July 19, 2009

Iva Bittová and the Bang On a Can All-Stars - Elida

This is a pretty cool album which sits comfortably between Eastern European folk music and the music of Wim Mertens, or a George Crumb vocal piece like Ancient Voices of Children.  Bittová seems to take about as much from Roma music as Ástor Piazzolla does from Tango - so, she is always referring to folk elements but never quite gets all the way there, but for a moment.  Her voice is like Diamanda Galás’s, but as if Galás was a cheery kindergarten teacher, rather than a vicious hellhound; they each sing sideways across genres, as if flipping through a Rolodex of genres crossreferenced with emotions, matching vocal technique as they go.

The Can-Bangers have always impressed me.  They have fantastic versions of tunes by Louis Andriessen, Brian Eno, and Terry Riley, and their own compositions are sometimes just as successful.  Here, leaving that comfort zone of precise structures and witty concepts, they at times have to actually tackle performance music, where technique is less valuable than spirit.  They are no Turkish cafe band, but they manage to keep from embarrassing themselves long enough to get back to something more fingery/thinky, less possessedy.

I get stuck, because I want to ask why these straddly folk/avant-classical musics never quite make it, while I recognize that plenty of rock/avant things succeed.  I think it’s a question of structure - in a music where the essential act is kick-snare on one chord for two minutes, kickety-snarety on another for a half-minute, and back to the beginning for the fade out, someone can pretty much record the sound of wringing cats and slide it into the interstices with out changing anything (see Derek Bailey’s Guitar Drums and Bass for an extreme example).  On the other hand, the folk and classical worlds thrive on large-form structure, having radically different ideas about how to achieve it, and every sqwauk and groan added to it must be relentlessly justified within those structural aims.  I don’t know.

I’d love to hear this woman do an album with Tom Ze.

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Tags: mainstream fringe folk Structure Bang on a Can playfulness Tom Ze
December 18, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Tom Ze - Fabrication Defect (hear “Defect 4: Emerê”)

Tom Ze may take the most circuitous path to “sounds good” of anyone.  To believe that he is too experimental for “the hoi polloi” is to listen too closely to what he’s doing.  When Tom Ze kick-drums with his mouth, scrapes balloons, and otherwise makes merry unusually, it never becomes hard to listen to.  He never hurts an innocent soul, the way The Books might be trying to do when they record child-parent arguments, or repeat a minimal figure until it becomes a substitute silence.  Derek Bailey is a just man, but like Frankenstein’s creature, he provides a rack on which the weak hang their troubles.

To hate Ze, you really have to be a miserable mess of a person.  You have to listen past all the superficial loveliness of the songwriting, the choric harmonies, the arpeggiated guitar figures and rythmic invention, to find bothersome details like Ze’s ubiquitous donkey noises, which are really only out of the ordinary because he is making them with his own mouth - barnyard noises are common enough on mainstream records.  You have to decide consciously to have a problem with Tom Ze.  You have to decide that he looked at you funny, or that when he stopped to tie his shoe, he was actually flipping you off.

OK, so Tom Ze is nonthreatening.  If I seem to be belaboring the point, it’s because one time I tried to ask the disc jockey on a latin music program to play some Ze, and actually he said it was “too experimental”.  This is on WORT in Madison, the station on which I once heard, back-to-back, a man describing how he used to nail himself on stage, and another man shouting “G.G.Allen has DIED!” for about a half hour.  By “nail himself” I mean that the man described combining the two possible meanings of that phrase.  So it would seem that Ze’s reputation travels in advance of his music, wreaking havoc along the way.

Ze actually encourages people to think of him as an odd fellow, with his donkey noises and his microbus-housed instruments.  He often phrases fairly common ideas, such as mildly socialist ideas or feminism, as though they might be inflamatory.  Essentially, he’s a fantastic, fairly normal musician whose craving for attention and eagerness to stop at nothing to get it is the force behind his creative drive.  He’s kind of the negative image of Bjork, who takes the Friday night lights commonly directed towards her as an opportunity to put the football on her head and dribble green jello from her mouth.  What do I know, though - probably in Brasil he is a national hero…

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Tags: Bjork Tom Ze books derek bailey experimentalism fringe 33 1/3
September 11, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Tom Ze - Danc-Eh-Sa

Tom Ze is the greatest.  Why he isn’t a top producer in hip-hop is beyond me.  At a bare minimum, he should be all over a Bjork album, right?

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Tags: Tom Ze Bjork hip-hop
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