good shabbes missus khupelstein

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"

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

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

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)

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

wow. did you guys see that?

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.