Before Sleep…

I often listen to music before settling into sleep. I’ve been in Vietnam for almost a year now and live off of my ipod and it’s increasingly haggard and vicious looking ibuds– I hate the knobby little things; sound distorts and I’m not a big fan of putting anything in my ears except a q-tip. But you make do with what you have. All minor concerns really; first world problems. I wonder what people did in my position did before the ipod revolution. Did everyone schlep a few favorite cds around the world with them? Did they pack a couple battered tapes of Neil Young or Glenn Branca in with their clothes and pray they didn’t unravel in the humidity and exhaust? I remember taking a few discs with me for a month in Nepal to play in my cracked and brutalized discman; if I remember correctly one was an early Deerhoof Cd, not a good choice… Thank god for mp3s then, as much as I hate what they are doing to our listening habits and attention spans and understanding of music, they are making my life a lot easier and more enjoyable here. And I can still download stuff, Electric Wizard here I come (“Dunwitch” is awesome).

I’m not sure what the best music is to listen to when you drift off at night. I know I tend to listen to “difficult” music, stuff with little melody or harmony, ranging from Cecil Taylor to Jason Kahn. Often I find myself going to sleep listening intently, only to find myself waking up later in a start to find something alien pulsating through my ears. Sometimes it can be so disconcerting that I cast my headphones off in disgust. I’m not sure what that says about the music I like or me, but it’s almost a ritual at this point. One wonders why I continue to do it. But those moments before I sleep allow me to listen to music in a different way. It’s both background listening and a prod for my thinking, which gets increasingly abstracted the closer I get to sleep; it makes sense I listen to a lot of drone and electronic sputter before I sleep. But last night I listened to a couple new things that proved revelatory…

One being, Milford Grave’s “Babi” album. It’s an almost unbearably intense album. A young Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover shriek away in thick distortion over a fantastically deranged pan-african rumble from Graves. It’s a live recording, starting inexplicably with an acapella version of a soul song I can’t be bothered to remember right now, but then it jumps in with the trio firestorm. This is definitely the epitome of fire music (as little as I like the term) but for a cassette noise age. I can’t tell exactly what I like about it so much, if it’s the unhinged chaos of the playing or the murky production that filters everything into some cheap and hypnotic dreamscape music. I don’t know another album that can sound this brutal but at same time utteraly soothing. Graves is a spectacular percussionist, none of the free players sound quite like him, not Cyrille or Murray or Ali (and especially none of the Europeans) have the same African tribal feel, which also lends an earthy authenticity to the music, his playing like a planet shifting in it’s skin. I’m less interested in Doyle and Glover’s playing on this one actually, which this recording seems noted more for in other forums– it’s great and powerful screaming, but nothing you haven’t heard before done better from Frank Wright or Albert Ayler or the Brotz. But it all combines to make a powerful outer space tribe music, but recorded on a boombox for the future generations of murk and tape hiss hounds. Shit-gaze music or whatever you call the stuff coming from Eat Skull and Psychedelic Horseshit has definitely got some precedents in the 70s free jazz movement. Surreal to say the least to go to sleep to. Apparently this very out of print but if you google it there’s several music blogs where you can download it from, and it’s most definitely worth it. Even if you aren’t into free jazz, music like this and from this time seem to transcend the staid bullshit labels, existing more as a pure music more than as some kind of footnote to a genre history; you don’t have to understand, you just have to listen and feel. And what it conjures inside you is not only a nostalgia for a time and place but a new atmosphere for the here and now. Cool.

More favorite bed-time listening: Georg Graewe’’s solo piano album “Fantasiestucke,” has been giving me a woozy last few minutes of consciousness lately. “Fatasiestucke” is filled with beautiful improvised piano pieces that show a clarity not often found in improvised piano work. Unlike some of the more popular free improving piano players like Alexander Von Schlippenbach or Fred Van Hove, Graewe does not rely on simple velocity or crush for his power. While I dig the previously named pianists, Graewe is more like John Tilbury than Cecil Taylor; although he’s without the deftness of touch Tilbury lends to his Morton Feldman interpretations. Graewe conjures a beautiful atmosphere through sometimes deceptively simple motifs of notes, and displays a overall understanding of where he wants his pieces to go that is not as common as you would think. Sometimes I feel especially with free jazz pianists a lack of theme and structure in favor of pure kinetic, cascading energy flow, as though they don’t really care where they end up as long as they get there fast and with the most notes possible. That’s cool, but it gets tiring just as quickly. I don’t listen to much solo piano actually, but this album is one of the few that I have been returning to. It’s subtle, engaging and powerful in equal measure. Graewe’s imagination and creative powers seem at their height here, he never repeats himself, never falls back on tired cliche or meanders too far from the essence of the piece. I don’t know his working procedure or what it all means, but it’s beautiful, exquisitely produced piano, rarely rising to a tumultuous catharsis, but when it does it’s that more satisfying.

Death, Life and Thrash.

Michael Jackson’s dead. I remain unmoved. I grew up with his music. My parents would play “Thriller” on their hi-fi and I would stare at a lounging Michael Jackson, pre-moleman transformation, on the LP cover as the music bounced behind me. I didn’t really like the music then. I like it more now. I can appreciate it. I can understand the craft and talent behind it. But I still can’t listen to it for fun. I don’t know if it’s because of the history behind it– the whiff of nostalgia that it carries– or if I simply don’t like it much. Maybe both.

I have to give him one for upping the ante on Howard Hughes-like weirdness. We always need a few people out there at the height of celebrity that seem to collapse in front of our very eyes, as though they understand the futility of trying to be real in such unreal circumstances. I often wonder if celebrity causes pychosis, especially when one reaches a certain apex of celebrity. It’s as the world cease it’s own realness, and one becomes an image, and thus becomes product. Not to sink into some Debord-inspired rant on the means of production and what have you, but I’ve wondered what it means that people such as this should exist. What need does the celebrity fufilll? It’s not a need for the image of success, because, certainly we can divorce the notion of success and celebrity easily. The two are not obviously synonomous. They can exist together but very often function entirely apart. To be a celebrity one must divorce any notion of oneself, and exist in another realm, one not ordained by oneself, but by others. I can assume that this easy enough to handle if temporary, but in the case of Jackson, I have to wonder if it did work towards some sort of odd rupture in the self, where at some point in his life there was a brutal disruption between himself and the rest of the world, between reality and ego. Eh. Probably not worth going down this road, as much to save myself from sounding like a pompous prick as anything else.

I’m listening to a really great split from Capitalist Casualties and Hellnation:

I remember seeing both play in 1998 or so in some shitty basement of an anarcho-info center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was either put on by some dudes from Profane Existence or by people related to them in some way; as in typical fashion of the time, I remember them being too cool to come down and watch the bands play and generally acting like elitist pricks to the hordes of 17 year olds kids who came to get crushed by thrash mayhem. It was a great show, as much for the oddness of the singer of CC looking very similar to my cousin, Jed, than anything. Neither bands previous material would be something I would recommend to the unaccustomed or unenthused. They always struck me as bands for the fans of the genre more than for the dabblers. Unlike bands like Dropdead or Tragedy, they don’t transcend boundries, they don’t win converts from the indie rock sphere or convince your 12 year old brothers/sisters to get into punk rock. They exist as brutal, fast-core monsters, all killer/no filler thrashers with little to concede to the feint-hearted. In that sense, they’re the epitome of hardcore, in at least what “hardcore” used to signify (the hardcore for the hardcore), or as Henry Rollins said pejoratively on some shitty “history of punk” documentary (and I paraphraze), “hardcore is for those amped up guys you saw in 7-11 parking lots banging their heads in their cars, oblivious to the world.” He was insinuating (like most out of touch and usually older blowhards of the early days) that punk stopped being real when they lost interest. Maybe so. But this isn’t meathead hardcore or new metal. This is anti-social, pissed off hardcore, more in league with nihilistic greats like No Trend and Seige than the jock-hardcore or Sceamo kids that pepper the social sphere like unpopped zits.

There’s an added maturity to the brutality. They still work that fine balancing act of the precise and unhinged, but now have added some strange off-kilter popish hooks to their game, which don’t come off as bids for the Warped tour as much as just smack of better song writing. (Gasp) The songs actually resemble songs now, rather than just insane meta-commentaries on thrash and grind. That’s a good thing. Hellnation, as always, edges out Capitalist Casualties on this one, mostly because their songs are just a little more frayed, out of control and tinny. Hellnation sounds like your worst day, your most harried onslaught at work, your most out of control moment… and the drummer sings, er, more appropriately, screams. Yes, the drummer… it’s an endurance act over a constant hyperspeed drum thrash (he can pull it off live too). And it’s awe-inspiring. This is no real slight to CC, as they still can hold their own with the pixie stick thrash, in fact adding some complexities to the guitar lines now and then, at points the guitars have a circuitous nature, like a slowed down Discordance Axis. Very nice. And the vocals still sound pissed. CC have never played second fiddle in the pure anger category. You know how so much hardcore punk can sound forced and played out? I stopped going to most hardcore shows for that reason: I kept getting tired of 20 year old kids screaming at me. I kept wondering why they just didn’t see a therapist about their girl friends, or if they were so sure nuclear missiles would come crashing down on us, couldn’t they just go stand outside with a sign or something? But Capitalist Casualties and Hellnation are both pushing their mid 30s or so, and when they sing they sound like they mean it. They meant it in 1998, and they mean it now. It’s a seething rage. It’s transparently real. And it’s refreshing.

Buy it from: http://www.sound-pollution.com/Hellnation.htm

A very belated best of 2007 albums list.

So here’s a long out of date End of 2007 best of list that I had written for a near-dead message board a while back, and rather than have it languish unread in that particular pock-marked end of the web I thought I would inaugerate this blog with it, so it can be unread here as well.  Soon to come is more music reviews (probably a best of 08, but this time more timely) and whatever else I can think of. Take care. Thanks for reading. Tanner.

Mattin and Tim Barnes “Achbal Al Atlas”
Little Enjoyer/Game Boy Records

Ah, that fucked up noise and drum rattle… The first track of “Achbal Al Atlas” starts out with nothing but a slanting buzz and endless kick drum gearing up for a great, big, slithering deathadder rebellion. Nowhere to be found is the boring and rote histrionics often expelled out of the crusty-asshole of the noise genre, instead you receive nuanced but crushed sounds filtered through cheap electronic murk courtesy of Mattin along with pernicious but loving textures by drummer, Tim Barnes (also a Sonic Youth collaborator if that’s your thing). Deft knee drops of silence are interspersed throughout only for the noise to come screaming back and level you with high end… It’s hard to even recognize where Barnes comes into this thing, his sounds so muddled in the electronic howlllllls, prodded into abstracted and granulated noise. Tense, provocative and good noise: don’t worry about any nihilistic pablum found so often in the noise genre–this is oddly joyful. Listen with lovers.

Jurg Frey “String Quartets”
Edition Wandelweiser Records

I can’t explain this record in pure musical terms– I don’t have the vocabulary or knowledge of theory. Who knows what the hell Frey is on about, or what his over arching themes are, what his modus operandi is. Certainly I don’t; oddly, perhaps, I think it would probably lessen the quality of the music if I did. I think this one works on purely musical terms, thank God, something the Wandelweiser chin-fiddlers don’t often seem to be known for — more high on concept, low on musical relevency, I suppose.  One thing I can tell you is that it’s a beautiful composition, basking in the sound of the string’s ephemeral tonalities. The first track is a simple repeated note motif, changing slightly over an extended period, from bowed to plucked strings,  reminding me slightly of Morton Feldman’s work sans the disorienting rhythmic patterns often found in his work. Feldman is the composer I’ve heard Frey most compared to on this album, but I think it’s a little unfair, and seems to be interested in a different atmosophere altogether.  The last track is a pianissimo exploration of texture, the sound of strings and friction– dry and droning– again a repetitive note motif, so small, so present and alive like cicadas shedding their shells. Again, does the theory matter when the results are so wonderful to listen to?

Sachiko M “Salon de Sachiko”
Improvised Music From Japan

Modern art music. Purposeful failed pop. Sachiko M extracts the essence of lush Euro electronics and tortures it into stuttering and disfigured pops, whirs and bleats. Gone are the stately sine waves of yore, replaced with a mutated back ground disco beat – arrhythmic, atonal, acetic. I’m still wrapping my head around it. It’s so different, yet it still commands that stubborn static quality that characterized much of her work in the past. It filters your space, living in the background and influencing the air around you. Apparently it was made with that intention, not necessarily “ambient” music as much as a music you live with – a silent but impressive roommate that helps you discover new vistas to your sadly straight jacketed soul (fortunately it won’t make you attend keggers or wear a Hawaiin floral shirt). I like it but it may be slightly obdurate… like a sonic stone. So let it sit.

Deathspell Omega “Fas – Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum”
Evangelium Diaboli Records/Souther Lord

Probably my favorite record of the year if forced to choose– So mind-bendingly complex and brutal it’s ridiculous. Although, let it be known, I could care less for such complexity if it’s only an excuse for mastubatory fret mangling, and Deathspell Omega certainly leaps over that trap. Honestly, I’m amazed consistently with Deathspell Omega. I’m confused consistently, as well. I muddle through the lyrics: “The idea of Salvation comes, I believe, from one whom suffering breaks apart. He who masters it, on the contrary, needs to be broken, to proceed on the path towards the rupture.” Fascinating and bleak and punishing, I’m reminded that music of this nature is needed in our world, fundamental is their exploration of the evisceration of the soul. Deathspell Omega are the grand purveyors of this struggle with the dark. They take it very seriously. I bet they are great at parties, a goblet in one hand, a copy of Bataille’s “The Eye” in the other—Satan has got to have the best jokes.

Jennifer Gentle “The Midnight Room”
Sub Pop

This wonderful Italian band has been reduced once again to its single constant member, Marco Fasolo, who wrote, performed and produced this record. It’s far bleaker than the previous “Valende,” but it’s just as psychedelic and dream-like, Syd Barrett’s ghost as heavy on this as any of the other work. The opening track, “Twin Ghosts,” is as beautiful as anything Fasolo has written. It’s definitely a grower. I didn’t like it terribly the first time I heard it ( just like the new Dead Meadow record) but have grown to adore its peculiarities – the plodding rhythmic conventions, the staccato string plucks and death carnival dreaminess. I unconsciously find myself drifting through a dark ball room, eyes glittering, feet steaming away into haze, Felleni-esque women casting glances in my direction. . .

Keith Rowe “The Room”
Erstwhile Records

Bitter and expansive meshing of electronics and guitar scrunch and flutter, Rowe’s music is so contemplative and perfect in its disparate elements it’s almost a shame. Each dab of sound is like a perfect accent to a sublime meal. A shattering beep in the middle of lush electronic haze is like the returning prodigal son. Each moment is an exploration of possibility. While appearing flat and obstinate at first glance, it reveals itself to be almost fourth dimensional in its layering than originally perceived, not simply leading you from one point to the next, but creating a spatial construction, a music of angles and environment… Lovingly produced: Rowe’s abstraction is so fully realized and his oeuvre so satisfying at this point that one could make the mistake in thinking anything else he makes in the future would be superfulous, like an exclamation point in a haiku. But everything points to more great work yet to be made. The Room is a powerful statment. Vital and essential to anyone interested in electro acoustic music.

 
Angharad Davies and Tisha Mukarji “Endspace”
Another Timbre

Ah these hidden words. How hard it is to try and describe the indescribable, but we try anyway, stumbling on our words, knowing the absurdity of the task. . . Davies plays violin, Mukarji plays the inside of a piano—each musician works with sounds derived from extended techniques.These abstracted and often percussive explorations combine equal amounts of prodding movement with timeless languor. The music often sounds suspended in air, moving about the room like dust particles, ghosts, or mechanical birds. My oft said word– beautiful — is more than apt here. This is music that stays with you.

David Tudor “Music For Piano”
Edition RZ

Interpretations of Cage, Feldman and others by the master of classical piano, David Tudor. This two disc set includes the massive, fucked-up mountain of brutality that is Tudor’s interpretation of Cage’s “Variations II,” which I never heard before and am now unsure how I could possibly have not… A good description from the booklet: “Variations II is made up of eleven transparent pages, six of which contain a straight line and five of which each contain a point. . . . By placing (or throwing) the pages on top of one another, a point-line pattern is created which then must be interpreted.” How this interpretation goes is left entirely to Tudor. So like a insane, bratty punk noise terrorist hidden in a classical, studious, puckered-asshole’s body, Tudor devised an amplified piano that he outfitted with contact mikes and various bric-a-brac he attached to the strings. Needless to say it sounds like a motherfucker (when played loud that is). Incredibly dense and dynamic, this thing will scare the shit out of the children playing stickball in your neighborhood (Do they still play stickball? Did they ever?). Other pieces are much more civilized but less interesting – heady, abstracted and very percussive, reminding me of the quote usually attached to Cecil Taylor describing his playing as sounding like “88 tuned drums.” I haven’t given much time to the majority of Cage or Tudor finding it far too cerebral and/or disjointed for pleasurable listening, but I appreciate the ideas very much and often find when the two things intersect — ideas and musicality — a sublime truce is made. None the less, it’s is a great compilation for those interested in Tudor or Cage and some of the pieces are real stunners; so open ended the ideas and such is Tudor’s exquisite taste and mixture of subtlety and brute force that it makes you wonder how you had lived so long without these works in your life. To have them all in one place is a real boon. According to the “experts,” Tudor was the premier interpreter of Cage in the 50s to 60s and one of the most prodigiously talented pianists in classical music until he largely gave up the sport of contemplating the keys for his own electronic compositions in the ‘70s. Edition RZ is a killer label, coalescing a wide variety of archival performances of such composers and players as Tudor, Xenakis, Luigi Nono, and Giacinto Scelsi while putting out new performances of contemporary classical composers like Christina Kubisch and Klaus Lang.

 Klause Lang “einfalte.stille”
Edition RZ

Like Tudor and Frey, I’m woefully inadequate in explicating exactly what musical ideas Lang is working with here. Although, I find with music such as this, it’s not particularly important – the visceral power of this music is easily translatable to the unschooled and it trascends the stodgy in creation of something real and, yes, beautiful. Lang works here with voices and percussion creating a dreamlike endlessness. Time seems to bend and the world becomes meditative. Deceptively simple, this album is a rare antidote to city sickness. After a day of infinite rumination over the seemingly endless war, torture and domination of modern life and the knowledge that you form only a miniscule silhouette in front of its crushing wave– be comfortable that you can still come home on a wintery afternoon, put this into the player, sit in a favorite chair with a fine bourbon, and simply rest. . . Rest.

 
Evan Parker, John Edwards, Chris Corsano “A Glancing Blow”
Clean Feed Records

Serpentine sax howling, inchoate bass rumbling, and propulsive drum battery from a unlikely trio. Well, unlikely, as I don’t remember a time in recent years either Parker or Edwards have played with an American other than Joe Mcphee or Peter Evans. Certainly there is a large divide between the English and European improvisers and the American Free Jazzers. Although to call Corsano a free jazzer would be unfair, as he’s probably just as active in that noise/improv hybrid so popular among the unwashed and bearded. Count me among the unwashed and bearded– he’s pretty great. I’m not on the Corsano train entirely; I think there are other just as great bald-headed percussionists out there, Paal Nielson Love springing immediately to mind. But with Corsano there is a great and yes, seemingly American, straight forward energy to his playing. Add this energy with the seemingly endless creativity and other non percussive playing (some kind of reed instrument in there somewhere?) you get something really worth hearing. So one shouldn’t be surprised to think it’s a wooly out-world freak jam that is in order when you jab him into the middle of the controlled but chaotic world of Evan Parker and John Edwards. And yeah, “A glancing Blow” is almost up to that adjective laden sentence. There is a totally different vibe here with Parker and Edwards than on their other stuff… something not found with their other trio with Mark Sanders (who I like, as well, but doesn’t seem to spur Parker on like this) or the large groups and ad-hoc ensembles. I’m not sure if Parker ever really changes his style of playing as much as slightly alters his attack, and in this case it’s at once more wild and compact fusing a more free jazz style with a strange, woozy almost-psych improvisation. And this is very different stuff than the total fucked and fried free jazz found in Corsano’s work in his duo with Paul Flaherty or in the group Cold Bleak Heat. It’s more contemplative than the knock-down curb-stomping that goes on in some of that stuff. It’s a comfortable balance of meditation and murder. But I’m probably stating the case too much. The music is just good enough and, more importantly, fucked up enough for me to find it interesting when so much trio music with standard instrumentation leaves me cold.

Graham Lambkin “Salmon Run”
Kye Records

Shadow Ring member, Lambkin, has fashioned one of the most beguiling and stunning records of the year. I haven’t fully digested this one either. Found classical samples melded with field recordings, laughter, wistful punctuating sonic glances on a public radio station. What an enormously fascinating audio document; unlike any of those simple sound art/concrete/field recording albums, this seems to be a cohesive work, a peek at a world of some possibly demented listener’s world. It’s not an album of music as much as it’s an album of a man listening to music, walking outside, laughing to himself over an email or a Sunday funny… church bells, a sigh. This can be unsettling at points, beautiful at others.