
This weekend I’ve been distracted by (a) a head cold, and (b) Street View on Google Maps. The
Sooper Seekrit Kar has been tootling around London for months now, but there still aren’t any British photos available on Google’s site yet. I’ve been counting on this to save me from having to take lots of boring photos of where I live, work etc to email the folks Back Home.
I thought I’d have to content myself with vicarious trips around New York City in the meantime, but I’ve just found out accidentally that Street View is now available for Australia. Not just inner cities – the whole bloody lot. Well, the bits I can be bothered looking at.
After checking up on the houses I used to live in around Melbourne, I headed out through the suburbs to see how far the Street View photographs extended. They extend all the way up the highway, 750km to Adelaide. Even though technically, out in the Mallee, there are no streets and there’s not much of a view.
If you ever wanted to check out the main drag of Lameroo without actually going there, now’s your chance. My childhood homes on the outskirts of Adelaide seem to be in there too, so I should have more to report soon.
Something Niblock said reminded me why I’ve never sought music-related employment as a day job to fund my musical activities: I worry about what might happen to me if I’m placed in regular contact with musicians. Here’s Niblock discussing the role of the performer in playing his music (remember that his music sounds kind of something
like this):
There were two especially bad performances in my memory. One was in The Hague, actually. We were doing a concert and one guitar player had come to the rehearsal; and the other guy couldn’t come for a rehearsal at all – he’d never heard the piece nor had the CD or anything. So he came and got up on the stage and immediately started improvising over the drone. And the other guy was playing perfectly. I almost got up and said to him: please lay out. But I didn’t. And a similar thing happened very recently in the States. I had even sent the CDs to this woman who I knew, and who knew the music, and the same thing happened; I came very late, there was no chance to make a rehearsal or a soundcheck, and she just used it as an opportunity to make a really long improvisation for herself with a drone background. I was sort of shocked. I didn’t say anything to her because we were actually staying with her, so that made it difficult.
Helmut Lachenmann, “
Guero” (1970). Mario Formenti, piano.
(4’57”, 5.89 MB, mp3)
This’ll learn me for talking too much about death. The
Brockley Dormobiles are still growing in numbers, and yesterday afternoon I awoke to find my house had been visited by this dilapidated
Kombi Van of Doom.
Needless to say, I went back to bed and waited until the hand-sprayed harbinger had clattered away.

“He reserves his respect
mostly for the dead.” Why am I interested in so few composers under the age of 50? Is it simply because I’m getting old and stopped taking an interest in anything new? Or is it that I was never that interested in what’s comtemporary, and my interest is in a particular historical period, of which I happened to catch the tail end?
It’s one thing when you realise that most of the generation of great composers born in the 1920s have now died – Xenakis, Ligeti, Berio, Stockhausen,
Kagel, etc – but now
The Rambler is reporting that
Horaţiu Rădulescu (b. 1942)
has died. No other reports yet, and Wikipedia is dithering on whether or not to put it on their ‘live’ page.
ANABlog has recently been posting
a bunch of mp3s, with notes, of Rădulescu’s music – simultaneously sensual and austere, using a rich and distinctive palette of microtones, embracing the complete “acoustic spectrum”. If the ANABlog links are down, there are more compositions easily found on the Avant Garde Project site (large FLAC files and sleeve notes
here, mp3 versions
backed up here).
He can’t stand Shostakovitch (“de la merde!”), dismisses Schnittke (“tuttifrutti!”), cordially dislikes Boulez (but admits that “he opened up a new sound world for all of us and his management skills come out well in front of the orchestra”), listens to Algerian rai, and Nashville blues while he accelerates in the BMW, and unwinds to Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez when he de-accellerates at home.
His own music is unclassifiable. Though frequently called spectral, it has diverged totally from the French academic spectralism which is so hot in institutional circles in Paris these days. Colleagues of his who have become well-known such as Dusapin (the tritones of whose cello concerto “set my teeth on edge”) annoy him through their business skills, and he refers to the music spectrale crowd in Paris with scorn (“they’re the mafiosi”). He reserves his respect mostly for the dead: Wagner, Bruckner (“not Mahler, his music is empty!”), Josquin des Pres, and Xenakis, whom he venerates, adores.
“It doesn’t matter where you are now, that’s not important. Where do you have to get to?”
I performed Kagel’s General Bass (for “unspecified bass instrument”—I used an accordion), a little piece of typical, mysterious wit consisting of sparse, disconnected phrases that hint at some absent, traditionally tonal grandeur. Kagel a) was mildly disappointed at the fact that my piano accordion was not a bandoneon, but took it in stride, and b) was very particular about staging—seated, not standing; very still, as if one player within a giant ensemble; and making sure to
underemphasize any
espressivo possibility in the fragments. It was a bit of master-class in how to play off of performance expectations, and in how magically you can up the stakes of humor the less you give away the joke.
Kagel could be intellectually unforgiving, but even his criticism was cloaked in the graceful good manners of an old-school radical; if he thought I was young and stupid (which he probably did) he never let on, instead giving the generous illusion that the time he spent with me was time well spent.
Lejaren Hiller, “
An Avalanche” for pitchman, prima donna, player piano, percussionist and pre-recorded playback (1968). Royal MacDonald, pitchman; Norma Marder, prima donna; Robert Rosen, percussionist; George Ritscher, audio technician.
I. Getting Ready For It
II. The Avalanche
III. Cleaning Up The Mess
(9’04”, 8.88 MB, mp3)
1. My
String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) continues its conquering of the southern hemisphere when the
Redrawing show tours to Tasmania. It opens this Friday, 19 September, at CAST (Contemporary Art Space Hobart), 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart, and runs to 12 October.
2. My “
World Class Anxiety” post from earlier this year has now been published in a revised, improved form in the latest issue of
Meanjin – volume 67, number 3.
By now I should have just come home tired and hungover from a weekend across the channel catching up with some friends at
Happy New Ears in the bustling Belgian burg of Kortrijk – or Courtrai, depending on which Belgian you ask.
Except, I had my ticket booked on the Eurostar
on Friday morning. So instead I spent the last couple of days sleeping, drinking alone (whoopee.) and sorting through a small pile of CD-Rs. One of these contained some photos from a trip to Berlin in 2006, which are
now on Flickr.
A bunch of these photos are of the sound/painting/lighting installation
psc by Michael Graeve, who was at Happy New Ears. Ah well. More sad stories as the week progresses.

The Fall, “English Scheme” (1980).
(2’00”, 3.61 MB, mp3)
Repeat (one week only): Kenneth Gaburo, “Fat Millie’s Lament (Exit Music No.2)” (1965).
(4’45”, 4.65 MB, mp3)