Boring Like A Drill.

I’m reluctant to discuss the work of people I know personally, but this is a point that goes back to my rant about electroacoustic music. In Bristol I saw a gig by Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras for the first time in over two years. Their standard performance setup is: Fox sits immobile behind his laptop while immediately to his left Pateras thrashes around with a small table full of crap. Regardless how I’m feeling, being at one of their gigs always makes me feel a lot better, but that’s not the point here. In the intervening time since I last saw them, Pateras has added his own laptop to the small table of crap. Their sound has not so much changed as expanded, the new computer acting as a box of hyper-crap. They are pursuing an idea, adding facilitating technology as needed.

Working solo, Fox has spent several years combining electronically generated images and music. At first he patched into his sound system a clapped-out old oscilliscope with a rotary display, showing the frequency of the waveform circling round a still, central point as its zero baseline. The visuals do not accompany the music, nor vice versa: the two are mutually dependent manifestations of the same signal. The image is generated by the sound’s waveform, which is in turn restricted to a range of sounds which produce visually interesting patterns.

These days Fox works with a laser projection system, a more purposefuly-designed piece of equipment operating on much the same principles. His shows with the laser are impressive, even spectacular – it’s not often you get to use that description for a one-man new music gig. However, Fox self-deprecatingly refers to his laser as a gimmick. When he talks about it more, it’s clear he regards it at best as a stopgap piece of technology in a transitional phase of his work. The range of sounds which produce interesting visual patterns is too small for him. He wants to be able to expand his musical vocabulary again, and not be dictated to by the limits of his available technology. The equipment will have to change into something not yet built, or be set aside.

A sunny afternoon and out they come. These two were snapped in the same fifty metre strip as this one and this one.

Cooky La Moo Enterprises (which includes this blog) is moving to a new server, so the site may be a bit flaky over the next couple of days. Please drop me a line if you notice anything unusual.

Normal service will resume shortly, with more room to offer new and exciting features (i.e. more unpopular music).

While travelling through Europe, ABC Classic FM presenter Julian Day (pictured left) stayed over at my place last week, during the London phase of his visit. I didn’t see him at all for the last three days he was sleeping on the sofa in the front room, and on Saturday morning he waited till I was in the loo before slinking out the front door without saying goodbye to catch his flight back to Australia. Was it something I said?

In any case, he left in such a hurry that he left behind a bag containing personal items more or less essential for his morning ablutions. I thought of keeping them as a souvenir, but now I have decided to offer them up for auction to the highest bidder. No doubt there are many fans of New Music Up Late who will rush to own a little piece of the man himself.

To this end, I decided to set up an Ebay account, but after a few minutes of reading through their FAQs it all started to look a bit complicated and potentially costly, so if you want anything on display below just email me privately at boringlikeadrill at yahoo dot com dot au and name your price. Reserves are listed in Australian dollars for the target demographic: a handy currency converter can be found here.

Lot 1: A mostly-full jar of Schwazkopf Taft Full-On Extreme Hold Power Wax. Now you too can have the look of the coolest radio announcer on ABC Classic FM, or at least like the metrosexual Morrisseyalike pictured on the label. There’s probably about 70g of the stuff left. I have personally tested this product and can guarantee that it sticks to your hair for a period of time. Reserve: A$5.00.

Lot 2: A rather stiff Body Shop shaving brush and Gillette Excel Sensor disposable razor. Both appear to have been fairly well used, which is odd, because he was unshaven when turned up at my house and didn’t shave the whole time he was here, as far as I could tell; but then, what would I know, having not seen him for the last three days he was lurking around upstairs? Reserve: A$6.50.

Lot 3: A used Colgate Reach toothbrush. Depending on your point of view, this item is either the most or least prized of the entire auction. Doubtlessly teeming with ABC DNA, the thumbgrip on the handle stills clearly bears used toothpaste residue. No toothpaste is included with the sale, so he was either borrowing my toothpaste or “went native” while in England and didn’t brush at all. The angled head and compact bristles make cleaning the harder-to-reach parts of your mouth a breeze. Reserve: A$2.00.

Lot 4: A slightly-used tube of Nivea FRESH Fresh Scent Mild Care Deodorant FOR MEN. Funny, I’d always thought Nivea was a girl’s brand, but I must have been wrong. That, or they’ve expanded their range of fine toiletries lately. This experience has been educational as well as financially lucrative. I’m almost tempted to hold on to this item myself, as there’s a part of me that can’t stand going shopping for deodorants, even thought it has become a fairly crucial aspect to keeping a girlfriend for any substantial period of time. Hopefully, Julian has since bought a replacement so as not to offend too many fellow travellers by the time he reaches Kuala Lumpur International Airport. If you see him, it may be wise to keep your distance at first, just in case. Alcohol-free, so don’t buy this if you were planning on drinking it. Reserve: A$3.00.

Lot 5: A small mirror broken off a small hinged compact, with a suspicious tranlsucent white stain on the glass. Also thrown in, a nub of mystery soap in a torn paper sleeve, possibly used for shaving (see above). The mirror frame is unmarked black plastic, so I can’t say for certain whose or what kind of compact this got broken off of. There are several perfectly good mirrors in my house, so this tiny glass is no excuse for Julian not shaving while he stayed over. Pleaese note that when I call that green blob “shaving soap” I’m only guessing. Reserve: A$1.50.

Lot 6: A small bag of complementary accessories from Qantas, including sleep socks (slightly worn), sleeping mask, a branded strap for attaching god knows what to it, and what appears to be a small grey vibrator sealed in a cellophane package (tests pending). It could be a rather industrial-strength looking tampon applicator, but I doubt it. I’m not going to break the seal and find out. Everything is tastefully shaded battleship grey and marked with the Qantas logo. These exclusive products are usually only available to the lucky few who take intercontinental flights in economy class on Australia’s premier airline. Reserve: $5.00.

SPECIAL OFFER: Buy all six lots and receive this special presentation bag (left) in which all the above items were carefully hand-packed by Mr Day. This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity, because I doubt I’ll have him crashing round my place again.

Older readers – you know, Gen X’ers and stuff – will remember experiencing their first David Bowie Moment, endlessly arguing over whether this is a misunderstood masterpiece or a lazy load of bollocks, when it’s really just Not Bad. Wait, I get it now! She’s channelling Patti Smith so it’s supposed to be cringingly bad, but we’re supposed to admire it because of that. Reckon in ten years’ time this will sound atrocious, and then gradually get better again?

* I hit ‘post’ before it was finished.

Late one Friday night at a cool indie pub in Whitechapel. Scruffily dressed bright young things mingle while a DJ plays dub mashups. In one corner, Ben.H is jumping up and down in front of a doorway.

A Friend
What on earth are you doing?

Ben.H
There’s a book up on that shelf above the doorway. It’s really thick with a pale green spine so I thought it might be Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

THE END

Epilogue

In a twist ending, the book turns out to be The Ultimate Pub Quiz Book, and not The Anatomy of Melancholy after all.

There’s something else I learned at Venn, but it has to wait till tomorrow night. In the meantime, please enjoy what promises to be a lengthy series of highly illuminating posts about life in a modern British provincial town; in fact, that most archetypal of nondescript British towns, Slough. The delights that await the business traveller can be followed at the blog Life in the Slough Lane.

I just remembered to write more about the Venn Festival. A couple of things stick in my mind from the weekend, beside the hangovers.

I got up particularly early on Saturday afternoon to go see Goodiepal without fully understanding who he was or what he did, just that the night before a friend had been very insistent I see him. A Faroese man with a fine beard, he was whistling a slow, meandering tune while setting up two large tables covered with small model planets, tiny paintings, music boxes, small vinyl records etched with various patterns. His hour-long set took the form of a lecture, as he explained planetary signals sent back and forth between New York and remote parts of the world, playing his very small records (of whistling, grunting and howling, or other lectures he has given), usually two at a time and talking or singing along with them.

Every now and then he would demonstrate how musical ideas changed in different cultures by giving a quick, vocal demonstrations in gibberish of New York rock bands, Norweigans pretending to be New York rock bands, French rappers, Björk, and offering evidence that every Scandanavian band now sings slow, keening melodies redolent of vast empty spaces.

He produced a small case containing a bird-like theremin under a glass bell, and I remembered where I had heard of him before: Music Thing blogged about this guy in March, linking to video of his appearance on a Danish TV program, under the heading “This Video Will Blow Your Mind“. Later they provided a transcript in English of the interview, where he talks about planetary movements and the interaction of electronics and mechanical music.

In Bristol, he talked for some time about prehistoric sounds being recorded in naturally-occurring magnetic rocks before he ran out of time and had to break it off, allowing audience members to look at the tiny paintings (which had been placed on the table face down) and buy records from him (for which purchasers would a name a price he could not refuse).

It felt like, regardless of whether he was talking, singing, miming or whistling, we had heard the latest instalment in a discussion he had been having with the world for some years now, about what music is, and what it could be.

Much later that night, a Finnish duo were playing a gig in another part of town. They began singing a slow, keening melody redolent of vast empty spaces and I had to leave the room, giggling. Several other people left at the same time. We had all been to see Goodiepal that afternoon.

Luc Ferrari, Collection de petites pièces ou 36 enfilades, Jeu du hasard et de la détermination (Michel Maurer, Françoise Rivalland)

While I was in Waterloo I also finally visited Gramex, in Lower Marsh, and found it pretty much as everyone describes it: a group of old men scrabbling through piles of CDs randomly stacked on a couple of large coffee tables. The main difference was that the two leather armchairs in the shop were unoccupied. They were being used as impromptu shelving for several more boxes of unsorted CDs, and so their usual occupants had had to find somewhere else to continue their day-long discussion of cricket.

One gent informed me he was searching for a Czech recording of Joplin’s rags played on a harpsichord, which had eluded him for the past eighteen months. I stopped myself from mentioning searching for it on the internet, figuring that he had probably heard and ignored that advice from younger people several times before. Besides, all my books and CDs have been found by hunting and gathering, so I’m not going to tell anyone else to be more systematic.

I didn’t expect to find much of interest. Over half the shelf-space was taken up with opera, and in most record shops opera is inversely proportional to 20th century stuff. I picked up a couple of discounted Naxos discs (yeah, that’s how cheap I am) and found this Luc Ferrari disc, which I hadn’t heard of before. Gramex also has a basement full of vinyl, which I didn’t dare look at because I haven’t replaced my turntable yet.

It’s another set of his disconcertingly jaunty and menacing piano pieces, with various taped and electronic sounds inexplicably popping up every now and then. I almost forgot to include that description of the music itself before posting this thing.

Last week I went exploring around Waterloo for the first time and stumbled across John Calder’s bookshop in The Cut. I had no idea that this transplanted piece of literary history still existed at all, let alone as a vital and interesting store (unlike the pickled ruin of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris).

Since the 1950s Calder has been the publisher of Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Wyndham Lewis, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and so on and so forth. Sadly, he will no longer be publishing Beckett: the writer’s estate has decided that Faber and Faber, who have until now published only the plays, will now handle all of Beckett’s work.

Calder has written a valedictory tribute to Beckett, the writer and man:

He was 47, unknown except to a few close friends and singularly unsuccessful, when he had his first success with Godot in 1953 – another of the lucky flukes that characterised his life and career. He had survived the war and the clutches of the Gestapo hiding in the Vaucluse mountains, along with many other misadventures. He had also endured misunderstanding of his work that very few academics, mainly Joyceans – and even fewer reviewers – were able to overcome…. He was a simple, totally honest, highly perceptive and overly generous human being who saw and described the reality of human existence as the tragedy it is.

He also explains how the initial division of publishing labour between his company and Faber came about (hint: it involves a fear of the police).

The comments attached to the article are worth a look too, as they include a link to an interview with Marion Boyars, Calder’s sometime publishing partner, and this observation from reader fmk:

I guess we’ve got a few years ahead of us in which Faber’ll be telling us of all the errors in previous editions and how their new editions are totally definitive, tpyo-free* and as the author intended them to be.

* [sic]

Remember the Roberto Alagna scandal at La Scala in December? La Scala, possibly after having run out of other people to sue, has now sent a cease and desist letter to Opera Chic, fearless blogger of all things La Scala and dogged chronicler of the troubled Aïda production. Opera Chic has had no option but to comply, removing all the photos taken inside the theatre from her blog, and changing her logo.

Supposedly, La Scala were worried that people would confuse OC’s blog with the official La Scala site. La Scala must also like to pepper its site with pictures of Riccardo Chailly with MS Paint speech balloons calling Alagna TEH SUXXOR, and feature guest appearances by the Drama Llama.

On the other hand, maybe people wouldn’t be so confused if La Scala’s site didn’t crash in a smouldering heap the day it should have announced its 2007/08 season, leaving Opera Chic to do all the work for them. Ingrates!

The story of the lost Morton Feldman recording, hidden in plain sight with a name tag and everything, reminded me of Kurt Schwitters’ recording of his Ursonate. Back when I was first trying to find out more about Schwitters, every book (yes, pre-internet) I read mentioned that Schwitters never made a complete recording of his major sound poem. Then one day I find a CD in the shops of Schwitters reciting the piece. All of it. How did this happen? It went a little something like this….

Jack Ox: Gee, wouldn’t it be great if we could hear how Schwitters performed his Ursonate?

Michael Waisvisz: Oh, you can borrow my copy.

Ox: No, I mean a performance by Schwitters himself.

Waisvisz: Yeah, I taped a copy of it from some guy at STEIM back in the 60s. It was a dub of some shellac discs Schwitters had recorded.

Ox: !!!!!

Waisvisz: What, is it rare or something?

UbuWeb has a page of different versions of the Ursonate, including the Schwitters recording, and the 1986 recording by Jaap Blonk that Ernst Schwitters doesn’t want you to hear!

Also, just because I found them while (ahem) researching this post, here are some ridiculously cool photos of Leon Theremin jamming with Michael Waisvisz.

There are artworks that are lost, and then there are artworks that are stolen from the backs of cars: such was the fate of the master tapes for Robert Ashley’s In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women before the proper mixdown could be made.

Perhaps more notoriously, because no trace of its existence remained, was Morton Feldman’s composition The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, the manuscript of which was stolen from colleague Christian Wolff’s car in 1966 (it was kept inside his guitar case, which was lifted along with the instrument).

The piece had only been played three times, once at a radio station. Feldman scholar Chris Villars and Steve Dickison of San Francisco State University did some inspired guesswork as to what station that might be and got in touch with Charles Shere, a former Music Director at KPFA Berkeley from 1964-67.

Amazingly, Charles Shere recalled seeing a tape in the archive labelled with the title of Feldman’s piece, which he had thought was a piece by Christian Wolff. No-one had realised the importance of this tape as probably the only recording of a piece whose score was subsequently lost!

Soon after, Other Minds unearthed a tape of the complete concert, including the lost Feldman work. A digital copy has now been made – no news yet of how or when it will be published.

This is a perfect opportunity to plug the new, improved RadiOM, Other Minds’ free archive of recordings of landmark concerts, readings, interviews and lectures.

I’ve just come back from a highly enjoyable long weekend at the Venn Festival in Bristol, which I might write up a bit, even though I’m reluctant to rant on about the work of people I know personally. All week I’m in and out of the house attending to various bits of business, so in the meantime please enjoy this photograph, taken at a friend’s instigation during a pleasant summer evening’s drinking by the old Bristol docks.

I am assured it is one of the vans the historic krautrock band Faust turned up in for their gig on Friday night. It certainly looks like the type of vehicle that might have been released by Brain records circa 1972. Also, if a picture paints a thousand words, then please accept this photo as an in-depth review of what a Faust gig sounds like in 2007.

It looks like I’ve been on a John Cage kick lately, but that’s like saying a physicist is on an Einstein kick. My interest in him hasn’t changed; it just happens that I’ve been posting about him more often than usual.

I’ve just been reading an interview of Cage with Peter Gena. This comment made by Gena makes, in a more concise and lucid way, the point I was getting at in my intemperate rant about most electroacoustic music:

There is a difference between receiving an idea, and evolving through one. The attitude in, “That’s a good idea; I think I’ll write a piece with that,” is usually less productive and rarely experimental. The best examples of this are often connected with technology. A technician introduces a new “chip” and can do forty voices at once, and costs only five dollars; so ten of those can produce 400 voices. Then because of the new chip, a composer who rarely writes music gets an idea for a piece, outside of any active aesthetic continuum.

This was said back in 1982. So many musicians (I’m thinking particularly of composers) have not learned to accommodate technology into their musical practice; for all this time they have been distracted by the continuous developments in technology and dashing from one latest thing to the next, allowing their music to be dictated by them. Furthermore, like academicism at its worst, the music so produced is directed toward justifying the idea behind it (the old “it’s better than it sounds” phenomenon) than as a product of genuine creativity.

What strikes me about your music and ideas is that the ideas come at a point when you need them, as opposed to this other approach.