fiction:
visual:
movies:
ratings (and occasional commentary) on my Goodreads and my Letterboxd
A common thread connecting a lot of the music I loved in the mid-1980s was the almighty Fairlight CMI — though I didn’t know what that was at the time. Here’s an article highlighting some Fairlight favorites. The more Fairlight, the more I liked it: Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, the “Miami Vice” theme, and most all, at the pinnacle, the Fairlight specialists, the Fairlight masters, ultimate gurus of the all-Fairlight-all-the-time lifestyle: The Art of Noise. Not just their own records, but also the songs they and/or Trevor Horn produced for other artists: Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”, and so on — though again, I didn’t know there was a connection.
The brilliantly stupid lyrics of T. Rex:
Girl you’re good
And I’ve got wild knees for you
On a mountain range
I’m Dr. Strange for you
With my heart in my hand
I’m a hungry man for you
I got stars in my beard
And I feel real weird for you...
Reagan Youth:
Death to the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan
Anarchy in the fatherland!
Anarchy for the new Aryans
No master race is gonna rule my land!
New order?
No order!
New order?
No order!
Disorder!
Disorder now!
ZZ Top really know how to verb a noun:
Have mercy, been waitin’ for the bus all day
Have mercy, been waitin’ for the bus all day
I got my brown paper bag and my take-home pay
Right on, that bus done got me back
Right on, that bus done got me back
Well, I'll be ridin' on the bus till I Cadillac
I love Martin Gore’s version of Tuxedomoon’s “In a Manner of Speaking”.
From “Underground”, on A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing:
Once I dreamed I was on a basement tape
Took in just one take
Oh lord, we gained our world distribution by relevant means
Jazz folk-rock fusion appealed to the teens
From You Walk Alone:
He brought a lot of phony eyebrow pencils
I hid behind an electric fence
Oh they brought all the jellyfish from Ireland
You said ah, just put ’em you know where
In the closet, that’s where
Where else?
The 1978 Lester Bowie date’s got a dream lineup: Arthur Blythe, Amina Claudine Myers, Malachi Favors, Phillip Wilson. And check out the brief, intense duo session by Bowie and Wilson, also 1978, also outstanding.
RIP Dusty Hill of ZZ Top (in 2021).
Balls (2000) is the last proper Sparks album (not a collaboration or soundtrack) that I hadn’t heard yet and it’s... a little better than I expected, as if some of the creativity that would burst forth a few years later on Lil’ Beethoven was already building within them. For one thing, it’s the best sounding album of their 1984-2000 period, like they finally more or less caught up with the dance-pop present instead of endlessly chasing after it. But it was too late.
No particular song is a total knockout, but one I like is “The Calm Before the Storm”:
The dogs are letting postmen come and go
The muscle cars are driving way too slow
And everybody’s walking on tip-toe
For every yes, a hundred nos
The kind of day when nothing hits the fan
The kind of day when nothing’s in demand
The kind of day when music means Chopin
And love is shown by holding hands...
RIP Ian MacDonald.
Can’t hear “Biped” without thinking of the two times I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company dance to it. Here’s a three-minute sample.
According to my concert log, I attended the following:
19961108 Empty Bottle
- Loren Mazzacane Connors
- Jim O’Rourke
- John Fahey
Pretty good lineup that night, eh? Yeah, not bad.
I can’t always trust what seem to be my memories of gigs that happened over 20 years ago, but I think Jim’s set consisted of him performing Happy Days — probably for the only time, live? He stayed on his chair and kept playing his acoustic guitar throughout the entire piece, even long after the guitar was rendered completely inaudible by the massed wall of hurdy-gurdy drone.
I do remember walking into the Empty Bottle that night and seeing Fahey sitting by himself on the low sofa by the pool table, wearing sunglasses, motionless, and I wondered if he was awake. From everything I’ve read about Fahey late in his life, it’s entirely plausible he was asleep.
I also saw John Fahey at Unity Temple in 1998, and I remember very nearly colliding with Jim, on a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed stairway, as Jim was rushing to bring Fahey some iced tea. John Fahey wants iced tea? You definitely bring it to him as quickly as you can. It’s not a question.
According to the same concert log I saw Fahey play a third time, at Schuba’s in 1999, but I have no memory of this, none, zero. He died in 2001.
All Revenant releases are long out-of-print, but Happy Days is available again on Jim’s Bandcamp, but with helicopter, not duck.
Iannis Xenakis’s classic Persepolis (1971) is unquestionably the greatest hour-long abrasive monolithic noise epic ever commissioned by the Shah of Iran. Trust me, you don’t want to hear the others.
Home listening hardly seems a substitute for being present for the original outdoor performance, but you could try cranking the volume up and pretending that 500 little Iranian kids are marching around your living room brandishing torches and dodging laser beams.
“Persepolis” is perpetually being remastered, re-edited, and reissued. Every few years they discover they used the wrong tape, or ran the tape at the wrong speed, or two minutes of material went missing, or lord knows what. Even the cuneiform on the cover of the original Phillips LP is upside down. You should think twice about the possible consequences of letting any version of this cursed music into your home.
None of the versions are backwards. That’s some consolation.
I don’t have any of the vinyl versions, but I now own four CD versions: on Fractal, Edition RZ, Asphodel, and now this new one on Karlrecords. And I want to be clear on this point: these aren’t different performances. It’s a goddamn tape piece.
This latest version was remastered by one “Martin Wurmnest”, and that seems like a suitable name for a man brave enough to open this nest of worms, as it were. I can’t find it right now, but I swear I read an interview with him where he said something like, “Well, we probably screwed it up this time around, too.”
The download-only issue pictured at the top of the post finally restores an important Cecil Taylor record to the catalog: Spring of Two Blue-Js, only ever available on CD as a poor-quality bootleg ripped from vinyl. Taylor’s own label, Unit Core, only ever released two albums, this one and Indent (1973). The latter is better known in the Freedom reissue, but let’s take a moment to appreciate the cover art of the original issue. Those mountains... aren’t mountains. Were they made by holding objects over the photo paper in the darkroom, or what? Was this a one-off by the artist or was there a series of similar images? I’d love to own the vinyl so I could stare at this while listening to the record.
The photograph is credited to one “Doyle Roberson”. I don't know if this obituary is for the same guy — seems like it could be, with his interests in music and travel and his proximity to New York at around the right time.
After Sparks pulled the rabbits out of the hat, they let them loose in this iconic Verlaines video (“Death and the Maiden”).
Inspirational MX-80 Sounds lyrics:
Guys and gals in all the big states
Are getting together and they’re wearing toupees!
It’s not just the hair, they grow it there
It’s wearing a wig with the people you dig!
Not sure about the third line. I’ll ask them about it at the wig store.
Before Betty, after Betty. Betty Davis, on getting her new husband Miles to dress hipper: “I filled the trash with his suits.” (source)
The best 99 cent cassette I ever bought in my life was either Sempre Amore by Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron, or maybe What’s THIS For...! by Killing Joke, I can‘t decide.
At the Bimhuis 1982 is good, too.
RIP Betty Davis 😢. All of her 1970s albums (including the fourth, only released decades after it was recorded) are great, but start with the first.
In some other timeline her music was hugely popular and influential and I wish that timeline was ours.
Sparks’ setlist in concert in Los Angeles earlier this week included “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” from Propaganda and several songs from Lil’ Beethoven; “My Baby’s Taking Me Home”, especially, was a joy.
On the “Two Hands, One Mouth” tour (2013), they did “Good Morning” (easily the highlight of Exotic Creatures of the Deep, one of their lesser recent efforts), but not at this show. I hope they haven’t dropped it from their live repertoire entirely. Ron Mael’s lyric always makes me smile. The narrator has no memory of his one-night stand:
Good morning
Who are you?
I woke up
and saw you
I’m dreaming, still dreaming
My life is now about to have some meaning
Thank you, God, for something rare as this
What surely must have been a holy night of bliss [...]
Good morning
You woke up
Got dressed up
Hair messed up
While I fix you breakfast
I hope it’s just your laugh that is infectious...
Here’s a photo I took of Jessica Pavone performing solo in Los Angeles last weekend. The concert was organized by The Unwrinkled Ear and supported by Black Editions.
Here’s a photo I took of Arooj Aftab performing outdoors at Long Live the Thing, in New Hampshire, last fall.
As of today, I have seen and heard Ron Mael (of Sparks) play this pipe organ.
From the 2020 Tone Glow interview with Jim O’Rourke:
At that time, for people into a certain kind of weird music, it was — of course — Nurse With Wound, Organum, and Hafler Trio. That was like the Holy Trinity [...] That particular time, you know, early Touch, Strafe Für Rebellion — one of my absolute favorites. There’s an early compilation on Touch called Vögel that’s a masterpiece. [...] I love Strafe für Rebellion. They’re geniuses. Vögel is gonna blow your mind.
Circa 1992, I was very much one of those people, into exactly that certain kind of weird music. We talked to each other on early-Internet discussion groups like rec.music.industrial and the nm-list. I don’t think the nm-list archives survive, but if you want, you could embarrass me by digging up some of my old rec.music.industrial posts. Most folks were there for the Ministry and the Front Line Assembly, but some of us were there for... this stuff. The other stuff that Throbbing Gristle led to.
And yes, that was the Holy Trinity, except usually Zoviet France instead of Organum. Not because of quality. Organum’s music was much more interesting, but most of us simply hadn’t heard it. You could go to the imports section at Tower Records and buy the Hafler Trio’s Kill the King or Zoviet France’s Shouting at the Ground. I bought my copy of Nurse with Wound’s A Sucked Orange at a little college-town record store in South Carolina. But I don’t recall ever seeing a single Organum recording for sale back then.
Tastes were heavily shaped by what it was reasonably possible to obtain and hear, especially on a college-student budget. I did swap cassette dubs with the people I was talking to online. That’s how I first heard Jim’s own Tamper and Remove the Need, Pierre Henry’s Les années cinquante, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, and other landmark recordings. But we couldn’t just email digital music files to each other — that came later.
Where was I? Oh, Organum. WHPK (the University of Chicago radio station) did have a copy of Organum’s magnificent Tower of Silence. I was never sure whether to play it at 33 or 45 rpm. It was later collected on the Volume One CD, which is as good a single-disc introduction to Organum as you’ll find, but that didn’t come out until 1998.
Where was I? Oh, Strafe für Rebellion. Who the hell were they? I don’t recall hearing the name back in the day.
So I have now dutifully checked out Vögel; it’s on Bandcamp. And... well, my mind isn’t blown, to be honest, but I am intrigued and puzzled by this music, in a good way. It doesn’t actually remind me of the artists Jim names. It does remind me of the more serious side of the Residents, or a more abstract Tuxedomoon, and even more, it reminds me of Dome. Sonically and formally, the songs on Vögel stretch the word “song” right to the breaking point, but not beyond. Song form and song feel are always lurking, even if distantly. (The singer might even surprise you by busting out some Patsy Cline, or is it Peggy Lee?)
Mayan Space Station is a terrific William Parker record and also an excellent showcase for electric guitarist Ava Mendoza. You can hear classic-rock gods like Jimi Hendrix or even Eddie Van Halen in her playing, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect that to blend with Parker’s aesthetic, but somehow in this trio (with Gerald Cleaver) it all sounds perfectly natural.
Some Bertoia LP covers I had on my living room wall, circa early 2000s. Obscured by an extremely large lampshade.
Some bands I have seen when they shared a bill with Shellac: Gastr del Sol, Fugazi (twice), The Ex, Space Streakings, Bellini, Helen Money.
Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, spent his teenage years in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. That desert is the only place on earth where Joshua trees grow. I drove by Lancaster the other day, on the freeway, but the town has neglected to put up a Beefheart statue so I didn’t stop.
I always thought Van Vliet died in the Mojave Desert, too. The way I pictured it, Anton Corbijn came to see him there and took the cover photo of the final Beefheart album, Ice Cream for Crow (1982). That photo shows Van Vliet standing by some Joshua trees, holding his hat in front of him, a mourner at the funeral of his own career in music. Then Corbijn flew back to Amsterdam or wherever; and Van Vliet went back inside his desert house and didn’t come out again very often until he died in 2010.
But all that was just my imagination. Except for the photo with the Joshua trees, I mean. I learned last week that Van Vliet and his wife lived out the final decades of his life in Trinidad, California, a tiny town on the green and humid northern California coast, in Humboldt County. He died at the hospital in nearby Arcata.
And then today I learned that Thomas Pynchon lived in Trinidad for a while, though not at the same time as Van Vliet. In Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990), Humboldt County is very much a place you go to get away from everything. Like the desert.
The most devastating song on Some Disenchanted Evening is “Anniversary”, and I thought so even before I’d paid much attention to the words, but then oh my god, listen to the words:
She said, “Sunshine will haunt you
And blue sky will taunt you
And beauty will court you with lies.”
She said, “Autumn will bore you
And spring time will ignore you
And the cold wind will warm you at night.”
And she asked me what kind of creature was I
That I harboured no rain in my eyes
Tell me why
Your cheeks are drier than mine
Are you too frightened to cry?
She said, “Laughter will hurt you
And children will disturb you
And dirges will serve you with light.”
And she said, “By the time
That you open your eyes
There will not be a shoulder in sight.”
And then listen to the music again, and how Graeme Downes’ voice can barely reach the high notes he wrote for himself, and the effect that creates.
