Remember Those Quiet Evenings

Time Flies and so on

2009-02-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

The shoveller's blog kind of went bust because it's not been snowing with nearly the ferocity of the month of December. I cannot say that upsets me.

I'm leaving tomorrow to head up to Minneapolis for the Spark Festival, doing a pair of performances (with PGT and a trio with my pal Tom Hamer and visualist extraordinaire Mark Hendrikson. I've even got some interesting stuff to take up with me to listen to - Jon Hassell's new "letter from an old friend" Last Night the Moon Came.... not the least among them. If you're in the Twin Cities, I'll be performing at the Bedlam Theatre on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

The Shoveller's Blog, part N

2009-01-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those weeks when I really fear that thought and patient work isn't any kind of substitute at all for inspiration (which I remember as a more common occurrence when I was younger). So this morning when I rose and looked out the window to see that we'd had the first serious fall of snow for the year, a part of me was kind of cheered; at least I can do that stuff.

I took Erik Friedlander's solo 'cello CD Block Ice and Propane out with me on the iPod. Of late, I've been favoring big walls of dense buzzy stuff [The "snowplow soundtrack." Owing to my less than stellar metal collection, math rock at high volume does about as well as anything], but the openness of this modest little exercise in restraint and beauty was perfect. By accident, I'd actually set it at a low enough volume so that the sound of my breathing and Erik's were almost equally loud. The snow was that very powdery stuff that doesn't pack - for those of you who are not snow-shovellers by avocation, this means the shovelling any amount changes the angle of incline of the new and nonpacked snow, causing mini-avalanches of powdered sugar that fill half of the are you just cleared off. Normally, this is disheartening. But today, it meant that I could stay just a little longer, listening to the marvellous space between the shovel's scrape.

Now, back to work. You should take a listen to this lovely little gem.

Oh yeah - Erik Friedlander is the son of Lee Friedlander, one of my photographic heroes (no, while his album cover photographs are great, it's his series of photographs of vernacular landscapes and American monuments that I go back to again and again). What a small world.

2009-01-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

I am trying to not be worried about posting to the blog twice within less than a 3-month period. I'm sure it will pass.

An email [probably collateral damage from entering Facebook and watching the ripples fan outward] about whether or not I'll get back to the promised third [yes, third] edition of an all-analog RTQE. In this case, it's supposed to seriously consider including the "old favorites" of listeners who particularly enjoyed the first two. In the same sense that it's often the case that old-school electronic tape music powerfully catches the attention of my audience of high-school age [for reasons I don't entirely understand], so it is apparently so that the all-analog stuff powerfully engages older listeners who recall the stuff from the first time around. Instead of fantasizing abot how long one would have to wait to program "the golden age of 1980s sampler music," I find myself aided in terms of focusing my thoughts again on the notion of interesting analog studio recordings by the recent release of two things I thought would really never see the light of day in CD form [except for places run by the serious amateur such as Creel Pone, of course]: the original Anthology Of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, Volume 1 1955-1966 and Anthology of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, Volume 2 1966-1977. I've clung jealously to the copies on vinyl of them I had, and it's great news to see these not only re-issued, but re-issued in their original form, complete with the original liner notes by Dick Raaijmakers. The original work with no attempt at the reissue version of revisionist history? It doesn't get much sweeter than that....

a new year and so on

2009-01-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

It's often the case that I'll rise somewhat early and listen to the sounds of our quiet house. I'm not sure why I think doing that for the first time in a given year is special or would be any different, but hey.

Given the ridiculous rate of non-update in this blog, you'd think nothing happened. Pas du tout. It was an amazing year.

I managed to get a nice early start on that annual list of the things that appeared that I valued/returned to for (solace/instruction/edification), and it was a nice rambunctious list that gave me all kinds of trouble. I should have made it a list of "what I listened to while shovelling the 4000 feet of walk," but that would be whiny. Nonetheless, the list is here.

It was an amazing year in terms of my life as a performer and (to a lesser extent) recording musician. I got to play a couple of gigs with my pal Tom that were widely enough separated that the tools and instruments were different, and realized that there was this kind of conversational quality that has run through what we've done from the beginning. One gig reunited us with visualist Mark Hendrikson, which always makes me happy. PGT was actually a busy unit considering that we all have "real" jobs, and our trip and performance in Evora, Portugal was an experience I will not soon forget. Although that specific confluence of idea and material that would have been "the new solo recording" didn't happen, I continue to work patiently. Onward.

among the vampires (things to wait for)

2008-08-04T16:50:00.000-07:00

J. and I dropped by the bookstore in search of something
to read. I wound up going with this, but we also wound up
falling down the rabbit hole.

We'd blundered into the store on the same evening as the
release of Stephanie Meyer's "Just Say No" vampire romance's
final installment. It was a little like going to an Anthrax concert
in that the demographic is focused and somewhat less differentiated
than one might see at, say, a Harry Potter book release.

While it wasn't my rabbit hole, I certainly am looking forward
to the appearance of a few cultural objects toward the end of this
month and the beginning of next:the new Byrne/Eno album,
the release of Spore, and Neal Stephenson's new novel.

We're all waiting for something.

from the margins to decenter

2008-08-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

One way to know you're getting old [insert whingeing here]: This isn't
my 5th grade teacher's Mrs. Hoffman's New Yorker (Sasha
nails it pretty well, though).

after silence, part N

2008-07-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

If I thought my life were really interesting, I probably would have said something during the last six months about (these are in no order):

Robert Fagles’ death and how much I’m reminded again by reading/hearing his recent translation of the Aeneid that I’ll miss him.
An enjoyable steampunk anthology
Michael Chabon’s audacious alternative history romp/murder mystery [which deserves all the accolades it gets]
The release of Max 5
Doing Max/MSP workshops in London and Copenhagen in a time of awful exchange rates and being buoyed by wonderful students, the help (in London) of Nick Rothwell, and morning and evening walks into town (down the Tottenham Court Road to Soho, or across the Bridge past the lake in Copenhagen).
The opportunity to see The Nels Cline Singers here in Madison, and to hear the band set the place ablaze.
Discovering the pleasures of Paavoharju – who, while not pinning the quirk-o-meter, are certainly a great listen across the great linguistic abyss.
The Punch Brothers’ sublime “The Blind Leaving the Blind”
New recordings from The Hub, Autechre, and its recontextualizations, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Morton Feldman, Ry Cooder , and the Scott Fields Freetet, (among others).
The amusing progress of my own career as a muso – specifically, how unabashedly proud I am of the duet with Jeff Kaiser, the first PGT release [these people are still willing to perform with me, happily], and a solo online release with Stasisfield.
My sadness at the untimely passing of Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson. What a shock and a loss.
George Lewis’ marvellous, meticulous, and lively history of the AACM.
The arrival of a good place in town to get a Mojito or Caipirinha.
How miserably hackneyed and uninspired my recent attempts at solo recording have been.

See? All I can do is point to things.

Farewell, and thanks for everything....

2008-02-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

I know we're long past the point in our cultural history when information is thought to reside primarily in texts, but that's how it is for me - even trying to think about certain kinds of practice or ideas summons to mind a book for me even more often than I think of a person.

So it's almost impossible to imagine analog synthesis without seeing a copy of Allen Strange's book Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls in my hand, all dog eared and the non-acid-free pages doing their color-changing thing. But today I'm thinking about the man who wrote it - Allen Strange. I'm greatly saddened by the news of his recent passing from among us.

It's often the case that, as a reader or listener, you form an image of the person who made the object of your attention. I think we are always doing that, in some way or other, or it's possible that this is one of the tendencies that marks me as a dinosaur in the new century/Dispensation - that desire to embody things as people. While my life is strewn with the debris resulting from the discovery that the person I imagined was kinder or more generous or decent or less [articulate in your favorite source of disappointment here], my own limited encounters with him were always a pleasure. I remember him as being nicer to me than his books were, and he really had nothing to gain from being particularly charitable to me. Maybe that's why I'm sad - I am afraid that this quality is a threatened natural resource.

Here is a live recording of Allen with one of the live ensembles he worked with - Biome. It's from the 70s, four Synthis.

The thing in the midst of this that made me smile is the following comment in the guestbook where I read the notice of Allen's death, and it seems the proper note to close this on.

silver lining:
God's Buchla will finally be patched correctly.
let the thunder roll

When we say "winter in Wisconsin," this is what we mean....

2008-02-21T08:07:00.001-08:00

When I talk about living here in Madison, I almost always include some kind of caveat about having four card-carrying seasons, and mention that the middle of January can be brutally cold. This week has been what I'm talking about. Owing to the weekend's particular sequence of ice/warming/rain/cooling/snow/even more cooling, my shoveling blog would be about venturing outside to scrape confectioner's sugar out from around the slush tracks now rendered into dinosaur footprints. Although we are reportedly venturing into the "It might warm up as high as the freezing point of water...." range this coming weekend, the temp swing yesterday was more in the character-building 15 below to 5 above range. I could do with a bit less character.

I have some things to keep me warm, however - a pair of reissues from Carl Stone (his very first recording ever Woo Lae Oak, the arrival of the second revised edition of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings that includes a bunch of source images I haven't seen (Yes, I've actually run the thing for long enough the first time out that I actually recognize the new images) and some new audio source material (which will be familiar to people who are familiar with the processed voice material that shows up in installation recordings such as Music for Civic Recovery Centre or the soundtrack project Music for Onmyo-Ji). In case you missed it the first time, it's worth considering picking up a copy.

The other recent companion has been the new Autechre outing Quaristice, which hits the streets as a physical object the first week of March but is available as a FLAC download or MP3 download right now. There's a lot here to digest, but I really like the range and breadth of the work.

D'oh!

2008-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

I could have found a great way to blog that didn't involve my anxiety at having such a boring life and not being a very interesting person: I could have written about shoveling snow - according to the student newspaper for the University at which my wife teaches, there have been 41 shoveling opportunities since 1 December.

Last night after midnight, we got a coating of ice, which warmed before dawn. Hard going? You betcha. But the rain did this weird thing where there was a layer of warm water below the coating of ice on the car. When you tapped the windshield with a scraper, it cracked and slid right off the glass or the car.

No point in shoveling - it's a hockey rink with several inches of water on the ice. And the story is that it's going to start snowing on top of this sometime this afternoon. This will almost certainly mean 40-pound shovelfulls of sodden snow. I may forsake the new Nick Bartsch's Ronin release on ECM Holon [its loose-limbed minimalist improv is perfect for walk shovelling] for something loud and snotty [old Oasis? It's the right snarl, even if I hardly ever listen to it]. We'll see. I now regret trading in the Zamboni for our little hybrid.

6 months of non-silence....

2008-02-12T07:08:00.001-08:00

If you think that your personal phobias, hysteria, and foibles are not so interesting that everyone in the world is dying to know about them, blogging can be a real dark night of the soul. What is worth saying?

That you're content in ways that were unimaginable back when you were a child and assumed you'd grow up to be inexplicably tall and blond and living in a domed city with a flying car?

That seems to go without saying, since one is really talking about the texture of areal life. Some textural elements:

We're breaking the record for the most snowfall in a Madison winter ever.

My little group with fellow laptopper Brad Garton and mandolinist Terry Pender is going great guns. You can find some live recordings of gigs here and here and here and here.

We're also performing at the upcoming Spark Festival in Minneapolis, which is always an absolutely warm and wonderful time. This is also an opportunity to reconstitute a trio with my percussionist friend Tom Hamer and visualist extraordinaire Mark Henrikson for a gig at the Nomad World Pub, which I'm really excited about.

Jeff Kaiser and I have released a duet recording together as The Desert Fathers - quartertone trumpet and laptops. I'm very proud of it. We had a chance to play together again at the annual International Society for Improvised Music's get-together at Northwestern U. in December.

And on the home front, work on the next major release of Cycling '74's Max - Max 5 - is coming to fruition. I look forward to seeing this enter the world.

RTQE is going strong, with the best of 2007 list up, and new work arriving on a regular basis. It's such a pleasure to do the program. I'm so lucky.

A Good Week

2007-06-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

The world is so full of those of us who work in privacy and relative isolation that I honestly don't know - beyond a surmise - about how other people feel about encountering versions of their own work in the wider world. In my case, I hardly ever encounter it, so this was an interesting week for me - it happened not once, but twice, and it was pretty nice both times.

Back in the days when J. was in grad school in New York, John Schaefer's program on WNYC-fm New Sounds was a favorite late-night listen. I heard so much of music I have come to love and value on that show, and it was a great way to end a long day. And I was tickled to death back in the 1980s when John actually played some of my cassette-only releases.

So you can imagine that I was kind of happy on Monday I got a couple of notes from sharp-eyed friends bearing pretty wonderful news: some of my recent work was going to be featured on an episode of New Sounds! I'm not embarrassed to say that I cracked open a Grolsch, sat on the couch with J., and really enjoyed myself - not least because I was in the company of musicians whose work I really enjoyed. I hope that's not too vain. You can hear an archived edition of the program, should it strike your fancy.

The second of the week's pleasures all started with a problem: at the end of the 2005 AES conference in New York, my flight was cancelled, leaving me with a good bit of a day and nothing much to do. My friend Luke Dubois, whose radar for the wonderful is finely calibrated, suggested I might enjoy an exhibition entitled Obsessive Drawing at the American Museum of Folk Art. The work
really impressed me - in particular, the work of New Zealander John Thompson. So I meditated on the work, and a week or so later started on a Jitter patch which would do something similar to what I'd seen as a kind of homage. I posted an early version of the patch to the Cycling '74 Jitter forum, and also thought it'd be of some interest to Christy Matson an artist I'd originally met when she attended a Max/MSP day/night school that I'd assisted with several years ago. Christy wrote back to ask if she might use my patch to create some objects, and - of course - I said yes. And waited to see what would happen.

It was worth the wait. Yesterday, J. and I piled into the car for a whirlwind trip to the Hyde Park Art Center to see what she'd done with the Jitter patch as raw material before the exhibition closed the next day.

The things that Christy had made from the humble Jitter patch were really beautiful - these elegant and rich black pieces shot through with the gleam of metal when struck at just the right angle by the light [they're tough to photograph, as what I've included here might suggest].

Several of the large works are actually interactive audio pieces - touching them allows you to interact with work from her collaborator in this project Mark Gallay.

Since there was another exhibition that involved a sequence of loud bands playing in a performance space next door, the audio was turned off. So the interaction portion is left for next time. There is a sample of the work here, though.

Between sitting quietly with J. and hearing my work on a program that was really central to forming my own sensibilities and seeing an idea of mine transformed into a beautiful bunch of objects by Christy, it was a good week.

Missing but not Inaction

2007-05-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

Wow. It's been a while - I have to keep reminding myself that I should try to overcome my usual view that my life isn't that interesting to total strangers and just get on with trying to construct a narrative that doesn't involve various manifestations of hysterical misery.

My new solo release Amalgam: Aluminum / Hydrogen is available on the Palace of Lights label. You can find out more about it and listen to a sample by clicking here.

In less object-oriented terms, 've been doing some performing here and there - most recently as one-half of The Desert Fathers, a duo with trumpeter Jeff Kaiser. Our inaugural appearance before actual humans was a part of the second annual Boise Experimental Music Festival.

You can see some pictures of our performance here. It was a great time, and my personal thanks to Krispen Hartung for his hard work and hospitality. You'll probably be hearing from The Desert Fathers in the form of some acoustic Icons, at some point.

The "two laptops and a mandolin" trio it's been my pleasure to tread the boards with has christened itself pendergartontaylor (or just PGT for short, inna prog stylee) and continues to make the joyful noise and generally thrive. Most recently, my pal Brad Garton's 50th birthday neatly lined up with his hosting an evening of the Roosevelt Arts Project in the Borough Hall of the amazing community he lives in, Roosevelt, New Jersey. We did two pieces for the evening's program, and you can listen to the first of them by clicking here.

It looks like the next PGT outing will be a brief performance at the 2007 NIME (New Instruments for Musical Expression) Conference in NYC. I'm looking forward to it.

Apart from that, it's been business as usual - staring slack-jawed with awe and wonder at the BBC documentary series Planet Earth, taking some pleasure in traversing the list of people Clive James thinks we shouldn't forget (there are some excerpts published here, in case you're curious), and enjoying some recent musical offerings from Arve Henriksen, Jim O'Rourke (realizing a graphic Takemitsu score, no less), Menomena, Hal Rammel, and David Torn (among others).

Oh yeah - I managed a quick trip to the Netherlands to do a workshop in Delft.

Well, okay - I guess it has been a gay, mad whirl.

Embarrassing admissions about luxury items

2007-03-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

I am normally given to enjoying and admiring those small and perfect things that the world presents to us free of charge or those things which are the gifts of attention. While I'm sure that insanely expensive hotel room on the shores of Lake Locarno is very nice, this cup of coffee has its charms, too.

Having said that, It gives me some vaguely guilty pleasure to type the following phrase:

prescription varilux bifocal Oakley sunglasses

There. I've done it. Move along, nothing to see here.

Spark trio performance now online

2007-03-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a few days to get around to getting it up, but an MP3 version of the trio performance with my pals Brad Garton and Terry Pender at the 2007 Spark Festival is now online and available on my new and expanded MP3 downloads page.

Part 1 (15:25)
Part 2 (12:39)

Reasons for a lack of stardom...

2007-03-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

...a lack of talent? Possibly, but that's not what I wanted to say.

I am in the process of working on some new material and patchery, and I have realized what one of my problems is; I spend too much time listening to things in their raw state. This week, it's been revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Nathan Wolek's granular toolkit for MSP, reminding myself that the whole granular thing may well appear to be "overused" because people only opt for a tiny subset of what's possible [as Marcel Wierckx' work suggests, which was always my view of FM synthesis in earlier times]. To that end, I'mve been taking materials I'm really familiar with and rather exhaustively tweaking parameters very slowly in various combinations, and spending a good amount of time living inside/alongside the results. For hours and days.

I expect that by the time I think I've got it figured out, some part of me thinks that no one else will be interested; my inner midwesterner shows up, pronounces the results "nothin' special," and moves on. This "slow preparation, fast execution" stuff is tricky.

How I missed on-air fundraising

2007-02-27T07:50:00.000-08:00

Owing to the spectacular snowstorm this past weekend, I was effectively trapped in Minneapolis. I am extremely grateful to Dave Pederson for filling in for me.

Things were fine when I drove up earlier in the week to participate in the annual Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, where I was going to perform with both of the live ensembles I'm currently working with - a trio with Tom Hamer on percussion and Mark Henrickson on visuals, and another trio [for this occasion, a quartet - hooray!] with Terry Pender on mandolin, Brad Garton on laptop and Luke Dubois on visuals. The quartet with Brad and Terry and Luke went swimmingly, and we even managed that particularly miraculous situation of being able to turn the bed in Brad and Terry's room into a recording studio for some sessions while Terry was in town.

Things got a bit interesting later in the week. Due to circumstances beyond their control, neither Mark nor Tom was able to make it to Minneapolis, which meant an impromptu solo set. Luke Dubois came to my aid and provided some visuals which I believe went a long way toward distracting the audience in instructive ways, but all seemed to have gone well (note to self: a consequence of playing with great people is that you feel all the more exposed when you return to solo work). The Spark Festival is a great collection of stuff, full of very friendly people and interesting music, and very short on attitude. My thanks to Doug Geers and his crew, and to J.P. Hungelman and his band of merry clubsters.

Given the storm and all the unpleasantness between Minneapolis and Madison, there was no way I was going home on Sunday, which is why you turned on the radio and got Mr. Pedersen instead of me. I made a cautious dash home yesterday, and things are kind of back to normal, except for the shevelling. Next week on RTQE, it's back to business as usual, thanks to our listener sponsors.

How to ruin an-air fundraising(and save your evening)

2007-02-19T08:07:00.000-08:00

Last night was the first of two weeks' worth of on-air fundraising for WORT-FM, when all good radio hosts talk a lot more than usual and wait for the phones to ring.

The normal and appropriate thing to do is to go with shorter pieces [for me, that means "less than 10 minutes," in case you're wondering] that are exciting and upbeat.

But that sort of bothers me. I'm quite well aware of being so generally unexciting, thanks - the Q stands for "Quiet," after all. But it's more the idea that the normal goal something that stops one in one's tracks. So I decided that I'd try to integrate this into my fundraising appeal... to play something that would bring things to a standstill by the force of its Ch'i/prana/integrity/whatever.

And I had just the thing: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's 2006 all-covers release Melody Mountain on Rune Grammofon. Go buy the disk. No, really. Susanna Wallumrod [yes, she is related to that guy who drums on ECM discs] and Morten Qvenild from Jaga Jazzist, very minimal instrumentation, and a production job from Helge Sten that displays the Prince, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, Kiss, and AC/DC covers like diamonds on inky black velvet.

I played her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and it even fetched people from other parts of the building/phone answerers into the studio to ask, "What is this? It's exquisite...." And, in honor of a later pledger, I ran her take on "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again."

Upbeat and exciting? Well, maybe not. But music that is about what I think I try to do on an ordinary evening? Oh my, yes.

Disk death (a chance to listen again)

2007-02-17T22:16:00.000-08:00

My preparations for the Boston workshop last week were enlivened by disk death, which involved two important things: the arrival of a new Macbook Pro, and the death of my iPod library. Well, actually, the death of part of the library.

So I now have to start reloading a large portion of my iPod library from CD again. Not something I look forward to doing, but it's been an interesting chance to look at those shelves again.

One thing I didn't expect to consider is my habit of what I put on the iPod. Previously, I had this notion that I'd be going through my library and keeping only the cuts on a given recording I liked. But going back to reloading stuff, I'm struck again by hearing the things that I left off the first time. The last specific example was some material from Talk Talk's "Spirit of Eden" that didn't make the original cut.

What was I thinking? Probably saving space. But I've decided to be more selective about including entire albums, and leave off the individual cut selection for a while.

In turn, I've been thinking about the notion of novelty vs. diffusion; My reloading puts me in the interesting position of simultaneously adding new work alongside things that have been off my radar for a while. The verdict: diffusion trumps novelty. There's just more in the past to be surprised by.

Don't just look out the window - check the curtains

2007-02-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

I'm in Boston to do a workshop, and did the Hotwire thing to find a hotel room. Owing to the insane cold snap that blankets most of the east and midwest scrambled my flights, my flights were retimed and rerouted, but (apart from a theme-park-ride landing) all went well. The hotel I'm staying is pretty nice. I was particularly drawn to the historically themed curtains. Never thought of putting historical documents on my curtains. Ah Boston, crucible of our liberty....

This reminded me of a little song about Curtains by Peter Gabriel. Just a fragment, really - it shows up on the B-side of the Single "Big Time," I think (Yep... Ah, online discographies).

Oh, draw the blinds
We can shut out the night
Oh, pull up the blankets
Pull the blankets up tight

And there are angels on our curtains
They keep the outside out
And there are lions on our curtains
They lick their wounds
They lick their doubt

The image of the vanquished nursing their hurt and doubt has stuck with me.

The last place this showed up was in a computer game - Myst IV. No kidding. You can see the sequence (and hear the tune) here.

Little Pleasures, part N

2007-02-04T08:47:00.000-08:00

This is not about perfect or guilty pop songs, although it does have something in common with them -- the idea that some small well-crafted things expand to fill a much greater place in the sensorium than you might imagine.

My favorite T-shirt.

Mint juleps on derby day.

"The Thrill is Gone" suddenly coming out of a radio on an Interstate in the middle of Wyoming in the dead of night while you're driving cross-country alone.

An extra hour of sleep on the coldest morning of the year.

And the specific item celebrated here: A freshly cooked batch of Irish Oatmeal, a dash of brown sugar, some chopped walnuts, and chopped dried apricots and golden raisins rehydrated in my favorite Bourbon.

Note: the quality of the ingredients makes all the difference. Fussy though it may be, Irish Oatmeal is a universe apart from the stuff I grew up with, and the nuts, fruit, and bourbon also figure heavily in making this a Platonic breakfast of which all other breakfasts are mere shadows.

Not a wall of sound. More like a fogbank....

2007-02-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

This week's through-the-eardrum wonder is all about the primary colors of rock and roll, but with a reduced palette. Well, okay. Not reduced in number, anyway. It'e Rhys Chatham's gloriously drum-free recording "A Crimson Grail" on Table of the Elements. One large, sprawly ensemble of several hundred guitarists and what appears to be a lone cymbal recorded live in the Sacre-Coeur in Paris.

It's interesting to hear the clapping and cheering between sections, since you get a nice sense for the size of the performance space. The architecture of the sections isn't particularly surprising - slowly building masses of strummed clouds [diaphanous in the first section, darker in the middle, and building to a huge chiming and ecstatic single-chord coda at the end] that rise and fill the space, and I'm sure that any recording would almost certainly miss the precise mix of individual voices or groups peeking through the giant cloud of massed tonalities in the space [something that I think never records]. But it's a wonderful thing to hear, having something of the same effect of my other favorite giant-mass-of-guitar-like-things piece, "Symphony #3 (Gloria) by Chatham's one time bandmate Glenn Branca. But where the Branca uses his work as a vehicle to investigate the overtone series - a kind of Mahler to Arnold Dreyblatt's Webern - Chatham's performance continually reminds us of the humble electric guitar itself. It's a lovely recording. Wish I'd been there.

Listener Questions (part N)

2007-01-26T17:03:00.000-08:00

"How come you didn't play any [artist/recording] when I called to request it? Do you think they suck or something?"

Although it was not always so, I plan every single RTQE program in advance. In part, this is because I'm programming from my personal library quite a lot of the time. In addition, I honestly try to make sure that things fit together with something that (at least at the time) seems like it has a logic, and the logic of free association is such that your request might not fit well, even if I did know it was in the station library.

So don't feel bad. I try to pay attention to requests and selections, and it's quite likely they'll show up the next week or thereafter."

A Well-known Address on Broadway

2007-01-24T12:49:00.000-08:00

Something like 15 years after he entered my listening life, the work of Tetsu Inoue continues to be something I personally seek out and continue to enjoy. I confess to a certain general interest in how artists grow and mature over time (even in those situations in which only a slice of their collected work is of interest to me. The later "tonal" work of Arvo Pärt and Talk Talk's last two recordings Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock come immediately to mind here as examples], and -- in particular -- the work of artists who are apparently willing to venture as creators outside of the zone of comfort provided by decent sales or critical acceptance or the inertia of a "fan base."

Like a lot of his fans, I was unprepared for the arrival in 1998 of the Tzadik release Psycho-Acoustic; there'd been some general discussion that Tetsu might have decided that he'd gone as far as he could or wanted to within the zero-BPM ambient genre that he'd pursued with such success. But the release was a bolt out of the blue, jettisoning nearly every outward and visible sign of the work that preceded it [timbre, form, time scales] in favor of a completely different universe. It wasn't the case for everyone, I found the release [and the release of Fragment of Dots on Tzadik the next year] to be a real revelation -- a chance to hear someone you thought you knew reinvent himself right before your very ears. So I've never been among that group of people who wanted Tetsu to go back to conjuring giant fogbanks [If you're the sort of completist who is always in the mood for impoverishment, there's a complete listing of his ambient-era Fax releases (along with mention of which ones have been reissued on the Fax Ambient label) here.].

So it was a real surprise to have a new "oldskool" Tetsu Inoue disc cross the transom -- one which in both form and title hearkens back to his ambient days on the Fax label. While I am not likely to stop encouraging you to hunt up a copy of his wonderful 2006 release Yolo anytime soon, this is a lovely piece of work.

2350 Broadway 4 is the fourth of a series of ambient collaborations with Fax label owner and canonical ambientalist Pete Namlook, and picks up there the earlier discs in the series [from 1993, 1994, and 1996, respectively] left off. Suffice it to say that it continues the work of its predecessors -- expansive and evocative single-take soundscapes of great grace and elegance.

The new release is a 2 CD set, but not in the traditional sense: it's a single stereo audio disc and a companion DTS 5.1 surround version of the same material. While both are nice, it's very interesting to hear the way that Namlook and Inoue imagine spatializing the piece. I'm considerably more accustomed to hearing multichannel works of the electroacoustic variety, where the grammar of space and placement has more to do with trajectory and velocity than it would with, say, diagrams of plantings in a large and formal English garden. If you're familiar with the earlier 2350 Broadway releases, you'll no doubt recall that careful placement and languid movement within the stereo sound field was a large part of the sound and feel of these recordings. Re-imagining them as 5.1 surround is not that hard to imagine. It's often the case that the differences between a surround recording and a 2-channel folddown are pretty radical; 2350 Broadway 4 does a considerably better job of making the transition down (or up). It's a fine addition to the series, it'll probably make people who found Tetsu's more recent recordings from the late 90s on to be problematic [i.e. people who are not me], and it's great to have the surround mix.

Since I really enjoy and value Tetsu's work over the course of the last decade, I think of 2350 Broadway 4 as more a note from a friend that reminds you of your shared past with them.

On a related ranty note, I continue to be amazed just how lousy surround stuff can sound on people's "Home Theatre" systems. I shouldn't be surprised to realize that lots of those things are judged by their owners to be great based on their ability to deliver butt-rattling low-end for big-budget pyrotechnics and shizzy high-frequency crap whizzing around intended to make the experience of seeing movies about beehives "more authentic," should I? But man oh man, some of that stuff in the middle range [where lots of interesting things like music take place] sounds just dismal.

Paging Mr. Proust, White Courtesy Phone....

2007-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

Something amazing happened this morning.

As a result of the release of some recent work of mine as a part of the Palace of Lights FLOOD series, an old acquaintance from the days when I was involved in cassette culture got back in touch after a number of years. That kind of thing is always a rare kind of pleasure, if for no other reason than forcing you to compress some large period of your life into a single short newsy paragraph.

He pointed out that he still had all of my old releases from the 1980s. It was certainly flattering to think that he valued them enough to hang onto them, but also got me thinking that - as nearly as I could tell - I might well not have some of them amidst various relocations and repacking for sabbaticals, etc. He was going to transfer the cassettes to CDR, and offered to run copies of them for me.

A package of five lovely CDRs arrived in the morning post covering a little over a decade of released work of mine during the decade of the 1980s, sporting jaunty color covers derived from the original cassette liners. I was stunned.

This was work I've not heard in at least a decade, and probably a lot longer. Imagine that someone reported finding a whole box of your treasured posessions in the attic of a house you lived in while growing up and sent the box to you and you'll begin to get the flavor of the rare gift my acquaintance blessed me with.

What's made me slow down while listening has been the discovery of the extent to which hearing these brings back a flood of memories about how and when they came into being. Election night of Ronald Reagan's first term when the engineer and I got drunk in the studio and recorded this beery eccentric handclapping for a track, an odd record of my learning to program FM synths and discovering samplers, backing tapes for my wedding, and guest appearances of my friends' children, now grown.

There's no absence of cringe in the bargain, as you would imagine [I certainly liked analog delay lines and gauzy synth pads, it would seem]. But I'm going to be a long time repaying or paying forward this chance to meet my old self and listen to the stories he has to tell me. This is a gift I would wish on everyone (and yes, I'll probably put a few of them up on my downloads page, at some point. There's a lot to choose from. :-) ).

Thanks, Robert.

Listener Questions (part N)

2007-01-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

"Why don't you play more lowercase recordings on RTQE?"

It's a matter of politeness more than taste, on my part. Probably the main reason is the same one as the reason that I don't play more stuff that falls within the Japanese "Otaku" genre circle of light—some of my listeners drive cabs for a living, and they simply can't hear the work over the noise floor of their "moving office." Back in the days when the WORT transmitter link was considerably flakier than is the case now, they would helpfully call me to inquire as to whether or not we were still on the air. Having driven cabs for a living myself and knowing the despair that comes from slim radio pickings while moving between fares, I remain mindful of that segment of my audience and avoid things that exist predominantly in the low or high frequency ranges, or work that is exceptionally quiet.

Another reason to avoid extreme changes in dynamic range is that some listeners with sleeping children will occasionally turn up something that is very quiet, only to have themselves scared silly and to have their children wakened when the next piece begins at a (now] very high amplitude.

And yes, I do think of silly things like an audience when I prepare programs.

Rampant Careerism

2007-01-07T15:44:00.000-08:00

Part of my New Year's resolution was to bring my behavior more into line with my pronouncements. Rather than merely speaking with admiration about online labels and artists who make their own work freely available in ways that don't include a UPC label, I decided that I would seek to do so myself. To that end, I created my own downloads page on my website, and also decided to pursue some online release opportunities.

The first one of those has come to fruition. A half-dozen excerpts from longer live performance recordings of my work is now available as a part of the Palace of Lights label's online release series, FLOOD. You can access those recordings here.

I'm very excited to be involved with Palace of Lights — it was one of my favorite American indie labels during the decade of the 1980s, and Kerry Leimer, its owner, has emerged in the new century with amazing new work. I commend both his new and reissued work to your attention without reservation. If you're a regular RTQE listener, you'll certainly have heard some of it.

Back in Black [Deathprod!]

2007-01-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

I first ran into Deathprod (Helge Sten) on a remix disc which took as its source material the work of the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim. Actually, I was initially curious about the Biosphere remix on the disc, but found myself actually preferring the stuff this Deathprod person did with the material. Dense, but very carefully constructed and mixed. In time, that led me to the improvising ensemble Supersilent, an ensemble that included Sten - one of those listening discoveries that is the start of a long and appreciative journey.

Trying to locate Sten's earlier solo work was quite a challenge - small release lots, some on obscure Norwegian labels, etc. But the release of his most recent solo project Morals and Dogma provided a marvelous respite from the endless search - the disc was also released as a 4 CD Box Set in tasteful black called, simply, Deathprod, which included not only Morals and Dogma, but his hard-to-find first two releases, Treetop Drive and Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha, along with a fourth CD of much older and unreleased work. The 2004 release, in its time, went out of print and once again, it became hard to connect with this sumptuous dark and strong body of work. In the meanwhile, I kept spinning it and ranting and raving about how great Morals and Dogma was, even though I knew that the truly serious Seeker After More among my audience was in for a bit of a hunt. As some of you know, this is one bit of my radio life that I always feel vaguely guilty about.

But ranting more broadly is once again an option - the 4-CD box is back in print, and well worth your time and listenerly attention if you have any love at all for beautifully and patiently crafted 0 bpm soundscapes. There is a more recent vinyl-only collection of a half-dozen remixes that I'll be spinning for you in the near future on RTQE. Stay tuned.

By the way - you can find an interview with him that might (or might not) shed some light on his methods and intentions here.

The Return of the Invalid Objects

2007-01-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

I'm never sure whether or not starting the new year with a post on something old is appropriate or not. But it seems to me that a consequence of living online is that diffusion trumps novelty.

Voiceband Jilt, the CD of my work released on the c74 label last year, took as its source material a set of recordings called the "Invalid Object" series. It was a project of the Irish label Fällt, originally released in the form of 24 3" CDs, each of which took their title from one of the "reserved words" in Java. Although I included a weblink to a location for the original recordings in MP3 format in the liner notes for Voiceband Jilt, the Fällt site was down for redesign and retooling for quite a lot of the last year or so.

The great news is that Fällt is back with a nicely redesigned website, and a reliable link to the material is back, too. I would commend that material to your attention (you can find it here) once again.

If you meet the Buddha on the disc....

2006-12-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

...I am not sure what the proper ending to that clause would be, exactly. Destroy the disc? Don't listen?

In his Monolake incarnation, Robert Henke [along with collaborators Gerhard Behles and Torsten Pröfrock, along the way] has been putting out fine music for a very long time. Although he continues from strength as his discography lengthens, I confess to a particular nostalgic committment to some of his earlier works such as Cinemascope or hongkong.

But it is often the "out of character" releases that draw my attention. In Robert's case, the recording of his that I most prize is beat-free, and scoured by wind, in tent, and choice to the very shape of Perfection itself: Gobi the desert EP. While his dub-rubbed and slow-cooked techno is up there with the best of them, the rumours of something off the beaten path from Monolake's regular output is an opportunity for joy. In addition to the languorous and finely detailed soundscape of Gobi, Robert has also turned his attentions to conjuring entirely different kinds of wilderness with Signal to Noise [the construction of the entirely artificial world in the piece "Studies for Thunder" by feeding pulses of filtered noise into networks of granular delay lines is amazing].

Robert's most recent release, Layering Buddha falls into that latter category, taking recordings of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian's ambient loop player, the FM3 Buddha Machine, as its starting point, and then extracting and processing the sound of this pleasant and humble device to the edge of recognizeability and well beyond. The result is a great addition to Robert's catalog. The links above contain MP3 samples - even if you don't hear it on RTQE some Sunday evening, you can still find examples there. Well worth your time and attention.

Tips for Funktion Collectors (recent releases)

2006-12-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

Anybody who's at all interested in the use of software algorithms for musical composition has probably run across the work of Gottfried Michael Koenig. Since I studied at the Instituut voor Sonologie, I guess I encountered his work a bit earlier and more thoroughly than some other people (Koenig directed the Institute for a number of years). Between studying and working with his computer composition program Project 1 and listening to his tape music, I found that I not only respected his work, I liked some of it. In particular, I was taken by his electronic compositions from the "Funktionen" series, and decided that I liked them enough that I would go about finding recorded examples of them [as opposed to going to the listening library at the Conservatory to hear them, which got a lot harder once I was no longer a Sonology student].

I was kind of surprised to discover that there really wasn't a single source that collected all of the Funktionen pieces. By far, the best place to start was a series released in the 1990s under the series name "Acousmatrix", one volume of which was dedicated to Koenig's electronic music. I picked it up, and discovered that although it was a fine representation of Koenig's work, it didn't contain a complete set of the Funktion pieces [the 2cd set included Funktion Rot, Funktion Grau, Funktion Violett, Funktion Blau, and Funktion Indigo, but not the "green" and "yellow" and "orange" pieces].

More recently, the Dutch label BVHAAST has reissued the entire Acousmatrix series, both as a 9 disc box, and individually. The Koenig release is BVHAAST 9001-02. More on this below.

Then, I ran across a Sub Rosa compilation "Institute of Sonology 1959-1969, Early Electronic Music" [Sub Rosa SR 164], which contained "Funktion Orange." So far, so good.

The package that showed up on my door yesterday afternoon completes the series. The recent Edition RZ release of Gottfied Michael Koenig's work includes both the missing Funktion Grun and Funktion Gelb pieces, in addition to some other early WDR studio releases I wasn't familiar with and a good sampling of his software-generated compositions in the hands of human musicians. In some ways, this might be the more interesting collection, since it highlights the
connections between his compositional practice in the context of both the "tape music" and "instrumental music" worlds.

If this is the kind of thing that interests you, the easiest place to find it is probably here, through Forced Exposure.

15 of the Top Ten of 2006

2006-12-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

All kinds of people appear to either create or take an interest in "Top Ten" lists - publications (blogged and otherwise), retailers, media, and so on. In the microcultures I'm involved in, it customarily happens after the first of the year - it seems sensible to comment after the arbitrary time unit of a year has passed.

So it was with me in my role as the host of a community radio program, until I started getting calls from listener-sponsors asking for recommendations for recordings I found to be of personal interest. In some cases, they wanted gift ideas for "their cool weird friends," and in other cases, people asked them what they wanted.

Scary as it may be to go out on such a critical limb (although, to be fair, I'm just making a set of arbitrary judgements based on having listened to and broadcast a whole lot of music during the last calendar year on RTQE) and post things before I'd had a chance to look around at what all the cool kids were lining up behind, I decided to start doing my "Best of the Year" shows during the early part of December as a service to listeners. Somehow, the list developed a margin of error such that it wound up being fifteen recordings.

From a programming standpoint, it's enjoyable - one is always guaranteed two programs per year that are devoid of filler, as a personal matter. And, if the calls that come in during the program are anything to go by, people actually seem to appreciate it.

The official web page listing my not-quite-top-ten for the year is here.

The new downloads page

2006-12-18T21:27:00.000-08:00

One of the only kinds of music I haven't played on my radio program RTQE is my own. I've just never been comfortable using a platform like my show to promote myself - a view that hasn't really changed much over the years it's been on. However, with helpful prodding from some friends, I have decided to create one on my website. It would appear from the website logs that people have actually found the page, which contains a number of MP3s of my solo work, and various collaborations with people I've been fortunate enough to know and work with. You can find it here.