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.
I think Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy fits about like Bob Dylan when it comes to writing songs, but bear in mind that I think Dylan is overrated, especially when it comes to the content and not just the form of his songs; and Jim O’Rourke deserves his notoriety as one of the few producers able to swim in the mainstream while walking off the banks. This album should by all rights have been a classic, but somehow it doesn’t come together. It feels as though it was just thrown together from scraps of a sit-down. Still, it could easily be someone’s favorite work of either Tweedy or O’Rourke, if the songs hit just right, or the noodling guitar skronk seems fresh. I might even love it some day, and it deserves to be heard again.
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…
Jim O’Rourke - Tamper (hear “He Felt the Patient Memory of a Reluctant Sea” edit)
O’Rourke has a certain kind of album which I love. He will play a country-blues thing on the guitar, one chord, one lick repeated into minimalism. Gradually, other instruments (on Happy Days a hurdy gurdy, on Bad Timing a slide guitar and horn band) peek around the corner, then step into the street, until they are playing a big beautiful concert.
This is not one of those albums.
Jim O’Rourke has another kind of album which I love. He writes quirky songs, sings them with ennui washed up from Lake Michigan, and interprets them with post-rock (Gastr Del Sol) or post-folk (Eureka).
This is also not one of those albums.
This album is one of those, which I never loved until now, where Jim O’Rourke alone or with a group of classical musicians, makes long, slow, whooshing noises for half an hour - Terminal Pharmacy comes to mind, maybe I should give it another chance.
Because the album art on Tamper is very similar to Happy Days, I was sure the music would be the same, but this is from 1990 (although the case of this reissue gives 2008), well before the kinds-of-Jim-O’Rourke-album-I-like started coming out.
But this is really cool, actually. It’s much more Pauline Oliveros than Keith Rowe, more hummmla than kkchrrtap. OK?
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.
