Concert Review: Elzweig/Perlmutter and Lower Case Curry

This is the third in a series of reviews on the LSG New Music concert
series, held at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.

The concert was held on January 26, 2006 at 8:00 pm. Following the
standard format of this series, there were two groups performing.
8:00 pm Solos and Duos: Marc Elzweig (bass clarinet) and Michael
Perlmutter (Saxophones). With Liam Staskawicz (trombone) Star Holder
(french horn) and Jesse Olsen (trap set).

This performance comprised a number of short pieces, that were in fact
solos, duets, and a small group including all those above.

I seem incapable of walking into this series on time. As we walked up the
stairs to the gallery, Mr. Perlmutter bent over the railing and greeted
us with a long lunar note from his saxophone. As we made it to the
gallery we saw that the players were distributed around the periphery of
the gallery, playing to the surrounded audience, with all
instrumentalists eyes on Mr. Perlmutter for cues.

Following this introductory hug, Perlmutter and Elzweig played together a
short piece that was based on a Bulgarian folk song--somewhat loosened at
the seams, allowing the tune to move between rhythmic, melodic and almost
ambient delivery. Several of the pieces spanned this range.
The next piece was a solo by Elzweig, slowly presenting the sonic
fullness of the bass clarinet.

The pieces from Elzweig's solo through the end seemed to focus on
technical strategies to blowing and fingering the instruments that
generated sonic qualities unique to the instruments.

Perlmutter presented a song with the word "Birth" in the title that began
with a full breathiness through the sax, and over the course of a couple
of minutes, led through a growing presence and complexity to a final
pitched note. The gallery is a great place for this kind of piece, as it
is small enough and live enough for the subtleties of such an approach to
be heard well.

The next piece sounded to me to have Klezmer roots, but continued the
breathy blowing of the previous piece. This was followed by another sax
solo with Perlmutter tapping the valves open and closed without blowing,
creating a percussive effect not unlike the sound of a picked electric
bass. This was followed by another sax and bass clarinet duet, and a
final piece performed by all members of the group.

While this group's music was not electronically generated nor enhanced,
it shared a materialist focus on the product generated by a physical
instrument. Perlmutter stayed away from the more common squeals of an
excited sax and he and Elzweig instead gave highly-magnified views of
what are usually micro-moments: the attack sound of the valve covers
hitting the opening at the beginning of a note, and the usually brief
startup that bridges silence and pitched sound. These, together with the
rich granularity of an extended note's vibration, were for me the primary
subjects of this first set of the evening.

The second set (9:00 pm) was by a group with my favorite name: "Lower
Case Curry". Nary an Indian in the group, though. MaryClare Bryzwa on
electric flute and MAX (running on a Mac notebook), Mike Sopko on
electric guitar, and Noah Phillips on prepared electric guitar.

LCC performed twice for their set. There did not appear to be a great
deal of interplay among the musicians, although each undoubtedly was
listening to the overall sound, and deciding what to play as a result of
that consideration.

Sopko sat in the middle of the three and for the most part played as fast
as possible, playing scalar runs of notes of equal length and loudness,
with short pauses from time to time. His delivery seemed self-absorbed,
which I don't mean as a criticism, just an observation. Like Pollock
delivering paint he ploughed into his single-note riffs and runs,
delivering a consistant sonic texture that seemed to pause when the riff
ran out, as opposed to sonic cues from other members.

Phillips' sounds were texture- rather than scale-based. He achieved a
remarkable range of timbres and textures using a variety of mechanical
materials (including I believe steel wool, a small egg-beater, and
various rubbing, tapping and bowing tools), as well as maybe a dozen
analog effects pedals.

Bryzwa started the set on flute, singing through it and delivering
breath-long notes, while also generating and modulating tones using MAX.
Her sounds mixed with Phillips' to create an atmosphere that wrapped
around Sopko's muted but furious 32nd notes.

The Noodles: Performance at LSG in SF

The Noodles: LSG in SF.

This is the second review on Outsound's "LSG New Music Series" held on Thursday evenings in San Francisco.

Outsound is a collective of "explorative sound artists" who present performances throughout the SF Bay area. Information on Outsound may be found at www.outsound.org.

This particular series is being held at the Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street (near 6th) in San Francisco, and curated by musicians Rent Romus andMatt Davignon. It is the longest-standing experimental music series in the Bay Area, having been operating since 1991. Past performers have included Cecil Taylor, Alan Silva, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith and many others.

On January 16 there were two performances: one by Daniel Martin-McCormick, and one by The Noodles (Suki O'Kane, Michael Zelner, and Allen Whitman.

I arrived toward the end of Daniel Martin-McCormick's opening set, so I won't say too much about it. He was using an amplified electric guitar to produce non-melodic and non-rhythmic sounds, layering them with sounds from CDs, and using a variety of effects modules. I'm sorry I arrived late as I would have liked to have heard more of his music.

The Noodles set up two on the floor and one in a chair, behind his effects rack with wheels. All three musicians switched between instruments and sound-makers. The instrument-shaped sound triggers I noticed were bass and electric guitars and a MIDI breath controller. Other sound generating devices included ipods, radios, a function generator and a button-interfaced sample player Suki O'Kane played with her fingers.

Michael Zelner sent his breath controller MIDI signals through two MIDI sound boxes and to a MIDI signal distributer, through to a number of effects modules. The audio signals from his MIDI modules were passed into a Mackie mixer and sent out into the PA.

Suki O'Kane split her time between rubbing the strings of her electric guitar near the bridge, and using her fingers to send out arhythmic cluster-clouds of short samples from her drum machine. She also tuned a radio receiver in, out, and between stations.

For the first part of the approximately 50-minute set Allen Whitman played samples from ipods or similar devices. For the second part, he picked up a bass and repeated non-obtrusive measures.

The overall soundscape was, like what I heard from Martin-McCormick, without melody or clearly articulated rhythm. The sounds were not new-agey, they were more machine-and-city sounds for that. For my ears they were not ambient either, too loud for that. But they did stay as ground without figure, a shifting, low-lying set of slow-moving textures.I perceived no tonal centers throughout the piece, other than occasional music from (I believe) a radio tuner, that was faded in and out of the mix without further modulation. I understand that The Noodles often modulate sounds picked up from the area they are playing in, but I did not notice that, if it occurred. The music changed but I noticed no sonic or musical structures that implied either direction or temporal modulation. This was an improvisation for the moment.

Information on the Outsound LSG New Music Series may be found at
http://www.bayimproviser.com/venuedetail.asp?venue_id=7 and
http://www.outsound.org/ .

Jon Brumit's Vendetta Retreat: A Review

A Performance Review:

On January 12, 2006, Jon Brumit and musicians performed in San Francisco's Luggage Store Gallery. The lineup included:

Jon Brumit - director/drums/guitar
Joe Goldring - baritone guitar
Wayne Grim - baritone guitar
Suki O'Kane - drums/percussion
Lee Montgomery - sampler/electronics/laptop/radio

There was a third drummer, but I didn't catch his name.

This was the loudest concert I'd been at since Glen Branca. But interesting stuff. There were two sonic strategies that I thought worked well for the group. One consisted of single, enormously loud hits by all drummers together. All three drummers delivered a synchronized hit of kick drum, snare/or tom, and cymbol. Immediately after smashing the cymbol the drummer(s) muted it. In the small loft space, at this volume (also amplified with 15" PAs) the effect was to send the reverberation of the stacatto hits off the walls, hanging it in the air for several seconds. It wasn't an echo, but a shimmering blast. I doubt it could be accomplished without the amplitude. I loved it--though I do believe I've lost five years of hearing that I was kinda counting on...

The second sonic strategy that worked for me was a sustained attack on guitars, drums and possibly electronics, lasting a couple minutes at a time. No definite pitches, no clear rhythm, but a wall of sustained noise that you could "search" actively listening to different parts of the sonic spectrum.

This second strategy took me back to a vinyl album I'd heard in 1970, of La Monte Young rubbing a gong for about 45 minutes. Again--as I remember--no definite rhythm, so melody, just a full spectrum of sound and resonance--like dark Morris Louis veils. I'm sure La Monte Young's performance was nowhere near the volume Brumit's group produced (and it would not have occurred to me to turn up speakers or headphones to that level), but the oceanic quality of the sound was similar for me.

Over the 30 minutes or so of the piece, I noticed maybe 12 or 14 distinct sections, and there were various other quieter and occasionally less minimal strategies played. For me, these two were the most, uh, striking. And like Branca, I don't think this particular piece would reproduce well as a recording. But in person, within this space, it was fascinating.

Brumit opened with a laptop piece that seemed a bit less raw, but I missed the beginning of the piece, so I can't really report on it, apologies.

The concert was a CD release event for "Vendetta Retreat", released on Edgetone Records.

Living Cinema 1987

Selling Out

The other evening at the Red Rock open mic I was talking to Bill, a singer with an incredible voice. He referred to Bob Dylan and mentioned "Selling Out".

I noted that the concept of "Selling Out" was hard to apply to Dylan, since he had a record contract within weeks of hitting NYC, before he wrote any of his most innovative songs. The question of "selling out" was around in the '60s and '70's, but its application has always been problematic.

Some artists create a space that is difficult for viewers or listeners to navigate. If that difficulty isn't too great (the level differs with different people and different media) people can be attracted to playing with the space, learning how to navigate it, and how its edges are determined. The attractiveness, as I've written before, is a function of Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development".

With the mass media that was present in the '60s, large numbers of people shared the same inputs, and pop artists emerged, like Dylan.

What happens, I believe, is that people eventually learn to navigate the artist's space. Artists also either exhaust it, or move to other spaces for their own explorations. The artist can lose the ability to create an attractive zone. Some artists find strategies that work throughout their whole lives, like Duchamp, Picasso, Zappa. Others have the space lose its foreignness for much of its audience--people domesticate it.

I like Beefheart's "selling out". After putting out some incredible sonic constructions, he put out an album called "Unconditionally Guarenteed" with a photo of himself holding handfulls of cash. The music inside was simple and dull, I've never heard anyone defend it. So when Beefheart sold out--explicitly--he lost his audience. Some sell-out. He later put out a couple of killer albums, after regrouping. And the space was back.

As an artist, you find a space to manipulate. Depending on the strategy of that manipulation, and the complexity it engenders, it may give you enough to work with for your whole life. Or you may work through it within a year, and never find another. But the relationship of the artist to that space is not one of money. You can't buy it, and you can't starve yourself into it.

I was looking through the foreign section of Frys' DVDs when I came across the Stan Brakhage DVD released a year ago, not long after his death. I had just asked Robert Polidori if he'd seen it, and coming across it in Frys was something of a surprise. I'm still surprised at times when I find something out here that I think of as east coast.

They did a wonderful job transferring the films to DVD, I'm surprised that DVD would handle the single-frames so well. The compression work is exceptional, as it should be for such a set of images.

I hadn't seen Brakhage's later directly painted work...God knows how many hours of Brakhage films I've sat through--possibly more hours than I've spent sitting in Greyhound busses. And I've done Greyhound busses.

The transfer was good enough for me to be absolutely transfixed by the images on my monitor. Brakhage films I always hear more than I see, even though they're silent. I guess there isn't much more for my eyes to bring to the images, my body instead reacts synaesthetically, and I settle into hearing the rhythms, pitches and timbres of the images as they pound past. What I get out of it, besides the sensual pleasure of the experience, is the sense that THERE IS SOMETHING PRESENT. There is a referent, somewhere between Brakhage, the painted film, and my self, that is present like a spirit, that, for moments at a time, while I experience the film, exists.

Not all art form provide that presence. Usually songs don't. Not for me. They aren't sensual enough, there's too much pre-agreement to the rules of the game. But sometimes there's an articulation that reminds you of the inner muscles in the throat, or a timbre that suddenly modulates from scratchy to smooth and hard, or a counterpoint that has you parsing the phrasing one way, then shifts and forces you to parse the same notes differently. Something happens between the form you hear and the ability to hear at all, and suddenly you glimpse into the interstice between the surfaces, as they shear and suddenly there is a depth there, a dimension that wasn't there an instant ago. And ya know I could fall into that depth, and so it isn't just another aspect, it's one that I have purchase in, and yet this is just sound. How can I have purchase in sound? But here it is, and I don't just hear it, I care about how it evolves, even though its only a sound.

So the Brakhage images remind me: there is this place, a place that has always attracted me, where for brief moments at a time, I am sensually aware of my immediate existence in a way where there is a break in time itself, which I recognize as an a-priori necessity for such a perception to take form. A fissure in the sensual stuff that is composed, a fissure that appears unexpectedly and invites my scanning senses to fall in, and at that moment I feel a vertigo that has nothing to do with the physical material of the composition except that I'm present. Because all that occurs in the presentation is a change: it is my self that supplies all the vertigo. And that is the moment I feel my existence, with its own texture.

Transcendence

Exhaust is America's transcendence.

Living Cinema 1989 

Art Process

Seen from a certain perspective, the generation previous to mine defined Existentialism, and my generation could take that focus and explore it as an art practice. Not just that existential moments existed, but that one could develop their poetry for ourselves.

Art, then, not as a hobby for distraction, and not as a career, but as an ongoing project of creating an image of what it means to be human. And whatever aspect that is the least successful for your last piece, that becomes the focus of your next piece.

So this process, repeated throughout a lifetime, leaves a crumb trail of portraits, and of course the sequence itself is as interesting as any one piece.

The creation of the work requires a certain seriousness of purpose...although I don't mean the type of seriousness that many people think of with art. I mean serious, I mean dedication to the series. Not a flake. And that's different than a dilettante, and where the dilettante and the artist part paths.

The younger someone is when they begin the art process, the deeper it sinks, and the longer it has to mature.

I was speaking with my friend Ethan Place the other evening, and we both knew people who had put off facing their meaning their whole lives, until they retired. And when they finally retired, they didn't know what to do. Sometimes they just die, for no apparent reason.

Children know instinctively what to do, they intuitively create art, and their laughter marks the moments that they perceive--it's all so amazingly natural. But people, one bit at a time, step away from that natural inclination to create, to grow the self. And life, when its distractions recede, becomes empty. There is no vector into the future, there is only the past and the empty room of the present.

There are many lives that are just too hard, and a person who is living through one of them may not have the ability or time to create. But where did gospel come from, if not sung by those who had the hardest lives, least time, and didn't even own themselves? Or the British and Irish tunes, rebirthing in the poor Appalachians? This isn't just a rich man's game.

What is it that causes us to want to shy away from meaning?

Old News

This is old news, but worth reviewing I believe. This was published briefly during the Iran-contra scandal. It was striking enough so I cut it out and kept it. After the initial publishing in newspapers, it was barely mentioned again. Interesting phrase "...national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." I wonder what today's version looks like.

Knight-Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North helped draft a plan in 1984 to impose martial law in the United States in the event of an emergency, provoking a sharp protest by Attorney General William French Smith, according to government officials.

The secret plan called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the little-known Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and the declaration of martial law in the event of such a crisis as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.

North's involvement in a proposal to radically alter the U.S. government by executive order in a time of crisis is evidence that he was involved in a wide range of secret activities, foreign and domestic, far beyond the Iran-contra affair, according to officials.

The chief council of the Senate Iran-contra committee has declared in an unreleased memo that North was at the center of what amounted to a "secret government-within-a- governement."

Lubeck, Under a Bridge 

There, and Offset a Couple of Centimeters

Walk for overlooked refuge
Seeking motionless being
One like every place at every time.
And in meaninglessness
It balances the caterwauling of civilization.
It balances what inertia insists.
It balances tomorrow's threat with the calm of eternity,
and anonymous existence.

This balance isn't death and it is not life.
It appears a moment after wings escape your hand.
It is in the shadow of the momentous,
in the piss-humid alley near the spactacular entrance hall.
It's the blue you yourself initiate after staring at yellow.
It's an inch to the right from the entrance of the bullet that killed Jack Kennedy.
It's a dropped voter's ballot that was never marked.
Its emptiness absorbs every boast.
It is the measure of importance and unimportance.
It is a bas-relief on a wall that has never elicited a face of the holy virgin.

Thoughts, hearth, country, globe, systemless scattering of suns.
Any unnoticed space the size of my hand.
The pressure in the forest never cocking an ear.
I remember that I sensed my late mother's presence in a place she'd never visited.
This rush of meaning into a vacuum without gesture.
Unaffected by the measure of one man's knife to the throat of another.
Unaffected by the desperately won identity of the primary causes,
Even the sound of a breeze through your hair excludes this place from your contemplation.
This is the place without chains and values,
This is the place that allows us to know love,
This is the place that is the senseless and uncaring measure of our achievement,
This is the place that is the other, and allows us grace.

Outside 

Inside 

Composition by Triangulation

When I sit down to compose a song, I most often start with a memory or feeling. It works best when that memory is multisensory, synaesthetic and engages emotions. Usually there are a variety of related "sense anchors" that I can dive into many times during the writing of the song, that don't wear out, in a repeated process like re-inking a pen.

I haven't been able to go back to decades-old, unfinished songs and make anything out of them. I think it's because my memories have drifted away from the sense anchor that I used to write it. When I try to fix part of the older lyric, I always patch it with the wrong material, they become eclectic and weak. That is true for both the words and the music. And the original sense anchor is no longer available, not having been correctly summoned when the song was first attempted.

Giving the sense anchor form is the reason for composing a song. It is to bring into existence a form that, as a stimulus, allows me to lock into this temporal world a way of experiencing the sense anchor as an explicit thing. Not that the thing is the explicit subject. The subject of the words, and the compositional strategy for the music combine to cause in me the art experience. What I am able to do when I compose is arrange things in this earth so that they provoke something not of this earth. Medium, sense anchor, and experience: composition by triangulation.

The sense anchor doesn't have to be a memory of something I did. It can be from a feeling, a cadence, a shape, a rhythm of words. In formalism, the sense anchor can come from a compositional strategy. But throw in too many formal elements and the sense anchor can't be felt because the music becomes dilluted.

To the degree that a sense anchor is shared, the music is tribal. To the degree that a sense anchor is unique, the music is avant-garde (anyone park their work next to that word now days?). I like music that falls into both categories, but since high school have always liked Michael Snow's remark to the effect that if you're going to make something, you might as well make something that didn't exist before. And the act of giving something a physical representation in this world that is otherwise ineffable , this reminds me of Gabriel Vahanian's remark that the "word" is iconoclastic only as it makes man become what he is not, that is, man instead of God.

Shuba Gunapu, her veena, my guitar 

Ragas, Time, Notime

A raga is a scale to be explored (along with certain rules for its playing).
On a sitar and some veenas, there are sympathetic strings that vibrate when their pitches are played on the melody strings, and that are also occasionally struck with the little finger.

The sympathetic strings are tuned to the pitches of the raga. Striking them is like projecting a photograph of everything that is possible. A synchronic snapshot, as opposed to the diachronic articulating of the melody.

Neither the veena (South Indian) nor sitar (North Indian) are designed to produce chords. There are no chords in traditional Indian music. But there is this continued reminding interplay of timeless existence of all possibilities versus the soul's narrative of the specific.

Indian musicians are extremely sensitive to pitch. They know a ragas by its feel. They learn to play each systematically, but when they have learned to explore the raga, they move within it, and know it.

I think of the raga as having an odor, a smell. And there are hundreds of ragas, and an Indian musician knows the range of their feelings. When the sitar player strikes the sympathetic strings it's like waving the incense: the air is filled with its scent, and the melody runs and weaves through it, writing its life in time.

R Edgar Surf Drawing Surf Painting 

Post Card

My oceans mark time
Like gulls hear language.

Let's part the boats from ports
Loosen boards from bindings
Lean and sway, trough and crest
Sweep as our oscillating bodies
Swim perpendicular to current, painting
Sine waves in sea as a
Turquoise cloud precipice
Sets up tomorrow's climb.

Speak to me as melted gold
Irradiating restless light
Irrigating lost thought trenches and
Icy reflecting oyster teeth.
Iridescent lightning stencils palm trees
Island escapes then falling back
Fading day draws scarabs from fronds
Fire spews sun spurs, sand melts to glass
Freed star sparks absorbed in inky night
Floor sand and sanspurs cool sun down
Frothy salt and seaweed floating to us.

The Ames Room