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2004 Music Wrap-Up/Geek-Out

31 December 2004 / / 0 Comments

The most memorable piece of music criticism I read this year was Dan Warburton’s Time, gentlemen, please. Warburton acutely describes the sheer impossibility of listening to, much less reviewing, the onslaught of avant-garde albums coming his way. (I would call it Sisyphean, but his rock never seems to make even temporary progress.)

Next to his valiant efforts, it seems silly for me to construct a best-of list from the paltry number of albums I heard this year. But I figure I’ll still use my small soapbox to boost my subjective and non-authoritative favorites out of what did cross my way.

I did much of my listening in the subway this year, and consequently heard a lot more pop, jazz, and classical music, and a lot less of anything requiring attention to timbral subtleties or the layering of sounds. Next to the uppercase sounds of the trains, especially the far louder older models, it seemed pointless to listen to music that wasn’t primarily melodic. There are some improv musicians I still intensely follow–Otomo Yoshihide, G&#xfcnter M&#xfcller, Tim Berne, Franz Hautzinger–but in general I pursued that scene much less than in prior years.

So here’s the (unordered) baker’s dozen:

Tetuzi Akiyama/Martin Ng: Oimacta Ng on turntables, Akiyama on filthy, metallic acoustic guitar. Dirt and drone.

Autistic Daughters: Jealousy and Diamond A sentimental choice, actually. I haven’t been a fan of Dean Roberts’ noisier, more experimental work, but somehow when playing pop songs, he uncannily summons up the sounds and spirits of Kiwi music of the 80’s, music that I have loved since I was 14. Roberts is from New Zealand, but I’ve never heard him sound like this before. In that context, Martin Brandlmayr’s intricate, precise drumming (his sounds remind me of Tony Oxley, but not the way he uses them) is totally anomalous, but enjoyable anyway.

Bach: Mass in B minor (cond. Celibidache) A very late addition to the list. Since I don’t especially care for HIP performances, my tastes for choral Bach are more in line with Karl Richter and even Otto Klemperer. Celibidache’s lush, flowing version has already become my favorite performance of recent years. For Celibidache detractors: this is surprisingly one of his less eccentric performances, with fairly normal tempi.

Dungen: Ta Det Lugnt Totally derivative psych-pop, but the most well-crafted thing of this sort since the heyday of the Olivia Tremor Control and the Green Pajamas. Near-perfect production even when the material is weak.

Frog Eyes: The Folded Palm/Ego Scriptor Blackout Beach: Light Flows the Putrid Dawn Three short records from Carey Mercer, one solo, one with his Frog Eyes band backing him, and one with just his wife on drums. What can I say? I heard a lot of undifferentiated pop music this year, and Frog Eyes immediately jumped out at me. Mercer’s histrionics (see David Thomas, Captain Beefheart, Peter Hammill, Russell Mael, that sort of thing) come off shockingly well, and the music absorbs a lot of influences without getting showy or self-conscious about it. And for reasons I can’t quite explain, I adore their publicity shot.

Milford Graves/John Zorn: 50th Birthday Vol. 2 I like Zorn the most when he drops the conceptual baggage (or most of it) and turns into a reconstructed free jazz player. With Graves as the ideal partner, here we go.

Jason Kahn/G&#xfcnter M&#xfcller: Blinks Fellow ex-Angelino Kahn (late of overlooked LA rock bands like Leaving Trains, Trotsky Icepick, Universal Congress Of, and Slovenly) was responsible for unearthly, ringing percussion work in Repeat with Toshimaru Nakamura. Here he meets the more energetic and restless M&#xfcller for eight short series of textures that portray tensions between stasis and motion. Kahn moves more than usual, M&#xfcller less.

Thomas Korber/Erik M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide: Brackwater Guitarist/electronician Korber is one of the most interesting younger improvisors. Not so much for his sounds, but for his overriding sense of macrostructure. It’s most noticeable in his solo work, but even here, the sounds that Korber makes at any time seem to be made with as much reference to the distant past and future of the piece than to the present, and usually more. Korber can sound less “in the moment” as a result, unwilling to abandon a larger plan and join in a spontaneously arrived-at communal direction, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of that in improv. Korber’s careful sense of placement and organization puts me more in mind of Georg Gr&#xe4we, Anthony Braxton, and Fred Van Hove, and it makes Brackwater stand out from other (often excellent) recordings that it superficially resembles.

Otomo Yoshihide New Jazz Quintet: Tails Out Their fourth album. I really liked their first, was puzzled by the second, and bored by the third. This is as good as the first, and it’s a progression from all they’ve done before. It includes tunes by Charlie Haden, Charles Mingus, James Blood Ulmer, and the Beatles, all in varying styles. On the last two tracks, they add electronics and drift off into more experimental ether. I’m still not sure what to expect from them next, but Otomo is enough of a musical genius that I have high hopes, especially now that crazy saxman Alfred 23 Harth appears to be in the group.

Radian: Juxtaposition The apotheosis of rhythmic, repetitive, geometric “post-rock.” Martin Brandlamyr again on drums, again amazing.

Keith Rowe/Axel D&#xf6rner/Franz Hautzinger: A View From the Window Hautzinger, who plays trumpet primarily with percussive breathwork, continues to be my favorite of the crowd of aggressively experimental trumpeters (D&#xf6rner being another). I loved Hautzinger’s Absinth album with John Tilbury, Sachiko M, and Werner Dafeldecker, and here he brings unusual textures to the fold again. The album also gets points for its two tracks sounding nothing like each other: one is a comparatively normal exercise in interplay and texture, the other is a monolithic, compressed, seething rumble.

Mark Wastell: Vibra #1 Up until this, my favorite music of Wastell’s was his overtone-laden cello-scraping in “Fermage” on Quatuor Accorde’s Angel Gate. I haven’t followed his recent, quieter work, but Vibra #1 is a twenty-minute drone on a gong-like tam-tam, with much richer variation than I expected. It made me think of the early portions of “Omaggio a Giacinto Scelsi” by Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuovo Consonanza (off of their Musica su schemi album), a piece I like far more than any of Scelsi’s own work.

Robert Wyatt: Cuckooland I was late to hear this one, but it’s Wyatt’s best since the 70’s. Unlike his recent albums, this is a collection of songs, not just moods.

REISSUES Can: the first 4 albums in vastly better sound
DNA: DNA on DNA
Dumptruck: the first 3 albums Eno: the first 4 pop albums in notably better sound The Homosexuals: Astral Glamour The Prefects: Amateur Wankers Sviatoslav Richter: Russian Archives 5cd Max Roach/Anothony Braxton: One in Two, Two in One Cecil Taylor: One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye

ALSO WORTHY Tim Berne + Big Satan: Souls Saved Hear Sabine Ercklentz/Andrea Neumann: Oberfl&#xe4chenspannung eRikm/Gunter Muller/Toshimaru Nakamura: Why Not Bechamel Mission of Burma: ONoffON Andy Moor/Yannis Kyriakides: Red v. Green David Thomas and 2 Pale Boys: 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest Shannon Wright: Over the Sun

These and other fine recordings are available in various combinations at Erstwhile Records, Squidco, Aquarius Records, Verge Music, and elsewhere.

Music: Rzewski, Johnson, Whitman

27 December 2004 / / 0 Comments

Frederic Rzewski is best known for The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a more-accessible-than-most theme-and-variations piano piece. It takes a Chilean folk protest song and weaves increasingly complex structural and thematic variations on it in various permutations, but because the source material is so anthemic and accessible, it plays nicely as a modern Diabelli Variations, except that the composer has the utmost respect for the original theme rather than condescension towards it.

A friend pointed me to an early score of Rzewski’s, Les Moutons de Panurge, from 1968. (See the score of Moutons, and an interview with Rzewski.) Given any set of instruments, the idea is that increasingly (then decreasingly) large pieces of a single melody line are played by everyone in unison, starting off at a fairly zippy tempo and accelerating. Rzewski’s directions:

Always play loud, never stop or falter, stay together as long as you can, but if you get lost, stay lost. Do not try to return to the fold. Continue to follow the rules strictly.

The point being that the musicians will inevitably get out of sync and the overlapping out-of-phase lines produce weird effects. I’ve never heard the piece and can’t find a recording–anyone know of one?

There must have been many other pieces written in recent years based on the idea of a score that cannot be accurately followed by humans, where the point of the score is to integrate mistakes, but the only other one that I know of (not being too familiar with this area) is Tom Johnson’s entertaining Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass. The text of the piece (spoken by the bass player while playing) explains the piece, and since it’s a short, funny piece, the recording of the piece at the above link is well worth hearing. Listen all the way through: Johnson has a good punchline at the end.

Finally, I’m late to the party on this one, but if you haven’t already, check out Brian Whitman’s A Singular Christmas, made with his mysterious Eigenradio software, which does some sort of statistical sampling of large amounts of music (in this case, Christmas music), and outputs some sort of sonic amalgam.

The question with all such conceptual works is: how much do you get out of the experience that you couldn’t get merely by reading the description of the work? In this case, a fair bit. With the exclusive use of Christmas music, the homogeneity of the input produces some eerily familiar, uncanny sounds. Joe Milazzo wrote up his response to A Singular Christmas at Bagatellen. My own reaction is less visceral and more sympathetic; hearing such sounds removed from their irritating contexts rehabilitates them. I wish there were a way to remove this sort of baggage from so many other kinds of sense data.

(Thanks for the pointers, Jason!)

Incensed at Peppermint

30 November 2004 / / 0 Comments

The South Korean film Peppermint Candy begins with a man gunning down some random person who’s ripped him off and then committing suicide, then traces his life backwards through his career as a dirty cop, a cowardly soldier, and a youthful innocent.

It’s not much of a film, but it did get me thinking back myself, before Irreversible, Memento, and Betrayal, to an earlier example of reverse chronology, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along, a morality tale about a successful playwright who gives up his dreams for fame and cash. As you’d expect, Kaufman’s gags fit very uneasily into the contrived framework, and on paper at least, the thing doesn’t work. (It was also excluded from the new Library of America Kaufman collection.) Stephen Sondheim tried to retrofit it as a musical fifty years later, and it bombed.

(Okay, I admit, I usually ignore films I dislike, but I came up with the title for this entry and had to use it….)

Update: Brendan Wolfe (who, if you follow the link under his name, has himself written a good assessment of Aharon Appelfeld) has asked why I didn’t care for Peppermint Candy.

I thought that the film consisted of plot elements that weren’t in themselves distinctive: a despondent, broken, hollow man committing suicide; a corrupt cop losing his morality; the man trapped in a marriage while he pines after his symbolic first love; the tragic death of an innocent in a war zone poisoning the man forever; the innocent youth naively ignorant of the horrors of the world.

The film takes two approaches to justify these generic mechanisms: first, through (backwards) structure, and second, through context (of recent Korean history). The contextual approach fails because the corrupted everyman protagonist does not become a representative of a particularly Korean experience; the movie actually feels quite American next to, for example, Shohei Imamura’s remarkable Vengeance is Mine, which makes a much greater attempt to place one man’s life (a serial killer’s, specifically) into the context of modern Japanese society. The structural approach fails because it does not provide any revelation about the content of the film. Thematically, it’s not hard to see that the man has progressed from innocent to corrupt to despondent, and the suspense is muted because the protagonist is too representative to be seen as an individual.

I haven’t seen other films by Lee Chang Dong, and it’s possible that were I Korean, I would appreciate subtexts that I missed as a foreigner.

Another update: I had originally posted this in the comments, but since no links are allowed there:

Another perverse backwards-chronology exercise is Anne McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The, where Crichton/Wise’s film The Andromeda Strain is run with its scenes in reverse order, fencepost-style. Fred Camper says:

This somewhat playful “deconstruction” of mainstream Hollywood has its virtues: with narrative causality flipped, one looks for causes of events already seen, questions traditional forms of narrative organization. But while we often hear the dialogue reversed–many lines get only single shots–longer takes contain whole conversations that we hear in the original order, providing a confusing disruption of the film’s “backwardness.” It is unique, but the interest of this rather mechanical exercise exhausts itself after a half hour.

Waggish says check it out.

John Peel

27 October 2004 / / 0 Comments

I can still remember
The last time we played on Top Gear
And though each little song
Was less than three minutes long
Mike squeezed a solo in… somehow
And although we like our longer tunes
It seemed polite to cut them down
To little bits – they might be hits
Who gives an… after all ?
Tell me how would you feel
In the place of John Peel ?
You just can’t please
all of the musicians all the time

Robert Wyatt, “Moon in June”

Back when I was a teenager and just getting into this stuff, a lot of bands had these four track “Peel Sessions” album, and I figured it was some sort of pun like “MTV Unplugged,” and I’d be treated to the sounds of peeled bands. Since peeling involved charging import price for about 20 minutes of music, I didn’t satisfy my curiosity for a while.

When I did, I still didn’t realize that Peel wasn’t some Rush Limbaugh-like demagogue but a peculiar product of government-subsidized radio, British noblesse oblige, and vaguely laddish youth culture. It was years before I realized that there were other presenters too who had radio sessions, and some of those even got issued. Peel meant an archival release of historical importance, worthy of being preserved. I knew only one other radio name–Andrea ‘Enthal of Pacifica’s KPFK–and Pacifica didn’t exactly work hard at making her sessions available.

My experiences with him were entirely secondhand. Varispeed Fall tunes on cassette, scratched Yeah Yeah Noh vinyl, poorly packaged EPs with a cover consisting of no more and no less than a list of every band whose session had been released.

Still, what I heard was great. English post-punk was my obsession and Peel provided the only historical evidence of some of these bands. Yeah Yeah Noh, the Prefects, the Creepers, Scritti Politti, Josef K, and others cut out the middleman and just released their sessions themselves rather than blowing cash on rerecording in a proper studio. The only good-sounding live recording of Henry Cow was on Peel. The Pop Group, the Slits, the Nightingales (“Butterbricks”!), Subway Sect, the Only Ones, Roxy Music, This Heat, the Go-betweens, Napalm Death, Wire, Datblygu…

I couldn’t hear most of his 90’s sessions, since they weren’t available here, but from looking at the lists, he stayed relentlessly current to the end. My tastes wandered in different directions, but Peel somehow kept up his enthusiasm for zillions of British rock bands until the end.

Peel was by his very position an unfair arbiter of taste, and just his particular tastes were indicated by who did and who didn’t show up on his show, who continued to show up long after their moment had passed, and who was undeservedly ignored. But as a powerful patron, he was one of the best of his time, and lord knows if we’ll see his like again.

[And, as soon as I can upload files again, a few of my favorites:]

The Prefects, “Faults” and “Total Luck” The Fall, “New Puritan” Yeah Yeah Noh, “It’s Easier to Suck than Sing / Cottage Industry”

4.2.1 Charlus and Morel

22 September 2004 / / 0 Comments

There isn’t the frustrating stasis of The Guermantes Way in Sodom and Gomorrah, but nor are there the high moments of lyricism (as with the death of Marcel’s grandmother) or a central, unifying concept (as with Marcel’s obsession with the Guermantes). The volume is livelier, but it is more shapeless, at least until the final chapter.
Having brought up Charlus’s homosexuality and theorized about the secret world of “sexual inverts,” as Proust calls them, Proust is content to let the theme recede for large segments of Sodom and Gomorrah, preferring instead to recollect parties, receptions, and another, far less interesting trip to Balbec. While the proportion of dreary social events to interesting and novel portrayals of homosexuals is probably accurate in relation to Proust’s actual life, the volume sags when it should be advancing forward. And correspondingly, Sodom and Gomorrah is most involving in the two plots that involve homosexuality: Marcel’s romance with Albertine, whom he suspects may be a lesbian, and Charlus’s obsession with his protege Morel.
Charlus and Morel: Morel is a vain, obnoxious young musician, and Charlus has great affection for him, taking him under his wing in a similar manner as he did Marcel in The Guermantes Way, and then some. Charlus’s obsession with Morel is pathetic, but it’s also overtly comical in a way that Proust hasn’t previously allowed. In Swann’s Way, Odette was far more coarse than either Charlus or Morel, but she never lost control as Charlus does periodically:

His explosions of rage were too frequent not to be somewhat fragmentary. “The imbecile, the scoundrel! We shall have to put him in his place, sweep him into the gutter, where unfortunately he will not be innocuous to the health of the town,” he would scream, even when he was alone in his own room, on reading a letter that he considered irreverent, or on recalling some remark that had been repeated to him. But a fresh outburst against a second imbecile cancelled the first, and the former victim had only to show due deference for the fit of rage that he had occasioned to be forgotten, it not having lasted long enough to establish a foundation of hatred on which to build. (678)

Charlus’s freak-outs never get old for me. But the broad humor obscures what I think is the most important point here: Charlus’s inconstancy in his reactions, his abrupt fickleness, is a reflection of the same capricious nature that was shown by Swann’s affections towards Odette. Charlus is not exceptional; he is demonstrative.
The humor extends to burlesques. Charlus challenges Morel to a duel in a fit of pique. On hearing that Morel is going to a brothel, he arranges to spy on Morel in the act, but Morel is told at the last moment, so Charlus only observes him frozen by fright among the women. By themselves these events are trivial, but taken as another slant on Swann’s tragic pursuit in the first volume, they undermine the emotive force of Swann’s journey while reinforcing the (arbitrary) causative forces. The effects, as expected by now, are cynicism and despair.
The shift in tone is, at points, linked directly to Proust’s perception of homosexuality. Consider:

The invert brought face to face with an invert sees not merely an unpleasing image of himself which, being purely inanimate, could at the worst only injure his self-esteem, but a second self, living, active in the same field, capable therefore of injuring him in his loves. (951)

Proust is vague about the connection, but I take it to be this: homosexuals possess a secret that puts them out of conformity with society even as they superficially conform to its mores to the utmost. It is the awareness of this secret, and this dissonance with society, that makes them hyperaware of their own selves, and their own selves as reflected in others, who they are preternaturally inclined to see (a) as more similar to themselves (as “a second self”), and (b) as arbitrary agents. They are therefore more inclined towards arbitrary behavior and more likely to take it over the top. It’s a narcissism that is paradoxically directed outwards, since it causes them to ferret out the similarities of their surroundings to themselves.
Against this backdrop, Marcel’s romance with Albertine plays out under laws that strip it of the nostalgic, but myopic obsession that Swann had when he pursued Odette, and cast it in blank gray tones.

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