Two posts, one night, right before bedtime! I am all kinds of fascinated with this description of Jim O'Rourke's recent living habits, listening habits, recording habits, etc. Bad Timing and Eureka were really important touchstones for me in the late 90's when the internet/mp3 thing was still coexisting politely with the compact disc/physical medium culture. i.e. I purchased Eureka on CD based on cool sounding reviews and neat sound clips I found online, then eventually snagged mp3s of Bad Timing, then pretty much endorsed whatever Jim O'Rourke did afterwards. One of my only "real" memories of him: seeing Murray Street era Sonic Youth playing live at 930 club (the day after redBus played a packed show at the Jewish Mother in VB) and when they played "Karen Revisited" watching O'Rourke double over during the feedback/drone outro section and make singing, rippling sounds with some kind of contact mic type object. Hey Jim, what was that? The next day it was back to redBus and back to the drawing board.
Last 3 weeks consisted of: work work, show, work work, family, jazz, work work, visiting friend, work work, golden weekend. Highlights of non-work:
1) Animal Collective at Prospect Park, 08/14: 4th time seeing em, first time in a huge venue. Weird to see em cross over into the bigtime. Youngish audience members freakin' out about Geologist wearing a headlamp, as if that's news to anybody at this point. Still, a great show. The enormous bass sound lent new power and fullness to the Merriweather jams (which I'd previously heard live in more skeletal form at Satellite Ballroom). And, contrary to some of the droney/minimal/uh boring(?) bootlegs I'd been hearing lately, this show featured a lot of noise, a lot of rhythm, a lot of energy.
2) Jason Moran and the Bandwagon at Village Vanguard, 08/22: Stunning, highly recommended. Moran and his Bandwagon group managed to link together ragtime, bebop/post-bop, funk, free jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop into one of the most seamless blends I've heard yet in an ostensibly "jazz" group -- no mere pastiche, just try and tell me where one influence ends and the next begins. They also made fascinating use of prerecorded sounds (of Lithuanian basketball players/announcers, of a pencil writing on paper, of Adrian Piper talking about art and society). One piece cleverly inverted the old "break down" party phrase into a manifesto for clever artistry.
3) Grizzly Bear at Williamsburg Waterfront, 08/30: got there late (I was sleeping off a 24 hr call night, ugh) and couldn't get in as the place had filled up. Pretty disappointing as my friend Tim was in town at least in part to catch that show and we both missed it. That being said, the highlight was when I was standing at the 7th St entrance, got tapped on my shoulder to move over, and then Tim pointed behind me: there I saw Jay-Z and Beyonce just kind of walking by me with their surprisingly reasonable and small entourage. This has been blogged about endlessly since, but I was literally next to these folks and it was my first strange brush with celebrity up here. PS any advance word on Blueprint 3? I haven't been following the leak game lately.
4) Battles/!!!/Flying Lotus (and Pivot, who I didn't see) at Terminal 5, 09/04: Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Warp Records, the label that pretty much defined my musical upbringing in the mid-late 90's. Flying Lotus was the huge shocker of the night. I expected FlyLo (?!?) to play a set of narcoleptic, fractured post-Dilla hip-hop and instead got slamming track after track of enormously bass-heavy dubstep, strange updates on the Warp 90's sound, weird hip-hop mutant beats, and a delightful appearance by a thoroughly chopped up Amen break at the end. He was having more fun than any of the performers who'd follow and the crowd ate it up. Thoroughly recommend checking him out when he swings by yr town. !!! were on next and managed to entertain. Jury's still out on whether they're really all that into making people dance or if the dancing is just an inevitable byproduct of the fact that they seem like closet psych-rock dudes who discovered disco and split the difference. Anyway, there was dancing. Finally, Battles. Debuted some new stuff that sounded great, didn't seem to be any huge departures from their debut disc. However, they were incredibly tight and reminded me how much I loved their jams when Mirrored appeared two years ago. Much like the Animal Collective show though, it was weird being in a crowd for a band that once belonged to a scene that seemed a bit more inclusive (or am I just being nostalgic for Cville again?). Example: the guy behind me who got really angry when I was idly clapping an afro-cuban rhythm to the beat. He talked some trash so I turned around and lectured him on 12/8 time signatures and how instead of getting mad maybe he should pay attention to the band onstage who happened to be using THAT SAME RHYTHM DURING THAT SAME SONG. i.e. !!! = tsk tsk tsk.
...I start out with bullet points and end with paragraphs. Ok, back to work!
It's just the way it is: as long as things are wild and crazy out there, I'm gonna have to get off-topic from time to time on this blog. Besides, I haven't had a chance to think through my next music-related post yet, so I'll leave you with this short, persuasive response to a far less insightful initial volley.
Coltrane + Ali. Pretty sure the first time I heard Rashied Ali's drumming was way back in high school when I checked out a copy of Stellar Regions by John Coltrane's late quartet. I continue to be blown away by the pulsatile feeling he creates in his work without ever playing in very strict meter. He'll be missed.
Pretty much any free time I've had lately has gone straight to the pursuit of visiting friends, having friends visit, and catching live (often free) music and art. Here's a little of what I've been up to in reverse chrono:
1) Rhys Chatham -- A Crimson Grail (for 200 electric guitars + 16 basses and 1 hi-hat):
What more can I say? The composition may not have broken new ground in minimalism, but its success lies in the sheer physical heft Chatham et al conjure. Arranged around us in a circle and divided into four groups, the guitarists played neat tricks like making a chord seem to sweep from right-to-left, front-to-back, like wind but with the consistency of water. The sound could be a bit muffled when sitting down, due to the other audience members being in the way of the guitarists; slowly but surely most listeners began to stand up in order to appreciate all of the treble, mid, and low end that the guitarists were producing. At its loudest, the sound physically vibrated the contents of a water bottle my friend Aaron was holding, which was unsettling and amazing.
2) Liquid Liquid -- played a set after Rhys Chatham
Incredible, possibly even better than hearing Rhys conduct a 200 guitar orchestra. Especially the set's climax, an extended version of their classic "Optimo". Liquid Liquid provided a completely different definition of minimalism during their post-Grail set. Where Chatham's work explores overtone series, punk headlong velocity, and the cumulative mass of a zillion players performing the same relatively few notes, Liquid Liquid's dance vignettes were built on the fidgety unity of four musicians playing with polymeter and timbre. It was weird to see the band at Damrosch Park Bandshell b/c i) many in the crowd seemed too old or stodgy to know what they were witnessing, ii) the cops wouldn't let people get together up front and dance, and iii) the huge stage and open air threatened to make the band sound too diffuse. Liquid Liquid won the day though, playing a taut set that steadily whipped the crowd, old/young/rich/poor/pop/art alike, into a standin-up-hootin-hollerin frenzy. Dance music, against all odds!
3) Tyshawn Sorey et al @ the Stone 08/06/09
Here's a clip of Tyshawn Sorey playing the drums. His tone is massive, his affect is both pensive and ecstatic. At the gig I caught at the Stone, though, a very different side of Tyshawn Sorey was on display. He was playing the piano with a group that consisted of a drummer, two upright bassists, and a classical guitarist. The piece was one of his own compositions and justified the many Morton Feldman references I've heard thrown around vis-a-vis Sorey's work. They played music that required monastic, near-total self-control, in which the musicians had to play with lengthy silences and suppress the urge to add even a single extraneous note. Heady pleasures arrived periodically in the form of gorgeous (and very harmonically sophisticated) piano arpeggios and runs, dialogues b/w Sorey and his nimble drummer, an extended conversation between the two upright bassists in which they played heaving chords followed by arctic silences, and a tete-a-tete b/w drummer and classical guitarist that justified the latter's somewhat tic-like tendencies. In any case, Tyshawn Sorey is an incredible player and composer and I'm excited to live in a city where I can hopefully catch him again and again.
4) Merce Cunningham Dance Company @ Rockefeller Park 08/01/09
Indeterminacy, i.e. neither I nor, presumably, the performers knew what would happen next. But it kept happening and, from time to time, stunning me into a silence more silent than itself. Like when the dancers seemed to be negotiating emotional encounters at one moment, then evoking a street scene where nothing much occurs, then standing absolutely still in wild poses for minutes at a time, like cheetahs in freeze frame...? Towards the end of the performance, a guy and his gal rode by slowly on the river by jet ski while playing a loud, cheesy top 40 R&B song; the dance absorbed this and everything else in its vicinity. R.I.P. Merce Cunningham.
5) Polvo @ Brooklyn Bowl 07/31/09
Saw em last year and was not let down, though not quite stunned either. This time around, they laid waste to amps, eardrums, and any expectations of a slack "reunion" gig. New segments are stitched into old songs more convincingly, old songs are played with an almost metal-like level of control and aggression, new songs borrow some classic rock phrasing and meld it into phrases that echo 90's indie rock classics. "Enemy Insects" had a long outro section that showed how the clean psychedelia of their late 90's Shapes album neither diverged from nor desecrated their earlier, tinnier, scrappier style. Bands of the 00's beware: face-paint, feathers, synths, and disco beats are not enough.
When I was living in Cville, I used to hit up Cassis from time to time, usually based entirely on whether or not my friend Wes, aka DJ Western Front, was the one spinning the tunes. About a year ago, he was hitting kind of a sweet spot, balancing just a smidge of pandering to the meat marketeers on the dancefloor with a taste for electro-leaning top 40 and top 40-leaning electronic music type things. Our mutual suburban upbringings would occasionally surface when we'd get excited over silly things like the time he unexpectedly dropped that old Punjabi MC song on the much-too-drunk crowd. Or every single time the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song got blended by surprise into who-knows-what.
Anyway, Wes just uploaded a short but fun 15 minute mix that cycles really quickly through a number of songs that would've been heavy-hitters last year alongside some tracks I assume he's using nowadays. A lot of the newer tracks seem to still be based on older indie-flavor-of-the-week bits, though he occasionally gets me to raise an eyebrow when the reappropriation is clever (i.e. the unexpectedly pleasant appearance of the poorly named P4k-darlings-turned-scapegoats known as "Black Kids"). Anyway, enjoy some 2007-2008-era body shakers and here's to hoping that Cville continues to enjoy new sounds emanating from Wes's decks.
Once you've employed an aleatoric device to wipe a stochastic tear from yr eye, you should find a few reasons for joy in the coming days. In reverse chronological order:
1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing as part of River To River NYC. Details here. Most importantly, it's free.
2) Considering the financially disastrous ramifications of trying to see My Bloody Valentine at one of their very few live shows. I'm teetering dangerously close to making a foolish decision in pursuit of a really amplified bliss.
3) Polvo are playing for free at South Street Seaport this Friday. I can't get excited enough for this show. They were pretty great when I saw them a little over a year ago at The Black Cat, but I'm excited to see how a year of gigging has hopefully helped them tighten their sound.
LISTEN TO THIS ONE LISTEN TO THIS ONE LISTEN TO THIS ONE -- kinda makes me wish I was closer to Charlottesville. Andrew Cedermark is bringing some serious heat with "Hard Livin", infinitely better than Titus Andronicus who never did light my fire. So much great music coming out of Cville lately, and definitely a different vibe than the excellent stuff that was coming out a few years ago.
