Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast (hear “Fitz & Dizzyspells”)

This guy reminds me of Hanne Hukkelberg.  He does a good looping thing live - I saw him open for Smog several years ago - and it really comes through on record.  His layers aren’t structural as much as textural.  The structure is really determined by one part, and the other parts just add detail.

This is a “leak” of an album which will be released in early 2009.  I have to admit that I am starting to allow myself to have things to which I have no right, strictly speaking.  I doubt I will buy this album.  I also listen to all kinds of things on Lala which I will probably not buy - which, to be honest I intend not to buy.

On the other hand, in the past around half the CDs I bought were things I listened to less than five times - I was just too curious about what they sounded like.  Some of those risks payed off: D’Gary, Tom Ze, Gastr Del Sol, Lisa Germano, Smog, Bang On A Can.  Now, I will be giving money to Times New Viking, and probably to Migala, and  I even bought a few mp3s specifically to post here on the Daily Listen, or even just to hear again for fun.  So I am still experimenting, and still paying when the experiment works, but I am not funding failed experiments.

In general, that is a serious consequence of the new music marketplace.  Without some sort of payment to failures, do we risk losing the successes?

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.

Portishead - Third

Amazingly, this album is almost all surface and micro-detail, with no intervening layers.  There is space between the broad strokes of music - the bass line, the vocal melody, the chord progression, and the essential rhythm - and its details, like an added tick on the cymbal, a quavering of the voice, a little bit more distortion on the guitar.  Usually, a band like Portishead will flesh out that space, using textural elements and countermelodies, ornamented vocal phrases and guitar licks, brass sections and record scratching, as in Portishead’s primary claim to fame, “it… it… it’s like that”.

But as you can hear in the track above, there’s nothing in between here.  You have the bass, the drums, hammering away.  Then you have these little stutters, pops and slaps.  This particular song is characterized by the sudden substitution of all the instruments, but they don’t stop playing essentially the same music.  Only the details change.

There are songs that have textures and licks here, but they tend to be very repetitive, which turns them into a macro-level phenomenon.  After you hear ding-doodle-do-ring enough times it stops meaning anything unless it changes.  Like a word that shows up too many times in one paragraph,  the meaning starts to drain out.

As a result, until I listened to the album on headphones, I thought it was a little lightweight, a little unfinished.  The songs were mostly over half way through.  Where was the effort?  I see now that Portishead spent a lot of time fiddling with very small, rather interesting details.

Synth solo ripped off from Pink Floyd is a little much, but then, why not…. what is that song, though?  I think it’s on Animals.