Today's MOG: Bennie Maupin

Bob Burnett: I've recently jumped to the world of cloud audio via both Spotify and MOG. While far from the be-all and end-all of music listening, I'm pleased since for roughly $10 per month per account I'm able to 1) significantly reduce my CD library holdings 2) re-visit or discover albums I never had or let go of long ago(such as the Bennie Maupin's early ECM release The Jewel in the Lotus now playing in the background) 3) check-in on music mentioned in reviews, "best of" lists to potentially spare myself from buyers remorse; owning a CD raved about by many but far from something I need to own.

It's a bit excessive to have both Spotify and MOG but I've found they're libraries differ enough to justify having both. For example, Spotify seems to have a much deeper collection of independent/contemporary music that is more to my liking such as a far deeper digital bin of Machinefabriek and more John Cage/ Morton Feldman releases. The search architecture of Spotify is far superior. I found an Erik Satie piano album that is terrific (Reinbert de Leeuw-Satie Piano Works) because of the visual interface . MOG seems to have generally better audio quality and a much wider range of ECM releases--seems the entire catalog is available. For now, that's reason enough for me. I'm pretty sure I can sell off my pretty vast collection of ECM cds and break-even for at least a year or two with MOG.


Another other benefit of the cloud option is it works well for my office listening. I'm very fortunate to be in a work environment that allows me to have a nice sound system and play what I want to. (BB-very little push-back except for the time I played several CDs of Anthony Braxton's Piano Quartet, Yoshi's 1994. I got a few looks of bewilderment.) I've connected my computer to my office sound system rig and can rummage around as I wish. In the past, I'd have had to make a choice of a CD, pop it in and go with that. Still, not bad (and still a viable option) but the cloud option is a nice diversion from the somewhat rigid nature of less-than spontaneous and specific listening that occurs with CDs.

Sarasota Modern

Bob Burnett: I recently bought Andrew Weaving's Sarasota Modern, published by Rizzoli. The sticker price is now a very approachable $17.95. The book nicely presents the mid-century modern residential architectural movement that took place in Sarasota.

Here's an excerpt:

Sarasota in the 1950s was a small community graced with an alluring natural beauty. What set it apart from so many Florida beachfront towns was the concentration of artists, writers, and architects who gathered there—including author MacKinley Kantor and architects Paul Rudolf and Ralph Twitchell—a unique confluence of talented and daring architects coupled with a hip crowd willing to take risks. Sarasota was a place in which innovation and experimentation were the order of the day, a place where an architect might run into the local watering hole to shout: "I just invented the sliding glass door."

My family has spent a fair amount of time in Sarasota since the '80s. We're fortunate to have a small "Old Florida" style place with a pool situated on the downtown waterfront. One of my favorite activities is exploring the residential architecture; finding the classics as well as those derived from the influence of the original mid-century modern movement.

Lido Shores is the neighborhood where mid-century modern first took hold and remains the core for many attractive homes. After a circa '90s spate of unfortunate tear-downs for new, mostly McMediterranean construction there's been a movement in place to make people aware of the importance of saving and renovating the '50s era homes.

One fine example is architect Paul Rudolph's The Umbrella House which has been renovated to full glory.

Finally--I'll end with a music connection. My high school-era friend Roger Hudson has moved to the Sarasota area to teach guitar full time at Manatee School for the Arts. He and his wife, Brenda, have recently put into motion plans to purchase a mid-century modern home by architect Ralph Zimmerman. I look forward to my next visit sitting poolside with the Hudson's in hopes I can coerce him to play a few original compositions. He keeps getting better. Below is Roger performing at the 2010 Montreal Guitar Show. Guitars are great but.... I still want to hear his Marimba composition.

Erstwhile Records box

Bob Burnett: Jon Abbey of Erstwhile Records made my day and subsequently my evening. Earlier in the week I received an email announcing the annual Erstwhile February sale. I sent back a reply, some money via PayPal and asked him to be the curator of his own label for me. I had the box (pictured above) waiting for me when I got home.

I've recently been listening to a few Erstwhile releases: Radu Malfatti/Keith Rowe ø , Keith Rowe/John Tilbury Duos For Doris as two examples. Over the last few years I've also paid keen attention to releases by Toshimaru Nakamura that were on other labels. (Egrets on Samadhisound and the duet with Tetuzi Akiyama Post Impressionism on Spekk)

I decided to go through this box and write up first impressions along the way.

I started tonight for no particular reason with two releases: Greg Kelley/Olivia Block Resolution and Nakamura's maruto. Both made for highly engaged listens for vastly different reasons.

Resolution is a "roll, pitch and yaw" recording; there's not only left-right imaging but depth. While listening with headphones the sound feels like it's 6 inches in front of your nose as well as behind your head. Kelley manipulates a trumpet with a variety of gushes and breath action--it becomes a new instrument in his hands. Black creates a wide, creative range of sound with electronics and spare, fleeting almost tender moments on piano that to my ears reference Morton Feldman's four note sequences in his Piano and String Quartet (as well as John Tilbury). At times the piano takes on an almost percussive oil drum timbre. On top of it all there's terrific energy with what appears to be found object percussion--very physical and if that's not enough the sound of a wooden floor either being walked on or giving way to the weight of the activity at hand. This is an intense and colorful listen. I enjoyed it very much.

Nakamura's maruto came next. It's a 46 minute execution of his no input mixing board technique. I decided to listen also with headphones since I've found his work comes across best that way. maruto is a wonderfully warm and drifting recording. I know he's presenting a far more active range of frequencies than I'm capable of hearing but that didn't really matter--while I couldn't hear the range of tones I somehow experienced them as part of the work. At times I felt like I drifted asleep but all the while remained connected to it. There's a deep, penetrating bass presence throughout most of it--soothing and flowing. Another great listen.

Added note: I'm re-visiting maruto via speakers instead of headphones. The low frequency tones are wonderful. This work benefits and expands greatly from the open acoustics of a room.

c60 Rekindle

Bob Burnett: When Kim and I started this blog back in 2007 the music landscape was vastly different. At that time we thought the idea of a blog was to expand our nearly 30 year dialogue about music into written reviews. We hoped people would like what we had to say enough to click on an Amazon link and purchase a cd.

The blog ran out of steam for the most part after a few years. My reasoning was I felt limited by trying to "review" music. We began sharing mixcloud mixes at that time too. That too ran out of steam because, as with reviews, I felt I was making mixes for the sake of the segue instead of having a connection to the music, the execution of the music, etc.

Now here we are in 2012. There's a wider array of music sharing options--as well as blu ray films, streaming media, small independent music labels and people who know a lot more than I do about a wide range of topics whom I feel I should link into c60.

I recently began thinking about re-kindling the blog because I wanted to not just add my thoughts to the cloud about music, but share other blog posts, point to what I found to be interesting and vital work going on and hopefully allow this experience to be fun.

Here's a start: The Peckinpah Trio:



So, welcome, or welcome back. In either case I hope there's something here for you.

"Alice in Wonderland" by Lorna Clymer

Here's a special guest post by c60 friend Lorna Clymer. She was kind enough to submit this look at "Alice in Wonderland" when c60 was more slothlike than a hookah smoking caterpillar.

By Lorna Clymer

Alice is back. In fact, Alice will always return, again and again. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, first published in 1865, can’t be exhausted by one reading, one interpretation, one retelling. Like any complex and mysterious work of art, Alice endures because it’s durable—each era’s readers can pull on it, bounce around in it, and extract meaning from it. It then snaps back, ready to be pulled and stretched some more.

A rendering or retelling of anything this durable can be an artistic—even cultural—event that then lives on with a life of its own. If it’s first-rate, it can be so compelling that our understanding and memory of the original is changed forever, as if distinct layers were applied to the original, and we can’t ever get them off again. The classic illustrations John Tenniel did for the first edition of Alice continue to exert their own influence. When we see Tim Burton’s revisionary live-action Alice, we might applaud or reject his liberties with plot, but our first reaction to Johnny Depp’s fluttering Mad Hatter is to compare this rendering to Tenniel’s or to another iconic image that preceded Burton’s—from Disney’s 1951 animated version. Such renderings, once experienced, become lodged in one’s memory.

Recently re-released after almost a decade, Randy Greif’s Alice is back. This version makes audible and vivid Alice’s wry, disturbing strangeness. One voice (or is it two?), changing to fit different characters and the narration itself, delivers the spoken passages, which are direct from the original text or changed only slightly. Words are linked with rhythmic, often distorted patterns and looped sounds. Greif puts into sound Alice’s deadpan presentation of a surprising, threatening world that can suddenly seem askew while apparently running like clock-work on its own peculiar laws and customs. This world has mind-bending and body-altering properties, in which a girl can become suddenly uncertain of her identity, or get infinitely tall or perilously small, just by eating or drinking or holding a seemingly innocuous object. This world is packed with logical puzzles and silly puns, with weird situations that seem to be spring-loaded with social traps, and with events carefully managed according to rituals that are meticulously observed, and vigorously insisted upon by imperious figures, but are ultimately absurd. The peculiar world is finally explained away as having been found “only” in a curious dream. But like all good dreamscapes, it can seem a great deal more real than much of so-called regular life.

Over a long career, Greif has mixed musical and verbal elements in many projects, labels, and collaborations. For example, Fragment 56 is spooky, often highly rhythmic, and satisfying. Verdi’s Requiem and War of the World [not Worlds] both show how Greif uses established works as a foundation for acoustical unions. Alice may be his masterpiece.

Alice is monumental: six hours, five CDs, 60 tracks. Who has time for a six-hour work? After listening to only a few tracks, you’ll find the time. Because this project first appeared in installments 1991-93 (on Staalplaat, in a very limited release), a CD at a time, tracks initially released together have at least a faint resemblance, but all cohere as an inventively varied sequence. For this reason, and because Greif’s Alice follows the original narrative with only a few liberties, don’t download this work from a site like Zune (where fortunately it has been available for some time between the two re-releases) and allow the order of tracks to be reorganized by “most played.” Keep them in their original sequence if you can. The many acoustical layers can get disappointingly flat on an MP3 player with poor quality headphones. Alice richly repays full quality playback.

Alice was re-released in 2000 by Soleilmoon (remastered, box set) and again by the same label in 2010. The packaging for the 2010 re-release, decorated with pasted-up collages (made from scribbled words, splattered blots, appropriated photographs and anatomical illustrations), isn’t as compelling as the earlier, more austere design for the 2000 boxed set (paper slipcases), which had only slightly altered Tenniel drawings against a simple dark background. But no matter. Having Greif’s Alice available again on CDs again is great.

Because this is a story, we want to know what happens next, or because it’s a familiar story, we already know what is coming next. If we set our own speed, we probably wouldn’t pause for long to contemplate the effects of finding oneself suddenly opening out like a telescope. But now Greif controls the pace. We hear a line taken from the book: “She looked down at her feet,” which are becoming alarmingly distant as Alice rapidly grows. The sound of that sentence becomes more and more distorted, then fainter, then a bit frightening, as it repeats and changes several times. A wordless interlude underscores the weird disorientation Alice feels at that moment. After hearing this version, you probably won’t read that sentence again and just rush on to the next one. Instead, you’ll hear in your mind Greif’s invitation to contemplate what looking down at your feet at that moment, and for several moments, even minutes, might sound like. Without picking up the book again, perhaps at a moment of disorientation, you’ll hear Greif’s Alice as the soundscape to your own proportion-altering moment. That’s one mark of a successful work—it starts to inflect your own experience.

Greif’s Alice isn’t just an acoustical backdrop for a narrative that more or less unfolds as it did in the book. It’s a soundscape as fully realized as the world in Tenniel’s drawings. The range of sound is often sculpted by pause and by repetition. There are musical patterns and percussive rifts. There are vortexes of repeated loops of spoken and played sounds, fits of feedback-like distortion, layers of sound that trade foreground for background and back again, low tones, sharp dissonant chords suddenly struck, followed by waves of dissonance. A spoken sentence like “Oh, the Dutchess!” or the iconic “Off with her head!” repeats, loops, fades, and becomes a background for what comes next. Manipulated words become musical. Syllables loop and loop until suddenly they sound like notes being sounded by instruments. Greif demonstrates how profoundly rhythmic spoken words are or can become if you listen carefully. He shows how trying to distinguish “music” from “spoken word” is actually a false dichotomy.

Repetition is mysterious; sameness in difference compels. How can something be the same and still incrementally change through time so that as it returns we recognize it as both distinct and the same as what went before? Greif’s captivating soundscape exploits this phenomenon so inventively you’re unlikely to feel bored because he’s repeating himself. Instead, his version repeats Alice and becomes itself an instance of repetition: profoundly strange and familiar. You’ll listen to it again and again.

Wind Shower Particle

Bob Burnett: I just put together a mixcloud mix called "Wind Shower Particle" that touches on a range of compositions and creations. The title comes from a cut on sound sculptor Sawako's album Bittersweet, another 12k release that has great sonic depth. I continue to enjoy Vladislav Delay's The Four Quarters, an album of four long form compositions that touch on diverse tempos, improvisation, tonal variation and flow. I've included "The Third Quarter" here in its entirety--but must say this plays beautifully as an album; a solid hour-long composition. From there the mix goes into a direction of the sense of harmonics and tonal qualities that happen when the physical action of touch takes place. Opitope's Hau with its warm, melodic sheen, Paul Metzger's deep-diving banjo improvisations and the unmatched intensity of the Joseph Holbrooke Trio's Edinburgh. The Joseph Holbrooke Trio was the free improvisation collaboration of Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars. This cut comes from their Moat Recordings release on Tzadik.

I went from Holbrooke into the visceral tones of Z'ev's Ghost Stories. I just acquired the full 65 minute composition after having a segment (courtesy of Napster) from years ago. I am greatly attracted to the physical qualities Z'ev conjurs in Ghost Stories; the deep echo, the sensations of metal on metal and clanking construction site energy taking place. The mix concludes with an AMM-derived duet from John Tilbury and Eddie Prevost from Discrete Moments.

Thanks for listening--I hope you enjoy it.

Wind Shower Particle by C60crew on Mixcloud

A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn+ some music

Bob Burnett: I haven't been "listening" to music recently. In fact, I recently went more than 2 weeks without playing anything on my stereo, computer or iPod. It seems music has tended to play a role of interrupting other events or moments--blasting from a nearby car with windows rolled down, playing in a public space as a shopping enhancer or as something happening in a restaurant and managing to soak into whatever I was doing or trying to do. In the past I was able to figure out a work-around to competing sources of music. One method was to recast the invading sound in a "suppose I listened to the sounds around me as if they were music,"John Cage-approach. That was all well and good until the sounds around became identifiable as Toto's "Rosanna".

All this is a roundabout way of saying I've fallen back into music thanks to the new listening experience Kyle Bobby Dunn and his A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn collection has brought me--a 2 cd set that makes for two hours of much needed re-introduction to what music is capable of meaning. Inasmuch as Toto becomes identifiable from down the street, Dunn's music thrives on being a mix of a variety of sounds that blend and float into a lovely whole without the need to identify how they were created. The album drifts elegantly and beautifully--a series of flowing musical moments (in the 6-17 minute range for the most part) that at times reflect the natural world--pastoral yet not feeling the need to re-create the sounds of nature in a thematic "flute-as-butterfly"" moment. The sound is from a variety of masked and treated instruments (ie guitar, brass,strings) moving slowly in a way that brings you along the same way a good movie allows you to forget the edits and the camera moves. And for me, the same way Lamonte Young made The Well-Tuned Piano and Eno made Discreet Music do exactly the same. Needless to say, there have been repeated listens. I find I mostly enjoy playing Dunn's work through speakers, filling a room, increasing the volume and letting it expand the space.

I made the mixcloud sequence (included below) around his composition "Promenade". He sparked my ears in a way that allowed me to build other music around his into a mix, which became Air Curtain.

I hope you enjoy Air Curtain but I also hope you explore Dunn's music.

Air Curtain by C60crew on Mixcloud