Boring Like A Drill.

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.

Something has been bugging me since Christmas. As is usual at that time of year, the radio, particularly the type of stations I listen to, was full of the usual christmassy songs, most of them customarily horrible. Like Dante’s circles of Hell, there are graded degrees of quality of Christmas song. “Adeste Fidelis”, say, might enjoy the company of Aristotle and Ovid, while “Jingle Bell Rock” rots amidst the betrayers.

I had always thought that there was a place reserved in one of the lower circles for “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, a song, on casual listening, I had always found exasperatingly smarmy and condescending. Over time I’d guessed that there was a greater meaning behind the song that I wasn’t getting, but didn’t care because the tune, its arrangement, and the way it was sung, inevitably crushed its suppressed sentiments down to the complacently glib.

It may have been one I hadn’t heard before, it may be that for once I paid close enough attention, but last Christmas I heard several times a version of the song that was sincere, touching, and achingly sad. Usually, a revelation like this is an experience of unalloyed pleasure, the thrill of discovery coupled with the minor relief of there being one less odious thing in the world to despise; but I cannot shake off a sense of regret for my newfound admiration of this song.

It can be hard to pin down the exact circumstances that force you to reconsider your tastes. Sometimes a shift in understanding can come from a forced change in perspective. I’d always disliked The Beatles’ “Ticket To Ride” until one day in my early twenties when, immobilised by flu on a couch, I heard it played on a small AM transistor radio hidden beneath a cushion and realised it was a little masterpiece.

More usually such changes in taste can be attributed to a natural, healthy expansion of one’s palate over time, or that comes naturally with the attainment of maturity. In this case, I can see how an older, more experienced mind can recognise depths in the little Christmas song to which a younger person would remain oblivious. Why does part of me resent finding this depth? Is it better to learn to sympathise with other people’s hopes and sorrows expressed in simple songs, or is it better to reject with a youthful sneer the foolish sentimentality, emotional manipulation, the con artist’s pitch?

Having shown so much love and understanding for so long, should I be less tolerant of other people’s tastes? Some years ago I drew a line in the sand at Frankie Valli; should I be doing more to defend myself?

There is so much good music I will never get to hear. Why should I be pleased to discover that “Me and Mrs Jones”, a song I’ve always found hateful, has a rather fine-sounding guitar break? Am I listening to too much mediocre music, and starting to prefer technical accomplishment to creativity and imagination?

Should I stop finding beauty everywhere, lest I open my mind so far that I let in the forces that will close it down, trapping myself in a popular critic’s world of stunted sentimentality and highbrow kitsch?

Is it virtuous to find reasons to accept the bad with the good, or does it ultimately lower one into relativism – a passive, complacent mindset that accommodates any mediocrity it encounters, never stirring to reject it and instead seek out the good?

(Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.)

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michaels Reise (Solisten-Version) (Markus Stockhausen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Simon Stockhausen etc etc)

It’s funny how as Stockhausen’s messianic tendencies became more evident, his music got less hard-nosed and abstruse, more relaxed, even folksy enough at times to drop corny jokes. It would seem that Stockhausen is a benevolent god. Perhaps the music gets a little too comfortable with itself sometimes, but it’s nice to hear old-school modernists mellow out a little.

It’s funnier still how when he’s writing melodies for doubled horns, in irregular rhythms with odd little leaps all over the place, he sounds just like Frank Zappa. Complete with wacky German muttering in the background.

Does everyone have this experience? I don’t think I’ve ever stopped this record early, but I can’t remember anything after “Candle”. I’ll have to start this disc at track 10 and see if it exists. I’ve just noticed my ancient CD player is showing “Trilogy” is indexed. That’s so cute.

As I’ve mentioned John Cage a couple of times recently, I may as well go on and mention that Silence, a collection of his essays from the late 1930s to 1960, is one of the most useful, entertaining, and best-smelling books I own. In his lecture “Indeterminacy” he tells, in part, how he came to be a composer. Instead of finishing college, Cage left California and went to Paris where, eventually, he ran into one of his former professors.

He gave me literally a swift kick in the pants and then said, “Go tomorrow to Goldfinger. I’ll arrange for you to work with him. He’s a modern architect.” After a month of working with Goldfinger, measuring the dimensions of rooms which he was to modernize, answering the telephone, and drawing Greek columns, I overheard Goldfinger saying, “To be an architect, one must devote one’s life solely to architecture.” I then left him, for, as I explained, there were other things that interested me, music and painting for instance.

When I first read this, and for years after, I knew nothing about this architect other than Cage’s single name-drop, and assumed that the name’s retrospective connection to a James Bond villain was a coincidence. This situation changed soon after I arrived in London.

For several weeks I wondered about the unusual tower building visible throughout much of north west London, until I found that it was written up in my Time Out London guide:

Trellick Tower, built in 1973 by architect Ernő Goldfinger and considered by some to be a hideous eyesore and by others to be a significant piece of modernist architecture. You might wonder about the concordance of Ernő’s name with a James Bond villain? That’s the penalty for irritating Ian Fleming.

Goldfinger left Paris in the mid 1930s and moved to London; most of his designs were built in England. Trellick Tower, on the northern edge of Notting Hill, is his most famous building – or notorious, depending on your point of view.

There are two persistent myths about Goldfinger the architect. One is that he committed suicide by throwing himself off Trellick Tower in a fit of remorse over his creation, and the other, more pervasive one is that Fleming maliciously named his villain after the architect as a rebuke to the latter’s aggressive modernist tastes. Goldfinger had built an avant-garde terrace house in Hampstead as his own residence, allegedly to the displeasure of his more conservative neighbour Fleming.

Nigel Warburton, Goldfinger’s biographer, has debunked this oft-repeated story, showing there is no reason to believe Fleming had any grudge against the architect. Fleming had most likely heard of Goldfinger through a mutual friend and took the name for his own use, as he often had before with other friends, relatives, and acquaintances – to their occasional displeasure.

Fleming’s irritation with the real Goldfinger came after the fact, when the architect sued for defamation. The publishers, unable to deny that use of his name was coincidental, settled out of court, and presented Ernő with six copies of Goldfinger. Fleming’s own suggestion that an errata sheet be inserted in the novel, explaining that the character’s name should be Goldprick, was not taken up.

Trellick Tower has always been a contentious building to Londoners, to a greater or lesser degree over the years. Apart from its brutalist style, by the 1980s it had become one of the more conspicuous failed modernist housing projects, rife with crime and squalour. Living conditions have since improved immensely since the local council invested some money in the site, and employed a concierge as Goldfinger recommended in the first place. The building now has a heritage listing, and has acquired some cachet among the fashionable.

Warburton has collected a number of related articles and book excerpts about Goldfinger, and Trellick Tower in particular. (His book cannily puts the Fleming story at the very beginning, to save journalists the trouble of searching the entire thing.)

Now that I know something about Goldfinger, one aspect of Cage’s story becomes unusual. Goldfinger was only ten years older than Cage, and was in his early thirties when Cage was sent to work for him: why did Professor Pijoan decide he would be a suitable mentor for Cage?

I was going to get a little bit nostalgic about Melbourne and simply point out that the Spill label’s compilation albums of eccentric indie pop from the 1990s are available for download from the Spill website, but I have Number Three playing now and I just remembered that I’ve heard this one before, years ago, lying helplessly drunk on the floor near the end of a very long night at Clare’s house, and so now I’ve gone completely over and incapable of making any reasonable assessment about anything, whether it’s music or just what I’m going to do with myself when I finish typing this. It’s all there, from Clag to Undecisive God.

Link found via No Rock and Roll Fun.