Thursday, February 24, 2011
....Like Sand Under Glass....
Eberhard Weber's 1975 album (is this jazz?) Yellow Fields contains the 15:34 track "Sand-Glass". The instrumentation, and the actual things the instruments play, begin in straightforward, nearly overly simplistic fashion, mimicking the form of the music, its undulation, the curved pulse, a slowly motioning wave of forward thought, aiming what appears to be nothing, (or perhaps this all sounds like it aims at nothing) -- fretless electric bass, drums, electric piano, soprano saxophone -- the song (usually instrumental pieces are called "tunes", but this track crosses over into "song" territory, capturing the flag of genre overseen by the guardians of musical categorization, there is nothing to "tune" here, only a singing to be sung through the frozen object of petrified time) barely moves, it's a drone, a repetition of each moment (which is sort of what every object is, isn't it, a thing that appears and reappears only as what it always only is), an ostinato, things that appear and disappear and reappear and elongate and contract and that are altered over time but whose basic shape and scope and intent remain as they always were.
Intent in music is a curious object -- not on the level of the "player", but on the level of the musical "idea" or "phrase". Where does this phrase mean to go based on the form it has taken? How is the form the expression of its own direction?
The song is hushed and appears fragile, it crawls slowly across some perilous surface -- a feeling of floating, or drifting, as though the thing this song is, in its fragility, is terrified to be seen, to be destroyed, it is only to exist under glass. The movement is more water than air, since it doesn't seem that at any point in time all movement would cease if the object moving suddenly accelerated and hurtled through space and crashed into a surface...
It doesn't seem that the disappearance of what holds it up will change the velocity of the world, what separates it from where it currently is and where it may be if everything beneath it ceased to have ever existed.
At the beginning of the piece, behind the ever-repetitive bass pattern and Rhodes chords cloaked in dusk air, there's a sound of a synthesizer, but it's not recognized as a sound that is "produced" through an artifice, a form of sound meant to represent the source of yet another sound. You think of an alien animal at the bottom of a quarry or bog that has, for the moment, awoken into the world, to walk the black earth in the black night. As though it wasn't in the world when it was sleeping, that was simply the image of space that had dreamed it, just then. I think of the giant sand worms that emerge in David Lynch's Dune -- the worms are made of the same substance of the planet in which they bury themselves, and they exist to consume everything that lives on the planet in order that these things become part of the planet.
The synth in "Sand-Glass" hides behind the other music in the song, its mutilated motif that of a melody sleeping, but that of a melody that has awoken the sleeping giant beneath the earth. The synth reappears at the end of the Rhodes solo, which has the feel of something close at hand, something imminent, to elongate a new distance between the sound of an amplified piano (one world) and the sound of a slithering depth that slips past us and pulls us away from ourselves (a subterranean future).
At a certain point in the song (you can see where if you watch the time go by, but the time seems to stay exactly where you are when you are listenining), the horn sound changes from that of a soprano saxophone to either a shenai or a nagaswaram. What you hear when this change occurs is an increase in melodic intensity, although what happens is not a "melody". The horn until this part in the music has hovered above everything else that is hovering, committed to nothing, lilting and treading even more lightly than that. But the change in timbre is like the change from surface to face, from what lies underneath to what is buried at the bottom of the world.
Everything has passed into an immediacy that can't be tracked through thought, just then (and then, then, too). It is a cry of the buried thing unburied, the hidden world unburdened, repression freed from the unconscious, the night made into the night it has always been.
Of course, the song continues, so there's time allowed to track things, to think them, to trace your thinking amongst them. Fifteen minutes for a song is quite a while, but in life, it's hardly anything. A drive across town, a walk to the grocery store, ten pages of a book, a paragraph of written words, a phone call to tell her or him how you feel. In the 70's progressive rock and jazz fusion records were generally filled with 15 minute, 16 minute, 20 minute tracks. It was a way for a band to say something longer than a song, more than simply make a song that you could simply come to know in the time it took to listen to it. Parts dissipated and dissolved, motifs established themselves and recapitulated after 12 minutes of departure....in pseudo-70's fashion, "Sand-Glass" develops, but I'm not sure it has parts -- or even departures, for that matter -- similar to its instrumentation and overall sound, which are of its time, but which seem to be from no time, or a time that knows itself and that is also unknown to itself. Like the sand worms from Dune, who can't know themselves, who can't know anything but themselves, it's a large structure made up of completely identical structures. It rises and falls, eventually, like the creatures who burst through the surface of the earth to announce themselves in space and time, but it's reason to be is simply that it is and that it won't disappear.
After the foreign horn fades, there's a Rhodes/bass/drums swollen sea interlude, only to be followed by a return to the beginning of the song...except with a double-tracked staccato horn melody that indicates some dramatic developments are taking place, at the level of structure, at the level of what the structure contains. And then what might be a "solo", although it's hard to tell if the fretless bass or the Rhodes is doing more of the soloing. But everything is controlled, is inside the container of the song, even when the drummer accelerates and is crashing a massive cymbal (his missive from beyond?) and the synthesizer draws down the moon, and you are too soon staring into the mute face of the moon, reflected in the dark, idle pool before you.
And then there is only the moon, strange as it is above us, as if it, too, is behind glass, perfectly framed, inanimately white, made of nothing but bleached sand, filled with the anticipation of an even clearer, darker, night -- one in which nothing can be seen, and everything is to be heard.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Rainy Day, Dream Away
The title to a favorite Jimi Hendrix song, off of Electric Ladyland (1968). It rains right now outside, a doomed to forever failure sky. These sounds float up to and evermore remain, distant to everlasting, at the surface, a causeway to thought far beyond clouds and sky, past wind over water.
(Are there any other Hendrix tracks where he solos without any distorted edges, where he's plugged modestly into the amp without anything but the trickle that streams from it? His playing here is sand-glass worn down by salt across time, through deep clear blue space, landing on a clay-caked shipwrecked planet.)
He duels/duals with a saxophone, the track beginning with a cough and a snort, finishing with the triumphant whimper of a new night fading in from the background, a damp empty street flanked by shimmering streetlights. The air clears, a tunnel opens to sweet black mist; a miniature flood of echo, an underground passage where musical goldfishes swim and glide and gild themselves round.
Other rains seep, slip, in. Pharoah's Dance, the sleepy-eyed opener from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1969). Layered water upon rain over drops atop dewlets, multiplied echo of chorused Rhodes and deep set-eyed tango guitar, the bass bursting its subterranean bubble to further christen the crisp air. The track is the swiftly flowing river across pebbled beds of soaked sand, whose dulled surfaces are the images of inevitably frozen movement. The drums, far off, at great length, give specific emphasis to each separated beat, each pulse happening changeless, perfect static repetition, are like those clouds, there, that won't move anywhere, the blanketed and immovable sky. (The sky owes us nothing, of course, except for our efforts to remember ourselves beneath it...)
The intro (perhaps the entirety of everything that is the intro, which is the whole song, an intro to nothing but itself, strangely) to Talk Talk's Myrrhman, from 1991's Laughing Stock. (How is it possible that this song exists in a time frame? Does this signify the timelessness, too of this rain, of that one?) It is rolling clouds, but no thunder. It is rain, but nothing pours down, out, or around. The forecast hurricanes are empty sets of unknown things, weirded-out chasm wide voids where the threat of something other has already been dispersed into space. (When I was a kid, we had a hurricane that lasted for 3 days. The wind blew, the sky turned sideways out with a flash of white ambience, and the power came and went and returned. I'm still awaiting that tender hurricane.) Myrrhman is the tender wound of the rain that leaves us without ever having ever arrived.
Do Make Say Think's When Day Chokes the Night, from 2000's Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead, is the sprinkle and splinter of drops, its initial form is a guitar immersed and submerged into night, each note a dripping monument to the night's further acceleration. By the time the drums crash in and cut off everything but themselves, the car has almost swerved off the road, the windshield filled with the flooded sky, the night air the careening sea.
Al Di Meola's rain dream is tracked by Traces of a Tear, from 1985's Cielo e Terra. How I love the lush gardens of your broken eyes, the deep trope of your darkness anchors me to the ache of love, the landscape of ever vanishing desire. But only vanished in as much as a trace can never have been fully erased. Your disappeared tears are the passing of the sky, out of sight, behind the rain, behind the moon, behind these eyes that are some other one's sun.
Jon Hassell and Brian Eno examine their very own Delta Rain Dream on 1980's Fourth World Vol. 1 Possible Musics -- delta being the ground zero of the dream, the rain not a rain cloud but a hovering presence over the terra firma that is the sliding sound beneath it. There is a buzz in the air of a world now unhidden, like the moment you realize when you step out the door that the rain was invisible from the window, that it is hitting you everywhere, that it is a cloud of liquid locusts here to cast doubt on what you see of things, of what you think is right everywhere. Because you never see all of the rain, even when, through the windshield, you see the sky yonder, over miles and miles, and something hovers influx above flooded earth, which flutters helpless like crisped leaves, now ground down under wet heels into graves of mud.
Tomasz Stanko's Soul of Things (2001) is the perfected hush of the world sprinkled with mystic rhythmic sky. The dynamic piano is of particular prescience, time's rain -- or the reign of its passage over the spirit of all-too-human.
Uriah Heep's Rain, from 1973's The Magician's Birthday, makes further use of a piano sea, doubled by flowing vibraphone, to further introduce the inner experience of silent rain, the storm within that has already broke, that leaves me broken and shattered with more than traces, with the hollow howl that is all of my losses at this very moment -- "Look what you've done / to my life" -- the "you" being the rain, the "my" being every surface that you have rippled, stormed, disrupted, destroyed, torn asunder with your thunderous effort to know me.
Of course, on Parto Forte, from After the Big Rain (2007), as Avishai Cohen reminds us, there is an end to our suffering, we are known to the world through the epic opening of the sky, the epilogue of our ancient days. The brightness is an interval meant for our astonishment, and we circle ever more intensely beneath the red sun in order to catch ourselves shouting everything ever over again.
(Are there any other Hendrix tracks where he solos without any distorted edges, where he's plugged modestly into the amp without anything but the trickle that streams from it? His playing here is sand-glass worn down by salt across time, through deep clear blue space, landing on a clay-caked shipwrecked planet.)
He duels/duals with a saxophone, the track beginning with a cough and a snort, finishing with the triumphant whimper of a new night fading in from the background, a damp empty street flanked by shimmering streetlights. The air clears, a tunnel opens to sweet black mist; a miniature flood of echo, an underground passage where musical goldfishes swim and glide and gild themselves round.
Other rains seep, slip, in. Pharoah's Dance, the sleepy-eyed opener from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1969). Layered water upon rain over drops atop dewlets, multiplied echo of chorused Rhodes and deep set-eyed tango guitar, the bass bursting its subterranean bubble to further christen the crisp air. The track is the swiftly flowing river across pebbled beds of soaked sand, whose dulled surfaces are the images of inevitably frozen movement. The drums, far off, at great length, give specific emphasis to each separated beat, each pulse happening changeless, perfect static repetition, are like those clouds, there, that won't move anywhere, the blanketed and immovable sky. (The sky owes us nothing, of course, except for our efforts to remember ourselves beneath it...)
The intro (perhaps the entirety of everything that is the intro, which is the whole song, an intro to nothing but itself, strangely) to Talk Talk's Myrrhman, from 1991's Laughing Stock. (How is it possible that this song exists in a time frame? Does this signify the timelessness, too of this rain, of that one?) It is rolling clouds, but no thunder. It is rain, but nothing pours down, out, or around. The forecast hurricanes are empty sets of unknown things, weirded-out chasm wide voids where the threat of something other has already been dispersed into space. (When I was a kid, we had a hurricane that lasted for 3 days. The wind blew, the sky turned sideways out with a flash of white ambience, and the power came and went and returned. I'm still awaiting that tender hurricane.) Myrrhman is the tender wound of the rain that leaves us without ever having ever arrived.
Do Make Say Think's When Day Chokes the Night, from 2000's Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead, is the sprinkle and splinter of drops, its initial form is a guitar immersed and submerged into night, each note a dripping monument to the night's further acceleration. By the time the drums crash in and cut off everything but themselves, the car has almost swerved off the road, the windshield filled with the flooded sky, the night air the careening sea.
Al Di Meola's rain dream is tracked by Traces of a Tear, from 1985's Cielo e Terra. How I love the lush gardens of your broken eyes, the deep trope of your darkness anchors me to the ache of love, the landscape of ever vanishing desire. But only vanished in as much as a trace can never have been fully erased. Your disappeared tears are the passing of the sky, out of sight, behind the rain, behind the moon, behind these eyes that are some other one's sun.
Jon Hassell and Brian Eno examine their very own Delta Rain Dream on 1980's Fourth World Vol. 1 Possible Musics -- delta being the ground zero of the dream, the rain not a rain cloud but a hovering presence over the terra firma that is the sliding sound beneath it. There is a buzz in the air of a world now unhidden, like the moment you realize when you step out the door that the rain was invisible from the window, that it is hitting you everywhere, that it is a cloud of liquid locusts here to cast doubt on what you see of things, of what you think is right everywhere. Because you never see all of the rain, even when, through the windshield, you see the sky yonder, over miles and miles, and something hovers influx above flooded earth, which flutters helpless like crisped leaves, now ground down under wet heels into graves of mud.
Tomasz Stanko's Soul of Things (2001) is the perfected hush of the world sprinkled with mystic rhythmic sky. The dynamic piano is of particular prescience, time's rain -- or the reign of its passage over the spirit of all-too-human.
Uriah Heep's Rain, from 1973's The Magician's Birthday, makes further use of a piano sea, doubled by flowing vibraphone, to further introduce the inner experience of silent rain, the storm within that has already broke, that leaves me broken and shattered with more than traces, with the hollow howl that is all of my losses at this very moment -- "Look what you've done / to my life" -- the "you" being the rain, the "my" being every surface that you have rippled, stormed, disrupted, destroyed, torn asunder with your thunderous effort to know me.
Of course, on Parto Forte, from After the Big Rain (2007), as Avishai Cohen reminds us, there is an end to our suffering, we are known to the world through the epic opening of the sky, the epilogue of our ancient days. The brightness is an interval meant for our astonishment, and we circle ever more intensely beneath the red sun in order to catch ourselves shouting everything ever over again.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Warped Plastic Wrapped in Plastic
Boards of Canada are intergalactic. Which is a totally meaningless thing to write, an empty set of the easy imagination, the "first thought/best thought" of this uncensored mind in the desolated midst of their preprocessed sound. Which gets to the meat (an irony of impeccable humanity, this word, "meat", since this is music of no flesh and no blood, no wires and no transistors. It is the music of cuddly metaphysical aliens) of what they sound like, some unknown speck, some red planet at the end of an endless telescopic lens -- meaningless, a perfect gleaming space into which any listener can shovel their every multi-layered fantasy of escape and of rescue.
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Boards of Canada's discography lists 9 recordings -- 3 full length records, 3 eps, and 3 "singles". If you look at the discography page on their website here, you'll notice they don't separate these categories. Everything is the same as a recording, it doesn't matter if you listen to BOC for 75 minutes or 5; everything you hear is part of this same eternal stargazed world, this same nocturnal desert island deliverance. "They" are two -- that is, there are two BOC'ers, although it doesn't appear that the number of people matters much, other than the fact that it can't be "a single" person, because the cosmology of the sound is the cosmology of some ancient pact made "betwixt" one and another. "They" have been releasing recordings since 1996, last doing so in 2006. So it's been 5 years since any "recordings" have been made physical in the world; it's been 5 years since I could walk to the record store, flip through the bins, and find something "new" to hold in my hand. But time is ethereal not only within their music, but around it, too, as though the entire mechanism of time passing is contained within and so ordered by this endless telescopic aura. I forget when I last bought their music; I forget that I know their music; I forget that I covet their music. When I return to their music, a return I attempt to prolong through my most hopeful, my most wonderous forgetting, everything I have ever forgotten of it returns, the ancient planet at the heart of everything I have ever longed for as "music".
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Boards of Canada have their own You Tube Channel. All the imagery they allow their music to be fit to is complete -- aged and ancient, emergent and modern, natural and desolate, man-made and intimate. And yet, endless variations exist, can exist, will exist. I'm sure that no one who would make their own You Tube to BOC would ever run out of ideas, there are as many possibilities as to imagine the narrative elements of these songs as there are atoms in a sheet of sheer Saran Wrap. The ease with which your mind rides the sonic elements through a cloud that parts into alien particles is proof that the entire image is as open and life affirming as amniotic fluid, which nourishes, protects, develops, expands. The internal images you make when you listen to BOC expand as the music swells, as the synthesizers slither around you and the drums suddenly sound, when the echoes are stripped away, like Africa. Where is Africa when you look through a telescope? It isn't that Red Planet, is it? Of course it isn't, that would be unfair to think of Africa as "over there", while I am simply "here" dreaming of it. As though all those people in that country, that continent, are simply what I would wish them to be, as alien as anything I have the arrogance to imagine. Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Circular Ruins" is the story of a man who "slips into the unanimous night" to dream a man into reality, only to die in the dreams of the man who dreamed him into reality. It is this "unanimous night" that is the backdrop of BOC's dream, it fills the dream with the emptiness that defines the heart of all things.
Boards of Canada's music sounds like a record left too long in the afternoon sun, perhaps stored beneath a window through which the afternoon sun shines and burns into an empty bedroom. Records swell and warp, being made of black plastic, in the heat, and a warped record's grooves turn forever asymmetrical once the sun strikes them and distends them until they become an alternate sound universe. But the strangest thing when you listen to a warped record is this -- you try to deny it is warped, because it means the record is over, that you can't listen to it as it once was, that the universe that has been altered is this universe, that time travel is the travel from one (known) time to another (unknown) time, which is still time, which is still you aging and dying and have been being born. The name of their first full-length record, "Music Has a Right to Children", references the deepest concept of humanity, children, possibly to acknowledge that there is nothing so alien as looking through the telescope itself at the sky, which shines in every window through every day and which knows us as well as we know that we were once born. Because we once were born, because we once had that right, and now we simply have the right to time, to the empty day, to something that sounds like something that it no longer is.
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Boards of Canada's music sounds like a record left too long in the afternoon sun, perhaps stored beneath a window through which the afternoon sun shines and burns into an empty bedroom. Records swell and warp, being made of black plastic, in the heat, and a warped record's grooves turn forever asymmetrical once the sun strikes them and distends them until they become an alternate sound universe. But the strangest thing when you listen to a warped record is this -- you try to deny it is warped, because it means the record is over, that you can't listen to it as it once was, that the universe that has been altered is this universe, that time travel is the travel from one (known) time to another (unknown) time, which is still time, which is still you aging and dying and have been being born. The name of their first full-length record, "Music Has a Right to Children", references the deepest concept of humanity, children, possibly to acknowledge that there is nothing so alien as looking through the telescope itself at the sky, which shines in every window through every day and which knows us as well as we know that we were once born. Because we once were born, because we once had that right, and now we simply have the right to time, to the empty day, to something that sounds like something that it no longer is.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Future Nature
Track Titles for Michael Brooks' 1985 Hybrid Album -- Hybrid, Distant Village, Mimosa, Pond Life, Ocean Motion, Midday, Earth Floor, Vacant.
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 science-fiction "future" film Solaris' opening scene shows a close-up shot of long florescent blades of yellow-green grass swaying in what appears to be slow motion, then what might be liquid wind as the camera backs away, and then finally the image fades to clear -- the grass is underwater, on the floor of a pond, and what we see is the image of the grass from above the surface of the pond, as our eyes are connected to a head that is perched on the neck and shoulders of a man who is observing the pond from outside the pond, standing at its edge. We are the eyes whose gaze is transfixed upon the pond and the swaying grass. This is the only explicit image of nature in a film about space. The image is distanced, obscured, technologized, hypercoded.
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The "hybrid" of the title of Brooks' record refers us to a specific gene-splicing of sound: from the natural, which is the sound of this moment, to the future, which is the sound of what may be, which is the projection of the world that we would hope for (or fear or already hate or have already loved).
We may stand transfixed, too, before an image of what "nature" is when we overlap it with "future", or when we hear the sound of nature spliced into future. In our dystopic, endlessly realistic dreams, it may refer to a world where nature is dead but preserved. Or alive but dangerous. Or finally done away with as we had always wanted. Or perhaps we finally have a reason to really live as we once would have, before the city laid waste to the mountains.
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The "sound" of "nature" in music originates with our idea of the "acoustic instrument" -- stringed, drummed, breathed, hammered. These sounds begin in a village, which is where women and men and children live together in a collective home. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, nature recedes, the volcano scatters the village inhabitants into distant atomic parts. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, the village is the city, the city is the planet, the planet is the to-be-colonized white fire surrounded by a raging inferno of nothingness.
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If there are any acoustic instruments on Hybrid, they are buried deep within the sound -- you would need some sort of hyper-magnification technology brought back from the future to extract them and restore them their originary status. The music seems to only reference, by way of its sound, things in nature like grass, or the ground, or the sea, or the day. No one is there to witness this nature, because this nature is what stands apart from us. Even if we look directly into its eyes, we don't see it as anything but othered.
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Solaris is a story about a man who takes a spaceship into space and ends up imprisoned in the deep guilt of his flypaper unconscious. He may as well remain under the water, the grass filling his mouth with projected reality.
Hybrid is a record that sounds like the nature that will outlast us, even if we live side-by-side amongst it. Can you imagine a day that you aren't actually inside of when you imagine the images of the day -- the fusions, that village, those flowers, that living pond, the moving ocean, those shifting day times, that surfaced earth, these no ones. Hybrid is the sound of an emergency crashing calmly into the sun, building a village there whose ashes are the remnants of every new day.
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(Further information on Michael Brook can be found at his website. His other records all showcase different aspects of his performing, composing, and production abilities. Hybrid, however, is a unique work that imagines a future that lies far beyond, and external to, us -- (humanity, I mean)...)
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tibbetts' Tibet
Steve Tibbetts, the Minneapolis-based American guitarist, composer, and world-weary traveler (and author of my favorite quote on creativity: "If all else fails, coffee will certainly do the trick"), appears as a man -- or force of man -- obsessed with Tibet.
I don't know how true this conclusion is, but the Tibbetts/Tibet connection is true, from his records with the Tibetan Buddhist singer Choying Drolma, to the song titles on his recent (i.e. the last 16 years' worth of) albums ("Dzogchen Punks", "Sitavana", "Lupra"). Although this obsession, as I am lazily naming it (it makes you think something might be wrong with him, right? When we know there's nothing wrong, of course, except for the fact that he persists in the relatively arcane in a world that generally looks for the in-arcane, which means he has faith in something, which is what is really wrong, because belief is so, I don't know, pre-technology) seems to have overtaken Tibbetts slowly, in time, like a creeping suspicion that all is not right with the world, that everything that is out there is daring you to name it, to make it be more than what it is, to demand everything of it such that it demands back, from you, everything that you are.
What's the opposite of a Real Life Living Tibetan Buddhist? A Downtown Greenwich Villager? How about a wind-whipped, snow-soaked Minnesotan? Perhaps it is Bob Dylan himself, who wanders with the wonder of a sage on endless sabbatical on 1970's "New Morning": "If dogs run free / Then why not we / Across the swooping plain"? These lines link Tibbetts's "The Big Wind" -- from his 1982 Acoustic Guitar'ed, Effects Percussion Duo'ed, Open Plain Dream of Repressed Americana ECM debut Northern Song - to "Dzogchen Punks" -- from the Wild-Eyed Guitar Ghost Screech of 1994s The Fall of Us All, a record that proves that ECM would go where an artist would'st go, if only said artist would take them there. Where does Tibbetts take us who are them? Into the Heart of a Night that Repeats Itself until All Embers Die Away with the Dawn.
"Night Again", from 1984's Safe Journey, neatly nutshells the Tibbettsian aesthetic -- acoustic guitars like lonely telephone wires stretched in an empty field of distanced sky. An overarching undercurrent of swelling, absent sound wind blows in from the north, the east, the west, each of which carries its grains of cultural sand, and your vision is empowered, for a moment, with a clarity, that "cutting clarity" (as the Edge once called the motivation for his delayed guitar chiming) at center of darkness. And always at this black center, a guitar so swollen with meaning that it spills inarticulately into the free space and lightning slashes in, raging on, from the north, under cover of darkness. This darkness from which, as in Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness", you would wish to be rescued, that darkness from which there is no -where or -one to be rescued to.
Life Is Suffering. Suffering Is Life.
Steve Tibbetts' Tibet shares the singularity of vision unique to original and unoriginal artists alike -- Gwen Stefani and Miles Davis have each enclosed their audience in a total aesthetic world, whose signposts, roads, rivers, and land's ends are all constructed out of subjective and interpretive atoms. The limits of Tibbetts' world are always the limits of the guitar, volcanic yawp of the modernized post- Hendrix, McLaughlin, Beck, Holdsworth, Di Meola, Van Halen universe. Tibbetts reminds us, always, that this universe is part of the sum total, the ethereal milky way that serves as his separate galaxy of inter-earth travel. As early as Northern Song (the first of his eight ECM records, which span twenty-eight years between them!), he titles a track "Aerial View"; by Safe Journey (1984), he is "Going Somewhere", a ten-and-a-half minute track whose path-like wandering meanders and settles upon a Lydian modal drone, with Buddhist peace drums and bleeding guitar feeding its distortion into the milky sky. It's a hungry sky.
Quick Postscript -- Although I am in possession of all of Tibbetts' records, I still look for his name amongst the "Jazz" CD's when I go to the record store, hoping to find some of my familiar friends in his bin. I like to re-experience the excitement of seeing one or more of these records, which I love so dearly, and imagining taking them home again for the first time. There is no suffering in desire, after all.
I don't know how true this conclusion is, but the Tibbetts/Tibet connection is true, from his records with the Tibetan Buddhist singer Choying Drolma, to the song titles on his recent (i.e. the last 16 years' worth of) albums ("Dzogchen Punks", "Sitavana", "Lupra"). Although this obsession, as I am lazily naming it (it makes you think something might be wrong with him, right? When we know there's nothing wrong, of course, except for the fact that he persists in the relatively arcane in a world that generally looks for the in-arcane, which means he has faith in something, which is what is really wrong, because belief is so, I don't know, pre-technology) seems to have overtaken Tibbetts slowly, in time, like a creeping suspicion that all is not right with the world, that everything that is out there is daring you to name it, to make it be more than what it is, to demand everything of it such that it demands back, from you, everything that you are.
What's the opposite of a Real Life Living Tibetan Buddhist? A Downtown Greenwich Villager? How about a wind-whipped, snow-soaked Minnesotan? Perhaps it is Bob Dylan himself, who wanders with the wonder of a sage on endless sabbatical on 1970's "New Morning": "If dogs run free / Then why not we / Across the swooping plain"? These lines link Tibbetts's "The Big Wind" -- from his 1982 Acoustic Guitar'ed, Effects Percussion Duo'ed, Open Plain Dream of Repressed Americana ECM debut Northern Song - to "Dzogchen Punks" -- from the Wild-Eyed Guitar Ghost Screech of 1994s The Fall of Us All, a record that proves that ECM would go where an artist would'st go, if only said artist would take them there. Where does Tibbetts take us who are them? Into the Heart of a Night that Repeats Itself until All Embers Die Away with the Dawn.
"Night Again", from 1984's Safe Journey, neatly nutshells the Tibbettsian aesthetic -- acoustic guitars like lonely telephone wires stretched in an empty field of distanced sky. An overarching undercurrent of swelling, absent sound wind blows in from the north, the east, the west, each of which carries its grains of cultural sand, and your vision is empowered, for a moment, with a clarity, that "cutting clarity" (as the Edge once called the motivation for his delayed guitar chiming) at center of darkness. And always at this black center, a guitar so swollen with meaning that it spills inarticulately into the free space and lightning slashes in, raging on, from the north, under cover of darkness. This darkness from which, as in Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness", you would wish to be rescued, that darkness from which there is no -where or -one to be rescued to.
Life Is Suffering. Suffering Is Life.
Steve Tibbetts' Tibet shares the singularity of vision unique to original and unoriginal artists alike -- Gwen Stefani and Miles Davis have each enclosed their audience in a total aesthetic world, whose signposts, roads, rivers, and land's ends are all constructed out of subjective and interpretive atoms. The limits of Tibbetts' world are always the limits of the guitar, volcanic yawp of the modernized post- Hendrix, McLaughlin, Beck, Holdsworth, Di Meola, Van Halen universe. Tibbetts reminds us, always, that this universe is part of the sum total, the ethereal milky way that serves as his separate galaxy of inter-earth travel. As early as Northern Song (the first of his eight ECM records, which span twenty-eight years between them!), he titles a track "Aerial View"; by Safe Journey (1984), he is "Going Somewhere", a ten-and-a-half minute track whose path-like wandering meanders and settles upon a Lydian modal drone, with Buddhist peace drums and bleeding guitar feeding its distortion into the milky sky. It's a hungry sky.
Tibbetts has said that he is looking for something interesting "far from home" -- he records the sounds of where he goes (all of his records credit him as playing "Tapes") -- and builds tracks around them. These tracks proceed with a logic that, after years of relistening, I cannot grasp, but this logic does not escape me -- it is as if the logic of this music exists purely to wriggle, slipping, from mind into air; as if this sound waxes as rhetorical as air, whose infinite patterns are accessible only when we determine ourselves of value to imagine them. As if we could actually determine our value in the face of "the world". As if "value" was ours, or anyone's, or anything, to determine. Tibbetts-ian Tibet makes sense of what has not yet been determined, of musical firmament whose elements peel back all four corners of the earth and reveal a perfectly smoothed surface, like the mind at rest in its Buddhist nest of purest cloudnoise.
Quick Postscript -- Although I am in possession of all of Tibbetts' records, I still look for his name amongst the "Jazz" CD's when I go to the record store, hoping to find some of my familiar friends in his bin. I like to re-experience the excitement of seeing one or more of these records, which I love so dearly, and imagining taking them home again for the first time. There is no suffering in desire, after all.
(Check out all of Tibbetts's work, with some excellent writings and biographical info, at http://stevetibbetts.com. And of course, www.ecmrecords.com, the label smart enough to anticipate him while knowing that he was the one to begin the anticipation.)
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Utopia: Pop Topic of Pure Unimportance
What to make of Todd Rundgren's Utopia? Certainly not a whole blogspot, but perhaps a stop on the blog, a blinded blip spot upon the screen saver of popped-out sounds....
(For specific context you can read about Utopia on Wikipedia, and the information is in good enough order for me to leave most embellishments aside for now. Yet, can't resist this, a quick synopsis:
"Todd Rundgren and Utopia -- 70's - 80's. Assignment: describe "who" "they" were. Rundgren was/is a unique producer, singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, front man, composer, bandleader, and all other kinds of things. He made a great living producing records for rock bands -- Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls -- and making solo records of all musical sorts on the side. And on the side of THAT (like an extra order of bacon (or something)) he had a band called Utopia, which included a bunch of no-names (to the general public -- Moogy Klingman, anyone?) -- these guys were respected professionals in the biz, but this wasn't a supergroup. They originally started as a snazzed up progressive-rock-art band (3 keyboardists on their first record!) with ineffable ideas/technique, without the internal/external seriousness of Important Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. As time went on (and it did go on!), Utopia became a very minor and curious pop band, really not like anything else, but also sounding like a perfect pop band, but also not like anything else, while also sounding conspicuously like everything else, such that no one could notice them unless they intended to notice them, meaning that they would have had to have known to notice them..."
I'll start near, but not completely, at the beginning, with this: a live performance of "Sunburst Finish", from the 1977 RA album.
Sunburst Finish, live, is kinda goofy -- the dress and hair and audience, the drab colors and ragged costumes, as if this is a performance of abstract musical theater, the context of which is forbidden to all of us looking historically at the screen. But the performance is incredibly agile, ambi- and multi- dextrous. A melody is sung over a too-many-notes-in-one-space, laughably relaxed and complex riff, the singing shared equally by three men whose voices, while of not the same caliber or quality, can each easily carry the melody safely across shifting rhythmic sands. While a few pop bands have had multiple singers -- the Eagles, Kiss, The Beatles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac all come lovingly to mind -- usually songs are "owned" by a singer or a voice, and that "ownership" creates the "meaning" and "message" of the song -- i.e, a "Paul Stanley song", or a "John Lennon song". But in this Utopia track, all three singers are the messengers. Later, they harmonize over what sounds like a ship sliding into the edge of the sea with an orange sun leading them onward, towards deeper waters of wizardry. Todd Rundgren has the "best" voice, so he takes the lead at the end before a disseminating a knuckle-clutch-the-highest-note guitar solo into the heart of a screaming orange jubilee sun....
But back to the singing over the initial riff -- it's the gaudiness of the act, combined with the hum-drum-iness of its execution, that gets me. Keep in mind that the "heyday" of musical prowess in rock and roll was really the 70's. I don't mean that "bands were better musicians then" (What a preposterous thing to even think to think. Who's going to publish the double-blind studies on that?), but more that this was a time when Rock music was claiming a musical legitimacy and complexity as a "part" of its identity and self definition. (Even the Ultimate American himself, "Uncle Ted" Nugent, had songs in odd time signatures as a sign of pure capitalist, sold-out-arena solidarity...) And part of this ultimate effort towards legitimacy was to flaunt, to brag, to expose, to shout one's prowess into the name of the heavens as a way of claiming one was there, that one had come, seen, laid waste to, politicized...
With that as contextual backdrop, relisten and relook at the riff and the singing in this clip: it's quite concentrated, yet totally casual, and nearly haphazard, in its delivery. And that's what Utopia brought to this 70's bombast, even a smile when Rundgren takes a high note and sleepily mangles it like Peter Brady. This is high art rock on the silliness of Spinal Tap stonehenge stages, made more normal by the homemade custom of cloth-cut, space-ape-aged costumes.
Utopia are totally unimportant. As they intend to be. Which makes the ease with which the difficulty of the musical task is accomplished as imperfectly astonishing as it ought to be for us outsiders.
(As a quick aside, RA's entire second side is a monstrous piece of Art Rock Storytelling entitled "Singring and the Glass Guitar." (Was it once intended to be "Sigmund and the Glass Cigar"?) In it, each member has their "own song" where they each solo (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums) and end each of their solos with a thematic section that they then all overlap in the song's epic denoument. Art Rock Fairy-Story Arche-Type in deed.)
(For specific context you can read about Utopia on Wikipedia, and the information is in good enough order for me to leave most embellishments aside for now. Yet, can't resist this, a quick synopsis:
"Todd Rundgren and Utopia -- 70's - 80's. Assignment: describe "who" "they" were. Rundgren was/is a unique producer, singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, front man, composer, bandleader, and all other kinds of things. He made a great living producing records for rock bands -- Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls -- and making solo records of all musical sorts on the side. And on the side of THAT (like an extra order of bacon (or something)) he had a band called Utopia, which included a bunch of no-names (to the general public -- Moogy Klingman, anyone?) -- these guys were respected professionals in the biz, but this wasn't a supergroup. They originally started as a snazzed up progressive-rock-art band (3 keyboardists on their first record!) with ineffable ideas/technique, without the internal/external seriousness of Important Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. As time went on (and it did go on!), Utopia became a very minor and curious pop band, really not like anything else, but also sounding like a perfect pop band, but also not like anything else, while also sounding conspicuously like everything else, such that no one could notice them unless they intended to notice them, meaning that they would have had to have known to notice them..."
I'll start near, but not completely, at the beginning, with this: a live performance of "Sunburst Finish", from the 1977 RA album.
Sunburst Finish, live, is kinda goofy -- the dress and hair and audience, the drab colors and ragged costumes, as if this is a performance of abstract musical theater, the context of which is forbidden to all of us looking historically at the screen. But the performance is incredibly agile, ambi- and multi- dextrous. A melody is sung over a too-many-notes-in-one-space, laughably relaxed and complex riff, the singing shared equally by three men whose voices, while of not the same caliber or quality, can each easily carry the melody safely across shifting rhythmic sands. While a few pop bands have had multiple singers -- the Eagles, Kiss, The Beatles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac all come lovingly to mind -- usually songs are "owned" by a singer or a voice, and that "ownership" creates the "meaning" and "message" of the song -- i.e, a "Paul Stanley song", or a "John Lennon song". But in this Utopia track, all three singers are the messengers. Later, they harmonize over what sounds like a ship sliding into the edge of the sea with an orange sun leading them onward, towards deeper waters of wizardry. Todd Rundgren has the "best" voice, so he takes the lead at the end before a disseminating a knuckle-clutch-the-highest-note guitar solo into the heart of a screaming orange jubilee sun....
But back to the singing over the initial riff -- it's the gaudiness of the act, combined with the hum-drum-iness of its execution, that gets me. Keep in mind that the "heyday" of musical prowess in rock and roll was really the 70's. I don't mean that "bands were better musicians then" (What a preposterous thing to even think to think. Who's going to publish the double-blind studies on that?), but more that this was a time when Rock music was claiming a musical legitimacy and complexity as a "part" of its identity and self definition. (Even the Ultimate American himself, "Uncle Ted" Nugent, had songs in odd time signatures as a sign of pure capitalist, sold-out-arena solidarity...) And part of this ultimate effort towards legitimacy was to flaunt, to brag, to expose, to shout one's prowess into the name of the heavens as a way of claiming one was there, that one had come, seen, laid waste to, politicized...
With that as contextual backdrop, relisten and relook at the riff and the singing in this clip: it's quite concentrated, yet totally casual, and nearly haphazard, in its delivery. And that's what Utopia brought to this 70's bombast, even a smile when Rundgren takes a high note and sleepily mangles it like Peter Brady. This is high art rock on the silliness of Spinal Tap stonehenge stages, made more normal by the homemade custom of cloth-cut, space-ape-aged costumes.
Utopia are totally unimportant. As they intend to be. Which makes the ease with which the difficulty of the musical task is accomplished as imperfectly astonishing as it ought to be for us outsiders.
(As a quick aside, RA's entire second side is a monstrous piece of Art Rock Storytelling entitled "Singring and the Glass Guitar." (Was it once intended to be "Sigmund and the Glass Cigar"?) In it, each member has their "own song" where they each solo (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums) and end each of their solos with a thematic section that they then all overlap in the song's epic denoument. Art Rock Fairy-Story Arche-Type in deed.)
-----
Somehow, it's 1984. We ended all up in here, synthesized and drum-machinated on our way to an empty heaven, where pleasure could only be the perfect automaticized autonomy -- and so does Utopia with their Oblivion album, where "Crybaby" (audio) meets "Crybaby" (video). (Nice irony,unimportance of a band no one even knew to know was there). This track
The Set-up
In my bedroom, we have a small Panasonic CD "stereo", an all-inclusive AM/FM receiver with a CD player and a nifty remote control. (I don't think the am/fm have actually ever been used, but since it belongs to my wife, as a gift from her former boyfriend, it is part of a life that precedes me, and therefore has an unknown history, which most certainly adds to its mystique.) I'm sure this thing cost $300 a few years ago, and I could get a new one right now for $50, so it has aged with the depreciation usually saved for foreign cars. (This thing has paid for itself and now actually pays for me to use it, strangely enough....)
"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.
Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.
Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.
None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.
-----
"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.
-----
Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.
-----
Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.
-----
None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.
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