“Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
About a year ago, while surfing through new additions on rdio, I stumbled on an artist I had never encountered before. That in itself is not unusual, but what surprised me was that the record was so fantastic — there aren’t many fantastic records from the 1970s that haven’t bubbled up to “classic” status over the years. Rodriguez was kind of in the Nick Drake / Tim Buckley vein, but completely off in his own head space. 30 seconds into the first sample, I was engulfed. This guy’s work was on par with the greatest troubadours of his time. How could I never have heard of him?
Continue reading Searching for Sugar Man
Over at Discaholic Corner, excellent Interview with Robert Crumb on his multi-ton collection of old 78s (more than 6,500 of them, and that’s with constant pruning!
Unfortunately, the site design is so horrible that the article is almost unreadable, but worth it.
Just last night, though, Aline, my wife, made a big Indian dinner for us and eight friends. She makes great Indian food. She suggested that after the meal we all retire to my office and listen to some of those wonderful Indian 78s that I got from the Shah Music Centre in Delhi. I played what I consider some of the most powerful of those records. Aline likes them very much, but a couple of the other women present just wanted to talk, and they involved her in conversation. Their voices just drowned out the music and I wasn’t about to turn up the sound and make it harder for them to talk, or tell them to be quiet. One friend simply fell asleep in his chair while the music played. Others picked up magazines off the coffee table and flipped through them. A vexatious situation, but what can you do? You can’t expect them to have the deep appreciation for the music that you have. You have to consider where they’re coming from, the kind of modern, commercial music they’re used to hearing, the unfamiliar, esoteric strangeness of this old music… Like I said, I mostly enjoy listening when I’m completely alone. I sit on the wicker couch that faces my old hi-fi set up, often I close my eyes while listening. It can be a profound aesthetic experience, if one isn’t too distracted thinking about other records one needs to acquire, stuff like that.
They said it couldn’t be done, but Stuck author Scot Hacker has finally cracked the code! New post over at birdhouse.org:
Quick, who’s the better drummer:
1) The Compressorhead ‘bot doing brutal justice to Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”:
OR
2) This four-year-old (?) prodigy wailing (and smiling) on Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You”:
Please leave your vote in the Comments.
(Thanks Jim Theobald and Jeremy Graham)
“Poor false eye lash, trapped beneath the ice!”
And poor Steely Dan, trapped beneath Donnie and Marie.
Word on the street is that Sid & Marty Krofft had a hand in putting together the Donnie and Marie show… which goes a long way toward explaining why it was so awesome.
Seriously though, whatever happened to the grand spectacle of the weekday variety show? Halcyon days.
Ready to have your musical mind blown? Just how many possible songs are there, anyway? Do all possible note combinations count as music? What is the relationship between the compressibility of data and our general threshold of enjoyment? VSauce nails it.
Listening to a Phillip Glass piece is more  like studying a stained glass window than listening to music in the conventional sense  – a passing glance would only tell part of the story, while the full picture is revealed by standing in deep meditation of its nuances.  Originally purchased tickets for last night’s Zellerbach performance of Einstein on the Beach back in June, but didn’t realize until a few days ago that I had signed us up for a 4.5-hour performance (“not including opening tones”). Even though I’ve got a warm spot in my heart for Glass, and had always been curious to see Robert Wilson’s legendary 1975 “Opera in four parts,” started to worry I had signed us up for  4+ hours of “difficult listening hour.” It’s not that Glass’ music is “difficult” per se’, but that he works in such large arcs, often pushing the limits of what audiences are willing to sit through. That doesn’t mean his work isn’t gorgeous – it is – but that we have to reorient our expectations of how long a composition should last, how willing we are to slow the hell down and become absorbed in a slow progression of subtly shifting notes and chords.
The “opera” (Glass says he only considers it an opera when it’s performed in an opera house … otherwise, “it is what it is”) is a meditation on science and society, gender roles, habits, patterns of living, all slowly unfolding as semi-opaque vignettes. The scene pictured above, for example, took twenty minutes to unpack. It is not just frozen because it’s a photograph – it’s frozen by composition. Starting as an impeccably painted factory building with a sole figure in the top window, characters (stereotypes) slowly enter and freeze into position. So little happens, it was almost painful to watch (though gorgeous to hear). But the funny thing about these “knee plays” is that every time you feel like your patience has been stretched to its limit, you realize that you’re  totally fascinated. Small details become important.
In another scene, a 30-foot-long bar of pure white light lays horizontally on the stage in the dark. As the music builds, one end of it slowly lifts up, moving so slowly it’s barely perceptible. A line is becoming an angle – that’s all – and over the course of 10 minutes, the bar finally reaches its vertical zenith. “Good,” you think, “Let’s move on.” Then the now-vertical bar starts to rise, and you realize it’s going to take another 10 minutes for it to ascend up behind the curtains. Part of you is asking “Are you kidding me? You’ve got to be kidding me.” while another part of you is totally absorbed in the movement of the simple light, thinking “So this is what the passage of time feels like.” You just have to let go of your rock and roll expectations and allow yourself to be swept into the pace of Glass – there is no other way.
Wilson’s stage production is austere, lightly symbolic, and sometimes funny, while the patience and endurance of the performers is stunning. It was the job of one dancer to “read” through much of the evening. Wearing  gray slacks, suspenders, and a white Oxford, she held a stiff book full of blank pages. Her head shook rapidly from side to side, vibrating  like a bobble-head doll, as if stuck in a permanent speed-reading trance. But reading what? That’s not important. It’s like she was the abstract, Platonic form of a reader, reading the abstract, Platonic form of a book. Nothing more, nothing less. How she maintained that head-wobbling for so long is beyond me – our necks ached in sympathy.
The performance peaks  in a crescendo of light and movement dedicated to the atomic age (the Einstein connection). A scaffolding rig recreates the Hollywood Squares of performance art, with dancers gesticulating mathematically at dancing light displays, some squares  shared with musicians. Lucite boxes containing floating, writhing humans traverse slowly from side to side. The victim of a nuclear blast dances with flashlights in the foreground. Two people crawl out of plastic domes, then slowly “duck and cover” to shield themselves from an atomic blast. An immense, gauzy scrim is lowered in front of it all – a massive enlargement of a 1950s explainer diagram on the mechanics of atomic detonation.
All the while, a violinist in an Einstein costume sites in a lonely chair in front of the stage, above the orchestra pit, playing his heart out just for you.
4.5 hours later we wandered outside into a warm October Berkeley evening, wondering where the time had gone.
Listening experience flow chart by Amy Kubes: Â Life Cycle of a Phillip Glass PieceÂ
It’s been 26 years since I last watched Laurie Anderson perform (“Big Science”). I was much younger, and so was she. The audience at the time was composed mostly of new wave/punkers with a literary bent – young adults into Fripp and Eno and William S. Burroughs. I remember a raft of white violins descending from the ceiling – with tape heads installed where the  bridges should have been – followed by a  dozen or so white violin bows  lowered into place, strung with reel-to-reel tape instead of horse hair. Each bow harnessed a different sound clip or spoken word recording, and she “played” each one back- and forwards, at any speed or in any staccato word rhythm.
Fast forward to 2012, Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley. Now 65, Anderson has dispensed with most of her avante-garde gimmicks and boiled it mostly down to pure storytelling , ensconced in more “traditional” violin playing backed by sequencers playing strange loops (a porch swing creaking, compressed air escaping in a repeating cycle with one timing mark off just enough to make you feel vaguely uncomfortable). The stage atmosphere  a sea of votive candles peeking out through mellow fog machine vapors, a giant screen filled with solid colors, a smaller one reserved for displaying the paw-scratch “paintings” of her dog (and a few entertaining clips of same dog playing piano – who doesn’t love animals on keyboards?)
She still pulls out a few of the old tricks – her digital vocal octave dropper completely changes the tone of her amazing poem/stories (a technique she calls “audio drag”), and she did take time to pop a pillow speaker into her mouth and play a short wah-wah improv, the shape of her mouth and breath conditioning the sound source. But for the most part, her presence is more minimal, more grounded now. At one stretch, she just sat in a big black comfy chair and talked. But the maturation of the performance seemed completely tasteful, appropriate.
Langue d’Amour, from Mister Heartbreak (1984)
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/02-Langue-dAmour.mp3]
Her poem/stories are still bizarre, but in a more grounded way – she weaves political observations about Battleground America into meditations on why the coloration of the peacock’s tail drove Darwin batshit crazy. And throughout, little zen zingers like:
“Of all the things that ever could have happened… most of them didn’t.”
She has the ability to deliver lines like this with such matter-of-fact precision that you feel like she’s pierced the veil of evening fog into something deeper. She takes you beyond without even trying.
Perhaps you are made of glass /
Should a dog strive for Buddha Heart?
(I’m paraphrasing from memory here). In fact there were many Buddhist references peppered into the performance – she’s been practicing, and that practice is reflected in the relative minimalism of the vibe. Laurie is aging like a good cheese, not like Jagger.
Performance art, by definition, always has the immediate potential for pretentiousness. But Anderson avoids it like the plague, mostly by being funny. Not comedienne funny, but “Isn’t life weird?” funny.
Via Wikipedia: In “The Cultural Ambassador”, a piece on her album The Ugly One with the Jewels, Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character [“Bergamot” – with the lowered voice]: (Anderson:) I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guess I did seem a little fishy — a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Atom Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren’t some kind of espionage system. So I’ve done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I’d have to keep setting all this stuff up and they’d listen for a while and they’d say: So uh, what’s this? And I’d pull out something like (Bergamot:) this filter, and say, now this is what I like to think of as the voice of authority. And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say, now why would you want to talk like that? And I’d look around at the SWAT teams, and the undercover agents, and the dogs, and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Super Bowl coverage of the war. And I’d say, take a wild guess.
I keep waiting for news about some upcoming collaboration between Anderson and her husband Lou Reed (file under “The most unlikely pairing ever that makes perfect sense”) but it never happens.