got in mind a progression of music, just a sequence of sounds I wanted to hear.
when I listen to balinese gamelan music, often I'm struck by the similarities it bears to my favorite electronic music, an amberous resonance of tone they seem to share. I played in a gamelan ensemble for a while, but I've really never understood how the amazing timbres get produced. of course there are also the obvious connections thru composers like P Glass & S Reich who were definingly influenced by balinese music & became themselves importantly influential.
this is, I think, the first recording of a gamelan ever made, from 1928. beautiful, right? the recording is wonderful -- I think a lot of people working now try to get a similar sound. the intimacy. everyone calls a gamelan a "percussion orchestra" but that's misleading; it's important to understand that the entire gamelan is one instrument. the recording is entitled curik nagras.
like a lot of the american music influenced by it, gamelan music seems to be about establishing a continuum of resonances, & sounding them in interlocking patterns. there's an interesting notion about sounds' having gender. here's another recording. I'm always impressed by the gamelan's ability to sound unified despite the mandelbrot maniness of its sounds. and there's a way of counting out beats, shadow, emphasis, it reminds me of the way musicians like, well, even that band the craftworks, will sometimes sound every beat & make the question of where accents falls the most compelling part of the music. (this is what, very ooooh centurarily Stravinsky famously does in his sacre du bleutemps, &, in the world of pop music, it's true more or less of nine inch nails' 1994 hit closer, which has aged better than any song of the era & might, mutatis mutandis, have better survived as a forgotten classic.) the rhythmic figures can snake & confuse: try counting them out, see where you get.
the dutch electronic composers Dick Raaijmakers & Henk Badings teamed up in the late 50s to create gamelan (fantasy in orbit). give it a listen here. in addition to the obvious ways some of its shifting rhythmic patterns seem to stare up at indonesia, I've always assumed the piece responded in part to the timbral babel of its titular instrument. I suspect some or all of the sounds in the piece are processed recordings of gamelans.
it's a lot clearer that this piece is made by electronically manipulating a live musical performance. it's called hallelujah!, & it's by the marvelous new york composer Phil Kline. the work of his I knew first was zippo songs, a song cycle ("airs of war & lunacy") in three sections: first a setting of several Rumsfeld quotes (there was an odd little vogue for doing this, does anyone remember?), then several settings of texts engraved by american gis in vietnam in the zippo lighters they were given before being, you know, dropped in the jungle. & then a David Shapiro text. the effect of the whole piece was like having blow-up things in your pants: just devastating, I mean, & a disincentive to having eventually children.
a bizarre thing about the beatles is the horse - in - a - wheelchair lameness of the pun their name is. wow, is that fucking dumb. anyhow, here is a version of one of their many mebbe-best songs by someone called dj natural. (helloooo? dj naaatural?) if you know anything about that, please tell me. in the meantime, I think it's interesting, & that it might fit in pretty well over here. the sun is really just like any other star & nothing's any stranger than that.
(irish o'garlic sausage is something I found at the grocery store recently. surprisingly, it is the most offensive thing I have ever seen. that's just a sidenote.)
now here is a beautiful song by duran duran. I know I know. but listen: this is beautiful, this duran duran song!
& now for finishing, here is a song called nekashim by John Zorn. (anybody know what a nekash is?) it feels like a good last song here, the way it's set up. this is part of his cycle the dreamers, which premiered last winter at st anne's warehouse in bklyn. it's seriously fleshed-out material. a lion whose parts are all from different lions. the very for-real band here features Marc Ribot on guitar, tone as ever, whole rushmores of face value; Cyro Baptista on percussion; Kenny Wollesen on vibes; and a guy called Jamie Salt on keyboards who is a fucking monsoon, just torrents & wonder.
well, if you're somebody, I hope you read my blog. this is fun. more contour! coming soon. I am nothing if not improvements.
& that leaves room for this, which is what magnificent things sound like when they sound like this. turn yr speakrs up. the future's more fun all the time.
the billowing-voice music -- (I realized I shldn't've said melisma, that's a part of it but contour-music seems like a better thing to call it, right? I mean, if you want to keep the wallachian one in there, & I do...) -- well I want to do a lot more about that, & have some grand recordings in mind. but I wanted to put up a few pop songs that have surprising beautiful electronic sounds in them. I feel delighted when boldly synthetic (or heavily electrically manipulated) sounds are used in music not oriented as "electronic". kino, кино, is about the biggest thing in russian rock music. imagine a world where Kurt Cobain had been assassinated by the fbi. I think there's a really great sweetness in their music. it doesn't take a fruit bat. the leader of the group is Viktor Robertovich Tsoj (Виктор Робертович Цой if you're counting), born in leningrad in 1962. you can find information easily on the internet, about them, & there are the usual youtube shrines & didja-knows. it's got the gawkiness of other rock music from warsaw pact nations, a kind of honor-to-be-nominated infatuation with its ability to be rock and roll. there's a great sensitivity to the band; they can be moving in a puppy-in-a-fog sort of way.
but what I really want to play is the song kazhduju noch', which just means every night. here, listen to it. I mean, it isn't a great song. russia o perhaps not so jamaica-mon, comrade? & the lyrics are a cascade of tumbling peaches: знаешь, каждую ночь я вижу во сне море знаешь, каждую ночь я слышу во сне песню знаешь, каждую ночь я вижу во сне берег знаешь, каждую ночь... znaesh'. kazhduju noch' ja vizhu vo snje more znaesh', kazhduju noch' ja slyshu vo snje pjesnju znaesh', kazhduju noch' ja vizhu vo snje bereg znaesh', kazhduju noch'... you know, every night I dream of the sea you know, every night I dream a new song you know, every night I dream of the shore you know, every night...
harmless, yes? vapo-rub! or so it seems. but then, about two minutes in, someone plays a mercury saxophone & the room becomes shimmering digits. what the fuck is that sound?! thank you, world of personal computing. one thing about russia is it produced the best future -- I mean the glass-ghosted future of constructivism, not the future that happened, with all the bootlegged softwear & tenacious militarism -- a future so good we still use it to signify a thrilling feeling of being on the edge.
in the soviet science fiction movie the heavens are calling (небо зовет, if you've got your decoder ring handy), a team of noble cosmonauts declare they're going to, I think mars?, on a particular date in the near-future. a team of privately-financed amyeriken-kepitolizm astronavty announce the same day that they're going to make the same trip but arrive a day sooner. funded by advertising! the soviets beg their comrades-in-all-but-blue-jeans-&-notions-about-the-means-of-production to join with them in a good-of-mankind joint mission, but the greedy gringoviches refuse &, predictably, run themselves promptly by the monocle right into harm's way, leaving the soviets the likely-suicide business of their rescue. brrrrrr! but what's gorgeous is when the cosmonauts (see! their future was so good that there's a separate word for when they go into space, just like aegyptos was so good at death that there's a different word for them when they die! I wonder whether Viktor Pelevin's noticed that?) land their empire-state-shaped spaceship on a sedona-red asteroid. it's beautiful!
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Omar Souleyman is a singer from syria, & here is a recording of his dabke 2001. the keyboard sound is marvelous, & takes attention right away. the guy playing it is called Abo il Riz. a really inventive player & the atari september of his tone does everything to me.
I have elsewhere mentioned the wondrous Czechoslovkian band manželé. I've mentioned I think already that I know nothing at all about them, but here is a song called sedl jsem si do bláta. I'd love a gloss on that. but it's the most beautiful thing in the world -- I hope someone is closely listening to this -- it is the most beautiful thing in the world. & the bursts of electronics, the nynex birdsong that gleaps its way in & out of the song, ma-donna! I love this song.
who is a fucking class act, I'll tell you who, is Kate Bush. here is a song called king of the mountain from aerial, the 2-disc set she released a few years ago. synthetic sounds keep the whole thing together here. her taste in her own work seems to be excellent. I think we do Kate Bush a disservice when we maximize her coolness. because she is cool, but the point is some people feel alienated by all that inflatable furniture. supposedly having children has made her weird? I bet Kate Bush's feelings get hurt all the time. there's a good hungarian band from the early 80s called európa kiadó, which I think means, more or, if not more, less, made in europe. (any one beszelek magyarul out there?) here is their song nincs sok idöd, which means we haven't got much time. I'm including it here mostly because of the careful & lovely arrangement, & especially the electric guitar. beautiful, rich sound. & the keyboard is marvelous. (makes me think of zelda.) I'd like to know a lot more about this band.
I hope some people have been reading the blog so far, & that it's of some interest to people. thanks to everybody who's been encouraging about it. I really do urge you to send me feedback, if you have it, at hudbahudby@gmail.com. good news is that my friend Andrew has agreed to do a guest-blog sometime soon. he's a doe of a guy & has good sound vibrations, & he & I together are a band, called either guns, germs, & steel or polar bears blah blah blah something something I don't remember. I think we have a myspace page.
also, here's one more thing. Roy Zimmerman is a really terrifically clever & seemingly nice guy. he used to have a band called the foremen. it's full of joke which is always a little like being in sewage. but he's done some things I've really liked. & anyhow, I thought this was worth watching.
blog blog. bloglodyte. bloglownight. far off suddenly. back to shore now.
I got to thinking of music in which voices flow & wander. melisma. I wondered whether anything seems to unite otherwise various musics of which this is characteristic.
it's some of the earlier polyphonic we have from evropa, but Johannes Ockegham has always sounded to me impossibly futuristic -- 80s-font future, zappy-noise future, an unnatural horizon seen from a talking car. unbelievably complicated gorgeous almost incapacitating music. a favorite is the kyrie from his requiem, the first or second polyphonic one ever written. here, give it a listen.
for a contrast I find immediately appealing, listen here to a polychronion composed in wallachia in the early xviiith century. it's composed by a guy called Chrysaphios the Younger in honor of bishop Anthim the Iberian, an ethnic georgian (they call him ანთიმოზ ივერიელი, Antimoz Iverieli, id est, Anthim the Iberian, wakka wakka) polymath publisher & church leader, best remembered now when romania & georgia face off annually at rugby, in his honor. the echos this is sung in coincides surprisingly with a western major scale more than once. & now here's in the gorge where the dog-rose blooms, a setting by the russischer komponist Vladimir Martynov of a text by the indispensable poet Velimir Xlebnikov. this is a group of singing dervishes in pakistan. what this wildly various music seems to have in common is a central attention to contour, to the shape of the line the melody cuts thru air. but is that connection interesting? I don't know.
now picture this: a pair of corny guys who make music in new delhi & think computers are the new sharkskin. I like the midival punditz. they are not halfwayers. one does not want to like this song because it is bad. but punchy strings perhaps activate something. we go deep reptile. all I know is: world-beat. thank you for the punchy strings. I like to live the punchy strings. (in musicophilia -- I always enjoy the mishearing music ophelia -- Oliver Sacks discusses auditory hallucinations, which are, apparently, common. a lot of people hear punchy strings & garbagy patriotic music & can't stop. Armando hears something that sounds like the menu music on the dvd of television's john adams.)
I got to thinking about music made by machines. different approaches. wonderful venus sounds.
born in Tehran in 1940, Alireza Mashayekhi is nobody's sweetheart. I mean I imagine they don't baby him, somehow. he comes at music from a powerfully personal direction, & it's hard to put his work into a context (by which I really mean you wouldn't know what aisle at Korvette's to scour). out of place in his own home town &c. but he has expressed (& everywhere in his work is audible) a deep feeling for persian classical music, & he doesn't seem out of place in the context of xxth-century classical muic (he studied under Jelinek, not J, but H). here is a recording of his Chahargah #1, a partly aleatoric composition for computers based, among other things, on traditional persian modes. eh? eh? he's in there. Mashayekhi describes his work this way: "I believe that we can discover truth through multilogical structures of artistic thought, this being the only way that we can encompass the contradictions that 'truth' carries in itself. I argue that by abandoning sequential problem-solving that has indisputably dominated 'logic,' especially since Newton,' we are able to pursue simultaneously a number of X's. I therefore call my own way of structuring music the 'quest for meta X.'" besides being a marvelous unmade robot movie of the 50s, quest for meta x gives me thought of work like Mallarmé's, Twombly's, maybe even Robert Irwin's -- work that privileges a sense of unity thru overlay, & of the redundancy of category. (or categorization.) & I think that the modesty of his music (his theoretical writing being, by contrast, anything but modest) offers a smartly other way of doing things than, say, Zukofsky's -- there's no symmetry at the crux of Mashayekhi's music, no absoluteness of intention or orientation, but a well-watered meander thru certain unforeclosing possibilities of sound.
anyhow, tell me what you think!
a completely other way in is Conlon Nancarrow's. born in texarkana in 1912, Nancarrow became one of the century's more celebrated composers -- enough so that there's no real sense in my saying much of him here. (14-year-olds the world over have been laboring hard to make information & school sucks available to you.) what interests me most about the comparison, tho, betwen AM & CN, is the way in which AM encodes random chance into what he's asking of the machines, while CN's turn to the cybertronic owes more to the flat inability of any human being alive to follow thru on the almost impossible rhythmic subtlety of his richly-ordered piano music. here is his study for player piano #24, a bottomless-sounding piece of haywire that is in fact a tonal, three-part canon.
lastly, for nowski, here is a wonderful piece of music by the wonderful czechoslovakian band manželé. manželé means something like the spouses. the title of the song is radostná událost se stala / mnoha radist stala, which means something like there was a happy occasion / a lot of happiness remained. (anyone know czech?) it was recorded in 1983 in somebody's house in praha, it is the best record in the universe, & that is absolutely all I know about it.
also, please to enjoy soviet advertising? wonderful looxoories (light switch, magnet tape) can be yours:
I'm making this blog as a way of sharing recordings with friends, mostly of music & poetry. I really hope people will read it, & that they'll tell other people too, if they like it. there's no particular principle guiding the choice of songs; it's all just stuff I like, that I think other people might enjoy. I would love to know what you think!, & can be reached at hudbahudby@gmail.com.
also, it is very important to buy everything. (by this, I mean to say that all of the recordings on this blog are intended for review purposes only. please buy the cds.) if you own the rights to anything posted here & want it taken down, please email me & I'll be absolutely certain to. I'm going to use zSHARE to post the files; follow the link to the zSHARE page, select "download this file", & do what it says.
ok!
the first song (here) is morse, by som imaginario. som imaginario is por-thu-gaize for imaginary sound. I don't know about that but. they started as Milton Nascimento's backing band & are secretly the greatest. I am going to start a band in the 1960's & the band will be called misty voyage. get it?
I was deeply sad this past février to learn the death of Egor Ljetov (Yegor Letov, say the hooded wikis with their torches), leader of the Siberian punk-rock band Grazhdanskaja Oborona (that's Гражданская Оборона in cyrillic, Civil Defense in translation; the grazh of grazhdanskaja is related to the familiar -grad (-град) suffix in russki place names, which is cognate with, wait for it!, ingles yard). I first heard them as "Egor I Opizdenevshie," which means something like Egor & The Cunteds, thepseudonym under which they made their best record, pryg-skok (which is something diminutive homines sovetici chant as they leap from foot to foot). after some bureaucratic to-&-fro the band's name was stamped-over in the original soviet pressing. he played a lot with a notorious roknrolnitsa named Yanka, (that's short for Yanka Djagileva), of whose stuff the singer Alina Simone has just put out a pretty decent cover record (here, see what you think).
& but here is a recording of Egor all alone in (I think) the 80s, singing a song called lobotomija (which, wld you guess?, means lobotomy).
the lyrics go:
ветер в поле закружил, лоботомия! vjeter v pole zakruzhil, lobotomija! a wind swirling in the field, lobotomy! поздний дождик напугал, лоботомия! pozdnij dozhdik napugal, lobotomija! a late little drizzle gave us a scare, lobotomy! зацвела в саду сирень, лоботомия! zatsvjela v sadu siren', lobotomija! the lilac blossoming in the garden, lobotomy!
вот такая вот хуйня, лоботмия! vot takaja vot khujnja, lobotomija! that's how it is, totally fucked, lobotomy!
Letov was marked by a kind of dug-in perverseness, a deep instinct for the unpalatable. born in a state morally decrepit, he based his work on what Uncle Slavoj (Žžžžžžž) has called (in someone else) the "notion of an authentic 'living in truth' [that] involves no metaphyics of truth or authenticity: it simply designates the act of suspending one's participation in the game, breaking of the vicious cycle of 'objective guilt'." he acted crazy. he got across.
& the main thing, to me at least, is you can hear him a mile away, that voice constantly amazed to hear itself breaking. one song goes kgb rock! rock kgb! kgb rock! rock kgb! there's a kinship too with the oberiu, a transense fixed in the space between atoms. a forceful way of seeing art & hooligansim as a same act. only the lights change. so a deep commitment. the journalist Mark Ames has written approvingly that "[w]hile proto-punker Richard Hell confessed that he was afraid to wear his famous 'Please Kill Me' t-shirt on the streets of mid-1970s New York, Letov and his followers were charging riot cops in a police state for the sheer life-affirming joy of it." we get the day, & what happens in it. I think the song is just beautiful. it takes everyone seriously, & hey that's funny.
here's a recording of him with Egor I Opizdenevshie covering the song krasnyj smjekh (that's красный смех, which means a red laughter), originally by the siberian punk-rock group instruktsii po vyzhivaniu (инструкции по выживанию, instructions for survival). he recorded at least three or four versions of it. the chorus goes:
металический не плачет дом хотя в нем вешаются столко лет непобедимо сострадает мне и продолжает падать черный снег далше! живите дальше! рожайте больше! красный смех гуляет по стране
metalichesikj ne plachet dom khotja v njom veshajutsja stol'ko let nepobedimo sostradaet mnje i poroldzhaet padat' chornyj snjeg dal'she! zhivite dal'she! rozhajte bol'she! krasnyj smjekh guljajet po strane
the house of metal does not cry tho so many years hang within it undefeated, it shares my suffering and the black snow continues to fall onward! live on! bear more! a red laughter is walking across the country on & unrelated, Ezra Sims is great, don't you think? if you don't I hope it's just that you don't yet, & so here is the 4th movement of his 3rd string quartet. isn't it beautiful? Izzy himself said of it, "It's a commonplace to describe sections of a piece as having written themselves when work was going at its best. But the whole of the quartet seemed something granted me rather than something I'd invented or uncovered. My role seemed essentially that of amanuenis."
& isn't that interesting, & strange, & a pleasure? the way things come in, the way everything infiltrates us, thru attention, & because of our being curious? & that we can TRANSCRIBE it? Sims was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1928. ok, & now it's time for the big exciting MYSTERY SONG. I'll be including one in every glob of blog I log. here's the deal: see if you can identifiy it, but don't cheat. I'm working hard here, shaking a tree from the top. if you can get what it is, you impress me & win a mix cd, which I will mail you. just email me at hudbahudby@gmail.com.
ok. I hope you enjoy this? or something. more posts are to follow.
got in mind a progression of music, just a sequence of sounds I wanted to hear.
when I listen to balinese gamelan music, often I'm struck by the similarities it bears to my favorite electronic music, an amberous resonance of tone they seem to share. I played in a gamelan ensemble for a while, but I've really never understood how the amazing timbres get produced. of course there are also the obvious connections thru composers like P Glass & S Reich who were definingly influenced by balinese music & became themselves importantly influential.
this is, I think, the first recording of a gamelan ever made, from 1928. beautiful, right? the recording is wonderful -- I think a lot of people working now try to get a similar sound. the intimacy. everyone calls a gamelan a "percussion orchestra" but that's misleading; it's important to understand that the entire gamelan is one instrument. the recording is entitled curik nagras.
& sounding them in interlocking patterns. there's an interesting notion about sounds' having gender. here's another recording. I'm always impressed by the gamelan's ability to sound unified despite the mandelbrot maniness of its sounds. and there's a way of counting out beats, shadow, emphasis, it reminds me of the way musicians like, well, even that band the craftworks, will sometimes sound every beat & make the question of where accents falls the most compelling part of the music. (this is what, very ooooh centurarily Stravinsky famously does in his sacre du bleutemps, &, in the world of pop music, it's true more or less of nine inch nails' 1994 hit closer, which has aged better than any song of the era & might, mutatis mutandis, have better survived as a forgotten classic.) the rhythmic figures can snake & confuse: try counting them out, see where you get.
the dutch electronic composers Dick Raaijmakers & Henk Badings teamed up in the late 50s to create gamelan (fantasy in orbit). give it a listen here. in addition to the obvious ways some of its shifting rhythmic patterns seem to stare up at indonesia, I've always assumed the piece responded in part to the timbral babel of its titular instrument. I suspect some or all of the sounds in the piece are processed recordings of gamelans.
it's a lot clearer that this piece is made by electronically manipulating a live musical performance. it's called hallelujah!, & it's by the marvelous new york composer Phil Kline. the work of his I knew first was zippo songs, a song cycle ("airs of war & lunacy") in three sections: first a setting of several Rumsfeld quotes (there was an odd little vogue for doing this, does anyone remember?), then several settings of texts engraved by american gis in vietnam in the zippo lighters they were given before being, you know, dropped in the jungle. & then a David Shapiro text. the effect of the whole piece was like having blow-up things in your pants: just devastating, I mean, & a disincentive to having eventually children.
a bizarre thing about the beatles is the horse - in - a - wheelchair lameness of the pun their name is. wow, is that fucking dumb. anyhow, here is a version of one of their many mebbe-best songs by someone called dj natural. (helloooo? dj naaatural?) if you know anything about that, please tell me. in the meantime, I think it's interesting, & that it might fit in pretty well over here. the sun is really just like any other star & nothing's any stranger than that.
now here is a beautiful song by duran duran. I know I know. but listen: this is beautiful, this duran duran song!
