Manafonistas

 

 
 
 

I am a looper. Ich streune durch die Strassen auf der Suche nach meinem Objekt der Begierde. Ich durchwuehle Sperrmuell nach Dingen, die ich verarbeite. Auf dem Flohmarkt erkennt ihr mich an meinem weissen Regenmantel und meinem schwarzen Cowboyhut. Abends gehe ich mit meinen Fundsachen nachhause und sortiere vorsichtig meine fragilen Schaetze. Dann lege ich mich erschoepft auf mein Bett und stelle mir vor, ich stehe mit einem goldenen Gong auf einem Wasserfall und hoere nach jedem Schlag dem Fallen der Klaenge zu. Ganz unten vernehme ich noch das Tropfen der letzten Wasserperlen.

I am a looper, ich heisse Williams. Ich bin Sammler von Maschinen, die laengst ihren Modegeist aufgegeben haben. Ich repariere nichts, aber ich verarbeite sie zu neuen Klangegenstaenden, die ihre Liebhaber finden. Sie koennen darauf hoeren, wie sie ihren Geist aufgeben, um Neues zu schaffen. „You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.“ Das sagt Bob Dylan. Und ich erweitere ihn mit den Worten von Brian Eno: „Repetition is a form of change.“ Ich bin ein Klangsammler und unterlege das Alte mit Neuem. I am a looper. My name is Basinski. Heute ist Sonntag, hoeren Sie mein Glockengelaeute auf The Disintegration Loops – II 1 DLP3.

 
 

 
 

Wenn er nicht auf anderen Geleisen landet, könnte es passieren, dass die Verbindung Eno/Hyde 2015 zum dritten (und wieder ganz anders klingenden) Streich ansetzt, jedenfalls hat Brian, wie er mir vor Monaten in einer Mail schrieb, klare Vorstellungen von diesem möglichen, nächsten Schritt. Zudem wird das Label Staubgold im nächsten Jahr rausrücken mit einem neuen Opus des Kammerflimmer Kollektiefs, es gibt sogar schon einen Namen für das Album: „Désarroi“. Thomas Weber wird gewiss nicht im Sinn haben, das vertraute Feld ohne Abzweigungen weiter zu kultivieren, vielleicht lockt ihn seine Arbeit mit Hörspielen auf neues Terrain. Ich hatte das Glück, überwiegend bei der Abmischung einer Manfred Eicher-Produktion dabei zu sein, die schon jetzt für mich ein „hot contender for the album of the year 2015“ ist. Tigran Hamasyan, mit Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang und Eivind Aarset. Aber nehmen Sie keine Warteposition ein. Ich tippe auf den Oktober 2015. In Lugano tauchte auch Egberto Gismonti auf, der ein pures Soloalbum aufnahm. Vorfreude auch hier. Man muss bei dem Brasilianer nicht in allzu ferne Jahrzehnte zurückschweifen, um sich an seine Meilensteine zu erinnern. Jene erst Zusammenarbeit mit Nana Vasconcelos, ja, klar. Oder das Album „Solo“, speziell Seite Eins (da gab es noch Schallplatten als primären Tonträger). Man denke aber auch (viele Monde später) an „Danca Dos Escavros“, Gitarre pur, Sternstunden sind selten in der improvisierten Musik, das war so eine! Peter Ruedi hat in seinem Mammutbuch eine herausragende Besprechung dazu geschrieben. Kaum nimmt man die Spuren der Zukunft ins Visier, landet man in einer Zeitschleife. It’s a merry-go-round!

 

 

„I didn´t know Lanois was out with a new album, and it is fantastic!!“
(Eivind Aarset)

 

 

 
 
 
Heute morgen, beim ersten morgendlichen Kaffee zu Hause, hat mich das neue NEIL YOUNG Album etwas ratlos zurueckgelassen. Habe seit gestern die DCD Version zu Hause, d.h. auf der ersten CD die „normalen“ Songfassungen; auf der zweiten CD dann die mit einem Orchester „angereichteten“ Fassungen der von CD 1 bekannten Songs.

Ganz verwegen heute morgen natuerlich nicht die CD 1 eingelegt, neinein: die CD 2 with added orchestra in den Player !

Nun ja. Ob sich Neil Young mit dieser mit voller Kraft begleitenden Orchesterbegleitung, fuer mich teilweise nahe am Rande des Hollywoodfilm einen guten Dienst erwiesen hat ?

Ein zweites und drittes Anhoeren am morgigen Sonntag, inbesondere der „normalen“ Songfassungen von denen ich mir dann doch etwas mehr verspreche…, aber soviel als erster Eindruck.

Yes, true, it might be Joey’s next favourite comic book. Takes a bicycle right to the end of the world, or nearly so. You have to take your time to find the book, maybe in some deserted bookshop in Amsterdam or London. I’m surely not an expert of this genre, but there were some comics that really blew me away. And I keep coming back to them. One thing I love is the fragmentation of time in a comic book. When a painter knows how to slow down time.

Such fragmentation allows us to freeze and meditate on fleeting events, deepening our appreciation of the ephemeral. British landscape printmaker Jon McNaught brings the colour-mixing of traditional lithographs to the medium, refining its borderless panel down to its sparsest elements and painstakingly drawing and separating by hand each layer of colour, typically black, grey, pale blue and sunset pink.

Is there something like „sunset pink“ – I do think so! In „Pebble Island“ the Englishman recaptures his wanderings as a boy on an island in the Falklands after the 1982 war, taking time to show the rain subsiding before he sets of cycling across the beach through shafts of sunlight. A sheep looks up and briefly watches him past. Beautiful. Not much happening. Robert Wyatt’s record „Dondestan“ from 1991 could be an ideal companion to this silent book: both share a sense for far away places and slow motion.

 

 
 
 

Nun liegt er vor, der Livemitschnitt eines Auftritts von Charlie Haden und Jim Hall beim beim Jazz Festival in Montreal im Jahre 1990. Acht Titel dokumentierten hier das Treffen zweier Meister auf ihren Instrumenten,  darunter standards wie „Body And Soul“, „Skylark“ und „Turnaround“.
 
Mein Eindruck beim Anhoeren ist, dass man diese standards sicherlich das eine oder andere Male gehoert hat; manche werden sagen: ZU OFT. Aber ich zumindest kann diesen, auf Bass und Gitarre reduzierten Fassungen einiges Neues abgewinnen. Und als Erinnerung an zwei virtose Meister Ihres Instruments eine Bereichung in meinem CD Regal.

 

„After The Gold Rush“ feels like Young’s morning-after-the-60s album, but unlike the consoling tone of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, it is gaunt, troubled and affecting. Amid the relationship woes, there is ecological disaster, racism and Don’t Let It Bring You Down, which, Young noted, was “guaranteed to bring you down”.

What do the new (forthcoming) albums of Scott Walker & Sunn O))) , Daniel Lanois and Sidsel Endresen / Stian Westerhus have in common?

Disturbance, a considerable amount of harshness, and, in rare moments, unexpected tenderness!

Scott and Sidsel get or certainly will get a huge amount of great reviews because they have strong admirers: nearly always the same small bunch of people who sings the praise, and for all the good reasons. I had the luck to listen to the second duo album Sidsel and Stian will release on Rune Grammofon in late November. Two days ago I vanished under my set of headphones and, listening to „Bonita“, I was transported to an oldfashioned  bar with old chandeliers and a Wurlitzer jukebox.

Two people –  bathing in neon lights –  danced to this undanceable  music (coming from a fantastic sound system Jamaican style). Dancing to this only seems possible in radical exercises of „Ausdruckstanz“. Listening to the duo, I forgot my standard aesthetic vocabulary, the word „postmodernism“ lost any meaning. Sidsel Endresen is the most expressionist female voice in modern music since Meredith Monk, and guitarist Stian Westerhus is playing with fire extending the vocabulary of his fucking old electric guitar with a grim smile on his face.

In the same way the meeting of Scott Walker and Sunn O))) was  a dark dream that came true. The more I listen to  the album, the more I’m seduced by the moments of vulnerabilty that surrounds the merciless flow of words. Some may know about this miserable old school of exorcism, part of the madness of  Catholicism. Now, listening to Scott’s singing can make you think of exorcising ghosts, but, in contrast to generations of mentally instable priests (inquisition’s killing elite), here it really gets a cathartic quality. There is something deeply human in Scott’s hunting territory between a whisper and a cry. The effect is similar to looking at the last fifteen minutes of the last episode of  „True Detective“.  

And now: Mr. Lanois. He releases an album that confuses a lot of critics who cannot categorize it. Critics who come from the mainstream and get their fucking kicks on route 66, on fucking Classic Rock Radio. Strictly conservative critics (rock journalism is full of  smart Alecs whose heads are filled with Harley Davidson memories and  „good old time“-obsessions). They cannot handle disturbance, because they think they know it all. „Flesh & Machine“ is too much for them, unbearable for a conservative mind. It’s not old school ambient, it’s something you didn’t expect from the producer of Dylan, U2, Peter Gabriel – on first listen it may deeply disturb. So several writers  are showing their thumbs down, writing about „unfinished“ pieces and „exercises in noise jams“.  

They are not used to someone touching new ground – oh, poor buddies, no deja-vues. But in one aspect they are right. The record should be sold with a warning sign: „DANGER! OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE!“

Ya remember the bar I was transported to (the way of dreams and good navigation systems) while listening to Sidsel and Stian. The owner of that bar (placed in a deserted area of King Crimson’s „RED DISTRICT“ in Torquay, England) is  a fabulous guy.  And a collector of jukeboxes. He loves extreme music, he loves the evergreens, too.  His  jukebox from the 1960’s is  crammed with that stuff. Thousands of singles: from „Winchester Cathedral“ to „Daydream Believer“. Big archive.

Now he ordered a special edition: two very rough tracks from Lanois‘ new „Wunderkammer-Musik“, a very limited edition: one single only!  It was nearly midnight. The two dancers left the wooden stage, the last echoes of Stian’s electric guitar dissoving into air, Scott Walker is watching „True Detective“ in his home in London, and my friend John  smiles and says: „The fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly“.  He likes riddles. He takes the Lanois single, puts it into the „holy grail“ of his juxebox collection, and takes a coin out of his pocket.

The stylus is landing on the the black vinyl, the piece starts. – Gosh, this is fucking genius, I say to him, but why did you do all this. – Just wait a minute, it’s all done with a purpose. It  didn’t take long, that minute. Suddenly the jukebox started to tremble, and tremble even more,  and before I could even open my mouth to say something like „what the fuck“, it simply exploded with a bang. The bar was closed for three months.

Our wounds were healing quickly (he excused himself more  than once that a  copy of „Hey Jude“ sliced up my left forearm), and when I asked him later if he had known what would happen, he answered: „Think so. You know there comes a time where you don’t want to rely on all your domesticated knowledge about music. Or life. Sometimes you have to handle explosives.“

(For Anonymous)

 

Hi!

Let’s think about instrumental music with vocal sections –
„The third area“ between song and soundscape

I love it when nearly unrecognizable words can be heard in instrumental music,
hushed voices, voices from old tapes, even singing from old tapes, bad quality tapes (with vocals on it) can have a huge emotional impact.

Gavin Bryars: The Sinking of the Titanic (Obscure Records)

Steve Reich: It’s gonna rain (the asyncronicity of two tapes leads to „semantic extinction“ – word becomes sound)

– I think Roger Waters et al are talking quite a nonsense, but I always loved Pink Floyd’s „Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast“. No real song, no real soundscape.

Brian Eno very often tries to attack his vocals, push them from the center, looking for an area where ambient and song intertwine. Another Green World is regarded as as a song album, though two thirds are instrumentals. Another Day On Earth (buried treasure!) also strives for a „theatre of voices“ where vocals lose their egos (or just vanish after short appearances). Listen to „And then so clear“.

– The Residents: Eskimo

I haven’t heard this album for a very long time, but reading your mail, it rings a bell. In my memory the way the „authenticity“ or „gibberish“ of the tribal singing and the enveloping soundscapes are my ideal of this „third zone“ (but, as I said, long time ago, memory may play tricks) I only loved two albums of the Residents, this one, and „The Commercial Album“.

Spoken-word-albums can do the trick for me, too. Listen to the fortcoming David Sylvian album with the long title (samadhi sound). Listening to it, you won’t have even a fleeting suspect the speaking voice of the old writer (damaged, wrecked) would weaken the music. It’s the other way round: the music has to live up to the falling apart / storytelling of the old man’s voice (not soften it, opening a second perspective)

– David Sylvian: There’s a light that enters houses with no other houses in sight

And, please, don’t miss this album:

– Heiner Goebbels: Stifter’s Dinge (ECM)

 
 
 

 
 
 

Press info: Sounds, tones, noises, voices and texts converge in one of Heiner Goebbels’ most extraordinary acoustic creations. Is it a composition, environment, installation or sound sculpture on the grand scale? Its creator once described it as a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers, “one might say a no-man show.” Yet it is teeming with sound sources – ranging from Bach to chants of natives of New Guinea to Greek folk song, and overlapping voices of, amongst many others, Claude Lévi-Strauss, William Burroughs and Malcolm X. The work was inspired by the work of 19th century Austrian Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter, who meticulously documented the signs and sounds of nature.

No, no,  it’s not overloaded with cultural references. Smart Alec’s Finnegan’s Wake. The whole album has a quiet flow thereby matching the tranquility of Stifter’s epic descriptions of landscapes. For me, it’s „the third zone“.

Personally, I’m dreaming of a long piece of music in which at certain, well-chosen moments an a-capella-„choir“ of three voices sings a small melody full of understatement, low-key (not longer than 45 seconds) – and the instrumental music is so thrilling that you don’t wait for the „vocal moments“…. Let’s say they sing three times within 25 minutes, always the same melody, always different lyrics…. May sound weird, but the idea is simple, and I never heard anything like that.

I do also think of the vocal „emanations“ (might be the wrong word) of early Can albums like Tago Mago. The voices become sound (you won’t think about semantics there) – it’s the shaman’s world:)

And how often did I listen to the first track of „High Life“ (the latest Eno/Hyde-collaboration, hope you know it!) –  the singing half buried in the electric guitar strummings – the soft singing surfacing and vanishing, you only get glimpses of meaning. Like My Bloody Valentine did it, in a different way, once upon a time. I never was a huge fan of them, but liked their approach of burying melodies.

Now imagine this: an electric guitar that plays free, moving sideways without being trapped by history or cultural baggage meets a singer that also improvises and avoids conventional language. One of the most expressve voices on this planet. Would you call it a song? Would you call it a soundscape? I’m speaking of the two albums of Sidsel Endresen and Stian Westerhus (both on Rune Grammofon, the second one will be released on Nov 21st – frightening beauty!) – human aliens…

And then I thought about

– Paddy McAloon: I Trawl The Mega Hertz

 
 
 

 
 
 

As did my friend Ian McCartney from the Manafonistas. I sent him your mail (we’re discreet people) – and these were the ideas he mailed to me:

 

Micha,

that is really interesting.

It’s something I do wonder about sometimes. In fact only last week I was listening to Bordeaux (Harold Budd/Brian Guthrie) and thought what if I start singing over the top of it? So I did. There was fun in changing the pitch of my voice but no semantic value to the exercise and of course Bordeaux doesn’t follow a verse/chorus structure, it’s more like a very slow cosmic spasm.

I think the semantic thing is at the core of the problem. In his book of short stories and essays, the author Russell Hoban gets close to an understanding of this. He describes a park at dusk (Eelbrook Common) an ordinary part of London he can see from his room. His writing is powerfully descriptive: he sees a ’scrawl‘ of kids playing in the park, who form a ’scribble on the dry grey concrete, black against the blue-grey dusk‘. In one incredible paragraph, Hoban draws a 3 dimensional world with vividly presented variations in light and a slight feeling of mystery and strangeness.

In the next paragraph Hoban then explains what he did – i.e. he described the onset of evening using language. But then he says something that has stayed with me for years: „To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something“. I guess that’s why when I stared at that LS Lowry pencil sketch, my eyes went a little bit watery. It was crowded, bursting with language and colour yet it was monochrome and wordless.

Hoban’s novel Kleinzeit has an odd set of characters that include a hospital and the London Underground:

„Listen, said Underground.

No one listened. The chill rose up from the black tunnels.

Are you there? said Underground. Will you answer?

No one answered.

Are you Orpheus? Said Underground.

No answer.“

This novel (at its best) opens the space between the semantic and beyond-semantic, entirely using printed alphabet. What it’s saying goes deeper than most language but it’s all done with language, making language even more miraculous – and without ever reverting to that kind of over-thought boring trendy Barthes/Derrida style theorising.

I don’t know about a third state – for me Paddy McAloon’s I Trawl The Megahertz kind of does this. Very strong mortality theme, words feature in some places but not in others – like consciousness being passed in and out of.

P.S.

1 – Havergal Brian’s amazing and totally bonkers Symphony No.1 in D Minor. The whole thing is like moonlight on gravestones, with lichen dancing on the stone, or appearing to. It’s just the moonbeams temporarily being blocked by clouds hurrying across the sky. Words are integral to various sections, but it’s like they emerge out of the music rather than superimpose upon it. I’m thinking specifially about the allegro moderato section 3 here.

2 – John Foxx and Theo Travis „All The Tides On All The Streets“. No words in this one, but the woodwind to me sounds like uninflected words.

3 – Aphex Twin’s „Minipops 67“. I know you’re not a fan of this guy’s stuff, but this track has 3 or 4 different vocals on it that have been fucked around with so much that any meaning is lost. One of them sounds a bit like „walking around in the park/ with you“ but it could be anything. The interesting thing here is that while it’s deliberately nonsensical, there’s a definite relish in the rendering of each syllable in every iteration of the repeated phrase. And not unlike the Havergal Brian allegro molto section 3, the words and the music seem to be aspects of the same thing. Bob Dylan’s voice and guitar are of course aspects of the same thing, too. But pop forms mutate, the same way languages break down from analytic to abstract e.g. High Latin to modern Italian/French/Spanish/Romanian – and of course the glorious fucked-up mush that is English.

 

So far some thoughts by Ian.

X, Michael

 

This won’t change music history, but I’m sure Mr. Anonymous  will find at least some inspiring stuff.