millions of piano rolls being manufactured, Congress took the matter into account with the 1909 Copyright Act, creating a new system of “compulsory mechanical licenses” whereby the Apollo Co. would now have to pay the White-Smith Pub. Co. a statutory royalty for each “mechanical reproduction” derived from use of their sheet music.

However, Congress declined to redefine what constituted a tangible thing. “Musical sounds which reach us through the sense of hearing” remained outside US copyright law until February 15, 1972.

But just as you can’t have divorce without marriage, since no US sound recordings prior to 1972 were under copyright, none have been released into the public domain. They are all - potentially - protected by any state, local, or even unwritten common law that might apply to their ownership. Some states acted to protect them under piracy rules, which have no expiration. The earliest any of these local laws may be superseded is 2067.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on July 13, 2012

Artur Nunes, “Mana”

From the notes to the wonderful 2-CD compilation Soul of Angola: Anthologie de la musique angolaise 1965/1975 (Lusafrica):

At that time [in Luanda] one might be just as likely to hear “lamentos” (ballads, essentially about love but which might also touch on social issues), a droll and rousing semba, or the languorous semba-rumba. Artur Nunes, known as “the Spiritualist” because his voice sounded like a singer of sacred music, is without doubt the “Mr. Lamento” of Angola, although he also explored the intricacies of the semba.

There are a few more biographical details in the notes to the CD Angola 70s (Buda Musique):

Artur Nunes was born in 1950 to an Angolan mother and a North American father. His songs drew inspiration from kombas, funeral rites where women sang laments… His singular style for “songs of the soul” earned him the nickname, “the Spiritualist.” From 1972-76, he recorded a dozen singles, plus two songs on the 33rpm collection Rebita 75.

Both sets of notes include this tragic postscript: after Angolan independence in 1975, during the civil wars that followed (which were also proxy wars between the US and the Soviets, with South African and Cuban fighters acting in their stead), Artur Nunes lost his life, along with so many others including fellow singers David Zé and Urbano de Castro.

I have not been able to find any more information about “the Spiritualist.”

Tagged: sad hits angola lusophone records and spiritualism

Posted on July 10, 2012

…Self Storage, cont.

But K.’s day is similarly incoherent. Walking to the storage facility where he works is more like his nighttime world than not - the town a collection of semi-detached homes, each built in a distinct historical or even national style, each fronted by a garden presenting yet another version of the ideal domestic landscape: cottage, flower, formal, vegetable. Details from these gardens are among the images K. has collected, which now overcrowd his dreams. Topiaries in particular capture his attention; and arbors, if arbor is the right word for a trellis built over a driveway rather than a garden. What dreams are these arbors designed to elicit? K. wonders. Or are they to protect cars from the sun.

As for the driveways: K. notes automatically the asphalt, concrete, brick, and packed dirt lanes running in front of each house, to the side, curving around back, or twisted into a loop going nowhere at all but back to the street where he now stands, at the edge of town.

The self-storage facility would seem to be a relief from this plethora of images, its blank uniformity like a military cemetery. A flash from an old dream reminds K. of the clarity this white and blue box once seemed to offer - a dream of the sea, with ten thousand ships’ hulls and ten thousand seagulls, hovering in a still wind. The odd outline of the building, with its many additions from ad-hoc solutions to now forgotten problems, contributes to this impression of a vessel, or some other machine so irrational in design it could only have been created for a highly specific function.

Posted on July 7, 2012

In Homer, Odysseus is saved from the Sirens’ song by silence; to be exact, the silence heard by his crew, who are deaf to the music and his entreaties to untie him so that he might go toward it. In Kafka, Odysseus is saved from the Sirens’ silence by song - a music of his own imagination, on which he focuses so intently that he is removed from the Sirens even as he is in their presence. In both, Odysseus is in a world of sound that only he hears. And he is heroically, epically, tragically alone.

Tagged: listen listen

Posted on July 6, 2012

Franz Kafka:

THE SILENCE OF THE SIRENS

Evidence that even inadequate, indeed childish means may serve to save one.

In order to be safe from the Sirens, Odysseus stopped his ears with wax and had himself chained to the mast. All travelers, from the very beginning, could of course have done something of the kind, except those whom the Sirens entranced even from a long way off, but it was common knowledge throughout the world that this was simply of no avail. The Sirens’ song penetrated through everything, and the passion of those who heard its magic would have snapped more than chains and a mast. But Odysseus did not think of that, even though he may have heard tell of it. He relied solely on the handful of wax and the network chains, and in innocent delight over his little stratagem he voyaged on towards the Sirens.

Now the Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their song, namely, their silence. True, such a thing has not happened, yet perhaps it is thinkable that someone might have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Nothing earthly can withstand the sense of having overcome them with one’s own resources, and the overwhelming arrogance resulting from it.

And in fact, when Odysseus came, the mighty singers did not sing, either because they believed the only way of tackling this opponent was with silence, or because the sight of the utter bliss on Odysseus’s face, as he thought of nothing but wax and chains, caused them quite to forget their singing.

But Odysseus - let us put it like this - did not hear their silence, he thought they were singing and that only he was safe from hearing it. Fleetingly he saw first the poise of their necks, their deep breathing, their eyes brimming with tears, their half-open mouths, but he believed this went with the arias that were resounding, unheard, around him. Soon, however, everything slid away from his gaze, which was fixed on the far distance, the Sirens simply vanished in the face of his resolution, and in the very moment when he was nearest to them he had already forgotten them.

But they - more beautiful than ever - stretched and turned, letting their dread hair float free upon the wind and tightening their claws upon the rocks. They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus.

If the Sirens had possessed consciousness, they would have been annihilated at that time. As it was, they remained; only Odysseus escaped them.

For the rest, tradition has a note to add to this. Odysseus, it is said, was a man of so many wiles, was such a cunning fox, that even the goddess of destiny could not penetrate into his inmost being. Perhaps, although this is beyond comprehension by the mind of man, he really noticed that the Sirens were silent, and confronted them and the gods with the pretended trick described above only, so to speak, as with a sort of shield.

- translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

from The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Third Notebook (October 1917-January 1918). Edited by Max Brod, 1954.

The same passage from Kafka’s notebooks was excerpted and published as an uncollected short story in The Great Wall of China (1946), where it is translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.

Posted on July 5, 2012

Tim Buckley sings “Song to the Siren” at the close of the last episode of The Monkees TV show, 1968. Directed by Micky Dolenz.

This acoustic version of the song is strikingly different from the one Tim Buckley eventually chose to release on his album Starsailor (1970), where he leaves the accompaniment to Lee Underwood on electric guitar. There is another beautiful version of the song, with both Buckley’s 12-string and Underwood’s electric, recorded as a demo in 1968 and released on the posthumous collection Works in Progress (Rhino Handmade, 1999).

The lyric is by Larry Beckett, who played drums in Buckley’s high school bands (“The Harlequin Three” and “The Bohemians”), and contributed to many of the songs on his first two solo albums. According to Beckett, “Song to the Siren” was the last they wrote together before Beckett was drafted into the Army, and Buckley began to explore a more open-ended form of songwriting on his own. (They occasionally reprised their collaboration after Beckett’s return from the military.)

Tagged: sad hits anglo 1968 from the desert to the sea lyrics by drummers

Posted on July 3, 2012

Self Storage: a novel

It starts with dreams, incoherent dreams so full of images they couldn’t be remembered. K. wonders at the wealth of these fleeting, potential symbols, but without a narrative thread there is nothing to report, nothing to remember each morning but a feeling (again) of too much. That’s it, he thinks - I have collected too much for use in dreams, and my mind is clearing itself out. Once I am back to the essentials my dreams will be coherent again.