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.