January 2012
1 post
2 tags
December 2011
2 posts
4 tags
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...
2 tags
September 2011
1 post
4 tags
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...
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
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.
7 tags
WatchBrahms - 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...
May 2011
1 post
3 tags
WatchJohn 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...
January 2011
7 posts
1 tag
WatchMilton Babbitt - String Quartet No. 2
3 tags
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...
3 tags
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. ...
2 tags
WatchNina Simone - “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”
It Sesame Streets me.
9 tags
Alexander Spence - Oar
To explain this...
4 tags
WatchSparklehorse + Fennesz - In the Fishtank 15
It’s hard to believe that someone pulled this off, and I guess it was just a few days in the making. It sits right between Sparklehorse’s perfect Neil Youngings and Fennesz’s ring modulated Ovalations. It sounds like a brain flag flying underwater.
9 tags
Dick Kirby - Talkin’ to Spring Gobblers
...
November 2010
9 posts
3 tags
4 tags
Kanye West’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Either I have no access to what makes this music great, or music journalism is in the same eddy as conventional journalism, in which received ideas bully critical thought to the edge of existence.
Anything which is proclaimed is acclaimed, it seems, but a work of art is not simply anything which is called a work of art. Proclamation only...
Henryk Gorecki - Symphony No. 3
Learned of Gorecki’s passing. His Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is his perfect lamentation. “Where has he gone, my dearest son?”
Yet somehow listening to it while doing life-stuff seemed even more correct. Preparing and eating dinner, just a moment of darkness when the soprano wells up out of the nothing.
9 tags
Gamelan Çudamani - live at The Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, 15 Nov 10
The people onstage - about 25 metallophonists, drummers, singers, flautists, and dancers - almost all were constantly on the verge of laughter. Intricate percussion patterns were traded between subsections of players, elaborately costumed girls stepped and stared, at times an individual stretched out into the void and...
6 tags
Taylor Swift - Speak Now
Though it is a mark of poor character, and probably unkind, I hereby rant against the pervasive claim that Taylor Swift is a songwriter. Hopefully I am where’s-waldoed into an army of detractors, although I have not seen evidence that a wall of spears is welling up behind my “charge!”. Faced with impending disagreeable consensus, I am compelled to act...
15 tags
Joan of Arc - Boo Human
I love Joan of Arc’s How Memory Works, which I remember I listened to constantly shortly after its 1998 release, when albums from the likes of Cat Power, Neutral Milk Hotel, Smog, OP8, Tortoise, and Gastr Del Sol were screaming into head space and garnering enough of the other stuff to become classics. On the outside, Radiohead and Bjork were loved without a...
5 tags
Antonio Lauro - Natalia
I have lately been transcribing music from audio recordings. I began with my own guitar improvisations, reasoning that a successful improv would be both a piece of music - which tends to be more difficult to create the more time one has to dedicate to it - and also obviously something I can play competently. In some cases, I intend to re-compose it with other parts. ...
6 tags
Smoosh - Withershins
hear it / have it
Really good. It feels unambitious, but ambition is not the mark. Ambition is by definition an overreach. This is music which is solidly true and a foundation for discovery. This is music by people comfortable with their limitations, for whom limitations are an outpouring of humanity.
The piano playing is cool, a slowed-down Terry Riley...
7 tags
Enrique Yara - “Corre, Corre,...
October 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Anthony Braxton - Wesleyan (12 Altosolos) 1992
Braxton’s music is essential to anyone who cares about the relation between improvisation and composition.
2 tags
Marnie Stern - This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
Marnie Stern plays guitar all over the place like some kind of outsider-shredder whose You Tube video only has 134 views. The songwriting is a kind of youthful vim and/or vigor, similar to something like Sleigh Bells I guess. On headphones this is like having a real dork...
2 tags
Tim McGraw - “Don’t Take The Girl”
It’s just a classic song. It may be a perfect country song.
The chords and melody are typical of country, the lyrics are precise and recharacterise one line in three contexts, “Don’t take the girl.”
The question of its perfection regards the line, “Give it a whirl”. The narrator, now romantically...
1 tag
Isotope 217 - Utonian Automatic, The Unstable Molecule, Who Stole the I Walkman?
I listened to basically the whole Isotope 217 catalog, not sure where my copy of the EP is. I have always had a strong preference for The Unstable Molecule, but this time I had no preference. I have finally reached the point where I can listen to the other albums without prejudice, I guess, after 10 years.
September 2010
9 posts
1 tag
Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog - Party Intellectuals
The Doors’s Break On Through seems to be a crass remark placed to clear the room before business is gotten down to, as the first track. There’s also a Pizzicato 5 or Cibo Mato type track, which is pretty good if a little disorienting. Those moments come off less as thrashing around looking for a genre than as bouys to fix...
2 tags
Federico Mompou - Variations on a Theme of Chopin
I’m fascinated by my desire to believe that each of the variations of Chopin’s theme, Prelude 7 from his 24 Preludes, is done in the style of one of the others of those Preludes.
3 tags
Califone - Heron King Blues
hear “Wingbone”
Classic Califony acoustic guitar playing, big swipes at the strings, keeping close to a rhythmic pulse but syncopated and all the bittersweet notes. Then shifting textures, sounds mechanically produced, organ chords set underneath ominously. Fed back electric menace.
It thickens, then finally thins again into beaten blue stabs at...
2 tags
Glenn Branca - Indeterminate Activity of Resultant...
7 tags
Glenn Branca - Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses
sample here, with audio edit and Cage interview fascism
A fairly typical sequence of Branca’s dense just outtonation chord clumps.
The purpose of this CD release seems to be to combine a recording of this work with audio of the controversial John Cage interview in which Cage declares that he “wouldn’t want to live...
3 tags
Weezer - Hurley
Weezer is in a mid-career oscillation, much like Beck’s flip-flop between psych-folk and sloppy hip-hop of the 2000s. But while Beck presented versions of himself which he labored to resolve but which were individually entirely fulfilled platforms for music, Weezer’s poles are opposed more in the fashion of an addict - depressed and sentimentally underconceived on...
3 tags
Elliott Carter - Shard
Here’s a guy just tearing it up on Elliott Carter’s Shard for classical guitar:
6 tags
Madonna - True Blue
(hear “Papa Don’t Preach)
Madonna - True Blue
Surprisingly, given the lasting effect of Like A Virgin and in particular its title track, True Blue is a much better album, although its title track confusingly bland. The hits are generally better constructed. If they are less memorable it is because they are perhaps not as shocking, but shock wears out. If...
August 2010
20 posts
3 tags
Sergey Kuryokhin - The Ways Of Freedom
(hear “The Wall Kuryokhin”)
Oh man. Have you ever heard of Sergey Kuryokhin? I stumbled at random on his entry in the Penguin book of jazz on CD. He is seriously out of control. Since he is a person, he plays the piano. If he were a mallard, he would play chess.
In 1981, Keith Jarrett was playing concert halls around the world, and I...
8 tags
Artists For Action (Calexico, Sergio Mendoza, Kinch, etc) - Live at Marquee, Tempe, 28 Aug 2010
Kinch, the first band to go on, was incredible. They play a kind of power-pop, slightly They Might Be Gigantic music, which I don’t normally seek out. They were so in control of their music, though - they had tons of little change-ups and never really missed anything. The guitarist looked...
3 tags
Ben Monder - Oceana (hear “Still...
5 tags
Robert Spring - Speak of the Devil!
It’s the churning gut of classical music. Assorted ideas and notions brought to fruition not out of mastery but just from action. The academies of music have their own basic research, just like those of biology or literature. There are some hundreds of papers written every year which present marginally new ideas about Shakespeare or painstakingly...
2 tags
US Maple - Long Hair In Three Stages
It sounds like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs only as “falling down a flight of stairs” is falling down a flight of stairs. US Maple is not actually the band said to sound like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs. US Maple has fallen down a “falling down a flight of stairs” flight of stairs.
5 tags
Madonna - Like A Virgin
A pop album like this one is - or should be - a kind of black hole, warping everything around itself by pulling it all into itself. You can’t even see it clearly because what light isn’t consumed is bent. Before it reaches you, any sign of the album has passed through decades, spurring reactions and derivatives.
Madonna isn’t really a good enough...
8 tags
Bobby Charles - Bobby Charles
Decent songwriting. I like “Long Face” and “I Must Be In A Good Place Now”.
Bobby Conn - The Golden Age
Ironic like a starched white shirt. Wild Jim O’Rourke production with lots of instruments, typical of the O’Rourke sound of that period, I guess.
Syd Barrett - Opel
Great weird songs. The lyrics are expressive and...
2 tags
Regina - Katso Maisemaa
Herring and potatoes.
9 tags
Boxhead Ensemble - Nocturnes (hear “Nocturne...
1 tag
The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka sample
“main”: http://www.mediafire.com/?q7s3u3mk8t7xv49
“second”: http://www.mediafire.com/?vy479xhqx99p0k3
Here are two mp3s of the 3rd track on Zaireeka, “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair”. The first, referred to as “main”, is Disc 1 left and right, the right channel of Disc 4, and the left channel of Disc...
6 tags
The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka
sample and method
I finally succumbed to the temptation to go against Wayne Coyne’s instructions regarding this 4 CD album - listen with 4 CD players, and four persons to synchronize the players, making the music come from four sources, and then reveling in the chaos of play-button finger failure. I remember buying the album soon after it was released, in...
2 tags
The Body - All the waters of the earth shall turn...
3 tags
Tammy Wynette - Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad
She’s an amazing singer. At a time when people really didn’t put vocal parts together phrase by phrase, the way most popular music is made now, she manages to sing each line precisely - but yet sounds raw, familiar, unpracticed. A singer like Alison Krauss sings everything perfectly, and I believe she is relatively free of...
3 tags
Fred Neil - Fred Neil
A simple song is a tricky thing to balance. If it is to have meaning, each remaining word acquires weight as the others are scraped away.
For example, here is Fred Neil’s “Ba-De-Da”, in which the title itself has evaporated:
I get so tired
Hangin’ around this town
All this old city life
Should bring us fellow down
Badada dada
Dadada dada...
2 tags
Big Boi - Sir something or other…
Competently over-produced, conceptually under-wrought.