carmen carminis

back to blogging! with apologyes for his haeiatus.

2009-01-21T12:45:00.001-05:00

one thing I like about Obama

2008-12-09T16:14:00.006-05:00

Herbstnebel wallen bläulich überm See;
Vom Reif bezogen stehen alle Gräser;
Man meint', ein Künstler habe Staub vom Jade
Über die feinen Blüten ausgestreut.

Der süße Duft der Blumen ist verflogen;
Ein kalter Wind beugt ihre Stängel nieder.
Bald werden die verwelkten, goldnen Blätter
Der Lotosblüten auf dem Wasser zieh'n.

Mein Herz ist müde. Meine kleine Lampe
Erlosch mit Knistern;
Es gemahnt mich an den Schlaf.
Ich komm' zu dir, traute Ruhestätte!
Ja, gib mir Ruh', ich hab Erquickung not!

Ich weine viel in meinen Einsamkeiten.
Der Herbst in meinem Herzen währt zu lange.
Sonne der Liebe, willst du nie mehr scheinen,
Um meine bittern Tränen mild aufzutrocknen?

Autumn mists drift, blue-tinged cross the lake...
Coated with frost, all the grass stands stiff;
One would think an artist had sprinkled jade dust
Over the delicate blossoms.

The sweeet scent of the flowers has vanished.
A cold wind bends their stems;
Soon the faded golden petals
Of the lotus will float past on the water.

My heart is weary. With a crackling sound my little lamp
Has gone out; it reminds me of sleep!...
I am coming to you, dear place of rest,
Yes, give me rest, I am in need of comfort.

I often weep in my lonely days...
The autumn in my heart has lasted too long.
Sun of love, will you never hine again
To gently dry away my bitter tears?

I know: jesus. but it's beautiful, right? I have a strong & distinct memory that I can't connect to any particular time or place of being somewhere & having a kind of a filthy old man rant to me pationately about Mahler. I remember especially him saying & this is Alma, right, & he just writes every curve of her body & he was sort of foaming, scaring me a little. I sort of want this to've happened almost maybe too much to be trusted on the memory. but I think it's real. one thing that make life better all the time is kooks. let's hear it for kooks.

& let's hear it for der einsame im herbst from Mahler's lied von der erde.

I have to admit that the auto bailout seems better than I thought. I am wrong about everything & just taking more baths from now on, ok?

big bad three

2008-12-07T01:43:00.006-05:00

powerful gasoline

2008-12-03T02:12:00.010-05:00

I'm sorry it's been so long since I last posted to the blog; I have been incredibly busy doing fantastically important things.

anyhow, this'll be a short post, but I've got some good stuff to share & largely also wanted to just check in -- a meatier heap is in the works. for now, some points of hygiene:

1) well, Odetta died today. I feel sad about that. one voice.
2) did you hear about Deborah Lawrence? & then my question is: is the art the event or the object?
3) sorry it's been so long since I've posted. mystifyingly, human beings continue to organize themselves into groups defined by kinship. & so I have been eating cousins' turkeys, or something. but I have a great post coming in the next day or two, a survey of a few of the really excellent things coming out on records right now. also some stinkers that sent me on fun tangents. it's going to include some out-of-print Anthony Braxton, the smiths in ukrainian (major improvement, from my perspective), the story of the time I saw 96-year-old Claire Barry sing makin' woopie vegas-style to a puddle of terror-struck midtowneres & some great stuff from new york's yiddish radio of the 40s.

in the meantime, here's a fanfuckingtastic song by the adventure, which is the nom de bleep of a guy called Benny Boeldt who's part of wham city, a baltimore-based arts collective whose most famous member is Dan Deacon. (hmmnnn.... baltimore, балтийское море... mere coincidence?). he gets a really grainy, lovely sound. (it's not made with 8-bit synthesizers, but you can hear how someone might make the mistake.) he gets a lot across in a really lean way. there are some lessons from Bach. & it's just fun. anyhow, here:

click here to download travel kid by the adventure.

the other day I saw the movie slumdog millionaire. I didn't love it, but the soundtrack is by A.R. Rahman, whom you should definitely know if you don't. one song that really got my ear was this one, which is called o... saya. I don't know what that means. it's a great song, maybe sort of, I don't know, gaudy?, but also really striking & interesting & essentially well-done. check it out.

click here to download o... saya by A.R. Rahman & M.I.A.

& now here is something very exquisite & weird & magnificent, for if you missed out on the splendor that was bratislava in 1966.

send Odetta some love

2008-11-21T04:27:00.020-05:00

ok, there's a lot it's important to say, but first, take a look at this: this is fucking crazy. look at what Sarah Palin agreed to stand in front of when she gave this interview. wow.

now, by request (thanks, Rachael), a post about Odetta, who, very sad to say, is reported ill. days ago she was in kidney failure, and she's already proving the doctors wrong. & plastered across the wall in her hospital room is, guess what?, a great big smiling BARACK OBAMA! Odetta is keeping herself alive right now, against failure of body, just to sing at Obama's inauguration; than her mature swan of a voice none is better suited to that magnificent event. and so for now, & for 58 days, Odetta is in a hospital room in Manhattan, holding to life by an incredible exertion of will. please send some humanity Odetta's way. she would do, has done, the same for you.

one song Odetta sings just resplendently is deep river, an old spiritual. (other notable appearances include a guest spot in one of the movies of show boat.) Odetta sings it with a conviction so rich it feels innately communal. & her pacing, her tempo are perfect! that voice. the song becomes utterly hers: will you ever want to hear a different recording of it? you won't -- she takes it all the way.

click here to download deep river by Odetta.

a song that shows a more aggressive style Odetta can play is jack o' diamonds. I don't know anyone who sings this song the way Odetta does. listen to how good her left hand is (that's such a dead-on guitar line that it feels familiar, even tho I've never heard one quite like it). her voice is as vast and subtle as ever, & its small shifts in color can be greatly moving. she always finds room to breathe, whatever the song she's singing. hear this & you'll understand: Odetta is the kind of woman who can decide to stay alive for Obama's inauguration. whose last act should be to sing at Obama's inauguration.

click here to download jack o'diamonds by Odetta.

I do not think Odetta is at her best with a jazz band. but what's interesting is that when she's with a band she has insights into that music as rare as all her musical insights; and it's a treat to hear her singing in any new light. so the song is a pleasure. the trumpet player here is a guy called Buck Clayton, an old member of Basie's band, and a really completely fucking fascinating side story is that Buck Clayton lived in shanghai in the 30s, where he befriended a qin player named Lí Jǐnhuī (that's 黎錦輝 if you can; I can't). they went on collaboratively to invent shídàiqǔ, a unique style of song influenced by jazz and by chinese musical traditions that flowered in china from then until the end of the war (ish). Lí was killed in the cultural revolution in 1967, his work having been labeled 黃色音樂, a complicated classification sometimes translated as yellow music & involving charges of cultural degeneracy. Buck Clayton, on the other hand, recorded this with Odetta in 1962 & later became a professor at CUNY. it's the grass the suffers. but here, give it a listen.

click here to download weeping willow blues by Odetta with Buck Clayton playing the trumpet.

and one more exciting & beautiful song Odetta sings is chilly winds. she's just positively arctic here, a fucking blast. her voice reminds me of the bridge over the neva in november. it has force. this, like deep river, is from her 1957 record at the gate of horn; for the most part a gorgeous set put down with the tasteful bass player Bill Lee (Spike's papa), who turned 80 this summer. (Odetta's a little younger -- she was born the last day of 1930.)

I imagine Bill Lee & Odetta must be burning with wonder. when I lived in russia I met a few people who'd been kids during the october revolution, & they were just overwhelming to talk to, the epochs they'd survived. in Odetta's life or Bill Lee's the event seems operatic in magnitude. Obama is a big fucking deal!, & there's no voice that contains fiercer multitudes than Odetta's. for having kept our shit together we deserve to hear Odetta at the inauguration. she was 23 during brown v board of ed. the schoolkids I worked with in petersburg had never heard of leningrad. Odetta is the real america. don't take my word for it:

click here to download chilly winds by Odetta.

& then please let's each write her a card to let her know that this immense expenditure of will she's undertaking -- which must involve great suffering, for her -- is not wasted. you can & should send Odetta some loving encouragement at:

Ms. Odetta Gordon
room # 719, 7th floor intensive care unit
lenox hill hospital
100 east 77th street
new york, ny 10021

as terrifically saddening as the news is, I'm glad it at least came when I needed some reminding of how thrilled & astonished I am that the us has elected its first black president and disrupted the most villainous course taken in its whole villainous history in the same act. my complete revulsion at mccain & his winking homunculus of a running mate could have driven me to rabid support for any democratic candidate, but it's clear that Obama really is a special step forward. his articulateness, his tangibility. he makes it look so good we forget that it sort of looked good before. (it reminds me of how dated once-innovative episodes of seinfeld look when I see them in syndication. cool-at-the-time Bill Clinton had to say that he'd smoked but not inhaled, which was asinine but exculpated him; curb-your-enthusiasm president Obama said, "I inhaled -- that was the whole point.") he seems completely sincere, & that's astonishing, even unheimlich in an uhmerican politician.

still, there are elements of his politics I detest. he has promised to use military force in pakistan unilaterally, has made statements that suggest he's beholden to the israel lobby (tho he's also sort of said no no not like that about it), and has of late been palling around with (actual) terrorists like Zbigniew Brzenzinski & Richard Holbrooke. in this interesting article the consummately reasonable Robert Parry notes that "[after] a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington’s Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in.'" these are swift currents we're asked to swim.

so, anyway, but my point is, it's nice to be reminded that something special is happening, despite a spreading disillusionment. it's deeply moving that Odetta is refusing to die till she can sing him in. we're only just beginning to see glimpses of Obama's permanent place in our psyche, but we all know sweetly together we're living thru Something. (five years ago no one had heard of him!) his personal courage, his power as a social force & a social example, the way he won by not condescending to us & by not french-kissing, and his eloquent impossibility can be an inspiration as strong as manifest destiny, only better, because manifest destiny was evil. this is our holiday year. it makes sense to feel a somber kind of joy.

I made you something

2008-11-18T04:36:00.004-05:00

just finally got my music software up & running again (thanks, Greg!) & immediately made this song. it's just a silly thing, but I hope you'll have fun hearing it.

click here to download principles of management by me.

ψέμα

2008-11-14T18:11:00.021-05:00

I first heard the song liar, liar, by the non-existant-except-for-the-song-liar,-liar band the castaways, when I was about 8. I had bought a record (I am so old that I had bought it new on vinyl) called frat rock, volume 3. I'd never heard the word frat but it sounded brutal to me, & liar, liar struck me as immensely powerful caveman music. & the band was called the castaways, so I pictured them as a bunch of high-foreheaded loinclothed lunatics waving rocks at each other on a little green island somwhere. (in an intriguing turn, the castaways were the only band of whom there was no photograph on the album sleeve.) that angry brunhilda & her crazy husky castaway voice! the song remains an absolute favorite. (I've since learned it's best known now for being played in the movie good morning vietgivemeafuckingbreak & for being on nuggets.)

the record also had some over-caffeinated commentary from someone named Gene Sculatti:

What we have here: a bone fide land 'o lakes frat band, formed for the sole purpose of playing campus beer busts. As one shots go, the Casts' is a riffin' wonder, and oh so '65.

now, Gene, nothing personal (Gene, Gene, I love you Gene), but reading that when I was 8 I understood about as much as a dog would. I'd never heard the words bona fide, & they sounded vaguely consonant with my caveman idea. I did not know what beer busts were, but they sounded like scoundrels would have them. as one shots go seemed to have two verbs. & so on.

I now of course realize that the upshot of Gene's comments is that this is a great song to listen to at parties, by a band from minnesota. (goooooooo Franken, let's re that count, fellows!) but it's a dark, brutal, beautiful song. fantastically well-produced: the sounds work together perfectly, the band sounds like they're precisely somewhere. they sing like they can't say what they want. that fantastic guitar sound! something else that's true of liar, liar is that it is, to borrow an adjective from health class, real gateway music: so rich, lively, & pleasing that it drives me to want to hear all kinds of other music -- powerful organ sounds, songs that describe blunt & childlike emotions, duets, dark songs, thick songs, music that involves a lot of repetition, music where someone screams. one of my metropsalmoi (μήτρόψαλμοι, is that right?). music is a wonderful gift of childhood!

click here to download liar, liar by the castaways.

then, really very recently, a spray of finitudes clouded the glass of my wonder: I saw this clip of the movie it's a bikini world, wherein I learned that the castaways look like a breakaway from the hitler youth: tidy youths all, & blond. my brunhilda is a minnesota farmboy's grimacing falsetto! if the song were capable of being ruined, this would do it for me:

I don't know much about the dutch group the opposites, but they have a pretty terrific song called ik ben dom, lomp en famous (which means I'm dumb, nasty, & famous). at least I think it's terrific. does anyone speak dutch? still it's an exciting song & they are fucking ridiculous: double delight. this song will make you want to become a greezy evropean. (& yes, that's a very cognate lomp, in the song title. here's a hint: dutch marXists talk about the lompenproletariaat. absolutely.)

click here to download ik ben dom, lomp en famous by the opposites.

& now, to close on a really depressing note, here is what the castaways are like now, still playing this same fucking song. if there's one thing we can learn from watching this, it is always do something different. for real. but I mean, really, put the kids to bed first. this is just about the most depressing thing I have ever seen, ever.

wow. I mean, the guy actually says senior moment. for something a lot more vernal, take a listen to this fun song by the zargozan rapper Rapsusklei. his accent is dense brush, & I have no idea what this song is about either, but I love the fervor of it, the sense I get from his delivery that he counts it a privilege to make music. this one won't turn you inside-out, but I bet it is the perfect thing if you are CLEANING THE BATHROOM. I like the way he says como tanta. I like the way he says mushiqa. I like to imagine him coming to new york city & getting dorky over how tall the buildings are. maybe he is really street. maybe he is rapping about his grampa's fishing boat. surely someone can understand this & enlighten, por favor? I guess I like to imagine that he is rapping about how good he is at spinning sumptuous fabrics. not that I expect to be right.

anyhow, click here to download the untitled rap by Rapsusklei from his decimoctavo tape.

the major chuvash russian poet Gennadij Ajgi (or Gennady Aigi, or Aygi, or, because of his connection to gallia, Aigui -- Геннадий Айги in all cases is the original) was born in 1934 in chuvashia & needs no introduction from me. he died two or three years ago, leaving a life's worth of verse not much more easily comparable to anyone else's than one death is comparable to another. here's an example, with my best shove at a translation:

теперь

друг мой
о мама-ребенок
младенца лицо отдаляется
силу иметь
чтоб приближаться сияюще-равным
к обликам-крyгам
любимых-и-любящих
(много
отдельно
Одно)

& now

my friend
you motherchild
the baby's face grows distant
have strength
to draw near shining by even
to (images are to circles)
loving/loved
  a lot
  is separately
  one

Aigi's son Aleksej (Alexey?) is an interesting musician who participates in a lot of different projects. one of these is with Pierre Bastien (do you know who that is? I don't know who that is), & their musique pour la relaxation is interesting & lovely. I love the way figures spin in & out. I love the weird fish saxophone sound. this is intriguing music. I don't know how relaxing it is.

click here to hear &/or download musique pour la relaxation by Aleksej Ajgi & Pierre Bastein.

& that really makes me want to hear Jazmine Sullivan's song lions, tigers, & bears. beside the distinction of having the dumbest lyrics of any song ever written, it's great. it reminds me of ben-hur (the Charlton Heston one). her singing is bombastic & the strings are played with no conviction. but sing she can, & there are strange & surprising moments thruout the song. the line is lumpy with an added chord that doesn't make sense, the intruments are arranged kind of oddly. but there's one chord change (the one that happens in the first line of the song right as she gets to the word bears) that gets me listening, & enjoying all the funky cereal prizes of strange chord & inane lyric ("why do we love love when love seems to hate us?"). also, the use of the word affair can't help reminding me of my old jewish relatives from the wastes of queens. it w as a lovely affair. what an odd word. (in rusland I taught anglisch from a textbook called affairs.)

click here to download lions, tigers, & bears by Jazmine Sullivan.

"you know, it pisses me off a little that this supreme court is going to outlive me
a couple of young italian fellows & a brother on the court now, too
but I defy you anywhere in the world to find two italians as tight-assed as the two italians we've got
& as for the brother... well pluto's not a planet anymore, either"

I fucking love a few words in defense of our country by Randy Newman. if a tinge of disney has worked its way into his sound, he's still acerb, transgressive, tough, sincere, funny. thru the election (aka "that foul & half-remembered dream of being poked at for 23 months") head after head acknowledged the recent End of America (EOA) only by talking about our inevitable re-ascent to dominance. & (maybe it's no coincidene he, unlike anyone qualified to be president, does not pal around with religion) Randy Newman has a far healthier attitude toward our prospects. this song is just what I've been wishing someone would sing in front of me for a long time now.

click here to download a few words in defense of our country by Randy Newman.

(ps, have you heard Q-tip's new record? it's a blast, just like they're saying. here's a song; give it a listen.)

emavungwini

2008-11-13T04:17:00.005-05:00

there's too much sadness to go around in Miriam Makeba dying. I'm sure people are hearing her stuff everywhere. my most real favorite of her songs I possess only in a vinyl form I don't know how to squeeeeze into the computer, but her version of mbube (the song will prove familiar if the title doesn't) is a close second. in her youth she sang with a lycanthrope's fervor. the hour of what we are melting into. great stuff. anyhow, listen to this in case you don't believe me. working on a bigger post for sometime spoon.

click here to download mbube by Miriam Makeba.

something interesting I noticed while cleaning the bathroom

2008-11-09T03:01:00.007-05:00

is that (stay with me here) on bbc world radio, when they're playing original recordings of people speaking languages that grew around islam -- when they're playing an afghan villager, say, declaring that his life will be no better under forty-four than fourty-three (which is what, sad to say, I was actually hearing) -- they translate (they do that thing, remember, where they play the original recording of someone speaking, say, pashto, & then louder over it a translator gives the english), what I'm trying to tell you is, they translate the word inshallah whole-parcel into english, without changing it. no god willing. no in the name of allah.. inshallah is bbc english, presumably meaning, well, if french has les blue-jeans, I mean, I think it means, duh, inshallah, but my point is, can you imagine if cnn dubbed in Karzai saying inshallah the meetings will be productive? we'd never have a presidential debate again!

(gomoseksualist is prim russian for gay person.)

anyhow, the original thing I wanted to blog about was happier: the bbc world service also covered the story that working people the world over are "rejoicing" (this is a word british people use to describe fun had by foreigners) about Obama. get a load of this:

Last summer a poll for the BBC World Service, conducted in 22 countries, indicated that people preferred Barack Obama to John McCain by four to one. Almost half said that if Senator Obama were elected, it would change their view of the United States completely.

here, read it for yourself.

it's not that I feel any particular attachment to uhmerican "prestige". I just think they're right asking we stop taking their lunch money.

for a real real treat, you should listen to the song rings by the band nomo. they sound like they could be a guy with a laptop. it is also sort of potato nostalgia music of some kind for old people like me who were young people, once, in the 1990s; music sounded sort of like this, then.

click here to download rings by nomo.

please note that I have stopped using zshare, because apparently it flashes pictures of ladies' butts at you when you use it for wholly un-butt-related things, which thing I swear to you, like the victims of the person swap video in my last post, had absolutely failed to observe. savefile is more polite.

& that reminds me -- I put up a much bigger post yesterday (which I may have, um, emailed you about?), with good music & fun activities, so please check that out, too. & hey, if you do actually want periodic emails to let you know when there's fun stuff on the blog, or if you have any feedback or requests, do please let me know at hudbahudby@gmail.com.

вдячнiсть.

so glad I was wrong!

2008-11-07T18:54:00.023-05:00

well, that's really something isn't it? even tho I'm already disappointed by the decisions Obama's been making -- his appointment of my thoid-cousin Rahm, for example -- I confess to open-eyed, ankle-pantsed amazement that uhmerica was not too racist to vote for the candidate who openly embraced sanity but was black. I'm glad I was wrong for a lot of reasons. & I confess to tearing up when Obama said at today's press conference that "a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me." I think on tuesday we had the feeling that all of us had been holding our breath. while the press (who, remember this?, are supposed to be there to help, tho, then again, nobody wants to just sleep on a mattress stuffed with money) bombarded us with the suggestion that we secretly wouldn't vote Obama, americans passed each other on the street & believed that we would. & while celebrating the fact that the gargantuan disparity in capability between two candidates -- who, now as ever, offered little doctrinal difference between them -- managed to overcome a racism that much of conventional wisdom regarded as insuperable seems, perhaps, to be setting the bar a bit low, here we are. the guy's name is Barack Obama. he speaks in sentences & his is probably the last chance history has the stamina to offer of saving this tottering state. so anyhow, is it too headbandy to post some songs that Obama's election makes me want to hear? hope not.

one song it's interesting to lsiten to now is the bourgeois blues, by Leadbelly. maybe now problematically, he talks about race & about class in an entangled way. one verse says, "some white folks in washington / they know just how / throw a colored man a nickel / just to see him bow," but another says, "this is the home of the brave, / land of the free, / I don't wanna be mistreated by / no bourgeoisie." it's a great song! I bet Leadbelly would cry if he knew what happened on tuesday.

click here to hear &/or download the bourgeois blues by Leadbelly.

there are some other versions of the song worth a listen, too. one that's fun (a little overdone, especially by the fun-tho singer) is the blue rags'. a particular favorite of mine is Taj Mahal's. you may be like me in the sense that you may think Taj Mahal made great records in the seventies & then suffered some kind of like brain thing or something & got sucky. but even if you are like me in that respect, listen to his version of this song if you are also like me in the sense that you enjoy terrific things.

click here to hear &/or download the blue rags' version of bourgeois blues.
then, click here (especially) to hear &/or download Taj Mahal's version.

because I appreciate so much about his being elected despite having long found his politics pretty uninspiring, Obama's victory feels more to me like a beautiful mass event than a political triumph (tho given the reprehensible backwardness, cynicism, & thick-tufted knuckle-hair of mccain & his people, it surely does represent an imperative moment for our political hygiene). it's a fantastic relief, & it's also a great opportunity to feel serious about something. a black president! I'm so solicitous now, already, for his safety. there's something gloomy about it. I'm reminded of all the history that's still happened & I'm saddened. I wish Fred Hampton & Frederick Douglass & Gus Hall & Paul Robeson could know. I doubt any of them would have believed it was possible.

anyhow, the way I feel about it puts me in mind of William Basinski, in particular of his disintegration loops project. they're statements of, to use a word I seem to be blog-flogging lately, real purity. if you think of Bach on an x & y axis, this is similar material on an x & z. (Bach's ideas are often really ripe for applying to experiments with color in music, a point made resoundingly by Webern's very exceptionally gorgeous arrangement for orchestra of fugue 2 from the musical offering.) instead of playing his theme in different harmonic variants, as Bach would -- sounding it different registers, in different keys, in variations juxtaposed on variations -- Basinski plays the theme thru an echo tunnel of ever-different shape, revealing different parts of the sound, different kinds of rhythms & resonances that emerge. & because that is fascinating, & because the theme he explores is so lovely, it's a really terrific piece of music in my opinion.

click here to download disintegration loops iii : dlp iv.

but it's important also to say that one of the strongest feelings I have about Obama is of being totally exhilerated -- like, wowza. the news goes long. the sometimes exhilerating british band the fuck buttons make intricate, forceful muzyk. exciting combinations. richly coarse textures. & this song is called okay, let's talk about magic, which is a delight. this music feels just as strikingly odd in what about it is conventional & what unusual as president-elect O-o-o-o-ooobama. & like Obama, it's easy to be around.

click here to download okay, let's talk about magic by the fuck buttons.

the cinematic orchestra are a terrific band from, I think, scotland?, who make full-sails music that's subtle & beautiful. it's not my most very favorite of their songs, but breathe is about the right speed for me, today, & it features the irreplaceable Fontella Bass, singing as sensitively as ever. she, like Tim Moore & Al Sharpton, has been obviously underrated because of racism.

please click here to download breathe by the cinematic orchestra.

& now there's a new threat against Obama:

don't let rove see it. I've posted this before, but it's the most beautiful thing in the world so I'm putting it up again?

this is also pretty good. it's all about how fucking terrific lemons are when you're skiing, because other cultures are by definition difficult for us to understand?

(they put the word power in red. so we know it's got tv-war-logo music under it. dun dun dun dummmm.)

most intimate aspects by monstrous

2008-11-01T20:10:00.011-04:00

what fun, I, thought to hear this sequence of songs:

first, the scherzo from Lou Harrison's suite rhymes with silver. Lou Harrison is just the greatest & rhymes with silver (Silver was his middle name) is a dance piece commissioned near the end of his life. just everest, I mean really gorgeous. rhythms in his music sometimes seem to ghost harmony's usual role: it's not which pitches sound together, but the ways they relate to each other thru time -- that's also why his percussion can sound so lyrical. & I'm pretty sure that he cites can't take my eyes off of you by Frankie Valli. anyhow, give it a listen: with your eyes closed!

click here to hear &/or download the scherzo from Lou Harrison's rhymes with silver.

one song that has been a deep-years favorite is z datelin, by Pavol Hammel & Marian Varga, two men from czechoslovakia about whom I know nothing. the record is from I think 1968. now, listen: about 12 million people speak natively the czech language. (when I lived in russia, products often came labeled for sale in countries across evropa, with the same nutrition information in, say, polish, estonian, latvian, russiche, ukraingo, czech, & slovak, & these last two would generally be identical, or very utterly nearly so. that's a funny thing about politics, but also a roundabout way of saying: slovaks, this means you too.) please somebody tell me what the title means? because the obvious correspondence to russian would yield the gloss from the dative -- which is awesome -- but seems improbable. anyhow it's kind of a beautiful song but what's most wonderful is the dinkiness of it, in all its sincerity. the really silly kind of precision they have. pretty 60s europe organ. I kind of want to find Pavol Hammel & Marian Varga in praha in 1968 & just let them know everything's going to be ok. (tho: is it?) anyhow:

click here to hear &/or download the impenetrably-titled z datelin by Marian Varga & Pavol Hammel.

a song I was not expecting to become wanting to be hearing is friend of the devil. it's originally a grateful dead song (what do you want from me?!), but my favorite is singing it myself, and, when that's a pickle, I'll take Lyle Lovett doing it, for sure. it's not a fantastic song. it's not a fantastic recording. but it has charm & is lovely & on the right side of things. do not ask questions.

do click here to hear &/or download Lyle Lovett's version of friend of the devil.

& lastly, ice cream time: rise by Nick Didkovsky. this is one of the pieces he's made by setting parameters in a computer program of his own design. the music is luminous. it's something that stays as various & real as anything thruout, record of a real investigation. it something I feel I could live inside. & the subtle ways it changes, & the the sustaining mass of sound. scandinavia! the way it spreads itself out harmonically is just beautiful. I bet Terry Riley danced around the table when he heard it.

click here to hear &/or download ice cream time:rise by Nick Didkovsky.

this is not a fucking joke:

2008-10-31T00:37:00.004-04:00

I mean, this obviously is a fucking joke, but the point is it's not intended as one. one two three. four five. six seven. eight. nine. ten.

ask a luthier

2008-10-30T14:21:00.001-04:00

"why a duck?"

2008-10-29T15:30:00.007-04:00

making a mix cd for a friend's birthday, & I got to thinking how great Bill Wells's remix of the pastels' the viaduct is.

I don't really know much about the musicians. the pastels are a band from scotland ( a l b a ) & Bill Wells is a bass player & bandleader from scotland. his mix is gorgeous, I think, just really harmonically lush, & quiet enough to haunt a small, intimate thrill out of the vocals.

click here to hear &/or download the viaduct by the pastels as remixed by Bill Wells.

when I first heard it it was kind of a revelation to me, because a different remix of the song -- kid loco's -- has been a many-years favorite of mine. but kid loco's remix is on a completely different plane from Bill Wells's; his version is totally unadventurous, but Istill find it compelling. he seems to conceive it as kind of a lovely dull song, something static to dance with drums around. but here, for some fun, first listen to just the instrumental track from kid loco's remix, if you don't already know it, & see if you can imagine what the vocals will sound like over this instrumentation.

click here to hear &/or download the instrumental track of Kid Loco's remix of the pastels' the viaduct.

& ok, now click here to hear &/or download kid loco's remix of the pastels' the viaduct vocals intact. what would stop anyone from listening to this song all day? matte!

music is surely one of the best things.

another thing I could do all day is watch that clip of mccain saying it's a tenet of socialism. what a horse's ass. Obama's as shady as any of them (& buying up all that tv time tonight -- while it's sort of a champion moment because you're rooting for him & goddamn -- is a pretty creepo move) but it's surely the case that mccain is a new bottom (not the one everyone's hoping for), a high water mark of cynicism, incredible stupidity, & profoundly incorrigible contempt for america. & that Obama, despite his participation in this depraved system, does have -- & promise to confer on america -- a certain basic dignity.

(meanwhile, on another side of town...)

I am really really really really really really really really really really nervous about the election.

keep on feeding them sugar

2008-10-27T01:36:00.006-04:00

until you see their eyes all white.

this greenspan business is really good for a laugh. it's a satisfying moment when Waxman asks him: "do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" greenspan was palling around with actual time-lapse ideological terrorists (remember: reagan appointed him but he's not a reaganite; reagan was him-ite) like Ayn Rand before most of us were the teensiest eye-twinke. it's infuriating because the idea that markets, by definition governed by greed & narrowly-thought self-interest, function most healthily when left to regulate themselves -- & that's an axiom now to the majority of the idiots running the country -- is as basically ridiculous as the idea that evolution & intelligent idea are two competing scientific theories. it's inane & it has never happened. alan greenspan to me is a maestro as ridiculous as the Maestro of television's Seinfeld.

anyhow, the one thing everyone seems to think is that the economy's in bad shape. I have heard of some persons unemployed. I thought it might be nice to hear some songs about poverty. my opinion is that Lonnie Johnson is one of the greatest musicians of his century. "hard times don't worry me -- I was broke when it first started out". his timing's wonderful & intriguing. his phrasing is wonderful. he has a wonderful sort of sense of line & gets a sound out of his guitar that's almost like a woodwind, almost like a goose in fog. anyhow this song if from 1937 & it seems perfectly current. & it's a fucking jaw-dropper. I suggest opening a BEER when you listen to this.

click here to hear &/or download hard times ain't gone nowhere by Lonnie Johnson.

lonesome for mother's prayer is a beautiful gospel song recorded in detroit in, I think?, the 40s. the name of the group hasn't survived. come on over here is by the same group. they're really just fucking going for it. they have a kind of fervid doom around them, & there's something sort of -- I don't know, pure? -- about not knowing who they are. were. probably men with hard lives. (that's what television's mad men would suggest.) it's as sad as this margarine package, & this is the saddest & most dramatic margarine package I can ever imagine seeing.

click here to hear &/or download lonesome for mother's prayer.
after that, click here to hear &/or download come on over here. the ending of this one's a real killer. brutal.

(by the way, here's a song I'm trying to make up my mind about. it's called jack & it's by the backsliders. I think I like it it sticks to its guns what do you think of it?)

I've been spending a lot of time in greenpoint lately, & hearing a lot of skalpel. a lot of it's really great. flying officer is a lot of fun & makes interesting choices.

click here to hear &/or download flying officer.

l'étranger en ville (come alive)

2008-10-22T00:30:00.012-04:00

ok, I have a lot of music I would look to put up here, but, real quick, first, because holy shit, did you guys hear about that protester that tried to get Rove in a citizen's arrest for treason? check it out.

& now a post by special request from a dear friend (& blog reader so loyal he actually catches me when I spruce up old posts in the middle of the afternoon -- his diligence is a lesson to us all). Del Shannon has always been one of my very favorite singers.

the song he's best known for is runaway, & there's a lot to be said for it. the song is beautiful, & it's beautifully produced (try to filter out the possibly-too-much horns, & listen instead to the urgent keyboard line & sermonic vocals). it's also a watershed for the tasteful use of electronic sounds in pop music: the instrument taking the solo is a custom-modified clavioline (to hear what it sounds like unmodified, listen to baby you're a rich man by the quarrymen; that instrument that sounds kind of like a bagpipe is in fact in clavioline). the song has a chorus but no verses: there's an introduction, then a chorus, then a solo, then a chorus, & the whole thing's over before you've even found your hanky. & what I always notice most about it, ever since I was a kid, is the peculiar line that hints at brutally dark feelings: I wonder where she will stay. brrrr, that's what I want to hear. sweet horrible lunatic.

click here to hear &/or download runaway.

it was Hank Williams who first made Del Shannon want to sing, & there's a part of how he gets it out -- like he's been cold in a paddock all night -- that acknowledges that faltering alabaman warmth. his 5th lp is called Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams, & is a record of Little Richard covers (no). his version of weary blues isn't as november-evening as the original, but it's still a statement of power. I dig the way he hold the word blues in the third line of the chorus. gets across, no?

click here to hear &/or download weary blues.

another lovely song with beautiful & interesting electronic sounds is daydream. click here to hear &/or download daydreams. this one's not a life-changer, but, I mean, not everything can be.

now. the good stuff. the more Del Shannon you listen to, the greater the role you realize is played by his bugs-under-the-skin neurosis, the same neurosis that seems the source of stark lines like I wonder where she will stay (imagine James Maddalena singing it). his second single, after runaway (& probably his second-best-known, an execrable cover of do you wanna dance notwithstanding), is hats off to Larry, whose lyrics make schadenfreude snappy: "hats off to Larry / he broke yr heart / just like you broke mine when you / said we must part / he told you lies, o it's / yr turn to cry cry cry / now that Larry's said goodbye to you". this song was #5 in a year whose #1s included Brook Benton's the boll weevil song & Pat Boone's moody river. (also another great moment for electronics in pop music, by the way -- check out the quivering glass sound that runs thru the song).

click here to hear &/or download hats off to Larry.

& now we're all strapped into the Del Shannon cyclone, & Del Shannon coney island is beginning to assemble itself far beneath us, & there is nothing, nothing to be done. stranger in town shows Del Shannon openly sounding against his formidable native paranoia. this is pretty weird stuff. check out the lyrics:

me & my baby been on the run so very long
her folks sent a man to get us, they say we done wrong
so we run, yeah we run, yeah we run from the stranger in town

stranger in town, he's out to get to me
stranger in town, wants me & my baby
follows me
to every town
& if he gets me
he'll bring me down
so we run, yeah we run, yeah we run from the stranger in town

the music has great sweetness & it's inventive on a fantastic scale (listen to that rhythmic vamp that plays while he sings follows me / to every town / & if he gets me &c, & then listen to the 4-bar instrumental bridge, the doofily somber prologue, the shimmering switches from major to minor tonality). also, it's about being incredibly troubled. I think there were few ears in america in 1965 that straddled brains capable of being wrapped around this music. least of all whoever was producing it -- no matter what the lyric, he always sings it like it were as natural as deeliver de letter de sooner de better.

click here to hear &/or download stranger in town.

a more bladerunnerly kind of oppression is being fled in keep searchin' (follow the sun). as Auerbach notes (of someone else, of course), Del Shannon's "speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts -- on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed." (my emphasis.) if crazies were breakfast this song would be one rootin-tootin lumberjack special. here are the lyrics:

no one will understand
what I've got to do
I've go to find a place to hide
with my baby by my side

she's been hurt so much
they treat her mean & cruel
they try to keep us far apart
there's only one thing left we can do

we gotta keep searchin' searchin'
find a place to hide
searchin' searchin'
she'll be by my side

if we gotta keep on the run
we can follow the sun

it's a lovely melody, like a lot of the ones he wrote. the song is all shadow: who are they? why are we hiding? just bizarre. & it ends with what can only be called an utter, dying-of-the-light freak-out.

click here to hear &/or download keep searchin' (follow the sun).

something characteristic of a great many of his songs is that there's no real verse to speak of: rather, there's a kind of weird introduction, then an intricate chorus, then an instrumental solo, repeat the chorus, & none of them is much more than 2 minutes long. simplify, simplify! what lovely & bizarre & concise statements were his.

Del Shannon continued being more sensitive & crazy than moldy-oldies reunion tours could accomodate. on february 8th, 1990, he killed his face with a gun, possibly in part due to derangement of his condition by prozac, which had been approved by the fda only 14 months earlier & may not have been understood clearly yet.

it might help us understand or remember just how barbarous were the forces at whose mercy Del Shannon's young career placed him to hear some of the radio commercials he made for pepsi. here are two of them. they're kind of even, well, beautiful, & also they are hideous & lame & are crap-things.

click here to hear &/or download a pepsi commercial starring Del Shannon.
click here to hear &/or download another one.

I'd like for Viktor Pelevin to write something about these.

I wish so badly for Del Shannon to have been born in a different age, down a different stream. anyhow, I hope someone loves these songs as much as I do. I love them a lot. I wonder where she will stay. he sang it that creeping line his whole life. victim of infinity. & we really needed him.

by the way, I hope you didn't miss my post yesterday on the musics of georgia. please write comments on this blog! & force others to read this blog! & for the love of god please put a link to my blog on your blog. (I'll do the same.) because that's fun.

shvili comma adze : sakartvelo

2008-10-21T02:43:00.017-04:00

nunc te bacche canam nec non silvestria tecum
virgulta et prolem tarde crescentis olivae
Virgilius Maro

georgia is a country with fantastic music. also bad. ideal conditions!

as I post some lovely georgian music here, I just want to let you know (are you reading this?) that I'll be trying to make the songs a little easier to find by posting the links in a more visible & dramatic way. you still have to wade thru zshare -- I'm working on that.

now. the first georgian music I heard was polyphonic folk song, & the sound was transfixing. like most places defined by mountains, georgia is home to a million ideas about how to get into things. shashvi kakabi is an exampe of the kartlian style of georgian singing, & the recording is from 1912, so be gentle, gramps. I wish I had a lot more to say about the context of & about the ideas underlying this music: I don't. but I'm struck by how gorgeous it is, & by how, again, almost futuristic it sounds. it also reminds me of medieval choral music, the notre dame school (my very very favorite), vox organum with intricate lines baroquing & fixing the space the space over it. there's a tension shared in both kinds of music between the vertical (progression of the music as a series of chords made by all the voices together at any given time) & the horizontal (the line as sung by each individual voice). I'd like to blog more on that soon; Machaut's formes fixes & Albert Ayler, great intersection!

click here to hear &/or download shashvi kakabi.

I gather that shashvi kakabi means the thrush & the partridge. it describes a sing-off held by the two. "a beautiful morning / most difficult war / thrush victorious over partridge".

I do not know what a thrush sound like; I do not know what a partridge sounds like.

as'll happen, people who were not from georgia heard this music & became sort of hot-in-the-pants to get comradey with it. increasingly as the soviet union worked to position itself as an enlightened, plural society (good joke about this in a sec), polished, respectablized versions of ethnic behaviors were created for public experientialities. there emerged a so-called "academic" style of georgian folk singing that, while inauthentic, surely deserves to be considered its own thing. the song mravalshamier is beautiful, sung by the rustavi choir, probably the best-known group making recordings in the academic tradition. this song is in the kakhetian style. but really I'm intending to contrast its inauthentic kakhetianness with the authentic kartlianness of the last song. the musicologist Carl Linich writes that the "Kartlian and Kakhetian styles are commonly grouped together, mainly because the provinces have been united for so long that it is no longer possible to determine which style originated in which province." I'm trusting you, Carl. (are you out there? Carl?)

click here to hear &/or download mravalshamier.

I do not know... anything at all, about the lovely sad song batonebo. it is sung by a guy called Badri Jimsheleishvili. I'm not sure of the woman's name who sings with him. I don't know what the title means, or any of the lyrics. but it's a beautiful, kind-of-stately-but-not-in-a-farting-way, don't you think? & there's a particular line, they sing it a few times, the harmony in the guy's voice is flatted, blue, & it just hits me with a powerful effect every time they sing it. the line I mean is the one that sounds like it begins with the words moan 'em yeast, like at 1'57", & again at 2'10". heart-stopper, right? I don't think it's a coincidence that that's how the last line of the song begins. well & but don't take my word for it:

click here to hear &/or download batonebo.

I should probably stop now, but first I just can't resist a little rtuli dro. it's a rap song, from georgia. it's very not, I have to say. wish I could understand the words. rtuli dro is translated as difficult time. I mean, even in radiant georgia, I'm certain there's worse music. & this isn't the first cis rap song I've heard aping that one Eminem & Dido did together. go ahead, hear a little rtuli dro. you've earned it.

click here to hear &/or download rtuli dro.

good shabbes missus khupelstein

2008-10-17T22:14:00.004-04:00

yellow submarine is a favorite. vivid fun & a reminder of how doofy & sometimes bad the beatles were willing to be. it has the feeling of experiment, freshness. only a northern song is a beautiful & compelling fucking song. et cetera tron.

beware of the j-men, bastards:

"bastards came." -- Clark Coolidge. also did you guys see Obama making fun of mccain at the Al Smith something or other? (I love Al Smith; I love the sidewalks of new york; I love the npr pledge drive; the great gray buildings: o pass me that olive-containing thing.) but anyhow, look at cute Obama being funny:

& lastly, for now, let us recall fondly a simpler time:

"on behalf of special needs"

2008-10-17T02:50:00.007-04:00

am I the only person who found it high-larious when mccain said that palin was "an inspiration to women and reformers all over america"? (here, enjoy this whole clip, or, for a real laugh, clamber up to 2"27' in:

real good, right?) a tide of reformers is cresting over america like the goddamn buffalo. reformers all over america? what the fuck was he talking about?

I'm working on a blog post that I'm excited about, by special request (тебе, Пчелка) a post on wet & dry kinds of music. I was going to include some really great wet songs & some really great dry songs, & also some electronic alterations of both. but I sprung a leak somewhere, softwarewise, & it'll be at least till tomorrow since I need to call fucking lesotho or wherever & beg one of the row of service technicians heaving in the galley to tell me why my registration's been invalidated.

(by the way, I have nothing but respect for the culture of lesotho. it just seems like a silly route for advice to take since the company that manufactures the software is in albany. & that's why I made up lesotho. Adlai Stevenson House of Pancakes. sour claw.)

anyhow, it might be a while, but here is a great new video of a Mr Lif remix. watch it! trust me! it is good!

turning a certain kind of a corner, Superalisa (Супералиса) is just the perfect thing. she's from tatarstan, one of the autonomous res publicae federated into the russian federation (other notable areas with the same political status include Chuvashia, where the poet Genadii Aigi was from; Chechnya, which apparently is closet russian for don't mention it; & Tuva, the delightful mountain paradise featured in indie filmdom's 1999 charmer genghis blues.) I don't know much about her except that she's doing her own thing. a lot of the lyrics are in tatar, so I can't understand them. others are in roosish. my friends, there is no sense in not watching this:

some of the lyrics:

я -- Супералиса татарская певица
танцуйте если на месте не сидится

ja -- Superalisa tatarskaja pevitsa
tantsujte esli na meste ne siditsja

I'm Superalisa, the tatar singer
get up & dance if you don't want to sit still

полезные советы я вам здесь пропою
не пейте алкоголь и не кушайте свинью

poleznye sovjety ja vam zdjes' propoju
ne pjejte alkogol' i ne kushajte svin'ju

now I'll sing you some useful advice:
don't drink alcohol, & don't eat pork

I wonder what Superalisa is doing right now.

o blinding light o light that blinds I cannot see look out for me

2008-10-17T01:44:00.000-04:00

the z = the u = the k = the o = the f = the s = the k = the y

2008-10-08T16:04:00.016-04:00

I got to thinking about the music I posted that includes speech. it shares a lot with rap music: repetition, electronic sounds, & an ear tuned to the musical possibilities inherent to the ways we talk. increasingly I think people working in both traditions are acknowledging that overlap in trajectory, as when Madlib samples SR's come out on america's most blunted, or when Arnold Dreyblatt writes beats that seem to be in part a hearing-thru of interesting producers like Timbaland & El-P. I thought it might be fun to propose four companion songs to the ones in my earlier post.

El-P is always interesting. his stuff is unrelentingly maximal, a tropics of storming hot sounds. sometimes it makes me wish I were watching seinfeld. sometimes it's just jabberjaw & could use a dose of the neptunes. but I think he sometimes, as here, on tuned mass damper, really gets it right: stupendous stuff happens here. I don't mean at all to say the connection to idle chatter seems strong. but both have a thick, busy sound. & El-P's accustomed logopudding style of lyric seems a good corollary to the indistinguishability of the words in the Lansky piece. (listen closely: "microscopic Sally Struthers with a lobster bib / munching on white platelets" -- sweaty zaum! superhuh! El-P puts it this way: "motherfucker did I sound abstract? / I hope it sounded more confusing than that / cause my clarity was found / under the arm of an economy-sized mousetrap". I would like to say motherfucker more often.) anyhow, like a lot of El-P's beats, I think this works grandly as an instrumental, too.

I also don't mean to suggest any very strong connection between sooner or later & this song, saliva by Viktor Vaughn, with a gorgeous first-snow beat by rjd2 (who has broken my heart just like everybody's by putting out that record where he sings). I guess what I see them sharing (VV & Bob Ostertag, I mean) is an agility, an ability to continue producing amazing & surprising sounds from fresh directions. sooner or later reminds me of Lorca & a little of Clayton Eshleman in its pursuit of the boy's body. saliva is by contrast really humorous, in that word's oldest sense -- the angles of disconnect between lyrics, a sort of thrill of shifting attentions, are at the heart of what's interesting.

one thing flagging has in common with that's life by Killer Mike is a good rough sense of humor. hear, here. they're both a little antic. Killer Mike (I feel like a nerd when I talk about him because his name is Killer Mike, which is something I would never otherwise say) is a really clever guy, & I don't blame him he's angry. I guess I thought too that Steve Reich's political stake was somehow vaguely summoned by the phase-loop stuff in the stock, hausen & walkman song. maybe that's optimistic. a headline you will not see: KILLER MIKE RIGHT ON BUSH! fucking country. I can see honduras from yr mom, Sarah Palin.

& I'd like to match so many little dyings with a combination of two songs. (picture an ellipse.) the first one is we celebrate by Ghostface Killah -- listen to it here. I love the laser-beam sound in the background! it's obviously really different in tone from Kyle Gann's piece, but they both feel sort of candid (what whiteness can add to them?) & sort of tender. also dill pickle = big laughs, over here. but I also wanted to post a turkish rap song called katil, by a guy whose name I might be misspelling as Sert Musselmaner. (sorry, Sert.) follow this link & listen. all I know is katil means killer. the song has a great swirly-alley sound. I feel patient with that, like I feel patient with the simulated-beach sounds in KG's piece, because I think it's true that both sounds contribute to an overall cohesiveness in the recordings -- they're well-produced is all, really. & I think it can maybe begin matching so many little dyings in weirdness, which hooray. hooray!

alright alright. hope there is somebody out there reading this blog. I mean, what do you think? write me comments! join the blogvolution!

ฮาร์ปซิคอร์ด (I think I could survive in a cabin)

2008-10-05T01:34:00.014-04:00

more Roy Zimmerman. this I guess is, as they say in the restaurant business, not so fresh, but as the sun sets on George W Bush's empire the broader questions it raises feel as pressing as ever.

Sarah Palin recently told donors in Englewood Colorado that Obama "is someone who sees america... as being so imperfect, emperfect enough, that he's willing to pal around with terrorists who would target their own country." what a revolting piece of morning-after-buffalo-wings shit she is. (she's talking about William Ayers, from the weather underground, to whom Obama has failed patriotically to refuse saying hi when they bump into each other around hyde park & at meetings.) I mean, planes don't fly thru hurricanes -- this is a new low, isn't it? meanwhile, in the nation Barbara Ehrenreich notes: "This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism -- aka 'free enterprise' -- seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead." I have also been thinking a lot about how sort of unfair it is for bankers to make the world end.

mostly I have been thinking about which records I will bring to my post-democracy cabin.

(by the way, did you hear what lovely Dennis said, in the house of representatives? after he voted in a non-bailout-supporting way? he said this:

it is not as tho we had no choice but to pass the bill before us. we could have done this differently. we could have demanded language in the legislation that would have empowered the treasure to compel mortgage servicers to rework the terms of mortgage loans so homeowners could avoid foreclosure. we could have put regulatory structures in place to protect investors. we could have stopped the speculators.

this bill represents an utter failure of the democratic process. it represents the triumph of special interest over the public interest. it represents the inability of government to defend the public interest in the face of great pressure from financial interests. we could have recognized the power of government to prime the pump of the economy to get money flowing thruout society by creating jobs, health care, and major investments in green energy. what a lost opportunity! what a moment of transition from democracy and towards domination of america by global economic interests.

in the house of representatives he said this! as if anybody'd be listening there!)

one recording I will bring to my cabin is this one, of Pharoah Sanders playing feelin' good. it's played with real force, & I think I'll enjoy that. there is a kind of a distracted quality to it, a lot of mismatching gestures thrown out. but it also feels sincere, & for me it holds together in a kind of hot, diffuse way. I hope my cabin has a view of the mountains.

I know cabin livin' may prove hard, but if there are still sunrises I will want to hear this, the third track from the record LAmmERGEIER, by the various & interesting duo of Richard Youngs & Simon Wickham-Smith, co-presidents of the Society for Guys With English-Sounding Names & really worthwhile musicians. I love the sounds they find, the structures they build out of them. the principles may overlap with those that decide the architecture of cabins.

& I think I'd like to have this lovely & strange recording of Andrej Vinogradov singing a song called uzh kak po mostu-mostochiku (уж как по мосту-мосточику, which you might understand to mean something like going now, beginning to go, across the bridge, the little bridge) it's a lovely snow-sounding song, & the harmonies are rich & a little surprising. times will be hard. I will probably be glad that I have a cabin.

so, by the way, has anyone got a nice cabin to sell? all offers heard...

ಗಣರಾಜ್ಯ

2008-10-03T21:19:00.004-04:00

wow. did you guys see that?

beautiful men sing of their honeys; also, voices speak

2008-10-03T00:08:00.011-04:00

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.

el chiki chiki

2008-10-02T18:28:00.005-04:00

in the next day or two, by special request, a post on music including elements of recorded speech. in the meantime, please lose your fucking mind:

let's just hope the respublika doesn't die tonight....

durian (& the dairyman cometh)

2008-09-25T19:56:00.018-04:00

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.

pop music with surprising beautiful eletronic sounds

2008-09-23T01:34:00.013-04:00

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.

voces melismatae

2008-09-22T01:55:00.007-04:00

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.)

music made by machines (but ixnay on the aftwerkkray)

2008-09-20T18:09:00.009-04:00

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:

We(b)lcome to my (we)Blog

2008-09-18T15:51:00.008-04:00

if you're reading this, I'm blogging.

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, the pseudonym 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.