VOTD 08/06/2025

 Gang of Four: Songs of the Free (WB)

Purchased used at The Attic

It was 1982 I became involved with WRCT. I was staying in Pittsburgh for the summer, regularly listened to the station before becoming involved during that summer. In the next semester or two, I'd spend more time at the station than in classes. I don't blame the station. I made some contacts that remain to this day.

Gang of Four was a big deal at the station. In the fall semester of 1982, they played the student union on campus. I know I should have bought tickets, but I slept on it. I was dealing my state of depression in general. Tickets sold fast.*

The entire show was broadcast over WRCT live. I was in Richard Schnap's apartment, above his parents' garage, listening. They sounded great. GOF was touring on this album at the time.

WRCT had a policy of what was called "bin cuts". The bin was new albums. It was a way to force DJs to play something different, and appease labels to consider the continued relevance of a (then) 10 Watt station. 

When the live broadcast concluded, KJ the Jazzman took to the air. KJ was a fellow music major, Keith, who played guitar. He was a smooth jazz guy before the term was coined. Keith went on the air and played the first side of this LP to get his bin cuts in, immediately after the ban itself played all of it live. 

The first two GOF LPs, and the singles and EPs between those and this record, were very important to RCTers. One friend, when considering this album, thought they had become blander because of the "girl in the band". That is, between the time of Solid Gold and this album, bassist Dave Allen was replaced by Sara Lee. I don't know the circumstances. 

There's a clear progression from the first LP (Entertainment!), the second (Solid Gold) and this, the third. The first is very raw. it's well played, but almost sounds like a demo tape of a band mostly playing live. The second is more polished, a bit more produced but not overly so. Funkier, the African American influences more obvious. Guitarist Andy Gill is almost was abrasive as the first album. 

Then we come to this third LP. It's not a dramatic break, but things have clearly changed. The vocals are more upfront. The bass less so. When Andy Gill died, I was quoted in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette as saying that he could make a guitar sound like it was being strangled. There's little evidence of that here. 

It's closer to being a pop record than before, though it's hardly a pop album.

What were their motivations? I don't want to accuse them of selling out, but it's clear they were trying to head to a more popular direction. Did Dave Allen's departure mark a change of direction? Or did their push towards a more pop sound drive him out? I'm afraid I have no idea. 

I don't want to seem as though I'm completely putting this record down. To 2025 ears it sounds more dated than the previous two in part due to its then current production techniques. Raw will always sound current, polished has a half life. This sounds like early digital reverbs. 

Some songs and lyrics still pack a punch: "We live, as we dream, alone"; "Having fun is my reason for living (give me a break)"; "Making money is making sense". But when the project sounds more like a commercial venture, do the leftist-leaning lyrics start to lack punch? Seems to me, yes. The pacing of the album also seems strange; the most bracing song, "Call Me Up" opens (makes sense) but it ends on "Of the Instant", rather downbeat.

So, worthy album? Yes, but not in league with #1 & 2. After this, I can't say at all. 

* I entered CMU as a freshman in 1981. Between 1981-83, the campus saw concerts by King Crimson, The Clash, Cheap Trick, Gang of Four, Blotto, Tom Verlaine, Adrian Belew, and Iannis Xenakis. What a time to be alive. 

VOTD 08/05/2025

 Frank Zappa: Sleep Dirt (Discreet)

As is usually the case, my studio/mancave is in a total state of disarray. I'm as disorganized a person as you will encounter. But I do need to pick up after myself sometimes. I was filing some records away, including Jazz From Hell, and I noticed this record. I realized I'd never laid stylus to vinyl, so here we are. 

Frank Zappa was going through a label dispute at this time. Warner Brothers released three sessions in quick succession with no personnel or recording information. I remember Orchestral Favorites from the cut-out bins, which might have also been true for this album and Studio Tan. I had former as a teen. I liked some of the pieces on it (specifically "Strictly Genteel"), sold it off in a record purge, only to buy another copy later. All three albums had cover paintings by Gary Panter. I like all three. Gary is someone whose work I'd know better through Ralph Records; my first Ralph was the "Buy or Die" #3, with Gary's Tyrannosaurus front image. In this case Gary's painted an image of Hedorah (the Toho movies' Smog Monster) emerging from a bed.

Frank would later refer to these albums as bootlegs. That's only half true; there was a contract, but it was in dispute. Some of the tracks of those three albums were collected in the album Läther, though not everything. In short, it's confusing. 

Frank lived such a relatively short life, and was such a workaholic, that one can break down periods of his work into years rather than decades. He's in instrumental mode here, somewhat jazzy but through a rock lens.

The mix is at times terrible. "Regyptian Strut" is very bass and drums heavy, with the essential horn melody lurking in the background. Now that I hear the mix on that piece, I know that I have had this vinyl on before. 

Frank's guitar is prominent in some pieces, particularly "Filthy Habits", "Time Is Money" and "Sleep Dirt".  All bristle with nervous energy. That was certainly Frank's signature. 

The personnel information is available online. Without looking, I definitely detect both Ruth Underwood and Terry Bozzio. That places this in a particular time between the Napoleon Murphy Brock bands (Roxy and Elsewhere) and Zoot Allures. 

This is only a few years from the albums Frank produced thatIi either dislike or downright loathe. I found Zoot Allures to be a mixed bag, but the title track and "Black Napkins" rank among his best instrumental pieces. Sheik Yerbouti is also mixed but falling on the negative side for me. It wasn't long after that he released Joe's Garage, which I largely loathe. I think of it as a bad rock opera, and largely self aggrandizing. It does have one or two great works on it, but I just can't largely stand it. The same goes for most of his "rock" albums for the rest of his life. 

I do like some of his orchestral works, and many of the instrumentals. Shut up n' play your guitar!

CDOTD 08/04/2025

 VA: Cologne - WDR: Early Electronic Music (BV Haast)

Purchased at a big Jerry's Records sale

I know that, in posting to this blog semi-regularly, I have probably repeated myself quite a few times. So I guess I'll do it again!

One reason I appreciate, if not outright enjoy, early electronic music is the sweat on it. It took tremendous effort to create these works, and in this case on equipment not even intended for musical purposes. That said, my preference leans towards works in the analog field more than the digital, even though early digital works would have been very work-intensive. I'll take a bit of grunginess over the clean playback of a computer-generated work. It's a generalization, though.

I also like that there were passionate schools of thought. Specifically, the French vs. German schools of post-war technology-based composition.* It's something I'd teach in my college classes, though I'd try to remind my students that boiling it down to France and Germany only is a dramatic simplification. There were concurrently to this time (approximately), studios popping up in the US, Italy, and Japan. 

Using France and Germany as examples does supply an easy narrative to consider: the sampled sound world of musique concrète, the entirely synthesized sources in elektronishe musik. There's also the idea that the French school largely worked intuitively or even experientially, working the materials over based on hearing the results. The German school was more pre-determined, more rationalized. 

The works on this disc date from 1952-58. You can hear the primitive sound quality on the earliest of the works, that there's a dullness to the sound, a slight muffled quality. The earliest works represented, by Herbert Eimert with and without Robert Beyer, sound like they are the loosest compositionally. "Klangstudie II" is a reworking of some of the same materials used in "Klangstudie I", both played in succession. I tend to prefer those to the more clearly serialized works such as the two compositions by Karel Goeyvaerts.

Some of the names I really only know because of this collection or from reading about the WDR studio: Eimert, Beyer, Goeyvaerts, Gredinger, Koenig, Kiebe. The more familiar names would be Hambraeus, Evangelisti, Brün, and especially Ligeti. The latter's two (and only two?) purely electronic works are included here. The studio had clearly made improvements and updates between the first pieces and these, from '57 and '58.

Name most notably missing: Karlheinz Stockhausen. He did after all become studio's musical director at one point. It's not that surprising and probably due to rights issues. Maybe that's a good thing. More composers get to be represented this way. I also find Stockhausen's "Studie I" and "Studie II" to be extremely dry and generally not that interesting. It's "Gesang der Jünglinge" where he made a major breakthrough, in scope and technique. Clocking at over thirteen minutes, putting that work on this collection would have knocked several other composers off.

A big question or tension in this all-electronic world is: do you attempt to model the sounds after acoustical instruments or other sounds from the natural world? I'm certain there's some of that. Nonetheless, this was a new and original sound world at the time, and these composers would have felt they needed to created new music with new techniques that weren't based on the past. The goals were both universalist (a music free of nationalism, for everyone) and complete newness. Nice ideals, but it is music that's very alien sounding at times. It's hard to identify with it. That's part of the impact of "Gesang", that the human voice used naturally draws your attention. 

Seeing as all the works are based on similar sound sources, it's not too difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins. There's a range of techniques and sounds the composers choose. Nonetheless, the dogmatic passion that some of these composers felt, France vs. Germany, seems silly and short-sighted in retrospect. Why not use any combination of electronic and sampled audio sources? 

* I began using the term "technology-based composition" to make a description more inclusive of a variety of techniques than "electronic music". Is musique concrète electronic music? I think it falls under that general umbrella, but there's an argument against it. Karlheinz Stockhausen gave himself credit for inventing electronic music. Not only did Pierre Schaeffer's first studies come before any Stockhausen work, but it's frankly disrespectful of those composers working at the WDR prior to him. 

CDOTD 08/02/2025

 Anthony Braxton with the Northwest Creative Orchestra: Eugene (1989) (Black Saint)

I visited Eugene, Oregon for the first time a few weeks ago. I'd summarily describe it as a cute college town. It's picturesque. There are two buttes (a kind of low mountain) that straddle the town, the East Butte and West Butte, that give a great view of the town below. There's a medium sized concert hall that benefits from being along the path from Seattle and Portland, to northern California. I'm told Napalm Death played there.

There are some nice restaurants and shops. If you are interested in such things, cannabis can be bought very cheaply. There are signs along the highway outside of town boasting $50 for an ounce, possibly even less.

Eugene is also not immune to the homelessness that plagues Portland. Considering how much smaller Eugene is, it's possible it's comparable per capita. But that's just idle speculation on my part. 

I was visiting my friend Josh Wulff, who is in the middle of a two year graduate degree and TA position. Take come courses, TA some courses, grade papers, play in ensembles, coach ensembles, for a stipend. He mentioned how a significant amount of the movie Animal House was filmed there. There's also some major Nike money that's gone into the sports facilities.

I've long had a curiosity regarding Eugene, based on this particular album. Recorded in 1989 but released in 1991, this is one of the many albums of Braxton's music after the publication of Graham Locke's book Forces in Motion, published in the US in 1989. It's part interview, part review, part biography, and part road diary of the 1985 Braxton Quartet in England (Braxton, Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway). Though there are a number of contenders, there's little disputing that this is one of Anthony's most significant and greatest ensembles.

This album is one that really cemented my interest in his music. It's one of the best documents of his "creative music orchestra" music (read: big band). It's not as clearly recorded as a studio project, but it's amazing that this is a document of a single concert. 

I know from experience this music is not easy. I pulled together a more modest version of this sort of project in Pittsburgh. It was very interesting to see Anthony manage a group of very dedicated but nervous musicians. He was confident, direct. "We're going to do [this], followed by [that]" etc. He places a huge emphasis on the downbeat when conducting, using close to a full arm's length to emphasize the beginning of every measure. After playing the first several measures of our first piece in rehearsal, he stopped and urged everyone to play at half the volume. After running one piece (we worked on four), there'd always be time for a few minutes' break.

Also part of the rehearsals was coaching on the Music Language Improvisation System. That's Anthony's name for his conducted improvisation cues. I have little doubt that it's an element of this performance too. The performance is continuous, and the MLIS is probably employed in between works.

This does point out the nature of some of the compositions, though. You'd have to be a true Braxtophile (or look up the recordings), but I'll mention: 134 he a defined ostinato and compositional logic (ascending minor thirds) so it's easy to pick it out on casual listening. Other works are complexes of polyrhythmic activity with brief improvisations layered in, making it difficult to tell exactly which is which. In some ways that's exciting, that blurring of what's composed and what isn't. It sometimes runs the risk of sound formless, like we're waiting for the next solid event to occur. 

Clearly though, for as many notes as Anthony writes, it's the improvisations that are the life, the gusto of the performance. However he may veer from standard jazz practices, it has that in common with mainstream jazz.

Anthony has just been placed in the Downbeat Jazz Hall of Fame. Seriously it's about goddamned time. So maybe it is jazz after all?  Eh, who cares. I was thinking of how little of the content of this blog is thoughts on jazz music, something I myself happen to practice. But maybe, like Anthony, I don't want my listening and output to be defined by idiomatic conventions. Miles Davis didn't want to be called a jazz musician, he was a musician. Likewise my late friend Chuck Austin. I'm in that camp, along with Mr. Braxton. Musician. 

VOTD 07/31/2025

 Nurse With Wound: Lumb's Sister (Nordung) (numbered picture disc edition)

Purchased used at The Attic

Here I am again, sitting down and listening and writing about another Nurse With Wound album. Writing cogently about music in general is a challenging thing to do, and I don't pretend I'm a great writer. My father, a painter, talked to me about people who have written about his work. I wish I could recall something resembling verbatim, but he basically said that articles about him had been pretty superficial. It was easier to write about the subjects of his painting but not the content. He also thought the articles about me he read were generally better, deeper.

I can blog about the circumstances of this particular record, maybe try to describe some of the content, but that doesn't really dig terribly deeply into what makes this music what it is. 

As for the circumstances, this was originally recorded 1986-87 at the IPS Studio. It was intended to a film but I can deduce that the film either wasn't completed, or the music was rejected. There was an earlier version released on a three record set, NWW, Current 93, and Sol Invictus getting one LP each. I have that as well, as this was around when I was collection any NWW (and the associated label United Dairies) I could get my hands on. It's not in the notes, but I was told the material was worked over and the content is considerably longer. 

While I've revived my interest in NWW/Steven Stapleton's work, I prefer this earlier period than when he started using digital resources for the first time, a few years hence from this. I mean, I get it. These original analog sessions must have been time and money intensive. There's probably some (if not all) he can do from his home at this point.

I've made the point previously, that I like the sweat on those analog-based albums. I mean, I feel the same way about The Residents; they started to become less interesting to me when they bought their first sampling keyboard. No need for the out of tune piano, the squawky saxophone only made only brief appearances. But I liked the out of tune piano!

The NWW catalog has become quite vast, so I don't try to snag every new issue. Look at their Bandcamp page: https://nursewithwound1.bandcamp.com/music

...and that's not everything. So while I may have started to pick up some of the more recent albums, I don't feel a need to get everything.

A point I'm certain I've made before: there's no typical NWW album. That is both exciting but at times frustrating. I've picked up a few that I thought were, well, boring. Part of why I laid off for some years. Like most, but not all, NWW albums, this plays something like a Surreal soundtrack for your mind. It's largely on the low key side, quieter, no big leaps in volume or dramatic edits. Quieter does not equal boring though! As is often with NWW albums, the voice plays an important part if not necessarily up front in the mix. Some voices sped-up, layered, whispering, sometimes distant, distorted. Often not the focus of whatever narrative might be suggested. 

Another point I've probably made before: bringing in a voice into a matrix of sound sources such as this will always draw attention to itself. We're programmed that way. (Hey! I taught college classes for twenty years, sorry if I can't remember what I said to whom.) From my first semester on, I always devoted one class period in my electronic music course to a discussion about Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (a record Steven Stapleton doubtlessly knew).

Why this particular piece? Many reasons, which I largely won't describe here. (Maybe I should pull that LP out some time, and blog about it.) But a point I tried to make, what's the effect of a boy's voice mixed with purely electronic sounds? It's easy to say the piece is creepy or scary, but why? I think (partially) it's because it's disconcerting to have the most familiar sound we know, the human voice, juxtaposed/combined with the newest source of sounds, pure electronics. Some got it.

A student from my fall 2024 semester commented that it made them want to pull their ears off their head. I would go to some length to say that I didn't expect anyone to like anything I assigned for listening. But, you know what? Grow up. In fact, why are you even a composition major? This student frequently skipped class and I gave them a D just so they'd never be in my class again. 

Yeah, I'm playing the gender pronoun game there. I don't want to get sued. I'm also doing a little post-retirement venting. 

This post turned out longer than I expected. Thanks for your patience. 

CDOTD 07/29/2025

 Francis Dhomont: Frankenstein Symphony (Asphodel/Sombient)

Purchased from the dollar bin at The Exchange

Who's Francis Dhomont? Hell if I know. But then most people, including many locals, could say the same about me.

In years past I've been a hawk for the dollar bins a The Exchange, as well as other stores. There's barely a dollar bin any more. There are so many CDs that nobody seems to want, why bother giving up the space?

The pickings at times were so rich, I had to stop myself. But I also made some incredible finds, such as two $1 Fela Kuti discs. That's why you hunt.

How did I pick up on this? Maybe the title Frankenstein Symphony caught my eye. Sure, I'll look at that. It's a promo copy sold off (multiple times it appears) from KVNM, a station in Albuquerque. Funny how these things can travel. There's a promo sticker on the front, which reads in part: "...more like a mental soundtrack. You can, however, scare little children with this, say around Halloween. Also applies to other holidays that require a new perspective. ... This composition is derived from the works of 22 other composers. He's 74 years old and still ahead of his time."

I thought, maybe a Plunderphonics-style work? I'll buy that for a dollar!

It maybe indeed be at its heart a Plunderphonics-style work. The thing about John Oswald's work is that he's often making a comment on the original (well known) artist by reassembling components sampled from their work. An example I often played in my classes was "Net", a less than two minute assemblage of Metallica samples (mostly drawn from Master of Puppets).  Oswald mostly edited together the short starts and stops of Metallica songs to create the ultimate Metallica work! I think it's funny as hell.

This work is assembled from bits and pieces of electroacoustic composers, none of which I know at all. Perhaps I've come across some of their names, but nothing sticks out. Gilles Gobeil, Ned Bouhalassa, Christian Calon, Annette Vande Gorne, Claude Schryer, is there a point in me going on?

"...A mental soundtrack" is as good a description of this work as any. It's without question more aligned with the French school of musique concrète than the German elektronische musik. Even if I'm uncertain whether some sound sources start acoustically or as synthesized sound, the work feels intuitive more than calculated. When coaching my former students on these styles, I would comment that musique concrète could have a narrative quality. That's not necessarily bad in itself, but that (at least in my opinion) it was uninteresting to try to tell a specific story. Let the sounds be sounds. 

Which reminds me of a project a student submitted. He had collected samples from recordings of the first moon launch. In the middle of the work, he had the sound of dripping water as if it was in a cave. I asked him why he used it? "Because it sounded cool." I responded, "Last I checked, there was no water on the moon."

This CD's work is in four movements, similar to a Classical symphony: "Allegro", "Andante", "Scherzo (Giocoso)", "Finale". In some way I think that's a joke, but also it gives him a framework, a form. Each has its own air so to speak, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you which was "Andante" if I heard it out of context. The scherzo movement does rely on car and toy horns, and duck sounds, for some of its content, so that tracks. I might have guessed it to be the "Scherzo (Giocoso)" if I listened to it separately. 

I'm working on an intuitive response to this, so forgive me with words fail me. It's not too far astray from Steven Stapleton/Nurse With Wound's work. Maybe a little more academic? But definitely not too much.

If there was nothing else to this album, there's an incredible amount of editing. It took effort. 

Would it mean anything to me if I was familiar with the sampled artists' music? I think I might catch something, an element I'd heard before, but nothing sits on a single idea for very long. There are highs, lows, hills and valleys, familiar sounds and unfamiliar. I'm okay with letting it all play by me. 

That said, the movements range from 14:30 and 16:41 each in length. Perfect length for a compact disc or a double LP. Does the medium influence results? In this case, I can't believe otherwise. If he was unfettered by the restrictions of the medium, would the work have been different? Considering all of the movements flow without a specific form that I can hear, I am uncertain each needed to be as long as it was. But I don't really know, do I? Maybe his decisions stand apart from the medium, maybe it's exactly as long as he intended it to be.

I see on Francis' discogs page that he died in 2023 at age 97. Like Tom Lehrer. There was an obit for Tom in the New York Times this week.

After my blog posts about Tom and Pink Floyd, maybe I thought it was time to go "impossibly obscure" again. Some or all of this is on Youtube if you care to look it up. 

DVDOTD 07/27/2025

 Tom Lehrer: The Tom Lehrer Collection [second DVD disc] (Shout! Factory)

Between the time I wrote my Pink Floyd blog post and now, I learned that Tom Lehrer died. Considering he was 97, this comes as little surprise.

Who is the greatest lyricist ever? I believe the question itself is flawed. How can we know who is the greatest at anything? Sometimes these things are measurable, but hardly in the arts. Best selling, yes. Greatest? A matter of opinion.

Who do I think is the greatest lyricist ever? I'm going with Tom. 

I was griping in my previous posting about songwriters who don't have the basic mechanics of songwriting mastered: fitting the rhythm of the words to the meter of the song, stretching too far to make rhymes. 

Tom had that down. He'd be the first to admit that musically he wasn't breaking new ground. All of his songs sound like jaunty, turn-of-the-century ditties. But that's where much of his humor lies: singing happy-sounding tunes with sarcastic, droll, or incredibly witty lyrics. And laugh-out-loud funny. 

Tom self-released in 1953 his first 10" album, Songs by Tom Lehrer. Original copies have his PO box address on it. It must have been picked up for some distribution, because I understand it sold into six figures.

There's really only a handful of Lehrer records. He was far more invested in being a math (and later musical theater) professor at Harvard.

The majority of the DVD half of this release is a Copenhagen performance from 1967. There's Tom, relatively young, bespectacled, wavy hair pushed back, at the piano singing "The Masochism Tango", "The Vatican Rag", "Pollution", and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". So modest yet absolutely killing it. 

The DVD includes four songs he wrote in the 1970s for The Electric Company, all very clever. There's also two songs he played in 1997 regarding math. Clocking in under a minute, "The Derivative Song" ranks with the best of any of his songs, and should be memorized by any first-year college student studying mathematics. 

It was pretty recently, like weeks, that I read that Tom had placed all of his songs into public domain. How can I not love this man? I'm certain I would have totally fawned over him like a fanboy if I had met him. I'm certain he would have been polite and hated it. 

When it comes down to it, what do we hope to do in this life? Make the world a better and more interesting place. At least that's my take. Tom was successful in that respect. We should all do so well.