Daily Listen by Brian Brock

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.

Loose Fur - Loose Fur

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.