Boring Like A Drill.

Like Dick Without A Hole, The Cure For Headaches was made at about the same time, and adopts the same types of source material: 1980s Adelaide talk radio and beloved TV stars.

In this piece, an intruder has disrupted the cosy little world of Adelaide chit-chat. The traditional Sunday night religious program was always a slightly tense affair, with a scarcity of earnest callers and, thanks to a reliance on importing extra content from wherever they could find it, the chance for lunacy to spring up either side of the microphone.

Much of the imported material came from the USA (of course), in the forms of both pre-recorded material and real-life talking from evangelists who had been flown in, usually by the Paradise Assembly of God (Paradise being the name of the suburb in north-east Adelaide). The regular host, a soft-spoken pastor in one of the more wishy-washy Protestant sects which thrived in that city, never seemed fully at ease with the fire-and-brimstone Yanks who confronted him from across the studio console.

The Cure For Headaches originally set an edited speech by one of these Americans to a slightly bemused host, against a backdrop sampled from a record sung by sometime Adelaide media titan Ernie Sigley. The juxtaposition of the two had always seemed a little arbitrary, so recently I began to think of possible ways to re-set the speech, without success… until Microsoft released Songsmith.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

The full glory of Songsmith can be appreciated in this promotional video, made by Microsoft.

It was quickly discovered that Sonsgmith has the power to add new, improved accompaniments to pre-existing songs too. This seemed like the ideal software to try out on my evangelical friend. Unfortunately, Songsmith doesn’t have a randomise function, but it does load up a different default genre every time the program starts, so deciding on the new music for the piece was a breeze. I think it’s worked, don’t you?

The Rothko show at the Tate closed on the weekend. Notes From A Defeatist saw it late in the season, as did She Sees Red, as did I. Both of them found the crowds come to see the Big Name artist offputting to a greater or lesser degree, and really incongruous with the introspective nature of Rothko’s art. I didn’t find the crowds so bad, but perhaps I’m getting used to them, or there were fewer people there when I went on a Friday night.

NFAD was especially narked by those egregious little headsets that everyone was wearing, which are supposed to explain the art to you but instead prevent you from seeing it. SSR took the novel approach of listening to her own ipod when visiting the show, thus providing a personal music soundtrack. I don’t mind this idea too much. Usually the ideal match for Rothko is supposed to be Morton Feldman, but amongst the Tate’s usual hubbub Feldman’s music would be obscured even more than Rothko’s painting.

It was a neatly focused show, built around an expanded version of the Tate’s Rothko Room, creating a vast room filled with double the usual number of paintings from the series of so-called Seagram murals. While the larger room lost the intimacy and atmosphere provided in the more distilled experience of the usual room, it gained the overwhelming presence of seeing so many paintings from the same series united in one place, impressing all the more how each painting contributed to another in this period of Rothko’s work.

The following rooms can’t help but contribute to the legend of Rothko’s decline into despair and suicide. A room of remarkable black-on-black paintings, and lastly, two rooms of works from the last year of his life, when ill health forced a change in his materials and working methods.

The last paintings remove what little illusion of comfort remained in the Seagram murals. A uniform arrangement of black over grey, negating the previous ambiguity of figure versus background; few and thinner layers of paint; a white border to frustrate the perception of depth. They’re an extraordinary achievement in testing the limits of what can be communicated in painting. I don’t like them.

Critics have called these last paintings “unreadable”, claiming they resist being looked at as landscapes. I find them too ready to be interpreted, and have great trouble looking at them as anything other than landscapes. The application of colour lacks the subtlety of the earlier work, making it seem too expressive and in need of analysis. The illusion of figure against a ground is too easily resolved in the mind, unlike the mysterious ambivalence of the preceding paintings. The border restricts and diminishes the image it contains. Maybe I need to spend more time with them, without the distraction of people all around me, shuffling through the heavy exit door to the merchandise store, filled with Rothko jigsaw puzzles and coffee mugs.

And it did end up snowing all night. Not having a job to go to anyway, I missed out on the thrill of being forced to skive off work because all the trains and buses were cancelled. I did get to spend the day at home with the girlfriend, however. Nice.

In any case, the girl was confined to quarters with a dud leg, so no skidding about on the snow outside for us. She contented herself videoing teenagers outside tobogganing down the street on a tea tray while I considered going out alone to take in the picturesque scene before deciding bugger it. I’m not getting cold and wet just for a few snapshots when thousands of much better views will be plastered all over Flickr by lunchtime.

Meanwhile, all across the island, Britons were rediscovering the innocent joys of a day (or evening) in the snow.

Olivia Newton-John, “Till You Say You’ll Be Mine” (1966).
(2’35”, 2.83 MB, mp3)

Just spoke to my dad on the phone: he’s been telling me how hot it’s been the past week. Over a week of 40-plus temperatures, and nights which barely dip below 30 degrees. Everyone is feeling the strain.

Meanwhile, I got caught in the snow coming home this evening. It’s kept up all night, and I’ve been watching people trying to drive their cars slowly down the street, only to lose all traction on the small hill in front of my house and gracefully slide sideways down into the intersection below, gently crashing into the steadliy growing pile of grief-stricken vehicles scattered about. It all looks a little bit like this.

I’ve just returned from a week in Rome. It was good to get away from the freezing drizzle of London to a milder soaking, of a type that made me nostalgic for winters in Melbourne, back in the days when it rained. Actually, it made me nostalgic for Melbourne coffee too.

Right now I really need to find a new job, but there’ll be at least a couple of posts over the next few days. Stand by for photos of quaint old Fiat 500s and the world’s wussiest gladiator.

The Stockhausen: Total Immersion post is finally ready, immediately below. This blog won’t be updated again until the end of next week, so in the meantime please entertain yourselves with this innovative example of Australian TV continuity from the Good Old Days:

The lingering question is: after three concerts on Saturday, after the week of gigs in November and the two Proms shows, have I had enough of Karlheinz Stockhausen yet? Not at all.

My long-suffering girlfriend agrees, on the whole; although she disagreed with me about Inori, one of the two major performances of the weekend. This piece was written in the early 1970s and, being a 75-minute work for large orchestra and two mimes, is sometimes pointed to a sign of Stockhausen’s encroaching, messianic loopiness that mars his later reputation.

Inori develops ideas from Stockhausen’s earlier, equally monumental but better-known works – the ritualistic experience of Stimmung and the use of formula composition in Mantra – and so points the way to the Licht operas, which exploit both aspects to the fullest possible extent. Inori‘s formula is a 15-note melody from which all attributes of the piece are derived. It’s interesting that for all of Stockhausen’s arcane impulses, he still wants to communicate with his audience. The ‘melody’ is heard first as rhythm alone, with the orchestra articulating and colouring a single, repeated G. The formula slowly reveals itself, section by section, adding dynamics to the rhythm, then harmony – all derived from the formula itself. In the latter half of the piece the melody itself is finally heard, before being elaborated in a formula-derived polyphony.

This is some of Stockhausen’s most powerful music; its static blocks of orchestral colour, processional qualities, and air of spiritual devotion rather than personal aggrandisement make it feel more Messiaenic than messianic. The spiritual and ritualistic element of the piece is made clear by the presence of the two mimes, who perform in unison a choreography of prayer gestures, whose increasing complexity further reflects and elucidates the underlying formula, expanding it into another dimension.

The girlfriend was put off by the mimes. She thought they were a distraction, and stranded the work as a relic of the times in which it was written. She also disliked the way the two of them (Alain Louafi and Stockhausen initiate Kathinka Pasveer) performed in slightly different styles, not exactly in synch. I thought this helped the performance, as it emphasised each individual’s devotional communion, over the need for a perfect surface appearance – but I may be arguing from ignorance.

The two mimes performed on a platform constructed above the conductor – a rather ungainly and rickety-looking affair, painted hospital blue. It’s apparently very old, dating back possibly to the first performance thirty-odd years ago. Stockhausen’s acolytes were insistent that the platform be reassembled exactly the way it had been done every time before, much to the annoyance of many in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to say nothing of the health and safety reps. This incongruous juxtaposition of the dilapidated platform with such finely-crafted music became a feature of Stockhausen’s music theatre.

In any case, we all had a better time of it than the BBC Singers earlier in the day. The afternoon concert ended with Stockhausen’s late choral work Litanei 97, a piece which like so much later Stockhausen demands extra-musical skills from the performers. It suffered from some uncertainty amongst the singers as they were required to circle around the hall, and the conductor struggling with an errant temple gong that made a break for it across the floor about halfway through.

The evening ended with an airing of Stockhausen’s 2-hour electronic work from the late 1960s, Hymnen. It’s one of his most famous and celebrated pieces, yet it’s also curiously inaccessible these days, both to actually get hold of and hear, and to understand.

The basic premise and material are well-known: recordings of national anthems from around the world are electronically deconstructed. The philosophical implications can easily be imagined, and Stockhausen pursues the utopian ideal with all the simplistic confidence particular to his generation. What is particularly notable, and disturbing, is the emphasis on destruction throughout the work, as familiar sounds are repeatedly pulverised beyond recognition.

The result often feels more like some new kind of anti-music. Stockhausen’s compositional methods of the time created an apparently free-form narrative that drifts and digresses from one moment to the next, including large negative spaces of near-static and metafictional comments on the compositional process itself.

Sitting in the dark for such a long time, contemplating the strange mix of familiar and unfamiliar sounds as they moved around the four speakers in the hall, was a perculiarly compelling concert experience. The white spotlight from the November gigs was back, but sitting with eyes closed or nursing a plastic cup of rioja removed this distraction. Hymnen works in a way that Stockhausen would not have intended, especially now that its Cold War politics have dissipated. It is an ambiguous, elusive essay on entropy – of social structures, of music, of the world and sound itself – and on the vanity of human wishes, whether to achieve power or to remove it.

Also: Hymnen streaming online!
Excerpts from Lecture on HU (video) and Inori (audio) on the Stockhausen website.

Morton Feldman, “Piano Piece 1952” (1952). Steffen Schleiermacher, piano.
(8’47”, 11.96 MB, mp3)

Yeah, but it’ll be a bit spotty over the next week or two. In the meantime, here’s Dormobile Number Seventeen, a fine left-hand drive specimen spotted on the same block and Numbers Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Twelve.

I’m back again. I was going to update the blog with posts about finally getting to see the Rothko show at the Tate gossip about the impending Stockhausen gig at the Barbican, as well as preparing some new music webpages and oh who am I kidding I got sacked today.

Not my fault!

First thoughts on getting the DCM:

• My girlfriend is going to kill me.
• Whoo! Monday off.
• Productive time wasted on looking for another job. Bleah.
• I won’t have to finish that boring budget stuff or organise that boring meeting next month. Good.

It’s been a rollercoaster, as you can see.

I’m back. Sorry I haven’t updated the blog much lately but I’ve been busy what with finally getting to see the Rothko show at the Tate and gathering gossip about the impending Stockhausen gig at the Barbican, as well as preparing some new music webpages and oh who am I kidding I’ve been watching darts all weekend.

This year’s champion is the splendidly-named Ted Hankey, who made a comeback after losing it at the oche last year when Aussie Simon Whitlock’s weapons-grade mullet mesmerised him into punching the dartboard. Ted attributes his renewed success to a rigorous training regime of cutting down from ten pints before a match to three. I’m not making any of this up. Looking at his photo, it’s scary to think he’s only a year older than I am.

King Loser, “’76 Comeback” (1995).
(3’20”, 5.08 MB, mp3)

Encore (one week only):
The Plums, “Au Revoir Sex Kitten” (1992).
(4’08”, 7.21 MB, mp3)

… died at the age of 47, apparently worn down by the excesses of alcohol and other substances, in particular, his favourite codeine-based cough syrup.

It’s not normal for a nation’s press to care about a cricket series on the other side of the world that doesn’t involve said nation. Unless I checked the fine print in the sports sections of the papers, the British media would offer me no clue as to the Australian test team’s performance – which is perfectly natural. However, in the past few weeks the BBC’s sports reports have become increasingly concerned with the current series of Australia versus South Africa. British newspaper columnists are quietly excited at the prospect of Australia losing the third test and no longer being the number one cricketing nation in the world.

The fact that the England team are ranked at number five and had no part to play in their former colony’s potential downfall is irrelevant: just the fact that someone has beaten them is a source of vicarious satisfaction. It’s like the instinctive barracking by a neutral country for whoever is playing against the USA at the Olympics, writ large.