September 16, 2009

Agustin Barrios - The Complete Guitar Recordings 1913-1942

As beautiful as a butterfly in a meat grinder.

Most discussions of this CD will weigh the importance of Agustin Barrios’s performances of his own pieces against the static, noise, and downright degradation present on a recording from a different time and place.

Although that conversation is valid, I would offer that this sound can be enjoyed purely on its own terms. Barrios writes music which is often particularly suited to being distorted and mangled, and at many points in the CD his repetitive passages, filtered by the ravages of time, are downright haunting. Jim O’Rourke or Thurston Moore would be proud to release a CD as compelling as this one at its peaks.

Of course, not everyone will expect a CD subtitled “Augustin Barrios plays his own and other compositions” to be an ambient grinding drone, and that mistake in packaging is likely the reason this collection has passed out of print. Still, even so, it is recommended if you like the Pablo Casals disc on EMI in which he plays the Bach Cello Suites (the original CD master, not the “restored” version).


I often think about making an edit of this music, wherein the grindy parts are emphasized.

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Tags: Jim O'Rourke distortion sonic youth classical guitar classical
January 8, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Just West Coast

Fifteen years later, this album still fascinates me.  I love John Schneider’s (ahem, not the man who played Bo Duke and country music) playing on the movable-fret guitar.  His performance of Harry Partch’s “Barstow” feels just a little bit more ridiculous to me now, but of course Partch’s own performance is a towering masterpiece of hiliarity.

These are works tuned in Just Intonation, ie the tuning of notes to pure intervals rather than to intervals compromised to allow key changes.  When used to play music with implied key changes, Just Intonation really just sounds like bad tuning, but it’s kind of delightful nonetheless. It’s like trying to write your name while your arm is dead asleep.

“Barstow” is one of my favorite pieces of music.  In general, I like the idea of making regular things special by changing the context.  Here, Harry Partch takes little pieces of highway loneliness, hobo screeds and lost travelers’ time-passers, and arranges them in his deliriously odd harmonic mess.

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Tags: context guitar harry partch just intonation classical guitar classical
September 15, 2008
Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures

Only one thing explains why Alban Berg’s music gets played by people everywhere but only Cecil Taylor plays his: Unit Structures must not have been transcribed yet. Specifically, “Enter, Evening” should be a favorite.

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Tags: Cecil Taylor classical jazz justice free jazz
July 12, 2008

SONIC REBELLION: ALTERNATIVE CLASSICAL COLLECTION

(copied from the original Daily Listen)

This amusingly marketed collection of modern classical, or contemporary art music, or new music, or as I like to call it, weird music, although some further signifier is in order since this music is rooted mostly in the classical rather than rock or jazz or whatever other tradition, is actually really quite focused and cool.

Probably Krysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” is the biggest eye-opener for me here. His tone clusters are truly gigantic. Unlike Glenn Branca’s vaguely structured harmonic-mass oceans, Penderecki lulls the listener a little before sucker-punching you with a sound which is truly hard to cope with. Great at high volume in the strip-mall parking lot. Rather than the intellectual delight of Branca’s angel-choruses, which your ear gradually synthesises out of the chaos, here we are never given time to make the fear go away - it affects the heart rather than the mind.

Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, Terry Riley (in a very short or perhaps unnoted edit of In C), and Jorgen Plaetner are among the other heavy-hitters here. The latter is a Danish composer whose electronic sounds are not particularly interesting, but who structures them effectively. Giacinto Scelsi has a piece built on one note and a hundred textures.

Unfortunately I didn’t like the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto. Too much like a bratty baby banging the piano while mom tries to watch the part of a Gary Cooper movie where he grabs the girl and the music swells.

About the packaging. It seems to me that if Naxos wants to make a CD that kids seeking alternatives will dig, and is going to put spattered paint on the front and call it Sonic Rebellion, they had better come up with some music which will make the kids want to break stuff. This is all a little tame (except for maybe the Penderecki and Nancarrow). Perhaps they should call this one new wave.

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Tags: classical experimentalism fringe penderecki glenn branca terry riley naxos