beautiful men sing of their honeys; also, voices speak

I'm really excited about the blog entry I'm about to write, but first I have something I'd really like to share:

they don't make them like these follows, not anymore. what this is is a commercial from soviet estonia encouraging citizens to comply with a legal mandate that they sell their agricultural surplus to the state. beautiful, right? beautiful!

Steven Mithen writes that neanderthals thudded around in a prolonged act of song-speech, a high-pitched inflected vocal line (contour music!) that was both song & speech. the poet Louis Zukofsky famously wrote:

I'll tell you.
About my poetics --

music
∫
speech

An integral
Lower limit speech
Upper limit music

technology allows for speech sounds to be put to musical use in new ways. Steve "Stevie" Reich is of course famous for his grand voice-on-tape compositions, come out & it's gonna rain & later on city life.

but I wanted to post this, a piece called idle chatter by the composer Paul Lansky. Lansky's work is varied, & ambitious. it's had some influence (ooooh) on radiohead (aaaaah). I love his work with recorded speech for its rich textures, ever reconfiguring each other, & for the ways it seems to invigorate the hearing of language by denuding it of semantic content (since you can never understand any of the words) & so bringing attention to the steam-shovel urgencies encoded in our usual speech at the levels of pitch & cadence. it stays weirdly true to the cluttered sound of depots & television: there's a kind of a naturalism to it. & I really enjoy the way it reminds me of playing with sk-1 synthesizers in the 80s -- in a dash to keep pace with the rise of samplers in pop music, casio put out a line of magnificently chintzy sampling keyboards on which, I & every 9-year-old of 1989 quickly learned, one could play mary had a little lamb as a peal of weary-circuited burps. (now I have a blog to satisfy the same impulse.)

something closer to the spirit of Steve Reich's early experiments with recorded speech guides Bob Ostertag in sooner or later, a piece he made on audio tape in the early nineties. here, give it a listen. all of the sounds in the first movement come from a recording of a kid in el salvador burying his father. what happens to that recording reminds me of Bach -- the most exciting part is hearing the whole russian garden of phrases Ostertag is able to extrapolate from the single original material, subtly differing patterns that emerge from & trellis up each other. samenesses bearing difference. what end up getting exposed are subtleties in contour, a tremendously moving topography of the boy's surge, rich in cadence, toward the horizon of Zukofsky's music.

here is a song called flagging by the enigmatic electronic band stock, hausen & walkman. I assume the text clips are just recordings found somewhere. this is what pop music sounds like to grass, sped up many times. mebbe. but it's interesting to hear how even a stock recording of times-table recitation comes to sound sung when other sounds are pulling its ends in the right set of directions.

lastly, here is a piece composed in 1994 by the inspired critic & inspiring composer Kyle Gann. it's called so many little dyings, & the voice is Kenneth Patchen's. Gann has followed a vitally restless ear that seems to tear -- like Monteverdi's did, like Machaut's did, & maybe like Gershwin's, too -- thru every musical form available to it. working with computers enables him to interact with recorded speech in audible-but-tiny intervals, calling to & meeting with equal complexity the minute melodic heaves & eddies of the voice in its saying. when I first heard the piece, I was bowled except by the tone of the lead instrument, that toy piano sound that seems to crinkle up all the ambient space around it. but when I listen now, I realize that there's a certain deadpan about it that helps offset the possibly itch-enducing seriousness of the (nevertheless probably lovely) text. & there's a gravelliness to it, a strained-circuit quality that comes to feel sort of gutbucket.

anyhow, I really hope you're reading & enjoying this, if you are someone. why not email me at hudbahudby@gmail.com with feedback & requests? & thanks to Jon, for writing kindly & getting me going.

also, are you having trouble hearing the songs I'm posting? I guess it can be a little tricky but you should definitely be able to hear, & download, all the mp3s I'm discussing in these posts (& the sundry extras that are poison-donuted thruout the ramblings). I'm looking into alternatives to zshare, but in the meantime, please email me if you can't do what we all want you to do.

also, if you didn't see it, please check out my posting from earlier today, on the chiki chiki dance!

lastly, I wanted to post this, which I remember fizzily from my years as a tender sprout. seeing it now, I kind of have my MIND BLOWN by it. beautiful! my heart is a pinecone. I like that it is about love. I like that it is set in the desert.



I'll blog more soon.