Honestly, back in the days when Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler doc became the Young Person's Guide to Same, I took issue with the author's assertion that German prog was part of a concerted effort to shed all all Anglo-American influences. True enough if you're listening to Neu!, Harmonia, Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Faust; but not much of the case at all when applied to most of their German prog contemporaries.
And not so true much early Can, either; which -- despite however adventurous it aiming to be -- still adhered to the arc set by Anglo-American psych/blues/"freak-out" models. But that would change soon enough , all such stuff was gradually stripped away and the music pared back to its base elements. Which is probably why Ege Bamyasi and Future Days remain the albums I most often revisit. With the former album, the band starts to shed the aforementioned baggage -- with Czukay's bass and Jaki Liebezeit's drums brought prominently into the foreground, guiding much of what transpires, mixed and crafted in a way that created an uncanny sense of sonic spatiality. The latter album followed further down that path -- far enough to achieve its own peculiar musical universe.
It was heartening to see Czukay paid proper tribute when the post-rave electronic music boom of the late 1990s came along -- his contributions as an e-musik pioneer widely recognized, thus giving him a second life with a new generation of listeners. I recall clips of him playing as festivals, bobbing and dancing around behind racks of new-gen gear, delighted that the world still kept offering him the means to further explore musical ideas that had gotten into his head from his early days as a Stockhausen student.
I suppose by this point I should quit occasionally popping up to say "please pardon my absence," as I've been doing more often than anything else (here) in many months. But I only recently discovered that this blog had been knocked out by a tech glitch. It seems google did some sort of update and the tweaking rendered some html meta-tag coding on the blog's template unparsable, thus taking this thing off the air. Which has since been remedied.
At any rate, a belated RIP is in order for e-music pioneer extraordinaire Pauline Oliveros. Admittedly, I don't own nearly enough of her work (although, if I had the money to spare, I imagine this collection from a few years back would've done nicely). But back when I used to do the free-mixing session for an experimental music radio show that aired late in the Chicago p.m. , what I did have of her work often filled the bill for providing one element or another to an hour-long multilayered mix.
So, with that in mind, here (link below) is one such mix that dates back to about a decade ago, with Oliveros taking the lead...
Flotsam on the Ocean of Sound(Radio mix no. 12)
Primary material includes:
Pauline Oliveros - “Something Else” (Pogus) Brutum Fulmen - “Spore” (Crippled Intellect) Miko Vaino - “Vaihtuja” (Wavetrap) Robert Normandeau - “Tangram” (Empreintes Digitalis) John Wall - “Construction III” (Utterpsalm) Joji Yuasa - “Projection Esemplastic for White Noise” (Neuma) Douglas Quin - “Canada Glacier/Wind Harps of Taylor Valley" (Miramar) Merzbow - “Tatara" (Manifold) Pimmon - “Bettler Kempt” (Fat Cat) Stillupsteypa - “Nice Things to File Away Forever” (Mille Plateaux)
{ Post-posting afternote: Yeah, I know, I exclusively drew from Hutcherson's early career. Shrug. There are a number (low number) of other notable vibraphonists throughout the history of jazz. But as far as depth, range, and flexibility, Hutcherson may've been the one who best demonstrated it's full potential as a non-novelty/surplus component of a jazz ensemble. Especially the way he used the instrument to bridge the melodic/percussive vs strictly-percussive properties of the piano and drums...best exhibited when he was working between an eccentric pianist/composer like Andrew Hill, and a drummer/composer (yes, that's "a thing," although very rarely) like Joe Chambers. Wonderfully guiding things in the right stretches and spaces; at others times -- espec as a sideman -- adding accentuations and highlights, or (as on the Henderson and Patton pieces above) helping drive the whole joint into rhythmic overdrive. }
Because I grew up in the 1970s. And because I later spent the better part of 20 years living in Chicago, almost all of it spent on the south side. In that part of town there was, among the homegrown population, a sort of perennial groove that was inarguably classic -- definitive. Once winter broke and people came outdoors, you could expect to hear certain spring soundtracking. Roy Ayers Ubiquity and early Kool & the Gang being big favorites. Early-to-mid '70s era Stevie Wonder and maybe the occasional Steely Dan joint. But guaranteed plenty of EW&F.
Earth Wind & Fire having started out as an entity very specific to the Chicago music that it evolved out of. In the group's early years, when its lineup was constantly shifting. In those days its membership encompassed musicians who'd played with local funksters The Pharaohs, as well as others who'd been under the mentorship of AACM multi-instrumentalist and former Sun Ra Arkestrateer Phil Cohran. (As evidence of that latter connection, check the larval EW&F's contributions to the Sweet Sweetbacks's Baadasssss Song OST.) And then once the band's lineup began to finally solidify, in stepped producer & arranger Charles Stepney to help steer them toward the limelight. Charles Stepney himself being a whole 'nother Chicago music story.
Some straggling, tangential thoughts; re legacy, canonization, etc....
Monday’s news eventually had me reaching for England Is Mine, Michael Bracewell’s lenghty rumination about the role of dandyism in shaping Anglo modernist cultural history. Flipping to the section where he addresses the Glam years of the early 1970s, in which the author frames Bowie and Roxy Music as staging some variety of sci-fi musical revue for the nuclear age:
“Hot on Bowie’s stacked heels were Roxy Music, who mingled science and artifice into a cabaret futura of decadent romance -- playing with nostalgia as Bowie played with the future. [...]
And yet Roxy Music and David Bowie, throughout the first half of the 1970s,...propounded notions of time travel that were heavily tinged with death, disorientation and decay. From Bowie’s ‘Five Years’, as an imagined response to the imminent end of the world, to Roxy Music’s ‘The Bob Medley’ (1972) in which the strains of an interior elegance are drowned out by gun-fire, the ultimate destination of their glamour was shaped by a romantic sense of mortality -- a plastic Keatsian ‘half in love with easeful death’. This strong sense of death beneath glamour...would be crucial to those post-punks who looked to the Glam age for their own aesthetic of death, dehumanization and Weimar decadence. As the sensual images of pin-up girls and swooning sirens on the covers of Roxy Music’s first four LPS hovered close to pornography, so too did their music move closer to the gloriously lurid, subverted by a arcane knowingness which crystallized their luxurious image into a sealed world of erotic melodrama: Edith Piaf meets Helmut Newton. Ferry -- ever the trend-setter -- would drop into German on the goose-stepping chorus line of ‘Lullaby’ (1974) to proclaim that the end of the world was nothing when one was stranded between love and art, thus setting into place, more or less, the entire agenda of New Romanticism.”
(At which point some readers might elect to supplant that “more or less” with a “for better or for worse.” No matter, Bracewell continues...)
“In terms of drama, David Bowie and Roxy Music turned pop concerts into rallies and Goth-Futurist theater, with the trashy rock-’n’-roll finding a natural home between the atmospheric, synthesized soliloquies of love and loss. Bowie singing ‘Sweet Thing’, as a lover lost in an urban future, could compete with Bryan Ferry singing ‘In Every Home a Heartache’ as a lover lost in Harrods; Roxy Music’s ‘A Song for Europe’, with its punning on the Bridge of Sighs, fitted nicely with Bowie’s double serenading of Jean Genet and Iggy Pop in ‘Jean Genie’. A whole new language had been invented for radical English pop, a kind of neo-Platonic plutonium plush, which was a world and a time away from the previous tyranny of American rockism over pop cool.”
Many of the Bowie obits and tributes that piled up on Monday and the following day featured the same component -- the blahblahblahing about the scope and extent of the artist’s influence on so much music that came afterward. Which prompted me to think about something I said in my prior post, the admission that I had gone nearly 25 years without listening to Bowie, without having much reason to think of him. Perhaps that was in some way testament to the degree of his cultural influence; that it was -- in certain aspects -- so pervasive in the pop industry (once again for better or worse) that it became all to easy to take that influence for granted -- it became such an inherent given, such an element of the environment that it like some sort of cultural wallpaper that was there when you moved into the premises, and long ago stopped noticing.
And the lazier tributes making it sound like Bowie was Glam rock, all but claiming that he’d invented it. Much like the lazy accounts of Pop Art that have it all beginning and ending with Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Bowie was a somewhat late arrival on the Glam scene. And as such was initially dismissed by a few as a bandwagon-hopping opportunist.* But let’s be honest, were it not for him and Roxy Music, glam wouldn’t have ultimately amounted to much more than a footnote in the annals of pop music. If it had boiled down to the like of T. Rex, The Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter, the whole thing would be remembered as little more than some Bubblegum 2.0 fad whose popularity was largely confined to the U.K.. (Next up, kids -- the Bay City Rollers!)
Which of course is the “authenticity” argument, the bulkiest and most unwieldy folder from the “rockism” file. Which I never fully understood, because the Authenticity party line was mostly a product of the late‘50s-early ‘60s folk movement, having only marginally spilled over into the ascendant rock scene in the years that followed.** Whatever the case, you can deem it as part of the cultural baggage from the 1960s that Bowie, Roxy, and other artists of the period decided could be readily done away with. (Relatedly, I saw this morning that Simon had posted something about the entrance of “meta” into the pop-music spectrum, via a 1980 interview with Brian Eno.)
And I realize that in siding with Bracewell’s argument, I place myself on one side of a dubious polemic adhered to by some people. That being the polemic that roughly goes: Sod all that high-minded, pretentious art-school hijackers’ alt-canon bullocks -- like a tosser who brings a book to a party, coming along and taking all the fun out of everything.
As far as Glam is concerned, I have no idea if either party Bowie or Ferry were privy to Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” essay; which is probably neither nor there because both parties they had something vaguely similar in mind. Ushering in the entrance of postmodern irony into the pop music arena, while showing notion of authenticity the door. Something pop-music artists and listeners have been mindful of ever since. All of which, of course, mostly has to do theater, presentation, image-making, artifice, public spectacle and the like, and -- one could argue -- nothing to do with music, per se. But hey, they don’t call it show biz for nothing.
* One can imagine the sort of incredulity that broke out in the Leo Castelli stable when the gallerist decided to take Warhol on, with Lichenstein, Rosenquist et al. grumbling, “Who’s this interloping Johnny-come-lately? Oh, he already has a successful career...and a pile of cash to go with it? well, fuck him!” ** Which of course is the “authenticity” argument, the bulkiest and most unwieldy folder from the “rockism” file. Which I never fully understood, because the Authenticity party line was mostly a product of the late‘50s-early ‘60s folk movement, having only marginally spilled over into the ascendant rock scene in the years that followed. Admittedly, this would change in later years, by which point rock-related notions of authenticity were often tangled up with issues about economic class -- was such-and-such an artist from a true working-class background/”the streets”/whatever.
Momus on this morning’s news, and the “theatrical timing” of Bowie’s passing:
"Apparently he’d had cancer for eighteen months. What a keeper of secrets, just as he was when he used to sneak in and out of Bromley bedsits, playing girls off against each other, giving everyone a different story! Sneaky David who lied to everybody because it really wasn’t any of our business! He even got Tony Visconti to lie about him being healthy and strong! I’d heard the cancer rumours, but I believed the lies. I preferred to, needed to: the lies were so much more palatable.
"But it wasn’t really 'unexpectedly'. His songs — the public statements that really matter — had all the while been spelling things out stark and clear to those of us willing to listen. I felt uncomfortable singing, in my Blackstar cover: 'Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside...' It was totally clear who 'he' was. And then came Lazarus, with 'Look up here, I’m in heaven...' And that video which has him disappearing into the wardrobe at the end. To Narnia, some said."
Of course there’ll be an avalanche of tributes hammered out and posted today and in the days to come, but I think I may stop reading there.
It’d be fair to say that Bowie was formative musical input during my early teenage years -- Station to Station being the first full album of his that I sank into, roughly about a year before the release of Scary Monsters. In the several years that followed, I did the backtracking and absorbed all of his back catalogue. But come my late teens and about 20-plus years of my adulthood, I paid him little attention -- never listened to his music (new or old), rarely had reason to even think of him.
What changed?, what prompted a revisitation after a long absence? I don’t know -- maybe it when younger critics, those who weren’t around back when Bowie was a big artistic entity -- began to appraise the man’s career at a more objective remove. Or maybe it was hearing Seu Jorge’s delicate versions of Bowie songs for the Life Aquatic soundtrack; hearing those songs in a more naked and humble form, stripped of their multipart arrangements and electric bombast, and realizing that underneath lay some very peculiar and at times lovely songwriting.
It prompted me to gradually revisit the early Bowie albums, curious to see how they’d strike me now that I’m much older and have the benefit of my own distance from the work’s period of origin. I found that my preferences hadn’t changed much over the years. The much-heralded, hit-making, high-concept Glam years -- good, but (as before) not among my favorites. Instead I found myself more deeply drawn to the fore-and-aft transitional phases -- particularly Hunky Dory and the “Berlin Years” material. The years when Bowie didn’t in advance know what direction he wanted to go, and was operating more by intuition and curiosity than by design.
But yes, back to the matter of timing. I’d spent the past few days noting the reviews of the new (and now final) album, Blackstar. Unanimously positive of the half dozen or so that I’d read. I couldn’t help but wonder if the verdicts of “his best album in decades” weren’t partly because of the element of unexpectedness of the project’s jazz-tinged experimentalism -- the surprising change of direction as proof-positive that the man still had a sense of artistic adventurism after so many years. Each accompanied with a checklist of reputed musical inspirations and influences on the project: Kendrick Lamar, Death Grips, and (perhaps mostly puzzling of all) Boards of Canada. None of which are, to my ears, apparent throughout the album. But a number of critics mention one possible inspiration that does make much more sense when I’d only heard excerpts from the first few of the Blackstar songs --- the music of Scott Walker. A bit ironic, that; considering Walker was a figure who has at the height of his pop fame at the time that David Jones took the stage-surname Bowie, spending the next several years floundering about in the U.K. pop market, before finally becoming the artist as he's now known and remembered.
And agin about that timing: I only got the album yesterday, giving it first spin around sundown. Yes, it’s frontloaded with the more experimental, more challenging tunes; but it ends with three songs that are -- by my reckoning -- among the most gorgeous things Bowie ever did. And the voice -- that distinctive throaty croon of his -- was undiminished by the years. By the time the album’s last song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, was in full sweep, my wife came into the room, practically clutching her heart. “This is really good,” she said to me. “Fucking hell. To think it was made by a man almost seventy years old. Maybe he really is an alien, after all.” Only then to awake to this morning’s news, which cast her comments -- as well as much of Blackstar's lyrics -- into an uncanny context. Fucking hell, indeed.
"An ordinary life; a dull life even, yet the polyphony of emotions and sensations is hallucinatory in its measured precision and accumulation of bliss: 'The lecturing voice was far away, irrelevant and unintelligible. Peace flooded her.' Why do we have to spatialise time, sound and thought, reducing all three to a manageable linearity and locus that has nothing to do with the way we think or hear? Because they are elusive, everywhere and nowhere. The pouring of thoughts, thoughts under thoughts and other inexplicable murmurings of consciousness may take place in a dark room of the imagination within the body as if a kind of ectoplasm gushing out of some hidden spring and dispersing into nothingness, into the blood or becoming a sound recognisable as audible words, the marks of writing or some other signs on or from the body."
- David Toop, with some of his own stray thoughts about the recent passing of Robert Ashley.
Simon has some words, as well as a relay of those by Keith Fullerton Whitman. Simon also has a playlist that features many pieces that I also would have selected. To which I might only add checking out De Natura Sonorum in full, if you don't know it already. And then there's this recent clip of his Violostories, as performed live at V22 by Aisha Orazbayeva.
Passing thoughts and notes on a recent passing
of note. Scratched out some 10-11 days ago; partial,
piecemeal, unpolished, unfinished.
Numerous friends & peers expressing shock or surprise at the news of Lou Reed's death. I shrug. Maybe I've become inured to such news in recent years, know to expect it at regular intervals.Maybe it barely rated as news. Maybe I had given the guy so little thought in recent years that...
Anyway. I did do the sort of thing of thing that I normally don't do on such occasions. Y'know -- that vulture thing of pulling out a bunch of records and basking in the achievements of the recently departed. Because hearing "Sweet Jane" turn up in the breaking news on Sunday made me realize that Loaded was an album I hadn't bothered to spin since roughly 1990. And even then, lifting the needle over about half the tunes. So I played it in full. Two things come to attention right away. One being that the politics of the label shoving Reed out of the band for the sake of front-staging (the hopefully more marketable and listener/audience-friendly) Doug Yule are deeply etched into the thing, since it sounds very much like some A&R-pressured departure from their abrasive, fringe-dwelling East Coast origins and far more like some West Coast country-rock outfit of the Moby Grape order, which I gather was really big at the time. Second thing I noticed that on those tunes wher Reed was allowed to lead ("Sweet Jane," "Rock & Roll," et al), his vocal delivery was uncharacteristically heated, exuberantly engaged -- possessing an energy and coiled intensity that otherwise was atypical in his long and often plodding career.
***
Related anecdote one: Seeing New Order play live in 1986. They were on supporting the Brotherhood album. I suppose they didn't feel too confident about said LP, because they defaulted on playing the bulk of Low-Life instead. And then for an encore came back onstage to play a long monotonously trudgey thing that went on for what seemed like 15 minutes, gradually building in density as it trudged along. Eventually some lyrics entered into the thing, something about doing the ostrich. Realized that I was hearing a tip of the topper to VU, tho' by way of an obscure route that involved a tune that had (at that point) existed mostly as an unheard footnote to the VU story. Or maybe it was meant as an echo of the "Sister Ray" cover that lurked in their earlier history via the Joy Division days. I didn't/wouldn't hear the original until I acquired of 45 of the tune some years later, and it still amuses me each time I hear it.
***
Related anecdote two: At some point in history, many of Reed's '70s solo LPS were actually considered essential, cultish listening. Item one on the "underground" cultural-credential credenza. Once a good friend friend of mine and a buncha friends of his from the school's radio station were hanging out drinking together at my friend's apartment, and the thing devolved into a music-geek pissing contest about "Name/Play The Most Depressing Song You've Ever Heard," illustrating their case inasmuch as one friend's record collection allowed. I'm can't recall what all got nominated, but apparently The Pogues'"And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"crossed the turntable at one point. But then my friend cheated, and made everyone listen to the entire second side of Lou Reed's Berlin, which shouldn't been tantamount to a violation of the Geneva Convention or something of that magnitude, as far as the rules of the contest were concerned. At any rate, by the time the stylus eases into the lead-out groove, everyone sat around in silence for a moment. Then one participant (the station's format chief, and a moody guy by nature) stands up, flatly declares, "Yeah, I think that's got to be the most depressing thing I've ever heard", and without saying another word to anyone, leaves.
***
I'd heard many years ago that there was some kind of rivalry between Reed and Frank Zappa -- like some sorta East Coast/West Coast gangsta beef in which the Velvets and the Mothers of Invention had been pitted against each other in competition for who would be roundly embraced as Lords of the Freak Scene. And that the two had harbored nothing but loathing for one another for all the years thereafter. If true, it always struck me as daft. The two acts were in no way comparable. No chance of the Velvets ever being a contender for that title, anyway. Far too dark, too severe, too art-damaged, and far too NYC and attitudinally out-of-step with the zeitgeist. Proper recognition would have to wait for later, much more different times.
Yeah, perhaps more thematically appropriate for my prior blog than this one. But whatever. Some dudes had style. And the Black Belt Jones OST used to routinely serve as the talkover music for one of my former radio shows.
All of which reminds me that I started a summer mixtape to post, but let it languish. Maybe its time I got around to polishing it off.
(And right, I realize this is a very content-light post. But hey, I just got done reading through the better portion of the latest edition of the e-flux journal, devoted to the speculative topic of "Accelerationist Aesthetics," and I still got nothin'.)
Truth be told, I thought Coffee and Cigarettes was a weak effort. A great idea, true -- or at least a promising one. But uneven in execution, with most of its segments falling (at best) a bit flat, it is probably my second least-favorite Jarmusch film.
But no matter. Because the above, the closing segment of the film, was wonderful -- deeply charming but possessing a certain solemn gravity at the same time. It worked because of the two characters involved; it worked even if -- as many who saw it -- you had no idea who the two figures in the frame were. The scene was effectively the Jarmusch's way of paying tribute to a prior generation of East Village DIY artists that populated the scene when he and his own friends and colleagues had arrived; the veterans who had helped get the ball rolling in the first place, or at least had helped keep it in motion over the years. In this case: a pair of survivors, honorary denizens of the bohemian substrata of the city.
The figure on the right is Bill Rice; painter, photographer, "unaffiliated"/autodidact art & literary historian. Rice also did a great deal of acting in NYC underground film over the years, turning up in a good many of the films cited or included in the recent doco about the NYC "no-wave" film world of the late '70s and early '80s, Blank City. Rice passed away in 2006, just a few years after Coffee and Cigarettes saw release.
The other figure is Taylor Mead -- writer, underground filmmaker in the spirit of Jack Smith, and former figure of note on Warhol's Factory floor. News of his passing began circulating earlier today, via a few small online channels. Apparently, a proper NYT obit is still pending.
Also having passed last Saturday: Visionary architect and urban theorist Lebbeus Woods, at the age of 72. John Coulthart offers a roundup of links; and among the many eulogies that are quickly piling up, plus there's also this image-heavy article via The Superslice.
A notice of his death, the last time I checked, has yet to appear of Woods's website. Posts on the site's blog in recent months had tapered off, for which Woods made his apologies in post this past August, citing fatigue and his health, as well as announcing that much of his spare time was going into writing a book. Woods began the blog scarcely 14 months ago, and for the time being it remains as an archive.
Headspillage, tangents, fragments & ruminative riffing. Guaranteed to sustain a low level of interest, intelligibility, or lucidity for most outside parties.
