YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

A movie about Glennie’s life and music, Touch the Sound (2004), moved me profoundly. The film steps slowly, observing Glennie as she plays a lone snare in the middle of Grand Central Station, ticks out a percussion masterpiece on an ashtray, water glass and plate in a Fuji sushi bar, creates a symphony with junk found behind her family barn in Scotland, watches/listens to a Zen monk raking gravel. Between clips, Glennie is caught in contemplative moments, explaining her philosophy of sound and vibration, about how sound is so much more than hearing.

Footage of her collaboration with master guitarist Fred Frith at an abandoned sugar factory is woven through. In one segment, Glennie is on the ground floor on marimba, Frith on a catwalk 100 feet away, the two of them communicating delicately through the echoing space. By halfway through, the raw emotion of the piece is apparent in Glennie’s face; by the end, she’s in tears.

Her 2007 TED Talk, How to listen to music with your whole body: is powerful.

Take a quiet night, chillax, rent this movie, and re-think how you think about sound.

Cafe Tacuba, “Rarotonga”

Instead of a standard review, decided to try and tell the story through Storify, capturing other people’s impressions and images (both from tonight’s performance and of Spalding in general) via social media, interwoven with some of my own commentary. Not sure this works – what do you think?

• Samuel Barber, “Adagio for Strings” (According to Alex Ross, “whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio plays on the radio.”)
• The Who, “Pictures of Lily” (Boy sees girl of his dreams and discovers she’s been dead for four decades.)
• Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “Tears of a Clown” (When clowns aren’t creepy, they’re liars, or worse, opera fans.)
• Richard Thompson, “End of the Rainbow” (The author of ditties like “The Wall of Death” sings to a baby, claiming there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow. Thanks, Dad.)
• Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue” (Bored, sad girl counts the raindrops and discovers evaporation.)
• Marty Robbins, “Streets of Laredo” (The singing gunslinger gets shot to death in “El Paso,” but that’s mild compared to this cowboy variation on the ancient “Unfortunate Rake” story.)
• Billie Holiday, “Gloomy Sunday” (The darkest version I’ve heard of the Hungarian Suicide Song. The composer later committed suicide.)
• Louvin Brothers, “Knoxville Girl” (The most violent song on the cherub-voiced death-gospel duo’s aptly named Tragic Songs of Life, reworking the English “Wexford Girl” murder ballad.)
• Big Star, “Holocaust” (Power pop drained of any power, words drained of any meaning, Beach Boys melodies sinking into quicksand.)
• Hüsker Dü, “Too Far Down”/ “Hardly Getting Over It” (The titans of melodic noise at their greyest, not seeing even a little light.)
• The Antlers, “Bear” (Heartbreaking ode to premature senility and the animal inside.)
• Etta James, “I’d Rather Go Blind” (Passive-agressive romantic obsession turns the lights out and entertains us.)
• Carter Family, “Engine 143″ (Lots of songs are metaphorical train wrecks. This one’s the real deal.)
• Graham Parker, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” (“The doctor gets nervous completing the service, he’s all rubber gloves and no head.”)
• Pernice Brothers, “Chicken Wire” (Garage clutter, exhaust fumes, and no redeeming sentiments.)
• George Jones, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (Why? Because he’s dead, that’s why.)

That playlist could keep you in therapy for years. But none of them outdo the real King of Pain, Skip James. Blues was never bluer. On “Devil Got My Woman,” Skip out-depresses the whole field by declaring that he’d rather be the devil.

Skip James, “Devil Got My Woman”

Big Star, “Holocaust”

Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue”

Joy Division remains the foundation of Manchester’s Factory Records sound, featured in the fascinating movie 24-Hour Party People and a more serious biopic, Control. Overcome by epilepsy and a bizarre love triangle, Curtis committed suicide just before the band’s planned world tour. The surviving members formed New Order, an equally influential band that was hardly chipper by any normal standard (“Love Vigilantes,” for example, basically retells the Top Forty war weeper “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” from the perspective of the dead guy). But compared to Joy Division’s intensity, New Order might as well have been Kajagoogoo or Wang Chung.

Earlier this month, I got my first chance to see Unknown Pleasures performed live, in a Los Angeles show featuring Joy Division and New Order’s former bassist and backup singer, Peter Hook, and his new band, the Light. I could quibble about the Light’s performance. Hook’s vocals were decent, but sometimes sounded like he was leading cheers for Manchester United. Guest singer Moby looked enthusiastic, but came off a bit like last century’s lightbulb. Still, the band was good enough to revive the majesty of these songs (and make me feel as if that bad date had never ended).

To perk myself up after the show, I scarfed too many shots of espresso and jotted down a few mildly happy thoughts about the Joy Division revival:

1. Their Disease is Still Better than the Cure

It’s easy to smirk at Joy Division for inspiring future mopeheads to whine into their microphones. Interpol and scores of other less catchy Joy Division-inspired bands have certainly overdone the emoting. But Joy Division also deserves better than to be known only as the emirs of emo and designer doom. As Robert Christgau has noted, Joy Division struggled against depression, rather than wearing it like a designer suit. Joy Division has inspired legions of misfits–among them Bono, Kurt Cobain, Thom Yorke, Morrisey, and even Robert Smith–to reach great, if sometimes grandiose heights. And the band’s taut riffs, fusing punk velocity to Can’s minimalism, sometimes have a life of their own.

Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control”

2. The Muppets Never Covered Any Joy Division Songs

Okay, go ahead and snicker. But a 2009 piece on the Topless Robot blog, The 7 Most Depressing Songs Ever Sung By a Muppet, refers to Kermit and Rowlf’s duet on “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along” as “pretty much the pre-schooler equivalent of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.” And here’s the really depressing thing: this song only rates as Number Six on the list of the most depressing Muppet songs. The winner is a Fraggle funeral dirge, which we won’t post here because we care about our readers.

Muppets, “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along”

3. They Didn’t Write the Most Depressing Song of All Time

Many have cited Joy Division’s final single, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” as the most depressing song ever. It’s a remarkable song, whose first passage captures in a few bars the end of one era and the beginning of another. But I can’t rate it the gloomiest. The music has too much energy. I keep thinking of it as half of a medley with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and wondering how Toni Tenille would sing it. There are stacks of of George Jones, Leonard Cohen, Son House and Tom Waits songs I consider more depressing, but lists like this have to get personal. My selections follow in the next post.

Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

Neil Sedaka, “Love Will Keep Us Together”

Growing up, Chaino’s face was always around, floating in and out of the amazing collection of LPs and reel-to-reel tapes my Dad had accumulated before marriage. Every now and then, we’d plop it on the turntable and groove to raw African beats, churned through a mesh of steel drums, slapping palms, shakers, bongos, and moaning voices (yes, moans!) Never stopped to think about which African country Chaino was from – “just Africa” was enough for us. The convincingly tribal LP cover sealed the deal – Chaino was real in our minds.

Chaino: Safari Jungle Maze

40 years later, while digitizing the LP collection, took time for the first time to, you know, actually read the liner notes:

“Chaino is the only survivor of a lost race of people from the wilds of the jungle in a remote part of central Africa where few white men have ever been… [he was discovered as a boy in] the remnants of what had been a native village. Surrounding hostile tribes had attacked the village and massacred its inhabitants. They found only a small boy near death starving amongst the ruins…”

Full liner notes here.

Add to that a closer study of the track titles (“Torture of the Mau-Mau?” Really?) and my B.S. detectors finally went off. Clearly the Chaino story was fiction, written for a white audience seeking exotic audio adventures on their home Hi-Fi sets. Vinyl and accompanying literature for the armchair traveler. But if the story and photography were all fabricated, then how to explain the music, which is pretty darned authentic sounding? A quick search turned the truth up to 11:

The self-styled “percussion genius of Africa,” exotica-era enigma Chaino was actually born Leon Johnson in Philadelphia in 1927; raised primarily in Chicago, the details of his early life are largely a mystery … following surgery to remove a brain tumor, he suffered a fatal heart attack on July 8, 1999.

Chaino was a brilliant drummer, but he was an American drummer riding the exotica wave of the 1950s and 60s (and who wouldn’t?). But leaving aside multilayered and complicated questions of identity, he was an awesome percussionist, and clearly knew his way around African rhythms. Unlike Martin Denny and a lot of the exotica scene, Chaino was not some white guy pretending to sound African – somewhere along the way, Chaino got real. But he still chose to present himself as a cultural fiction… as something not quite from Chicago.

Somewhere in my wild and somewhat random record-collecting teens, I happened on this LP by Özel Türkbas – How To Make Your Husband a Sultan. OK, truth out: I probably bought it for the cover. But through it, I discovered the wonders of actual Turkish belly dance music.

Özel Türkbas: Andalou Asia Minor:

The coolest thing about the record is that it comes with a little pamphlet (which I still have) demonstrating exactly how to make your husband a sultan, i.e. how to pretend to belly dance for your husband. The pretense that a suburban American housewife could convincingly learn an ancient art from an eight-page pamphlet is ridiculous of course; its real purpose was to provide an excuse to show off Türkbas’ mighty assets through the convincing guise of cultural education. I have a feeling the pamphlet was deployed more frequently for ogling than for training.

Where Chaino and Türkbas disconnect is that her record is the real deal – these are real Turkish musicians playing fantastic Turkish belly dancing music – the kind you’d be likely to hear in any authentic belly dancing nightshow or club in 1969. Turns out the book 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die profiled it a while back:

Put this on, and the first image isn’t of some scantily dressed cosmopolitan housewife of the era sashaying around snapping finger cymbals. It’s more like a public celebration or a scene from a bustling dance hall, where the band is cranking out brisk, precise music that has everybody moving. Built around the wizardry of clarinetist Mustafa Kandıralı, this ensemble slithers and undulates, creating swirling waves of hypnotic rhythm. Several pieces leave room for improvised variations, and that’s where things heat up. Kandıralı and violinist Cevdet Çağla keep the dance rhythm going while unspooling extended technically demanding embellishments. Like the swing-era musicians who had more to offer than “In the Mood,” they manage to slip in subversive, jaw-dropping runs without shirking their main responsibility, accompanying dancers.

Here’s the difference: While Chaino was channeling pretty-much-believable African music through a fake African identity, Türkbas put together real Turkish belly dancing ensemble, but packaged it simplistically for an American audience eager to become a bit more cosmo by indulging in harmless middle eastern fantasy. “Oooh, so exotic!” Still, both are in a totally different category from Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, who pretty much faked the whole thing along with the rest of the exotica movement*.

* Don’t mean to dish on Denny here – he’s a hero to me. More on him later.

Big chin wag to Hermenaut #15 – the legendary False Authenticity issue.

Susana Baca’s smoldering and gorgeous version of “Maria Lando,” written by her mentor Chabuca Granda, is the standout track on David Byrne’s uniformly excellent 1995 compilation, The Soul of Black Peru, and also appears on one of her solo albums. Since “Maria Lando” is a heartfelt ode a woman who works hard for the money, I’ve sometimes put it on playlists that also include Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” But the ache in Baca’s voice is so intense that it makes the protagonist sound like her hours are 9 AM to 5 AM.

Baca is actually highly qualified for her new post, as an adept music historian and the co-founder of a cultural organization, the Instituto Negrocontinuo. The appointment comes just in time to promote Baca’s new album, Afrodiaspora, which takes her out of her traditional ballad comfort zone and on a journey to survey the threads of African influences in all the Americas (with a brief stop in Spain as well).

If this sounds like one of those sentimental, grooveless world music projects that drowns in self-importance, it isn’t. When the minister wants to get out of the office, she knows how to throw a good party. Afrodiaspora includes suitably moving (in both senses) tributes to Mexican singer Amparo Ochoa and Cuban salsa icon Celia Cruz. But Baca also ventures in more unexpected directions. She drastically reinterprets the Meters’ classic New Orleans funk strut “Hey Pocky Way.” Things get even sweatier on “Plena y Bomba,” a collaboration with Puerto Rico’s Calle 13 and its often-shirtless leader/MC, René Pérez Joglar (AKA Residente). Baca also sang on Calle 13′s “Latinoamerica” last year. Although 2011 is far from over, I’ll predict now that Afrodiaspora will win the award for Best Nontraditional Latin Album by a Credentialed Burecaucrat.

Susana Baca, “Maria Lando”

Susana Baca (with Calle 13), “Plena y Bomba”

Those who know the Equals’ guitarist and main songwriter Eddy Grant as the dreadlocked pop-reggae singer who recorded “Electric Avenue” (written in reaction to a 1981 Brixton riot) might be surprised to see him with the Equals, sporting dyed blond hair and sometimes playing fuzzy psychedelic guitar as if his life depended on it. Growly Derv Gordon, not Grant, served as the band’s lead vocalist, and the band continued after Grant, weakened by serious illness, quit and returned to Guyana in 1971. But the band’s peak period ended with Grant’s departure.

The Equals’ two signature songs are probably best known as covers. The infectious “Baby Come Back,” which received a lighter treatment in Pato Banton/ UB40′s 1994 hit version, is concise and compressed enough to remind me of one of Grant’s heroes, Chuck Berry. The hard-charging “Police on My Back” fit so seamlessly into the Clash‘s repertoire on its sprawling 1981 album Sandinista! that most listeners assumed it was a Clash original. But the Equals’ original version packs almost the same wallop, with a little extra dose of sweet soul.

The Equals, “Baby Come Back”

The Equals, “Police on My Back”

When the Equals are mentioned at all, it often seems to happen after some major protest in which England’s youth take to the streets–most recently in Salon, which offered the band’s work as the soundtrack to a burning London. It’s true that by the late sixties and early seventies, the Equals offered some compelling slices of politically charged psychedelic soul (“Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys,” “Equality,” “Stand Up and Be Counted”). Yet the Equals weren’t close to being politicians, and their love songs hold up as well as their fight songs. They would deserve to be heard even if the streets of London became perfectly quiet.

The Equals, “Black Skin, Blue Eyed Boys”

The Equals, “Equality”

None of Davis’ earlier work, though, prepared me for his epic spoof of Christgau, whose peerless (and sometimes inscrutable) Consumer Guide recently transformed into a blog, Expert Witness. Davis’ spoof culls negative phrases from more than 13,000 Christgau reviews into a single composite pan. Here are some teasers:

A born liar, showing all the imagination of an ATM in the process, a certain petty honesty and jerk-off humor, a man without a context, a pompous, overfed con artist, a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ‘50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser, a propulsive flagwaver attached to UNESCO lyrics about people all over the world joining hands, a simpleton, but also a genuine weirdo, a spoiled stud past his prime, so that while he was always sexy he wasn’t always seductive, a stinker, from Jesus-rock to studio jollity, a tedious ideologue with a hustle, a tough talker diddles teenpop’s love button. Act authentic for too long and it begins to sound like an act even if it isn’t.

Air-kiss soul, alienated patriotic, all clotted surrealism and Geddy Lee theatrics, all form and no conviction, except for the conviction that form is everything. All he proves is that when you dwell on suffering you get pompous. An archetypal indie whiner.

Christgau’s prose, dense with cross-cultural allusions and insider jokes, is ripe for this sort of roasting. He has self-confessed biases (against salsa, metal and prog, and for almost anything African-sounding) and puzzling sources of inspiration (this means you, Black Eyed Peas). Far too cerebral to be considered a gonzo journalist, he’s impassioned and impulsive enough enough to have thrown pie at one of his generation’s finest essayists, former girlfriend Ellen Willis. Christgau only started liking Sonic Youth after they threatened him in a song. When Lou Reed slandered Christgau on a live album, Christgau thanked him for pronouncing his name correctly.

Yet Christgau is one of only three music writers whose work has moved me as much as my favorite fiction authors (the other two are Amiri Baraka, who wrote far less about music, and Lester Bangs, who wrote with more heart but far less consistency). And I admire that after four decades of nonstop listening and writing, he has an insatiable appetite for new sounds and a disdain for sacred cows. I like Radiohead, but won’t forget his take on Kid A: “Alienated masterpiece nothing–it’s dinner music. More claret?” When classic rock still ruled the airwaves, Christgau had this pithy take on Prince’s Dirty Mind: “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”

Excerpt from “Robert Christgau: “Rock and Roll Animal” (1999)
(Music: Modern Lovers, “Government Center”)

Just as I was absorbing Davis’ Christagu parody, I discovered that Christgau and his wife, writer Carola Dibble, penned a Consumer Guide to Beer that is almost as funny. Written in the mid-seventies, before the advent of alt-beer and the heyday of Michael Jackson (the Dean of American beer critics, not the singer), the piece is surprisingly sympathetic to flavored-water American macrobrews such as Coors and Budweiser, with nary a reference to obscure Belgian monks.

Still, I love how the Christgaus start with a pedantic lesson on the history of grain fermentation since 6000 B.C. They review San Francisco’s Anchor Steam as if it were a bottled version of the Grateful Dead (“Our bohemian friends found it winy, but we found it one more instance of San Francisco’s chronic confusion of eccentricity with quality”), and describe the Krautrock-worthy Beck’s as if it were a bottle of Can (“This beer is so overbearing that bad-mouthing it seems risky”). As George Clinton would say, can you get to that?

Funkadelic, “Can You Get to That?”

Too Much Joy, “King of Beers”