let Your enormous library be justified

A curious pleasure lately in seeing musicians alluding, whether through explicit titles or more subtly through various signifiers, to literature I have some personal history with.

This occurred recently with Michael Pisaro's July Mountain, linking a Wallace Stevens poem, the last the great poet would see published, with Pisaro's prismatic music inspired by, and sourced from, mountains in California; then again, as I continue listening to Pisaro's a wave and waves, taking at least some of its animus from John Ashbery's ruminative, 21 page poem, A Wave.

Now I am digging into the Joe Foster/Kevin Parks two-CD release, Acts Have Consequences, and there is a nod to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I referenced in my thoughts on the sound world of Rafael Toral [entitled, after the staggering acts of creation in the Argentinean's strange bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings].

Well, I was an English major in my misspent youth, reading with an avidity and affection diminished over the many ensuing years. Sweet to be reconnected to these old friends, and in the case of all three cited, Stevens, Ashbery and Borges, I need reach no further than my home office for the referenced works in the music under review.

The Foster/Parks piece entitled The light they give is insufficient and unceasing [translated in my New Directions paperback edition as The light they emit is insufficient, incessant] is lifted from Borges' short story The Library of Babel.
Borges imaginarium here is a library that is the universe, containing an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of volumes, too many to read, too various to derive meaning from, and tended to by librarians who are a sort of hermetic cult, endlessly seeking light from the stacks around them.

But alas, laments the guide through the labyrinthine library, I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm.

Carry a little of that admonition into your listening to abstract music such as Foster and Parks offer here.

Even while Borges, consummate creator of mandalas of contradiction and paradox, adds

No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.


All italicized passages, as well as the post's title, from Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New Directions Paperbacks

lower down into it

I have attended three nights of music since Tuesday, so new reviews have been on the back burner. There will be several and soon.

Last night, in a pissy mood following immersion in a six hour block of hipster socializing and some depressingly mediocre music, I came home and re-read B.H. Friedman's introduction to Morton Feldman's Give My Regards To Eighth Street. Friedman is evaluating his selections for the volume, inclusions and exclusions, and refers to his sense of overwhelm:
I feel much as Lytton Strachey must have when, facing the 'great ocean of material' that became Eminent Victorians, he rowed out to 'lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up...some characteristic specimen.'

I have amassed quite a queue of material to review; I hope to bring up a few specimens soon. This state of aversion to music passes, if past experience is an augur. The last time I felt this way, I jettisoned my blog zero into the aether. I think a long drink of near silence will be medicine. Thanks for reading.


Give My Regards To Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, B.H. Friedman, ed.

Heliotrope 7

A pointer for anyone willing to travel to Minneapolis for the seventh annual 3-day festival of "underground music from the Twin Cities and sometimes elsewhere," the Heliotrope Festival.

Curated by visual artist and guitarist Rich Barlow [of Take Acre, performing on Friday May 28th], and guitarist Erik Wivinus [of Thunderbolt Pagoda, performing on May 29], Heliotrope essentially provides a sweet venue and a respectful forum for bands that can scarcely get a gig elsewhere.

I haven't attended the fest since 2006, due largely to matters of personal taste and interests [the preponderance of post-rock bands], and the opportunities I have to catch preferred shows throughout the year. This year, however, includes a number of musicians I enjoy immensely, and I want to honor the sweat equity and for-fun-and-for-free efforts of Barlow, Erik Wivinus, and all the musicians who schlep amps, analog synths and kulintang paraphernalia out of Econolines to make a joyful noise.

For details, visit the Heliotrope page on Facebook.

Pictured: Visions of Christ [John Jerry/Casey Deming], photographer's name unknown, sorry.

For Steve Lacy

This world
a fading mountain echo
void and unreal.

~Ryokan

Steven Norman Lackritz
July 23, 1934-June 4, 2004

裏を見せ 表を見せて 散る紅葉
うらを見せ　おもてを見せて　散るもみじ

ceremonies out of the air

When you've got nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

~ Cormac McCarthy, The Road

This potent line provides the title for a new recording, ceremonies to breathe upon, a bass duo performance by Andrew Lafkas and Michael T. Bullock.

The picture is a draftsman's drawing of an immense 19th century structure in Troy, New York, dubbed Gasholder House, originally a storage facility for an ironholder of coal gas.

The structure was the site for the bass duo performance in March 2008 of Lafkas and Bullock. Much like the in situ resonances and reverberations heard on the trio release of Axel Dorner, Xavier Charles and John Butcher, The Contest of Pleasures, the site is integrated with evident care by the musicians, who avoid the more obvious possibilities a space with ridiculously slow decay and incredible amplitude offers.

That the trio recording was in the venerable Chappelle Sain-Jean, Mulhouse, while the Lafkas/Bullock duo was in a storage garage for paint trucks, is a sweet reminder that any environment, when encountered and engaged by superb musicians, can be an integral element of the music.

I hope to have more to say about the music itself, as I revisit this impressive release on wind measures recordings.

For Michael Pisaro

And our landscape came to be as it is today:
Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance
A haven of serenity and unreachable, with all kinds of nice
People and plants waking and stretching, calling
Attention to themselves with every artifice of which the
human
Genre is capable. And they called it our home.

~John Ashbery, A Wave


In my undergraduate days at a small college in Iowa, I subscribed to the American Poetry Review, edited by the excellent poet Stephen Berg. A cover story about John Ashbery was what first pulled me into his poetry of disintegrated syntax, the always morphing and unlocatable "I" of his verse, and the so called New York school of poets and painters, principally Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara. Seldom owning a clue what Ashbery was getting at, but delighted nonetheless with the process, I distressed my roommate at the time with uninvited readings of selections from Houseboat Days and Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.
Said roommate was an art major, and subscribed to Art News, where, I was tickled to discover, Ashbery contributed regular columns about painters he adored and pilloried with equal wit.

I sort of forgot about Ashbery in the ensuing years, though I would be reminded of his very American brand of surrealism when my fealty for strange poets shifted to James Tate.




















For the past several years I have been listening with great interest, and with a growing sense of affinity, to the composer Michael Pisaro. My review of Pisaro's July Mountain, a composition that takes some of its inspiration from another famously difficult American poet, Wallace Stevens, attempted to bind together my impressions of that specific offering from Pisaro's sound world, Steven's perceptual leaps in his poem, and the dual reality we all sense shoots through all things- unity and fragmentation, the particulars and the whole.

I am spending a good chunk of time listening to Pisaro's piece for percussion, a wave and waves, recently released on the Cathnor label. The piece is structured in two 35 minute sections, the first entitled the world is an integer, the second a haven of serenity and unreachable. These titles, and I think some of the animus for Pisaro's work, are derived from Ashbery's 21 page poem, A Wave. Published in 1985, when Ashbery was a couple of years older than this writer, the poem is a Moebius strip, like much of Ashbery's work, resisting the reader's gaining too much of a toe-hold or orientation, to say nothing of having a beginning or end.
A Wave is a flood of stanza-upon-stanza of waves - waves of memory, encounters sweet and harrowing, of an aging man's acute sense of his essential apartness, and an indefatigable, recurring wave of belonging, of residency in a fallen world.














The release of Pisaro's a wave and waves, aided by an email from the amazing percussionist Greg Stuart, heard here and on the aforementioned July Mountain, sent me back to Ashbery. I had asked Stuart what poet served as the muse for Pisaro's newest work, and he pointed me to an old companion.

For me, Ashbery said in an interview with John Tranter, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does.
Michael Pisaro understands and grasps with an invisible hand the unrolling of time in his extraordinary music. I am especially grateful that meeting Pisaro has meant a reunion with an old, strange friend.


The photos are of Ashbery, Pisaro and Big Sur, the last another source of inspiration for a wave and waves.

Honey on the razor's edge

I recall first hearing the Catalan improviser Ferran Fages in 2006, on a duo release with percussionist Will Guthrie entitled Cinabri. Fages and Guthrie forged an intelligent, cacophonous noise engine of a recording, contact mics and acoustic turntable shredding and rending the air with an improvised musique concrete sourced from metal junk and real time verve [Cinabri was recorded in two sessions, assembled later by the meticulous Guthrie]. Discussing Cinabri with Guthrie a while later, he asked me if I had heard quite another dimension of Fages' musical sensibilities, the 2007 solo guitar release Cançons per a un lent retard. I knew Fages only via the dense sonic bruit of Cinabri, so Guthrie sent me a copy of Cançons, my first taste of his guitar duende.

Cançons is among those musical documents that contain moments of uncomfortable, unvarnished vulnerability and sorrow, and I thought so before reading later of Fages' father dying as he composed the pieces. Stark, somewhat redolent of Loren Connors, the use of bottleneck and sparsely placed notes creating a very gradual gravitas [Cançons is 71 minutes of unrelieved dark], I was impressed that this sort of elegy on acoustic guitar was served up by the same fellow who filled the air with sparks and hell-raising sheared metal on Cinabri.











On one singularly striking track on Cançons, Athens [Greece]-based zither player Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga accompanies Fages by detuning the guitar as he plucks dolorous notes and hammers out shimmering, unstable chords. It is a harrowing effect, an extension of his dark sound that is seamless and invisible. Move forward several years, and Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Fages have a working duo called Ap'strophe, with two releases available, Objects sense objectes from 2009 and Corgroc, just released as part of the four disc guitar series on Simon Reynell's imprint, Another Timbre.

Ferran Fages has been making improvised music for about 12 years, with five discrete duo projects, two trios and a quartet. His instrumentation is principally guitar, turntables and electronics. I have pointed to the radically disparate sound worlds of Cinabri and Cançons, and at first blush, so they seem. However, the last several weeks of listening a great deal to three of Fages' projects- the 2009 solo guitar release Al voltant d'un para/.lel, the Ap'strophe duo, and Fages' long-standing duo with Alfredo Costa Monterio, Cremaster- I hear a pervasive sensibility throughout both the noisiest and the most dulcet works. In a border land between disorienting noise and sensitive, performative statements, Fages brings to mind an image attributed to the 8th century Indian scholar Santideva, "honey on the razor's edge." Used by Santideva as a metaphor for human desire, I'm appropriating it to convey the sense of buzzing noise latent in Fages' quietest works, and the sweet coherence and clarity at the heart of the sonic maelstrom of Cremaster.















Fages might be the only guitarist in improvised music who can evoke the Taku Sugimoto of Opposite, and the John Frusciante of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. On Al voltant d'un para/.lel, a live recording from 2007, Fages extends the dark harmonic territory of his earlier solo work, more chordal than single line melodies. Whatever pedals or other devices Fages might use, his notes own impressive hang-time, suspended and replete with rich overtones and harmonics, enough grit and distortion in the shimmer to disabuse anyone he is a straight up romantic. There are passages evoking dolor and doom, but also chordal sweeps and upstrokes that evince the lovely Castles Made Of Sand. It is a grower, asking for repeated, careful listens, a very satisfying iteration in the series of explorations for solo guitar begun in the 2004 release A cavall entre dos cavalls [composicions per a guitarra].











Ap'strophe's sound world is tough sledding, if approached with any vestiges of expectation about what an acoustic guitar/zither duo might sound like. Lazaridou-Chatzigoga offers gears grinding, steady-state sine tones, gates creaking and hallucinatory string-sawing. At times she sustains an abrasive area just to the brink of exhausting its interest. She is alternately delicate, murmuring and purring, and supportive of Fages' occasional foregrounding of the guitar, principally with sustained, wobbly pitches. She brings to mind Harry Partch's kitara, the third bridge mutant of the zither that enabled him to sound extended techniques on a familiar sounding folk instrument. And what of Fages' contribution to the Ap'strophe gestalt? Look, I'm not going to pretend I can always discern where one leaves off and the other begins. Much of the time Fages' guitar is a guitar, picked and strummed here and there through the ambiguity and duo fusion, metal and wood self-evident. [The nearest acoustic guitar-sourced sound palette that comes to mind is that of Arek Gulbenkoglu, a brilliant, sadly overlooked guitarist whose acoustic guitar work sounds like anything but]. Much of the time the duo erase the distinctions, and become the single-sensibility sound generator that characterizes the similarly yoked Cremaster.

This leads me to what was revealed by alternating my listens between Fages acoustic [solo and duo], and Fages with Monteiro, unleashing the torrential but carefully formed cacophony of Noranta Graus A L'Esquerrat, Cremaster's blistering, ebullient release on Monotype. What became evident to my ears is that Ap'strophe often sounds, to sling a little taxonomy to make my point, like a very quiet noise group, and Cremaster often sounds like a cauldron of carefully sounded, distilled and selected abrasions, plangents and ear scours. The sound of honey on the razor's edge, which Fages brings to the collaborations in no small part.












The Cremaster release is stunning, among my few favorite releases in 2010. Fages and Monteiro have collaborated for many years, and their cohesion is as evident as their joined passion for generating streams of thick, cadenced noise that branches off into new directions just when a new direction is called for. The squall and shit storms are somehow shaped and directed by the two, with fantastic episodes of brief percussion patterns and lurching rhythms yielding to an overall avalanche of saturated, extreme sound. This is as good as I think this area gets, and along with the Tomas Korber/Ralf Wehowsky duo on Entr'acte, certain to be among my favorite releases of 2010.











Ap'strophe's Corgroc consists of two tracks, titled after the first line of an e.e. cummings poem that begins
spring is like a perhaps hand
[which comes carefully
out of nowhere] arranging
a window, into which people look.

Corgroc, situated within the Another Timbre series of the-guitar-and-how-it-got-that-way conceit, is certainly vexing at times. There is, to paraphrase Joachim-Ernst Berendt's observation about Monk, "a pathological aversion to playing the next expected sound." Repeated listens lay bare with what rigor and musicality the duo pursue that subterfuge, and actually how much their sound world is made of steel wire and wood after all. I really enjoy the sound of Ap'strophe's intimacy and the degree to which they bring a noise sensibility to their quiet sound spectrum.

Fages' work reminds me of a sort of off-hand categorization system an old friend, himself an improvising musician, shared with me 30 years ago. He said a lot of the music coming out of the European free improvisation scene, as well as American free music, could be heard as either "low-intensity/high volume", or "high-intensity/low-volume." The former, the theory runs, is balls-to-the-wall, screaming free music, volume supplanting a genuine, visceral intensity. The latter is music that achieves that grip of visceral intensity at even low volumes. Ap'strophe, and Fages' solo guitar work, is definitely of the latter. Cremaster's Noranta Graus A L'Esquerrat, with both extreme volume and attention and care given to the detail in the detritus, is high volume/high intensity.

Fages is someone I think you ought to listen to.







References

• Santideva, A Guide To The Bodhisattva Way of Life, trans. from the Sanskrit by B. Alan Wallace

• Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The Jazz Book

• e.e. cummings, spring is like a perhaps hand

• Ferran Fages

• Simon Reynell's excellent imprint, Another Timbre

• Monotype Records

• Etude Records
  

we see this empty cage

the wise know nothing at all
well maybe one song

Ikkyu, A Zen Harvest

anatomy of the moment

If you persist in pushing through the more tangible and readily apparent forms of zen, at least those successfully marketed in the West [sitting posture, breathing, a commodified aesthetic familiar in the West as watery wabi-sabi], you occasionally come upon extraordinary articulations of what it means to improvise. The best teachers, in fact, are not preparing you for interminable hours of remaining seated on a cushion, but for improvising.












If you persist in sifting through the often hermeneutic and, consciously or unconsciously, obscure ramblings of improvisers discussing what they do, you come upon articulations of the pith and gist of zen.

One such excellent teacher of zen in the U.S. is Charlotte Joko Beck, who wrote,

"Another way, which is our practice here, is slowly to open ourselves to the wonder of what life is by meticulous attention to the antaomy of the present moment. Slowly, slowly we become more sophisticated and knowledgeable...in this approach everything in our life becomes grist for the mill... as this anatomy becomes clear, freedom increases."

In a 2001 interview, improvising musician Keith Rowe offered the following;

"I studied under a Buddhist monk called Sangharakshita, I studied form, perception, meditation. What I wanted to be able to do was look at something and understand it, or to be able to understand the relation, the tension between these two things (searches around for objects on the café table), between the corner of this [ashtray] and that round thing [the back of the chair].. I wanted to be able to walk into a space and immediately comprehend what the space was about.
Part of Taoism was being able to do the right thing at the right time. You develop a sense of what to do."

Meticulous attention, immediacy, responsiveness, interrelationship, "what the space is about"-improvisation.

This is the intersection of where I spend a great deal of time and place my attention.



Charlotte Joko Beck is quoted from Everyday Zen, 1988.

Keith Rowe is quoted from a Paris Transatlantic interview, January 2001.

The picture is of Taku Sugimoto's Guitar Quartet during soundcheck at the Amplify 2002 festival; I chose it as it reminds me of one of my early experiences of watching improvising musicians in a new area of music collectively sharing that meticulous attention to the anatomy of the present moment.

For Richard Pinnell

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.
So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of zen.

~ Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind















The piece is not actually silent [there will never be silence until death comes which never comes]; it is full of sound, but sounds which I do not think of beforehand, which I hear for the first time the same time others hear. What we hear is determined by our own emptiness, our own receptivity; we receive to the extent we are empty to do so. If one is full, or in the course of its performance becomes full of an idea[...], then it is just that.

~John Cage, responding to a detractor of 4'33", recalled by Christian Wolff



Photo: David Tudor performing 4'33", 1952

Absolutely necessary and altogether impossible

New music writing appearing shortly. I have been called to granddaughter-care duty for a while.



























I am delighted to read here and there how flummoxed and wind-milled many listeners feel when trying to articulate some sort of response to motubachii, the radical duo release on Erstwhile of Annette Krebs and Taku Unami.

This mind-stoppage, however temporary its hold before we resume concretizing what initially blew our orienteer-shit away, makes it possible for us as listeners to really look at a lot of received and reified notions about what is music, how dependable is our listening acumen, stuff like that.
This occurs too infrequently, at least in an uncontrived and visceral way, and I am growing fairly confident motubachii may be that sort of genuine article.

My thoughts on motubachii will be published in the summer issue of the Paris Transatlantic.


[Post heading from Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries]

All bend
in one wind.

Wendell Berry, All

kyi

Why all the embarrassment
about being happy?
Sometimes I'm as happy
as a sleeping dog,
and for the same reasons,
and for others.

Wendell Berry, Why

Bonne lecture!

[Cellist Charles Curtis]


While you are waiting for me to get the next piece of music writing posted, do yourself a favor and hie over to the irascible, indefatigable Dan Warburton's excellent Paris Transatlantic, and enjoy copious reviews of new music.

Be sure to check the interview with cellist Charles Curtis, whose interpretations of Elaine Radigue, La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier are among my favorite releases. Paris Transatlantic gives the interview format ample space, and when the subject is Curtis, it is justified.

the guidelines

A student asked Suzuki Roshi if he kept an eye on his students to see if they were following the precepts, the Buddhist guidelines of conduct.

"I don't pay attention to whether you're following the precepts or not," he answered. "I just notice how you are with one another."

~ Suzuki Roshi quoted in To Shine One Corner Of The World

clarify the great matter

Dogen Zenji does not say just wholeheartedly sit on a cushion. If you believe in just doing that, place a rock on a cushion and let it sit. It sits better than we do.
Is that enlightened life? We should not fool ourselves.

~ Taizan Maezumi Roshi, Clarify The Great Matter

The photo is of the altar in the zendo at Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, where I occasionally attend.
The rock supplanted a statue of the buddha, in order, according to Dharma Field head teacher Steve Hagen, "to not confuse people" who react strongly, whether reverentially or negatively, to religious iconography.
One matter is clarified by sitting in this space- it is as Maezumi says, the rock sits better than we do.