November 22, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Dominic Duval’s String Ensemble - Live in Concert

It’s a spider web of extruded aluminum.  Minnows and geese are caught up, bubbling and squawking while the Mrs. winds them up, and the goose tries to eat the fish.

Listen to this stuff loud, if possible.  The amount of attention you give to good free jazz is directly proportional to the enjoyment you can reap from it.  It sounds like shit if you don’t pay attention.  This is only true up to a point - the good associations developed from listening to it eventually overwhelm the disorienting squall and you can do the dishes or cook while it plays.

The texture changes clearly from track to track in this music, which signals that they are not just hacking away at “free jazz” but actually doing something specific in each piece.

There’s some odd dated liner notes in this CD (from 1998) about cyberspace.  Check it out in the next post.

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Tags: 90's Liner Notes Noises attention dishwashing dominic duval experimentalism fish jazz listening music live texture ugly free jazz
August 15, 2008
Vladislav Delay

Vladislav Delay makes music somewhere between Pole and Tetsu Inoue, two of my favorites.

Pole pioneered a type of minimalist techno, involving a lot of clicks and static from a broken Waldorf 4-pole filter, as I remember reading somewhere sometime.  The sound is very stable and brilliant.  At lower volume, it more or less disappears into the dark walls.  Listening closely, I am enthralled by it.

Tetsu Inoue creates drunken robot music.  His CDs are impossible to understand and can’t be listened to at high or low volume, without some sort of detachment.  I have looked at waveform displays of his music in audio editing software.  Normal music - and by normal I mean almost all - looks like a line of fish, each biting his neighbor’s tail.  Tetsu Inoue sets a cat loose in the fishtank.  It’s really quite awesome.

Vladislav Delay is normal music.

One thing I’m interested in is the process of mainstreaming fringe ideas.  Look at how Wilco or Radiohead took a bunch of noises and weirdnesses and by placing them in the mainstream context of pretty songs declawed them.  Those cats have stopped tipping fishtanks.

Whether Vladislav is an odder Pole or a wilcoed Inoue is really immaterial.

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Tags: context fish mainstreaming pole wilco techno