a tennis ball off a wall

Butch Hancock laying down a formidable palindrome.

Uncle Tupelo, "Blues Dies Hard" (bonus track on No Depression)
Butch Hancock live at the Red Dragon, Baton Rouge, 2/10/2011
Neil Young, Le Noise
Dinosaur, Jr., Bug

I've never heard this song at the tail end of the bonus tracks of No Drepression, after all the herky jerky bouncing post punk angst off the grain silos, like a bored kid does a tennis ball off a wall. With focus. "Blues Dies Hard" though is a different sort of thing. I suspect it's a cover I don't recognize (sounds like Dinosaur, Jr.), or a Neil Youngism growing hot in young Jay Farrar's pocket but it is lovely lovely. It sounds like the speakers went out in your car. I thought it made me want to hear the new Neil Young, despite the way I think Daniel Lanois generally over butters the toast he is privaleged to get. The butter-to-toast ratio is just right on this one.


Here are all five of the Butch Hancock performances I caught the other night: "Spilt and Slide pt.1", the palindrome thing from above, a cover of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Had No Place to Fall", a new song "Danglin' Diamonds" and a song he wrote for his fellow Flatlander Joe Ely, "If You Were a Bluebird" performed with Gina Forsyth on fiddle.

I love

Stereolab, Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements

I love Rhapsody + iPhone + 3G + car stereo aux input + my car + its sunroof + the crack of spring. I love Stereolab for still being around for nearly two decades, ever evolving and yet still kinda being the same band the ground out "Jenny Ondioline." I love their unabashed Frenchness, their icy Socialist flair. I love that they love Velvet Underground so much that they created themselves in their image. I love how indebted they are to that sound. I love how the hip hop booming from the cars around me at the car wash all owed Dr. Dre a wet 'n' sloppy. I love this letter someone supposedly found where Dr. Dre made a mental note to "make some loot off these fools" at Burning Man. I love the idea that he did it, even if he didn't.


I love this song. 

I love my wife, all the way. More than I love all these things. I don't talk about her all that much here because the things I talk about here are trivial, fleeting, butterflies-in-nets, and she is bigger and more than all of that.

I love the reproduction of "Sunflowers" sitting in a neighbor's driveway and the box of paperbacks upon which it was leaning. I love that Stereolab album again, and I love the Lou Reed they love. I love that  @JackPendarvis was driving away twitter followers with Rigoletto jokes.  I love this little passage from one of Lester Bangs' zillion interviews with Lou Reed that I happened to read this morning:

I got eight hundred albums in the can just in case. There's all sorts of stuff, like one is I rewrote my own version of Rigoletto, you know the opera by Scriabin, except it's set in this Puetro Rican leather bar where all the customers are amputated at the thigh and rolling around on these little carts on wheels. They keep trying to have punchouts, except the carts keep bumping and they can't reach each other. So they got very frustrated. I sang all the parts myself, and I stole all the lyrics off old "Lucas Tanner" dialogue, but nobody will notice the difference because I made the music salsa and it's so fucking loud you can't hear any of the words. I'm not gonna put that out just yet. They'll have to wait for that.

I love how things tie together.

a few things

Black petunias.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Aaron Copland: Sextet [1937]/Piano Variations [1930]/Piano Quartet [1950] and Hindemith: Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano & Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57
AlJazeera live Egypt coverage via YouTube




Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950. (from here)

the clockwork of the world

The soon-to-be remains of the long derelict portion of the Westmoreland shopping center as seen on the walk home. It used to be cavernous flea market and there was the loosest of talk about it becoming a mixed-use development with a Borders in it and condos above, and I've heard it is becoming part of the Catholic high school that lies on another block behind it. I guess there's little chance the Catholics will put in a decent coffee shop with wifi right there by the house. Frank took a much cooler picture, as he always does.

Maxim Rysanov, Bach: Suites Nos. 1, 4, and 5
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Edo de Waart, cond.), Reich: Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards 
I Solisti Italiani, Vivaldi: 6 Violin Concerti, Op. 6
Jan de Winne, Handel. Sonatas for flute and basso continuo

11,842 words drafted together as of last night, sorta like unwilling soldiers. Bear in mind the lion's share has already been written as little boxcars of wisdom, they just need to be linked up into a train of thought. I will avoid any depot and derailment analogies for the time being.

Ooh, I don't think I've ever heard this one Reich piece before. It is a park full of birds chirping all at once as a hawk circles overhead, momentarily quelling the communicative din which rises with the passing of its shadow. The birds in the camellia trees outside our door do this with the hawk aht lives in the neighbor's tree. It is very "shhh.... the cops" when the hawk makes its rounds. And the Bach viola suites were the clockwork of the world.  I used to eschew Bach and Mozart because I thought their music was too perfect, lacking the surprise I liked in the music I liked. Each note was the only thing that could follow the previous, and it also fully informed the next, like you could reverse engineer the whole piece with one note in the middle and their minds. This notion is, of course, stupid, but I still almost never listen to Mozart. I can't even make myself click on it. Vivaldi always seems to be hanging on by a thread, though, like he might fall off that trapeze any second and that's why the audience loves the circus.

I like how in both these Handel and Bach recordings I can hear the performer's breathe.


 

To grease her wooden leg

A leaflet posted around the scene. Do it. I dare you. I don't really care much about the Scientologists (the subjects behind each of those searches) one way or the other but I will note that Jack Parsons, books about whom I have just quit reading, was good friends with L. Ron Hubbard who married one Sara Northrup, half-sister of Jack's first wife Helen. Evidently Jack was carrying on with Sara (as high-minded rocket science occultists are wont to do) while she lived with the young couple and L. Ron swooped in for the kill.

Fieldswork, Door
McCoy Tyner, Echoes of a Friend
Nico Muhly, I Drink the Air Before Me
George Harrison, Electronic Sound
Boards of Canada, Music Has the Right to Children

Media Announcements: The Dirtbombs, Alejandro Escovedo review, Marc Olson, and up, up, up with GIVERS in this week's Record Crate blog for 225 Magazine. I had to untweet this to make it semi-legible here.

Fieldwork - the trio of pianist Vijay Iler, drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and saxophonist alto saxophonist Steve Lehman - continues to kick my ass. This McCoy Tyner tribute album to John Coltrane is one of my favorite jazz albums ever, but there is anoth Coltrane tribute, maybe Pharoah Sanders, that I heard once. It was a deafening full-band manifestation of suffering and loss, bellowing tears, but I've never found exactly it. This Nico Muhly album is amazing but is wearing me out; it's a workout. I checked out this George Harrison curiosity while procurring more Beatle product for the wee one. resistance is futile. when at the counter, the most passive-aggressive impromptu library checkout training session unfolded in a cascade of sighs before me. It was kinda beautiful how put upon all parties were and how it spread to us patrons in line; it was like we shouldered the non-existant burden together. But anyway....Fieldwork...

I can't think of the last time a jazz trio hit me right where I live as they do. Also W. C. Handy's autibiography is a wellspring of poetic prose, though I'm not sure I'm down for the whole thing. I love the way he has things boomerang around a sentence:

Brute strength and plenty of it was required in the pipe works, but I was not very strong.

and then song lyrics included, like this for "Little Lady Goin' to the Country" played on the fiddle by his Uncle Whit while the young W.C. tapped on the strings with knitting needles to provide a rhythm

Sally got a meat skin laid away
Sally got a meat skin laid away
Sally got a meat skin laid away
To grease her wooden leg every day.

I can think of no better reason to lay away a meat skin.


George Harrison, "Electronic Sound (Part One)"

Compartmentalizing

Compartmentalizing: in this case, at the plant store.

Last night:
George Pendle, Strange angel : the otherworldly life of rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons
Wes Montgomery, Wes Montgomery's Finest Hour
Shorty Rogers, The Fouth Dimension in Sound
Bill Evans Trio, Quiet Now

Up to 8334 words on the first compilation and edit, though this last chapter needs some work.

Today:
Matthew Shipp, 4D
Bill Evans, Sunday at the Village Vanguard
The Necks, Mosquito
W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues
Fieldwork feat. Vijay Iler, Simulated Progress
Radiohead, In Rainbows
The Dirtbombs, remixes from Party Store (here, here, and here)

I'm dropping out of Strange angel for the same reason I don't like my last chapter - just get to it, already. I'm not sure I've ever really given Bill Evans my full ears. He's buried just up the street from me. I was looking for something soft but complete to write to last night and Quiet Now was what I was telling myself as the album of that name played out over my conscious listening. Listenig right now, Sunday is a masterwork of sizzling cymbals. My minimalist listening tendency is requesting that the melodies be relegated to a pulse bolstering up the sting, hence where the Necks come in, since that's pretty much what they do, but wow, Bill Evans is good. 

The songs on Sunday are landscapes painting themselves, each elementment applying one translucent layer of its own golden sap at a time, the way the real masters did it. It's not the pigment but the glaze and the see-through. It made me think how we don't really see a thing; we see its molecules, all bunched up, all of them and what we see is the blur of that bunching. We see those spaces between the molecules. I wonder if what we hear works the same way? OK, I know what's wrong with my chapter now.

I'm ditching Sex and rockets too for W. C Handy's autobiography. Sentences! From the first few pages:

Where the Tennessee River, like a silver snake, winds her way through the red clay hills of Alabama, sits high on these hills my home town, Florence.

I was too small to know what a viper was my mother caught me in the act of picking one up. I found it upon awakening in my bed.

I was an expert with a rock, of which there was no scarcity.

...I knew the music of every songbird and all the symphonies of their unpremeditated heart.

The run-on is gloriously his. The Dirtbombs being remixed back into techno posesses a similar serpentine beauty, ouroboros, even.


W. C. Handy, "Memphis Blues"


The Necks, "The Royal Family"


Bill Evans Trio, "Alice in Wonderland"


Ed. to add: Fieldwork is the kind of jazz outfit we who work in this field refer to as a "motherfucker."

post-rock-listening pose

My post-rock-listening pose.

Goddamn Electric Bill, Topics for Gossip and Jazz (streaming at Spinner)
Cotton Jones, Paranoid Coccoon
Japancakes, Loveless
Mogwai, EP+6
Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Not for nothing, Goddamn Electric Bill is the best band name I've heard in some time. The band is almost as good as the name, even, which is a plus in their favor, Vince Clark-era DMode synth mobiles with a possible steel guitar or suitable steel guitar substitute. It would adequately soundtrack a breakup-montage in a mid-budget movie set in Portland.


Japancakes do the whole My Bloody Valentine album Loveless. Supposedly the band came together when the steel guitar player assembled as many peopel as he could to play an open D chord simultaneously for as long as they could, which is something I'd like to have heard.


That post-trim glow. I can't wait to get my new glasses. I got short-timer syndrome with these now.