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.
They Might Be Giants - Lincoln (hear “Shoehorn With Teeth” and “Cage & Aquarium”)
I was hugely into my Lincoln tape back in 88/89. That and the awesomest awesomeness of my King Missile Fluting on the Hump / They cassette were my number one Piers Anthony novel background music.
Lincoln is such a hugely ideaful bunch of stuff exploding in every direction at once. The lyrics are surreal to the breaking point. The instrumentation veers from odd to classy. John and John Flansburgh and Linnell sing as though they are explaining that they cannot talk to a telemarketer (selling timeshares in Branson) because their shoes have become inexplicably knotted together.
In my view, Bob Dylan made it OK for a significant portion of overly intellectual urbanites to listen to the blues, or the country blues, or what have you, by attaching “intelligent” words, which truth be told were often just obscure and bitter. In a sense, They Might Be Giants then harvest the remaining fruit from the highest branches of nerdality, by attaching countless weird and unnecessary postmodernisms to what is essentially folk music. I love it.
I guess that’s what makes their music so easily appealing to children, because basically kids are very weird people who nonetheless want to be able to listen to very normal music.
ps. adding this to my 33 1/3 list, although there are other people who are much more obsessed with this band/album.
I listened to this on Grooveshark, which seems to be in a legal grey area. Of course, I still own the tape, so I believe I am entitled to downloaded copies. Have you ever used the “Autoplay” feature on Grooveshark? It has very adequate suggestions for similar music. Why do these algorithms think I only want to hear something similar, though? Might I not be tired of the sound after a whole album?
These new folk rock bands love the reverb. It’s a vice, like salt in soup - or so I claim as my belief.
Intimacy used to be incompatible with technology, but they have been frankensteined together for good or for ill. The headphones, the internet, the home studio, all permit a kind of mediated immediacy.
By slathering vocals in reverb, musicians spin the listener’s cocoon into a cathedral. The singer in these folk rock bands always sings about loss, death or heartbreak, and so serves as confessor.
Emily introduced me to Sonic Youth, King Missile, Killdozer, The Skatalites, and basically everything beyond The Police and They Might Be Giants.
Because of Sonic Youth, I learned of Glenn Branca. Because of King Missile, I learned of Kramer and Shimmy Disc Records, on which label was also Eugene Chadbourne, who I witnessed (on VHS) playing the rake and the cow skull in about 1990, much sooner than I would have otherwise. Because of Killdozer, I knew why Nirvana sounded so awesome - Butch Vig’s production does something pretty similar on the Killdozer albums, but of course Killdozer’s songs and performances are pretty awesome too. Because of the Skatalites, I can never be unhappy involuntarily.
Parts & Labor sounds like a frenetic collaboration between Richard Thompson and Jeff “Neutral Milk Hotel” Mangum. They have Thompson’s British folk thing happening, and Mangum’s dedication to the outside edge of the song, all while trying to get a terrified cow out of a burning barn. It’s good stuff.
I’m struck by the similarities between this music and the Finnish psych-folk bands which I recorded, discussed here: Voyages On Vinlandia. I mean, it should be expected, but the melodic and tonal qualities of these “ancient” singers (they were actually recorded in the latter 20th century, but are performing traditional music) are very much represented in the modern Finnish music. Even some of the frighting wildness of the Vinlandia music can be attributed rather to Scandinavia than to the developing of tolerance which has accompanied us into modernity.
I like these folk music albums. I also listened to “Songs of the Inuit” the other day, which I will revisit and write about sometime. Folk music is not music in common sense. No one can listen to it while they do the dishes, and to listen closely to it is often not a musical but an ethnomusicological experience. That is to say, the first order (see Judas Priest, 22 Jan 08) experience is often extra-auditory. You find out about different cultures and so forth.
Another related phenomenon is “world music”. There’s a certain class of person who, alienated (often with good reason) from their own culture - in the case of world music that culture is American or West European - embraces another culture by adopting its speech patterns, style of dress, and so forth. They then begin playing the music of the other culture or cultures, often with a great deal of attention to authenticity, which is ridiculous because folk music is not essentially a sonic endeavor but one of expressing culture, a culture of which these performers are not members. I guess they’re amateur ethnomusicologists, but they perform as if they are musicians. It’s very confusing.
The confusion of musical and non-musical values is something which continues to interest me.
