Listening: 26 March 2013

The home stereo plays more ambient than most forms of music. Recently enjoyed the following:


Sawako (pictured): 'Tsubomi, Saku'


Northerner: 'The End of December'


Brian McBride: 'Several Tries in an Unelevated Style'


Akira Rabelais: 'With the Gift of Your Small Breath'

Listening: John Cage

Reading two books on Cage presently so have been playing as much of his music through the stereo as possible. He is not at all conducive to portable headphone listening. Not always conducive to the strict demands of the home stereo either but there's been sufficient time and place to hear the following:

Stereo

John Cage: Perilous Night and Four Walls, Margaret Leng Tan

Perilous Night is, as the title hints at, rather rackety, while Four Walls, apparently depicting Cage's fraught emotional state before settling down with Merce, is gloomy, with less use of vocals than I expected. Typically with Cage moods are hardly straightforward and 'gloomy' is quite freely drawn. An old Harold Moores relic, pleasantly listened through from start to finish.


John Cage: Early Piano Music, Herbert Henck

Bought cheap off the HMR rep, restricted to playing The Seasons and In A Landscape, the latter more for comparison with Lubimov's version below. Ophelia which follows provides a shocking contrast and is far from Cage-does-Satie.


Alexei Lubimov: Der Bote

A home stereo staple from Wesley Classics, bought for In A Landscape which is how I always hear it.


John Cage by Zeitkratzer

Promo and features great sustained droning chamber orchestra performances. Only listened to in part.


John Cage: Thirteen

HMR relic sans case (stolen), features two versions of Thirteen, like the above but even better. Again played only in part.


John Cage: Short Pieces for Prepared Piano

I love the sound of the prepared piano. DLed recently, burnt to CD and heard only in small part.


Victoria Looseleaf: Harpnosis

DLed and burnt to CD, now a home staple. Cage's In A Landscape sits comfortably alongside Satie's Gymnopedies (of course), Claire de Lune and Pachelbel's Canon, all played on harp. Featured on this blog before and just read that a sequel Beyond Harpnosis is available, on casette only but the original you'll find easily on the web and in fine shape.

All these In A Landscape's have prompted me to try and play it on the piano, which is proceeding slowly. Not very difficult but long, and my reading is crap. I first heard the piece on a Mini Disk given me in Japan by Velvet Hands, in the pre-download MD trading days, and was a sucker immediately. It was aural balm between all the Autechre and Skam discoveries.

Portable/Digital

John Cage Shock

Doubtless these sound and look great on vinyl but music is lost on mp3 through headphones. Not quite all, there's some delightful and very live setting recordings here, where the novelty and 'shock' does translate and is audible, but the grubbiness and chaotic sense of space is poorly suited to commute listening. I ought to whack it through the mixer and hear it proper like but time and energy will prevent it. Good review in The Wire and elsewhere.


Music For Merce

Mammoth set of recordings by mostly Cage associates but again, plenty of haze and fluff and misses the extensive notes, images, packaging etc. that came with the proper release. Great Wire review for this too and worth spending much time with, but not on headphones commuting.


John Cage: Ryoanji

Odd music this, defined by a repeated percussive bang which persists throughout, around which other elements dart about, very Japanese-like. Very interesting and the restricted tonal palette works just fine through headphones. Fourteen appears on the Zeitkratzer CD and not yet played Ten.


John Cage: 12‘55.6078

Wonderful box set this, 12 CDs covering the Donaueschingen Festival - 75 Years: 1921-1996, picked up gratis sans cases. A regular Dead and Alive staple, I played this early recording on the portable digital device, a piece for piano and trinkets (?) filled with humorous whirrs and pings, with good input from audience in the form of laughter and jovial heckling, which Cage doubtless enjoyed. The old recording does no wonders but the mirth is palpable.

Listening - 25 March 2013

Oddly traveled to work by work car this morning and listened to 45 minutes of Per Bojsen-Moller's Curator's Cuts 28 for Little White Earbuds, burnt to CD for the car stereo. Was good, with slow tempo, calm tones and regimented 4/4 suited to Monday morning's headache and sluggishness. Had zero interest in music at this hour but this helped bring me round. Good start with Madteo:


Much as I enjoyed it I'm not sure I'll bother hearing the rest of this set. Had burnt this to soundtrack a long road trip and figured the air-break tracklistings to be useful, but now that the trip is over... interest has waned.

Listened to no music at my desk, as usual. Tried unsuccessfully to play a few things on the portable digital music device while walking about at lunch but headphones were stuffed (dodgy work in-ear cheapies). Heard snippets of R.E.M. from their I.R.S. Years, skimmed through Autechre's Chichli Suite and Lee Perry's Disco Devil but all sounded too shit to bother with.

This is the problem with portable music all too often, along with the interface being too user unfriendly to engage with, and yet for many (including myself) this is the primary means of listening to much music. And this is a factor in commencing the Listening Series, to try and bring some sense of active engagement to these driftless and passive and largely (presently) unenjoyable activities.

The weekend's listening highlight was several airings of the Delos CD Perchance to Dream to soothe a sick child, played through the living room stereo at modest volume. This was acquired through warehouse in Soho Square, where masses of abandoned Delos and Hanssler CDs were stored. My daughter calls it "the magic CD" and isn't the only one:

Just last week my nephew Karl sent me a quote from Danielle, a friend of his from school days, about her experiences with “Perchance to Dream” and its sequel:

“I had something I wanted to share with you should you ever pop up on my radar again. So, through all of these years, I never forgot that I had the opportunity to meet your Aunt Carol and how cool I thought it was that she’s a concert pianist.

“I thought you might like to know that in my son’s 5-1/2 years on this planet, he’s probably gone to bed at night fewer than thirty times without listening to one of her CDs. I would say that Nicholas is likely her biggest fan. I forgot to bring the CDs with us to Hilton Head last week and heard an earful because of it! I’d better get that stuff on my iPod STAT.

“I purchased “Perchance to Dream” first when I was going through a particularly rough time in the early 90s and was looking for something to help me relax (short of fist-fulls of Xanax!). I liked it so much that I purchased “Such Stuff as Dreams,” too. When Nicholas was born, I was looking for something other than Disney to play him at bedtime. The rest, as they say, is history.

“Anyway, the next time you speak to her, let her know her #1 fan is a 5-year-old boy in metro Atlanta. She might get a chuckle out of it.”

Perchance to Dream: A Lullaby Album for Children and Adults is the only CD I own to feature contrasting covers for adults:


... and children:

Listening Series - Introduction

This is an attempt to start a new series here, based on documenting music listening in an attempt to slow down the deluge of random data passing through my head without proper digestion. Partly inspired by the Slow Listening Movement, which I vaguely attempted 3 years ago before promptly giving up only to follow, before giving that up too, the Listening Series will provide a space to document specifically what music I've listened to, but also and perhaps more importantly where, when, how and why I listened to it. There might also be a 'what did I think of' aspect too, but reviewing is not the main aim. Rather, this is a space to record and question the nature of my listening habits, as habits - in the bad sense - they seem to be.

I had a wave of ideas about this over the weekend which seemed grand and important and valuable, but these petered out to seem trivial and dumb, so the form of this will likely develop over time. Ideas thus far have included:

- documenting all music heard over a particular time frame (day / week / month)

- imposing restrictions upon listening habits (medium / genre / artist / label)

- recruiting others into the above concepts and documenting their findings

- devoting each morning's listening to critical attention and documentation

- random jottings of some or all of the above (present and likely resolution).

Like Slow Listening Movement, My consumption pattern of acquisition versus listening has gotten way out of hand. The acquisition side isn't likely to change, based as it is on both boundless curiosity and unfounded anxiety over available digital music becoming unavailable, but perhaps the reception can. We'll see how this proceeds, but like many things the first step is often the hardest.

Lynchian Psychodrama

Forthcoming radio broadcast on the music of, about and around David Lynch. Airing Thursday 14 February - Valentine's Day - 7-8pm in Max Headroom on Melbourne's 3 Triple R 102.7 FM. Here's the blurb:

Since the cavernous industrial noise of Eraserhead, music has occupied a prominent place in the work of David Lynch. Blue Velvet re-imagined Roy Orbison as an echo-drenched psycho-delic operatic crooner, Twin Peaks introduced the world to Julee Cruise and created an influential version of jazz noir, Inland Empire revealed the horrors lurking amidst the massed strings of Mantovani while Lynch himself has devoted increasingly more of his energies towards pop and rock production.

Featuring music from his TV and films, by influences and influenced, and from Lynch himself, Lynchian Psychodrama presents an hour of bipolar sonic merriment. Let's Rock!

This ought to set the mood:

Retro Futurism Resumes

Retro Futurism will return to Triple R 102.7FM 6.00pm this Sunday 23 December. I'll be filling in for Jonathan Alley's Under The Sun for three weeks while he's on summer vacation.

Episode 6: Dubs, Versions, Copies and Covers will celebrate my role as 'cover' by playing 'covers'. Stream it here.

Sylvia Love: Extraterrestrial Lover

Best dance track ever?


And this 'aint bad:


Sylvia Love is back producing, details here.

Retro Futurism Commences 2 November 2012

Retro Futurism Episode One - Pioneers will air on the Tabula Rasa slot Friday 2 November midnight to 2am on Melbourne's Triple R 102.7FM and broadcast on the net www.rrr.org.au.

Details here.