Rhoda Penmark, Don Quixote, Orson Welles, Nico, Jim Morrison, with Cervantes jumping from tree to tree in the back of your mind.
This captures the feeling of the imagination in the end times like nothing else I’ve seen.
1 week ago
January 17, 2012
December 30, 2011
Music which has held my interest over the past few seasons:
Morton Feldman - I decided he was the first great composer after Stravinsky while listening to “The Viola in My Life”
George Crumb - just keep listening to Ancient Voices of Children
Benjamin Britten - Nocturnal after John Dowland - as played by Paul Galbraith.
J.S. Bach - Cello Suites 1 and 4. Here, I recorded the 4th Cello suite (playing guitar).
the moment when Kenny G walked on as Foster the People played Saturday Night Live. I hate that music, that egotistical music, that music that exists solely because someone makes a grand idiotic claim. However, this was a triumph of egoism.
alison krauss’s record - it just wishes I would put it on the shelf in the ruin, but yet I still think of it…
Grateful Dead - europe 72 volume 2 - make a classical guitar quartet version of the Playin’ in the Band from this album.
john fahey - dietrich keeps laying this deep fahey stuff on me and I don’t know what it is.
a certain transition which I believe is in Handel’s Hercules - it’s a woman singing, a very chromatic, slow rise, which then breaks, and suddenly a real light Handel popular melody type of thing happens. It crystallized a lot of ideas about large form structure.
Leo Brouwer - Preludios Epigramaticos. Also here.
brahms - String Quintet. It made me feel crazy.
skip spence - best wildman blues of all time.
john martyn
the microphones - make music right.
bill callahan - still bill.
micachu - chopped and screwed - still micachu, still scropped, still chewed.
joan of arc - it’s always on in our house.
marnie stern - it’s the big time.
1 month ago
December 2, 2011
September 6, 2011
Lindsey Buckingham - Seeds We Sow
His songwriting seems permanently stuck in adolescence, but his guitar playing and production just keeps developing, improving in a direction rarely proved. There’s some kind of alternate approach to what music can sound like in his guitar tone. It sounds like he’s playing a Malian Kora, and his technique almost follows the sound into something unlike traditional rock guitar playing. I suppose it’s taking the speedy arpeggio style of classical guitar playing, popular with many rock technicians coming to classical, but performing it on a wigged out piezo-pickup amplified classical. Then behind that, put the assured confidence of the sort of person who created some of the best rock albums of all time, and add a kind of isolation from influence, and cook for 30 years.
Strange how the songs still seem to be hovering back in 1980, though.
4 months ago
August 30, 2011
The Carpenters - Passage
My yearly dose of The Carpenters’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”. Such a sturdy melody must be looking for a side door out of this party of freaks and weirdos.
Beatifully self-indulgent album with bonus Evita interlude.
5 months agoTags:
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August 29, 2011
Brahms - String Quintet Opus 111
Were it a stone dredged from a dark crevasse, which when cleaned were found to have infinitely refracting crystalline interstices formed by millenia of nature allowed to roam freely, this Quintet would rightly astonish. As the work of a human mind, or rather of a human spirit, certain doubts must surely arise regarding authenticity, regarding purpose, human spirit itself, I suppose. Though music making is necessarily a process of discovery of hidden laws of nature, a science, as an artistic act it must also have a point of view, something within which the artist pushes off of, which places an endpoint on a line which travels from soul to soul.
I applied Brahms to my brain during an evening drive to the Shitty Barn Sessions in Spring Green, WI, where I hoped to hear Dietrich Gosser. Gosser is a great songwriter, guitarist, and singer who writes music which has literally caused a man to cry. I watched the man cry, even when he might have somewhat prepared himself by telling us all about his previous tear-filled encounters with Dietrich’s music. Nonetheless, after the performance he stood stunned and fearless before us all, wet-cheeked again.
The primary emotion Brahms brought up from me was terror. As I arrived at the alcohol-fueled celebration filled with Golden Retrievers delightfully bringing one another the dead flesh and chewed play-toys of easygoing sociability, the Quintet came to an end, and I felt like a raw nerve had been drawn out between my eyes. Though I tried at the time to shoulder the blame alone for my frayed personality, as the evening passed I gradually understood that I was mad after witnessing complete madness, in the same way a tennis player might, after watching a Federer utterly demonstrate tennis excellence, surprise herself with an adopted - perhaps temporarily - mental acuity which allows the ball to float and grow and makes the physical aspect diminish.
In no other music have I heard so clearly this inner justification and complete clarity, which is typical of madness. G.K. Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy_%28book%29), compares the materialist to the madman. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Each has an entirely consistent viewpoint, bolstered by irrefutable facts and still fortressed into the mind though relentlessly attacked by the sane or faithful. “If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do.” His problem is not irrationality, but overrationality, and he needs not to be pinned down, but freed to grow up. “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it!” If only Chesterton could have exhorted Brahms. The materialist, the utter rationalist, occupies this same degree of loneliness, a shrunken husk of a world unfilled by love.
Brahms’s music is a masterful construction, but supports no point of view. He seems driven neither by faith nor by doubt, but in the throes of mania finds upon every new chance turning of the eyes confirmation of the utter rationality of Tonal Harmony. This quintet in G major seems to have the exact same content as other of his chamber music, for example the Clarinet Sonata in F minor (Opus 120 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_16io5rzmsQ). Each is a mere field of reason, upon which to plant several flags and then connect them with bits of string. His skill in flag-planting is unmatched, and he surely nears Lacanian ingenuity in the depth of his knowledge of knot tying. For a Mahler, however, the difference between G major and F minor might be the difference between a year of panic and one of joy.
The melody from Mahler’s first symphony, first movement was in my head at the beginning of the drive, and as I shut the door I found myself still singing it. Spirit unmoved by Brahms, yet he set my mind reeling.
5 months ago
May 17, 2011
John Martyn - Bless the Weather
Here’s a fine album of acoustic guitars, soft vocals, careful thoughts and eyes rested casually over your shoulder. “Head and Heart”, above, has some great acoustic guitar playing as it steps offstage into the woods.
Nick Drake’s friend, Martyn shares much of his aesthetic, but for better and for worse is either less engaged in his conversations with the eternal or less over-matched by them.
8 months ago
January 30, 2011
January 27, 2011
Marnie Stern’s discography
I’ve been listening to nothing but Marnie Stern for the last few days. I like how she combines overwhelming sound masses with carefree melodies, and technically overwrought guitar playing with careless singing.
here is “Every Single Line Means Something” from In Advance of the Broken Arm:
Since Apple decided to put its rotten thumb into the great music source Lala last year, I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff on Rhapsody. It’s not totally free, like Lala, but then, you can put the tracks on a device and go grocery shopping with overwhelming carelessness blasting into your middle.
1 year ago
January 26, 2011
Lou Reed - The Blue Mask
I think the second track of an album, and the second verse of a song, and the second line of a verse, should usually bring extra weight, as it comes after the listener has settled in but before they can drift away.
Though it has long been one of my favorite albums, today I can’t figure out why Reed made most of the choices I notice on The Blue Mask. “The Gun”, repeating the line “carrying a gun” over and over, is the only song I can understand, but it is about such a twisted bunch of stuff that it still won’t make it onto a list or anything.
“Women”, the second track, succeeds at grabbing the attention and the bass in this song is still the awesomest thing on the album, but today the bass seems overdone, too harmonically complex and muddy, and the lyrics (“I love women, I think they’re great…”) seem like what you would write while conferring with your psychologist.
On the other hand, I still remember most of these songs even though I lost my cassette dub ten years ago and just now found it to hear again. I was a bit disappointed, though, because I remembered the song “The Power of Positive Drinking” being on this album - that’s a great song too, and one which I will probably be utterly flummoxed by should I ever hear it again.
1 year ago
