Category Archives: music

the condition of muzak

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No, I refer not to the Michael Moorcock novel of that name, but rather to what is presumably a Pandora station playing here in the little place down from where I live. Keeping a cup of coffee company while my beleaguered veteran car is tended to up the hill, I’m aware of a string quartet emerging from the ceiling corners. But what music is this? Sounds like a pop tune I’ve never heard.

After a couple such that I don’t recognize, I find myself registering something out of long ago, vaguely unsettling … and … oh god, that’s what it is: “and if a 10-ton truck…” No no! It’s Mr. Morrissey, transformed into a string quartet! How can this be?

Whenever this song comes on I never really want to listen to those lines of the chorus, want to put fingers in ears. I always feel people shouldn’t wish for such things, even in the context of an intentionally hyper-romantic gesture.

However, the very end I always thought was all right. And here it comes, in the form of a string quartet, as a trickle of rain descends upon the little parking lot and the mind hurtles back to a view, usually of soft blue sky and golden sun in my memory, though in reality most often grey, of the Bodleian, Sheldonian, and St. Mary’s from my 2nd year window. A city positively drenched in melancholy and the kleshic weight of centuries.

Then someone calls out a greeting to a friend across the room and I am yanked back to the new world – brave or otherwise – and a smell of baking croissants, a cup of coffee and the tiny patch of condensation on the window where it rests. Parking lot, silent Prius pulling in, pattering rain…

There is a light that never goes out.
There is a light that never goes out.
There is a light that never goes out…

Billie Holiday remixed, and Belfast, and Cocteau Twins…

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A couple more… for it be late and sleep not yet happening. So wandering the realms of youtube, coming across a bunch of new things and revisiting some not heard for quite awhile.

Including this gorgeously sad remix of Billie Holiday by Bent:

And this one, featuring a sample from Hildegard von Bingen and a full two minutes of decelerando at the end, which always brings back a certain June night and a field near the town of Glastonbury, Somerset. 150,000 people off their heads in one form or another. Someone I love re-emerging from the shadow of the Wall. The sun slowly suffusing the eastern sky with a billion shades of orange and pink and red.

And since I happened to mention a certain combination of colors… the unspeakably sublime Cocteau Twins…

“but this world … will be shaken by a whisper”

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From the exquisite album “Nommo” by Slovo, which a couple of summers ago I couldn’t stop listening to and which always sucks me in. Slovo is a project of Dave Randall’s and there have been two releases so far along with various remixes.

The vocals on this one are by Kirsty Hawkshaw, whose voice I’d heard for a long time without ever really knowing who she was, on account of those famous backward samples from Opus III on Orbital’s “Halcyon”…

Some really beautiful visuals on this too.

I always think of this paired with one of their versions of “Empires Fall,” since I edited the two together for a personal compilation once. Can’t locate it at the moment, but it’s the one with just the 7/4 guitars of “Weebles Fall” and the Charlie Chaplin sample from The Great Dictator (1940) layered over it. The one that goes (and this seems somehow appropriate to quote today post-election):

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor, that’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible – Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We don’t want to hate and despise one another.

In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life could be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goosestepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Our knowledge has made us cynical, and our cleverness hard and unkind.

We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture, and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me I say: do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress, the hate of men who will pass, and dictators die. And the power they took from the people will return to the people, and so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Bonobo – Nightlite (featuring Bajka)

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Sitting in a cafe where this has come on, reminding me how much I’ve always liked what Bonobo (a guy called Simon Green) does. The strings in this one really make it for me, adding that extra twist of drizzly-late-autumn-afternoon-melancholy to the gentle swing of the tune.

 

the genius of Andy Partridge

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Gold sun rolls around
Chocolate nipple brown
Tumble from your arms
Like the ground your breasts swell
And awake from sleep
Hares will kick and leap
Flowers climb erect
Smiling from the moist kiss of her rainbow mouth

Simply one of the finest songwriters around, and far too unknown in the US. Something amazing started blossoming in this guy’s head in the mid-80s and the albums beginning at around The Big Express and Skylarking and moving on through Oranges and Lemons, Nonsuch, and Apple Venus Volume 1 contain many gorgeously-crafted creations.

This is one of a dozen or so of theirs that gives me chills everytime. Andy himself says in this very entertaining, hour-plus-long interview that it’s maybe one of two favorite songs of his (the other being “Wrapped in Grey”). He’d come up with the chorus many years before but didn’t do anything with it – it just sat there in the recesses of his unconscious waiting for something. Then one day he found himself playing with these “earthen, lumpen” (as he puts it) chords on his guitar (which end up being orchestrated). They kept rising up the strings until there was nowhere left for them to go and then suddenly … that melody from a decade or more earlier leapt out, and “Easter Theatre” was born.

With no false modesty (entirely appropriately) he says in the interview that sometimes you wonder if you might ever reach the heights of the greatest songs you ever heard (he mentions the best of the Beatles at that point), and that when this one was finished he realized he’d got there:

You know you’re doing alright if at some point during recording a demo, your hair stands on end. Which it did when I reached the ‘Easter. . . in her bonnet’ section in the middle. Self fright or self delight is difficult to achieve at the best of times, but here, bang out of nowhere, it arrived in bucket loads. Every pore of my skin was smiling fit to burst. Where does this stuff come from? Surely it’s not me thinking these songs up? I live in Swindon! Maybe my right arm is an aerial picking up the practical jokes of angels or the whisperings of Genii. Surely my washing machine motor of a secondary modern school brain isn’t capable of thinking up songs like this?

(Stage left)
Enter Easter and she’s dressed in yellow yolk
(Stage right)
Now the son has died, the father can be born
(Stand up)
If we’d all breathe in and blow away the smoke
(New life)
We’d applaud her new life

Bai Hao and Prokofiev

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Taking a break from piano practice to drink some always delicious Bai Hao tea from Stone Leaf in Middlebury. With the change in season I find myself drinking less green tea (Bi Luo Chun being a great discovery this past year) and old standby Bao Chung (a green-tea-like oolong), and moving to darker oolongs and black teas like the Yunnan Golden Strand. John’s Bai Hao comes from near the northern tip of Taiwan and is a tea famous for its intriguing honey tones. It hits the spot on this early autumn day. (However, I have just run out and must replenish…)

Have been learning the Prokofiev 9th Sonata, his last. Often overlooked in favor of the previous group of “War Sonatas,” it lacks their density and firepower. The 1st movement, which is the one I’m currently working on, is mostly quite serene, with airy textures and a child-like simplicity in places. The sweet opening theme even makes me think of a music box tune (but not in a bad sense at all).

When I first started playing it I couldn’t quite see it as a whole. It’s unhurried and a little rhapsodic (also oddly spare in dynamic markings). Takes a bit of digging beneath the surface to discover some of the more interesting features. For example, the phrasing is worth a closer look: as my teacher pointed out, it’s quite delicate and precise and a clue to making larger decisions about the piece. And then the other day I noticed just how extended the left-hand chromatic counterpoint in the opening theme is. He really stretches that phrase as far as it will go, and it contrasts nicely with the pure diatonicism of the melody above.

small hours with John Martyn…

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It’s nearly 4, reminding me of the John Martyn song “Small Hours”… Over the summer I discovered piles and piles of live videos of him on YouTube going all the way back to the 70s.  And a couple of nice full-length documentaries. A man barely known in the States but nobody else had a voice like him or ever will. No slouch on guitar either but for me it was that tender, growling, roaring, aching, endlessly expressive voice… Simply one of the greatest singers we have had.

I got to see him once. He could give spine-chilling performances live, every one unique, and then he could get on stage totally wrecked and sound a complete mess. I caught one of those gigs, in a small club. He came on swigging scotch the first half, came back for the second chain-smoking spliffs, which he would smoke 3/4 of the way down then toss into the audience. (One of which landed at my feet, then disintegrated…)

He started out as a folkie in the late 60s then incorporated jazz / rock / blues elements in a way all his own, until eventually there was just nobody who sounded like him. Ended up with a burst cyst in his right leg, requiring amputation, after which he also put on a ton of weight. He lived such a wild life a lot of people, including he himself, were surprised he made it as far as he did (we lost him in 2009, to pneumonia). Not a consistent songwriter–there are chunks of his career I don’t connect with, but then there are these moments…

Like the song he wrote for his friend Nick Drake in 1973, the year before Drake died, age 26.

But then, can you believe this is the same guy, only a few years later? A 10,000 volt version of “Lookin’ On” :

Then for something completely different again … I was watching the movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley” one day, shell-shocked by the ending, the film score music going on over the credits, then a pause halfway through and suddenly … that voice again. It was John Martyn of all people doing a cover of the jazz standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” but doing it like it’s never been done before, in this sinuous, intimate, world-lost way. Such a brilliant choice by the director Anthony Minghella also (a movie full of brilliant choices and breathtaking ensemble acting by every lead) — the song gives a sort of ambiguous, subversive little twist I think on the movie. Martyn himself said that often a singer has to be satisfied with getting to 7 or 8 out of 10 of what they were after, but that with this recording he felt he hit a 10.

And finally a performance of “One World” from 1990. He doesn’t start singing until almost 3 minutes in but … don’t touch that dial!

A heartbreaking version of “Never Let Me Go” from the same concert is also up on YouTube but cut off a minute or so from the end unfortunately. So you also miss the stunned silence afterwards and some guy in the audience then whispering “beautiful” …

The guy even does … “Over the Rainbow” … like you never heard …

“your heart is the big box of paints”

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“…and others, the canvas we’re dealt.” (XTC – “Wrapped in Grey”)

Earlier today overheard the tail end of a sentence: “… they’re just so uncomfortable with shades of gray.” But, really, this isn’t right. Shades of gray are still only combinations of black and white. The third category merely buttresses the overarching sovereignty of the Two. Of “This or That.” So now we have “sort of This, or sort of That.”

But I think what we really fear is the profundity and brilliance of living colour. Irreducible to anything else, to any grid or agenda, any … This or That. The redness of red, the blueness of blue, the greenness of green. As the Buddhists say, “suchness” beyond concept. That which is, in itself.

I guess this is why I’ve always liked the term “person of colour.” And, in part, it’s why I’ve always disliked the term “bisexuality,” for instance. Because the latter keeps us imprisoned in one-dimensional calculus: there’s a dot over here, and a dot over there, and you can have one dot, or you can have two dots, but that’s “who you are,” that’s what your longing is, your full exquisitely sensitive aesthetic. It’s a dot — or two.

But our “sexuality” or libidinal universe, the realm of all that we find beautiful as a body among bodies, down to the last unmappable particular — this remains unique to us, vast and uncontainable. Not black, not white, not black-and-white, but our own personal world of brilliant colours.

And so with our pure longings, in our natural radiance, we go out into the worlds which are given to us, and we create our communities of love.  

“your heart is the big box of paints
and others, the canvas we’re dealt
your heart is the big box of paints
just think how the old masters felt, they call:
awaken you dreamers…”