A couple albums I liked in 2011

It’s strange how used you get to dudes going by names like Nocturnal Grave Desecrator and Nuclear Hammer Jesus or whatever. I’m more surprised when metal dudes use their own names now, as these black metal super hero personas are so part of the play at this point, originating with Celtic Frost or Venom and perfected in Blasphemy, the kings of funny eeeevill names. I understand the point of some of the names– how for some, the titles help tap into something beyond themselves, fiction suits that alter their realities. Seems like simple stuff really—but it’s undeniably effective, the pomp of spikes and blood and corpse paint establish the rules of the game, the space for something to occur that conjures dangerous energy. Wrath from Averse Sefira has written rather eloquently about this on his blog http://aversesefira.blogspot.com/.But it’s hard not to see so many of these affects as shallow poses for so many of the bands now, when not verging on a sort of autistic genius… Caller of the Black Winds, indeed.

That said, one of my favorite lps of the year, Negative Plane’s Stained Glass Revelations, includes the somewhat puzzlingly named Nameless Void and Bestial Devotion in their ranks. If Stained Glass Revelations wasn’t such a unique example of modern black metal than maybe I would chock it up to yet more EEEVILLLL posturing. But there’s something altogether more creative and compelling residing in the grooves of SGR’s lp that sets it apart from the so-called blackened hordes (who isn’t tired of this cliché? Denizens of the Android’s Dungeon is probably more apt), and it’s not just the recorded in a sepulcher production. With the best black metal, there is a feeling of dread and claustrophobia, of a resonance that isn’t entirely explainable. Most of this lost in modern black metal, hidden behind half-assed satanic imagery, hackneyed riffs and interchangeable vokills. And while Negative Plane is certainly a black metal band, it’s safe to say that there hasn’t been one quite like them before. But like a lot of black metal, Stained Glass revelations is couched in a kind of mystery, a shroud of obscure reference and symbol — heavy in meaning and difficult to interpret, but sidestepping the hodgepodge of pseudo-occultism found in so much metal. Instead Negative Plane bleeds a kind of neurotic asceticism, which manifests itself in a cobwebbed sound as indebted to Klaus Fluoride as it is to the Possessed. Everything about the album seems to reach for some aspect of the antiquated, the ancient and forgotten. It wouldn’t be out of place playing in some antique shop; Negative Plane seem more at home in the refuse of the dead than at some show among raised fists, beer, and hair matted in sweat. And like anything of any worth, this takes work. It takes time and investment.

Toshimaru Nakamura’s Maruto on Erstwhile doesn’t have much in common aurally with Negative Plane, but it does share its clarity of vision. It’s by most accounts Nakamura’s most successful solo work. But I don’t really care where it falls in some pantheon. Because this music displays such absolute conviction, a tense and beautiful tightrope act of frequency and structure. As singular, hermetic and air tight as any of the best black metal, Maruto also displays a glistening intensity. The sounds moves like great blocks of electricity made audible, corralled into a twisting, sinuous construction. It’s not the loudest or harshest or softest I heard this year, but it’s the most well-defined. The sounds used here sound quintessentially Nakamura, but also as if he’s stretching out more than ever, exploring new vistas of electronic howl. It’s amazing it seems so lean, and uncontrived. It can get so damn tiring listening to improvisation that drawls, stretching a single idea into a masturbatory meaninglessness. And while Maruto loses none of improv’s immediacy, it sounds completely in control of where it’s heading.

Nothing is lost the more you listen. In fact, I find it more compelling as time passes, the shocks and quivers, the dynamic shifts playing tricks on my insides. The shape of it seems burnt into the side of mind like a cattle brand. Of all Erstwhile’s impressive releases in 2011, this one has left the most lasting impression. Try as I might to consider it’s legacy, I’m left only with the sound. And that’s more satisfying than anything else at this point.

Rama

Drumm’s Imperial Distortion is as good a late night album as any. A few fingers of bourbon sitting on my window sill and the gentle warble of the New Age coming across my living room as I look out to where Lake Superior should be on this starless night. And the black chasm the big lake becomes at night begets all manner of dark ruminations, starry wisdoms better left unsaid. Music as open ended as Imperial Distortion fits that Lovecraftian weird, stewing in the stagnancy of small towns at night, that almost palpable pressure of the atmosphere weighing down on your head, the stars burning holes into all that cumulonimbus, water hanging in the air. Drumm’s music pushes right on through, alien intelligent.

I’m not looking for the next big Miasma tonight. Imperial Distortion sounds just right. Not nearly as static as I‘ve heard it described, a track like Snow moves around my apartment like an undulating poisonous cloud punctuated with random colored lights. At turns ominous, but frankly far more comforting than all that it would imply — high school science experiments with alchemical references, Kelly LeBrock in the shower and you with your jean shorts still on.

The bullshit about Drumm and his “black metal noise” makes me queasy. Conflating admiration with influence. Why is it so much harder to just let the music speak for itself. Don’t get me wrong, I love Carcass, but they ain’t Vivaldi, even if they steal from Four Seasons. And who wants Carcass to be Vivaldi anyway? As if that validates their onslaught. As if their onslaught needs to be validated. And who wants Drumm to be some corpse painted asshole, moaning about the moonlight cascading onto the icy plains of some forefather‘s foreskin? Isn’t this authentic enough? Isn’t this boring or brilliant… or more simply itself enough? But if one wants to go down that road, if there is some tortured darkness to Drumm’s music, I think it’s found far more on these long shifting drones of Imperial Distortion and Imperial Horizon than any of the noise terror he’s so admired for. SHM, Impish Tyrant the rest brim, spit out like sparks from the fire. They’re detrital, layered, subsuming. But Imperial Horizon leaves you behind. It’s down right nihilistic at times, a track like Guillain-Barre taps into a slim coursing eternal line, beginning and ending without a glimmer of recognition, of heeding our calls. Antiseptic glow. Beautiful in its way (and working wonders on the insides of my nasal cavities), but ultimately unknowable. And beauty being so hard to qualify. Like the end of Romantic Sores, all floating indifference but oh so pretty.

I can’t complain. I should go to sleep now, and conjure some personal demons to make myself feel more like myself. But it’s nice to have a piece of music that colors the space for a little while. In this sleepy town. Because I know this is all just words. And probably says more about me than the music. But that’s nice. That’s good. Perception is a fucking tricky thing. Sleep tight.

A crash of piano like thunder.

Days like these.

The head shop down the street has shirts that read, “Lake Superior Makes Me Wet”. Outside shitkicker trucks grind their transmissions into dust while blasting ‘Bodies hit the Floor’ or window-rattling hip hop. With small bibles tucked into breast pockets, old men suck on their teeth, and shake their canes at stray dogs. It begins to rain. A crash of piano like thunder, a clarinet that blurs and bounces from plaster walls. The smoke curls in the air.

I have four large windows windows that look onto Ashland’s Main Street, an honest to God Main Street: the small movie theater, the furniture store, the sticky menu café, the liquor store with advertisements of proud hunters knocking back Miller Lite while they bury their knees in the necks of glassy-eyed deer. Saturday afternoons I watch teenagers, flush in the coarse bash of youth and bored out of their skulls, circle the block like sharks, as if they stop moving for a second they’ll slowly suffocate and die. All greasy haired and chew spackled lapels as they bum cigarettes from each other and commiserate,

–Motherfuckers keep taking my shit. I fuckin’ say to ‘em, I say, ‘I’ll bring it when they bring it.’ Dumbass white trash motherfuckers.

I bought a pipe in a fit of nostalgia a few weeks back when I moved into town. I missed the smell of the smoke, the feeling of it nestled between my teeth when I was a child and would clandestinely steal a few drags on my Father’s pipe. Smoking it now seems like the right thing to do on this windy overcast day, thinking too much, listening to Burkhard Stangl and Kai Fagaschinski’s Musik-Ein Porträt in Sehnsucht. It’s an album that seems like a salve, an assuagement to the shock of being somewhere that’s concurrently so small and so goddamn large. There’s an ooze of history dripping from the cracks of every building here, as dense and heavy as the iron ore resting at the bottom of Lake Superior. You can see it woven into everyone‘s hair, filling every shot glass, in the bottom of every shoe. My nostalgia seems to be both bolstered and relieved, listening to the delicate piano cling clang like a 2 AM Tilbury at the end of “Last Night I had Visions.” I sit transfixed to the Feldman-esque lope of “Sexy M.F.” with Stangl’s guitar pinging off into space, accenting Fagaschinski’s tart breathy burrs. The meander of this music seems at home here. At home in the slow afternoons contemplating the ache that comes with the smell of shoe polish and wood smoke.

I had missed the deft sensitivity that marks Stangl and Fagaschinski’s playing when I had first listened to this (what, a year or two ago?); I hadn’t noticed at the time how each player only seems to fully come into focus through the aspect of the other. They both have some remarkable duos under the belt where this characteristic is apparent, but never to such an extent as found here– it’s as if each player was working as a filter or lens for the other. Returning to the album now, I notice it also has an incredible coherence. Each track is a subtle progression to the next. Even when the modes change– from slow drones to gentle vibraphone ruminations to gentle melodic guitar/clarinet cells, the thread is never lost. And the narrative is never severe. In fact it seems to bloom and envelope by virtue of its subtlety. These are seven tracks that seem to glide by on their own volition. But like so many good things. they are not afraid to be punctuated by the outside world, like in “Weißt Du noch unser Lied?” where motors rev, birds chirp, and 70s hard rock cassette deck soloing comes through an open car window while a guitar strums over it all.

Musik-Ein Porträt in Sehnsucht hadn’t made as much sense before living here. It wasn’t the right time or place. The seemingly effortless playing appeared too easy, too ambivalent to the world I chose to live in. Here in the wind, in a small town that seems adorned by it’s own memory it all makes a kind of sense, as if it urges you to let things happen by their own accord. As the afternoon turns to dusk, it becomes that much more powerful, stuck on repeat in my living room, pitching itself against boredom and sloth, hanging in the orange light of the dusk. In this time that seems to stretch and guide ones hand to ruminative bullshit, where one feels stuck in thinking of the here as though it were somewhere else, this album seems to embellish the play of time, and perform gentle accompaniment to the slow burn of days like these.

Erstwhile Records www.erstwhilerecords.com

Well, well…

Sloth and nostalgia — a bad combination. But new things are on the horizon. No doubt I should probably update this place more, but the last few months I’ve seen some pretty radical changes in my life (and in the spirit of too much information): a new move into the wilds of Northern WI tucked into the nook of frigid Lake Superior; a big commitment to a long-suffering girl friend; a start of another degree in an unfamiliar discipline; alien abduction etc.. Anyway, I’m working on it. But really, it’s a good time to be out of it, as reading up on all the NYC Amplify fest reviews other places make me pretty damn jealous I can’t be there. But it sounds like a pretty great time for electro acoustic quackery either way. And that’s pretty exciting. This place will have something new at some point in the future.

In the meantime, if you want to read more of my drivel Tokafi.com has been commissioning a few reviews from me here and there:

Korber.Prins

Buenos Aires Tapes

And while you’re at it check out the rest of the site. They have a new John Butcher interview up, if that’s your thing. I haven’t read it yet, but I bet he mentions quarks (I know I would). Thanks for reading, as always.

Perspectives are like assholes…

Syndromes Temporary Perspectives Organized Music From Thessaloniki

I’ve been sitting on Syndromes’ (made up of Kostis Kilymis) Temporary Perspectives album on his own Organized Music from Thessaloniki label, playing it often, but waiting for it to fully take hold, to open itself to some wider digression of thought than, “Well, jeez, this sure does sound real nice.” And while my subsequent thoughts haven’t strayed too far from this initial estimation the thing has flowered a bit.

At the very least I think I’ve figured out the best way to play it — loudly with few distractions, allowing the first high tensile sine tones of the first track, “Less Surface Noise,” to crack the enamel of your teeth all the while high mass distortions, pops and crackles begin to swell and reverberate through your sticky subcutaneous tissues, forming eddies against your stomach lining. This album can often sound like all the mistakes your body has made fighting against time, a piano wire cutting through a mass of twisting visceral chunks committed to audio, as meshed in the down and dirty of an infected audio cochlear nerve as any funereal death metal pig squeal. And while the stuttering electronic hoo ha, buzzing filters of found sound, and deft placement of space/silence hook it up to the EAI IV, Temporary Perspectives seems far more constructed than anything improvised. It also sounds far more bodily oriented and dare I say organic than the antiseptic glow of so much of that nebulous genre. It spits and stumbles, cutting out entirely in places only to lurch back into frame again in shadow, in scuffling feet, fastened into a disorienting mass. This can seem overly worried over, as though Kilymis wasn’t sure exactly where to stop in places, adding a slight tinge of over seasoning. But when it has moments of such spectacular nuance it’s hard to get too bent out of shape.

And “Part 2 (my voice),” is the most dynamic and powerful on Temporary Perspectives, a plunge through an elongated moment of dental morass: front row and center for a blasting out of infected pulp, smelling the burn of tooth enamel and soft palate salivary gush. Yes, yes, easy now, I don’t want to paint some post grad art student body hate picture here, as though it’s all dentist drill whirs and Michael Gira groaning pretty nothings about skin disease in your ear. In an enlightening interview by Tobias Fischer about Temporary Perspectives, Kilymis states,

The emphasis is on the auditory experience, being a listener and how we place ourselves inside the listening experience, how this affects our senses and ultimately, in some brief moments, how we perceive our surroundings.

Let’s not forget that these pieces are, as is written in the sleeve, “4 studies in human perception,” and if I fall too readily into the idea that this is all some play on the sound intersecting the body, the body through time, the drivel of random misfiring functions — what the hell does it say about me? Maybe it’s my own issue that the listening experience of Temporary Perspectives elicits an auditory Fantastic Voyage through the mucous membranes, of charting rapids along a bony shell. It seems to succeed in this challenge of the listeners perception and question its malleability, although one wonders if ones time is better spent musing on these questions as simply listening, as on, “Much Remains to be Broken,” it’s so easy to just stop and play in the angular planes of slow tones that work around the room, reflecting from walls, stopping dead against the carpet. A beautiful, er, study that seems to weave a delicate track through the inner ear, which makes sense when Kilymis continues in the interview,

The whole album has a linear progression – it is like a story, and each part of the story builds on the previous one. Its different parts are taking different angles – perspectives – in reading what is going on.

While I can see that this idea of a linear progression in an album as abstract as this one as an easy, and possibly cynical out from any real discussion, “Much remains to be broken,” does feel like a further of events through it’s eventual dissolution of tunneling muffled sounds, that again shift in emphasis, reinforcing the feeling that you are indeed following something. Just what that something is could be entirely left up to you. And while I can’t completely shake the feeling that this is indeed just another aspect of some sort of inner space, if not in the sounds of hormone cascade, then somewhere emotional and hermetic — it’s seems rather novel sitting here with some cheerios.

And less I put too much emphasis on the inward, Kilymis spackles the album with outside sounds of traffic, voices, echoed footfalls as if to let the outside in. But these seem to only reinforce further disorientation for the listener, of letting the “different parts,” take, “different angles.” But of course, this begins to seem troublesome after a while — this idea that it’s all some discourse on perspectives of listening. Because once you unload the language of “temporary perspectives,” and “studies in human perception” I wonder if that isn’t what most music is about already, these temporary perspectives. Aren’t all pieces of music or audio by definition studies in human perception? Few musicians seem to want to point this out as much as Kilymis, however, and it’s an interesting experience. Even if sometimes I think the overall effect can be far greater when you just let your mind run around in the sounds, and not be too taken with questions of how you are listening, or what it all means, or if you should be doing anything at all. Nothing is wrong with you, guys, just sit down and listen. As Temporary Perspectives is an often twisting, peculiar and fascinating album, one that has obviously been painstakingly shaped into an impressive whole. I can’t relegate it to some dark corner of my swollen shelves. It begs for further inspection and some drunken contemplation nights like these. And yes, it sure does sound real nice.

Organized Music From Thessaloniki

Doris Salcedo Chair a lot

I’ve taken some time off writing about music. My mind feels like this Salcedo above sometimes. And nothing has driven me to unpack it lately. Thanks for stopping in. New things soon(ish).

fields have ears

Michael Pisaro fields have ears Another Timbre

I suppose this could be construed as maudlin in certain circumstances: a piano etches with resonating single piano notes some unspooling tape of field recordings — the cawings of crows, chirping of sparrows, jet scrawl — all so beautiful and quaint. Where’s the goddamn noise? But let’s not get angry here, because we don’t expect that either, right? And there’s something that sets it apart from the forced sentimentality of William Basinski’s degraded tape piano musings or those records of ambient crystal gaze piano and jungle sounds you listened to in your grandma‘s basement — she cooked a mean squash curry, don‘t get me wrong. And while there’s a kind of easygoingness to fields have ears 1 (for piano and tape), it’s far from torpid, instead exhibiting a gentle propulsion, becoming a meandering walk where as you travel further there‘s more and more to see. And maybe you wouldn’t be totally wrong to think this is the avant garde equivalent of that much feared EZ listenin’… But when is it that everything has to be so tough? Things are what they are, not what we think they should be sometimes. And sometimes I wonder if we all want difficult art because our lives are so horrifyingly boring, so disturbingly easy. No, no, I digress. Let me explain.

The field recordings used are themselves entirely ordinary and in this creating a kind of novelty, throwing out the obvious by jumping head first into the everyday, albeit this everyday slightly muffled under a quiet pallor of tape hiss. And in fact this is where it gets sticky, it’s as though fidelity of the tapes are part of the point, in one instance early in fields have ears 1 there’s a flutter of distortion in the tape, drawing ones attention to the medium itself and the fact that this might not be what it seems. This is an aspect where it’s suddenly apparent that this isn’t a rumination on a loaded memory… no childhood baths, cotton candy stuck to fingertips, tire swings in the backyard, digging holes in the yard until you hit rotting treasure. Nope, it doesn’t seem to fall into that pit of nostalgia when it so easily could reside. You could almost miss the sine tone at the ten minute mark well up only subside to a barely insinuated hum throughout the piece it’s so well integrated that it could easily be ignored, fitting snuggly in the elbow of the environment that has been constructed.

I read in a interview conducted by Sam Sfirri and Jason Brogan where Pisaro states that, “The fields have ears series is about trying to install a three dimensional environment on the concert stage – to create a field on the plane of the stage.” Interesting if initially a little oblique in regards to a recording like this one, but there’s something that resonates. Each placement of sound does seem to chart a different area of perception/listening, conjuring up an amalgam of responses. The use of these oddly resonant and nearly melodic piano notes and chords create a grounding that the field recordings obscure, while the sine tone gently needles the inner ear making it seem like the whole thing is just …a… little uneasy– there’s something hidden out there, somewhere. It’s as oddly disconcerting as it is beautiful and immersive. These sounds come from nowhere and everywhere, as artificial as they are naturalistic, drawing attention to themselves and the nature that we attach to them.

There’s something nice about music that purposely shows the subtle seams in it’s construction, as though commenting on itself. It seems to be a motif that Pisaro has employed before, this use of field recordings and barely there sine tones in Transparent City albums or July Mountain, which seem to be as much about how we as listeners listen and find meaning as it is about just making some nice sounds. And let‘s face it, this sounds pretty damn nice. Philip Thomas plays with the requisite emotional fortitude, engraving chords with subtle resonating power, so that even if you simply sit down and listen to it superficially, which I no doubt do most of the time, it‘s still very attractive. Although in this case I don’t think a superficial listening works so well. It’s too easy to write off that way, far to easy to think it‘s just some winsome if rote routine. Don’t worry be happy.

fade (for piano) is an interesting interjection, although that‘s probably not a fair description of the piece. None the less it still strikes me as a breather between fields have ears 1 and 4. It’s definitely harder for me to come to terms with. The composition seems simple enough — usually 5 or more repetitions of a single piano note let to decay, often lowering in volume after the initial note. One could stop there, fart in the bath, and continue reading Murakami, plucking absently at their eyebrows. But again, that’s missing something, just what is up to you. Because in this simplicity complexity rises, albeit slowly, and with care. It strikes me as a slow dislocation. I keep striving to hear something in it that isn’t there and in a way it‘s like searching for something that you don’t know even exists. And in this case it’s a boat (if you were wondering when a bat shit crazy analogy would come in). Thomas’ piano notes chart depth, as though using soundings so as not to run aground. But that never seems to be a possibility here– the splintering of timbers, the mast snapping and falling into placid water as the sand bar ground the keel would be far too obvious. Expected in that movement towards catharsis found so often in music such as this. Instead there’s something like a miscommunication here, just below the surface. When the notes overlap it seems almost as there’s a beautiful struggle coming out like getting over some small hiccups of mistranslation in a café in south east China. No, you really like Tony Leung, yes, Leung. No not leung, LEUNG. Tony. Tony? Forget it.

Like fields have ears 1, I wasn’t initially interested in fade, it struck me as overly simple and spare and maybe I was simply falling into that trap which equates mass with truth, volume with force. I don’t know if there’s any truth here, whatever that may mean, but there is force, there is a feeling of being somewhere for a time, and while it may not be immediately recognizable it’s there.

fields have ears 4 (for 4 or more players)is quite immediately stunning in all its minute detail, and surface tension. The small puffs of sound that are emitted remind of sudden blooms of algae. The character of the sound is woody, dark, vegetative. And very quiet. You hear Thomas’ piano among the barely stirring mass, a bassoon possibly, low tones, it’s hard to single any of the other 13 musicians (including Sarah Huges, Patrick Farmer, Dominic Lash and 10 members of the edges ensemble) out really. But you don’t hope for anything too recognizable, as it would seem gauche in a way, and that surprises me. That’s not always something I look for in music, as I usually celebrate the awkward, the obnoxious, the perverse, the singular voice. And thankfully this music is far from the gauche. You don’t feel as though the imperative is for all the musicians to sublimate their natural inclinations or voices, but to work together as one thing, one group to further the piece. It’s cool if you don’t want to bow down, but it’s cooler if you just want to join in for a bit. The piece itself changes, of course, nearly subliminally, but changes none the less, around the 11 minute mark the activity increases if the volume does not, Thomas’s piano chimes a few times, before it disappears again. The timbres change so delicately it’s like someone you love breathing against your cheek as they shift in their sleep.

I find what I appreciate about fields have ears 4 and much of Pisaro’s work is that it doesn’t aim at making you feel the listener feel like philistine or rube, either. It doesn’t seem to place the pedantic bullshit that springs up in modern composition ahead of the results, the mood, the … music. You don’t have to worry about getting it. You don’t have to feel like your method of listening is wrong. You don’t have to feel like your missing something, anything. Because you exist with the music. And while it’s not telling you anything, you can join it if you want. In these delicate plumes of sound that arise out of silence, there is a delightful acceptance. No, this isn’t some kult artifact, as there is no required knowledge of previous works, arcane books, or greasy discographies: there is no wrong here. You are not wrong. And while this is all easy to write, like some dripping hippy armpit bullshit, it’s there none the less. And while so often this music is considered austere, this in fact feels completely full and alive. I can’t explain how nice that is.

another timbre

Ah, Shit…

A while ago, what? 10, 11 years ago this inspiring kid killed himself. I remember listening to the first Man Afraid EP (half mast records). The honesty in his voice, the truth in him. I didn’t know… I miss that feeling now. RIP Mark Griffin. We miss you.

Cemetery Ridge

keeping warm by the light of a television, in an empty room, in an
emptier life. making promises to myself. trying to validate myself.
lashing out at the fiction and it hurts when the eyes roll back.
when the means defeat the ends, you cheated.
what did you mean to defend your usa, your dirty hands, the
backsliding, or the choice? now you’re standing next in line like the
cowards who came before you and I can’t ignore it. it’s a question of
wrong or right.

I remember the ride up. it was snowing outside and I could see your
breath, yet we seemed so dead. the nearest light was miles away.
talking about how my dad died and who he’d hurt and how we’d
have to pay. I know why you tagged along, but the means defeat the
ends, you cheated.

what did you mean to defend your usa, your dirty hands, the
backsliding, or the choice? now you’re standing next in line like the
cowards who came before you and I can’t ignore it. it’s a question of
wrong and right.

you said you’d never sell yourself.
were we really young and stupid?
am I really crazy?
how could all those empty victories
amount to so much more?
watching friends go by.
losing another battle deep inside.
some things are better left unsaid.

Tables and Stairs

Nikos Veliotis, Ferran Fages, Robin Hayward Tables and Stairs Organized Music from Thessaloniki

That isn’t to say you think improvisation is a pack of lies… No, you don’t mean that exactly. But you do wonder if the best musicians are the ones that lie… and lie well, so well that the truth comes out cold and lifeless and the lies end up warming you while are alone in bed, staring at the water marks on the ceiling. Could the most perceptive, most delicate and subtle be the best liars, the ones that play down their true feelings in order to further the conversation? Those who restrict their egos when their psyches are all screaming “play louder, play more, play now…” You press play, all too aware that you must leave the house soon.

In day to day life first meetings can be filled with awkwardness and unknowing, as though in each word you could be stepping into the perilous. You can offend others so easily, you realize — that secret you let out of its cage… Was it so goddamn important for you to mention your interest in diaphragms to her?

Nikos Veliotis on cello, Robin Hayward on micro-tonal tuba and Ferran Fages on sine tones… Table and Stairs. You’ve been listening to this one for a couple of weeks. It spins and you sit back; you wonder how they all first met… over beer perhaps? Does Fages enjoy beer? What kind? Maybe he likes something bitter, something that goes well with those sine tones? If that’s the case, you think, then Hayward has got to be a Guinness man — all those subterranean depths he conjures. Veliotis, a lager, an ale… yeah, an ale, a barley wine in fact, something rich, powerful, nearly sweet, a tang of alcohol but ultimately soothing. You don‘t know if they‘re lying when you hear this album, Table and Stairs… recorded at a concert in an apartment in Athens, and released on organized Music from Thessaloniki… Organized music? you wonder, is it music that marches in unison on the factory owners, chasing down scabs in the dark of night, lighting fires in a rich man’s house? You think of the stairs they climbed up to that apartment in Athens, shoes scuffed against stairs, tuba hefted, cello cradled, laptop in a pack… Fages got off easy. You imagine the apartment they played in is tight with a few casual but suddenly close friends. The album seems frustratingly brief, you think, but realize that in its briefness there is an allowance of breath, and you don‘t worry so much, because it will all be over soon, whether you like it or not. And there’s something about being left wanting more that is so much better than wanting less.

There’s a mustiness, a laden air to the thing, you think. Clean lines erupt from Fages’ computer and are quickly subsumed by cello groan, tuba sputter… but sometimes, once and a while, they are left alone, unanswered in the air: a question asked, or a statement of intent? But the beginning, the beginning is unclear, unformed. Hayward’s sounds travel slowly, as though through a viscous liquid, light straining through amber where grit hangs in wisps, and you think of the ice that is melting off into your whiskey, hazy as heat distortion rising off pavement. Fages’ punctures, swipes broadly, uses his sine tones like blunt rapiers, down out across the sound, and not subtle but in away refreshing; Veliotis’ cello courses gently in the background, rosin on horsehair, pulled coarsely, sleeping. Drones erupt and subside, never cloying in your hair, pushing you into outer space to contemplate the space Buddha or some shit. You think to yourself, this is searching. But for what? Where does truth enter in? Somewhere along the line, 20 minutes in or so, it all makes sense, in the beautiful entwined movement there is communication. Is it all lies you wonder? You turn off the stereo, after it shambles to a halt, and a few moments pass; you almost think it will start over, again. You almost wish it, because you know you have to leave. And there are people to meet.

It’s cool outside, but not so cool that you need a jacket. You wear a sweater; even though the sweater is not one you would wear normally, it’s the only one that was clean. But that’s beside the point: you are on your way to meet some people at the bus station, people you know, but not so well that you would characterize them as friends. But you told them that you would pick them up when they called you and said they knew Thomas, and anyway Thomas vouched for them. Your sister called earlier and was upset. Her boyfriend left her and she was feeling bad, bad enough to take her own life, to throw herself out. Out into where you had asked? The train tracks that run behind her house? God no, please, that’s morbid. No, she said, out there, out the goddamn window, you pussy. Jeez, Maria, no, no. You talk her out of it, or at least you talk her out of the idea that she may want to think about killing herself. Because you know her, and you know that she doesn’t have that in her. She’s weak. And this concerns you only insofar as that it could be a bad page in your journal, something you might not want to read later. So you may not write an entry today, or at least you might write about the movie you saw last night instead, even if it wasn‘t very good. You didn’t understand the ending. But you rarely understand endings. If all things could just last forever, you think, then in some ways you could live forever with them, because you were there too, if only for a moment. But that’s besides the point, because you’re on your way to meet some people, and you’re late.

No, no, that’s not right. You’re right on time. But there’s something off initially. Your feet don’t seem to follow one another in that concise movement you‘re known for. Your breath seems caught in your throat. And there’s no time for that. They come off the bus, the man has a grey mustache and she has a birthmark on her cheek that looks like a silhouette of a small bird mid flight. They smile and you shake their hands, but your hands are sweaty. They don’t seem to notice, or if the do they ignore it. You get the pleasantries out there so you can chart how far the ‘how was your trips’ go before there’s silence and you know when something’s gone wrong or right… You ask them if they are hungry, and they say that they had already eaten at a rest stop on the way– it was vegetarian, but a kind of vegetarian that simply means a dull yellow cheese, white bread, wilted lettuce, and a narrow slice of tired red tomato that spits out the end on a conchoidal sheet of mayonnaise. You all pinch your eyes and laugh at that sudden shared unspoken comment. You hear wind through the trees. But there is no wind at the bus station, just exhaust, the patter of rain that has started to fall against windshield. And as you start off you realize that you’re talking more than you had in a long, long time

Your parents never trusted you with the car so they made you work in the back yard until you raised enough money to pay for insurance. Your cheeks got red in school when a girl kissed your best friend and you were so worried that they all would see that redness and misinterpret it… somehow. You notice that good comedy is structured in such a way that the protagonist of a joke is almost always simultaneously relatable but also heroic, something you were beginning to understand acutely, but could never master. You stopped smoking cigarettes because you were afraid.

Veliotis’ cello streams through the window. The window pane shudders.

And what was so strange was that these two strangers respond and start telling you their stories like they are friends. And these stories are not asked for exactly, but seemed to make perfect sense in the telling. There are moments of silence after some time, but never oddly over drawn or uncomfortable, really, but seem more like short respites, where the communication has to stop, to breathe. Then abruptly it starts again. And they talk to you, and the joke you had heard from your brother last spring before he had gone to basic training makes them laugh, laugh so hard there are tears in their eyes and the man with the mustache grabs your shoulder when you were taking a left turn onto Johnson. You try to remember something else to say, something that is funny, but you can’t because his hand is warm and it feels so differently to you just then. How strange you think, as you pull up to their hotel, and the rain is falling — how strange to think that they were only strangers a minute ago… It was a short ride you realize suddenly. And as they get out of the car they shake your hand through the open window, but you don’t say proper goodbyes because it’s raining and they were getting wet, holding newspapers above their heads, eyes squinting as the rain is streaming down their faces. You are aware of your handshake. You never felt your handshake was ever strong enough. You had practiced on your other hand, but it always felt awkward — people stared at you as you sat at your desk at work, squeezing your other hand and shaking it one, two– no more than two times. They wave you good bye from the door way. You wave back. Where is your applause you wonder? Where is the audience? . Hayward blasts a deep resonating note. Let’s face it you think, as you twist the car radio dial, maybe it was just lies, but they were good ones. A high pitched tone, doubles, pins the leaves against the wind shield. You rub your head with your hand. When you get home your girlfriend comes up to you and tells you to listen, to quiet because this line from one of Mikhail Lermontov‘s poems is so beautiful,

I am bored and sad
and there is no one to whom I can stretch out my hand
when the soul is afflicted.

Isn’t that sad? She asks you.

You take her head in your hand. You hug her.

Organized Music From Thessaloniki

Been busy…

Sorry for a lack of posts, more to come soon, but I’ve been pretty busy lately with among other things this:

As some of you may know, Wisconsin’s (I live in Madison) governor, Scott Walker, has been trying to shoehorn a bill through that would effectively destroy all State workers collective bargaining rights, and basically eviscerate the state worker’s unions. Suffice it to say, this shit won’t stand. This has enormous implications for the rest of the US right now, and if it passes would allow many other Republican majority state governments an opportunity to make similar bills under the auspices of “budgetary tightening”– Ohio I’m looking at you. If you’re at all inclined, check out more information and maybe lend us here some support with an email to Scott Walker and his cronies. Anything helps, because it’s sleeting outside and people have been camping out there since last Monday, keeping it real. All 70,000 of us.