George Crumb

George Crumb, for lack of a more precise term, makes weird music. It is shadowy stuff that seems to be cast from its performers rather than to come directly from them, dark anti-reflections of life. Quiet and seemingly undefined for vast expanses then suddenly clamorous and monumental, like you are walking through the fog and unexpectedly bump your head on a skyscraper.

Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death: At first, this is a rather rock 'n' roll piece for Crumb, (though he might balk at this description) utilizing the electromagnetic hum of amps as its baseline, disjointed electric guitar, drum lines and the occasional prog keyboard interruption. There is even a growled vocal line that bears shocking resemblance to the maniacal chuckle at the beginning of "Wipeout. " Ultimately though, the pieces succumbs to dream logic like much of Crumb's work, vocal lines punctuated by fleeting thoughts guised as weird percussive tings and rattles and thuds.

Here are four of the sections of A Little Suite Christmas, A.D. 1979, performed by pianist Jiun Yoong Lim:

I really like seeing him reach over and pound the strings to conjure those dark-cloud overtones.

Crumb occupies a sonic between space - his music is markedly unconventional, would hardly pass inspection as "music" to most regular tastes, yet I find it imminently accessible stuff. It operates on background channels, like Satie does, or grocery store music, does, or sounds outside your window do. Parts of it feel remembered as it issues out, like the quotations of Pacelbel's Canon in the Canticle of the Holy section of the above piece.

Quest is a sweet, cerebral lyrical excursion of a guitar into the curious wood, scampering like a fox in the snow. There is a distinct nervous curiosity to the interplay of the instruments, slightly laced with panic. In the composer's own words:

The poetic basis for Quest was never very clearly articulated in my thinking. I recall pondering images such as the famous incipit of Dante's Inferno ("In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy mood, astray ...") and a line from Lorca ("The dark paths of the guitar"); also the concept of a "quest" as a long tortuous journey towards an ecstatic and transfigured feeling of "arrival" became associated with certain musical ideas during the sketching process. But although the movement titles are poetic and symbolic, there is no precise programmatic meaning implied.

The Official George Crumb website, by the way, is the gold standard of how an artist should document their work. His notes for Federico's Little Songs for Children are reveal the process he goes through, moving through obsessions with material to set to music, thinking he's exhausted Lorca only to find one more piece to draw him in. Also there is this bit

The concluding piece, Silly Song (Prestissimo [and alternately: molto più lento]; with piccolo), is ... just a silly song!

[outsideleft] Vic Chesnutt: The Ringer

Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, and the Amorphous Strums
Dark Developments
(Orange Twin)

There are those who choose to collaborate, one suspects, because of an inability to create something meaningful on their own. I suspect that this is the dark undercurrent of many an indie rock ‘n roll band member. In many groups, collaboration results in a sum that falls short of a totaling of parts, that a completed band version is somehow less than the songwriter going at it alone (see the YouTube clip of the acoustic version of anything). And then when the songwriter realizes this, they eventually sack the band and go it alone—guitar, stool and bared soul vs. the universe. That kind of trajectory only leads to isolation, ego-explosion and worst of all, Beatle-esque laptop artists.

Fortunately, Vic Chesnutt is not that kind of songwriter. He is a rare commodity that writes rather brilliant songs on his own, but when coupled with a group of other musicians, invests in them a spirit of greatness they never quite reached on their own. Take Lambchop, for instance – a perfectly fine, textured band that creates its own subtle magic on its many records you’ve never listened to, but when backing up Vic on The Salesman and Bernadette they created something cosmic. Ditto with Widespread Panic on their outings under the Brute moniker, and he even managed to make the dour Silver Mt. Zion dudes crack a smile on last year’s North Star Deserter.

On Dark Developments, Vic finds a magic formula with Elf Power, and amiable band that had the mixed fortune of being one of the least exciting groups in the Elephant 6 cabal. Elf Power is one of many groups that generally elicit, really through no fault of their own, a shrugged “I like them well enough.” My impulse is to champion a group like that, but I have shrugged the same reaction after listening to them. I find that while I too like them well enough, I rather love them with Vic Chesnutt at the helm, and maybe it’s a spillover of the love people have for him. Vic is a guy people adore, who they want to call "Vic," even when his albums are a little unfocused (see Drunk, though I kinda love it for that very reason. See what I mean?)

Everyone is loosened up in Vic’s presence, and the elves power these songs with a diminished variant the sixties-fetishism with which I (maybe wrongly) associate them. Songs like “Little Fucker” are aglow in naughtiness and tremolo stoney bliss, arrogant and searing. “Bilocating Dog” is a strange little story like those on Vic’s excellent collaboration with Van Dyke Parks Ghetto Bells, one that speaks of mental problems and old ladies with smirking charm and slyly epic scale.
“Mad Passion of the Stoic” is a dense tale of damage and failure that offers the ballast for this breezy record – oh how wrong things sparkle and entrance hoarsely whispers the narrator over a slow burning melody that depicts the killing cleansing magma of which he sings in the second verse.

What is beautiful about having Vic Chesnutt around is that he apparently inspires extremes in his collaborators they seem reticent to undertake on their own, such as this dreary, delicious melodrama or the ebullient Dylan Thomas listing of characters in “Phil the Fiddler”, where he lists off folks like Dick the Butcher and Tom the Bootblack as if he’s flipping idly through a scrapbook in the attic only to stop and focus on The girl in the gingham dress. You have know idea what he's specifically talking about, but we all have ideas about girls in gingham dresses, and that is the power in Vic Chesnutt's songs.

Vic is nearly alone nowadays in being a songwriter able to evoke a greater narrative out of pointed details, and maybe I hear this because there is something about him that I love, and maybe he channels that love through the amplifier of his collaborators. That’s a lot of maybe’s—and what collaboration isn’t?—that adds up to a resounding yes.

Link to original

jawbone of an ass

I used to work with this guy who is likely best described as a curious redneck. Country as hell, really nice guy, wanted to know about things even though he had no ambitions to participate in those things. For instance, we always went to lunch at the same cheap Chinese food place and he would consistently marvel that anyone could eat food with sticks - not that they did, but they could, and preferred to eat that way instead of with a knife and fork. On the way back to the office, he postulated that maybe they were born with that ability and I cavalierly offered, "I can totally eat with chopsticks, I just never think to ask for them." Why I said this I have no idea, since I'd never eaten with chopsticks in my life. He replied, "No shit? Tomorrow I'm buying you lunch. I want to see you eat that whole thing with chopsticks."

That night I went out to a Chinese buffet, determined to acquire this skill. I fumbled though noodles, dropped countless pieces of sweet-and-sour chicken on my shirt, and may have flung broccoli onto the floor, starting to feel some kinship with my redneck friend - why would anyone choose to do this? - until eventually I got the hang of it, and by the final plate of fried rice, I was a facsimile of a seasoned expert. This is, by the way, how all men acquire whatever skills they have, purely out of fear of being caught in their own pointless lies.

Next day, I passed my test and sent my friend's head to shaking. "Man, I didn't think you could do it. You seem like the type that would show off a skill like that every time." Checkmate. Then he went on "Cuz the only time I've ever picked up a set of chopsticks was when I played this piece by I-annis ZEE-nakis. We had to tap on a metal bucket with chopsticks." I nearly dropped my chopsticks. I had righteously assumed that I was the only person to know about the hidden realm of contemporary music, or at least I knew more than the guy that drove an oversized white truck and listened to Alabama all day.

"Oh yeah, I was a percussion major in college, and we always had to play that crazy shit. There was one where I had to get on stage and play a jawbone of an ass (that piece possibly being John Cage's Third Constriction). Man, I was embarrassed. Right there on the program it said '[his name], comma, jawbone of an ass'. My dad still gives me shit about that. 'I paid for four years of college for you to play a jawbone of an ass!'" I remained dumbfounded, trying to hold my tempura, as well as my dignity, with these flimsy goddamn sticks, realizing Jethro had a much more intimate knowledge of this prized secret music of mine than I ever would. I asked him about it, looking for names of things to seek out, but he said he only fooled with that stuff for class. "I'd learn to play it and then forget it. I-annis ZEE-nakis, though, I'll never forget that name. I had to say it a hundred times before I got it right."

Thank you Kroumata, for being a kick-ass percussion ensemble and for reminding me of this.

[The Record Crate] Now That was a Festival

I only made it to the Sunday installment of the tenth-annual Voodoo Experience this weekend, missing Nine Inch Nails CGI apocalypse and the time barrier being ignored by Lil Wayne, but I did have a near-perfect rock festival day. Waiting to go through security, I saw no less than three Parliament shirts, hoping that either they were a surprise addition about which I was unaware (they weren’t) was an omen of things to come (it was). I stopped in the New Orleans Bingo! Parlour which this year upsized into a bona fide circus tent. I wedged into the crowd, standing next to a muscly woman wearing a gold leotard and a fake moustache as I witnessed the Bingo! Show’s sub soul subversion, reducing R&B to a clatter and a croon, sirens and giggles, all with a primal throb standing in for a full soul revue. The fake moustache woman pushed past me, the first of approximately 10,000 people to do so that day thinking there must be a lot more spots up front, and made her way to a white rope dangling from the tent. She ascended the rope and set about a perfect trapeze accompaniment to Bingo! circus music of the damned.

As she dismounted, Clint Maedgen from Bingo! exclaimed, “That is so f*** in’ cool! I can’t believe you can do that!” and I felt the same way about the progression of the Bingo! enterprise over the years, having witnessed the early days of Liquidrone at M’s Fine and Mellow Café and practices in a house I shared with some then members in Spanish Town over a decade ago. Stuff like this is what sets Voodoo and New Orleans apart from other festival destinations.

You find yourself seeing bands you’d never see otherwise at these things. Dashboard Confessional was all anthems, all the time, pleasant enough like the slight breeze from the cusp of fall crossing City Park, but I wandered off thinking "Diet Journey." I was excited to see Kanye West protégé (does that make him a Kanygé?) Lupe Fiasco. I’m not sure why Lupe didn’t quite take off like I thought he would, pitting the sophisticated and the personal in glimmering, seamless hip-hop context. “Hip-hop saved my life” he says, and in return he gives it his all, but with all that gratitude and positivism there is little grit. The dismantled variation at the beginning of “Go Go Go Gadget” offered a bit of loose turf before it reverted to its Xbox-game paced natural state, but otherwise I couldn’t find any traction with his show.

I remain amazed by the shirtless masses that attend these things just to publicly nap in dog piles with their sunglasses their only remarkable features.

There are three constants in New Orleans festival life: cochon de lait, Deacon John doing a tribute to a New Orleans music titan you didn’t realize wrote all those songs, and mango sorbet; and thankfully, all three were to be had in a sumptuous triangle by the Preservation Jazz Hall tent.

Dirty Dozen Brass Band finally got the day up to liftoff velocity, pulling enough P- Funk tropes out of the air to morph into make that funk uncut, fulfilling the promise of all those Parliament shirts from the gate. Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings followed, opening a can of Tina Turner-brand whoopass on the vintage soul vibration for which they are known. With groups like them and Charles Walker & the Dynamites around, there might just be some hope for mankind after all. Checking my schedule, I made the gamble and left her shimmying to make it back to the Bingo tent for the Butthole Surfers.

It seems silly for a grown man to be typing this phrase, but I’ve been waiting to see the Butthole Surfers for about 20 years now, having been too sick to go when they played one of the first shows in The Varsity’s post-movie house days. If psychedelic music can be seen as a road, then down at the far end there is a set of skid marks leading to a flipped pickup, and smeared in the mud on the side is the name Butthole Surfers. Turns out there was no hurry to get there, as the elaborate multimedia setup for which the band is famous took longer than expected. During the Beckettian mic check, lead singer Gibby Haynes left his delay unit repeating “check…check…check” until it incited a chant from the crowd. Then he let it go on for a couple minutes longer, leaving some in the crowd who were familiar with the Surfers’ perverse strategies for provocation worrying that this might actually be the show.

But once every sound tech had been brow-beaten, the group launched into a full lysergic rock attack, three different seizure-inducing film loops beamed all over the tent. It was an explosion of the facets that make a rock show: the beat, the visuals, the vibration, everything blown to insane excess. Sensing the grumblings that a number of fans were missing R.E.M. on the main stage, the group graciously tore into a rather good cover of “The One I Love,” which, to me, could not have been bested by the actual thing a football field away. Finally at the end of the show, the fog machines erupted, giving the now amorphous din a physical form, filmstrips still projecting on them made the mass look like a supernova. The smoke continued to expand until it filled the tent, as the roadies turned off the hissing amps left to feed back on themselves. When you come to the expanse of a rock festival, especially one with a circus tent, you want spectacle, something huger than yourself, huger than the music, and I can think of no better finale than this.

Link to original with events calendar

that deep

One of my co-workers stopped by to report the ostentatious displays of notice-me hipsterism at the coffee shop across the street, particularly a skinny kid in sunglasses holding up his Nietzsche paperback for the room to see him reading it, so I figured I could at least one-up that by blogging a Charles Bukowski poem of which the Brahms Viola Sonata in F minor, Op, 120, No. 1 reminded me. No really, it really did make me think of it. I'm just that deep. Serious, y'all.

And I have some William Burroughs quotes at the ready, should a full on hipster-lit-nerd cliché battle ensue. Just sayin...

"Friends with the Darkness" by Charles Bukowski

I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible--
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.

the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.

finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into
the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and
monotonous
jobs
by strange men behind desks
men without eyes men without faces
who would take away my hours
break them
piss on them.

now I work for the editors the readers the
critics

but still hang around and drink with
Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the
Bee
some buddies
some men
sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.

[outsideleft] A Public Service Announcement on Behalf of The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats
Satanic Messiah EP
(http://satanicmessiah.com)

Let me ask you, when was the last time a one-time PayPal transaction of $6.66 saved your life? Not only will it allow you to purchase this fine digital EP by The Mountain Goats, a band that has given you so much over the years, but a portion of that $6.66 will go towards efforts initiated and maintained by the band to keep demons from popping up out of dark closets unexpectedly and harvesting your still-beating hearts, allowing your entrails, and thereby your secrets, to spill out onto the floor right there in front of everyone. That's right, actual demons. Demons have a license from The Universe to harvest you in order to balance out the impact of your uncountable, horrible sins, and, if you are reading this, haven't gotten to you yet simply because of backlog and the corralling skills of The Mountain Goats.

Here is how it works. Due to a longtime familiarity with the forces of darkness, The Mountain Goats get a signal that demon is about to appear and they are all like "Hey, Demons! Check me out!" right as the beasts enter the mortal plane. Fleet-footed as a Mountain Goats are known to be, they engage the demons in chase to a spot behind the convenience store where runaway teenagers hide in the weeds with baseball bats. The teenagers beat the shit out of the demons and then take all the money in the demon's wallet to buy an Icee and some drugs later. Simple and effective.

Sure, you may not want to be directly complicit in the further drug-addledness of teenagers, but picture being in a meeting and having a goddamn demon bust in and harvest your heart and reveal your secrets. Your coworkers will be stunned and pitying for a moment and then look at your entrails and see that you are a cross-dresser, or you always smell your fingers after going to the bathroom, or you think about driving through the guardrail every time you cross a bridge. When they see these things about you, your peers will feel disgusted by you, and as soon as someone gets up here to clean up this mess, you will be but an unpleasant distant memory to them. Someone will ease in and start doing your job, and you will be effectively erased from the Book of Life. You don't need that shit. And maybe, just maybe a lifetime of piety and prayer will sustain you against the heart-hungry beasts of the pit, but who has the time nowadays? $6.66 is a small price to pay to keep your secrets safe, keep your family safe, and to keep The Mountain Goats in business.

Link

For Philip, Morton, David, Harold and Don

Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973)

Oil on canvas 77 1/2 x 103 1/2 in.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
(from here)

Being able to let Morton Feldman's gargantuan yet spare For Philip Guston trickle out over the course of the day is a much more productive way to face down the abyss than laying under tight covers, eyeing unfinished paintings on the walls with a plate of cakes resting on your belly, tempting as that actually sounds.

Speaking of, I am thirty pages into David Foster Wallace's Everything and More; A Concise History of ∞, his rather witty and personable take on higher math, and while I know it is a weak impulse to read everything written by a suicide as a suicide note, his meditations on induction and phenomenology and infinity are littered with anxiety, using the notion of "if you really thought about it, you'd never get out of bed" as the pedestals on which he places intellectual theories without which the downward what-if spiral would never end. He has a great layman's grip on math, as well as the sweetness and humor to convey it effectively, and an uneasy comfort with discussing anxiety. It is really easy to see this book as a rationalist's variant on a religious internal dialogue, acknowledging that there are little leaps of faith one must make to not fall in the gaping holes.

Feldman's Guston is as unending hole-filled field over across which we make out little leaps, with a near-imperceptible breeze in the flute, momentary chills in the vibraphone churchbells, and the will to push on from the piano. As for Guston's Painting, Smoking, Eating, he's probably closer to the real truth than either Wallace or Feldman are.

Or in the face of anxiety, maybe the real answer lies with Harold and Don Reid and the rest The Statler Brothers...